…from Bruce Gagnon.

I don’t have time to critique it properly, but I toss it out as fresh meat to the commenters and the blogosphere.

Cassini has returned a natural-color high-resolution image of Saturn’s rings.

There’s an article in the Houston Chronicle about the cuts to NASA’s 2005 budget request. The Majority Leader does seem to be on the warpath about it:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Sugar Land Republican whose district includes NASA’s Johnson Space Center, called the cuts “unacceptable,” then warned: “It would be very hard to get this bill to the floor if it’s unacceptable to me.”

DeLay, the second-highest-ranking House Republican, schedules measures for floor consideration and wields considerable power over spending bills.

So, why?

I haven’t looked at the cuts in detail, but they seems mainly to affect the president’s new vision. One of the biggest cuts is in the Prometheus Program (largely Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter at this point), most of which would go to California (JPL and whatever contractor is selected) and DOE labs for the reactor work. No money for JSC there. The general exploration activities, including CEV, are nominally funded out of Houston, but it’s managed at HQ and will go to contractors all over the place. Shuttle is fully funded, as is ISS. This action doesn’t seem to be bad for JSC at all, all things considered, from a pork perspective.

So why is DeLay up in arms about it? He is supposedly, after all, one of those Republicans who are supposed to be concerned about federal spending.

Theory 1: He’s greedy, and assumes that any budget cuts will affect JSC to some degree, however minor (probably a valid assumption).

Theory 2: He wants to support the president in his budget request, out of loyalty to the White House.

Theory 3: He actually believes in the vision, and wants it to be funded this coming year.

Theory 1 doesn’t seem worth holding up an appropriations bill over. I’ve got to surmise that it’s theories 2 and 3 in some proportion. Can it be that the Hammer has become a space nut?

There’s an article in the Houston Chronicle about the cuts to NASA’s 2005 budget request. The Majority Leader does seem to be on the warpath about it:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Sugar Land Republican whose district includes NASA’s Johnson Space Center, called the cuts “unacceptable,” then warned: “It would be very hard to get this bill to the floor if it’s unacceptable to me.”

DeLay, the second-highest-ranking House Republican, schedules measures for floor consideration and wields considerable power over spending bills.

So, why?

I haven’t looked at the cuts in detail, but they seems mainly to affect the president’s new vision. One of the biggest cuts is in the Prometheus Program (largely Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter at this point), most of which would go to California (JPL and whatever contractor is selected) and DOE labs for the reactor work. No money for JSC there. The general exploration activities, including CEV, are nominally funded out of Houston, but it’s managed at HQ and will go to contractors all over the place. Shuttle is fully funded, as is ISS. This action doesn’t seem to be bad for JSC at all, all things considered, from a pork perspective.

So why is DeLay up in arms about it? He is supposedly, after all, one of those Republicans who are supposed to be concerned about federal spending.

Theory 1: He’s greedy, and assumes that any budget cuts will affect JSC to some degree, however minor (probably a valid assumption).

Theory 2: He wants to support the president in his budget request, out of loyalty to the White House.

Theory 3: He actually believes in the vision, and wants it to be funded this coming year.

Theory 1 doesn’t seem worth holding up an appropriations bill over. I’ve got to surmise that it’s theories 2 and 3 in some proportion. Can it be that the Hammer has become a space nut?

There’s an article in the Houston Chronicle about the cuts to NASA’s 2005 budget request. The Majority Leader does seem to be on the warpath about it:

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Sugar Land Republican whose district includes NASA’s Johnson Space Center, called the cuts “unacceptable,” then warned: “It would be very hard to get this bill to the floor if it’s unacceptable to me.”

DeLay, the second-highest-ranking House Republican, schedules measures for floor consideration and wields considerable power over spending bills.

So, why?

I haven’t looked at the cuts in detail, but they seems mainly to affect the president’s new vision. One of the biggest cuts is in the Prometheus Program (largely Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter at this point), most of which would go to California (JPL and whatever contractor is selected) and DOE labs for the reactor work. No money for JSC there. The general exploration activities, including CEV, are nominally funded out of Houston, but it’s managed at HQ and will go to contractors all over the place. Shuttle is fully funded, as is ISS. This action doesn’t seem to be bad for JSC at all, all things considered, from a pork perspective.

So why is DeLay up in arms about it? He is supposedly, after all, one of those Republicans who are supposed to be concerned about federal spending.

Theory 1: He’s greedy, and assumes that any budget cuts will affect JSC to some degree, however minor (probably a valid assumption).

Theory 2: He wants to support the president in his budget request, out of loyalty to the White House.

Theory 3: He actually believes in the vision, and wants it to be funded this coming year.

Theory 1 doesn’t seem worth holding up an appropriations bill over. I’ve got to surmise that it’s theories 2 and 3 in some proportion. Can it be that the Hammer has become a space nut?

The show we broadcast last night, in which we read our ceremony on the air, is now up on the web site. There is also a link to my solo appearance on Sunday night. They’ll both be on line for a week or so.

Via Space Today, there is a press conference next Tuesday to make some announcements regarding X Prize developments. More than likely this will be Rutan’s official announcement. Brian Feeney of the Da Vinci Project will also be there. Let’s hope he also announces a prize shot. Nothing like a little competition to rev up the ratings.

Jeff Foust rounds up more stories on the House cuts to the NASA budget request. A quote from Congressman Weldon:

This bill takes care of most of our needs at Kennedy Space Center, so I’m hard pressed not to support my chairman when he’s taking care of Florida.

Yup.

I’ve got mine. What did posterity ever do for me?

I also always wonder if they understand the impact of “delaying” a program for a year. A contractor has a team put together, and they can’t just put them in cold storage until Congress decides to finally fund the program. They get reassigned to other projects, and it’s hard to reassemble them later, resulting in putting together a new team, with associated learning curve. This is one of the reasons that government space programs are so inefficient and costly.

Over at RLV News Clark Lindsey takes an uncharacteristicaly blunt swing at a particularly stupid article on SpaceDaily. I can’t say it any better than Clark, so go on over there and read his take.

There’s also a good item on the state of sounding rocket research (dismal). I’m a fan of sounding rockets since they offer a low cost means of doing simple space research. In science it’s often the simple experiments that have the most dramatic impact (in part because it’s harder to quibble about simple results, but that’s another post entirely). Unfortunately simple isn’t sexy, and sexy is what NASA is most interested in. Another point about sounding rockets that’s not generally well understood is that there’s a region of the atmosphere between about 50 km and 100 km which is too high for balloon research but to low for satellite research. There’s some important processes that take place in this region, and sounding rockets are really the only way to study them directly.

We’ll be reading the ceremony live, starting in less than an hour, at 7 PM PDT. You can listen here. There will be opportunities to submit questions via email and chat.