It's hard not to worry about costs at NASA. The sums spent on manned space are immense and currently returning very little; space science is no snip, either. The Next Generation Space Telescope, nowadays called the James Webb Space Telescope, seems to have managed to push its projected costs up above the $3 billion mark. The last round of Discovery proposals for small planetary missions ended up selecting no new spacecraft, and one of the reasons (I think there were a few) was that most of them didn't look like meeting the budget cap: the Kepler mission, a personal favourite, is now delayed to 2008 for lack of funds. The Phoenix Mars mission came in over budget even though it started off with a spacecraft that had already been built -- the abandoned Mars 2001 lander -- an advantage NASA tried to play down. In recent discussions about future cosmological missions, the Caltech professor Sterl Phinney argued that the way to get future missions to come in on a $600m budget was to ask for proposals that would cost no more than $300m, and that seems pretty accurate.
So given all this, it's good that Congress is on the case. Mr Chris Chocola, a Republican from Indiana, has successfully removed from NASA's budget the $20,000 that was to be spent on funding Laurie Anderson as the agency's first artist in residence. That'll sort things out.
Certainly there are more serious cost issues to worry about. However, a little context is useful. Many people in Congress, and particularly conservatives, remember a period in the late 1980s when government money was being used directly or indirectly to fund artists that they found highly objectionable. Whenever they see a new case that has similar themes they instantly get alarmed. It is a hot button issue, but not without reason.
I'm unfamiliar with this performance artist. NASA does have a long history of supporting artwork, and the NASA art program has produced some really nice stuff over the years. There are at least a couple of books on the market devoted primarily to NASA's officially sponsored artwork. It would be a pity if the overall program got harmed because of this.
Posted by: Dwayne A. Day | June 24, 2005 at 05:28 PM
Worldwind Dev too. Well with Worldwind u can change the bidruanoes if u want at your own whim.Just import ur own Borders data and declare war :)I work on vector data support.If you can compile a politically correct boundary file I will show u how to add it(After it has put to the UN of course).
Posted by: Nyeuu | August 04, 2012 at 02:15 PM