Financial Woes of NASA
NASA’s procedures “are not what they need to be,” says Rep. Mark Udall, D-Colo., chairman of the House space subcommittee. “They have to be accountable. These are … very significant amounts of taxpayer dollars.”
——————————————————————————————Now that we have word NASA’s twin rovers are safe from the latest budget cut, what about NASA itself? The latest report through USA Today is saying that over two-thirds of the NASA programs are either over-budgeted or behind schedule. And according to USA Today’s writer, Traci Watson, in her article, “Major NASA projects over Budget”, this was what NASA had reported to Congress in their latest report. With that kind of track-record, how can anyone be safe through NASA?
Unexpected expenses, cost overruns, and a stagnant budget have all but destroyed NASA—rover or no rover. A passed 2005 law states that NASA must report to Congress when any major project that is currently under development will exceed its budget by more than 15%, or is in danger of falling behind in excess of six months. And right now, four of the 12 major projects are reported as being over-budgeted, while eight of them have been reported as being behind schedule. How good can it get?
The NASA budget hearings which occurred on March 13th for NASA’s Fiscal Year 2009 Budget, was larger than the previous budget, and discussed closing the Aericbo Observatory, Near-Earth Asteroids, the Constellation X space observatory, and the MSR—or the Mars Sample Return mission. Also discussed was the “ITAR” legislation. This prohibits people from other countries working on defense programs that are extremely sensitive that affect NASA.
But a lot of the money waste is through too big of a government, no communication between divisions, and nobody caring enough to do a good job. For example, just recently it was noticed that our government—the United States of America, accidentally sent Taiwan four fuses used to trigger nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles in late 2006. But the error was only discovered a week ago, according to the Pentagon, after being sent to Taiwan as “helicopter batteries”. They were recovered, yet are the second major nuclear security breach that has been discovered in the past six months. The previous one was last September, when a mistaken transfer of nuclear armed cruise missiles occurred, from one US base to another aboard a B-52 bomber occurred.
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered an investigation into the incident and a comprehensive review of the US inventory of all nuclear related components as well as of policies and procedures, the officials said. “We’ll do a thorough investigation, and those who are responsible will be held accountable. The secretary is quite forceful on this,” said Ryan Henry, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy.
This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 2:55 am and is filed under Space Agency News. 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.
