NASA Budget Hearings on NASA-TV...RIGHT NOW (March 13 - 19:10 GMT)

Right now on NASA-TV (which can be seen on nasa.gov) are budget hearings in Washington D.C. for NASA's Fiscal Year 2009 Budget. They started at 19:10 GMT (3:10 U.S. Eastern Time)

Talking about budgets maybe isn't as exciting as talking about aliens, but this is still very important stuff, albeit very mundane on the surface.

NASA is proposing a budget that was larger than the previous, and they are making their case to the U.S. House of Representatives to prove that they need more money.

So far they have discussed Shutting down Aericbo Observatory, Near-Earth Asteroids, the Constellation X space observatory, and the Mars Sample return mission (MSR). They have also discussed the "ITAR" legislation, which prohibits some people from other countries from working on sensitive defense programs -- which directly affects NASA.

[edit on 3/13/2008 by Soylent Green Is People]

I think NASA should be done away with altogether. They have no profit motive, so there's not much incentive for them to innovate or find a way to open up space to commerce and settlement. Furthermore, since they can and frequently do overrun their budget, the private sector cannot compete with them. NASA is strangling real advancement in space.

reply to post by chromatico

I don't agree -- there is no direct profit motive in much of the Space Exploration that NASA is doing (Mars Sample Return Mission, Cassini-Saturn Mission, Possible Missions to Jupiter's Moons). If NASA does not do this, then nobody will.

The U.S. government has a long history of giving grants for pure science purposes that will have no DIRECT payoff for actual industry -- but lead to a robust technological economy decades later. The government puts up the original money in doing the vital early research that will someday lead to great commercial advances. Government science grant projects plant the seeds that will someday fuel our economy.

Take Particle Physics for example...who do you think provides most of the money for programs such as particle accelerators and such -- the government. Particle accelerators don't directly produce profit-making results, but what particle accelerators have taught us about physics decades ago is what helped fuel our recent commercial technological advances.

And if you want private industry launching rockets, you're getting it. NASA has a program called "COTS" (Commercial Orbital Transport Services) that is hoping to get private industry to develop orbital crafts that can get a spacecraft to orbit to do things such as re-supply the Space Station. NASA is hoping Priavte Industry (via the COTS program) will help take up the slack sometime after the Shuttle Fleet is retired in less than 3 years.

[edit on 3/13/2008 by Soylent Green Is People]

reply to post by Soylent Green Is People


Oh, great. So we need the government to condescendingly "help" private enterprise to do what they're more than capable of doing on their own. Also, you apparently aren't remembering the fact that almost all global exploration was done with profit in mind.

WOW! Did you happen to see the pics of Mars from the rovers and the MRO? Avelanche???

Now it says the hearing has ended. I think those Mars pics were just a tease for the check signers. Let the real meeting begin gentlemen?


[edit on 13/3/08 by cbianchi513]

reply to post by chromatico

It's not at all condescending...Private enterprise has relied for many decades on the U.S. Government providing grants to Universities and other private institutions to do the up-front research that will eventually turn in to consumer products that fuel our economy. Why wouldn't private industry welcome this research (and they actaully DO welcome this research).

...and this symbiotic relationship between government-funded cutting-edge research and U.S. Private industry has been working beautifully for more than a half-century, and the technological wonders that the (usually) robust U.S. economy has been giving us is proof of that.