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Old February 6th 17, 12:21 PM posted to sci.space.policy
Jeff Findley[_6_]
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Posts: 2,307
Default Musk remains on Advisory Council

In article . com,
says...

On 2017-02-05 21:24, William Mook wrote:

President Trump has met with Musk and Hewson, both companies have discussed human presence on Mars in the near term;


Not quite as you portray it. Trump has met with group of business men
who include Musk. Musk didn't meet privately with trump to tell him to
fund space big time.


Musk is likely far more interested in protecting his electric car
business which might be "forgotten" by a pro oil presidency intent on
"drill drill baby" with subsidies going to oil/coal instead of electric
cars.

It remains to be seen what the budget will look like. If Trump wants to
pave highways, congress/senate may tell him to cut elsewhere to fund his
spending. So unless space is part of his spending plans, it may be where
he agrees to cuts to fund other things.


That and the Trump Administration has made it clear that they want to
cut taxes on businesses in order to make the US corporate tax code more
attractive in order to bring jobs back to the US (that's the theory
anyway). The downside is that the Administration will need to pay for
it somehow. One of the first things Trump did when he got into office
was to freeze all government hiring with the exception of the military.
NASA was not an exception and has had its hiring frozen.

This indicates to me that NASA will not immune from the budget cuts
which are quite to come. So, even if Trump were to give a Kennedy like
speech on space, his Administration is quite unlikely to back that up
with the large proposed budget increases required to make the contents
of that speech become a reality.

In other words, Trump's space policy will likely be more of the same for
NASA in terms of overall budget. The best we can hope for is that his
Administration kills SLS, stopping the giant sucking sound, and replaces
it with more "commercial" initiatives within NASA. IMHO, a commercial
HLV program coupled with a cryogenic fuel depot and reusable upper stage
(e.g. ACES based) wouldn't be bad way to go and ought to be doable with
a re-purposed SLS budget.

Jeff
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