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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.
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?
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.
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.
This planet might not seem confining to you, but it's most definitely a case of all of our eggs in one basket. There have been extinction level events in the past and there will be in the future. On a long enough time-scale, humans will certainly be in a lot of trouble if we only exist on this one planet.
You're argument seems to be "it's okay to have all your eggs in one basket as it's a really big basket. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to the size of the earth, listen...".
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
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