It's refreshing that given everything else happening, Congress is still at least functional at this level.
Should be noted that many of NASA's programs are situated in predominantly conservative areas of the country. Brings lots of jobs and resources to the local economies.
I hope they manage to do something similar for the NSF. The proposed cuts there are crushing. The NSF funds great science in all parts of the country, and subsequently tons of jobs to the area.
Maybe the NSF needs to geographically disperse grants to maximize Congressional Districts that benefit. Kind of like how military spending is spread around states.
Word. The NSF provides great value from a relatively small budget. Because of the small sums involved I take these cuts as evidence of a fundamental hostility to scientific research.
"The full text of the Senate bill hasn't been released, but the budget blueprint would postpone the Trump administration's plan to cancel the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft.'
Personally, I prefer more of both. You have to actually do things - as in, develop the engineering, test things, see what works and what doesn't - to advance the state of the art. We need robots for science, humans for engineering.
Want to get paid, by the US Federal Government, for pursuing science or technology?
From experience, in simple terms, a word: Have the work for and the funding from the US DOD, department of defense, military, for some work they really care about.
This sounds like a joke, but it's 90+% real.
For years early in my career in applied math and computing, far and away the best parts, funding, technically advanced work, growth in expertise, and working conditions were on US military work, e.g.:
(1) The FFT (fast Fourier transform) and power spectral estimation (as in the book by Blackman and Tukey) for analyzing ocean audio, close to parts of the movie The Hunt for Red October. Also, the movie uses magneto hydrodynamics (MHD), and the specialty of the guy I was working for was MHD.
(2) Some optimization using Lagrangian relaxation for nuclear war.
(3) Given many ships at sea, some Red, some Blue, and some Blue submarines, war breaks out, and how long will the ships last, in particular, the Blue submarines? Sounds impossible or nearly so, but in WWII there were some cute derivations on search at sea and some Poisson process math by a guy Koopmans, and I did a little more on the math, in assembler wrote a random number generator starting with an Oak Ridge formula, and wrote some Monte Carlo code for the whole thing -- yes, used the speeds of the ships, their detection radii, and for each Red-Blue pair the probabilities of none die, one dies, the other dies, both die.
Surprisingly, a famous probability prof was flown in for a fast review. His remark was: "No way can your Monte Carlo fathom the huge sample space tree." Well, maybe, but so what?
"After some days, say 5, let X be the number of Blue submarines still alive. Then X is a random variable and is bounded, that is, is >= 0 and <= the finite number at the start. Then the law of large numbers applies, and can do 500 independent and identically distributed sample paths, add, divide by 500, and get the expected value for the 5 days, and each of the (times) days, within a gnats ass nearly all the time." The prof agreed but was offended by the gnats remark!
Sure, it was simple, but maybe not fully too simple -- was liked, passed the review, and helped my wife and I get our Ph.D degrees.
Also the military funding let me sit alone for some days learning PL/I that later, with a tricky feature of PL/I calling back into the stack of routines called but not yet returned, used to save IBM's AI product YES/L1! Ah, military worked again!
Ah, the military may (still) be interested in computer and communications security and reliability, system design and development methodology, system monitoring, and management, and now in AI, drones, etc. A commercial server farm or network doesn't expect to be attacked by long range missiles, but DOD systems have to be robust in a war!
Once I was at the David Taylor Model Basin (big tank of water to tow candidate ship hull designs), and they were seriously interested in the Navier-Stokes equations -- maybe they still are! Uh, do they have good solutions yet?
> From experience, in simple terms, a word: Have the work for and the funding from the US DOD, department of defense, military, for some work they really care about.
Arguably, national defense research is and should be a core funding target of a federal government. This will never go away, as national defense is one of the core purposes of a government.
A counterpoint: The DoD government positions have slowly been converted into contract positions with okay pay (not great), bad benefits, and bad job security. As a contractor at a DoD facility, you're also likely to be treated like a second class citizen in many ways (sorry, you can't attend this meeting/can't use this resource/need to fill out extra paperwork to do something/etc.). The government positions are fine, if you can get one, but most people probably couldn't even before the current administration. I don't think this is the best path for people interested in science and technology.
Happy to hear about this. Actually, budget should be increased not reduced. From purely ROI terms, NASA has a stellar return on investment. Immense contribution to human civilisation beyond US.
These analyses are highly questionable. NASA has a long reputation of being highly inefficient for good reasons. SpaceX did a much better job at optimizing cost in a way that NASA never could have, so it raises the obvious point: how much better would ROI have been in a world where private spaceflight was incentivized earlier? The answer isn't obviously in NASA's favour.
How does this square with the recent SCOTUS case that says, basically, that the executive can dismantle the DOE with mass dismissals, regardless of Congress? Couldn’t Trump do the same here?
SCOTUS has not issued a judgment in that case (McMahon v. New York). They merely granted the case and will hear it next term. The headlines you likely saw were commenting on how the court chose to deal with the preliminary injunction that was in place in the meantime. It's a major peeve of mine when those headlines make it sound like such an order is actually disposing of the case. In reality, the case is just starting.
Anyway, on the question of whether the chief of an organization can fire his or her own employees, the answer is usually "yes, of course, how could it be otherwise?" That's why it matters who the chief is.
We're counting down the days to August 30 in our house as my spouse is a NASA contractor who works at a program with a current expected budget cut of 40%, IIRC. I sure hope these bills pass and the cuts don't happen, but it's abundantly clear at this point that optimism is pretty foolish.
There's over a dozen! They're blatantly ripping off SpaceX, which is very smart and what everyone else should have been doing. It's absolutely insane that the US is going to throw another $10 or $30 billion at SLS. Our leaders will go on TV with a straight face and say "China competes unfairly, everything is state run!" but China is probably doing FIFTEEN reusable rocket projects for less than the amount of gov't money we're lighting on fire with SLS rocket to nowhere.
The aggressive cutting meant we ran a budget surplus for June. This has to happen or everything gets cut. We're pretty much at the end of the road.
The Democrats had control of the white house and legislature at the beginning of Biden's presidency and could have chosen alternatives to cut but did not.
As I've said so often: if you don't like what Trump is doing you need to campaign for viable alternatives.
Can someone with better search-foo than I tell me when the last time was that the US passed an actual budget? Not a continuing resolution, an actual budget. And maybe what the time before that was?
My impression is that it's happened maybe twice in the last 15 years, but I am open to correction.
This is the most basic duty of Congress, and they've been incapable of fulfilling it lately. (If you wonder why the president rules so much by executive order, it's because Congress can't or won't do its job.) So it will be interesting to see if the current Congress is more functional than recent ones.
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[ 9.8 ms ] story [ 54.0 ms ] threadShould be noted that many of NASA's programs are situated in predominantly conservative areas of the country. Brings lots of jobs and resources to the local economies.
The Senate Launch System strikes again.
Exactly the opposite of what they should be funding..
Want to get paid, by the US Federal Government, for pursuing science or technology?
From experience, in simple terms, a word: Have the work for and the funding from the US DOD, department of defense, military, for some work they really care about.
This sounds like a joke, but it's 90+% real.
For years early in my career in applied math and computing, far and away the best parts, funding, technically advanced work, growth in expertise, and working conditions were on US military work, e.g.:
(1) The FFT (fast Fourier transform) and power spectral estimation (as in the book by Blackman and Tukey) for analyzing ocean audio, close to parts of the movie The Hunt for Red October. Also, the movie uses magneto hydrodynamics (MHD), and the specialty of the guy I was working for was MHD.
(2) Some optimization using Lagrangian relaxation for nuclear war.
(3) Given many ships at sea, some Red, some Blue, and some Blue submarines, war breaks out, and how long will the ships last, in particular, the Blue submarines? Sounds impossible or nearly so, but in WWII there were some cute derivations on search at sea and some Poisson process math by a guy Koopmans, and I did a little more on the math, in assembler wrote a random number generator starting with an Oak Ridge formula, and wrote some Monte Carlo code for the whole thing -- yes, used the speeds of the ships, their detection radii, and for each Red-Blue pair the probabilities of none die, one dies, the other dies, both die.
Surprisingly, a famous probability prof was flown in for a fast review. His remark was: "No way can your Monte Carlo fathom the huge sample space tree." Well, maybe, but so what?
"After some days, say 5, let X be the number of Blue submarines still alive. Then X is a random variable and is bounded, that is, is >= 0 and <= the finite number at the start. Then the law of large numbers applies, and can do 500 independent and identically distributed sample paths, add, divide by 500, and get the expected value for the 5 days, and each of the (times) days, within a gnats ass nearly all the time." The prof agreed but was offended by the gnats remark!
Sure, it was simple, but maybe not fully too simple -- was liked, passed the review, and helped my wife and I get our Ph.D degrees.
Also the military funding let me sit alone for some days learning PL/I that later, with a tricky feature of PL/I calling back into the stack of routines called but not yet returned, used to save IBM's AI product YES/L1! Ah, military worked again!
Ah, the military may (still) be interested in computer and communications security and reliability, system design and development methodology, system monitoring, and management, and now in AI, drones, etc. A commercial server farm or network doesn't expect to be attacked by long range missiles, but DOD systems have to be robust in a war!
Once I was at the David Taylor Model Basin (big tank of water to tow candidate ship hull designs), and they were seriously interested in the Navier-Stokes equations -- maybe they still are! Uh, do they have good solutions yet?
Arguably, national defense research is and should be a core funding target of a federal government. This will never go away, as national defense is one of the core purposes of a government.
Just a reminder from 2012: [Neil deGrasse Tyson: Invest In NASA, Invest In U.S. Economy](https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisbarth/2012/03/13/neil-degr...)
Anyway, on the question of whether the chief of an organization can fire his or her own employees, the answer is usually "yes, of course, how could it be otherwise?" That's why it matters who the chief is.
There's over a dozen! They're blatantly ripping off SpaceX, which is very smart and what everyone else should have been doing. It's absolutely insane that the US is going to throw another $10 or $30 billion at SLS. Our leaders will go on TV with a straight face and say "China competes unfairly, everything is state run!" but China is probably doing FIFTEEN reusable rocket projects for less than the amount of gov't money we're lighting on fire with SLS rocket to nowhere.
The Democrats had control of the white house and legislature at the beginning of Biden's presidency and could have chosen alternatives to cut but did not.
As I've said so often: if you don't like what Trump is doing you need to campaign for viable alternatives.
My impression is that it's happened maybe twice in the last 15 years, but I am open to correction.
This is the most basic duty of Congress, and they've been incapable of fulfilling it lately. (If you wonder why the president rules so much by executive order, it's because Congress can't or won't do its job.) So it will be interesting to see if the current Congress is more functional than recent ones.
Where else can you pay someone 50k a year and get PhD-level productivity?