NASA abortion and abortion

[Kijutsu]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... last-nasa/

"Word has leaked out" not sure how credible this is, but still.

[Word]

I don't know the details but I doubt it was an easy decision for the US Government. Maybe they should collect donations. I can see that questions concerning life's origin are less important to a state that has enough other problems that could make future research impossible if they remain untreated. Although there's almost always a better way to save money.

[INW]

Isn't this old news? :P:P

[Desolate]

That article is just a bit biased, but I'm not sure how I feel about it.

How is it old news Spin?

[Kijutsu]

<SNIP>

[syllabear]

Perhaps NASA could do to streamline a lot of its spending (even the article mentions poor spending habits), and perhaps they could raise funds through some kind of privitisation. Sure it's not ideal, but it's better than nothing.

[kyle]

Do you really think Obama will be in office to see that through?

[epsy]

Well, independent space "explorers" are around. While they haven't sent anything to the moon yet, they are where NASA engineers will go to.

[Hoax]

Future space exploration is cooperative anyway

[raph]

Pretty sad in my opinion. Kind of funny how man kind still has war and fighting as top priority over scientific exploration (or at least US).

Fun facts (without sources(I used to be interested in this stuff)):

-In the year 2010, the President’s budget request totaled $3.55 trillion.

-Discretionary spending totaled to $1.386 trillion (up 13.1% since 2009).

-The department in which the most money was spent is the Department of Defense, totaling $663.7 billion.

-Department of Education amounted to $46.7 billion

-In the Iraq and Afghanistan war, $1.148 trillion has been spent.

-During this war, Bush awarded a contract with an oil services company in Texas, formerly run by Cheney, to operate in Iraq. Reports suggested the contract was worth $900 million.

-Iraq officials estimated $35 billion in oil revenues in US last fall; meanwhile, the US was spending approximately $100 billion for the war cost

-The army estimated that in 2009, US government spent $198 million on military bands. Ya, the trumpets and shit.

I won't even bring up stimulus packages and blah blah.

[Z-Man]

Well, ESA, Russia and China are still there. I'm hoping I won't have to make a second big lie to my daughter. "I'm sure it's only temporary, we'll return as soon as we have sorted out our problems down here."

(The other one being "No, I don't know why they start at IV. Probably just to make it sound big. Maybe they planned to do I-III, but AFAIK that never happened.")

[INW]

How is it old news Spin?

The fact that NASA is "closing" is old news.

[Mkay1]

Due to the fact we aren't going to space anymore, the Hubble space telescope can not be serviced anymore to replace the gyroscopes. There are four gyroscopes, once it gets down to two, the system will be rendered useless. The gyroscopes go bad every 2(?) years. This satelite is responsible for the biggest increase in knowledge of our galaxy. A new telescope is being developed but won't be finished until around 2016.

- this is coming from my Astronomy teacher.

[apparition]

Psh, that fucka can't even count gyroscopes.

[Phytotron]

NASA "closing" is not "old news." You may be confusing the ending of the shuttle program with all of NASA.


Neil deGrasse Tyson on Real Time with Bill Maher, on the James Webb space telescope, NASA budget, and the value in space exploration. "It's not that you don't have enough money; it's that the distribution of money that you're spending is warped in some way that you are removing the only thing that gives people something to dream about Tomorrow. ... They're playing for the quarterly report, they're playing for the next election cycle, and that is mortgaging the actual future of this nation."

Note: His numbers are a little off, and they're confusing a couple different pieces of legislation. TARP, enacted in late 2008 by Bush, created a $700 Treasury fund, with disbursements having been about $430 billion, with $245 billion to the banks. I'm guessing Tyson got the figure of $850 billion from the early figure floated by the Obama team for what ultimately would become the (woefully insufficient) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which actually ended up costing about $787 billion. Still, the overall point holds, as the combined 50-year running budget of NASA, in real terms, has been just $790 billion.

Remember that in 1974 when it was first proposed by the Ford Administration, and in fact then enacted by Congress, that funding and development of the Hubble Space Telescope be scrapped, the greatest outcry against that wasn't limited to astrophysicists and people within NASA, it was from the public. There were letter-writing campaigns, it was all over the op-ed pages and the talk shows. The public took ownership of Hubble because of what it meant, that the universe would be brought to them as participants in the frontiers of discovery. (Well, and perhaps still a little bit of wanting to win the space race with the Soviets.) We seem to have lost that.

And by the way, speaking recently of the Large Hadron Collider, the American Superconducting Super Collider that was cancelled in the early '90s, would have had peak energies three times as large of that of the LHC. But, so, now the center of mass of particle physics is no longer in the US, it's in Europe, which in one talk Tyson marked as the beginning of the end of the US's leadership in that realm.

The problem is, American culture at the moment, especially on the center-right (which is also unthinkingly anti-government, except where it's theocratic, corporatist, and war-mongering), is very suspicious of science, even being anti-science. What little science is taught in schools (with much of it having been further cut by the massive failure of NCLB's self-defeating math/english teaching-to-the-test) and accepted by the public is mainly focused on the technological, vocational areas. But, as Dawkins said, "Justifying space exploration because we get non-stick frying pans is like justifying music because it is good exercise for the violinist's right arm." There's not a vibrant counter-culture that elevates science and the natural world and universe, and the exploration thereof, on the basis of being intrinsically wonderful, wondrous, illuminating, enriching, and even poetic—rather than mundane and utilitarian, not to mention being seen as undermining people's cherished religiosity (or flakey liberals' postmodernism). Carl Sagan was exceptional at conveying that, and Neil deGrasse Tyson could be considered his spiritual successor, but there's not the fertile socio-cultural landscape to give him, or others who express that view of science and nature, the attention that is deserved and necessary. (Much of this paragraph could also be said for the arts and civics, by the way.)

Tyson giving a "sermon" on having a cosmic perspective and the impact of science. "When I reflect on our kinship with the cosmos ... that excites me, that makes me want to grab people in the street and say, have you heard this?!"

There is a grandeur in this view of life.

But, no: pointless and illegal wars, Christian extremism, and tax cuts and subsidies for Wall Street millionaires and big corporations are far more important American values these days—at least among those who have the power and their witless, hapless pawns like the Tea Party. Well, I think the Occupy Wall Street movement needs to incorporate the pro-science and reason movement, I say.


Disclaimer: I've shamelessly paraphrased a bunch of lines from Tyson (though mostly the informational ones, like the Hubble bit), and a few from Dawkins, in this post.