NASA may pull plug on Voyager
via MercuryNews.com:
In a cost-cutting move prompted by President Bush's moon-Mars initiative, NASA could summarily put an end to Voyager, the legendary 28-year mission that has sent a spacecraft farther from Earth than any object ever made by humans.
The probable October shutdown of a program that currently costs $4.2 million a year has caused consternation among scientists who have shepherded the twin Voyager probes on flybys of four planets and an epic journey to the frontier of interstellar space.
``There are no other plans to reach the edge of the solar system,'' said Stamatios Krimigis, a lead investigator for the project since before its launch in 1977. ``Now we're getting all this new information, and here comes NASA saying, `We want to pull the plug.' ''
NASA officials said the possibility of cutting Voyager and several other long-running missions in the Earth-Sun Exploration Division came up in February, when the Bush administration proposed slashing the division's 2006 budget by nearly one-third -- from $75 million to $53 million.
The handful of dollars being spent today on these projects probably represent the salaries of a handful of scientists -- the large defense contractors stopped making money on these projects decades ago. The way to keep the campaign dollars flowing is to shift the money to new and hardware-intensive projects.
And so the War on Science now reaches the Final Frontier. Team Rapture controls the purse strings, and knowledge is clearly seen as an enemy rather than as a tool. What could be out there other than God anyway? And the Enlightened already know Him, so why explore? Let's move the money to going back to the moon, and auction off the mineral rights...
In a cost-cutting move prompted by President Bush's moon-Mars initiative, NASA could summarily put an end to Voyager, the legendary 28-year mission that has sent a spacecraft farther from Earth than any object ever made by humans.
The probable October shutdown of a program that currently costs $4.2 million a year has caused consternation among scientists who have shepherded the twin Voyager probes on flybys of four planets and an epic journey to the frontier of interstellar space.
``There are no other plans to reach the edge of the solar system,'' said Stamatios Krimigis, a lead investigator for the project since before its launch in 1977. ``Now we're getting all this new information, and here comes NASA saying, `We want to pull the plug.' ''
NASA officials said the possibility of cutting Voyager and several other long-running missions in the Earth-Sun Exploration Division came up in February, when the Bush administration proposed slashing the division's 2006 budget by nearly one-third -- from $75 million to $53 million.
The handful of dollars being spent today on these projects probably represent the salaries of a handful of scientists -- the large defense contractors stopped making money on these projects decades ago. The way to keep the campaign dollars flowing is to shift the money to new and hardware-intensive projects.
And so the War on Science now reaches the Final Frontier. Team Rapture controls the purse strings, and knowledge is clearly seen as an enemy rather than as a tool. What could be out there other than God anyway? And the Enlightened already know Him, so why explore? Let's move the money to going back to the moon, and auction off the mineral rights...
posted by bluememe at 4/05/2005
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