The Long Empty Road for NASA Is Soon Over
“NASA is in trouble. This little agency has been asked to do too much with too little. And that is the problem. It is my hope that within the last eight months of the Bush administration that we can get the president … to adequately fund it,” said Nelson, D-Fla. Nelson is pushing to add an extra $1 billion to NASA’s proposed budget of $17.6 billion in 2009.
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Last May of 2007, Nebraska’s Ben Nelson and other critics had showed concerned over the serious lack of money available for NASA. His arguments were based on the space agency not receiving enough money to run the International Space Agency, yet were expected to develop new spacecraft, advance science and aeronautics to a new level–putting NASA into serious financial trouble.
An answer to NASA’s prayers, thanks to the politicians which include Ben Nelson, who have worked hard to promote more money—the House has recently introduced legislation to authorize three additional space flights between now and their 2010 retirement with a designated new budget of $150 million, in addition to a $19.2 billion 2009 budget, showing an increase of $1.9 billion from 2008.
In addition, one billion dollars is being sought for the acceleration of NASA’s space shuttle replacement vehicles—Orion crew capsules and Ares I rocket. With an additional $2 billion dollars, the replacement vehicles could be done sooner to avoid paying Russia extraordinary fees to transport us to the ISS. Personally, if we have to put the money out in such large figures, we may as well invest it into our own pockets.
Part of the proposal plan is for the launching of a science probe, removed from the space shuttle Columbia’s manifest after its accident. This present proposal of the NASA Authorization Act of 2008 designates that $150 million for the shuttles are also to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the ISS in 2010—a space borne particle physics experiment that was originally designed to search for/measure various “unusual” types of matter. It originally consisted of two missions in space with its 1997 proposal plan: ten days on the space shuttle, then onto the ISS for a three to five year stay. With the latest proposal from the House, their latest news is now a reality which has laid empty after the destruction of the Columbia and financial problems since.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 11:08 am and is filed under Public Relations, 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.
