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Congress moves to reject bulk of White House's proposed NASA cuts
- geuis 1y agoIt's refreshing that given everything else happening, Congress is still at least functional at this level. Should be noted that many of NASA's programs are situated in predominantly conservative areas of the country. Brings lots of jobs and resources to the local economies.
- BlackjackCF 1y agoI just wish Congress or the Supreme Court would show any teeth whatsoever. Right now most of the firings have been happening illegally, despite all of these programs already being budgeted for and funded.
- kelnos 1y agoIt's not about bravery. This is what Republican members of Congress want. This is what the conservatives in SCOTUS want.
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoI'm not sure about that. It's what they vote for, but I'm not sure it's what they want. I think at least some of them are so fearful of being primaried that they do whatever they're told. For them, it is about bravery, or the lack thereof.
- Iwan-Zotow 1y agoNo, it is not With level of debt and borrowing, cannot afford more spending
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mindslight 1y agoIf the debt is a problem worth addressing, then why did the big ugly spending bill raise the debt by trillions of dollars?
- mousethatroared 1y agoPresumably the OP believes the BBB is stupid too?
- clipsy 1y agoWhy are you speaking for him? Surely he's capable of denouncing the BBB himself if he chooses to.
- mousethatroared 1y agoBecause "mindslight" didn't have an argument? He just threw a little non-sequitar tantrum assuming that OP was a Trumpist.
- readthenotes1 1y agoWarren Buffett had this line that we would have no budget deficits if it we're required that every Congress person who voted for such would be ineligible for re-election. Pushing the cost burden on subsequent generations is a cowardly way to deal with our financial problems. When Reagan entered office, the debt was less than $1T (about $3.5T in today's dollars). The #4 cost currently is paying off interest (not principle) on old debt.
- fn-mote 1y agoIt’s funny but economically wrong to ban deficits. I agree we are spending too much now, but the solution should not be to stop all spending. The problem is deeper than just a deficit.
- somenameforme 1y agoExcept SLS/Orion should be cancelled. The SLS is pejoratively called the Senate Launch System, because it has no real place in the market yet is continuing to consume tens of billions of dollars. It was mostly obsoleted by Falcon Heavy years ago (SLS has been a black hole of funding since 2011), and its costs are completely ridiculous. You're looking at billions of dollars per launch if it ever is confidently flight ready. And mind you it's not some amazing technological marvel that's driving these ridiculous costs. It's essentially a really expensive refactoring of the Space Shuttle program to the point that it will be using the literally exact same rs-25 engines. And you already hit exactly on why they're not being cancelled - there's going to be a very short degree of separation between Congressmen and the people charging absurd costs for simple tech that's being used in this project. To me, this is perhaps the purest embodiment (and reason) for governmental dysfunction, at all levels. It's simple pork and corruption.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y agoNeed some competition to commercial near-monopolization (in the pre-to-mid 2010s when it was funded), some other program, they already funded SLS (which was funded to carry way more payload than FH), let it play out, IMO. Also, not to say it isn't a time to start acting, if we are another decade out still adding funding to SLS with the current balance sheet, we have major issues. But $30B over 10Y isn't that crazy when we spend ~$900B a year (with much more in 2026) on defense.
- somenameforme 1y agoThis is the definition of throwing good money after bad. Even if SLS can be completed, it just has no purpose. The latest "estimates" (which means will likely be well below what actually happens) put the recurring per launch costs of SLS at $2.5 billion per launch, on top of the ongoing tens of billions in development costs. That's for a system that is aiming for an initial payload of 95k kg (to LEO). By contrast the Falcon Heavy costs $0.097 billion per launch and can send 57k kg to orbit. So in other words, 1 SLS launch will costs more than 25 Falcon Heavy launches, with a payload capacity that's 67% greater.
- giingyui 1y agoIf there is something Congress will always be functional for is increasing spending.
- IAmBroom 1y agoExcept this Congress is massively cutting spending on things like the Department of Education. This story is about a notable exception.
- kyo_gisors 1y ago[dead]
- crooked-v 1y agoSo what are the odds that Trump just takes away the money anyway, and the Supreme Court lets him?
- trostaft 1y agoI hope they manage to do something similar for the NSF. The proposed cuts there are crushing. The NSF funds great science in all parts of the country, and subsequently tons of jobs to the area.
- Dig1t 1y ago[flagged]
- moab 1y agoYou clearly did not look at the proposed cuts for the coming years---it guts the NSF.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- oivey 1y agoWhere did you read this?
- ogjerajogae 1y agothis user has been making this claim repeatedly for months -- and if you look at the source data they used, the titles are fabricated and non-representative. They are either a GenAI disinformation bot, or they're a human who is so dedicated to their dishonesty as to be impossible to distinguish from such a bot.
- Dig1t 1y agoI am not a bot, you can search the list of cancelled grants on this site: https://grant-watch.us/nsf-data.html https://grant-watch.us/nsf-data.html Just take a minute and read some of them, almost every single one is DEI related. It’s pure racism. The titles I pasted into my post I copied directly from the published list of grants, it’s not like I made up those weirdly specific names. You can search for them yourself.
- Animats 1y ago"The full text of the Senate bill hasn't been released, but the budget blueprint would postpone the Trump administration's plan to cancel the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft.' The Senate Launch System strikes again.
- ACCount36 1y agoIf there was one good thing to come out of this administration, it was Jared Isaacman who would just axe Gateway, SLS and Orion. Now, it seems like even that might end up not happening. What a shitshow.
- windows2020 1y agoWait, so are humans actually going to the moon for the first time in my lifetime in 2027?
- protocolture 1y agoI wouldnt hold your breath. There was a great writeup here only a few months ago about why 2027 was already an overly ambitious target.
- naysunjr 1y agoNASA going back to the moon and Musk to Mars is nothing but pipe dreams to sell the story mode types. The US government has pivoted to animal husbandry of the populace through techno police state, and handing sycophants to power their own title, land and serfs
- notfish 1y agoMy ex coworkers at spacex are pretty damn motivated to get to mars, many of them despite all the Musking happening. I wouldn’t bet against them.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoCan they please get him to Mars?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bongripper 1y ago[dead]
- naysunjr 1y agoYou ever see that video of the flat Earther who disregarded what his own eyes saw for his memorized semantics? Your ex workers goto work whistling Star Trek TNG theme song? Come on… the shit people believe? Some people just “believe” to make money but so many many more believe in American civil religion, or whatever stream of consciousness they simmered in early on. I’m not hating. I’m saying direct experience is truth not our visual syntax. Still waiting for my nuclear powered… everything. Where’s my mini commuter helo and …etc etc etc It’s a government job with extra steps. No hate. Good grift if you can get it.
- propter_hoc 1y ago> Fewer robots, more humans Exactly the opposite of what they should be funding..
- blitzar 1y agoI too welcome the rise of the terminator and its fellow machine overlords
- adastra22 1y agoWhy?
- IAmBroom 1y agoIMO, because robots can replace humans in dangerous and highly undesirable jobs, while increasing overall productivity.
- adastra22 1y agoAstronaut is NOT an undesirable job. Bringing people beyond the earth is kinda the whole point in fact.
- SlightlyLeftPad 1y agoRobots completely replacing humans cannot occur in a capitalist system without complete economic collapse. If robots are developed to be able to perform the most undesirable jobs, then they will also be developed to perform the most desirable jobs. If humans don’t work, they have no money. Humans without money cannot buy things. Humans can’t buy things, companies can’t exist.
- spauldo 1y agoPersonally, I prefer more of both. You have to actually do things - as in, develop the engineering, test things, see what works and what doesn't - to advance the state of the art. We need robots for science, humans for engineering.
- graycat 1y agoBudget cuts? Want to get paid, by the US Federal Government, for pursuing science or technology? From experience, in simple terms, a word: Have the work for and the funding from the US DOD, department of defense, military, for some work they really care about. This sounds like a joke, but it's 90+% real. For years early in my career in applied math and computing, far and away the best parts, funding, technically advanced work, growth in expertise, and working conditions were on US military work, e.g.: (1) The FFT (fast Fourier transform) and power spectral estimation (as in the book by Blackman and Tukey) for analyzing ocean audio, close to parts of the movie The Hunt for Red October. Also, the movie uses magneto hydrodynamics (MHD), and the specialty of the guy I was working for was MHD. (2) Some optimization using Lagrangian relaxation for nuclear war. (3) Given many ships at sea, some Red, some Blue, and some Blue submarines, war breaks out, and how long will the ships last, in particular, the Blue submarines? Sounds impossible or nearly so, but in WWII there were some cute derivations on search at sea and some Poisson process math by a guy Koopmans, and I did a little more on the math, in assembler wrote a random number generator starting with an Oak Ridge formula, and wrote some Monte Carlo code for the whole thing -- yes, used the speeds of the ships, their detection radii, and for each Red-Blue pair the probabilities of none die, one dies, the other dies, both die. Surprisingly, a famous probability prof was flown in for a fast review. His remark was: "No way can your Monte Carlo fathom the huge sample space tree." Well, maybe, but so what? "After some days, say 5, let X be the number of Blue submarines still alive. Then X is a random variable and is bounded, that is, is >= 0 and <= the finite number at the start. Then the law of large numbers applies, and can do 500 independent and identically distributed sample paths, add, divide by 500, and get the expected value for the 5 days, and each of the (times) days, within a gnats ass nearly all the time." The prof agreed but was offended by the gnats remark! Sure, it was simple, but maybe not fully too simple -- was liked, passed the review, and helped my wife and I get our Ph.D degrees. Also the military funding let me sit alone for some days learning PL/I that later, with a tricky feature of PL/I calling back into the stack of routines called but not yet returned, used to save IBM's AI product YES/L1! Ah, military worked again! Ah, the military may (still) be interested in computer and communications security and reliability, system design and development methodology, system monitoring, and management, and now in AI, drones, etc. A commercial server farm or network doesn't expect to be attacked by long range missiles, but DOD systems have to be robust in a war! Once I was at the David Taylor Model Basin (big tank of water to tow candidate ship hull designs), and they were seriously interested in the Navier-Stokes equations -- maybe they still are! Uh, do they have good solutions yet?
- northlondoner 1y agoHappy to hear about this. Actually, budget should be increased not reduced. From purely ROI terms, NASA has a stellar return on investment. Immense contribution to human civilisation beyond US. Just a reminder from 2012: [Neil deGrasse Tyson: Invest In NASA, Invest In U.S. Economy](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisbarth/2012/03/13/neil-degrasse-tyson-invest-in-nasa-invest-in-u-s-economy/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisbarth/2012/03/13/neil-degr...)
- adastra22 1y agoAs someone who worked for NASA, I can tell you all those spin out numbers are bunk. NASA is indeed a good investment, but not for the reasons given. NASA public relations has cooked the books.
- naasking 1y agoThese analyses are highly questionable. NASA has a long reputation of being highly inefficient for good reasons. SpaceX did a much better job at optimizing cost in a way that NASA never could have, so it raises the obvious point: how much better would ROI have been in a world where private spaceflight was incentivized earlier? The answer isn't obviously in NASA's favour.
- SlightlyLeftPad 1y agoIt’s hard to say privatization earlier would have lead to better outcomes. The drawback of privatization is the constant search for profitability which puts undue pressure against safety (Boeing?). Historically, only nation states had the organizational structure and long-term thinking to fund the massive investment required to research space flight in the first place, often motivated by weapons development. Obviously, this is no longer the case. However, It’s arguably because of these nation-sponsored programs that made companies like SpaceX commercializable in the first place since they’re piggybacking on a lot of the science done by the governments.
- aqme28 1y agoHow does this square with the recent SCOTUS case that says, basically, that the executive can dismantle the DOE with mass dismissals, regardless of Congress? Couldn’t Trump do the same here?
- cvoss 1y agoSCOTUS has not issued a judgment in that case (McMahon v. New York). They merely granted the case and will hear it next term. The headlines you likely saw were commenting on how the court chose to deal with the preliminary injunction that was in place in the meantime. It's a major peeve of mine when those headlines make it sound like such an order is actually disposing of the case. In reality, the case is just starting. Anyway, on the question of whether the chief of an organization can fire his or her own employees, the answer is usually "yes, of course, how could it be otherwise?" That's why it matters who the chief is.
- ceejayoz 1y agoAllowing it to go through until next term is fundamentally permitting it. (This is the entire point of injunctions; to prevent irreparable harm while the case is argued.) Many of these folks, once fired, are never coming back. Mission accomplished, even if SCOTUS says "ok we've finally decided that'd be wrong" sometime next year. > Anyway, on the question of whether the chief of an organization can fire his or her own employees, the answer is usually "yes, of course, how could it be otherwise?" That's why it matters who the chief is. The government is not a company. It has three coequal branches. The President is often not legally entitled to fire employees, let alone shutter entire agencies whose existence and function is mandated by law. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48432 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48432 "In the 1970s, however, President Richard Nixon asserted the authority to act on his own to withhold funds or curtail programs he opposed. This assertion was challenged in the courts in a number of suits to compel the release of impounded funds or require the Administration to carry out statutory duties that would result in the expenditure of funds. Congress ultimately responded by enacting impoundment control legislation as Title X of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974."
- phtrivier 1y ago[dead]
- erghjunk 1y agoWe're counting down the days to August 30 in our house as my spouse is a NASA contractor who works at a program with a current expected budget cut of 40%, IIRC. I sure hope these bills pass and the cuts don't happen, but it's abundantly clear at this point that optimism is pretty foolish.
- themgt 1y agoJust do a quick skim of China's reusable rocket projects: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1lncgi8/status_of_chinas_reusable_rocket_program/ https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1lncgi8/status_of_ch... There's over a dozen! They're blatantly ripping off SpaceX, which is very smart and what everyone else should have been doing. It's absolutely insane that the US is going to throw another $10 or $30 billion at SLS. Our leaders will go on TV with a straight face and say "China competes unfairly, everything is state run!" but China is probably doing FIFTEEN reusable rocket projects for less than the amount of gov't money we're lighting on fire with SLS rocket to nowhere.
- FrustratedMonky 1y agoIf they are going to try and backtrack, why pass it in first place?
- IAmBroom 1y agoBecause: Congress has turnover; the POTUS has turnover; things change; Trump is a mercurial idiotic dictator-wannabe.
- FrustratedMonky 1y agoBut they passed the big bill like a couple weeks ago, and now changing already. There hasn't been any turnover.
- ceejayoz 1y agoThe bill was signed twelve days ago. What turnover?
- msgodel 1y agoThe aggressive cutting meant we ran a budget surplus for June. This has to happen or everything gets cut. We're pretty much at the end of the road. The Democrats had control of the white house and legislature at the beginning of Biden's presidency and could have chosen alternatives to cut but did not. As I've said so often: if you don't like what Trump is doing you need to campaign for viable alternatives.
- softwaredoug 1y agoThe viable alternative is pretty obvious. Don’t renew the tax cuts and cut entitlements and defense. That’s what you have to do to get a balanced budget. You don’t get a balanced budget trimming random measly costs that might look nice but are infinitesimal parts of the budget. But we tend to cut taxes, not substantive spending. Which is going to saddle my kids with a mess.
- msgodel 1y agoWhat do you think the tariffs are? We've just about maxed out domestic tax. Already we're probably past the peak of the laffer curve.
- Tadpole9181 1y agoThe BBB contained over 4.5 trillion dollars in tax cuts and will add around 3 trillion to the US debt. It is one of the largest transfers of wealth to the corporate elite in the history of America, while removing the healthcare of tens of millions and putting half a million jobs at risk. Tariffs will not make up for this because tariffs are, beyond specific circumstances, a failed policy that harms your own economy and disproportionately targets your lower class. It threatens US exports, makes many US businesses non-viable (thus losing jobs), slows down economy by increasing the prices of even domestic goods. Combine that with a looming recession and Trump's insistence to take over the fed fiscal policy and enforce a political bond policy... Crashing your economy does not help reconcile debts.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoCan someone with better search-foo than I tell me when the last time was that the US passed an actual budget? Not a continuing resolution, an actual budget. And maybe what the time before that was? My impression is that it's happened maybe twice in the last 15 years, but I am open to correction. This is the most basic duty of Congress, and they've been incapable of fulfilling it lately. (If you wonder why the president rules so much by executive order, it's because Congress can't or won't do its job.) So it will be interesting to see if the current Congress is more functional than recent ones.
- j7ake 1y agoFunding training programs and basic is extremely effective per dollar spent. Where else can you pay someone 50k a year and get PhD-level productivity?