Posted on 03/24/2011 11:21:45 AM PDT by NonZeroSum
WASHINGTON — Congress has again failed to rid a temporary spending bill of language forcing NASA to waste $1.4 million a day on its defunct Constellation moon program.
Though Congress passed a new stopgap spending bill last week, the measure retained a leftover provision from the 2010 budget that bars the agency from shutting down Constellation, which Congress and the White House agreed to cancel last October.
This so-called "Shelby provision" — named for U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, who inserted it into the 2010 budget — is expected to cost NASA roughly $29 million during the three-week budget extension through April 8. It has already cost the agency nearly $250 million since Oct. 1.
Equally galling to budget hawks is that Congress has known about the mistake for months and has done nothing to correct it.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
Ping.
Time these critters realized that they need to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
Just give me two days’ worth please. I won’t waste it.
NASA has been a defense contractor “stimulus” for decades. The waste and fraud from the Shuttle program are incalculable. But jobs as well as many small businesses were created.
Sound like a “proxmire” article to me.
Once you stop work on the lunar lander and the earth departure stage you still have the light booster (Ares 1, personnel lift), the heavy booster (Ares 2, Cargo lift), and the crew module. There are potential commercial equivalents, but only the Ares 1 has been launched yet.
The shuttle is going, what do you replace it with?
Personally I prefer the SSTO design for personnel.
Ares would have been outrageously expensive to both develop and operate, and not been available until almost the end of the decade. In terms of “replacing Shuttle” for crew access to space, we could have both Dragon/Falcon 9 and a Boeing CST-100 on an Atlas V within four years or so for a tiny fraction of the cost.
And Ares I never launched. All that launched was a four-segment lower stage with a dummy fifth segment and dummy upper stage. It was just for show.
Privatize NASA. Space X, Lockheed, Boeing... Let the private markets work.
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