Senators Demand NASA Continue Spending On Ares 152
FleaPlus writes "Senators Richard Shelby (R-AL and ranking member of the appropriations subcommittee handling NASA funding) and Robert Bennett (R-UT) have added an amendment onto an emergency spending bill for military operations in Afghanistan, reiterating that NASA must continue spending its funds on the Constellation program, particularly the medium-lift Ares I rocket. Alabama and Utah have strong ties to Ares/Constellation contractors, and both senators are opposed to the new direction for NASA, with Shelby describing it as a 'death march' for US spaceflight and criticizing the emphasis on commercial rockets."
Re:Pork! Pork! Pork! (Score:4, Informative)
These actions speak louder than words, and I hope the voters are listening this November.
You don't have to wait until November. Bennet already lost his party's nomination. [kansascity.com]
Re:NASA is Military Spending (Score:5, Informative)
NASA is military spending because most of NASA's contractors contract for the military. NASA is also a military organisation, believe it or not
Yes, most of NASAs contractors also contract for the military because it just makes sense, but that does not make NASA a military organization.
Did you know that the Air Force budget for space development and operations actually exceeds that of the entire NASA budget?
Speaking as a NASA contractor, NASA is definitely NOT military.
Re:It's about jobs in this economy (Score:3, Informative)
Worse, they didn't want to engage in rational discussion of the issues and were unwilling to consider compromise. They also seem to misunderstand what exactly one senator, or every Republican senator could do with respect to HCR. All you got was just a drumbeat about the "loving" the Constitution. This will get them nowhere in Congress.
That is a poor generalization based on a few anecdotes. There were ~3500 state delegates and the idiosyncrasies of a small number of them does not a proper analysis make. The thing about Senator Bennett is he doesn't actually seem to get it.
Conservative Republicans in the state haven't liked him very much for years. This year there were just a lot more conservative delegates - in large part due to horror at the prospect of trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.
Perhaps Bennett thinks earmarks for such projects as the "bridge to nowhere" are fine. Perhaps he thinks that sponsoring health care reform bills that have stronger individual mandates (at the federal level) than the bill that actually passed is legitimate. Perhaps he thinks that granting $800 billion to the Treasury department to spend as they saw fit was a good idea. Perhaps he thought that opposing reasonable reforms of Fannie Mae back in 2003 was a good idea.
The merits of those positions notwithstanding, most of the delegates disagreed, and they chose two candidates (excellent candidates I might add) that more closely reflected their views. It has nothing to do with "anti incumbent" feeling. It has to do with the rise of movement conservatism, something that Senator Bennett doesn't seem to have much sympathy for. So the serious conservatives voted him out, and by a rather overwhelming margin at that. He couldn't command more than 27% of the vote.
Re:Science and Politics (Score:1, Informative)
We have that many aircraft carriers because we have the only navy expected to be able to act on any coastline at once, and because they take a long time to build. At any given time, a few are back home for repairs and/or upgrades and/or training new pilots. At any given coastal city you might need a carrier at, most of the carriers are on the wrong side of the planet. In even a small war, you'd want to have 2-4 carriers; yet against any competent foe, you should be prepared to see 2-4 carriers destroyed or damaged enough to be out of action for a while. They heavy fighting period of a modern war seems to only last about a month, meaning it takes too long to wait for a carrier travel from the wrong side of the planet, it takes too long to send a damaged one back for repairs, and it definitely takes too long to build a new one to replace a lost one (it's at least 5 years in peacetime, and though we might be able to eventually get it to under a year if there was a huge need, it would probably take a year before that to even figure out how...). So yeah, that's basically why we keep 10-12 around. The logistics suck.
The pork argument works slightly better for submarines, but, even then, the nuclear-armed ones have logistical problems. At any given time, a third of them are in port (therefore vulnerable), and in the event of a war one should expect to lose one of the other thirds, meaning we need to be able to plan to win using only a third of what we have. And as a nuclear second-strike-only nation, the subs hidden at sea are basically our only real deterrent (because we expect to lose everything on land if someone seriously launched a nuclear attack against us). There are nuclear arms reductions in progress, but it'll probably be the land-based stuff that gets scrapped first.
The logistics applies to the tanks and planes, too. They can't really be produced fast (nor can new pilots or crews be trained fast), so you need to have a bunch of them ready in advance, and be using them to keep a larger number of pilots and crews trained in advance. And since we never really know *where* they'll be needed, we end up needing an even larger number of units spread out. And since wars don't happen on nice timetables and may escalate, we can't plan to have the exact right number of units available, because if we send them all, that leaves nothing to defend elsewhere...
You could argue that the US shouldn't expect to have to deal with global bad stuff at that level... but then, scaling down leads to a power vacuum for someone else to fill, and do you really trust any of the other countries that have both the will and the means to fill that void? As far as navies go, historically, having a bunch of competitors all at the same strength causes arms races and confrontations; having a clear leader (that very notably isn't really USING its navy) has at least deterred naval arms races and naval conflicts from happening. Take a look some time at what some nations claim "on paper" as their sea territory; other countries don't recognize those claims, but the real difference in practice is whether the claims can or cannot be held by force.
Re:Science and Politics (Score:3, Informative)
What counts is raising money to stay in power,
and both parties are dirty to the tops of their eyeballs
Democratic Party: Top Industries [opensecrets.org]
Republican Party: Top Industries [opensecrets.org]