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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday December 27 2018, @11:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-pay-no-play dept.

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Latest shutdown to curtail NASA activities - SpaceNews.com

A partial government shutdown that started Dec. 22 will once again force NASA to halt most of its non-essential activities and could hinder coverage of spaceflight events planned for the end of the year.

NASA is among the agencies whose funding lapsed at midnight Eastern time Dec. 22 when a continuing resolution (CR) that had been funding them expired. NASA is funded by the commerce, justice and science appropriations bill, one of seven yet to be passed by Congress. Five other bills, including for the Defense Department, have been passed, and those agencies are not affected by the shutdown.

[...] NASA updated its shutdown plan Dec. 18. That plan is similar to the one it followed in its January shutdown, where the agency continues critical activities related to International Space Station and other spacecraft operations, any critical spaceflight hardware processing and general protection of life and property. All other activities will be suspended for the duration of the shutdown.

[...] An extended shutdown could jeopardize the agency's ability to publicize some upcoming events, including the flyby of the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, also known as Ultima Thule, by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. The spacecraft will make its closest approach to the distant body just after midnight Eastern Jan. 1, and NASA had planned to provide extensive coverage of the event on NASA TV and on the web.

However, NASA's current shutdown plan, like previous ones, notes that, in the event of a shutdown, "Citizens will not have televised access to NASA operations and programming or access to the NASA Web site." During the January shutdown, NASA interrupted NASA TV programming and stopped updating its website and social media.

The flyby itself, though, will not be affected by the shutdown should it continue through the rest of the year. The spacecraft is operated from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland, which will also host events for the flyby. Michael Buckley, an APL spokesman, said Dec. 20 that those events will proceed even if the government shutdown continues. Without NASA TV or its website, he said, "we'd likely use APL's web and social media resources" to cover the flyby.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday December 27 2018, @08:43PM (1 child)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Thursday December 27 2018, @08:43PM (#779104) Homepage Journal

    It's not because a Continuing Resolution has not yet been passed, but because the Treasury does not want to cause a "Sovereign Debt Crisis" by failing to pay the interest on the National Debt.

    By halting all non-essential services, there's enough money to avoid a default.

    The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified in the wake of our Civil War. Among other things, it stipulates that:

    The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

    This was done because the South dominated the Congress before the war. The Union's part in the war was paid for largely by selling Treasury Bonds. After the war, the South rankled against its being taxed to repay those same bonds because its economy was wrecked by the war itself.

    This stipulation has always been of _crucial_ significance to the credit-worthiness of Treasury Bonds; were we to default on so much as a penny of interest, because the entire planet's international trade and specifically oil is done with dollars, there would be a Domino Effect that would send the entire planet's economies down in flames.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 31 2018, @10:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 31 2018, @10:48PM (#780414)

    What a terrible thing that would be. /sarcasm

    Let the fucker burn, the planet's full of idiots and scumbags who deserve nothing.

    Oh, what will our Ferengi overlords do if there's no economy!

    As if it'll effect anybody who can trade or barter, just for example, there's an entire alternative economy that the Australian Tax Office is endlessly pissed off about not being able to tax: the beer economy.

    People will work for goods and items. The only people who will *really* lose out if economies collapse in the west, is those who had the most, the greedy shits at the top who're currently sucking the life out of everything.

    Fuck em.