Not exactly my grammar, but a good point...

In one senate speech (back during the period of Newt's "Contract with ("on" for others) American" and the balanced budget crunch) Kerry noted how small the part of the NASA budget which was spent in his state was. That's why he favors the science side, because the money is spent in his state.

Originally, during Apollo, the LEM was built on Long Island, and electronics were done out of the MIT lab (Lincoln Laboratory?) - Glennan had the spending allocated across the country. My observation is that right now NASA budgets have a rough time getting through in the middle of winter - you have the sunshine, and you want us to send you money too?

Kerry knew he was really vulnerable on this and that's why he started his campaign at Kennedy SFC.

I don't know how the current NASA administrator will handle these structural problems, or if he will deal with them at all.

Robotics went to Carnegie Mellon (Pennsylvania) where Detroit and Ohio had more engineering need.

Long term data storage went to (North?) Dakota, a really good move, but data mining from there (such as the creation of super resolution images from earlier imagery, and improvement in planetary data sets) is impossible - they simply lack the expertise, and that expertise is not going to move to North Dakota any time soon.

Cornell (New York) competes with SWRI (Arizona) for secondary planetary money - JPL does a good job here.

Photonics (think Earth Obsevation) is big around Rochester, but Japanese companioes are giving them a fit. There is no centralized easily usable continuous set of Earth observation data - the danger of the use of this for programming cruise missiles is a real problem.

Industrialization of NASA technology is run out of Alabama, but the key tech cetners are the Bay Area (Moffet) and the Boston area - it never makes it to Detroit.

One clear place where NASA could spend more money in the NE is in support of the Minor Planet Center at Harvard, and they're absolutely going to have to have more money to handle the new data coming in.

When the NEO problem was awarded to JPL (which despite Morrison's hard feelings is really the only lab capable of handling it), Ames got Mars and astrobiology in compensation, while SWRI received more money, with JPL not getting enough to handle the NEO problem. No question SWRI has the expertise in crater counting and ground astronomy, and needs more money, but ultimately it's going to take space assets to handle this - JPL. Some crater study money still goes through Morrison/Ames, but again it is not enough, and sorry for the hard feelings, but it should go through SWRI instead.

Other than that, they ask Hubbard to start to move Ames over to a JPL type model, which would be real good for Bay Area universities, and then they clobber him on a technicality when he starts off on it.

oh well
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