Comments on: House ignores request for more NASA money for moon mission

By: wodun

wodun — Sat, 25 May 2019 00:59:44 +0000

Does this mean that Trump wont be getting his cut to Gateway funding?

I think it is more likely that these lunar prospecting missions will get going than any type of “big” program. They can build them up incrementally to support larger (in scope, scale, and difficulty) missions as time goes on. They operate on shorter timelines, especially for the outcome, which fit in better with the budgeting process.

But with Democrats giving more money to SLS/Orion/Gateway who knows? Just goes to show how little control Trump has over the process and how hard it would be for him to do what so many space nerds want in cancelling SLS.

By: mike shupp

mike shupp — Fri, 24 May 2019 15:13:49 +0000

This is a House Appropriations Committee, not an Authorization Committee. So what happened is that committee decided to provide funds for what was already in their hopper — namely the original Trump budget request from February plus the amendments given that subsequently. The size and scope of the Artemis project has not been approved by the House, and how much to allocate to it this coming year has not been decided by an authorization committee, so arguably the appro- privation committee has been operating as it should. There’s still plenty of time to amend NASA’s funding, either in the House or Senate, or Joint Conference sessions.

Other than this being Democrats against Trump (and Bridenstein) this isn’t a real case of “Democrats Against Trump.” House committees have worked this way back during the Obama administration, the GW Bush administration, the Ciinton administration, and so on maybe as far as George Washingtons.

By: Ian C.

Ian C. — Fri, 24 May 2019 01:03:21 +0000

Earth science + gateway = establishment stuff.
Moon 2024 = Trump stuff.
They don’t want to give him this win, especially not during his second term.

P.S.: Nothing against Earth science or better measurements of climate change. I don’t want to see it associated with liberal talking points; actually we have to free it from the politicization that poisoned those fields.