House Appropriators Pull Out The Knives

Will the cuts include STS 135?
Discretionary spending always tends to be somebody's else pork spending that never gets around to being cut.

The national debt is over 20 trillion. The deficit is over a trillion. Time to cut. We cannot afford these expensive toys any more than a family facing forclosure can afford a new boat, RV, or dirt bike.

If that is all NASA loses its doing really well. Somebody is watching out for the space program.

These cuts won't do anything for the long term future of our nation. They are an attempt to 'look good' politically.

Until social security, medicare/medicaid , and other federally mandated non discretionary spending is handled,,,,as a nation we face dire consequences.

...and we've seen how willing both the politicians and citizens are willing to tackle those problems.

Cutting NASA's budget, and DoD's budget means less purchasing power for the rockets that Elon Musk et al are building....

The national debt is over $14 trillion. NASA's annual budget is less than $20 billion. So even if you totally eliminated NASA spending for the next 7 years, it would only reduce the national debt by only 1%. However, since the annual interest on the debt is more than ten times the annual NASA budget, we'd actually save nothing while continuing to dramatically increase our debt.

Also studies continue to show that NASA spending actually creates more wealth for the US than it consumes. So cutting the NASA budget would only make the country poorer besides also making us a much less technologically advanced country!

Its the highly inefficient Medicare and Medicaid system ($799 billion annually) and titanic military expenditures ($689) that are killing us. And our extremely expensive and inherently inflationary employer based private health insurance system is also killing the ability of private American companies to compete against companies from countries that have highly efficient national health insurance systems.

It should also be noted that the personal debt of American citizens is higher than the Federal debt at about $16 trillion. So American citizens are not exactly great models for the politicians when it comes to spending.

Marcel F. Williams

Should be relatively easy for NASA to absorb....zeroing out KSC "modernization" and STS-135 offsets much of the cut

Though unfortunate, that sounds tolerable from a NASA perspective in these tight times. However, it should be painfully obvious to everyone now that if this record discretionary budget cutting only saves $100B in the face of trillion dollar deficits then bankrupting the future cannot be avoided without making serious cuts in entitlement spending. It's almost not even worth the Congress's time to debate discretionary spending for this level of savings if it distracts time and attention from seriously cutting entitlements.

Everybody claims their pet government program only consumes 1% of the budget. Our evil invasions of the Middle East...."Only 1%" Our mega billion dollar yet useless new fighter...."Only 1%" and so on.
Well, time to break out the knives and slash a lot of programs that "Only" consume 1%, Like maybe 50 - 60 0f them? Add NASA to one of the many 1%'s

Space Ops get approximately current CR funding levels, restoring over 1Billion Obama took and spread around. Sounds like we can make that work, and get ourselves back into space ASAP.

It could be worse. This proposal would give Space Operations the FY10 funding level instead of the FY11 PBR cut of $1 billion, so we should be able to fly STS-135. In fact, I don't understand what the Shuttle program will do with full FY10 funding for FY11 instead of phasing out as planned. Sounds like another case of spending hundreds of millions on a cancelled program and getting nothing for it. ELV and ISS share in the Space Ops appropriations line so it is impossible to see without the details where the money is going.

While the FY11 Authorization contained language for KSC modernization, the CR that we have been actually operating under had no budget for this activity. So if this is a "real" $300M cut from our existing FY11 money, there's nothing in KSC modernization to cut from. The big question is whether this new spending bill will contain language to really cancel Constellation and what, if any, it directs toward the new path.
Not exactly sure about the rates and the math, but if one has to cut $300M and you have only about half a year to do so, then you could be talking about layoffs on the order of 5000 engineers/scientists to get there. Likely not real motivating for today's youth to pursue careers in science and engineering.
No doubt I am biased, but I really wonder if such a move is in the best interest of our country for the long term. As has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, its the entitlements that are killing us. Maybe its time to bite the bullet and piss off the veterans and the seniors in order to secure our future. But I won't hold my breath for that!

Watching your life's work flushed down the toilet is pretty dishearthing to todays scientists and engineers.

Watching your life's work flushed down the toilet is pretty dishearthing to todays scientists and engineers.

Yep, happened to us in 1993 when SEI died. The difference is that this time those of us that went through this last time, and saw the architecture picked by the administrator (who was also there at NASA in 1993 with his first lunar outpost architecture), knew that it was only a matter of time until this happened.

For the development of the space frontier to be sustainable, it MUST have economic development as a centerpiece.

Zero G Zero Tax

Just a quick reminder that this is the House "pass" at language accompanying a proposed remainder-of-fiscal-2011 CR. The Senate has to respond and then horse-trading and arm-wrestling will ensue, accompanied by public pontificating and not-public work on compromise. There are many possible outcomes, including a series of short-term CR's while the thrash continues.

*shrug* it is same everywhere. In my country too politicans search for cuts where it is politically viable, not where it would really help, like cutting out privileges of union parasites.

Watching your life's work flushed down the toilet is pretty dishearthing to todays scientists and engineers.

Watching the Shuttle mafia squander your future in order to protect the privileges of the current workforce, the profits of existing contractors and the political careers of their unscrupulous allies in Congress (probably in vain too) must also be pretty disheartening.

Its more like the family is still getting its dirt bike, RV, and boat while turning off the educational package on the cable TV bill.

When it comes to cuts the last thing politicians will go for are their favorite pet programs. They aim at the essential ones first.
This gives them the argument for why they need to spend more money while not risking anything they care about.

Be careful what you wish for,

You people keep crying that you want this AND you want that. There is nothing anywhere that says we have to do ANY of this HSF stuff.

Yeah it's nice and I love it too but the fact is money is uber tight and it just isn't truly necessary.

Preeminence in space?

Yes that's important--but it's military preeminence in space that will come first and NASA HSF is a luxury! We went 6 years without HSF in the 70’s—do you think it won’t happen again?

You wanna cut something out in trade for your precious HSF?

How about closing a field center or two? Because that's just what it may cost. It has to happen sooner or later--NASA CANNOT sustain 9 field centers it just can't!—Why is this not on the table for NASA’s budget woes?

This isn't the 70's kids-the space race is over and not likely to be repeated, we most likely will not be going to the moon or Mars in our lifetime.

NASA doesn’t care anything about aeronautics anymore so why not just drop the first “A” in NASA, dole out all the aero facilities to the DoD and close a couple field centers to have funds for HSF.

NASA absolutely does not have enough work to support 9 field centers full of people sitting around doing nothing or sitting around building things that will never be used.

But it really doesn't matter anyway because NASA has turned into nothing but a jobs program anyway so don't worry they won't cut a field center for a long while.

I don't see a man on mars until 2200

Spiff......Out

Reductionism at NASA did nothing to improve achieving NASA's missions. The only thing that even more reductionism will do is to destroy NASA further without any gain.

Some seem to think that less center activity brings a virtue. This is false. It just means less activity and less getting done. There is no net advantage.

America has spent too much time embracing "lies" about what it does with its activities across the board. We do things for the wrong reason, and our cynicism gives license to non virtuous behavior that we enshrine in "virtue" for our invented purpose. If you wish to find a villain, here it is.

We must reverse course away from this self destructive behavior, make a clear eyed assessment of what we need and why we need it, without bringing along baggage from the past that'd like to for convenience but no longer can afford to.

So its not that we need to be reductionist in activity, but to be genuine about what we need to actually be doing with that activity. But this requires a genuine unanimity we currently don't possess. And an honesty rare as well.

Honesty and unanimity are the leading factors - not money or will. Currently people have the will (still) to rather spend 100x the money poorly spent ... than deal with these.

Reductionism has and will continue to likewise keep us from our goals.

-nooneofconesquence.

Don't listen to what WDC is saying rather look at the reality of what is happening. What you and I want or think is right has little or no affect in WDC any more. This is about them. Sure they will make some cuts as this is "the season of government cutbacks" or rather the talk of government cutbacks. The reductions that are being made are merely noise and really don't change the national deficit in a way that will have any lasting results. This will never happen until they cut entitlements - and yes including social security - which is by far the runaway freight train in America. Sure DoD is a large part of the budget but they have already started to make significant cuts as we can no longer afford to police the world.

You could cut NASA 10 times more than its annual $20B budget and the US would never feel it or know it except for the loss of high margin - advanced education jobs. I guess WDC doesn't value those jobs and education any more although NASA loves to talk about how they are all about education and inspiration to explore the universe. Again talk is cheap - look at reality and the actual data.

The WH, Bolden and congress are saying all kinds of things about NASA most of which is shallow words but it is obvious to those involved that the goal is to cut the forces without making any formal announcements - meaning many people have been fired, will be fired this year or leaving on their own (because NASA is FUBAR'd) - that way when it comes time to announce the final numbers the actual cuts will be minimal although they may move money around from here to there to make it look like they thought about things a bit or had to do some backroom deals to get certain members of congress to agree or swap votes. This allows WDC to not take the blame directly and a report will be issued by the congressmen and women in their local districts that only a few people had to be laid off due to the new budget. See how that works? Pretty smooth if you ask me and I've seen this many times in various agencies and programs over the years although I must say NASA has them all beat with how bad they have handled things the last few years not to mention their communication to the public and their own employees. I guess the communication had to be bad because they knew if they spoke up more it would expose their true plan.

California for example when they started to have budget issues fired teachers and police first rather than state workers who push paper. So NASA will do the same. They will fire the engineers and keep the paper pushers which essentially cripples the space program. All part of the plan.

I struggle to understand why this is the plan but the data is what it is. The bottom line is WDC is trying to put NASA out of business and cut some of the brightest engineers in the US at a time when they say "we are laser focused on jobs." I love how they can look at the camera with a straight face knowing what they are saying is a bold face lie. Truly amazing.

And for those who thought gutting NASA is a good thing and would force engineers to flip burgers - well so far almost all of them have found jobs mostly in another government agency or in the private sector so I'm not sure your hope of pain has been reached but give WDC some more time and maybe your dreams will come true.

I wish I was wrong about my general assessment but the facts speak louder than words.

Watch what people do not what they say but more importantly look back at the historical data and this alone will tell you what their true plan was. Some think it is merely chaos - I believe it is The Plan.

If someone is looking for nominations for Center closings I would suggest Johnson and Ames.

Both are relics of a bygone era.

Johnson only existed for purely political reasons and Ames has so few facilities in use that they could be closed and what few functions there moved to other centers. Sell off or hand rest to contractors.

Overall, HSF needs to be reduced to researching new long range technologies for future HSF and concentrate on space science and aeronautics. These are areas where the benefits are much greater and it does not take $100B to accomplish a mission (like a person on Moon or Mars).

"The national debt is over 20 trillion. The deficit is over a trillion. Time to cut."

Yes, time to cut. But that alone won't solve the problem. People need to get real. According to the National Taxpayers Union web site, the rates for the top Individual Income Tax bracket were as follows:

1958 NASA created Rate: 91%
1969 1st moonwalk Rate: 77%
2008 latest listed Rate: 35%

Our country did great things in the 50's and 60's because we PAID for them. Top earners now pay less than half what they did then. You can't cut your way out of a revenue hole. Cuts alone just won't cut it.

I think that Congress wants to continue to spend money with NASA but there eyes have been opened over the course of the last couple years and especially by the successful Dragon flight last year. They are coming to the realization that NASA appears not to be able to get the job done in anything like an effective cost or a reasonable schedule. For a long time they pointed to NASA as the exemplar of high tech wizardry and intelligence; now they have come to the realization that NASA has lost the abilities that the nation used to take pride in.

I think Congress and the American people are willing to continue to support NASA, at the same funding level, but NASA has to show they can offer something for the money. NASA is getting a reputation for not delivering.