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Welcome to the new era!
Photo Credit: NASA
The Soyuz TMA-04M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, May 15, 2012 carrying Expedition 31 Soyuz Commander Gennady Padalka, NASA Flight Engineer Joseph Acaba and Flight Engineer Sergei Revin to the International Space Station.
Photo: NASA/Bill Ingalls
Space Shuttle Columbia orbits over Typhoon Owen while on STS-62.
Photo Credit: NASA
Members of the media photograph the Soyuz TMA-04M rocket launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome
Photo: NASA/Bill Ingalls
The Soyuz TMA-04M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, May 15, 2012 carrying Expedition 31 Soyuz Commander Gennady Padalka, NASA Flight Engineer Joseph Acaba and Flight Engineer Sergei Revin to the International Space Station.
Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
An Orthodox priest blesses the Soyuz rocket at the Baikonur Cosmodrome Launch pad on Monday, May 14, 2012 in Kazakhstan.
Photo: NASA/Bill Ingalls
Space Shuttle Enterprise and Discovery nose-to-nose.
Discovery, the first orbiter retired from NASA’s shuttle fleet, completed 39 missions, spent 365 days in space, orbited the Earth 5,830 times, and traveled 148,221,675 miles will take the place of Enterprise at the center to commemorate past achievements in space and to educate and inspire future generations of explorers at the center.
Photo: NASA/Bill Ingalls
Welcome home Discovery.
Photo: NASA/SI/Eric Long
We rarely get political on here, because politics is quite a venom in spaceflight. But we feel sometimes that we want to be involved in movements, and because we enjoy NASA and our attached careers in the spaceflight industry, we feel that we need to tell you about a idea we heard of that we fully support in helping advance NASA.
If you don’t want to hear about it, we’re completely okay with you taking this position and would respectfully ask for you to ignore this post.
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#penny4NASA
Right now there’s a movement beginning to form.
A lot of us love our space history.
Project Mercury proved that a man could go to, operate within and return safely from space.
Project Gemini showed us that we could build vehicles that could carry two astronauts and keep them alive in space for a couple of weeks at a time.
Project Apollo was the icing on the cake: We set a goal for ourselves and we accomplished it: Astronauts walked on the Moon.
The Space Shuttle Program gave us the means to conduct scientific experiments and build our current project: the International Space Station, which is proving that long-duration trips into space are a reality, not a fictional story.
And let’s not forget the countless robotic programs: Mariner, Viking, Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, the Mars Exploration Rovers and the past, present and future missions to come.
But something’s amiss: NASA ain’t what it used to be.
During the height of glory, NASA received a solid 4% of the US Government’s annual budget, which provided the quantum leaps we needed in technology to get a man on the Moon.
Today, NASA will receive 0.45% of the proposed FY2013 budget. Less than half a penny for every dollar of taxes you pays goes to pushing humanity beyond it’s boundaries. NASA is suffering, as evidenced by the cancellation of our participation in the intentional ExoMars project due to “budgetary constraints”
Most are shocked to learn that NASA receives such a small amount of the money is takes to run this country, with most figures during public polls placing our budget near “20-40%”, and they couldn’t be further from the truth.
Congress seems to be set on making NASA history, defunding it to the point that it just can’t function correctly.
Losing NASA would be a serious blow to the scientific community, jeopardize international science and ruin the commercial spaceflight industry.
Some of us are NOT okay with this, and we are beginning to let our voices be heard.
NASA is not simply just an exploratory agency, the technological benifits that have been dervied from the work NASA has done have revolutionized our cultures and economies.
Personal computers, GPS, smart phones, water purification systems, vaccines against diseases, lighter materials, maybe even the mattress you sleep on every night: none of those, nor countless other innovations we take for granted daily would be possible without the help of NASA.
All we’re asking for is a slight increase in the budget to NASA: move from 0.45% to 1%. Let’s dedicate a single penny of every tax-dollar received to NASA.
Sign this petition today advocating this increase and let your voice be heard.
Imagine what we could do with a single penny.
Discovery prepares for her final flight to the Smithsonian.
Photo: NASA/Dimitri Gerondidakis
