The Planetary Society reports:
Representative John Culberson, an 8-term Texas Republican and staunch supporter of NASA and planetary exploration, lost his re-election bid to Democrat Lizzie Fletcher last week. Many factors played into this outcome, but one bears consideration by space advocates: his support for the scientific search for life at Europa was seen as a weakness and attacked accordingly.
Over the past four years, Culberson used his chairmanship of the Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) appropriations subcommittee to increase spending on NASA and missions to search for life on Europa. He directed hundreds of millions of dollars to this effort and played a critical role in getting the Europa Clipper mission officially adopted by NASA and the White House. And he did this without cannibalizing other NASA programs. His motivation was passion, not parochialism, as the prime benefactor of these federal dollars was California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, located far outside his Houston-area congressional district.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday November 19 2018, @01:03AM (1 child)
Guy likes space, pushes for funding. Now that he's gone the funding is gone. This is not how you fund long term projects.
Main corollary being funding big projects. Cost effective to have a few places build stuff. Politically effective for lots of small places in various districts to build stuff. If you like bang for the buck you choose 2-3 vendors. If you want political cover you spread out the costs, so some dipshit can "bring home the bacon", never mind that bacon cost 3x what a normal person would pay.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Monday November 19 2018, @01:44AM
Not the case as far as I know. The mission is on schedule, and NASA still has the extra money that Culberson directed to them. It's unclear whether they will be able to add a lander to Europa Clipper [wikipedia.org], but barring unforeseen screw-ups it will launch by 2023, even if SLS is out of the picture.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]