Repeal the goddamn thing already! It appears that Louisiana will be the ninth state to seek a waiver from Obamacare.
The pigs rule! Congress to NASA: follow the authorization act.
In other words, Congress wants NASA to spend money (Pork!) on a rocket it can’t complete for the cash provided.
Senate Democrats and the White House offer $20B more in cuts.
This is further evidence that the political winds favor trimming the government. However, to find out how serious the Democrats are we’d need to find out some details about their specific proposed cuts.
More on the space war over NASA from Jeff Foust of The Space Review. Also read this Aviation Week article.
Overall, it is still a mess, with much of the money allocated to NASA a complete waste that will not get us into space.
The NASA space war mess.
Congress is now looking to flatline or cut NASA budget (or not enact new ones) while also playing its own game of telling NASA to do things it simply does not have the budget to do. A new slow motion train wreck is in the making.
An critique of NASA: No vision equals no innovation.
That NASA (and our government) lacks vision is not necessarily a bad thing. For the first time in decades, this is leaving room for new and independent companies to move in and fill the vacuum left by NASA. In the end, I think we will be far better off.
Repeal the damn bill! An industry report has revealed that consumers may be paying billions of dollars more in out-of-pocket health care expenses due to Obamacare.
Repeal the damn bill! The death panel that is part of Obamacare.
The board would cap the total amount of money Medicare recipients could get for care. Roe, a practicing doctor before he entered politics, said that means health care decisions will end up being based solely on cost, instead of what the best possible option is for Medicare patients. . . . Congress can recommend different spending amounts, but has to offset any increase in one area with a decrease in another. If Congress doesn’t change anything in the board’s “recommendations” for how much money should be spent per Medicare recipient, their recommendations become law – even without congressional approval or the president’s signature.
The program-formerly-called-Constellation moves forward: Lockheed Martin yesterday unveiled the Orion spacecraft and the test center to be used to prepare it for space.
Though this press announcement was actually intended to encourage Congress to continue funding, it also illustrated how this portion at least of Constellation had made significant progress before it was undercut by both Obama and Congress.
The mess from the NASA space war spreads: Three European space science missions are now on their own after the U.S. the space agency pulls funding.
A boxing gym, fighting its state’s eminent domain proceedings for being “blighted”, gets its day in court.
Those private companies better get cracking! The Russians have raised their ticket price again, from $56 to $63 million per astronaut ride on a Soyuz.
How the White House bullies the press.
Does this make you feel safer? The TSA is going to retest the radiation levels of all its airport body scanners after maintenance records on some showed levels 10 times higher than expected. Also this:
The TSA is responsible for the safety of its own X-ray devices. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said it does not routinely inspect airport X-ray machines because they are not considered medical devices. The TSA’s airport scanners are exempt from state radiation inspections because they belong to a federal agency.
The squealing continues: Senators defend NPR funding. I like this quote in the comments:
What part of being broke do they not understand?
Discovery has landed safely, for the last time.
Not surprisingly, the Obama administration has appealed a Florida judge’s ruling that Obamacare is unconstitutional.
The future of Obamacare: bureaucracy and pulling strings.
Discovery has undocked from ISS, for the last time.
The new Senate budget proposal for NASA cuts the agency’s budget, though it does so less than the House.
Only a few months ago the Democratically-controlled Senate proposed giving NASA an increase from its 2010 budget. Today, the Senate, still controlled by Democrats, now proposes cutting that budget instead. It is remarkable to watch the impact of an election.
If Obamacare was so great, why have the number of waivers the administration has issued to the law now climbed to more than 1,000?
Clark Lindsey of www.rlvnews.com/ has posted some interesting thoughts in reaction to the successful launch of the Air Force’s second reusable X-37b yesterday and how this relates to NASA’s budget battles in Congress. Key quote for me:
Charles Bolden doesn’t seem prepared to make a forceful case against the clear and obvious dumbness of the HLV/Orion program. Perhaps he in fact wants a make-work project for NASA to sustain the employee base.
As I’ve said before, the program-formerly-called-Constellation is nothing more than pork, and will never get built. Why waste any money on it now?
Go Texas! Legislators there have proposed making it a felony for TSA agents to perform full-body patdowns without cause. They have also introduced legislation that would make the body scan equipment illegal.
NASA administrator Charles Bolden revealed at House hearings this week that NASA will announce the future museum homes for the retiring shuttles on April 12.
There is something terribly sad and ironic about having this announcement occur on the 50th anniversary of the first manned flight into space by Yuri Gagarin.
