Being complimented for a post online… something else that’s mind-boggling. Thanks again.

The Outer Space Treaty, of which the US is still signatory, prohibits the deployment of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction to orbit. Treaties may only be as enforceable as the willingness of the participants, but you start throwing stuff downhill from orbit, and nobody on the planet will be your friend, because everybody is an undefended target. While there is some defense against ICBM’s, there isn’t any against ‘Rods from God’.

Space spending makes us such a paltry amount of the budget compared to most of what the government blows money on that I think it should be immune from cuts.

Even when Biden was blowing through wads of money–NASA really didn’t get much more.

Something I have noticed.

In the recent past–Republicans were more pro-Space. Europa Clipper, Bush 41, etc.

Now I sense a bi-partisan hostility–not only do the more libertarian cost cutters want to go after NASA, as many have always done–but the Green Left also is anti-space (anti-private space that is).

While I doubt the fools at OMB will manage to kill MSFC (by proxy) let’s suppose they did.

Will that even touch the deficit?

No.

Not subsiding fatherlessness would. Not having WWII/Cold War era bases all over the planet would–with orbital batteries taking over force projection.

Instead-we cut pro-space individuals that we should call friends?

Insanity.

True, maybe not everyone you see in NASA look to being doing what you’d like–but they also serve who only stand and wait.

It will make me very angry to see MSFC shuttered only for welfare cheats and warmongers go untouched.

VERY angry.

Patrick Underwood: My gosh, I should have figured this out myself, having reported this kind of government negotiating strategy for decades. You outline the exact plan. Threaten big cuts in science. Then offer an alternative, cut SLS/Orion (giving the job to private enterprise).

This I think is exactly what is going on. Kudos to you!

“Whaaaat? NOOOOOOOOOO!!!”

“Okay. Is there something else we could cut instead? Perhaps on the HSF side? For instance, a certain large booster that has eaten your budget for a couple decades now?”

“NO. Absolutely not! And our Senators will back us up!”

“Very well. There go your science missions.”

“Um… give us a little time to think about it.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

NASA can do without for awhile.

On the other hand, some probably do get it, and just use the ensuing panic as their own bargaining tactic.

This is me sweetening the medicine I need to deliver: astronomers today *do* want the Grace Roman telescope.

Yeah. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that now.

There are real concerns about how the process of how Roman was designed unfolded. But there’s clearly going to be heavy demand for time on the telescope. It’s vastly more capable than Hubble.

It is also gratifying that NASA is instituting a Guest Observer program for Roman. Not just the Usual Suspects will get time on it.

It’s a good point. Passbacks on agency budgets should be held until the agencies have permanent heads in place, able to have input into all stages of the budget process for their agencies. If you are going to hold the head of an agency responsible for the results of his or her agency, they need to be able to exercise authority for the acts that create those results.

In order to collect those bagged samples, the Chinese would have to land very close to them. Mars is a big planet, and there’s lots of rocks out there.

If they’re interested in rocks and returning them, it would be far easier and cheaper to collect their own rocks and return those. Returning the rocks collected by NASA would be a pure political game.

MSR seems to me like some of the projects I’ve been involved with, where there’s goals A, B, and C. C is the most difficult, so the project planners just assume C will happen. That way, it’s not in their budget and so the whole thing looks less expensive and more plausible that it will work.
If C is “move the existing stuff over to the new process” (or with MSR, “bring the rocks to where we can use them”) then it’s the most important part and the whole thing won’t work without it…

Better bang for buck to send an astronaut or six along with the SpaceX crew to collect samples and load them on a return Starship, and maybe stay on to help set up the Mars permanent base.

For that matter, it’d be an even more clever use of bucks to also fill a Starship with lab equipment and do analysis there. Boots on the ground is an order of magnitude higher value than any return proposal.

That would be a big boost for private industry in space. We can create an Earth to Moon transportation industry, a lunar rental industry, and a space manufacturing industry. Not just for the Moon, but for the whole solar system.

On the other hand, per the debacle in the Wuhan lab, I’m not sure that we’d want them handling such material.

Never mind.

“We simply cannot continue making believe money grows on trees. It does not, and if we don’t regain control over the federal budget at some point — looming sooner and sooner as time passes — disaster, bankruptcy, and collapse are certain to happen.

And when a collapse occurs, there will no longer be any money for NASA or space science. Other priorities, such as survival, will force the end of such work.”

Am I the only person who read this part, or does everyone else believe that this simply “can’t happen” because… Well, because it would be *inconvenient and unhappy* if it did. Nope, we’ll go on believing that money DOES grow on trees, that debts (and the compounding interest on them) DON’T have to be repaid, and history provides NO examples of governments falling and civilizations collapsing back into ignorance and poverty. Again, if you think that it can’t happen here — we’re “special,” etc. — try doing a little reading, beginning with Jared Diamond’s book. Yeah, he may be off in a few details, but there are just too many examples throughout human history to simply shrug it off and pretend that it can’t happen to us. God, no.

Having said this, however, I would suggest — and am urging Robert to write more along these lines — that a successful private sector-based space industry that transforms this country into a true space faring nation may be just the spark that reignites American greatness. Likewise, it might help rekindle an economy (based on once again creating *actual things of value* as opposed to churning out more imaginary paper profits on Wall Street) that enables us to pay our debts and retain a currency that is actually worth something.

By analogy, was the aviation industry — aside from the initial role of an airmail subsidy — created by the government picking winners and losers, or was its development driven by marker forces and what its customers, including the military, wanted?

Or so it seems. If the budget has surged in nominal dollars over the last decade, COVID and Bidenflation ate up a lot of it. FY2015 was actually $23,891 in current dollars; FY 2025 is $24,875. Is this more like that U2 song, running to stand still?

But as for our two big ticket items on the chopping block: I think the thing with WFIRST/Roman is not so much how it came to be on the 2010 Astrophysics Decadal Report (which actually was not far removed from the recommendations), but how it grew after that. When the midterm Decadal review came ’round in 2016, astronomers were surprised at how it had inflated. As Jacqueline Hewitt, a professor of physics at MIT who chaired that midterm assessment, put it, “I, for one, was quite surprised that the WFIRST that appeared before this committee was very different from the one that was proposed by Astro2010,” she said of the discussion of WFIRST by her committee. “WFIRST took a lot of our time just getting our heads around how this mission would respond to the science, what all these changes would actually mean.” https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3435/1

But it could be argued that this is water under the bridge, however smelly it might be. I think the differences between Roman and Mars Sample Return come down to this: 1) Roman is, as you say, nearly complete now, and little money will be saved by axing it now, whereas MSR exists only on paper (er, several papers); and 2) the science customer base for Roman is simply going to be far bigger than for MSR. Call it a Frankenscope if you like, but from everything I have heard it is going to be as oversubscribed for time as JWST and Hubble are now. Whereas however valuable those samples from Jezero Crater might be, strictly speaking, there’s just a much smaller pool of scientists and facilities that can or will work with ’em. It’s a fascinating planet, one we hope to colonize soon, but it is just one planet. Roman is going to be scanning much of the universe.

I have been in favor of euthanizing Mars Sample Return for some time now, and that feeling is only stronger now. It’s not that I don’t value getting curated bits of Mars back to Earth geology labs, but I agree with you that it’s time to step back and really rethink how that might happen, and how it might be done more cost effectively. Because right now, even the “cheap” option NASA identified in the independent review still threatens to swallow up a vast chunk of the planetary science budget for the rest of this decade. We just can’t go on like this.

Perhaps the same situation will bear out a hundred years from now. We may have so many GPS- or telecom- satellites that they’ll have to be restricted to only small-fusion-powered or m-a-m – battery powered ones. m-a-m = matter-anti-matter for those of you not in the know. Why is the future so hard to predict? Of course, my own predictions are just shy of 95% accurate. For past events.

If you are looking for “good cuts in spending”, why did everyone seem to think it was a fine idea to NOT hire 85,000 IRS agents, as Slo-Joe wanted? (That number I thought was a lot excessive, but typically audits bring in 2 to 5 times the “cost” of the IRS agents. My own figures, not someone else’s.) That should be a good thing.

Yet, even the Wash Post 6/14/23 berated Congress’s cutting IRS budget because audits return 12 times the cost (their figures, not mine). And here I always figured the Post was liberal!!

We must end the presumption that OUR money is actually the property of the government, and that our keeping ANY percentage of it is something for which we should be grateful.

Across the board, NASA included, the federal government has proven wasteful and irresponsible with OUR money. This must change, and the Trump administration is rightly working to effect such a change.

Each dollar spent on NASA got you a seven-to-one return.

So that’s what they cut?

This isn’t welfare going to some lothario’s side-babies by several different women–these are cuts to America’s exceptionalism.

This is going to hurt the brand.
The DNC hurt themselves by overreach.

This can happen to the GOP as well.

Respectfully disagree. Tax cuts never cost $$$. Rather, they make or create $$$. The notion that tax cuts cost $$$ is little more than democrat anti-tax cut propaganda that sounds good but has never, ever happened. Cheers –

THIS!

While it is tragic that programs are being cut, the government needs to stop spending. And that means both sides. “Look all these cuts saved a trillion dollars. Let’s have a tax cut!” just spends imaginary money in a different way.