NASA Funding: what percentage of the federal budget?

I think you have hit upon the main problem with increasing NASA funding. The piss poor leadership of Obama hasn't given them a clear mission to go after.

The first step is have a plan, the second is to get funded for it. 99% of the public has no idea what NASA's manned space flight program is even doing these days. Why would they EVER support a budget increase? I am a huge NASA nerd and think their budget is too high for what they are doing. JPL is killing them in cool space news from the last 3 years.

 

100%. Our government should be all NASA all the time.

 

President Obama has disappointed me with his lack of clarity and quality of leadership with regard to the space program.

 

Obama has disappointed me with his lack of clarity and quality of leadership in general........

 

Sure, which ones?

That would be $100-$200 billion.

 

So while most of us are paying 20-25% to the govt...telecom companies are getting BACK 2-3%!

Among the worst offenders were telecoms that were also busy trying to strip Internet users of their online freedom:

Between 2008 and 2010, Verizon received $12.3 billion in tax subsidies from the federal government and had an effective tax rate of –2.9 percent.
In the same period, AT&T received nearly $14.5 billion in federal tax breaks, second only to Wells Fargo, which received nearly $18 billion. It had an effective tax rate of 8 percent.
Comcast received $2 billion in tax breaks and had an effective tax rate of 20.6 percent.
The telecom industry as a whole paid an effective tax rate of 8.2 percent during the 2008–2010 period — far below the standard 35 percent corporate tax rate.



http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/11/11/18/att-verizon-and-other-telecom-tax-dodgers

 

Shooting all our elected officials into space does sound appealing.

 

That's because Congress gets heavily involved in NASA's budget - Obama has sought to outsource stuff to SpaceX, but congress resurrected Orion even though it will never lead to anything absent a massive budget increase.

 

You have to assume there is some crossover, especially in the defense sector.

I'm not sure how much NASA should be funded, but these are the big things I believe government should work on. Most things should be handled by the private sector, I believe. However, big, expensive, and far-reaching projects such as space exploration, should be handled by governments -- not that the private industry can't also contribute.

 

I dont think this is fair at all. NASA now is so much better managed than it was even a few years ago.

Go back to the 90s when Daniel Goldin started that better, faster, cheaper nonsense. That bafoon promised that NASA could meet all of its existing objectives while facing spending cuts because NASA could magically meet all of its project objectives for less money and in less time.

Instead, countless projects failed. NASA looked like a bunch of incompetent morons who couldn't get anything done (which in turn justified further spending cuts since why spend money on an agency that can't complete any projects).

Then Bush replaced him with Sean O'Keefe who didn't know a damn thing about NASA (or really anything since he wasn't a scientist). He brought in a bunch of military guys (who also knew nothing about NASA). You can look up the proposed designs that they made for a new manned space exploration projects. It's really quite laughable how bad that stuff was.

It wasn't until after O'Keefe (who left during the beginning of Bush's 2nd term) that things started to turn around. NASA is still reeling from the 90s and early 2000's. The sheer incompetence of that 15 year span has done so much damage to the agency. You can't even describe how bad that was. Now even smart people who value science will piss all over NASA and call them useless because for about 15 years, it was useless.

NASA is in much better hands now. They actually have technical people from the industry running the agency. And outsourcing near earth space exploration to SpaceX and Boeing was a good move. NASA has to focus on delivering something noteworthy because it will take a lot of work to slowly rebuild the public's trust in NASA. I think putting someone back on the moon really will be a big step forward (as sad as that sounds). No politician is going to step up for NASA until they get the public's confidence again. And that will only happen by executing properly and not ****ing up over and over like they did for a long time.

 

I think it is absolutely fair, and I'm a Democrat. I'm not talking about what "shape" NASA is in, but rather what I consider to be a lack of clarity about what NASA is attempting to do, and what NASA's plans are, short term, long term, and in between. I don't think the majority of the American people have much of a clue as to what NASA's goals are now. He just doesn't seem entirely engaged when it comes to the space program, and in my opinion, it's partly due to a lack of leadership in this regard.

 

where's the zero option?

 

Well we can agree to disagree on that. I dont think it matters what Obama says. Bush went so far as to make NASA part of a state of the union address. And that meant zilch. That's not leadership. That's posturing.

Everyone wants some president to come along and be Kennedy again and give a big speech at Rice about going to the moon. I dont care who's president. You can outline the best vision ever. It wont matter. No one will believe you. Politicians will laugh at you. And you really just wasted your time.

No one trusts NASA to do anything. 15 years of incompetence has rendered public declarations of NASA's future irrelevant. No question that Obama comes off as aloof and disconnected. And I can see how that bothers you. I'll continue to judge him by the people who puts in charge of NASA. To me that's leadership too.

We all know Obama can't play the theatrics of being president like Clinton or Reagan. But I'll still give him a solid grade on NASA. You're right, he doesnt get an A+. An A+ would be properly managing NASA and mastering the political theater required to promote NASA and science as a whole. He sucks at the latter. But the former is so much more important at this juncture in history. The latter is great in a world like Kennedy's time when funding was practically infinite because we were on a deadline to beat the Soviets.

I'll put agency management as the big priority any day of the week when it comes to NASA today. We need it so desperately and Obama does deserve credit for this.