In article , Mutts wrote:
Years of declining NASA budgets under the Clinton administration and
NASA used as a political tool (GoreSat nonsense, gobs of money spent
bailing out he russian space program, messing with environmentally
safe foam instead of one that works better, etc).

STS-107, unless something escaped me, was flying with the foam that
"worked better"... or was that just the old tank, but with new foam? The
FAQ (to which we refer once more) is vague here...

Doesnt this deserve more attention? The report certainly considers
the budget a major factor. Seems to me Clinton/Gore failed NASA.
What do you think?

I think that, if the US Government failed NASA, it's not particularly
due to the name of the guy in the White House. I doubt even less
it's due to the name of his party. YMMV.

I did an analysis a while ago, of the variation in NASA's budget over
time; knocked it down into budget as a fraction of national budget, then
noted the fraction that changed by FY to FY. Making the not-unreasonable
assumption that - say - the Clinton years were FY 92 to 00, we could
then see the effects of differently-"aligned" Presidencies on the NASA
budget - if they tended to reduce it, or if one was consistently more
generous than the other. There was very little to show between them,
although this is skewed by the Apollo blip in the later LBJ years -
although he cut it as much as he increased it - and by the fact that I
made my analysis method up on the fly and never rechecked it. g IIRC,
both seemed slightly predisposed to cutting the budget fractionally...

I'll post the figures, if anyone's interested; don't have them to hand,
but I can dig them out.

--
-Andrew Gray