An overview of the space war situation by Clark Lindsey
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Clark Lindsey has written a very nice and short summary of the present political battles over NASA’s budget and its future manned space rockets.
Please consider donating to Behind the Black, by giving either a one-time contribution or a regular subscription, as outlined in the tip jar to the right or below. Your support will allow me to continue covering science and culture as I have for the past twenty years, independent and free from any outside influence.
Clark Lindsey has written a very nice and short summary of the present political battles over NASA’s budget and its future manned space rockets.
JWST and CCDev are going to be very vulnerable to hits. The later has no political support in Congress or real utility (they couldn’t deliver with COTS so why trust them with CCDev – unless you want to give it to the current bigplayers, which the supporters don’t.), and the former is way over budget and technically iffy. I wnder if they were kept on this long just to have something to offer for cuts now?
SLS I expect is safe though. It has a lot of bipartisan political support, and is on the critical path for NASA currently envisioned future. It will likely get the highest funding priority of any NASA program. Also this week with us currently seeing a real possibility of losing the station because of the failure of the booster for Soyuz and the Progress freighters (yeah betting everything on one 1950’s Soviet booster made real sence.) the idea of getting a US option fielded quickly (?) will look higher priority.
I think the rumbling was NASA will lose 20% of its budget. So JWST and CCDev may just be the start. A lot oflittle stuff could get whiped as well. Wouldn’t want to be on a science orunmaned program now.