Obama hails NASA's Mars rover program as he's cutting it 40%

CaptainGoodnight

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Oct 13, 2000
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http://news.investors.com/article/621162/201208070832/nasa-mars-rover-curiosity-lands.htm

Almost immediately President Obama, whose minions have been whacking the NASA space budget ruthlessly for money to spend elsewhere while promising grand vague things ahead, issued a statement celebrating American exceptionalism:

"The successful landing of Curiosity — the most sophisticated roving laboratory ever to land on another planet — marks an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future. It proves that even the longest of odds are no match for our unique blend of ingenuity and determination."

Alas, budget cuts have retired the entire U.S. space shuttle fleet scores of missions short of their designed flight lifespans. Highly-trained American astronauts are steadily retiring. While those remaining must rent seats aboard Russian rockets to reach the International Space Station for years to come. While China plans manned Moon landings before 2020, an American return is unlikely in the foreseeable future.
Like Nixon with the moon landings.

The topic of this thread is NOT the same as in other threads - this thread is about cutting NASA's budget, not the accomplishments of Curiosity. -Admin DrPizza
 
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JTsyo

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Nov 18, 2007
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hasn't this already been done to death in the other threads?
 

a777pilot

Diamond Member
Apr 26, 2011
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Not at all like Nixon. Both LBJ and Nixon funded the space program and fully supported it. Nixon approved the Space Shuttle program. So don't try to compare this anti-American we have as our President now with other Presidents that actually loved this country.
 

Pr0d1gy

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Jan 30, 2005
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In before lock. We could have took a plane to Saudi Arabia and dropped an RC car in their desert and got the exact same pictures. Waste of money, time, and resources.
 

ichy

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Oct 5, 2006
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Not at all like Nixon. Both LBJ and Nixon funded the space program and fully supported it.

No, Nixon gutted the Apollo program. We already had the hardware for either two more moon landings or one more moon landing and a second Skylab station but those all went unflown because of a lack of operational funds. The shuttle was never adequately funded which is part of the reason it turned into the clunky, inefficient system that it was.

Obama has not been good for NASA funding but the blame is far from being his alone. Part of the reason that the planetary program is such a mess is that the SLS and James Webb Space Telescope programs are gobbling up all of the other money in the budget.

Anyone who blames Obama for the demise of the shuttle is clearly an idiot who understands nothing about the space program. The decision to retire the shuttle was made under George Bush and the program was effectively dead before Obama took office. Also, the shuttle's retirement was a good thing. It was always a highly flawed vehicle and it was time to replace it. The problem was that we retired it without any kind of realistic replacement. Bush gets partial blame for that (he made a big hoopla about Project Constellation but never funded it adequately) and Obama gets some blame as well (he's shown essentially zero leadership on this issue since taking office.)
 

ichy

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Oct 5, 2006
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In before lock. We could have took a plane to Saudi Arabia and dropped an RC car in their desert and got the exact same pictures. Waste of money, time, and resources.

I know this is a troll post, but if you think that Curiosity's science data mostly comes from pictures then you're truly hopelessly uninformed.
 

nobodyknows

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Sep 28, 2008
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How about he moves money from the bloated medicaid budget to NASA?

If they could just catch all the scam artist who are ripping of medicare/medicaid the could probably fund the whole NASA program.

Link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrill...dicaid-fraud-is-costing-taxpayers-billions/2/


How much Medicare and Medicaid fraud is there? No one knows for sure. In 2010 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report claiming to have identified $48 billion in what it termed as “improper payments.” That’s nearly 10 percent of the $500 billion in outlays for that year. However, others, including U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, suggest that there is an estimated $60 to $90 billion in fraud in Medicare and a similar amount for Medicaid. Big money!
 

woolfe9999

Diamond Member
Mar 28, 2005
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If they could just catch all the scam artist who are ripping of medicare/medicaid the could probably fund the whole NASA program.

Link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrill...dicaid-fraud-is-costing-taxpayers-billions/2/

There have been several pieces of legislation in the past meant to reduce fraud in the system, and they've actually worked, to a point. Money was saved. The trouble is that they have now already weeded out the low hanging fruit among the fraud, i.e. the stuff which can easily and cost-efficiently be detected and stopped. What remains may cost more in enforcement to eliminate than the value of the fraud itself.
 

DrPizza

Administrator Elite Member Goat Whisperer
Mar 5, 2001
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If NASA had Medicaid's money, we'd have a fully functional manned Martian base by now.

And, what would we do with a fully functional manned Martian base? Send people millions of miles from Earth to have a circle jerk or something? Any science worth conducting on Mars can be done much more cheaply (and safely) by robots. [See: current events.] There's nothing a human could do that a robot can't, except perhaps, to react quicker. Fortunately, there's no Marvin Martian with an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator that we have to suddenly hide from.

I hope to see far more missions like Curiosity in the future, sent to other parts of the Solar System (especially the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.) However, there's zero need for human space exploration, and no science to do (other than analyzing the effects on the human body - which is 99% of all the "worthwhile" experiments done on the ISS) that can't be done remotely by robots.

Eliminating the return of man to the moon was not a bad decision by Obama.


Mod edit note to cybrsage - (since you never look at the OP), see the mod edit in the OP -Admin DrPizza
 
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ichy

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Oct 5, 2006
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Eliminating the return of man to the moon was not a bad decision by Obama.

Except he didn't really eliminate it. We still have the SLS project which is gobbling up a huge portion of NASA's budget. Pity we don't really know where we're going to launch the darn thing once it's built :-/
 

K1052

Elite Member
Aug 21, 2003
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Except he didn't really eliminate it. We still have the SLS project which is gobbling up a huge portion of NASA's budget. Pity we don't really know where we're going to launch the darn thing once it's built :-/

We're going to stick a couple guys in an Orion and shoot them around the moon to take pretty pictures.

SLS should be eliminated in favor of upgrading/man rating the Delta IV or Atlas V (or both even) for a hell of a lot less money.
 

ichy

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Oct 5, 2006
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I sort of agree with you. If NASA had more money I'd love to see a new dedicated heavy lift launcher (screw SLS, dust off the F-1A engine plans and build a new Saturn V!) but with the funding reality they're facing I agree they'd be better off doing the best they can with upgraded versions of current launchers.

What I really wish they'd also do is direct more money into alternatives to chemical rockets once you get past low-Earth orbit.
 

K1052

Elite Member
Aug 21, 2003
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I sort of agree with you. If NASA had more money I'd love to see a new dedicated heavy lift launcher (screw SLS, dust off the F-1A engine plans and build a new Saturn V!) but with the funding reality they're facing I agree they'd be better off doing the best they can with upgraded versions of current launchers.

What I really wish they'd also do is direct more money into alternatives to chemical rockets once you get past low-Earth orbit.

Isn't the VASIMR engine prototype supposed to be heading up the ISS in the next couple years?
 

ichy

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Oct 5, 2006
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Isn't the VASIMR engine prototype supposed to be heading up the ISS in the next couple years?

Scheduled for 2015 apparently. I didn't realize that up until now. I thought that serious research into electric propulsion died when NASA killed off the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter.