State of Alabama Fighting NASA's New Plan 340
FleaPlus writes "Alabama politicians have formed a 'task force' dedicated to fighting NASA's new plans to cancel the costly Constellation/Ares program, which is largely based in Alabama. The chronically mismanaged Constellation project attempted to build new rockets in-house and replicate an Apollo-style lunar program with minimal investment in new technologies. NASA's new boosted budget revives formerly suppressed R&D efforts into critical technologies needed for a sustainable push towards Mars and intermediate waypoint destinations, works with (instead of trying to compete with) existing commercial rockets to transport cargo/crew to orbit, and funds a stream of robotic precursor missions to scout other worlds and demonstrate new technologies. The Alabama task force fighting the new plan includes former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and former Ares project manager Steve Cook."
Well, shoot, son (Score:5, Funny)
Now, I dun know so much about rockets and flyin' to the moon and all that, but hooey, when you wanna start talkin' bout putting some downhome good ol' boys out of work, well, sir, I just gotta speak my mind. This ain't a threat, son. You take those jobs away from us here and God Almighty help us, we ain't gonna have nothin better to do than march on up to Washington and have us an ol' fashioned conference with each individual congresscritter that 'pposed us. Alabama style.
You catch my drift, fellas?
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Ah, yes - the only remaining societally-sanctioned bigotry allowed. Applause all 'round, sir.
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I think you misread his attempt at humour.
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A rather competent one, I must add.
Re:Well, shoot, son (Score:5, Insightful)
In that case, I've got a few nigger jokes I've been itching to tell someone...
Hey, it's just humor right?
Re:Well, shoot, son (Score:5, Insightful)
why yes, it is just humour, a nigger joke is no more racist than one that starts "there's an englishman, an irishman and a scotsman" Racism doesn't lie in the words you use but in the actions you take. Calling someone a nigger, kike, wop, etc etc doesn't make you racist. Not hiring someone because they happen to be black, refusing to allow your jewish daughter to marry a muslim, putting a sign on your hotel that says "no irish" those sort of things are racist. If the word itself is racist then most hip hop should be labeled hate speech, instead we use these words as a crude marker: "if you say x you believe y" isn't a good enough way to deal with whats a very contentious issue.
Re:Well, shoot, son (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, shoot, son (Score:5, Insightful)
Not so. Making fun of ignorant WHITES is always accepted. But attempt to make the same type of humorous blanket commentary about the ignorance of any other ethnic group, and you'll immediately be branded a brown people-hating racist.
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Hey, this topic reminds me of a joke I came up with the other day:
Q: Why do white trash prefer to use MySpace instead of Facebook? :)
A: Because Facebook has the word 'book' in it!
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No, it’s because the only face book they know, is the one at the police station, which looks like a family reunion album. ^^ :)
(Works equally well on any color/race/whatever.
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You get to be the Master Race, so suck it up.
Who's it more sporting to kick,the boss up on his high horse or some poor bastard trying to pick himself out of the gutter?
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Re:Fixed it for you (Score:4, Insightful)
My ethnic group/race is Homo sapiens.
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Making fun of ignorance is always accepted.
Indeed. We should make fun of all ignorant people. Including the dumbfucks here who think that anybody from "down south" or "out west" who doesn't live on a coast is somehow mentally retarded or at a very minimum one variety of bible-thumping, goat raping, redneck or another. Why, I believe that kind of ignorance -- which leads to the bigotry previously mentioned here -- far outshines the alleged ignorance that you allude to. So lets have at it shall we? Let's make some serious god-damned fun of those ignor
Re:Well, shoot, son (Score:5, Insightful)
It will be ugly, as pork barrel politics often get, but I believe, in the end, reason will prevail.
Ares should be axed. What we need is cheaper ways to haul large loads to space. The shuttle more or less taught us how not to do it, but the Ares I first stage has proven to be too problematic. A shuttle-derived vehicle, such as suggested by the DIRECT folks, would be a better choice and would use the Orion, which is more salvageable part of this project.
It would make a lot of sense to develop a series of modular vehicles, with modular engines and structures. That way you protect the money invested in developing each component.
What frightens me is the possibility this new plan also fails to deliver viable vehicles.
In that case, maybe we shoud give up the idea of being a spacefaring civilization.
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> It will be ugly, as pork barrel politics often get, but I believe, in the end, reason will prevail.
Have you actually been following US federal politics recently? It sure doesn't seem like 'reason' is even allowed anywhere in the vicinty. Hell, one side (R) seems intent on saying no even when the other side proposes starting with their own proposal (R's proposal).
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Well... The shuttle doesn't meet the requirements initially set for its development - it's not reusable, but it can be fixed. I remember the way it was proposed: mount it on a rocket, put it in space, let it do whatever has to be done and land like a plane, then it goes back to the Cape mounted on a 747 and gets mounted on a rocket and off it goes. Nobody told it would require half a year of repairs between one flight and the next.
It was also designed to bring cargo back from space, something it did, IIRC,
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That's cute and everything, but before stereotyping the region, read a little about it from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Huntsville's main economic influence is derived from aerospace and military technology. Redstone Arsenal, Cummings Research Park (CRP), and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center comprise the main hubs for the area's technology-driven economy. CRP is the second largest research park in the United States and the fourth largest in the world, and is over 38 years old. Huntsville is also home for commercial technology companies such as the network access company ADTRAN, computer graphics company Intergraph and design and manufacturer of IT infrastructure Avocent. Telecommunications provider Deltacom, Inc. and copper tube manufacturer and distributor Wolverine Tube are also based in Huntsville. Cinram manufactures and distributes 20th Century Fox DVDs and Blu-ray Discs out of their Huntsville plant. Sanmina-SCI also has a large presence in the area. Forty-two Fortune 500 companies have operations in Huntsville.
In 2005, Forbes Magazine named the Huntsville-Decatur Combined Statistical Area as 6th best place in the nation for doing business, and number one in terms of the number of engineers per total employment. In 2006, Huntsville dropped to 14th; the prevalence of engineers was not considered in the 2006 ranking.
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No, to be fair, the South is producing some of the brightest minds and innovative solutions in the world. But it's ok, we'll let you Northerners and Westerners think that we all live in a 30-year old trailer and we do nothing but line-dancin', fishin', and cow-tippin'. Don't let the facts get in your way. Obviously, you do all the high-quality research into bioengineering, quantum physics, and new technologies that make the world so much better... we're just too stupid to understand that stuff.
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you forgot to threaten to strangle them with all 3 of your hands...
Re:Well, shoot, son (Score:4, Funny)
As someone who was born and raised in alabama.
I believe that you were educated in Alabama. Your poorly capitalized sentence fragment gives it away.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. :)
Kill the Pork (Score:5, Insightful)
The Alabamans want to save their pork, plain and simple.
Their efforts should be attacked as being pure pork-barrel politics and characterized as a deliberate attempt to save a bad program purely for the money.
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It maybe pork but it's also jobs and I'd expect my representatives to fight like hell for jobs in this recession.
Re:Kill the Pork (Score:5, Insightful)
Really!?! Talk about shortsighted.
You know what creates jobs? Small business. The overwhelming majority of Americans are employed by small businesses. And what is the enemy of small business? Taxes. And what drives higher taxes? Pork.
So, you wanna save the economy and get out of this depression? Kill the Pork.
Re:Kill the Pork (Score:5, Insightful)
And what is the enemy of small business? Taxes.
Taxes are not the enemy of small business. Most small business pay very little in tax, for the simple reason that taxes are paid on profits. Most small businesses that fail, fail without paying a dime of tax.
The enemy of small business is the fact that starting a business requires a lot of up-front cash and you need income immediately to start paying that back. This is a difficult proposition even for a well-managed, well-conceived business plan.
Right now, the enemy of small business is the fact that they can't get those loans to begin in this economic climate. Blaming it on "taxes" is just the knee-jerk response, without foundation.
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Small businesses pay a lot of employment taxes, even if they aren't profitable. The business has to match the employee's contribution to Social Security and Medicare, and pay into federal and state unemployment funds. These are not necessarily bad things to be paying for, and I'm not arguing that the
It's healthcare, not taxes (Score:3, Informative)
Small businesses pay a lot of employment taxes, even if they aren't profitable. The business has to match the employee's contribution to Social Security and Medicare, and pay into federal and state unemployment funds.
Yes, but on the other hand, all competing employers have to pay these taxes as well. So the taxes essentially reduce the cash wages that you can afford to pay an employee, but it's not unfair (to the business owner) since it has the effect of reducing the employee's market wage. It can be a
Re:It's healthcare, not taxes (Score:5, Insightful)
These taxes on small businesses ARE unfair, because they dramatically raise the bar for starting or operating a small business. You might argue that even if that tax were placed square on the employee, then businesses would have to raise their wages so that employees could afford to pay. And that's valid. But at least then it wouldn't be a half-hidden cost. It would be direct, and people would have a much better idea of where the money is coming from, and where it is going. Which is ALWAYS better.
So let me reiterate, for the record, that I am a small business owner, bringing several years experience to the discussion. I'm also the one who's absorbing all of this alleged unfairness.
In fact I do agree with you that it's ridiculous to assign half of each employee's FICA to the business rather than the employee. Unlike you I don't think it's ridiculous because it's unfair to the business, rather I think it's ridiculous because it's transparently just a tax on the employee that's being "hidden" by stashing it on the employer's books rather than on the employee's tax statement. Anyone who pays self-employment tax knows that the government will gladly take both halves from the worker when there's no business to hide it behind. And furthermore, any competent business owner makes hiring decisions based on loaded employee cost (including taxes, benefits, etc.) anyway, so they're already folding those cost into the employee's take-home wage. (Like I already said, the exception here is minimum-wage employees.)
You might argue that even if that tax were placed square on the employee, then businesses would have to raise their wages so that employees could afford to pay. And that's valid.
This is the entire point. I wish that the tax were placed transparently on the employee. But the existence of these taxes is hardly a secret and I'm confident that the market is pricing them in quite effectively. Moving them over to the employee's side of the ledger wouldn't magically make it easier to start or run a small business. It sounds great in a Slashdot post, but it's almost meaningless as public policy.
The only tangible exception to this rule is the case of minimum-wage employees. If you moved the employer's share of the tax onto the employee then thousands of fast food franchises would benefit, but they'd do it at the expense of their worst-paid employees. If you want to help small businesses, don't do it on the backs of people who are making sub-poverty-level wages.
All that said, let me say that on a personal level I really, really hate payroll taxes. Not because it hurts my business, but because it's a transparent ripoff. You see, payroll taxes only apply to the first $100k or so of income, so they're essentially a tax on the working class. Anyone with a really high income is paying a much lower tax rate. That would be ok if these taxes were actually being used to finance retirement benefits, but back in the 1980s a Republican President and a Republican Fed Chairman hiked them way above the level needed to fund benefits. That excess money was (and still is) being used to finance huge tax cuts which primarily benefit the wealthy. I see this as a crime against the American people and it absolutely disgusts me. So while I'd like to see these taxes reformed, I absolutely do not trust the Republican party to fix it. Just my two cents.
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Every business pays quite a lot in payroll taxes.
The availability of loans is a problem as well, but then part of the reason they can't get loans is because the capital to provide those loans is being diverted into the treasury to help fund huge deficits. In effect every small business trying to get a loan has to compete with the US government who also wants the loans but offers sweeter deals.
So whether we're being slammed directly through taxes or through misdirection of capital in the money market, the re
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The reason lenders are so uncertain about the future is because of the predatory lending practices that helped get us into this mess. The kinds of predatory lending practices that came about because of deregulation. The lenders were bitten because they played wit
Re:Kill the Pork (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what creates jobs? Small business. The overwhelming majority of Americans are employed by small businesses. And what is the enemy of small business?
Big Business? Healthcare costs? Under-expanding? Over-expanding? Lack of a certain skill? Unfair foreign competition? Lack of access to loans to expand? Key people leaving?
Taxes.
Err.. OK. I've been in several small businesses over the years, and the number one thing they worry about sure as hell isn't taxes. It's on the radar of course, but who doesn't like to complain about taxes? Any business that sits around and worries about taxes is already a very successful business to worry about such small scale issues. If you want to help small business, you probably shouldn't start with one of the things of least concern. I'm really tired of the same-old-same-old line from the Republican party that "if we just lower taxes, that'll fix everything!". So here we are with a far lower tax rate than we had during the 90s, and the economy is in the shitter. How many times do you have to do the same thing which doesn't work to realize it's not working?
Re:Kill the Pork (Score:5, Interesting)
Big Business? Healthcare costs? Under-expanding? Over-expanding? Lack of a certain skill? Unfair foreign competition? Lack of access to loans to expand? Key people leaving?
A couple of those, big business and health care costs are directly linked to tax law. Big businesses can play the tax game better. Complicated tax law increases the barrier to entry for small businesses. And not paying taxes on employer health care just drives up the cost. Hmmm, I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason foreign competition is "unfair" is because they don't have to cough money for Social Security, health care benefits and other things that plump up the cost of labor without adding much of anything. Taxes play a big role in that process.
Re:Kill the Pork (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure if you realize this, but there's more to government and business than just lowering taxes. If the lens you bring out is the tax lens, all you're going to see is tax solutions and miss all the far better ones. Demonizing taxes is a sure way to an unbalanced and foolhardy view of the world (Social security is the major cause of unfair competition? Are you actually serious?).
The Republican obsession with lowering taxes reminds me of the old NORML rhetoric of how if we just legalized marijuana, it'd suddenly wipe out about half the problems we have! It'd reduce our prison populations, it'd solve the environment problems through hemp paper(Big Wood Pulp destroys the environment), it'd cure so many diseases that the pharmaceutical companies just want to sell you a pill for, it'd solve all our economic woes though taxing it (big tobacco doesn't want that!, it'd solve our energy problems though hemp oil (big oil!). Hemp rope is 10 times stronger than anything else! (Big nylon) Hemp seed will solve all our nutrition and health problems since it's the perfect food (Big food)!
Sheesh. At least most people saw the extremes of that whole argument for what it was. Unfortunately there's too many people that are True Believers in the lowering of taxes.
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Unfortunately, in this case, we need to cut pork not to cut taxes, but rather to get our debt load under control
I agree that we need to get our debt under control, but this is a long term problem. We need to solve it AFTER we get the economy in shape. Cutting spending now is foolhardy. That doesn't mean EVERY program is a worthy one of course. If we're talking about going to the moon again, it's a stupid program that doesn't benefit much of anyone.
The real problem here is Americans have short memories.
Re:Kill the Pork (Score:5, Insightful)
The flaw in this is that Bush did not actually lower taxes. To do that you also need to lower spending. What Bush did was to DEFER taxes by reducing current taxes and borrow the difference. Obviously this is completely untenable as a long term policy. These borrowing will have to be repaid, with the money coming from - you guessed it tax increases, or maybe more subtly as increased inflation.
These is something very fundamental here. Your taxes are equal to what government SPENDS. Not what it collects as tax revenue. Some of those taxes are due immediately, others are payable at a later date.
The idea that Bush's tax cuts improved revenues is transparently wrong - the didn't, revenues went down. Not only that but unemployment is very high now, and we have accumulated a large debt from those tax cuts that will hamper our economy.
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Saying that "high taxes hurt small businesses" and saying "the complexity of the tax code hurts small businesses" are two different issues that should be dealt with separately.
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two different issues that should be dealt with separately.
Higher taxes can lead to more complex tax code through the need to hide the effects of taxes from the voting public. A less transparent tax code is a likely outcome of sneaking in taxes in a variety of relatively hidden niches.
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So, you wanna save the economy and get out of this depression? Kill the Pork.
Your pork is another citizen's investment for the future.
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The GP wasn't talking about "evil rich" or any other strawmen arguments, they were talking specifically about taxes and pork.
Just a few articles down the frontpage is talk about Silicon Valley losing its technological edge due to (surprise!) poor public policies. To the folks in Alabama, the historical government investment in Silicon Valley (you know: universities, national laboratories, DARPA's role in starting the Internet, etc.) would be called "pork".
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Actually I will hazard a guess that most of the small businesses that are starting up in this economy is performing work on a contract given by the government.
These contracts would not exist without earmark spending.
Small business and pork spending are not mutually excluded. I bet they are mostly in the same set.
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I have a small manufacturing business now, and for me (and everyone else in my industry), the annual cost of liability insurance is 10x the cost of taxes. The bigger retailers like Amazon require several million dollars of liability insurance for each consumer product they sell in our category, the premiums on which are a tremendous drain. I'm not one to say hang the lawyers -- they serv
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That is a statement of economic ideology, not of fact.
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That is a statement of economic ideology, not of fact.
Yes, it is difficult to provide evidence for such a claim. But I hope you aren't intending to claim that because something is difficult to establish, means it is false.
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By "I'd expect" do you mean "I'd want/demand"? Fighting for jobs is well and good, but why not demand jobs that are non-porkish?
Why not fund jobs re-building crumbling infrastructure, or new energy tech, or space programs NASA actually wants?
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Fine. I think that even with stimulus spending, government should try to spend its money as effectively as possible, and the Constellation program doesn't sound particularly effective. But if a GA Rep. wants to come out and say, "my district is already being crushed by unemployment, and that's why I'm fighting for this program," I can respect that.
But I'm guessing that the Rep. fighting for the program is also constantly haranguing his constituents about "out of control government spending," and voting ag
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"No proven plan".
I love this kind of weasel speak, it reminds me how myopic people can be when it suits them. Perhaps he should have said, "our unproven plan is vastly superior to their unproven plan"?
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Just pointing out how such discussions start: some Alabamans prioritize saving their pork over the success of the program.
I sincerely doubt a significant part of the Alabaman workforce involved in the program has much hope it will not end in a disaster like the shuttle.
Re:Kill the Pork (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember the Republican mottos, kids:
- Earmarks are bad, except in my district!
- Government spending can't create jobs, except in my district!
Whoever marked parent as "Troll" (Score:5, Informative)
Remember the Republican mottos, kids:
- Earmarks are bad, except in my district!
- Government spending can't create jobs, except in my district!
"Troll" ?!? Excuse me!?!?
That's how it works in Washington. We have the same thing here in GA. Saxby Chamblis (R) and the rest our mostly Republican congressional team bashes Obama's spending ALL the time but when it comes to the F-22 project (they're made here in Marietta), he's got his hand out just like any other politician.
Both parties are guilty of it. WTF is it with you people, someone makes an observation that's actually true but says something negative you mod it down?!?
Some of you people are such ignoramuses! Troll indeed!
Save the Pork. (Score:2, Interesting)
Taxes bring in money from that state ... its the job of congressman to earmark it back to the state they represent. Anything not earmarked is handed over to the executive branch to spend however they want without any sunlight/oversite. The war against earmarks is a smoke screen to provide the executive branch more money to throw around doing who knows what. As far as I am concerned ... every damn cent should be earmarked. At least then we know where its going.
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As I listen to your wisdom, I am now beginning to understand why China is now able to spend about $145 billion dollars per year on high speed trains
When you treat most of your population as "slaves of the state" (the average Chinese still needs government permission to move from the countryside to the city, for example) then it frees up a lot of money for whatever else you might want to spend it on, but that doesn't make it right. There are hundreds of millions of working class Chinese who never ride these trains and never will, but their cheap labor greases the wheels of the Chinese economy and the Chinese state has an interest in keeping them in thei
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I could say the same for the Green Jobs initiative, "Bullet Trains", or any other Obama spending package.
I guess it's only bad pork when it isn't helping your state.
We want Change|Wait, that means things will change (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical, people complain about taxes and wasteful spending, then shit themselves when the government stops spending wastefully ON THEM.
I guess I understand it. People don't really care about whether taxes are high or being spent wisely. They only care about how much of it goes to them. To most, the government is nothing more than a big ciculating fan that sucks money from somewhere and blows it to somewhere else. You jockey for position to stand where the biggest cash dunes collect, and from there use the money to shape the future direction of the wind.
That's all this is. It's got nothing to do with actual space exploration or engineering or research.
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This is a lot like how communities fought military base closures. We don't need an air base in the Dakotas to defend ourselves from Canadians. They want it because the base contributes to the local economies. A lot of times, the Pentagon gets hardware forced on them because a contractor in key district makes them, it had nothing to do with whether it was needed or wanted. The bigger projects made with components from many different districts are even harder to kill.
Griffin and Areas (Score:5, Interesting)
Not surprised Griffin is trying this. He's always had some agenda. When he took office, the constellation program was based on building a new capsule onto existing launch vehicles, while doing R&D on new launch vehicles and other approaches. (Essentially the exact same program that is being put back in place). He threw out years worth of development to develop 2 launch vehicles and manned capsule concurrently, which is a much more expensive and complicated process.
About the only thing that survived was the X-37 and that is because it is a USAF run program. It is scheduled to launch in April.
It is much, much easier to design a single system than interlocking systems. Each weight gain on Ares results in a weight loss on Orion. Until they finalize the design of the launch platform, they can not really make much of a guess as to the final design of the manned capsule. In the 1960's, they were able to do that for Saturn and the CSM because Von Braun did not believe the initial weight budgets for the proposed Saturn rocket, so he allowed for a large degree of error in those estimates before giving the base design requirements for the CSM. That did not happen with Ares and Orion. They made their mass budgets with little room for error, so any growth outside the projected mass had a rather large impact on Orion.
(Seriously, it was bizarre how Griffin came in and years of design work on X-38, OSP, CEV, X-33.. *everything* was thrown out. The one R&D program he could not touch that started in 2006 is set to fly a demo in about 2 months. X-38 and others were much further along in their development path than Orion is now. If he had not monkeyed with the OSP program, its a pretty reasonable guess we would be flying hardware now).
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NASA does realize that. The core tenant of design for a long, long time has been modularity and leveragability. Orion and CEV were both designated as needing to form a core for an orbital assembly. The capsule was supposed to be able to be docked with other modules launched from Earth to form a core for space-space transport. (Apollo with the CSM was also such a design. It mated with a lunar module. They elected to do an all-in-one launch, but it could also have been done with orbital assembly.)
If you look
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Remember that STS stood for Shuttle Transportation System. The Orbiter was just 1 of 4 elements.
1) Orbiter
2) Station
3) Orbital Transport Vehicle
4) Orbital Rendezvous (iirc)
The Shuttle program had many of the exact same problems Ares has. Oversold, bad design. The sort of vehicle being flown now (X-37 and a couple others) were variations of the design Faget proposed. The problem back then was that they had an HLV that put everything else launched since to shame, but they could not afford both Saturn and Shut
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You do recall Columbia, yes? They determined that the systemic flaw that caused its accident was not fixable. And that we saw similar damage on a large number of other flights that had just not reached the point of destroying the vehicle. Flying the Shuttle was Russian Roulette. They were going to lose other orbiters. (98% safety over the schedule from 2005-2010 as originally scheduled with 6 flights per year gave a 54% expected survival rate over the course of the program. Taking that out to 2020 gives
And keep the government off my Medicare! (Score:4, Insightful)
So, to recap:
Alabama congresscritters vote to cut taxes and argue that we should reduce government. The citizens call Obama everything from a socialist to a fascist, and argue that they are Taxed Enough Already (that's the TEA in teabagger) and that government is full of waste. Yet when the Democrats want to cut a program that hasn't produced in an effort to save money, the Alabamanites are upset?
Pure hypocracy.
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What makes you think this is any different from how any other politician operates?
Also, "TEA" would be a backronym, because the Tea Party movement got its name from the Boston Tea Party, which was a tax protest.
Finally, this isn't really hypocrisy, for two reasons: one, if NASA is going to get the funding anyway for some sort of program for manned missions to planets/moons, a politician might as well try to get the money to go to their constituents. And two, you haven't established that the Alabama Congres
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I fail to see how the fact that NASA will get the funding anyway makes this not hypocritical. The project in question has had a lot of money spent on it and hasn't really worked very well in the past few years. I think the comment about the tea parties from the parent came from them being mostly Republicans, which you're correct in saying that it doesn't necessarily make them agree with the Tea Party protesters. However, this does mean that five out of seven of their congressmen are from a party which ran m
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This does raise some questions as to why it is they can do this and not have their fellow party members claim that they're socialists or spend-thrifts.
That's pretty clear - partisan politicians, regardless of party, don't devour their own (except for sex scandals or over-the-top Nixonian or Blagojevichian corruption).
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You think cutting NASA is hard, guess how hard it might get if anyone ever seriously dared try cutting defense.
Or the deficit for that matter. Banks and wealthy people LOVE treasury bills, and the higher the interest rate the better: that 20% of our budget we pay to service the national debt is just a check we write to investors, and mostly accrews to the very wealthy.
People make a lot more cash voting themselves money out of the treasury, then acheiving a "balanced budget.". The money the government waste
Re:And keep the government off my Medicare! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problems with your argument are as follows:
(1) "Mayor Tommy Battle" and his "task force to include 25 community leaders" does not equate to Alabama congresscritters, Alabama citizens in general, or the tea party movement.
(2) Nor do I really think if we took a poll of Alabama's citizens that we would find a majority who thought Obama was "fascist" or "communist".
(3) So far I haven't found anything definitive about Mr. Battle's political affiliation... maybe someone else can make a more skilled research. But the best lead I have is that he spoke [flickr.com] at a conference for Democrat women. It may be the case your assumption he represents conservative groups is incorrect. Was it substantiated by anything other than seeing the word Alabama?
(4) Promoting small government does not preclude people from supporting the existence of certain government programs. I mean, theoretically you are talking about conservatives (or some crude caricature thereof), not anarcho-capitalists. As "the Alabama task force fighting the new plan includes former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin and former Ares project manager Steve Cook," I think it there are probably some decent balancing arguments for maintaining the program.
I'm not saying that securing pork isn't likely to be among the motivations, or that there mightn't be some hypocrisy; but as far as establishing either of those points goes, all you did was rant off some wild generalizations.
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Your points are far too even-keeled and rational for a Slashdot post. Are you sure you didn't accidentally stumble on the wrong website?
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Sure when the Democrats spend WAY more pork money elsewhere.
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Re:And keep the government off my Medicare! (Score:5, Insightful)
That might have been the least bit believable if you folks hadn't given Bush and the Republicans a free pass on his profligate spending habits. Funny that you came out of the woodwork as soon as the Democrats entered power, is what I'm saying.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I find it interesting that the TEA party movement aligns with Palin. She made sure Alaska was #1 in pork money every year. Yet she's the one to fight big government? She IS big government.
Oh, yeah, and the for profit rally. The TEA party movement is nothing more than a shell game. The organizers are making money and the poor schmucks who attend are filling their coffers. I'm sure someone in the government somewhere cares about something somebody said there.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm no Palin fan, but that wasn't her doing. That was Ted Stevens' [wikipedia.org] doing. When the Republicans won control of the Senate, he became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee [wikipedia.org] (they decide which bills get funding). Historically, there's almost a p=1.0 correlation between the State whose Senator is chairman of this [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So you're saying that the governor of a state has absolutely no pull with the senators from that state? I find that to be a highly dubious assertion, especially when the governor and the senator both belong to the same party.
Lets not forget that Sarah Palin only began opposing the "Bridge to Nowhere" once it became a political hot button. Until that project became prominent as an example of pork, she was all for it.
Re:And keep the government off my Medicare! (Score:4, Insightful)
Voted out of office? Really? Then why was Mr. Bush president from 2004 to 2008? Was the USA a dictatorship for those four years?
The way I see it, the Republicans were voted out of office in the 2006 midterm elections due to their extraordinary mismanaging of the Iraq war. Then, in 2008, the financial crisis hit just before the election, causing the public to turn against the party in power. The profligate spending habits of the Republicans had little do with them getting voted out of power.
Re:And keep the government off my Medicare! (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you square your assertion with the fact that the teabaggers suddenly appeared from nothing as soon as Obama got elected?
It might have been believable if teabag protests had started in '06 when the Republicans lost control of Congress, but it's pretty goddamn suspicious that they waited until Bush was out of power.
Pork barrels all the way (Score:3, Interesting)
Impressive wording in the summary (Score:2, Insightful)
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Yah, I agree about the sleazy summary.
But we got to kill any idea of real progress, technical or economic. anyway, we are in the terminal phase of a malthusian collapse and we need to just suck it up. After all, there is no difference between humans and animals.
funny how quickly a techie oriented slashdot goes luddite. I suspect something like astroturfing.
I seem to recall that the the over-schedule part of constellation was directly traceable to underfunding with respect to promised money.
here are two
Chronically ignorant OPs (Score:2)
List your qualifications and show you have the knowledge and experience to determine that a rocket program is "chronically mismanaged". Or shut your mouth. And quoting the critics is not allowed, since they are by and large either inexperienced shysters trying to use their "knowledge" to wring appearances fees out of the media or
Chronically ignorant danwesnor (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a graduate degree in rocket engineering and have been testing rockets longer than most of you have been alive.
Constellation is way over budget, way behind schedule, with a bunch of sniveling managers trying to hide both facts. That's classic mismanagement, in any goddamn field. These guys should be put out to pasture and whipped for attempting the endeavor in the first place with inadequate resources. Rocket science may not be hard anymore but IT IS EXPENSIVE, always will be. These fuckers knew b
I'm so sorry (Score:2)
Oh, hey, wait, this really isn't so bad.
Contractors, easy come.. easy go.. (Score:2)
You are all fired. Go home and start looking for a new job.
More insightful than we want to admit (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the legacy of Ronald Reagan. He believed that if we replace federal workers as much as possible with private contractors, we could shift the size of government at will - increasing or decreasing the labor force in tune with the changing priorities and budgets.
The fallacy is that when you have federal tax dollars flowing into a locale, that locale becomes dependent on the influx. To cut that flow off - whether through salaries or contracts - means killing growth in a district. A district which will look to its congressman as their champion to right that "wrong." In effect, all we've done is add more overhead (contract administration on both sides, procurement processes, and profit for the contractors). Well, that and forced the core engineers and scientists out of NASA, so that when we really need continuity we can't get it.
There are things that can be outsourced efficiently. I outsource cleaning my office, office supplies, and telecommunications. If I chose a different vendor for any of those, it's no big deal. But when you're dealing with a $4T budget, it means that switching vendors or stopping a project has a major impact on whatever area your vendor was set up in. Sadly, we don't really have the money to pay everyone - no matter what your congressman promised two years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
All true. But a contractor knows that from the day he/she signs up.. his paycheck could end the next week.
I've been seeing something similar happen to the US Army. They have converted many jobs from military to civilian in the belief that they don't have to increase the size of the army, just get more people out from behind desks and into the field. More trigger pullers and less support folks. So now they have to drag overpaid contractors along to established FOBs to handle the higher level support func
AASA (Score:4, Insightful)
States rights seem to be popular on this board. I'm not sure why-- I'm not particularly inclined to trust "those idiots down in Richmond" over "those idiots down in Washington." But perhaps the states could fill a void and start up space exploration programs of their own.
The Reason for States' Rights (was:AASA) (Score:2)
States rights seem to be popular on this board. I'm not sure why-- I'm not particularly inclined to trust "those idiots down in Richmond" over "those idiots down in Washington." But perhaps the states could fill a void and start up space exploration programs of their own.
But if we can keep "those idiots down in [insert your state capitol here]" and "those idiots down in Washington" at each others' throats, we might be able to accomplish something while they are distracted. You can't fight 'em, but you can get 'em to fight each other.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, with my proposal, Alabama will be able to say, let the Feds launch a rocket, and the Feds will be able to say "no, let Alabama launch the rocket", and bicker until the launch window is closed, and all the costs associated with actually launching the damn thing will never be realized, saving us all a lot of money in the long run.
PORK Alert (Score:2)
What a coincidence... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Nasa has a much better plan for the USA (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Unless there's a very different story that I've never heard of:
a) That was Indiana
b) They never considered a law making it anything
c) They certainly didn't consider making it 3, because that's what the Bible says
d) No such law was ever passed.
Basically, they were looking at a law recognizing some local crackpot who offered them free use of his method of squaring the circle (which intrinsically involved pi, of course). As it turned out, pi can be read as having multiple values in his work anyway. (It's not
Re: (Score:2)
I'm all pro NASA. As an Alabama resident I love what it does for Huntsville.
The real blame here should go to Parker Griffith. You don't leave the majority party, this is what happens when you do. If he hadn't become a turncoat there would be no way the administration would have cut funding to his district.
But he made the decision easy for them... good luck Parker getting re-elected with the right and the left wanting to taste your blood.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What about neophyte startups like ULA, a joint venture by Boeing and Lockheed, and of course Boeing proper. Much of the new 'commercial' sector is going to be the same people as before, just acting through fixed-price rather than cost-plus contracts.
Comparing Ares 1X to Falcon 9 is foolish. Falcon 9 is the potentially final vehicle, with a first and second stage. Ares 1X was a 4-segment SRB (as opposed to the required 5-segment), a second stage mass simulator, and a Titan control system. It was intended
Re: (Score:2)
From what I've seen, in the time it takes to plan and implement one robotic mission to another planet, NASA changes its focus 2-3 times. Consequently, it's rare for anything to go beyond LEO since the funding for anything more will be cancelled before the project is complete.
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Like most federal government, NASA needs a reboot,
Of course, since it worked for Start Trek, it will work for NASA. Why didn't we see that when we saw the movie?
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NASA has received more funding to develop new rocket technologies and to develop in orbit manufacturing and refueling.
In orbit manufacturing? Are you an idiot? The space station was built in orbit, and has been refueled and resupplied and then some....
How can you even support this lie?