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can someone closer to the action speak about actual issues in that office? As an outsider, it seems like there was some fishy news about the International Space Station, for example...

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Not an insider, but I think your comment gets to the core of the issue. One of the pictures used in the story has a Space Shuttle in it, and another has a Vehicle Assembly Building; neither of those have been used (for anything interesting to the public other than tours) for over a decade. NASA has become very constituency-driven, running many small projects which don't drive public support, or do anything visibly useful to the citizenry, which is why it's being cut. Choosing which navel-gazing experiment to fly to an expensive and obsolete space station seems very out-of-touch.

Bullshit. It’s always been a constituency-driven jobs program, but that doesn’t meant it still doesn’t do important work. Apollo was incredibly useful to the citizenry and it still wasn’t widely supported.

The guys doing the cutting are also the guys responsible for NASA having no other options but to try to keep the ISS going as long as possible with any science that can be performed on it.

Some of them are probably old enough to have been screwing over NASA since the end of Apollo.

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