Thursday, March 09, 2006
Thursday Space Blogging: "Mission To Nowhere"
by Tom Bozzo
OK, it's not really little; it's actually rather long.
You may consider my Total Drek guest post to be part of an ongoing series on the Bush "vision" for space exploration. My overarching thesis is that close examination of the Bush NASA budget requests suggests that adherents to the conventional wisdom that the administration is gutting space science funding in order to return astronauts to the moon and then send them onto Mars are being optimistic about the moon and Mars bit.
I also note that NASA Administrator Michael Griffin's CV, which includes stints with the Strategic Defense Inititative Organization (the original Reagan "Star Wars" project; 20 years and still no "peace shield") and the Bush père Mars project, perhaps uniquely qualifies him to take NASA nowhere under the Bush administration. But that's all the way at the end, so please do read the whole thing.
For some bonus material, you can get a small file with some of the proposed budget figures to which I allude here (19K .xls spreadsheet).
For you NASA budget junkies out there, I composed a little post on the NASA funding situation in response to a request for a guest post from my pal Drek of the suprisingly fine Total Drek.
OK, it's not really little; it's actually rather long.
You may consider my Total Drek guest post to be part of an ongoing series on the Bush "vision" for space exploration. My overarching thesis is that close examination of the Bush NASA budget requests suggests that adherents to the conventional wisdom that the administration is gutting space science funding in order to return astronauts to the moon and then send them onto Mars are being optimistic about the moon and Mars bit.
I also note that NASA Administrator Michael Griffin's CV, which includes stints with the Strategic Defense Inititative Organization (the original Reagan "Star Wars" project; 20 years and still no "peace shield") and the Bush père Mars project, perhaps uniquely qualifies him to take NASA nowhere under the Bush administration. But that's all the way at the end, so please do read the whole thing.
For some bonus material, you can get a small file with some of the proposed budget figures to which I allude here (19K .xls spreadsheet).
