The House Appropriations Committee is criticizing NASA’s “ominous” shift in priorities away from legacy programs and those with environmental and educational benefits to meet a “politically motivated timeline” for the Artemis program to put astronauts back on the Moon by 2024.
This first sentence says it all. I don’t recall environment and education being principal parts of the NASA charter. In fact the word ‘education’ appears only twice and ‘environment’ doesn’t appear at all:
There is this: (1) The expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space;
So atmospheric phenomena. How this overlaps with NOAA is anybody’s guess.
But “politically motivated goals” like beating the Russians to the moon (1969), or the Chinese back to the moon, that’s obviously out and was never part of the NASA legacy.
Where did I leave my lighter for the gaslight?
Enh, just another effort to say that the President can’t direct federal agencies he is constitutionally charged with directing, like when they said the DOJ was an independent agency.
It is inherently political when politicians, either the President or Congress, direct an agency. Who would direct NASA in the absence of politicians? The Democrat party would control it and that certainly wouldn’t be less political than our system of checks and balances.
If Trump wants to take credit for getting back on the moon, he should have Ivanka contract with Elon to put a Trump hotel on the moon, rather than muck around with Congressional committees.
The near term Artemis endeavors that don’t rely on SLS are credible.
As much as Trump might benefit from a lunar success story, the Democrats think they will benefit from sabotaging it. What is best for the USA though? If SLS wasn’t in the picture, it is pretty clear what the Trump administration wants to do is better for the USA than what the Democrats want to do.
Those aren’t credible because Congress won’t fund them. There really is no way for NASA to get back to the moon by 2024.
We don’t even know what the current Congress will ultimately do given that the Senate has yet to weigh in and the NASA budget has yet to be sent to conference. And the current Congress will only be with us until next Jan.
Even given all that, the House’s NASA budget provides some money for Artemis and neither scuppers commercial involvement in deep space nor any longer insists that SLS be used for Europa Clipper – both of which provisions were in the original version of the House bill. What give there is in this House NASA budget is modest, but it’s all in the correct direction.
Artemis 3 in 2024 is still very much a long shot, but it’s not flatly impossible yet. What is asymptotically approaching zero probability is that SLS and/or Orion will play any role in accomplishing a Moon landing at all, never mind by 2024. Neither has yet officially joined Gateway on the list of things no longer on the critical path for Artemis 3, but there are going to be alternatives for both in-hand by 2024. Whether a next Moon landing happens in 2024 or not is, frankly, much more dependent upon the progress SpaceX makes with Starship than on anything else, including both Congress and SLS-Orion.
The House Appropriations Committee is criticizing NASA’s “ominous” shift in priorities away from legacy programs and those with environmental and educational benefits to meet a “politically motivated timeline” for the Artemis program to put astronauts back on the Moon by 2024.
This first sentence says it all. I don’t recall environment and education being principal parts of the NASA charter. In fact the word ‘education’ appears only twice and ‘environment’ doesn’t appear at all:
https://history.nasa.gov/spaceact.html
They must mean ‘as amended’?
There is this:
(1) The expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space;
So atmospheric phenomena. How this overlaps with NOAA is anybody’s guess.
But “politically motivated goals” like beating the Russians to the moon (1969), or the Chinese back to the moon, that’s obviously out and was never part of the NASA legacy.
Where did I leave my lighter for the gaslight?
Enh, just another effort to say that the President can’t direct federal agencies he is constitutionally charged with directing, like when they said the DOJ was an independent agency.
It is inherently political when politicians, either the President or Congress, direct an agency. Who would direct NASA in the absence of politicians? The Democrat party would control it and that certainly wouldn’t be less political than our system of checks and balances.
If Trump wants to take credit for getting back on the moon, he should have Ivanka contract with Elon to put a Trump hotel on the moon, rather than muck around with Congressional committees.
The near term Artemis endeavors that don’t rely on SLS are credible.
As much as Trump might benefit from a lunar success story, the Democrats think they will benefit from sabotaging it. What is best for the USA though? If SLS wasn’t in the picture, it is pretty clear what the Trump administration wants to do is better for the USA than what the Democrats want to do.
Those aren’t credible because Congress won’t fund them. There really is no way for NASA to get back to the moon by 2024.
We don’t even know what the current Congress will ultimately do given that the Senate has yet to weigh in and the NASA budget has yet to be sent to conference. And the current Congress will only be with us until next Jan.
Even given all that, the House’s NASA budget provides some money for Artemis and neither scuppers commercial involvement in deep space nor any longer insists that SLS be used for Europa Clipper – both of which provisions were in the original version of the House bill. What give there is in this House NASA budget is modest, but it’s all in the correct direction.
Artemis 3 in 2024 is still very much a long shot, but it’s not flatly impossible yet. What is asymptotically approaching zero probability is that SLS and/or Orion will play any role in accomplishing a Moon landing at all, never mind by 2024. Neither has yet officially joined Gateway on the list of things no longer on the critical path for Artemis 3, but there are going to be alternatives for both in-hand by 2024. Whether a next Moon landing happens in 2024 or not is, frankly, much more dependent upon the progress SpaceX makes with Starship than on anything else, including both Congress and SLS-Orion.