Waaaagh!

For the want of $4m the US will be putting one of the two martian rovers into hibernation to come into line with budget cuts. Let's think about this for a moment... the $4m doesnt get poured into a transmat beam and shipped to mars - it goes to pay salaries of extremely talented and enthusastic people, people who are some of the brightest this country has to offer who already work in jobs with low pay and little recognition for what they do. These are people bright enough to have taken a different route - gone to work at Bear Stearns - and complain that $10 isnt enough of a bailout that they'll be able to afford to keep the cottage house in the Hamptons... they could have become the consultants with trophy wives and a bevy of emperor's club whores on the side like the rest of their high powered friends... but instead they chose to dedicate their lives to a project analyzing soil samples from a far off world - with hardware that's just good enough to do the job.
When they cut the budget - how do you think they'll save money?
Those people are going to lose their jobs...
Not the bigwig administrators that sit in the offices and exercise political control over the science - like modern day religious commissars.... it'll be the grad students and the 20 somethings... and that means those bright kids will have to go find jobs somewhere else - and we'll lose them.

This is exactly what's wrong with this administration. There's no money in this project for KB&R, no oil on mars, no people W can kill... so there's no incentive to do it. Well fuck that. The money at issue here is all of 12 minutes of our time in Iraq. It's a fraction of the amount we've blown on new strike fighters and B2s that crash into runways and idiotic military programs involving staring at goats. Congress controls the purse... the dems control congress... FIX IT. We elected you to keep things like THIS from happening - to stop the idiots from screwing things up any worse than they already were... so go get $4m of money set aside for blowing shit up and FIX this.