Ted Cruz, the sniveling, sanctimonious gasbag who gets caught on a regular basis telling laughable lies to cover up his unctuous behavior, recently talked about the possibility of Texas seceding from the union. He said a breakaway Texas would take NASA, the military, and the oil with it. It's all BS of course. Texas is a gimme state, receiving $1.20 in federal funds for every dollar it sends to Washington. It couldn't pay NASA's budget or the military without federal aid.
After I posted about Cruz's empty threat, a Goddard Space Flight Center scientist (who asked to remain anonymous) sent me an email that drives another nail in Cruz's Texit coffin:
As it relates to NASA regarding your recent BB post about our favorite Texas politician, Ted Cruz, I just wanted to respectfully point out an error in the comment about the number of NASA employees in TX.While it is correct that there are about 17,000 Civil Servants (Federal Employees) in NASA, only about 3,000 Texas residents at Johnson Space Center are Civil Servants. The remaining 8,000 "NASA Employees" in TX are contractors.
Another example: I am a contractor at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. I have a NASA badge and email address; we all say we "work for NASA." At GSFC there are about 3,000 Civil Servants, and about 7,000 contractors.
Just wanted to clarify this because that ratio that was presented in the post distorts the image of NASA and makes it seem like TX has a bigger chunk of the contribution to our work. I'm not sure if the words came out of Ted's mouth. I could not watch the interview because his voice will give me an aneurism.
You can see the split of NASA Civil Servants via the IBM Cognos reporting platform here. (This is also the 3rd reference on the NASA Wikipedia page.)
