Screaming Penguin

Well, I dont know if anyone else is following this, but if you are unaware, NASA's budget is up for another USD $1 Billion in cuts for next year. Basically it boils down to the White House and the House Republicans getting into a pissing war over who could add more money to the Veterans Administration in their budget proposals. The money had to come from somewhere, so 1B of is is coming from NASA.This is a cut into the bone of the space agency whose budget has been diminished by over $35 Billion since 1988. Projects on the chopping block should the finance bill pass the Senate: The space shuttle Discovery. Subsequent missions in the Deep Space lineage, a planned '03 mission to Mercury, a lander mission to Io, about 1/2 the budget for the space station's science module.I dont know about anybody else, but I find this wholly unacceptable. Why would NASA, which has been the poster child of success under Clinton/Gore's "Reinventing Government" initiatives get the legs chopped off? We have a projected 890 billion budget surplus for next year, and we are trimming an agency that lost all its fat 5 years ago. While the Space Shuttle is certainly not the high point of good engineering in many ways, I would rather decommision a stealth bomber than a space shuttle, never mind that NASA's DS1 and DS2 missions already flying have introduced some of the most exciting spinnoff technologies since TANG.Take a couple of minutes over the next couple of days, and fire off an email to your Congressman. Let him know if it takes a .01% tax increase to keep NASA off the block you will pay it. Geez. A billion dollars.