Astronomer Protest NASA With Bake Sale

XNewsman sends in an article from the New York Daily News concerning a rather unusual bake sale! According to the article astronomers at a Florida university and others have found themselves and NASA space exploration budget facing almost 300 million in cuts. Sounds like a massive amount of money does it not. Well let put it into perspective, the military budget for 2010 was $680 billion. Billions MORE than was requested by the executive branch! So 300 million is what...less than half of 1%?!! 300 million is not a deduction, it's a distraction. However 300 million buys a LOT of space science. In protest students, professors and scientists at the University of Central Florida will be holding a protest bake sale consisting as the article points out: super nova brownie cookies, Milky Way cupcakes and other earthly delights.

Tracy Becker, a graduate student in planetary science pointed out that the lose will take the form of a loss of satellites and their ilk that explore other planets. The bake sale is meant to hi-lite losses of whole missions, but also students to carry on the research as well as scientists will be lost due to job loss.

Becker currently works on the Cassini Saturn mission points out that it is these type of programs that create high tech jobs and new tech.

Alan Stern a researcher at Southwest Research institute (who also helped organize the event) That if cuts like these go through it becomes impossible for the US to maintain leadership in these critical areas!

For me what is even more disconcerting is the blatant waste in NASA! Recently NASA said that it has decided to halt work on a new x-ray telescope. A telescope to study deep space and black holes. Work already done and paid for, wasted because to finish would exceed NASA's budget.

The bake sale can help inform the public as to the importance of the work but also how relatively speaking, how inexpensively it does it!

Read more at the New York Daily News artile site here

Obama Tells NASA to Junk the Moon Project

Ok, here is some stuff just to make you crazy....

Dvice.com reports that president Obama is telling NASA to Scrap plans to have men on the Moon by 2020! Want more Junk the Constellation program.

Ok, first off, I know, I took one look at the Constellation program and the planned Moon missions and said this is Apollo redux! And I did hammer on the Constellation with it's vibration problems and the asinine spring solution. And I know, I have said that going back to the Moon instead of focusing on Mars seemed like a serious waste of time. (why redo what has been done....the earlier programs were "this is how you do it" not "this is a recipe on how to do it just like this again) It's one thing to sit and grumble, I don't set policy so I can take that liberty, but it's another thing to see the paring knives come out and the butchering begin. And now without even the poorly conceived Constellation rockets, we have NOTHING as a follow on to the Shuttle program. Obama is citing lack of innovation in both projects...
ok, that is a hard one to call him on, but my grumbling was almost "inhouse" - as a space enthusiast I felt that this was not one of NASA's best efforts, but I would have been right there when one of them bad boys roared off the pad. It's hard to see NASA being put down like an old dog by someone from "outside" lol, I know...but it just feels wrong.

This is what the Dvice article quoted the NY Times about:

• Mr. Obama's 2010 budget proposal for NASA asks for $18 billion over five years for fueling spacecraft in orbit, new types of engines to accelerate spacecraft through space and robotic factories that could churn soil on the Moon — and eventually Mars — into rocket fuel.

ok, that doesn't sound so bad, but refueling what spacecraft? What, our space program is now relegated to gas station attendants? Just feels .......... wrong.

read the complete Dvice article here

read the NY Times article here