Europe is looking more and more appealing.

Obama and the Democrats are weak and utter failures. We have tax cuts for the rich so Obama is “forced” to cut programs for the poor and cut science. The one billion the US spent in a week for Libya would have paid for LISA.

One day, we will talk about this the way we talked about the SSC.

This is genuinely sad. On the one hand, LISA has been something like commercial fusion — it is always N years into the future, where N is some constant of order 10. On the other hand, LISA would provide a genuinely revolutionary way to look at the heavens.

There is no upside to this.

Actually the astrophysics decadal survey killed LISA and IXO by rating them behind WFIRST and the Explorer program. At this priority, NASA did not have the budget to to LISA on the timescale required for the ESA Cosmic Visions Large mission (and LISA was not yet selected for this in anycase).

Advanced LIGO will go live by 2014, but it won’t achieve design sensitivity until several years after that date. So, realistically, don’t expect any gravitational wave detections for at least 5 years.

Perhaps the millisecond pulsar groups will beat LIGO at “directly” detecting GWs

”
Europe is looking more and more appealing.

Obama and the Democrats are weak and utter failures. We have tax cuts for the rich so Obama is “forced” to cut programs for the poor and cut science. The one billion the US spent in a week for Libya would have paid for LISA.
“

In all honesty, the Republicans don’t have the better track record for funding fundamental research. Also, keep in mind that now that he doesn’t have a majority in both houses of Congress, one can’t pin everything one doesn’t like on Obama. In particular, the “tax cuts for the rich” smell more Republican.

On the other hand, LISA would provide a genuinely revolutionary way to look at the heavens.

Right, and in such instances always something extremely interesting was found.
(often not the thing one looked for:=)

“And that is the real reason you wont have any significant NASA space science programs other than JWST for most of the next decade.”

Nonsense. I would remind you that WMAP was an explorer class mission.

I think it’s wrong to frame this as “JWST killed LISA and IXO” or “The Decadal Survey killed LISA and IXO”. The space science budget is a very small fraction of NASA’s total budget and the money is there to solve the JWST issues without gutting space science, if NASA would treat it as an agency wide issue. The JWST shortfall was largely a NASA project management failure (according to the Casani report), resulting indirectly from Constellation squeezing everything out, but all of space science is paying the price.

@Philip Helbig: The tax cuts for the rich were extended while the Democrats still had both houses. The Democrats chose to ‘take it off the table’ for the election.

@Fred: There are many issues with the politics and budget of the US, not the least of which is that it is hard to get 308,745,548 (# of US residents in 2010 according to the census) people to agree on what we should spend our money on. Especially when most of them can’t even identify most federal agencies or politicians other than the president. If you’re interested, the 2010 US budget numbers can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budget . First of all note that we spent 1.4 trillion more than we brought in. The claim is that’s the reason why we’re headed for a federal shutdown tomorrow (although it appears to be more of the petty policy battles over things like funding NPR).

@Julianne: In NASA’s FY2012 budget request (available on NASA’s website), science gets $5B out of a total of $18B, not an insignificant fraction. JWST gets ~$400M per year of this $5B every year for the foreseeable future, presumably until in launches. Again, not insignificant when you consider that the $5B funds all of science, not just astrophysics.

Bottom line is that NASA doesn’t have the money to do any big astrophysics (and maybe planetary) missions in the next decade. This makes both the recent Astrophysics and Planetary decadal surveys dead-on-arrival. Europe has no choice but to go it alone because they have a chunk of money that they are supposed to start spending in 2015. I sincerely hope that the European gravitational wave community can pull together and get something going, perhaps in the interim fortunes in the US will change and we can contribute when the time comes.

As it stands, this post is just a rumor. (you should show links to some official statements )

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

(Is this kind of post allowed on these reputable forums?)

“I’d far rather fund extrasolar planet detection missions, which are wildly productive,”

Wildly productive of what? Breathless press releases announcing the discovery of yet another ball of gas or piece of rock? In fact, extrasolar planet “research” has about as much credibility as searches for a cure for cancer. “We have found ANOTHER planet! Sure, we knew already that there are other balls of rock out there, but this has the potential to CHANGE THE WAY WE SEE THE PLACE OF THE HUMAN RACE IN THE COSMOS. blah blah blah…” It was always boring and it is even more boring now. Comparing it with gravitational wave astronomy is ludicrous.

Love LISA, think it’s awesome, and am good friends with key folks on the project. It’s still wildly expensive for the current budget, but more than anything, it’s like another poster commented (though Julianne disagreed) — the Decadal Survey killed LISA. The community and it’s representatives did not prioritize LISA or IXO on top, but instead as medium priority technology developments. Kiss of death. But it’s what the majority of the community wanted — which is supposed to be the whole purpose of a Decadal.

that said — it’s not that NASA just pulled out of LISA and IXO. They also pulled out of Euclid (Dark Energy), and Laplace (a mission to Jupiter’s moons). There is not funding folks.

Better to use the collective creativity of the community to think of new inexpensive ideas than keep hoping for for the Billion dollar plus flagships.

(by the way, yes WMAP was an Explorer — but check the cost actuals — it was about 5 times the current Explorer cost cap).

We need some creative new ideas that are implementable in these tough times.

No LISA?! What a blow. Here’s an idea: rename LISA the ‘God Signal Explorer’ and let the Templeton Foundation pick up the price tag. That’s half a problem solved. Atheists just need to wait another generation or so for the other half to resolve itself…

petergreat, that’s one reason you shouldn’t believe all pop-sci books
I think LISA still has many technological hurdles to surmount. Also anyone know the status
of LISA path-finder and how this decision impacts that ?

@Shantanu

LISA Pathfinder is not formally affected by this change. It is predominantly a European mission with some token involvement from NASA. NASA is bound by prior agreements with ESA to deliver their portion of the experiment, known as ST-7. In fact, it is my understanding that ST-7 has been delivered to Europe and the delays are due to some issues with European hardware, particularly the microthrusters. Ironically, the ST-7 payload is a different kind of microthruster that was developed in the US and seems to work. What is the European mission-formally-known-as-LISA team going to do without this key piece of NASA technology?

We see clearly here, the perennial myopia of the US govnt., even unable at this time to keep its dysfunctional self operating. Many have lamented the demise of the SSC, Misson to Mars, & now LISA, perhaps the most grandiose experiment in the history of science, & one exemplary of our emergence as an advanced civilization. Orbiting our star, would’ve been a technology of 15 Giga-meters in size (1/10 A.U.), dwarfing the LHC, but engaged in physics as fundamental. Even applied physics projects, with practical goals such as the Space Elevator (est.$50B) are now hanging (no pun) by a thread.
Assuming the US govnt. continues to operate, the next shuttle will launch Sam Ting’s alpha magnetic spectrometer, an instrument designed to search for dark matter & antimatter in space.
http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/articles/2011/04/10/mit_physicist_samuel_tings_space_odyssey/?page=8
A Nobel laureate (J/psi -`74), Prof. Ting has gone to hell & back to save, shepherd & reinvent his project, only to emerge triumphant. This is cause for hope, but LISA’s axing does not bode well for the evolution of the human species, beyond its terrestrial niche.
Freeman Dyson hypothesized Five classes of evolution for emergent civilizations, dependent upon their hierarchical control of energy sources. Currently, we are a struggling class I, & yet we stand upon the precipice of ascending to class II via solar power satellites, currently under study by PG&E and Wash.St.U. Such a grandiose project would seem impossible financially, without a dedicated consortium of countries & governments. Sadly, LISA’s demise does not bode well for our ascendancy up the galactic totem pole, nor does the utter lack of vision evidenced by the US Govnt., continually mired in mediocrity, and unable to aspire to any project which transforms our world, & uplifts our vision to the stars.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of LISA’s death are greatly exaggerated. The current LISA project within NASA has been instructed to stand-down, and the LISA International Science Team (which I was a member of) has been disbanded. But this is not the end of the story. NASA is not going to walk away from space based gravitational wave astronomy. The 2010 Decadal report for astrophysics strongly endorsed the LISA mission concept and its science goals, and NASA is expected to find ways to implement these recommendations. The way forward won’t be easy, but expect to see a re-designed and re-named LISA project at NASA. The science opportunity is just too compelling to let die. It is not a question of if we see a gravitational wave detector in space, but when.

Luckily NASA had enough money to put that dopey global warming satellite into space. Dumb stupid, idiot liberals.

the reason the JWST is eating cosmology missions is because it was designed as an all or nothing mission. The design is a monster, it is way beyond anyone’s capabilities, and it’s consuming all observatory dollars. I will note for the record that a spare Hubble Mirror is available. It’s sitting in the Air and Space Museum. A decent approach would take that spare mirror, mount it into a
Hubble Frame, put some modern electronics in it and send it up to GEO-Sync orbit.

Yes it would be unservicable, but, we know many of the bugs, we could put it on a Delta 4 heavy, and
let it do Long look missions, which would be relatively easy. This spacecraft could be built for 2-3 hundred million and flown and operated for no more then $500Million. Sitting in GEO, it could talk to a dedicated ground station so it wouldn’t need TDRSS time and it wouldn’t need heavy comms management.

With that kind of Stare Time it could work IR, UV and Deep Field and hunt for planetary signal.

This would leave money for LISA

If you think the cancellation of the LISA is bad, can you believe that while scouting talent for a science documentary I want to make explaining my theories about time displacement.

I was arrested and put on trial for child molestation. (Los Angeles County).

Regardless, I ‘am still going forward.

it is sad. LISA is one of the ambitious project. Crunch of money should not stop the project. If the same was the case with some of the ambitious project of earlier times – building of accelerators, sending men to moon, launching of various space crafts, establishing Hubble, Chandra and other powerful telescopes, sequencing genes … , we the mankind would be the looser. Let Obama and his men stop funding heavily on defence and divert them to Science projects like LISA so that our understanding of the universe and nature to reach new frontiers.
Krishna

Just as I was thinking we might really do something new and significant … another sign of America’s decline slaps me in the face.

LISA won’t go away, it’s too important to science and our future. It will just go elsewhere; to other countries and private contractors, (maybe even American ones, but that’s probably too much to hope for).

I hope all you extremely wealthy Americans are thoroughly enjoying those beautiful homes, private jets, fancy cars, massages, gourmet meals and other perks that the Bush tax cuts and a total lack of fiscal restraint and regulatory oversight have helped to finance.

I’ve lost all respect for you.