Word: nasa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...right, I was sleep deprived. So what? Still confident that there was nothing wrong with my ability to function at full capacity, I flew to San Francisco, where NASA's Ames Research Center keeps a full-size virtual-motion simulator of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. It's the next best thing to really flying. After a few hours of training and several takeoffs and landings, I had mastered the 747--or so I thought...
...seemed serious, promising to complete the station by 2010, mothball the shuttles after that and redirect the saved resources to the new manned initiatives, all without sacrificing such scientifically priceless-and fiscally prudent-programs as new space telescopes and the growing fleet of interplanetary probes flown mostly by the NASA-affiliated Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). When NASA's new, no-nonsense administrator, Michael Griffin, took over last April, he echoed that. Not ?one thin dime? would be cannibalized from the hard-science missions to pay for the manned ones, he promised. Now, it appears, there will...
...detection to find black holes, galactic nuclei and supernovae; the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which, as its name suggests, would hunt for Earth-like planets around other stars; and a welter of small craft known as the Explorers-discount ships designed mostly by university groups and launched in cooperation with NASA. Narrowly focused and cheap to fly, they have in the past paid big scientific dividends on very little investment...
...Defenders of the current fiscal policy point out that NASA's budget will still grow by 3.2% this year, at a time when plenty of other agencies are suffering deep cuts. True enough, but after the new belt-tightening, the projected annual growth through 2011 will be down to 1%, less than the rate of inflation. What's more, the agency's overall allotment this year is only $16.8 billion out of a total federal budget measured in the trillions. And though every federal agency faces hard choices to make ends meet, the missions NASA is scrapping make the least...
...NASA was founded in 1958 with the expectation that smart scientists and gutsy lawmakers and bureaucrats could get together to explore the cosmos without breaking the bank in the process. For a while they did. Now it looks like most of the money will keep getting spent but the cosmic rewards will continue to dwindle. The scientists, by any measure, are still smart. The same, alas, cannot be said for everyone else...