Should NASA be disbanded/suspended during $ crisis?

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Is that supposed to be witty, because TBPH its just dumb........sorry, had to say it.

if anuything we need to pour more money in it..Solig gold space shuttle!

Sorry but Mr. Edward Solig has no gold to spare.

then why am I donating a kidney to him...loser.

I've heard that NASA is a rather efficient when using their money, unlike the DoD.

Not necessarily. Shoot them out behind the STS's orbit, so that it cancels out their rotational momentum.

Then they will fall more or less straight down unimpeded, until they encounter the atmosphere. If they are going fast enough when that happens, then yes they could, but it seems at least feasible to have unshielded objects survive reentry under ideal circumstances.

Especially objects with that sort of surface area / mass ratio. Wind resistance would keep them well below the velocity needed for frictional heat to reach the combustion point.

Yeah thats the ORION project. Though I don't think its realistic to put them in orbit, nuclear explosions in space = an continents worth of EMP. Using that propulsion system it would take 3 weeks to get to Mars.

Well once you are actually in the atmosphere you are fine. The problem is getting to there with a small enough velocity. I cant think of anything that combusts at terminal velocity. River-rocks might explode from the heat though?

The STS has a typical orbital velocity of 17,500 mph. Decreasing that by 200 is sufficient to deorbit rapidly. You would have to decrease it to near 0 for dollar bills to even stand a chance. The second factor is that you are falling in a vacuum, so you will accelerate above terminal velocity.

Wikipedia lists the lower bound of the STS's operational altitude at 185km (~115 miles, ~600,000 ft), and since the atmosphere only really begins to be a factor in such things at 80,000-100,000 ft, you are looking at falling nearly 100 miles without any tangible deceleration.

That is what is most likely to make this impossible... though I guess you could say that a graphene spheroid filled with helium could make it, what fun is that?

Eh your right if it was being dropped from the STS I was assuming a release just outside the atmosphere at around 100,000 feet.

NASA is generally transparent in most of its spending. If you look for the information about what missions and/or research they run you will generally find it. They also don't mind other people coming in to do experiments that need vacuum chambers or other technology developed by NASA (the mythbusters have collaborated with NASA many times to do their experiments, for example...)

Just goes to show... transparency generally leads to efficiency...

Now, the DoD would be expected to carry a bit of classified information, but certainly not all of it, and other departments that have nothing to do with classified information could learn some things from NASA...