"Before his Throne a Trump is blown"

Thus one and all, thus great and small,
the Rich as well as Poor,
And those of place, as the most base,
do stand the Judge before.
They are arraign'd, and there detain'd
before Griffin's Judgement seat
With trembling fear their Doom to hear,
and feel his Anger's heat.

with apologies to Wigglesworth, doesn't scan anymore...

Craig mongers... NASA rumours

"I understand that heads of all major departments will be briefed on Sept. 5th, and the public press conference on the 6th. I also understand that the true result has been leaked and is out there (somewhere); and also that there are false rumors out there. Since I've heard two contradictory rumors about the result, I am sure the second part is right."

I had heard the results are out there, but shrouded by false contradictory rumours, and the specific one I heard came with the caveat that it was unreliable, which is why I will not repeat it, not just wishful thinking...

I had not heard they had moved the announcement up to next week, that is interesting.

There are some anxillary pieces of data: the "Astrophysics" (aka Universe) people have been letting it be known that there will be NO flagship missions in the foreseeable (10-15 year) future; and at most one ~ billion dollar mission.

The compensation will be a handful of SMEXs to keep lab groups going, and a couple of medium class missions (not exactly MIDEX level, but bigger like the old constellation class concepts - I'm gather cutesy names for mission classes based on Trek or similar is also Right Out - I guess the new name is "facility class", if I'm keeping on top of the jargon, they need a NASA center as a lead institution, and I wanna say budget cap of $650million?).

So, that is an interesting clue - because I don't see Con-X happening for under a $billion.
JDEM/SNAP could be done for that little, of NASA money, IF all goes well, and DoE+foreign partners chip in as promised. LISA might be done for that little if ESA picks up at least 50% per plan.

I keep hearing the same feedback:
LISA is exciting but should wait for LISA Pathfinder results;
Con-X is bread'n'butter but doesn't do "Beyond Einstein" well;
and SNAP is in danger of being cherry-picked by ground based efforts going after the low-hanging results.
EXIST is still out there as a wild card, I don't see Inflation Probes making the cut, but what do I know.

IF both Con-X and EXIST are cut, then at least one SMEX will have to be high energy.
IF JDEM is selected, then there is no guarantee that SNAP would actually be chosen for development, the competition is serious about its concepts, and you gotta think that ADEPT has a shot at selection and arguably DESTINY also. Interesting question then is whether DoE would still buy in, or take its ball away and go play by themselves...

The next week should be interesting, the the LIST meets Sept 11-12, could be a fun meeting.

Well, I'll stick my neck out: I think, from reading the rather mouldy tea leaves, that it will be JDEM as first selection with LISA second, which would be devastating to the high energy community, to get neither Con-X nor EXIST.

There is another peculiarity: which is that we know the budget ramp for "Astrophysics" over the next five years, and we can linearly extrapolate... even if you keep MODA for all the other missions in the pipeline until 2020 (ie Chandra, GLAST and JWST plus some li'l uns), and then stack in R&A and the one big mission, couple of mediums and a handful of SMEXs, then the budget does not add up - they should be able to do much more with those amounts.

So... either they are figuring on overall NASA cuts beyond 2013, or on Science Mission Directorate funding being diverted to some cost overrun elsewhere, by the billions of dollars.
Or, they are planning Really Big Lunar Science projects using SMD funding.

Wot a choice, eh?