To follow up on my own comment (doh!) here is a link to a document detailing recommendations to the obama administration for NASA..

Right on schedule, a radical restructuring recommendation.

I'm not commenting on the merits of this particular publication (could be great!!) but it certainly drives home the point I was making. It's hard to make progress on a 20 year program when your agency is radically "restructured" every 4 or 8 years.

sexconker: Have you ever seen that movie "UHF" by Wierd Al Yankovic? Remember the scene where he walks in and says "Hi, I'm the new boss!" and the secretary screams at him? "OOOOOOOoh, It's kind of HARD to be PROMOTED when EVERY WEEK you have a new boss!".

It feels a bit like being that secretary, to be working at NASA. Everyone thinks you can just "get people on mars already you assholes". Your budget is less than half of what's provided even to the federal highway administration who doesn't even have to leave our comfortable atmosphere to do their jobs. Hell, our budget this year is 0.009 percent of the cost of the two "stimulus packages" for banks and mortgage companies. That budget also must be split among your multiple "missions" - Science, Exploration, Aeronautics, etc. (By the way, robots play an important part in all of the missions, and researching them is critical).

Finally, you have not one boss but 500 or so, each of whom has different priorities for you and concerns that you spend your limited budget in THEIR district (not where it might be most appropriate) and EVERY 4 (or 8) years you have a new boss with a radically different direction for the 20-year program you're supposed to be completing. By the way, they can issue a memo and, poof, it's federal law now.

Sorry for going on a tangent but it really irritates me, comments like yours. There's plenty of valid criticisms for NASA that you could be throwing together in this topic and you chose a simplistic, uninformed and insulting tantrum.

I am the sole IT person for a nonprofit, volunteer animal rescue. They don't have any money to pay for professional staff (preferring to spend it on the animals instead).

All of our IT tools (a wiki, a bird tracking database, OTRS, our website, a chat server, etc) are webapps.

The type of people, for the most part, who are willing to volunteer to do animal rescue are not geeks, techies or even "power users". For a long time our animal tracking database was a client application. 75% of the volunteers had so much trouble figuring out how to INSTALL IT and connect it to our database (even with written instructions) that they didn't even use it, and had to ask others to do all their data entry for them.

It got to the point that each adoption coordinator had to be set up with a technically astute "data entry buddy".

Now that our bird database is a webapp, all the coordinators can use it, because they CAN navigate to a website and use the tool.

So, yeah, there's a place for thick client apps too, but without webapps we'd be screwed.

Wow, you appear to live very close to me as well! The intersection at Fair Oaks and the 101 South exit is HORRIBLE. I've written the city about it several times. In addition to short yellows, there is a serious bicycle safety issue.

  I ride my bicycle through that intersection in the mornings to work. There is NO guided-left turn for any of the 4-way intersection, yet the people taking a left from Fair Oaks to try to make the IMMEDIATE exit onto 101 pay no attention to right of way. I've almost been run into multiple times by folks who don't realize that traffic going STRAIGHT through the intersection have right of way over folks trying to make a left!

I ended up altering my bike route to instead go over a pedestrian overpass and go an extra half-mile rather than continue risking that intersection.

Of course, I never, ever heard back from the city.

I see your point, but I have to point out that as of now, the bailouts have never put anything directly into the treasury either - so both NASA and the Bailouts have never put anything into the treasury. While the bailouts may, they also may not.

My chart doesn't really compare NASA to the bailout as much as it illustrates where NASA is prioritized according to other federal spending, and by what margins. The reason I created it is that I get tired of hearing people talk as though cutting the space program (which to them means "NASA") would solve our financial woes. It won't.

NASA in entirety is .5% of the discretionary budget (.15% of total budget). While cutting funds to NASA would make as much of a difference to the budget as cutting funds from any other federal agency, there is a lot less room in NASA's budget for the cuts compared to other agencies which have equally nebulous direct benefit to the taxpayer.

Are $2.4 billion in military aid to Israel or $1.3 billion to Egypt returning any net to the treasury, or a tangible benefit to the US taxpayer, even indirectly?

Look, I understand that not everyone values Science research and space exploration, or believe that they should be done by the government. However, for nearly every tax dollar you can point to NASA spending, there's likely some indirect but tangible and provable positive gain to our country, citizens and economy that have resulted from it. Meanwhile, there are programs of dubious value spending as much or more money than NASA which get a complete pass on the pinata whacking party, and it is very sad to be on the receiving end of the stick, knowing that.