Explain this!

Earlier this week, there was the news about the very likely shutdown of the NASA program that monitors the Voyager spacecraft.

The probable October shutdown of a program that currently costs $4.2 million a year has caused dismay among scientists who have shepherded the twin Voyager probes on flybys of four planets and an epic journey to the frontier of interstellar space.

Got that? Saving $4.2 million a year. And at the price of losing out on learning something about our solar system.

Today Voyager 1, about 9 billion miles from Earth and traveling at 46,000 miles per hour, and Voyager 2, about 7 billion miles away doing 63,000 miles per hour, are flirting with the edge of the solar system, where the sun's magnetic field and the solar wind give way to interstellar wind. Virtually nothing is known about this boundary. Data from the spacecraft show periodic increases in radiation levels -- expected when the solar wind is no longer able to block incoming cosmic rays -- followed by smaller declines.

''By 2006, the spacecraft may have crossed into the outermost layer of solar atmosphere, where the supersonic wind has slowed and heated to a million degrees as it interacts with the interstellar wind," said Edward C. Stone, Voyager's chief scientist from the outset. ''If Voyager is terminated, we will lose the opportunity to observe [this] interaction."

... Voyager has been what Stone, a physicist at California Institute of Technology, described in an e-mail as ''the defining event that has shaped my career for the last 30 years." The Voyagers have amassed accomplishments unsurpassed by any spacecraft. The two probes have discovered 22 moons at four planets. Voyager 1 has traveled farther than any other spacecraft and took the first portrait of the solar system from the outside looking in.

There's more.

The administration is rearranging NASA's finances to finance Bush's ''Vision for Space Exploration" to the moon and eventually Mars. Cuts in aeronautics funding prompted by the initiative have provoked an uproar at some NASA centers.

That's a ruse. Nobody is going to Mars.

And it's not just the Voyager spacecraft.

NASA officials said the possibility of cutting Voyager and several other long-running missions in the Earth-Sun Exploration Division arose in February, when the Bush administration proposed slashing the division's 2006 budget from $75 million to $53 million.

The other programs on the block are Ulysses, launched in 1990 to study the sun; Geotail (1992), Wind (1994) and Polar (1996), to trace the interaction between solar events and their effects on Earth; FAST (1996), to study Earth's aurora; and TRACE (1998), to investigate the solar atmosphere and magnetic fields.

Who cares about the sun? Who cares about magnetic fields? Who cares about the interaction between the sun and the earth?   The sun has absolutely nothing to with the earth! We don't need no stinkin' sun!

But seriously, how can this be justified? The probes listed (above) have already been launched. Bush is proposing saving $4.2 million on Voyager and $22 million overall. We won't get valuable data and instead, will reduce the deficit by a pittance. This is insane.

No wait, it's not insane. It's scary.

Again, going back to the proposal to quit monitoring Voyager. $4.2 million is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Especially when you consider the pork-barrel projects in the works. From CNN's Inside Politics (6 Apr 2005)

BRUCE MORTON, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: This year's earmarks will cost taxpayers $27.3 billion, 19 percent more than last year's total. And, of course, the federal deficit is setting records.

The champion pork dispenser, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. $26 million for Alaskan villages, $1.7 for barrier research, $1.1 million for alternative salmon projects. Well, you get the idea.

TOM SCHATZ, CITIZENS AGAINST GOVERNMENT WASTE: This time Senator Stevens, the outgoing and now former chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, really went whole hog. He added $646 million for his state ...

When the proposed budget calls for cutting $4 million or $22 million which eliminates spacecraft monitoring programs, it's on the level of being handed some information, not looking at it, and throwing it in a trash can.

This is contempt for science and contempt for the future. Have Bush and Co. embraced the notion that the apocalypse is nigh? Is this guiding the policy choices? We've always thought such charges against Bush were over the top. But if anything, this move to ignore science makes the case.

And don't forget that the invaluable Hubble telescope is scheduled to plunge into the ocean when it fails (because no rescue missions are planned).

The only other explanation we can think of is that the Bush cabal believes the U.S. is headed for decline, that this will be China's century, the brains will be in India and Europe, and so it's grab-the-money time as this nation moves back to an extractive economy.

[FULL DISCLOSURE: Edward Stone was our instructor when we took physics at college.]

posted by Quiddity at 4/08/2005 06:34:00 PM