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Navy funding

Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2007 12:58 am
by pstudier
Are there any navy documents available which would indicate why they stopped funding? Has anyone in the navy written any technical evaluations of Polywell?

Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2007 12:47 pm
by jlumartinez
I suppose that document exists but maybe is not public. The general idea is that Navy has stopped many programs research (not only this one) due to budget limitations

Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2007 1:29 pm
by Zixinus
The general idea is that Navy has stopped many programs research (not only this one) due to budget limitations
Which is due to the Iraqi war.
Has anyone in the navy written any technical evaluations of Polywell?
I recall, and even might have some papers that are from the DARPA archive, but most of them are almost a decade old, and do not deal with recent findings.

Posted: Sat Jun 30, 2007 5:42 pm
by cuddihy
Zixinus wrote:
The general idea is that Navy has stopped many programs research (not only this one) due to budget limitations
Which is due to the Iraqi war.
Has anyone in the navy written any technical evaluations of Polywell?
I recall, and even might have some papers that are from the DARPA archive, but most of them are almost a decade old, and do not deal with recent findings.
I'm in the Navy, and I've dealt with DOD research funding before. First, you need to understand how the govt budgeting cycle works --first, an organization (in this case the Office of Naval Research Advanced Propulsion program) devises a spend plan that they can justify to their parent organization (the ONR). Then the ONR decides how they want to divvy up their congressional discretionary funds. When Congress returns with an actual budget, the spend plans have to be adjusted to fit.
In this case, ONR got an across the board 10% cut in funding for 2005-2007 monies. Congress made that decision, for whatever reason Congress made it. If you want to say Iraq war, say that--but it's Congress who decided that, not the Navy.

That's for all ONR research. ONR decided, in order to maintain funding for more near-term impact projects, like weapon systems, C4ISR, and anti-IED hardware(speculating on what won), to just zeroize the Advanced Propulsion research budget. Bussard's project was only one small part of a not-insubstantial pot that got entirely cut. That's clear, because Admiral Cohen subsequently made the decision to send Bussard an additional $900k after the budget adjustment.

Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2007 6:29 pm
by Zixinus
Does anybody know if the information blockade EMC2 was on in the last decade is still active with re-activating the contract?