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Finalizing the remaining Fiscal Year 2007 (FY07) funding measures International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), Calls for Balanced and Transparent NASA Budget Preserving Science & Aero, Core Technical Capabilities Achievable Within FY06 baseline
FPTE also argues that Congress make absolutely every effort to provide a $305.9 million budgetary increase above the FY06 enacted level to allow the Agency to continue its development of a new generation of manned spacecraft.
Increase the Exploration Systems account to the $3,978.3 million in the President's proposed FY 2007 budget to support an increase in the Constellation program needed to keep the Vision for Space Exploration on track so that NASA can move forward beyond the Shuttle era.
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Looks like it is going to be a bigger fight to transition from shuttle to the orion than we were lead to believe.
NASA workers fight layoffs, seek spaceship aid
employees have asked congressional appropriators to adopt fiscal 2007 language forbidding layoffs at the agency and to grant sufficient funding for the next-generation manned spaceship.
The space agency had planned to cut up to 2,673 employees by the end of fiscal 2006, but senators proposed a moratorium on layoffs,
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By "sufficient funding" they mean "keep paying the whole Shuttle army even if we don't need them"
The reality of the situation is that NASA isn't going to need the entire army of engineers that operate Shuttle, and so some time, sooner or later, layoffs should therefore happen. Since money is tight while trying to keep Shuttle going and develop Ares/Orion/etc simultaneously, sooner the better.
With the present very low unemployment, now would be the best time for the workers too probably.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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When hasn't money for space travel been tight? There always seems to have been a war to finance at the same time in the past. And by workers, I suppose you mean all those whose experience has been gained for half a lifetime managing space hardware and fuel management. There's nothing requiring that kind of expertise in any other field in the country. Civil service aside, we should be encouraging more applicants not fewer for these support positions, or else make it easier for foreigners to jump in when the anticipated post Space Shuttle push we seem to be discussing starts up.
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Griffin Says NASA Will Protect CEV, Station Against Flat-Budget Squeeze
By Frank Morring, Jr./Aerospace Daily & Defense Report
01/11/2007 09:08:43 AMNASA will trim from the bottom to accommodate a half-billion-dollar hole in its expected funding this year, halting or shrinking low-priority programs to keep top-dollar efforts like the Orion crew exploration vehicle and International Space Station assembly on track.
With scant hope for a loophole in the year-long continuing resolution ordered by the new appropriations chairmen in the Democratic 110th Congress, Administrator Michael Griffin says his choices are clear.
"We will find what we believe are the lowest priority half-billion dollars in content, and we'll extract it, across the agency," he says, stressing that does not mean programs at the core of the redirected U.S. space program as defined by President Bush almost three years ago.
"I will do everything I can to keep Orion and Ares I on schedule," he says. "That will be right behind keeping shuttle and station on track, and then after that we'll fill up the bucket with our other priorities."
Although NASA asked for almost $16.8 billion this fiscal year and planned accordingly, Congress hasn't passed its fiscal 2007 appropriation and doesn't intend to. Instead, under the continuing-resolution plan developed by Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), the new appropriations committee chairmen, most of the government will operate under its fiscal 2006 funding levels.
The Byrd/Obey plan also includes a no-earmark rule, which knifes a $1 billion add-on proposed last year by Sens. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) to "pay back" NASA the cost of returning the space shuttle to flight after the Columbia accident. So the agency will have about $520 million less than it expected in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.
Wiggle room
As with everything in Congress, there is some wiggle room. Capitol Hill aides say the fiscal 2007 continuing resolution probably will be drafted to give federal managers more flexibility to shuffle money between programs to cover shortfalls. And the fiscal 2008 budget, which is due out Feb. 5, also will give government agencies an opportunity to play catch-up.
But this year the money has to come from somewhere, and in an interview with sister publication Aviation Week & Space Technology on Jan. 10, Griffin gave his view on where that should be.
"The ideal candidate is a fairly new, lower priority effort where not a lot of money has already been invested, and by stopping it now you can react and not have to spend future money that you know you're not going to get," he says. "If we don't find the ideal candidate we'll look for less ideal candidates."
Griffin notes that most of the members of Congress who endorsed NASA's exploration plans in the fiscal 2005 authorization act were re-elected, and he doesn't expect the change of leadership to upset that bipartisan support for the overall agency goals. And members of Congress who take an active interest in NASA programs have been concerned about the "gap" in U.S. access to space between the last flight of the shuttle in September 2010 and the first flight of Orion with a crew.
Driven by budget
NASA has tried to improve on the 2014 deadline for that flight set by Bush by a couple of years, but the latest date for it is now October 2013. Griffin says that, too, was driven by budget, and that technically the Orion and its Ares I launch vehicle remain in good shape to become operational as a U.S. link to the ISS in 2014.
Using the space shuttle to complete the space station remains the top priority, he says, because if the U.S. doesn't keep its commitment to deliver expensive European, Japanese and Canadian hardware to the station, it will have a hard time finding partners for its long-range lunar exploration plans.
Beyond the Orion/Ares I route to low-Earth orbit, it remains to be seen how other elements of the exploration program will fare over the coming year.
Work on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter set for launch in 2008 is too far along to meet Griffin's criteria for cutting in Fiscal 2007, but the Ares V heavy-lift launch vehicle, its Earth-departure stage and the lander and other hardware needed for a resumption of lunar-surface operations are in their early days.
[color=darkred]Let's go to Mars and far beyond - triple NASA's budget ![/color] [url=irc://freenode#space] #space channel !! [/url] [url=http://www.youtube.com/user/c1cl0ps] - videos !!![/url]
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Clear summary of the present budget situation
Exacerbating the problem is the lack of a 2007 budget for NASA. The 109th Congress adjourned in December without approving most of the FY 2007 appropriations bills on its plate, including the one that funds NASA. The new Congress, now under Democratic leadership, announced last month that instead of finishing those outstanding bills, they would instead quickly pass a “joint funding resolution”, which, in effect, would be a longer version of the stopgap continuing resolutions that have funded NASA and other affected parts of the government since the fiscal year began on October 1. The new resolution, which would run through the end of the fiscal year, would continue to fund agencies at the FY 2006 levels—meaning that NASA could end up with about a half-billion dollars less than what it anticipated for 2007. That’s not good news for an agency that was already feeling squeezed.
Some reports have suggested that there may be some room for improvement in the weeks to come as Congress hashes out the joint funding resolution, allowing NASA to win back some of the money it currently stands to lose. However, given the expected fierce competition for funding, it seems unlikely NASA will get it all back, making a bad situation worse.
[color=darkred]Let's go to Mars and far beyond - triple NASA's budget ![/color] [url=irc://freenode#space] #space channel !! [/url] [url=http://www.youtube.com/user/c1cl0ps] - videos !!![/url]
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Martian Republic said:
"the CEV might be twice as big as Apollo, but it still not going to be big enough to even put together a large colonization colony even on the moon."
Well no kidding, Sherlock! The CEV isn't a colony ship, obviously. Again! NASA isn't in the colonization business, that is going to be left to somebody else unless Congress orders NASA to change its mission. Colonization isn't exploration, which is NASA's cheif purpose.
"Any idea that private enterprise is going to step in and save the day after NASA get there, that will not happen either, because it will be too expensive for them too."
It doesn't have to be private, but I bet it probobly will need some private involvement, besides that though the point is that exploration isn't colonization, which is outside of NASA's jurisdiction.
After we have our Mars bases, it will then probobly make sense to build (or hopefully buy) a real live honest to goodness "no really, we're not kidding this time!" Shuttle-II to reduce the cost of operating bases and to enable the SEI-sized missions beyond Mars. Then we can talk about colonization, and not a single hour of a single day before.
As far as building Shuttle-II now instead of CEV, hush and listen for a minute: NASA is balencing on the edge of a knife, if it can't get VSE started in earnest it is very probable that what little credibility the agency has will evaporate, and manned spaceflight will die with the ISS. It is absolutely imperitive, life or death, that NASA accomplish VSE in a timely fasion. Any Shuttle-II vehicle is going to be expensive, and there is just no way that NASA is going to get that kind of money while doing Shuttle/ISS simultainiously. Just to explore and set up bases doesn't need a super RLV either, and can be done just fine with a heavy lifter and the CEV, they are the obvious choice.
Lunar mining is a little different, in that there is never going to be a large presence on the Moon. Ever. Not even with PGM mining... in such a case, you don't need ultra-cheap launch quite so badly, and Elon's Falcon-IX or Pioneers' newly aquired KH-1 would perhaps be sufficient.
Yang Leiwi said:
"Very true, the mission isn't about setting up a lunar settlement its about marking the flag planting anniversary of Armstrong and Aldrin."
You are apparently having trouble understanding, NASA is going to explore this time unlike Apollo, which was just a mad dash to show up to Communists on television and newspapers, and not about science. One of new Moon landings will gather more data about the Moon then all the Apollo missions put together.
If you had been paying attention, you would also have noticed that one of the items in the VSE technology development list is a liquid oxygen generator for the Moon. Now, if all we were going to do was land for a day, plant flags and take pictures, why would we be doing that? NASA is still putting money into its nuclear reactor program, which would serve no purpose at all if we were just going to visit for a week. One of the cheif tenants of VSE is to return to the Moon, but this time its to stay.
Infact, NASA has already started to think about such a base, and seems to point to about half a dozen heavy lifter launches would be enough to build it. In the Shuttle heyday, eight launches of a much more complicated vehicle were accomplished, so six heavy lifters should be practical to do over a short time frame. Again, its not a "settlement," its a manned research & prospecting camp, with the potential to be a "beach head" for mining ventures.
There isn't ever going to be any colony on the Moon, ever, and teams of temporary miners can be fed & supported from Earth just fine if there is LOX available on the surface. There aren't going to be big hydroponic farms. There probobly isn't going to be big fields of solar arrays either. Just a camp, powerd by a nuclear reactor, with supplies regularly deliverd from Earth via medium rocket.
EuroLauncher said:
"Yet some Mars-fans and Moon-fans think Moon bases need to be bigger and plans like Mars-Direct has minor flaws, then others say Zubrin's HAB and the ERV are too small."
Now THERES an understatement... every single one of the major componets of MarsDirect - the HAB, the ERV, the rover, the nuclear reactor, the science package - basically all of them, are all assumed to work with much too small of a mass budget.
I honestly think that the currently proposed MarsDirect is infact a fraud, and Zubrin knows full well it can't possibly work, unless... Unless the Ares launch vehicle were fitted with a nuclear rocket upper stage. Zubrin, being a nuclear engineer by trade, would likly be biased tward such an option to make is plan doable.
He just didn't feel it prudent to tell the rest of the world... the basic non-nuclear Ares MarsDirect is a lie, just like Bob lied about O'Keefe and distorted Griffins Lunar plans. He did this so the project, with its deceptively small price tag and launch mass, would be adopted by the pricetag-sensitive congress, who would believe NASA's argument that it isn't big enough wouldn't be credible after the SEI red herring. Also, being chemically powerd, MarsDirect would be much more palatable to the environmentalists.
So a few years into the MarsDirect program, it is "determined" that MarsDirect will not be big enough, and it will be blamed on regular old aerospace weight and requirement creep. Since so much has been invested already in the arcitecture, some means of fixing it rather then disguarding it will be sought, and viola', Bob will show up with his glossy for a nuclear upper stage to solve all the problems.
There are just a few problems with this...
1: It still won't be big enough to get much done, four people and a tiny science package is a waste of time.2: A nuclear upper stage will be fired before reaching orbit, and hence presents a risk that it will reenter and kill tens of thousands. Even me, the nuclear fan boy, hates this idea.
3: It will have to be a big engine with lots of thrust probobly to hold down reactor mass, which will be expensive. We have the facilities to build and test small RL-10 class engines, but brand new ones would be needed for a J-2/SSME class engine.
I think NASA has its priorities mixed up, its supposed to be the number1 space aganecy but that's why its in soo much trouble recently
David Obey is the big stumbling block.
Who is he ? Another anti-manned flight US politican ?
Fix the budget
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_o … deral.html
budget cuts are coming ?
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007 … re-coming/
'first steps are not for cheap, think about it...
did China build a great Wall in a day ?' ( Y L R newmars forum member )
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UPDATED: House Budget Proposal Could Delay Shuttle Replacement
The joint resolution that cleared the House Appropriations Committee Jan. 30 provides no increase for NASA over its 2006 budget of $16.2 billion. NASA had been seeking $16.79 billion for 2007, but the agency’s budget request was tossed out when Congress decided late last year to scrap all spending bills left unfinished at the end of the last legislative session and instead fund most agencies at their 2006 levels.
The resolution directs NASA to spend $890 million on aeronautics this year, $166 million in excess of what the agency had planned for.
NASA science programs would be funded at $5.2 billion, about $100 million less than what NASA had requested for 2007.
At the same time, the resolution provides only $3.4 billion for exploration systems, $575 million less than the agency had requested for 2007.
The cause and effect of this budget will be cutting back on science, those effected will whine terribly and manned versus the machine will be the mantra that congress will here for it is cheaper.
NASA officials had been hoping to redirect surplus funds from the international space station, space shuttle and other programs to Orion and Ares to keep those vehicles on track to enter service by 2014.
Counting chickens before the eggs hatch again...
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Line item numbers are here.
House Approves $16.2 Billion Budget for NASA
Congressional Democrats announced in December that they would not try to complete the nine annual spending bills that remained unfinished at the end of the last legislative session and would instead pass a year-long joint resolution to keep government agencies funded through 2007.
For NASA, that means making do with $16.2 billion, about $547 million less than the agency had been seeking for 2007.
NASA spokesman David Mould said Jan. 30 that the joint resolution denies NASA the $577 million increase it had been seeking for its exploration programs and would as a result jeopardize the agency’s efforts to field the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle and Ares 1 rocket by 2014.
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And in that budget NASA are forced to spend hundreds of millions more on aeronautics than they think is necessary, all because the Congress knows far better how much money is needed for aeronautical research. Their main argument seems to be that because NASA spent more in the previous years they should spend even more in the future. The real reason is effective lobbying for GRC.
[color=darkred]Let's go to Mars and far beyond - triple NASA's budget ![/color] [url=irc://freenode#space] #space channel !! [/url] [url=http://www.youtube.com/user/c1cl0ps] - videos !!![/url]
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Some more of the impact is contained in this article and of its indirect actions that will be felt. With the squeeze coming by underfunding there is the cry now of the House cuts jeopardize new Cleveland jobs But this time its now from Nasa budget that the cries are for. The Pentagon base realignment program that was to bring hundreds of new jobs to Cleveland has seen cuts of $3 billion.
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National Aeronautics and Space Administration; President’s FY 2007 Budget Request
It includes forecast yearly amounts as well, sure is a huge report...
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NASA budget $550M less than hoped - 15 Feb 2007
Effect on Orion, Ares development programs unknown
BY LARRY WHEELER
FLORIDA TODAYWASHINGTON - The Senate handed NASA a tight budget Wednesday that the space agency will have to deal with for the remaining eight months of the fiscal year.
The measure was the same as one passed earlier by the House giving NASA a total budget of $16.24 billion, about $545 million less than the White House said the agency needed to carry out its programs this year.
It is essentially the same amount NASA received from Congress in 2006 before emergency funds and other one-time adjustments were added.
The measure passed 81 to 15, with four senators not voting. Florida senators Bill Nelson, a Democrat, and Mel Martinez, a Republican, voted for the bill.
Nelson, who chairs a subcommittee overseeing NASA programs, is concerned the spending level will slow the agency's development of the crew capsule and its launcher that are to replace the shuttles in 2010.
The new Orion crew capsule and its Ares launcher will take astronauts to the International Space Station and eventually the moon. The vehicles are currently scheduled to be operational in 2014.
"We're committed to seeing NASA made whole by restoring funding through a supplemental (spending bill) or in the 2008 budget," Nelson spokesman Brian Gulley said.
NASA has yet to specify what affect the spending level will have on the agency.
"It will have serious effects on many people, projects, and programs this year, and for the longer term," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said during a budget briefing at NASA headquarters this past week.
"It is certainly a pause and we would rather not have that," Griffin said last week. "I'd like more money. What agency head would not?"
Exploration 0-1 Science
[color=darkred]Let's go to Mars and far beyond - triple NASA's budget ![/color] [url=irc://freenode#space] #space channel !! [/url] [url=http://www.youtube.com/user/c1cl0ps] - videos !!![/url]
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Bump nothing to fix...
Lots of good stuff in the topic...
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