In 2008, between the election and the inauguration, Obama sent an advanced team to see exactly how many billions of dollars could be stripped from JSC’s budget to pay for more worthwhile programs and projects. One of them commented something along the line of “Shit, there isn’t anything we can really cut. There isn’t much here.”
Well they did end up canceling the Constellation program because that was a Bush idea to go back to the moon. But congress ended up funding the SLS rocket and Orion capsule anyway. Of course they didn’t have a reference mission or a destination. They just spent the last 12 years building both. Neither has flown an actual mission. There was one pad abort test of the Orion capsule. And since the SLS uses 4 refurbished Shuttle SSME’s and they don’t return for reuse like the Shuttle, only 4 launches of the SLS are on the books. This has been the worst investment that NASA has ever made - maybe. It may rival JWST. But it kept a lot of engineers and civil servants working at Marshall and Stennis. I worked on Orion from January, 2007 until about May, 2015 through numerous stops and starts. In 2015, they still didn’t know how many astronauts it was supposed to accommodate.
The other program that is an embarrassment to NASA is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). I work on the from 2003 until I went to Orion in 2007. Work on it really began in 1996 as the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) with a proposed budget of $500 million and a planned launch date in 2007. It still hasn’t launched and won’t launch until at least 2021. The budget right now is up over $10 billion. But it kept a bunch of engineers and civil servants at Goddard working.
What did they use the money for? Well, it is not directly traceable but if you look at how the money from the TARP stimulus bill was spent, you will see 100’s, maybe thousands, of Pell grants to cosmetology and beautician schools in Sheila Jackson Lee’s district.
I particularly enjoyed being served by local "NASA" contractors in the DFAC during my lovely stay in Afghanistan circa 2011-12. They all had nice "NASA" baseball caps and mostly crisp and white chef's coats... Many laughs were had about that, I am not sure they can be catalogued in the Book of Laughter due to sunset clauses on FOI requests. We did enjoy this particular site:
ilovebagram.comMan, there was this legendary red-head that was a "Bagrhram 10{11? 9?}" who had
both matching curtains and drapes... Whoa!
I think she was Russian and I bumped into her at a CONEX that had a mistakenly "lost" serial number...
Nautical Shore, but them Russian/Ukrainian contractors were an interesting bunch.
Talk about the Wild West.
I will say that the obvious Russian designed helicopters that were used by contractors were interesting; instead of a horizontal ramp for cargo they utilized a vertical rear clam shell. Weird looking, add in the odd number of rotor blades...
Well, they operated on the other side of the main run-way quite close to the Tower. It was always fun to watch their operations on a slow day, just looked plain weird whatever the actual fuck they were doing over there.
It seemed like the "hajj" did not like them; most of the rockets seemed to hit the "Russian contractor" areas. Maybe they were terrible shots?
Nautical Shore!
Hah, g-u-d thymes.
-p
