Comments on: National Acadamies of Science to Congress: loosen the purse strings

By: Soccer Fairy » Quick Hits

Soccer Fairy » Quick Hits — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 11:49:02 +0000

[...]

Stuff going on in the blogosphere:

Darksyde writes about Rep. Brad Miller’s attempt to provide protection for scientific whistleblowers employed by the government. Since pressuring scientists to make their results conform to politically-desireable outcomes is standard operating procedure for the current administration, such protection is especially valuable and timely.
Phil Plait reports that the National Academy of Sciences has released their advice to Congress concerning NASA. Guess what? Not nearly enough money is being allocated to accomplish what the agency is being asked to do. Since science is one of the first things to go when the budgets fall short, let’s hope Congress actually listens.
ScienceBlogs, you may have noticed, has expanded. Among CV favorites that have found a new home within the Borg collective are Dynamics of Cats, The Loom, and Mixing Memory; Bora Zivkovic of Science and […]Original post by Sean and Elliott Back More On: [...]

By: Diana

Diana — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 22:34:59 +0000

Thanks for the reply, Irishman. That’s interesting to know.

By: Quick Hits | Cosmic Variance

Quick Hits | Cosmic Variance — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 17:20:44 +0000

[...] Phil Plait reports that the National Academy of Sciences has released their advice to Congress concerning NASA. Guess what? Not nearly enough money is being allocated to accomplish what the agency is being asked to do. Since science is one of the first things to go when the budgets fall short, let’s hope Congress actually listens. [...]

By: Irishman

Irishman — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 14:00:11 +0000

Diana, there are legal problems with NASA marketing anything. As a government entity, it’s not supposed to be self-promoting, it’s not supposed to be marketing. Educational outreach is okay, and so is garnering publicity, but actually selling things or advertising is a No-no.

Reduce its dependency on the government? NASA is a Government Agency. It is supposed to be dependent on the government.

That doesn’t mean the way the government directs the funding shouldn’t be scrutinized.

By: Diana

Diana — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 04:08:37 +0000

By the way, I got a whole bunch of errors on the next screen when I just posted that. Didn’t think my post would go through, but I guess it did.

Here are the errors, copied and pasted.

Regex ID: 3961 (crystalman23@earthlink.net) appears to be an invalid regex string! Please fix it in the Blacklist control panel.

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By: Diana

Diana — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 04:07:16 +0000

Maybe NASA could do some things to earn money and support itself, and thereby reduce its dependency on the government.

For instance, maybe lots of rich people would think being flown up into space is incredibly cool and worth paying tons of money for.

Or, maybe NASA could mass-market stuff like astronaut ice cream, or sell incredibly high-quality posters, T-shirts, postcards and the like, of Hubble pictures, etc. Or your own remote-control toy Mars rover, etc. Maybe they could have a NASA amusement park+science museum, or several.

Maybe they already do some of this stuff, I don’t know. I can’t take as much interest in astronomy as I would like, due to my own constant financial struggles.

But, a big marketing push like that might help popularize NASA more. Above all, though, I think NASA earning their own money would be a lot better than having to beg Congress to give them some of the money that has been robbed from honest hard-working people through the income tax.

By the way, here’s an interesting website: http://www.freedomtofascism.com/

That site has some interesting things to say about the monetary system, income tax, taxpayer dollars, etc., so, it is in fact somewhat related to the topic of this blog post. Perhaps if the economic problems of our country were addressed at the root, then NASA’s troubles would be alleviated as well.

Great blog, I enjoy it.

By: Irishman

Irishman — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 17:47:36 +0000

They need to increase NASAâ€™s budget, and they need to back way off on earmarks.

Interestingly, the report you cite calls for more earmarks.

Given the funding shortages associated with elements of the human spaceflight program, the committee further urges that funding for science (both the amounts requested and any modest additions that might be made) be isolated from other NASA accounts to ensure that the money is actually spent on science.

That’s not quite the same thing as adding unrelated or loosely related earmarks into the budget, rather it’s more about allocating funds for specific elements of NASA’s goals. Still, it is earmarking.

The more important criticism is to reduce the extras that are plugged in that aren’t really the scope of NASA.