Calling your congresspeople is definitely something everyone should do if you are upset but it’s not step one.
FRC regions with NASA supported teams are going to need to inventory the needs of those teams once a budget has been set. Regional directors and District leaders usually communicate with teams August-October to see if there are any teams going through hardships to encourage and mentor them to find alternative sponsors, and sometimes apply for the NASA hardship grant. Teams and regions may need to seek some creative solutions and probably huddle together sooner rather than later to begin to figure this out.
To a lesser extent: 254, most rookies, 233, etc
And even non NASA teams would feel the impact because teams that used to have extra hardware may not have as much
I may be getting to the “a giraffe sneezes on a butterfly” type hypothetical but the point is NASA effects us all
If all the NASA funding for FIRST is coming through the office of education (I’m not sure that it is), and that funding goes away, FRC will be a dramatically different competition next year.
In my experience, I have found education funds for FIRST to be few and far between. Unless a team is intrinsically part of the school curriculum, the DoE stays away. Extracurricular activities do not fall in that jurisdiction.
Thanks Karthik, I just dug deeper and found that page too.
I’m sure the NASA “house teams” and others under the agencies support are going to begin work soon to find solutions if their funding is cut. The FRC community will be a valuable support network if it’s needed.
If you look at the budget it shows a $52B increase in defense spending that will benefit some of the FIRST sponsors and a $0.2B reduction on NASA. I think that we are overreacting. I believe in the benefits of FIRST and the quality of the students that we put out of the program. There will always be money available for things that work.
It is worth considering though that if this new budget come with the associated corporate tax cuts that have been proposed, it would free up funds that companies might choose to “invest” into programs like FIRST, especially if they see a void created by government cut-backs that directly affect their future talent pool. It’s also possible that states might opt to raise taxes to fill in funding gaps left by federal cutbacks which could also benefit programs like FIRST.
Generally speaking, the statistics have held that as federal government spending on education increases, the quality of that education either stays flat or goes down. Currently the US is in the top 5 countries in the world in terms of educational spending, but doesn’t even make the top 15 in terms of test scores. Personally I think education should be handled at a much more local level, I don’t have a problem with the federal government giving out grants to specific programs like FIRST if they fill a void left by the shortcomings of the education system (it might even be the sort of thing you roll into an NSF budget) but these really should be more of the exception than the current “throw more money at the problem” rule. These are also the kinds of programs that could be funded at the state level, much as FiM has done.
So are private defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems going to step in and fill the team support void since presumably they will be receiving a boon from increased military spending? And none of this only support teams within a certain radius of a facility bullcrap. I’m talking full nationwide support.
What, if any, of that $52B increase will be going to DoDSTEM? Will DoDSTEM open grants to teams that don’t have direct connections to DoD Laboratories?
If there is always money available for FRC, why do so many teams struggle to find adequate funding? Why is the cost one of the biggest drivers of team attrition? What guaranteed nationwide revenue sources are available to replace lost education spending at NASA?
FYI, that’s for the current fiscal year (FY17) and isn’t the new (FY18) budget proposal. It does give a good breakdown of how NASA is organized (and which programs would be affected), though. Thanks for posting it.
Space Grant is under NASA Education, and it supports FIRST Tech Challenge in our state (and possibly other places).
I feel like people overlooked my last post, so this time in more obvious verbiage and larger text:
The grants to FRC teams are not funded by NASA Education. They’re funded out of Planetary Sciences*, which isn’t getting cut. There’s no indication that anything is happening to the FRC grants.
*And have been for at least the last three NASA budget proposals. I’d guess this is because that’s where Dave Lavery was in NASA
And you think that eliminating education budget at NASA won’t have any ripple effects to education efforts in other departments at NASA?
e; To make this clear, just because one initiative is under a different department, doesn’t mean it’s safe from budget cuts. The ripple effect of elimination one educational effort could very well impact the educational budgets in other departments, such as Planetary Sciences.
