Riots Avoided

I can't be sure of how much coverage has been given to the President's FY2011 Budget on the regular news, but its gotten a lot of coverage at NASA. Why would a bunch of scientists and engineers care about a budget that usually draws more concern from economists and pundits? Because there are big changes to NASA in the budget. NASA will overall see a budget increase, especially for research and development (most of what Ames does), but the manned spaceflight (what a lot of NASA Centers do) program is being effectively killed. Thats not to say Ames Research Center doesn't interact with the manned program, Ames just provides all the research side of it, like supercomputing, arc jet testing, etc. A lot of people could potentially lose their jobs because the Constellation Program was cancelled. So why was a riot avoided? Details were few and far between about what cancelling Constellation meant. The first metnion we heard of it was that all manned flight would be stopped and private corporations would take over. That was not a good day at Ames, even for those who do not work on the manned spaceflight program. Why would they care? Well the average age of the employees here is around 40-50, so that means they saw the moon landings, after that a lot of them decided to work for NASA. It was that manned spaceflight program that inspired a large number of people to work for NASA and in the private sector. Heck I was inspired by that, and I was not even alive to see the landings live.
I keep digressing, the riot, so today The President announced his new space policy. If the president had announced something that was radically different from what he did announce, there might have been a riot at Ames. I can see it now, test tube moltovs, the arc jet turned into a weapon, the UH-60s being commandered by the distraught engineers. But it was avoided, thanks to the smooth talking of el Presidente. If you don't know what his proposal is, here's a summary. Short term: scrap Ares I and IV, Shuttle is scrapped, hitch ride with the Russkies, finish orion for a lifeboat, hitch cheap rides on SpaceX's rockets, develop a new heavy lifter by 2015. Long Term: launch the heavy launcher, skip the moon, go to an asteroid, orbit Mars, have humans land on Mars by 2030s. Thats the plan at the moment but we'll see what happens, if new presidents keep cancelling the former's programs in favor of their own, we're never going to go anywhere.