Sheesh. Tax cuttin’, border watchin’, agent pardonin’ Congressman says, Ooops! I’m sorry!
U.S. Rep. John Culberson of Houston apologized Tuesday night for condemning NASA last week as a failure and a waste of federal money.
Whew, nothing like the wrath of those ‘conservatives’ when you touch their pork, eh, John? Makes for a quick change of heart, doesn’t it? Here is what he is apologizing for saying:
Culberson’s assessments of NASA last week were that “we’ve spent a fortune on (the agency) and we don’t have a whole lot to show for it., It’s deeply disappointing, and it’s because it’s a government-run agency.”
Citing an essay by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently published in Aviation Week, the congressman said Gingrich is “quite right that NASA has failed us miserably.”
Truth is, he was right last week. Send the defense portion back to the Air Force and let private companies compete to be the first to build a colony on Mars. Principles are principles.
Unless constituents phone your office.
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32 Responses to “Culberson: I didn’t mean it! Really!”Search
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Come on John, stand up to these people.
Judging from the comments of the article, you get an idea what he has been catching.
A sample:
Heh, yeah this country was built by big fat gubment agencies.
What NASA has become was summed up pretty well to me when Walt Cunningham was on KSEV after Columbia’s crash. There was discussion on why didn’t the crew go out to inspect the tiles since there was suspected damage, his reply was in so many words was a space walk was not on the schedule and you can’t just willy-nilly go changing things around. Well Walt, they do it all the time now, I guess it got put on the schedule.
Mindsets like that, Apollo 13 would not have made it back.
I hope my mentioning John Culberson two days in a row, didn’t lead to this article. For the most part, he has done a fine job, and no one is perfect. He may be stepping on toes along the border, because crime is down, drugs are slowing, etc. I will vote for him again. As to Nassa, I know he is an avid astronomer, that’s all my experience with that. My issue is border. He works hard for me.
Yes, but what about Newt? Geez, you suppose he could have spoken his mind?
NASA is a beautiful resource, all one has to do is take a peek at their website! It is quite educational–and always on the “cutting edge” to stardom! Look at the unlimited celestial boundaries… kids, my kids simply adore the astronomical fascination into unknown galactic adventures! Front row and center! Oh, and let’s include the awesome teachers please! It is they who successful manage their own love for kid’s vivid imagination! Kudos to NASA! (Vote Pete Olson for Congress SD #22)
Unless constituents phone your office.
I thought we hired these people to work for us? Aren’t they supposed to listen to their citizens and do as the majority want? Maybe his personal opinion is Nasa has squandered too much money, but his constituents let it be known Nasa is a valuable asset? I have no idea. Personally, as long as other countries are interested in space we need to be. Other than that, I’m not curious.
And yet when John Cornyn listens to his constituents, who do not want a fence blocking access to water, you call him a phony. Interesting.
Dreams ….that is what NASA is made of! Thanks to elaborate “hands-on” programming the “Distance Learning” projects is the first of it’s kind. The concept to DL is quite simple really. Teachers and students alike, thoroughly enjoy their space participation via satellite connections– a most unique way to teach actually. DL’s concept allows a variety of schools to simultaneous chat with their peer students from other schools. Cool huh?
BigJolly
Shall we list the products and technological advances we owe to NASA? How soon we forget.
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater has always been very shortsighted.
Notice how Republicans seem to have become whiners with no solutions? Tear down, tear down, tear down. No wonder they are going to be a 1/3 minority in Congress.
Would those advances not exist if private companies were competing to go into space? How many advances should the taxpayers pay for?
Is there any government project that should be privatized or should the government continue to expand unchecked?
#9 rick
NASA has become bloated & hidebound. It has been living on its past glory for a couple decades now. You ought to read Dr. Richard Feynman’s (CalTech physicist) account of the investigation of the Columbia (or Challenger, the one that happened around 1985) accident. He basically said NASA’s arrogance was the ultimate cause, as it would not even consider that something they built was not safe.
A side note to that: NASA’s estimates of the probability of a failure resulting in the loss of a vehicle was something like 1 in 100,000. Feynman calculated it to be somewhere around 1 in 100 or 125. Turns out he was a lot closer than anyone gave him credit for at the time.
We do have a solution: give the Air Force the job of launching military payloads and privatize the civilian launches. Most (almost all) of the non-human launches are pretty much private anyway.
7
Heh
As an aerospace engineer who used to work as a JSC contractor, I’ll have to say that I agree with Culberson’s original statement. NASA is a big disappointment. I hope that Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and the rest of those rich guys out there working on their own space stuff have all the success they ever dreamed.
At the same time, I sure wish we would wake up and see that China is fixing to surpass us in a lot of areas, and that the next flag planting on the Moon may very well be theirs.
“Shall we list the products and technological advances we owe to NASA? How soon we forget.”
Tell me of a single product or technological beakthrough in common use today that has been developed because of actual space work. ALL of the so called “advances” have been made in SUPPORT of the space program and not as a result of space work. Which raises the question: at what cost do we want to speed up the development of technologies 10 or 15yrs? Because that is all that NASA, and related businesses, accomplish.
To get a comparison from history read about the northwestern railroad and what happened to it because of the fascist trans-continental railroad financed for the benefit of Lincoln and his cronies.
Culberson dared to say the truth … if only for a brief moment. The “conservatives” who bilieve in Consitutional government inasmuch as it does not gore their ox put Culberson back where they like him to be all the time.
NASA has at one time been very valuable, now it often seems nothing more then another government jobs program, Yes, Mr. Culberson should have stood his ground. All in all, he is a very good congressman, one of the few still left in the party.
#15 jaime
There are now many companies that specialize in innovation and product development for other companies. That is, these other companies outsource part of their R&D efforts in an effort to get a fresh perspective. This route would almost certainly be much less expensive and much faster than NASA could even dream of.
Rick, name some scientific experiments aboard ISS right now. Because of poor planning and implementation, the space station crews spend 95% of their time on repairs and sustainability.
Talk to people that work there, and the bulk of the employees are saddened by the current state of science and the advancement of technology.
Commercial space is the future - government can help fund it, but they shouldn’t be in charge of it.
Any organization that gets penalized for coming under budget is going to end up in a downward spiral.
Too bad Culberson isn’t sticking to his principles here.
Big deal. I don’t agree with the insinuation that this shows Culberson to be a hypocrite. He made a general statement and later clarified that his comments targeted the bureacracy, not the people. Ho-hum.
Culberson’s human, too. Get over it. I think his record speaks well of him.
BigJ, I think it’s the majority of constituents. Edd Hendee said today he thinks the Chronicle took Culberson out of context. IF Culberson could prove the majority of his constituents do not want a fence…..I would have to agree. It wouldn’t be what I want, but majority rules. I do not hire these politicians to do as they please. I hire them to do our will. So, if Culberson’s phones light us with people from all over his area saying they think it’s important to keep NASA funded , so be it. Remember, we killed the amnesty bill because the majority of people were against it. It should work that way on a smaller scale in each district. It’s his job to keep us informed, and it’s our job to stay abreast.
One had to have been on Congressman Culberson’s call the other night to understand what happened. Just out of the blue, some obstreperous loud mouthed liberal started in on him as only those people can do, stridently accusing, bullying, and twisting anything Culberson said. Any effort by Culberson to question, counter, get in a word edgewise or otherwise respond was met with a change of topic, more baseless accusations or snide remarks. With all that confusion I might have said I hated my mother–that’s how disruptive this guy was. It was hard to sit there and listen and not be able to join in the fray and pound Culberson’s attacker! The next morning when I read the Chronicle, it was obvious to me that Culberson had been set up. I thought reporters were supposed to announce their presence, identify themselves, and give one the opportunity to be on or off the record. And where was the reporting on the many other constituents on that call who noted the current actions of the Democrat Congress to give away our Country one piece at a time? I say shame on the Chronicle for their duplicity.
I am vacillating between irritated and being sympathetic to some on this issue. First let me say I support NASA. NASA has never been profitable. Not even in the beginning 10 years when it was so exciting. No government agency is set up to be profitable. NASA is about exploration and knowledge. Some point in the DISTANT future, space exploration will be profitable. Communications satellites are put up by NASA. The private company only insures the satellite itself. Should they have had to develop and deploy their own boosters and launch sites? If that had been a requirement, we wouldn’t be using cell phones today, and we wouldn’t have any satellites up there for any form of communication other than military. None of your iPods or any other little palm devices would work either. Cable TV would be nonexistant.
Astronomy has never been a subject that added a dollar to our pocket books. Yet we put the Hubble telescope up. Well, that’s not true about astronomy not adding a dollar to our pocket books. Actually it’s been worth trillions of dollars to the economy of the entire world. It was the study of astronomy that allowed us to compute tide tables around the face of the earth, which has drastically affected shipping for centuries.
It’s always the derivative applications we benefit from. At some point in the future that big frigging rock will be headed our way. An observatory on the moon or Mars might give us the months or years we need to react and save our planet. The same people who say NASA is a waste of time now would be the same ones wringing their hands and asking why somebody didn’t do something if we didn’t have the time to prevent a cataclysmic event that would destroy our planet. That’s short sighted in the most tragic of ways.
Guess I should add that without astronomy, you would not have the mathematics to put up those communications satellites. You wouldn’t have had the mathemetics to put up our spy and military satellites in space either. You also wouldn’t have had the threat of ICBMs raining down on Russia or China, which prevented WW III.
b45
I think you’re mixing a couple of separate functions here. NASA has the mandate to explore and research space; it also has been involved for several years in commercializing space.
If NASA were to continue to exist, I would like to se its mandates separated into an exploration/research function and a function to monitor and oversee other entities that launch objects into space, much like the FAA does with aircraft.
The exploration/research function should be primarily through the distribution of grants to academic and private institutions like the NSF now does. In fact, I don’t see why it couldn’t be rolled into the NSF. We don’t need a bunch of Federal employees doing research when there are organizations that have it as their primary mission.
The oversight/monitoring function would basically act to ensure safety protocols are in place to make sure rocket parts don’t start raining down on the general public. This would be the only involvement NASA should have with launching satellites. Raytheon, Lockheed, Rockwell, et al. know how to launch satellites and have the capabilities to do this, so they should. There is no reason for gov’t involvement.
As I said earlier (as did the front-page post), military payloads should all be the complete and total responsibility of the Air Force.
“we wouldn’t be using cell phones today, and we wouldn’t have any satellites up there for any form of communication other than military. None of your iPods or any other little palm devices would work either. Cable TV would be nonexistant.”
Nonsense. And my guess is as good as yours 8P
I guess NASA is THE example that proves socialism, at least in space research, really does work.
Jaime, it is not nonsense when I state
You can go buy a car. If Jaime had been forced to invent a car, manufacture a car, drill the oil, refine the oil….well, you’d be walking or riding a horse. Yes, private industry developed all those things, just like private industry built all the things for NASA. But if NASA hadn’t funded them, they would not have been built. There was no financial incentive for it to be done.
It’s one thing for a communications company to develop a satellite. It’s another for them to build a rocket and launch facilities. They couldn’t make any money OR you would be paying one helluva lot more for your communications.
Wagon, the monitoring of objects in space is performed by the military now under the United States Space Command (USSPACECOM).
“It’s one thing for a communications company to develop a satellite. It’s another for them to build a rocket and launch facilities. They couldn’t make any money OR you would be paying one helluva lot more for your communications.”
That is your conclusion, as you stated before.
My conclusion is different. The rocket and launch facilities would have been built. The technology would have been a little slower in coming but the real cost would have been upfront and not hidden. And those costs would not have been inflated through the wonder of compounded bureaucracies and political favoritisms and buy outs.
My guessing game is as valid as yours.
And after the first 4 or 5 crashed, who would have risked additional capital for that Jaime? Nobody was going to underwrite the billions of dollars in risk in those early days. NOBODY could do it except the government. There was no profit motive for others to do it, so it would not have been done. No board of directors would have approved it, no insurance company would have assumed the risk. You please go back to 1957 - 61, and tell me what the cost would have been and which companies were in position to underwrite such an adventure, particularly NASA in those early years came to represent failure.
Apply that to the aviation industry. Most of the research for aviation from the very beginning was funded by the military. Then it was applied to civilian applications. But without the military funding those big bombers, you would not have civilians airliners. And they were all plagued by huge fatalities.
Wihtout the government taking the people’s money at gun point, metaphorically speaking, the progress would have been slower but the development would have happened.
The question at what cost, on whose dime and if the cost is funded voluntarily or by coersion. And to repeat, all the associated costs of political bartering hidden in the socialist enterprise.
Again, socialism does not work except in aerospace.
How many space developed comercial fproducts so far?
Ooh, such a lot of money too when less than half of 1% of the federal budget actually goes to NASA. They do a lot for their less than 1% compared with some of the other larger government programs that don’t produce any profit.
My favorite NASA spinoff would have to be my Debit card. Few people realize that it originates to an Apollo check-out program. After being created for Apollo it was given to the commercial industry to develop a commerical purpose. Before the program I believe credit cards had no magnetic strip - just raised numbers run through a carbon paper imprint machine.
No Jaime. Development would not have happened. There would have been no profit motive for it to have happened.