I’ve read several reports stating the budget will be 100 billion more than last year, but aren’t the Afghan/Iraq wars included instead of being supplementals? If that is the case, the budget is actually, using the accounting bullshit of the Bush years, 50 billion less?
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CB
an excellent point…which will no doubt be completely ignored by the wingnut and squak-box crowds
Jade Jordan
John, you are correct he is listing the wars and other things that were not budgeted under Bush. Don’t worry, not only will he get no credit the MSM is already saying he is raising taxes by letting the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy expire.
http://consumerist.com/2010/02/six-e-readers-compared.html
Consumerist has a good chart summary on the 6 top e-Readers as you make your decision.
SteveinSC
Don’t know about the bookkeeping but Obama said that in the past the wars were funded by supplementals, so I assume they are fully in the budget. I think one of the plusses is the expiration of the bush tax cuts for the rich. That means the republicans need to suck up to the Dems and try to get them to agree to a bill the republicans want (quid pro quo on HCR?) Also, I saw that Obama will kill the moon-mars boondoggle. Cornyn and the rest of the frugal, waste killing, earmark shooting, conservatives from TX will have to figure out how to get their favorite pork barrel for Houston back in. Be fun to watch the royalty of hypocrites in Texas arguing about how vital to America sending some idiots to Mars is. Another little gem this year is the complete elimination of inheritance taxes. If I were some rich old geezer, I’d hire me a food taster, or make the kids eat the food first, before I did.
Chad S
Bingo. If you count the Iraq/Afghan war costs with Bush’s budgets(which were purposefully separated to make the headlines better), Obama’s cutting the budgets from the previous years.
Warren Terra
@SteveinSC:
This is very good news, if it happens. Manned spaceflight is one gigantic, tragic money-pit – and sadly, one of the principal victims of this drain is all the great unmanned spaceflight projects that don’t get funded.
On the other hand, manned spaceflight apparently has some popular gut appeal, possibly of a jingoistic nature, and I’ve already seen some whining about Obama giving up the Meat On Mars project.
Hence Paul Krugman’s evocative name for the inheritance-tax-repeal-with-later-reinstatement bill, the Throw Momma From The Train Act Of 2010.
Kryptik
Don’t tell anyone that, John. Remember, that’s the same monetary jiujitsu they pulled to tag Obama as a greater deficit explosion than Bush was.
Svensker
Don’t you think the frigging Dems and the WH could be trumpeting this a bit? But no, let the Repubs frame the issue, as always.
General Winfield Stuck
@Warren Terra:
Not so true/ Manned spaceflight has provided many scientific breakthroughs and modern technologies many of which we take for granted today. It started with Tang, and gave us a whole lot of other useful shit.
Besides stirring our imaginations that is part of the human experience and replenishing our creative juices.
Martin
@Warren Terra:
Nobody likes to feel like we’re going backwards. Once you start sending people out of orbit, it seems like you should only do more of it as time goes on.
There’s too much blame to go around for why it’s no longer feasible, but I’d heap most of it on the contractors and NASA that insist on building the most complicated thing ever made rather than a bathtub with a rocket in its ass. The point is to get astronauts there, not keep engineers employed – there’s more than enough work for them as it is.
Eric S.
Not really commenting on manned vs. unmanned space exploration but on that Tang thing,.
Bill Jones
There’s no way of knowing until the end of the year when you can check out the increase in the debt.
All the rest is bullshit.
J. Michael Neal
@General Winfield Stuck:
Maybe I just have a stunted imagination, but my creative juices can be replenished for a hell of a lot less than a couple of hundred billion dollars.
Martin
@General Winfield Stuck:
Like Diet Tang, which is literally made from shit.
Bill H
Um, I think the current deficit refers to money actually spent, so what amount was in the proposed budget or what amount was in supplementals is irrelevant. We have a current deficit because we spent $1.3 trillion more than we took in, not because any portion of it was or was not budgeted.
Obama proposes to spend more next year than we spent this year, not merely more this year than was budgeted last year. Not commenting on the rightness or wrongness of that policy, merely the facts of it as I believe them to be. I might be wrong.
james hare
Are the supplementals really counted as part of the budget? They’re certainly still paying for the wars with supplemental budgetary resolutions — but I have neither the time nor the inclination to check to see if those supplementals are being included in the overall budgetary framework.
Martin
@General Winfield Stuck:
Conservatives hate that. Their vision of a utopian future is Ward and June Cleaver, not James T. Kirk.
Cris
I’m kind of psyched that the private sector is on the cusp of being able to fulfill the imagination-stirring, creative-juice-replenishing part of space exploration.
Common Sense
Sure Tang was invented by a government agency. And initial government R&D spending on things like the Human Genome Project allow all those private medicines changing our lives via TV ads today. I do however think that private companies can now handle manned space travel if it’s truly viable. Just look at the Virginia or Ditch/English East India Companies. Sure, exploration of the Americas was initially done via government fiat (Columbus, Magellan). But private companies made exploration into colonization.
Also, every one of the companies I cited survived on government largesse. They weren’t total mercenaries, and I don’t think any Space exploration company would be either. I’m not saying private companies can do everything better via the invisible hocus pocus hand of the marketplace, but they certainly deserve the chance to utilize what we’ve already developed, no?
Look, I am a huge fan of what investment in space has brought us. Freaking streaming video was invented on the fly to solve a problem with the Gemini probe. When a panel on the satellite broke, the original transmission antenna was not able to be deployed, and all of the photos and data had to be transmitted via a tiny antenna that could only handle a tiny percentage of the bandwidth. Programmers at JSC invented streaming video to get that data back to earth, and we have YouTube today. But YouTube was when private enterprise took over and made a good idea viable for the masses.
Warren Terra
@Martin:
I’d believe this if anyone had proposed anything worthwhile for the astronauts to do once they’re up there. The entire accomplishments of manned spaceflight amount to the moon landings (which were hugely important, both psychologically and because the samples they returned were of huge scientific value – but which aren’t obviously worth repeating, especially given that advances in robotics make the scientific goals of such a project laughable), data on the effects of prolonged microgravity on human health (somewhat interesting, though its justification is a bit circular), and repairing the Hubble (at a cost greater than replacing the Hubble). Contra Stuck, the people in orbit don’t even get the credit for Tang.
And if you weigh the astronauts’ accomplishments against all the unmanned projects cancelled so we can send up a jet jockey or two to fart around in a leaking bubble with chancy toilets, it’s no contest. I can’t think of a single scientific result from manned spaceflight (leaving aside the Hubble and the moon rocks already mentioned) that was ever considered a major advance and published as such in a truly major journal.
SteveinSC
@General Winfield Stuck: Nothing anywhere approaching the cost of the manned part of the space program has resulted from “spinoff” and everyone in NASA knows it. In addition, since I worked on the Space Station Program and the earlier Bush I’s Space Exploration Initiative, the projected costs were $400 Billion for return to Moon, and $1.2 trillion for the Mars Mission in 1990 dollars! Since levitation or transporters have yet to be invented, one would expect the price tags to be at least double those numbers in current year dollars. The far less expensive unmanned elements have either produced tremendous science return or, in the case of earth observing, both science and practical benefits (e.g. better weather forcasting.) By the way, Space Station is still orbiting uselessly as we speak with no science instruments on it and no useful technology coming from it. For this manned space, technological stunt we are squandering about $5 Billion per year of NASA’s already diminished resources.
Annie
@Svensker:
I really agree with you on this. If this was a Republican budget, they would be shouting from the mountain tops, and every wingnut radio and TV show from here to eternity.
Martin
@james hare: No, they aren’t. That’s what makes them supplementals.
The old routine was to roll out a budget, get the CBO deficit projections, tout those as ‘look how great we’re doing’ and then run through a whole pile of supplementals that drove up spending and the deficit while still touting the original CBO numbers.
It was the fiscal equivalent of fasting for 3 days before stepping on the scale, then heading out to Claim Jumper every night for the next 2 weeks, and then proclaiming you had lost weight.
Zifnab
@Martin:
Why? While it’s all well and good to have dudes golfing in deep space, what exactly is the scientific advantage of sending up three dudes in a bath tube loaded with tang and astronaut ice cream, when we could litter the face of Mars with Johnny Fives at a bare fraction of the price.
Two of the biggest obstacles to human deep space travel involve radiation and consumable resource management (re: food and air). Get rid of the people, and those problems practically go away.
How much more valuable was the Voyager probe and the Mars lunar rover than the Apollo Moon mission? If you’re serious about putting people on a foreign world, getting reliable tech into space is going to be far, far more important than jacking big metal buckets into orbit.
General Winfield Stuck
@Cris:
Yes, we have the first space airport right here in southern NM. Not far from Roswell and Trinity. We live dangerous in these parts.
But they still can’t match NASA for manned space flight. On to Mars I say, on my little Rocket Ship!!
General Winfield Stuck
Chickenfeed. Besides, the Chinese will pay for it. And how much is it worth to partner with the Russkies and maybe Chinese and other countries on a shared goal and project? For the cause of whirled peas.
Max
@General Winfield Stuck: My parents have a ranch up against the NM Spaceport. The traffic to the place rolls right by their front gate. It’s been steadily increasing each day.
It’s pretty cool. My dad was actually buried in the direction facing the launches, so he could “watch” them in the afterlife.
If anyone is interested in buying 400 acres near the spaceport, just let me know.
DBrown
@Martin:I have read some on this subject and to blame anyone but top NASA Brass and astr-o-nuts … astronauts is wrong. These bitchs placed their ego’s ahead of reality and killed the manned program the second they started the shuttle program and gave up on the Saturn V. As the top Engineer at NASA (in the late eighties conceeded – the Saturn V could put up payload into LEO at 1/5th the price of the shuttle.
Chad N Freude
@Warren Terra: The devotees of Ray Bradbury (of whom I am one) have always believed that going to Mars is one of mankind’s highest goals. Well, until we found out how complicated and expensive it would be. (And now, I suppose, we’ll never get to Pandora.)
@General Winfield Stuck: IIRC, Tang preceded the astronauts.
@Martin:
I don’t think this is true.
jl
I do not think it is worth the time to worry about such details at all, unless you want to score some debating points with dishonest or idiotic Congresscritters such as Gregg or Bayh.
The amounts are chump change, and two or three years of outsize deficits right now mean nothing compared to the damage done by the Bush tax cuts, and various forms of corporate tax shelter crony capitalist welfare state policies.
I read that some of the weasel-Dem faction in Congress are talking about not ending the Bush tax cuts. That is much much more important issue.
Zifnab
@DBrown:
And if one of them blew up getting off the launch pad, it was a business cost rather than a holocaust. You’d think between Challenger and Columbia, we wouldn’t be so gung-ho about blowing up our best and brightest.
Warren Terra
@DBrown: \
I’ve never understood how the whole Shuttle program ever made sense to anyone. Sure, a reusable spaceship sounds cool compared to simple rockets, but we’ve known for decades now that the damn thing needs to be inspected to a level of reconstruction after every flight, at an enormous cost far greater than replacing a dumb rocket and re-entry module, we spend so much to launch all that extra gear, and we shape payloads (such as the Hubble) to fit in the shuttle’s cargo bay instead of shaping them to fit in the larger containers we could otherwise launch.
General Winfield Stuck
@Max:
Your dad sounds like a cool dude and fellow space cadet dreamer. Once I get some new tires for my truck, I think I’ll take a venture over that direction to check the spaceport out. And maybe time it with when they open Trinity to visitors once a year or so. It’s only about a 150 miles from here.
And we also have the VLA on the St. Augustine plains about 70 miles away. Have visited it several times and it is stunning when you get up close to the giant saucers that used to have SETI to listen for little green men, though I think they might have stopped doing that. There is also a national telescope in the mountains east of Alamagordo where I used to live that I’ve gone through the museum there.
Lot of cool stuff in this state on the space wonder front.
MikeJ
@DBrown: Actually the original shuttle design wasn’t that bad, but to get funding they had to get pentagon money and the DOD really fucked it up and gave us what they wound up building.
For instance, the original design wouldn’t go from the pad to a polar orbit, it used the rotation of the earth to pick up a bit of angular momentum. Pentagon said no funding unless it could go from the pad in Florida straight over the pole and over the dirty reds. Which made the whole thing five times bigger(1). And much, much more complicated. And that was only one of the demands of the masters of war.
(1) Five times bigger may be hyperbole.
Warren Terra
@Chad N Freude:
I’m a huge fan of space colonization, be it in orbit, on the moon, or on Mars. But the way to do it is to demonstrate that you can make a self-sustaining or a nearly-self-sustaining colony. The only way it could conceivably make sense to send people to Mars, what with the huge expense and time requirement, which is more than doubled if there’s a return trip, is if it were a one-way trip and we thought they could live there with minimal outside assistance. If we were to develop the technologies to do this, Mars might even make some sense as a destination, as we know it’s got accessible water. But no-one’s working on the technology to build space colonies, and this research wouldn’t in any case be done in orbit. Instead we’re proposing to send up ever more monkeys on long, expensive, pointless missions, at enormous cost, apparently because those huge manned rockets represent something else.
John O
Hate it (cutting the NASA budget), gotta do it, a measure of our fall and failure, IMHO.
General Winfield Stuck
@Warren Terra: We need WARP drive.
Brian J
It doesn’t make much of a difference, because it’s still THE LARGEST DEFICIT EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, no, not really, but still, who cares? Why aren’t we doing everything we can to jump start employment growth and then worrying about the deficit when it’s below a certain level? From what I, as a non-economist can tell, it’s going to be a much less of a problem as long as the economy is growing steadily in the coming years. As long as it’s on a downward path as a share of growing DP, I don’t see the big deal.
SteveinSC
@Warren Terra: Well, actually, they are working on those technologies. In situ resource extraction was, at least at one time, part of the Mars Mission, so was nuclear propulsion and strip mining the moon for Helium III to pay for it all.
DBrown
@Warren Terra: There is a big problem (really a show stopper) – cosmic radiation – in 2.7 years a 55 year old male burns out his lifetime dose (it gets worse for younger people.) You can not live outside our magnetic field for long and the Moon/Mars have none. Going underground is the answer but costs climb fast for that. Also, power; we don’t have enough here on earth for our life style and you expect what on the moon/mars?
If you want to dream, try thermonuclear fusion – that at least could end greenhouse gases, raise the whole world’s living standard and give us hope to develop all human potential.
Still, if a major effort and a few billion dollars were committed and the effort was made it might be possible. For a possible system, see the Nike laser, at NRL.
Warren Terra
@SteveinSC:
And a pony! In this case, a Space Pony!
@DBrown:
I agree with all this, and all of it makes manned spaceflight even sillier.
CalD
@SteveinSC:
I’m nearly certain that “supplemental” means “not in the budget” in this case. Republicans didn’t want to accept any accountability for the cost of their wars so they basically just ignored it. The “emergency” spending bills they kept passing to fund them counted toward the national debt of course but never toward the federal deficit. Same thing for Katrina relief, I think.
Anyway, when Obama took office, he ended that and some other shady accounting practices such as the AMT relief dodge (I think) that previous administrations of both parties had used to sweep unpleasant budgetary news under rugs. They did that with full knowledge that it was to going immediately make their budget look worse than Bush’s but perhaps with the mistaken belief that anyone would remember that fact or give them any credit for it a year later.
Catsy
@Warren Terra: You’re missing the point entirely. And to be fair, I’m not sure that’s all your fault, since most of the responses to you seem to buy into your frame that we have to justify manned missions on the same set of merits by which we evaluate unmanned missions.
I get that you don’t like manned space travel, and think the ROI of unmanned missions is far higher. And up to a point the latter argument is even supported by the data.
But all of the ancillary scientific and medical benefits are beside the point. When we send a robot off to space, we’re expecting to get something in return–a specific test to be run, data to be collected, or theory to be evaluated. Absent that, we are spending billions of dollars to do nothing more than prove we can make tons of mass achieve escape velocity.
Manned missions are different in a way which simply is not empirically measurable. Yes, it is still a mission of scientific exploration, and there will undoubtedly be a barrage of experiments planned, but in my view, putting people in space is the whole point. We’re not putting people up there because we need human hands and eyes to do science, although it doesn’t hurt–we’re putting people up there to put people up there. In other words, manned space exploration isn’t just a means to a goal, it is a goal. Call it national pride, call it imagination, call it whatever you want: you can’t measure it, it’s important, and you either get that or you don’t.
Svensker
@CalD:
Ahem. My point, again. Trumpet the damn thing, please folks. This IS about politics.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Zifnab:
One thing that was vitally important about the Apollo missions (and which would be damned hard to do w/out humans) was taking non-trivial amounts of physical samples (aka the Moon rocks) and bringing them back to Earth. This triggered an explosion in the quality and quantity of modern petrologic tools for the investigation and study of small samples (like the post-1960 electron microprobe). Geochemistry as we know it today, and everything that we know about our only habitable planet by way of it, would not exist without the funding stimulus which came in the wake of the Apollo mission. No modern geochemistry = no modern oceanography, or paleoclimatology. That means global warming would be hitting us now with no scientific framework for understanding or measuring what is happening to us.
Mino
Helium-3 on the moon may be the catalyst that enables fusion reactors. Maybe it can be mined by robots?
Warren Terra
@Catsy:
This is the only argument for manned spaceflight that I think is honest. Frankly, the partisans of manned spaceflight tend to bombard its critics with a lot of utter nonsense about the scientific impact of manned spaceflight, which for me at least just diminishes their credibility. And I agree with you: there’s something magical about having people in orbit.
The questions are whether it’s 4 or 5 billion dollars per year of emotional magic, whether this emotionally magical thing requires a space station that has no actual purpose other than to perpetuate the magic, and whether it’s fair that — because of the aforementioned hypocritical claims that manned spaceflight has a scientific mission — this emotionally magical undertaking draws its budget from the same pool of money that also serves as the principal financial resource for the genuine scientific goals of unmanned spaceflight, which you concede is a completely different undertaking with essentially unrelated goals.
This, on the other hand, I will absolutely not concede. As I already stated, I’m not aware of a single significant advance from manned spaceflight since the moon rocks, with the only exception of using people to repair the Hubble at a greater cost than replacing it. I’m not even aware of a single experiment that failed that, had it succeeded, might have been interesting. In my own field, I know what sort of experiments are performed in orbit, and they’re a complete joke.
DBrown
@Catsy: Buy into? Uhh, last I checked I and others foot the bill for space and we have every right to expect some return. Then you talk about the moon and Mars for what, hundreds of billions, a trillion? Then I damn well expect great returns and not just the satisfaction of some trained monkey with a thermocouple up his ass getting his rocks off. When someone else pays with their own money, then say we missed the point. Please get your head out of the clouds – real people – children and adults go hungry, die in pain, and suffer because real money is short. (yes, as a well feed, covered person with a job and a paid for house, I find a mission to Mars excitting – but my real concerns are for people not so lucky.)
General Winfield Stuck
@Catsy: I’m with ya catsy. And I will reiterate the also not measurable element of nations working together on manned space flight are less likely to fight with one another here on planet earth.
Chad N Freude
@Warren Terra: Of course, you’re right. Frankly, even as a kid, I never believed it would happen, but that just made the number of possibilities greater, and how cool was that?
The original moon landing was a political project — the Soviet Union had gotten a satellite up while the US was still working on “Project Vanguard” (dismissively renamed “Project Rearguard”), and we had to reassert our superiority. Every subsequent manned operation was some combination of politics and technomuscle flexing, and eventually — Surprise! — manned space flight became an entrenched industry, but unfortunately one too big to succeed.
Nellcote
Humans shouldn’t be allowed to infest other planets until we can get our shit together on Earth. It’s bad enough that we already leave all sorts of trash orbiting or left behind. It’s pathetic that we have to schedule launches so as not to hit space garbage.
Nellcote
Humans shouldn’t be allowed to infest other planets until we can get our shit together on Earth. It’s bad enough that we already leave all sorts of trash orbiting or left behind. It’s pathetic that we have to schedule launches so as not to hit space garbage.
Catsy
@Warren Terra:
I can’t help you there. We can honestly and openly weigh the scientific gains from manned vs. unmanned space exploration, but denying that manned missions can be scientific or produce new discoveries simply because they’re manned and therefore wasteful smacks of ideology to me.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Let’s face it – the real reason we can’t fund NASA more is that Al Qaeda’s space program sucks. Say what you will about the Russkies, but they could build rockets and didn’t care how many people they blew up getting stuff up into orbit. The Axis of Evil today is letting us down by comparison.
Warren Terra
@Catsy:
I concede that my response sounds dogmatic, and I’m willing to be convinced that a particular manned mission is sensible. But I don’t think it can be seriously be argued that any significant scientific advances have been made through manned spaceflight since Apollo (with the above-mentioned exceptions of microgravity physiology and an incredibly overpriced Hubble repair). So the track record’s on my side: in the modern era, manned spaceflight has not been scientific. And there’s no proposal to make it scientific: I haven’t seen any experiments proposed for future manned missions that are remotely worth doing, or that can’t be done much, much cheaper, and probably much better, using robots.
SteveinSC
@General Winfield Stuck:
You think the Russians, Europeans and Japanese are footing the bill for our manned space? This “working together” is funded, 95%+ by the US taxpayer. The part which we don’t fund is proprietary to our “working together” partners.
P.S. While they are justified in a big way, I will refrain from pejoratives.
Catsy
@Warren Terra:
It’s here where I think you go off the rails.
You can plausibly argue that manned spaceflight is wasteful, that the science done on manned missions could be done more safely and efficiently with robots. This argument rests on the assumption that the only value we can weigh is the raw data that is returned, that manned spaceflight in and of itself adds no value. I don’t agree, but if you’re evaluating it on a strictly empirical cost-benefit basis, that’s fine.
That is a different argument than saying that manned spaceflight is not scientific simply because the things it does could be done better with robots. You can’t argue that the exact same experiments, performed on both manned and unmanned missions, are scientific when carried out by robots but somehow become unscientific (as opposed to simply inefficient or wasteful) when performed by human hands.
You need to separate the efficiency/ROI question from the question of whether or not a mission is scientifically valid or beneficial.
General Winfield Stuck
@SteveinSC: It’s not always about money. Some things you can’t put a price tag on.
I think it’s worth it, you don’t, so be it/
Warren Terra
@Catsy:
Indeed, and I don’t make this argument. Well, I do in one case that’s still a hypothetical: people make the case for manned sample-return missions, because this aspect of the Apollo missions was so important, and I agree that this mission was hugely important and in its time was an argument for manned spaceflight, but argue that it can now be done much more cheaply by robots. Other than this hypothetical, while there are “scientific experiments” performed in orbit, they are for the most part not the same sorts of things done in unmanned missions. To the extent there’s a slight overlap, it’s that some instrumentation and some unmanned experiments are sent up within the manned missions, although in some cases these experiments are assigned to the manned portion of spaceflight simply to boost its credibility, and in some other cases the unmanned experiments that are sent up, such as biological cultures in self-contained apparatus, aren’t really worth sending in any case.
And when you consider the excellent unmanned projects that were shelved to free up funding for manned spaceflight (such as the decision to stop spending money to monitor transmissions from Voyager II), I can absolutely argue that as currently constituted not only does manned spaceflight not contribute to scientific knowledge, it’s actually harmful to scientific process.
cmorenc
Here’s a HARD FACT about the future of manned spaceflight, even if we were fully committed to it budgetarily and scientifically and politically.
There’s the moon.
There’s Mars.
THAT’S IT! There isn’t any “else” out there, unless we want to start visiting asteroids. NONE of the other planets are feasible to land on, and ALL of their moons are Hellishly difficult places – frigid with extremely toxic atmospheres (if any at all), some with intermittent chances of dangerous vulcanism. In other words, ideal places to send unmanned probes to, not manned probes.
More particularly, there IS NO feasible path period for manned visits to even the nearest stars to our own, about 4 light-years away, unless we find some loophole in the physical laws of relativity, in which the speed of light is an absolute speed limit, and the practical speed limit for spacecraft acceleration is far lower than that. Assuming we could achieve a velocity that would take us from Earth to Moon (240,000 mi) in one hour, that’s 1/2700th the speed of light…still 10,800 years. Even if we could speed this up to a velocity that could take us from Earth to the Moon in one minute, that’s still a 180-year each way journey. NOT likely to happen with manned spaceflight.
Wile E. Quixote
@DBrown:
I fucking hate people like you, really, I fucking hate you because you’re so full of shit that it drips out of your eyes and ears. We can debate the utility and scientific value of the manned space program, but the whole “we shouldn’t have a space program because people are dying” is just whining bullshit. If you really cared about the poor and hungry Dbrown you’d sell your house and all of your personal possessions and give the proceeds to charity. You would then quit your job and go to work to alleviate the suffering of the poor and hungry, accepting only the bare minimum necessary to keep yourself alive.
“…real people – children and adults go hungry, die in pain, and suffer because real money is short”, if this is the case then every time you spend one cent on yourself for anything other than the bare necessities you need to stay alive or anything other than helping these people you’re just as much of the problem as anyone who proposes spending money on a manned space program. Every minute you spend blogging or doing anything other than helping the poor and hungry is a crime against humanity.
Again, if you want to debate the utility of the manned space program that’s fine. If you want to say “I’d rather us spend the money on helping the poor and hungry” I’m fine with that too, those are honest positions. But you’re not honest and your “concern” is as cheap and fake as that of any politician justifying his pet program by saying “think of the children.” You want people to get their heads out of the clouds, OK, why don’t you pull yours out of your ass.
Catsy
@Wile E. Quixote: This.
Thank you.
General Winfield Stuck
@cmorenc:
More than enough to keep us busy.
Warren Terra
@Wile E. Quixote
@Catsy:
I don’t disagree with anything in Wile E Quixote’s righteous rant. I realize that for all my minor economies I live a very selfish life, and I have no intention of changing that voluntarily. Very few of our endeavors can really stand up to the “why don’t we feed the hungry instead?” test. So I think that DBrown’s argument was appropriately skewered by Quixote.
But while I feel that the test DBrown posed was unfair, I object to the way that manned spaceflight is nearly always sold as being a scientific program, and I object to the price that unmanned spaceflight pays for this dishonest representation of manned spaceflight. If most of manned spaceflight’s partisans were instead to sell the undertaking honestly, as being a potent and important symbol, I’d cheer them on – but I probably wouldn’t endorse their push for funding at anywhere near the levels they desire. Which is undoubtedly why they don’t promote manned spaceflight honestly.
Wile E. Quixote
@Catsy:
I get that, but what has the NASA manned program done in the last 30 years that’s worth a shit? Wow, we’ve got the shuttle and we’ve explored the living fuck out of low earth orbit. Boy howdy, that is some seriously explored empty space up there, we know it like the back of our hands. But from a scientific standpoint the shuttle program has accomplished nothing other than to serve as an incredibly expensive booster rocket. The International Space Station has accomplished nothing of scientific value either. So we’re left with the whole excitement and wonder thing. OK, I get that, I really do, I choke up when I watch For All Mankind and do you know what, I’d still get choked up even if was the Soviets who made it to the moon because holy fucking shit, people walked on the moon and that’s so cool that I don’t care what country they were from.
But I find it difficult to get choked up about canned primates endlessly orbiting the earth in a leaky tube. Not a whole lot of excitement and wonder there, and when you see the Shuttle program taking money away from scientific missions or NASA announcing another Moon/Mars program that will never get beyond the study stage or NASA failing to exercise due diligence and letting a shuttle burn up on re-entry as a result, well, not a whole lot of excitement and wonder there either.
The manned space program has been a total failure since the 1970s. NASA killed two Apollo missions, missions that had been paid for, crews trained and hardware built, to free up money for the clusterfuck that is the Space Shuttle. They had two fully built Saturn V rockets that they let rot on the ground because they needed money for the Space Shuttle. Has the Shuttle program accomplished as much scientifically as those two manned moon missions would have accomplished? No. But NASA wanted the Shuttle, and lied to everyone about what it could do because they were more concerned with keeping the funding stream going than they were in doing science.
After Apollo NASA became a corrupt, sclerotic bureaucracy that was more concerned with keeping the shuttle flying than actually accomplishing anything significant. ISS was designed as a means of keeping the Shuttle flying, there was actually a plan to build ISS on the ground and launch it in one piece using a modified Shuttle stack, but that plan got shot down, even though it would have given us a really neat heavy lifter because after that there wouldn’t have been anything for the Shuttle to do that couldn’t have been done more cheaply by having the Russians handle cargo and crew launches.
So if you want a manned space program you need to find a better agency to run it than NASA because NASA sucks at manned space flight. You also need to sell it honestly, if a robot can do something better than a human being or more cheaply than a human being then use a robot. We don’t send humans into dangerous situations on earth if we can use a machine to do it instead just because of some putative value in having a human being onsite, why should space be any different?
General Winfield Stuck
@Warren Terra: Most of the partisans who sell manned spaceflight cite multiple reasons, and almost always include the “potent and important” symbol aspect. Though I would add that is in our nature to explore our surroundings, and nothing surrounds more than space. And to deny that innate calling represses our needs to continue on in our natural social evolution.
And dissing potential scientific discoveries based on most such useful discoveries being relics of earlier manned space is not the full equation. We can’t know what can be discovered unless we do it. That is the conundrum of using such arguments of something we cannot know, yet.
Wile E. Quixote
@MikeJ:
The whole “the shuttle is fucked up because of those clowns at the Air Force” myth is one that really needs to be debunked. To get money for the Shuttle NASA went to Congress and said “We’re going to build a reusable system and will be able to save a lot of money by getting rid of all of the unmanned systems that we use and save lots of money. Now the Air Force didn’t really give a shit about manned versus unmanned boosters for launching satellites, they wanted to be able to do so cheaply and efficiently and had certain mission demands. One of those mission demands was to be able to launch the KeyHole series of surveillance satellites and another was to be able to launch into a polar orbit. Launching the Keyholes meant scaling up the Shuttle because the Keyholes are large and heavy, and since they’re in a polar orbit they you don’t get the advantage of the earth’s rotation adding to your orbital velocity.
NASA management told Congress that they could design a Shuttle that would meet the Air Force’s requirements and the Air Force was told that the Shuttle was going to become their launch platform and that they weren’t going to get any money for unmanned boosters. So the Air Force, which had the responsibility of launching the Keyhole satellites said “OK, you need to build something that meets our mission requirements, which are being able to loft a 24,000 pound satellite into a polar orbit. Oh, and we’d also like to be able to recover those satellites as well. We can’t do that now, but since this thing is reusable it would be nice to be able to do that in the future.”
Now, if NASA management had been honest they would have said “We can’t do that. The technology isn’t there.”. But they weren’t honest, they wanted to develop the Shuttle, they wanted it so badly that they let two fully built Saturn V rockets rust on the ground in Florida to free up money for Shuttle development. So rather than go to Congress and the Air Force and say “Look, we can’t build a system that meets all of these criteria” and risk losing funding for the Shuttle gravy train they lied and said “Sure, we can build that, no problem.”
The Shuttle was never launched into a polar orbit because of safety concerns about the uprated boosters and when Challenger exploded in 1986 the DoD was able to get out from under the Shuttle and go back to using unmanned boosters for launching satellites. But it wasn’t the evil DoD that forced those changes on NASA, it was NASA claiming that they could build a system that met the DoD requirements so that they could get money that would have otherwise been used to develop and procure unmanned boosters.
bago
So conservatives believe in individualism. What they don’t understand is that social algorithms have logarithmic descriptors.
Each byte on the machine has an address, and only one address because the CPU can only use a 32 bit number. Using a form of idirection you can jump this on some servers, like win32, by providing a layer of indirection that translated address space with two 32 bit words. However, this is an unwanted layer of indirection, only used on the enterprise and datacenter editions of windows 2k series. It is much preferable to use an address space that your machine can handle without indirection, as it affects every memory access. Switching to a 64 bit address has improved accessible memory, but all references take up twice as much space.You lose 4 gigs, you gain 2251799813685248 gigs(if you can install them).
IPV6 is 2^128th, but because the first 8 bits are used to utilize an unused A class V4 address (The first 8 bits of a IPV4 address), they are unusable for the address space calculation. 2^128th / 2^8 is 2^120th. Those exponents grow… exponentially.
This means that usable IPv6 address space is about 1.3292279957849158729038070602803e+36. That means you move the decimal 36 positions to the right. It also means my 32 bit calculator overflowed. This means that in base 10 (your standard exponent is base 10 because we have a base 10 enumeration system. It makes the decimal thing so easy. (Decimal, base 10, yadda yadda. It makes perfect sense for people that use the metric system. Easy to do exponents. Everything is base 10. Too bad computers are base 2.) At any rate, converting 2^120 to decimal you get 1.3292279957849158729038070602803e+36 .. 36 decimal positions to the right. But to quote again on the number of atoms on the surface of the earth… Remember, it’s the widest expanse of earth.
But to make it come closer, I computed the number of atoms on the surface of the earth. That turns out to be 1.26 x 1034 atoms. 2120 is 1.3292279957849158729038070602803e+36, which is still bigger by 105 times.
So we could assign an IPV6 address to EVERY ATOM ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH, and still have enough addresses left to do another 100+ earths.
Connection is valued, and valuable. If anyone actually read Hayek, they would know that his books were about connectionism, a theory that led to graph theory, how things were connected. The major conceit was price theory, namely that local actors would know the price of things and compress that down to a single price vector, up the graph, where that actor would optimize the prices by optimizing his price vector, and so on up the chain until they got maximum profit, but incorporating localized knowledge into your price vector. The problem with that is that scenario you only have one price vector. If you can optimize prices by externalizeing costs, such as co2 pollution and acid rain, you can get a cheaper price vector. As long as you could invoke a tragedy of the commons (like our atmosphere, including carbon for global warming or the acid in acid rain), you could reduce your costs, and gain market share. This increases profits by unfairly reducing costs. Teabaggers are right when they say regulation causes them to increase costs, because they have to pay for their mistake through punitive damages. This reduces their profit. Sometimes it’s cheaper to buy a few senators than it is to clean up their mess, like the leaks in bhopal, or cO2. Being rational actors, they take the cheap option, because their manipulation of the price vector by externalizing the costs is borne by everyone else. Tragedy of the commons.
In essence they are being quite unlibertarian, because they are trying to get other people to bear their logarithmic costs by externalizing them, invoking the standard libertarian trope for defense of commons via private ownership. The truly idealistic libertarian would optimize the costs to their company from punitave damages and regulation by purchasing sectors and shares of the commons they intend to pollute, eliminating the tragedy of the commons. Of course, they’ll be dead by then.
flyerhawk
John,
I’m pretty sure that Obama included the supplementary costs in the previous budget. He made a point about that during his Republican retreat beatdown.
Norwegian Shooter
I can’t believe no one got this right (and so many people are obsessed with our space program):
Jake Tapper:
lee
Just in case someone needs a link to where it says the wars will be included in the budget
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy10/pdf/fy10-newera.pdf