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Why NASA's Budget "Victory" Is Anything But
StartsWithABang (3485481) writes 'Earlier this week, attempts to cut NASA's budget were defeated, and it looks like the largest space agency in the world will actually be getting nearly a 2% budget increase overall. While common news outlets are touting this as a great budget victory, the reality is that this is shaping up to be just another year of pathetic funding levels, putting our greatest dreams of exploring and understanding the Universe on hold. A sobering read for anyone who hasn't realized what we could be doing.'
Maybe we shouldn't put our greatest dreams in the hands of government.
A scrap of funding for such a vital tool for human survival. Is it that our technology could never allow us to escape the confines of Earth, or is it that the government would rather lock horns with rivals on a pebble in a sea of pebbles? KUNG KUNG KUNG...
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Seriously think about it. How can we pay for the NSA to spy on everyone, our Military to bomb anyone, our CIA to fund terrorist groups in the Middle East (and everywhere else for that matter), pay for Welfare instead of actually doing something to fix the economy, continue to let the top .01% live tax free lives of luxury (and allow them to offshore most of their money), provide strike force military equipment to local police and sheriff departments so that they can enforce "Free Speech Zones", pay for expansions in DHS and TSA so that they can frisk little children and search colostomy bags for explosives, have the Federal Reserve give hundreds of billions of dollars to whatever country they feel like propping up today, and give your tax money to countries like the Ukraine so that they can revolt and join NATO if we are spending money on bettering mankind?
I really and truly wish that something in my list was a joke, but sadly it's actually a very short list of how the US is being mismanaged by corrupted people holding offices.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I always cringe at comments like this.
Space exploration can be an end to itself, but it has also proven to be a massive driver for improvements in life in general.
The spinoffs alone are huge, let alone the jobs created, the money moving around the economy.
https://www.sac.edu/AcademicProgs/ScienceMathHealth/Planetarium/Pages/Benefits-of-the-NASA-Space-Program.aspx
$18 Billion is what, $70 a year per person in the US? (rough guess there).
If you want money to help you live a better life, have a look at the defense budget. For the Joint Strike Fighter in the development phase, $14 billion was spent on 35-40 prototypes over 3 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II#Procurement_costs
How much does a nuclear missile cost? The NSA?
There's no "safe place to sleep" on a planet unprotected from large asteroids, any more than there's a safe place to sleep in the caldera of an active volcano. There's merely hoping the statistically inevitable won't happen in your lifetime. Space can't wait.
Sigh. It's not NASA vs SpaceX. It's NASA and SpaceX/Bigelow/etc, versus NASA and LM/ATK/etc.
It's a crew capsule built for NASA for around a billion dollars total, versus a crew capsule built for NASA for around a billion dollars per year.
It's a launcher that will cost NASA less than $100m per launch for 50 tonnes to LEO, versus a launcher that costs NASA $2 billion per year every year for one launch of 70 tonnes to LEO once every year or two.
It's commercial space stations that cost $100-150m/yr each for NASA to lease, versus a space station that costs NASA $3 billion/yr to operate and is dependent on Russian modules and Russian crew capsules (costing an extra $75m per seat.)
It's about the most cost effective way for US taxpayers to achieve the things they apparently want to do, versus repeating the same costly mistakes over and over.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Qatar is investing enough money to host the football world cup - a tournament that lasts one month - to fund NASA for ten years.
http://keepingscore.blogs.time...>/
What a world.
You don't need to know anything complicated about the situation to realize this is bad. ALL you need to know, is that INFLATION in the US stays around 3% year over year.
So, a 2% budget increase, is really a 1% cut.
Keep this in mind at work, when you're getting your annual performance reviews. If you aren't getting at least 3% each and every year, you're getting your pay CUT.
Companies with a policy that pay increases can't be more than 3% (or less), absolutely infuriate me. Those smart enough to intelligently object, usually get the problem worked-around. However, it's still a company policy that says, in no uncertain terms, that every employee who has performed superbly, must get penalized, year over year, as a punishment for remaining employed by that company. They're encouraging you to jump ship and get a higher salary elsewhere. Then, you could possibly come back, getting signed-on at a much higher starting salary than they were willing to give you while you stayed with the company.
Institutional knowledge is valuable, and companies go out of their way to destroy it. </rant>
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Dont count your cookies just yet. Senator Shelby has inserted a poison pill amendment into the spending bill to put onerous accounting requirements on spacex missions for NASA, in order to make them less competitive with the SLS, a lot of which is being developed in Alabama, Senator Shelbys state.
Yes, but, apart from timekeeping, radio, clean air, water, electricity, education and roads and public order, what has the Government ever done for us?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS