NASA budget proposal targets SLS (Space Launch System)
The White House's fiscal year 2020 budget request for NASA proposes to delay work on an upgraded version of the Space Launch System and would transfer some of that vehicle's payloads to other rockets.
The proposal, released by the Office of Management and Budget March 11, offers a total of $21 billion for the space agency, a decrease of $500 million over what Congress appropriated in the final fiscal year 2019 spending bill signed into law Feb. 15.
A major element of the proposal is to defer work on the Block 1B version of the SLS, which would increase the rocket's performance by replacing its existing Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage with the more powerful Exploration Upper Stage. The budget "instead focuses the program on the completion of the initial version of the SLS and supporting a reliable SLS and Orion annual flight cadence," the OMB budget stated. The first SLS/Orion mission, without a crew, is now planned for the "early 2020s," according to the budget, an apparent slip from the planned 2020 launch of Exploration Mission 1.
NASA had previously planned to use the Block 1B version of SLS to launch elements of its lunar Gateway, using a "co-manifesting" capability enabled by the rocket's greater performance. Instead, according to the budget document, those components will be launched on "competitively procured vehicles, complementing crew transport flights on the SLS and Orion."
[...] The budget proposal would also remove one non-exploration payload from the SLS manifest. The proposal offers $600 million for the Europa Clipper mission, enabling a launch in 2023. However, NASA would instead seek to launch the mission on a commercial launch vehicle rather than SLS, a move it claims "would save over $700 million, allowing multiple new activities to be funded across the Agency." The fiscal year 2019 budget request also proposed a commercial launch of Europa Clipper, but Congress placed into law in the final funding bill the requirement to use SLS for that mission.
Are we nearing a good timeline?
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 12 2019, @02:46AM (6 children)
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/cost-iraq-war#chapter-title-0-4 [cfr.org]
I don't think Afghanistan $$$ [wikipedia.org] is even counted in that number.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 12 2019, @06:51PM (5 children)
Good lord that's a lot of money just to suppress some people who didn't fly some planes into some buildings.
It probably would have been cheaper to solve the problem properly and invade Saudi Arabia.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 14 2019, @09:12PM (4 children)
They merely employed the people who did.
Even though Afghanistan officially provided material support to Al Qaeda while Saudi Arabia did not? It's interesting how someone can simultaneously damn Saudi Arabia for funding of Al Qaeda and involvement in 9/11 by a few of its citizens while simultaneously ignoring that Afghanistan not only provided a territory for Al Qaeda to operate in, but was paying them substantially for mercenary services too.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday March 14 2019, @09:50PM (3 children)
Here are some quotes from a Wikipedia article on the 9/11 Commission:
And, under the heading "Denying support from Saudi Arabia"
Read all about it here. [wikipedia.org]
The money used to employ the people who flew the planes came from Saudi Arabia, but the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 14 2019, @10:33PM (2 children)
So the 9/11 commission agrees with me? Then what's the problem? Again, we have Al Qaeda operating openly in Afghanistan with a military unit [wikipedia.org] of several thousand based in Northern Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks. Meanwhile we have support from a few Saudi citizens. So we're to invade Saudi Arabia for stuff it didn't do and ignore the transgressions of the Taliban government?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday March 14 2019, @11:45PM (1 child)
But let's invade Iraq.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 15 2019, @03:16AM
That's a different ball game. I happen to think the world is better for that invasion, BUT it was justified on bogus grounds and a number of people apparently knew that ahead of time (such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Rumsfeld who suddenly changed his story when it became evidence that WMD would not be found in Iraq around March, 2003).