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House Passes NASA Authorization Bill
simonbp writes "The US House of Representatives has just passed the Senate version of the FY2011 NASA Authorization Act. This bill is a compromise between Obama's proposed budget and earlier House bills. It cancels Ares I in favor of commercially-operated crew transportation to ISS, adds technology development funds, and keeps a version of Orion and a new heavy-lift 'Space Launch System' to both be operational by 2016. The timing of this bill was crucial to keeping key NASA personnel and contractors from being laid off."
Nasa gets less that 1% of the budget, while Medicare, Social Security and Welfare get 57%, Defense gets 19% and the interest on the debt is 5%.
Do you see the problem here?
Yes. Someone should've played more Civilization.
With 19% in Defense USA should've invaded at the very least his own continent. And 1% in research isn't going to get them to Alpha Centauri any time soon.
Lower research to 0%, lower all health to 5% (no need for so much pop anyway) move everything else to defense and go for the domination victory before the japanese start deploying giant robots.
One day we'll invent this magical system of "getting things done outside of the government", but I guess until then, we'll be stuck with having the government run everything.
Doing things requires work. Work is made by people. People ask for money in exchange for their work. There are limited sources of money:
1 - Other people. Insufficient amounts unless you can make a very large number of individuals pay.
2 - Corporations. Wont't invest without a defined ROI, which isn't clear in pure space exploration.
3 - Governments.
So, as you sarcastically refer to non-government based financiation, are you implying you've got a ROI to offer to corporations? Or you have an idea to get a lot of people to donate money for space exploration.
If you have the answer to either of those, you're welcome to share it.