Since there's nothing of interest going on anywhere, it seems, I was scanning websites out of boredom. And that's when this headline hit me. "Rocket To Nowhere" Because after the president "nixed" a NASA project, Congress is still spending $500 million on it over the next six months.
Due to legislative bottlenecks, NASA must continue funding an already defunct rocket program until March. Half a billion dollars will be spent, in trying to replace the space shuttle.
Constellation is an umbrella program, including the Ares I rocket NASA's been building to replace the space shuttle as means of transport to and from the International Space Station among other spacecraft capable of performing a variety of missions. But although President Obama cancelled Constellation last year, congressional delays and inaction won't let the program die, costing scads of money.
$165 million of the estimated $500,000,000 NASA will spend in the next few months, will be paid to Alliant Techsystems, toward development of a solid-rocket first stage for the Ares I rocket. However, with the program cancellation signed into law in October, there are doubts the technology will ever be used, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
The reason this happened is a political battle over the last year. Since potential cancellation was looming, lawmakers wrote clauses into NASA’s 2010 budget, protecting Ares I jobs in their home states. Those clauses effectively prevented NASA from shutting down the program pending a new budget from Congress.
The new budget was expected to happen prior to October 1, but Congress extended the current budget until March, thereby the inaction leaves NASA obligated to keep Ares I alive, despite the program’s cancellation. NASA is currently spending almost $100 million a month on Ares I, or roughly $500 million from October to March 2011, according to the agency.
The reason I mention this is that while these charlatan SOB's in congress makes lot's of noise about spending on the big issues like health care, tax cuts, bailouts and unemployment benefit extensions where they throw away trillions, a small column buried in the press exposes half a billion of taxpayer's money they might just as well have burned.
And this is only one example of money totally wasted by people who couldn't care less about the dire financial straits their country is in. To them all that counts is skimming off as much as they can for themselves from the top, or anywhere else they can find it, and everyone else be damned.
But as I keep typing more and more lately, the game is changing and these folks are being found out. And although I really do believe that today, the public's much more aware and far better informed, there's still too much time between elections until the incompetents and crooks can be blown out. I truly believe the time has come that although politicians get their jobs via votes, there has to be a method put in place to simply throw the bad ones out. Just like they do in the real world.
That's it for today folks.
Adios
No comments:
Post a Comment