NASA moon, Mars vision not getting funded

Can you believe 16.3 BILLION dollars of our tax money for 2007? We could do so much better by junking and starting over with severe monitoring or just flat-out privatizing space efforts. They strike me as total MEDIA WHORES and overly secretive about their actions.

“The U.S. Government Accountability Office said the Constellation program, scheduled to begin by 2015, is troubled by engineering, funding and mechanical issues. For instance, the program was meant to use heat shielding from the 1960s Apollo program, but experts apparently could not replicate the material. Earlier this week, U.S. space agency officials told Congress that between 5,800 and 7,300 jobs would go over the next three years as the space shuttles are retired, most at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The shuttles are scheduled to be grounded by 2010. The 2009 budget request for the Constellation program is $3 billion, NASA’s Richard Gilbrech told the subcommittee hearing. But former astronaut Kathryn Thornton, now a professor at the University of Virginia, said costs linked to retiring the shuttle had not been accounted for in NASA budgets. “Each year since 2004 when the Vision was announced, the NASA budget has fallen short of that required to achieve the mandated exploration goals and milestones,” she said in submitted testimony. “In short, there is a mismatch between aspirations and appropriations that no amount of spin can disguise,” she added. “Today, the global space economy exceeds more than $220 billion annually, and that figure is growing rapidly each year.” - Source

Check out some info on NASAs 2007 16.3 BILLION dollar budget and a comparison of NASAs exhorbitant budget to other government agencies and efforts.

Most people think NASA was chartered as a civilian project, but in reality it has deep military roots.

“The governmental institution known as NASA is a department of the Executive Branch, ultimately answerable solely to the President of the United States, an Agency created through the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958. NASA ostensibly is “a civilian agency exercising control over aeronautical and space activities sponsored by the United States.” (Emphasis added.)[i]

But contrary to common public and media perception that NASA is an open, strictly civilian scientific institution, is the legal fact that the Space Agency was quietly founded as a direct adjunct to the Department of Defense, tasked with specifically assisting the national security of the United States in the midst of a deepening Cold War with its major geopolitical adversary, the Soviet Union. It says so right in the original NASA Charter:

“Sec. 305… (i) The [National Aeronautics and Space] Administration shall be considered a defense agency of the United States for the purpose of Chapter 17, Title 35 of the United States Code…” [Emphasis added.]

In another section[ii] of the act, this seldom-discussed defense responsibility — the ultimate undercutting of NASA’s continuing public facade as a strictly civilian, scientific agency — is blatantly spelled out:

“Sec. 205… (d) No [NASA] information which has been classified for reasons of national security shall be included in any report made under this section [of the Act]…” [Emphasis added.]

Clearly, from this and the other security provisions[iii] incorporated in the Act, what the Congress, the press and the American taxpayers get to see of NASA’s ultimate activities — including untouched images and data regarding what’s really on the Moon, on Mars or anywhere else across the solar system — is totally dependent on whether the President of the United States (and/or his legal surrogates in the Department of Defense and the “intelligence community”) has already secretly classified that data. This is directly contrary to everything we’ve been led to believe regarding NASA for over 50 years now.”