Dare mighty things ... as long as we can afford it
COMMENT NASA could be in line for severe cuts to its science budget, with a 50 percent reduction floated by folk in the space industry. The consequences would, according to observers, be nothing less than catastrophic.
This comes shortly after the agency was told to get ready to lay off 1,000 employees. That threat was removed, possibly at the behest of the incoming Administrator Jared Isaacman. Still, according to The Planetary Society, budget belt-tightening would be "an extinction event for space science and exploration in the United States."
Dramatic? Not really. Should the cuts come to pass, NASA's science budget would fall off a cliff so steep that even a Tesla shareholder might say "steady on." Estimates from The Planetary Society show that funding could drop to levels not seen since 1985.
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Isaacman professed ignorance of the "supposed cuts," saying in a social media statement: "The President said he's targeting fraud, waste and abuse with a scalpel – not a hatchet."
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There seems to be a curious inability here to distinguish between scalpels and sledgehammers. (As usual, the Comments section is worth reading.)