Another Fine Fix by NASA
Celebrating the launching of today’s NASA Atlantis space shuttle, carrying a 17.2 ton payload for the European Space Station’s Columbus laboratory, would be more of a celebration if it were not for the recent release of NASA’s budget cuts. Florida is expecting layoffs of more than a thousand as NASA is preparing to turn their International Space Station over to Europe and Russia. According to Shana Dale, a NASA representative, “That’s part of the regular process of actually ramping down space shuttle operations.”
Well, heck…what else was she expected to say to a state where NASA provides more jobs than any other company?
Only 13 flights are remaining in the soon-to-be retired space shuttle operation, in order to prepare for NASA’s return to the moon that is going anyway but smooth. This may fall to a remaining 10 flights by May as things are developing. Today, we could see this new turn of events as a European astronaut and the Columbus laboratory are on the space flight of Atlantis as it heads to the International Space Station, with NASA planing on moving into high gear soon for another space path.
Atlantis launched “majestically,” according to NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, yet after two weeks of delays due to storms and technical glitches, a severe budget cut which is moving the ISS into other two other country’s hands, and three hits as launching occurred–two small foam streams and one ice chunk–majestic MAY not be the word for it!
Recently, an MSNBC live vote was taken by the public, and 47% voted on NASA’s first priority should be other space science, with only 32% of them considering the moon as priority. Yet 21% voted on neither the moon or space science was important, but instead other issues were more important–education, terrorism, etc. Obviously, the importance of the moon is not important to anyone other than the government and NASA.
It needs to be noted that NASA has been pulling out from under many contracts lately at the last minute, with their sub-contractors being forced to foot the bills by sheer pressure. When a project is over half done or almost finished, most feel they have to finish it to recoup some of their expenses–which is more than NASA is doing with the International Space Station. Yet one has to wonder why it costs us so much more money through NASA than through other countries to send someone to space. Hmmmm……?
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Space Agency News, Technical Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
