Snowglobes

In case you missed it in the Presidential Budget request yesterday, there is a page near the end that requests the full termination of the Constellation program. This includes Ares, Orion, and every other aspect of NASA's plans to build vehicles to put Americans in space anywhere in the near future. And, yes, that is true. If you believe these "commercial" companies can do it sooner than Constellation, I have a large sum of money from a prince in Nigeria that just needs someone to help transfer it to the US if you only give me your bank account number. In case you didn't know, I work on the... Constellation Technical Support Contract, so you can guess where that is going too.

And oh by the way, no one knew this was going to happen and by no one I am including upper NASA mgmt who have said so specifically. Word was Ares was going to get cancelled but no one knew Orion (my actual project) or the overall direction of NASA was going to be cancelled. And normal protocol includes notification of the major contractors in advance, that also did not happen. Real nice of the administration to treat us like this.

I have a lot of opinions on this, but am not ready to vent them all. As for my actual job with my company, it's not greatly threatened. We will have some work somewhere, Houston only has about 100 people in a 20,000 people company worldwide. We will work on other things and do remote work for other projects, but it may not be at NASA anymore. This will also be developing and the gist is I really don't know what will happen, but I'm not going to be fired tomorrow at least.

Today, my day in the office is like being in a snowglobe that someone just violently upended. The snow is flying and no one knows where it is going to land.