Comments on: Working with NASA

By: QuietDesperation

QuietDesperation — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 18:59:19 +0000

Reign, to rule over

“Love, Reign o’er me, rain on me” — The Who

By: mike

mike — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 18:09:20 +0000

Scanner, you would be some sort of magician to raise the billions needed to complete the telescope. I’m quite jealous of the way money is shoved into the space programs to be honest. I just spent 4 months almost full time to raise the required 90k for a next year project… 1 million dollars would fund our labs work for a long time…

By: BigBadSis

BigBadSis — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:20:34 +0000

@11. Rob: I don’t believe for a minute that Barbara Mikulski is pulling pork barrel tactics here. Of course, she does try to protect her constituency, as any good senator does, but Babs, as we fondly call her here in B-more, is a very intelligent public servant who listens to and understands scientists and their craft. She knows it’s wildly over budget, but that continuing it’s funding with a practical and manageable plan to keep it’s future in budget is worthwhile for the country and the world’s scientists.

By: sion warwick

sion warwick — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 14:03:47 +0000

As a horse person, it drives me nuts when people mix up reign and rein!

Rein, the strap of leather (or other material) attached to the bit of a horse’s bridle. You rein in a horse.

Reign, to rule over

Thanks!

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 04:59:17 +0000

The only reason Senator Mikulski is trying to save the JWST is because the Space Telescope Science Institute is in Baltimore. Her motivation is porkbarrelling a massively over-budget program that should have been killed years ago.

By: scanner

scanner — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 03:08:07 +0000

Phil if they do cancel the JWST the remains will be sold government surplus, right? A perfect opportunity for an activist group of scientists to buy everything and fund raise to complete it. Finding a main sponsor shouldn’t be to hard although the name might have to change. How about the Ronald MacDonald Space Telescope?

By: ToSeek

ToSeek — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 15:55:49 +0000

It’s got to be more than 4 terabytes. SDO all by itself generates 1.5 terabytes a day. Add the 3 terabytes a day the EOS satellites collectively generate, and you’re already well over.

By: Unimpressed

Unimpressed — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 09:20:42 +0000

Phil, even you admitted in an earlier post that the JWST is a dog’s breakfast of a program: over budget, late and mismanaged. Sen. Mikulski reaching out and successfully saving the program will be a great thing for astronomy, and a lousy deal for taxpayers. The lesson it leaves NASA with is that being an effective guardian of the public’s money isn’t as important as reaching for the right political levers.

IMO, the impediments to returning to greatness — NASA’s bureaucratic culture, apparently marginal program management skills, and lousy brand image with the public — are tough issues, and the human impulse will be to pay lip service to fixing them as long as someone can reach in and pull the Agency’s bacon out of the fire.

It’s not just NASA. Deep cuts will be devastating for lots of people’s favorite areas. But we also have a culture across the federal government where there’s no direct link between the quality with which a program is run and the level of public money that goes into it. So we continue slouching along into deeper debt, with less and less to show for it.

By: MadScientist

MadScientist — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 09:07:46 +0000

Data from the NASA satellites are paid for by the taxpayers and by law all that information must be made available (at some time) to the US public. Years ago when the international distribution of data was discussed, it was decided that it would be best to make the information freely available to the world and for the benefit of science rather than waste resources policing the data. Unfortunately the European Space Agency does not do the same. Anyhow, while there is an awful lot of information out there, you have to know a hell of a lot to be able to process and make sense of it. On the other hand, NASA and other organizations also make a lot of the pretty processed images freely available.

By: Crux Australis

Crux Australis — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 22:58:46 +0000

Um…that’s cool and all, but…wouldn’t it have been more useful if they had brought out the Google Earth plugin some time *before* the end of the Shuttle program?