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Should We Be Content With Our Paltry Space Program?
StartsWithABang writes: At its peak — the mid-1960s — the U.S. government spent somewhere around 20% of its non-military discretionary spending on NASA and space science/exploration. Today? That number is down to 3%, the lowest it's ever been. In an enraging talk at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting, John M. Logsdon argued that astronomers, astrophysicists and space scientists should be happy, as a community, that we still get as much funding as we do. Professional scientists do not — and should not — take this lying down.
Oh wait, paltry. Damn I already pressed "submit". Sorry guys.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Article hits the problem on the head, but doesn't do a great deal to address it, beyond a basic but kinda meaningless "lets show the world what we can do!".
People perceive these as "troubled times", and unless the space nutters can come up with an actual tangible end benefit (beyond furthering humanities understanding of the universe) I think it's going to remain status quo. Vague statements about technological advances probably won't cut it either. Of the small percentage of people who actually care about general technological advanced, an even smaller percentage are convinced it's best done through dangerous and expensive space programs.
The moon landing happened because the USA wanted to stick it to Russia's ass. Without a similar concrete end goal, I don't think we'll see much development. Sad as it sounds, I think the best hope is the eventual militarization of space.
Tax religions. Give the proceeds to science.
This is true of practically all research whose payoff is distant - the only exception being the occasional long term planning industry, like Pharma or the Energy sector. Most others are focused on returns obtainable in 5 years or less. This makes most of most space research uninteresting from a private point of view. So your argument that it should be individually funded seems void to me.
Indeed.
Whether we agree with it in retrospect (or even if you specifically agreed with it at the time), one-upping the commies was a national interest that a majority of the country could get behind. It made sense as a government endeavour. Once the public lost interest in further space exploration, it no longer made sense for it to receive huge amounts of funding.
If NASA wants more funding, it needs something that the public wants, beyond just that scientists want to science.
NASA's bound to shrink. Particularly if you start from a baseline of the "mid-60s." Medicare, which takes up a very large and ever-increasing proportion of the budget, was not even passed until '65. Social Security was much less expensive because in the mid-60s most baby Boomers were still in High School. If you add in the recent mania for balancing the budget solely by cutting that pesky non-defense discretionary spending (and nobody actually seriously proposes cutting either a) Social Security, b) Medicare, or c) the Defense Department), there is absolutely no way NASA's getting a $5 Billion a year budget increase. Given increased partisanship, the fact that the non-Presidential party almost always controls at least one House, that nobody in the other party wants the President to be able to take credit for a moon-shot, and that the American people hear NASA's in the $18 Billion range and think that is a lot of fucking money; the politics of getting increased NASA funding are hideous.
Now if the President, and the Congress were the same party; and a) the low-taxes hawk, b) the deficit hawks, or c) both could be convinced to shut up for 10 goddamn years and let the government pay for nice things (note: in the 60s we had much higher taxes and much higher government spending due to 'Nam and LBJ's Great Society) we could do something about that.
But if that happens it will almost certainly have to be a Republican President, because it's very difficult for Democrats to win the House, and it would have to be a truly great politician with a strong commitment to space exploration because the GOP base is a) more anti-tax then the Dems, b) more anti-deficit then the Dems, and c) not particularly enamored with government spending on principle, and d) not that fond of scientists. You'd almost need a couple years of 5% economic growth because that would wipe out the deficit and let the President spend money without pissing off low taxes people or deficit hawks.
beyond just that scientists want to science.
The problem with we shouldn't fund "X-ers or X-ists for doing X" is that for X = science you get something totally different in return from anything else. You get new and demonstrable knowledge.
In the mid-60s, we were in the middle of the Cold War, so there was an enormous amount of prestige at stake.
Nowadays, there are no obvious returns on investment. And past results are no guarantee, mind you, before everyone starts pointing towards Teflon, navigation and pens that write upside-down.
The next space wave will start when we find a definite candidate for habitable planet.
You need to work on your math... It is way, way off...
Maybe they should be aware of how much they got back from the investment. Just going to orbit, not landing elsewhere, the impact on everyone's life is all around, from weather/climate prediction to GPSs on phones. And maybe some activities that would have even more impact on our everyday life (zero-g manufacturing/alloys made from captured asteroids?) need more funds to be able to be done. And if well things in the space could give obvious returns, reaching other planets could get us unexpected yet (or only suspected) benefits.
Landing elsewhere and planting a flag is nice as a symbol, but things that have economic return may sustain a complex space program a bit better.
Of course, there are things that may end having infinite ROI, if by standing there we could avoid the end of mankind (detecting threats and avoiding them, or at least having a backup copy elsewhere). Delaying it till is too late will be much more expensive than doing it now.
If China were to put a man on the moon, that might be enough. If they also announce that was only the first step to eventually colonizing Mars, for themselves, the rubes would suddenly demand we get there first.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The population of the USA is about 320M, so that works out at 160M, or $1.6M. NASA's budget is actually around $17,647M, so you're off by three orders of magnitude. Do you, by any chance, work for Verizon? It's actually about $55 per person in the USA (including children).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
After WWII the country believed Gov't worked and was good for people. We believed that the space program was a response to a Russian threat. We have somewhat the same motivations now, expect that a large number of people believe any money spent by the Gov't is bad. We muster much more money now for big machines because OMG it would be terrible if the Chinese had a machine faster than ours. In science we are more motivated to use money to fight competition, not because it will help our society. We are also of course motivated by things people understand, e.g. curing cancer, though strangely not fighting diseases like Ebola which we think is restricted to Africa and which congress did not fund at the levels requested.
There's a real distortion in what we spend and what people think we spend. Polls have been conducted about whether we spend too much or too little on various items in the discretionary budget. They often think for example that many believe we spend too much on foreign aid, and those same people believe we spend more than 10x what we really do on foreign aid.
Not all of us agree that the Government should spend tax dollars on social welfare programs either, so by your logic we should cut those too, right?
But that doesn't mean that the government should be paying for it, because not all of us agree we should be paying for it. Using Tax to pay for something should only happen for things we can only collectively purchase, like National Defense. We should be able to pay for it ourselves, and reap the rewards individually
In this case you are to a large extent right. NASA used to concentrate very much on manned space flight. If the USA copied Europe more, where much smaller investment has given back much more scientific value then it would be better.
As a general rule this doesn't work much of the time and for many many important decisions. The reason why things like new power sources are being developed much more successfully in China and the USA is falling behind in technology is because it's possible to make 10-20 year investments there. The new technologies coming out of China now are a result of Government decisions to send engineering students abroad in the 1980s!!
There will aways be at least one person opposed to any sensible project. There needs to be a way for representatives of a majority of the people to be able to fund sensible science and technology projects even if someone objects.
Right now the space program is a huge waste of money. We need to solve some of the very serious problems here on Earth first before we start spending billions of dollars in space.
The labs i worked in spent less than 200kDollar/Year and researcher. In average 10-15 impact points in publications per year for each lab. For the cost of the ISS or a moon shot you could finance my expriments a hunred thousand times over, so i really would appreciate if the decisions are made carefully.
What i really love to see is automonous systems in orbit, i.e. telescopes. I would thing if you uses the money for the ISS on other things, maybe we would not have to built radiotelecope arrays on earth, but coul put them in space. Instead of rdeaming of a manned mars mission, we should send many probes to other planets and moons.
The scientific achievement of the rovers on mars (and the comet mission!) are significant beyond anything we could have dreamt of.
Yes, and just to remind that a lot of modern devices and technologies we have in all places now came from R&D from space programs: wireless devices, technology that is now used in devices for detection of heart problems came from the water detection devices used by NASA, the current glass lenses manufacturing process, a lot of the modern aviation technology (including runway, the tower and the airplane), and some minor ones, like modern running shoes, infrared thermometer, the foam used in those "NASA pillows", drinking fountain, modern smoke detectors (that don't trigger with false positives), etc. So it's not "just that scientists want to science".
There are still rats biting children in poor neighborhoods. That money should be spent on them!
Mr Musk, How will you secure the first stage of the Falcon 9 to the barge when it lands? Gravity or some mechanism? REPLY [–]ElonMuskOfficial " Mostly gravity. The center of gravity is pretty low for the booster, as all the engines and residual propellant is at the bottom. We are going to weld steel shoes over the landing feet as a precautionary measure." http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
Should We Be Content With Our Paltry Space Program?
You've obviously already made up your mind, so why not just state so outright instead of prevaricating with a question?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
There are several other space-faring nations now. When you look up and see a Chinese base on the Moon, or Mars, then will it be time for the government to care?
I'm perfectly capable of managing my own defense, thank you very much. You crypto-statists with your "police" and "national defense" are nothing more than collectivists pretending to be rugged individualists. You're just as effete as the bleeding heart redistributing liberals.
The question is not if space programs produce useful spin-off products. The question is whether space programs are more effective at this than other programs. Bell labs never went into space, but they still generated an impressive list of products.
How will that materially affect you, other than hurt your ego?
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
What if it came to the point where the initial funding would lead to resources that could be invested in?
The eventual goal of space is space mining and then space tourism, before we go full space faring society.
Any nation that doesn't want to get behind space mining is only going to gimp its own future by having to pay others for it.
If anyone truly believes any of these private industries are going to stick by their promise of "infinite resources, we will push humanity in to a post scarcity society", you are delusional.
These companies will trickle down resources at high prices for decades. Still lower than current market prices, but still high prices for decades.
Space tourism will also eventually become a huge industry in the latter half of this century for sure, getting in 1st is the best thing. Well, maybe 2nd, then you can see what others might have done wrong and not do that.
What we REALLY need is a ground launcher that uses no fuel to propel itself to space, just a railgun with pure awesome electricity launching that damn thing as fast as it can. That way we can get the resources we need up there at insanely cheaper prices than we can now.
Building all those rockets is expensive business, and for cargo, are simply wasteful.
Leave rockets for people.
Making an argument on an unreadable site: Priceless.
This is the same argument used for military R&D spending - there are lots of useful civilian results. The problem is that if you throw a big pile of R&D money at anything you'll likely get some useful results. The question is whether you get a good ROI. Compare NASA to, for example, Xerox PARC (Ethernet, the GUI, laser printers, etc.) or Bell Labs (the transistor, access control lists, UNIX, etc.) and see which produced more inventions that benefitted the economy as a whole per dollar spent.
Each shuttle launch cost, on average, $1.5bn. The cost of one launch would fund over ten thousand PhDs, or several hundred DARPA programs. Do you really think that NASA is the best ROI for taxpayers?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm confused now. Why would rats need money?
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Yeah. Those rats could do with biting something tastier.
So they can travel to the better neighborhoods and bite the rich kids.
that makes you the third person on the planet that can then, after Musk at #1 and Branson at #2. Impressive that you have enough capability to manage your own space program!
our paltry steam locomotive program?
At its peak in the 19th century all trains for passenger and cargo were steam driven. Now the only place we find steam is on heritage railways or museums.
Well, that's it: steam, like space, is a relic of a bygone era.
Stop living in the past, accept what they learned, and move the fuck on.
My Space Program hasn't been doing so well lately. I can never find enough room for all the stuff I keep buying...
I agree. Those poor rats need high quality protein, not these scrawny bags of bone.
No you just didn't do your fucking research, and don't realize that just making a stupid unsubstantiated claim as criticism makes you look smart
fucking
moron.
While I applause your stance in not wanting public money to be spent in things that may not see any ROI any time soon, please allow to remind you that as of right now, the government of the United States of America is paying BILLIONS for ...
... NSA to snoop on us
... FBI / Local cops to set up fake mobile stations to tap on our mobile traffic
... myriad of cost-overrun military white-elephant projects that offers no additional protection for the country
... and so on, and so forth
If the government is paying all the above and it's all hunky-dory with you, I do not see why we should restrict the government money --- heck, it's OUR MONEY --- to pay for space programs
Of a POULTRY space program. It has to be done. We're not making enough progress with this funding but, chickens are smaller and of course more cost effective in the long run.
I am outraged because fairness means our $SLICE of the $PIE should be what it was in $YEAR, because my $ARBITRARY $NUMBERS I decided are the $ONE_TRUE_WAY_OF_MEASURING_FAIRNESS.
It would be nice to have a base of the moon, but it is difficult to know why we need or what we would do with it and getting there and back is dangerous. And going to Mars would be nice, but it has no useful atmosphere and the Martian soil is toxic.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Oh for fuck's sake. Stay off our roads. Keep your kids out of our schools. Stop drinking our socialist treated water. Stop eating our collectivist inspected foods. Stop using our socialist sewers. Stay off our government-granted monopolist power grid. Don't call our communal fire department.
In other words, go back to middle-ages subsistance farming and its way of thinking.
but fuck you.
We need to stop wasting money on bullshit that will never return one red cent of investment of the taxpayer's money.
The USA, as a country, has wasted enough taxpayer money on pie-in-the-sky so-called "research" that has yielded exactly zero profit. It looks pretty in the science textbooks but exactly how many good paying jobs are there for astrophysicists?
I would hazard a guess that there are about about 10 astrophysics majors versus 100 million people out of work in the USA.
It's blisteringly obvious we need more jobs for the 100 million real workers than we need for the 10 theoretical astrophysics workers.
Let the Chinee and the Rusee waste their money.
To pay for Obamacare and Social Security, there has to be 90% participation in the workforce with everyone, including the illegal workers, paying their fair share, not the current 20% or less.
Now if you want to see Obamacare gone then you should do something about it but you still need to fix the jobs problem and to pay for Social Security because SS isn't going away anytime soon, even though it's bankrupt and you'll never see a dime of it when you retire.
No one gives a shit about the less than one percent of less than one percent that have astrophysics degrees until they build us spaceships to bring us manna from heaven.
Sorry PhD AstroPhy, you are a waste of money and we have more important things to do than you do.
The paltry amount we're spending on our space program is a national disgrace. Great endeavers are not achieved from corporate bottom lines. There's no short term profitability in going to the moon. Our generation quibbles about budgets and deficits like a bunch of nanny accountants. When I was young, I dreamt that we'd colonize the moon and have regular trips to and from Mars. The only focus we seem to have is how to monetize social apps on our smartphones... aka advertising. It's a disgrace ...
A manned space flight would inspire a generation of scientists and engineers. Isn't that worth something?
That's without even counting the scientific knowledge gained from such effort. And without counting the fact that a person on Mars is able to do much more efficiently and quickly the work of remotely-controlled robots.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
"I don't like American Exceptionalism, which is why one of the first things I did as President was cancel the Orion program, instead NASA will do muslim outreach" -Barack HUSSEIN Obama
Corporatism != Free Market
America needed commies. With no credible commie threat today, they have no incentive to explore space or keep inequality under control.
Seriously, every successful attempt the US government ever made to address inequality was driven by an attempt to show the commies that capitalism doesn't lead to a hyper-unequal dystopia. And when they weren't around anymore to make that accusation...well it turns out that it does, I guess.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Hate to rain at your parade, buddy, but nowadays NASA is not run by the scientists
Click on the following link and you know what I mean ...
http://www.space.com/8725-nasa...
Does Musk qualify? He wouldn't be doing what he's doing for much longer without business from NASA and/or other government space agencies. He's not running his own space program any more than Lockheed-Martin is running their own air force.
Branson's really is a private program, but whether it qualifies as a *space* program is debatable.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Isn't that four orders of magnitude?
No, he just knows how to multiply. 350 million people x $0.005 = $1.75 million. The projected NASA budget for 2015 is a little under $17 billion, which works out to a little over $48.00 per American. If you come up with a wildly different number, either show your work and provide cites for the numbers, or STFU.
the U.S. government spent somewhere around 20% of its non-military discretionary spending on NASA and space science/exploration.
we did this due to the cold war. the Soviet Union had managed to put the first satellite into orbit, the first man into orbit, and made the first hard landing on the moon with Luna 2. they invented the first ion engine and autonymous rover and the worst part for the United States was that as a nation they did this without any regard for profiteering or revenue. this was directly contradictory to our doctrine, yet made a very immediate statement about the apparent superiority of the soviet system of sciences and education. We did not explore space for any other reason than the fact that we as a nation had been directly challenged and bested. That had we not made great efforts to explore space, the state would have sustained damning losses to their thesis of governance.
we dont explore space at a greater pace because the nature of our government, a plutocratic oligarchy, cannot derive any immediate or long-term profit from it. purse strings are clinch knotted to the waistcoat of our 21st century robber barons and so far, fleecing the government of the public-sector technologies and sciences used to propel our space exploration during the 70's and 80's in an effort to privatize and monitize is the only apparent gain. To continue exploring space, we need to stop funneling money to SpaceX in the form of tax-backed loans and grants and instead apply tax revenue directly to the only organization that has consistently and successfully acted in the public interest of exploration and knowledge of space: NASA.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I heard that in the 60's we went to the moon. Yet, we haven't gone back since. Why not?
This is the 21st century. A moon mission is long overdue.
NASA should have a mission to setup a webcam station on the moon for the public to view the moon for themselves.
If they could send people and machines to the moon and have radio communication in the 60's, there is no reason in this day and age that they couldn't have a "moon cam" for public viewing.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Its a case of generic problem solving vs targetted capitalism. Were there any companies actively pouring R&D dollars into smoke detectors? Yes this is a cherry picked example, but while you're right about Bell Labs you end up getting from these companies only things which are relevant to their core competence. There really is very little in the way of generic life improving research that compares to a space program outside of simple University PHD students doing random research.
By Bell Labs own admission what we are going to see from them now is solving industry challenges in the IT sector. Effectively they'll break the broadband speed record every other year and do little else. How much incentive is there to put R&D dollars into a new kind of pillow foam? Also how much is the private enterprise going to just slap on a patent and then never release a product if they accidentally invent something that isn't part of their core business strategy.
Yes, apparently I'm the one applying for a job at Verizon...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually to be honest the size of that pisses me off as....too big.
Now don't get me wrong, I would love a bigger space program. Hell, if they spent 20% of the military money on the space program I wouldn't mind, but 20% of the non-military discretionary? No wonder this country is so fucked up.....everything including the space program has to fight for the scraps left over after our ridiculously oversized military?
No way 20% of whats left over should go to NASA. Cut the military and give it to NASA...tripple the size of NASA....but take 100% of that increase away from our super sized military.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
This makes most of most space research uninteresting from a private point of view.
The fact that you are completely unwilling to use your own money makes it uninteresting. That shows up in the priorities for NASA where it's more important which congressional districts the money is spent in than what the money is spent on and where it's more important to develop new toys than to deploy those new toys in an alien environment and do any sort of interesting space activity.
the only exception being the occasional long term planning industry, like Pharma or the Energy sector
Space development is one of those "occasional" long term planning industries right now.
(20 billion (dollars) * 100 (cents/dollar)) / 300 million (Americans)... ...is about $66 per American by my math. This is not even taking into account the substantial portion of Americans who pay no taxes.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Except that right now, private space efforts are popping up everywhere. Corporations may be run by MBAs, but quite a few of their billionaire founders are famed for their long-term thinking.
My ox is being gored!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I wish I could indicate that my taxes go to the Space Program.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Yes, and just to remind that a lot of modern devices and technologies we have in all places now came from R&D from space programs
No, that stuff is an example of private profit, public risk projects. The R&D would have been done anyway, but they obtained a portion of the funding for the research via the federal government.
Each shuttle launch cost, on average, $1.5bn. The cost of one launch would fund over ten thousand PhDs, or several hundred DARPA programs.
Part of the reason those shuttle launches were so expensive was that they carried a lot of science. Satellites that took years to plan and build. Multiple biology projects involving dozens of researchers, also for years. Yes, the cost of transporting those experiments to LEO is huge, but each shuttle launch provided multi-year support for hundreds of scientists, in addition to the NASA and contract engineers actually tasked with the flight.
That's not true at all.
Much research is wasted funding, to keep the snouts firmly in the troughs.
The problems we all face is - life after funding. Worse, we explain observed behaviour with unverifiable theories and assumptions. Worse again, is we base new research and conclusions on past work that's also unverified. We live in a world of pseudo science masquerading as truth, when nothing could be further from the truth. Take for instance, atom smashing as an exercise. We think we observe all kinds of exotic reaction including the "Hicks Boson" particle, much predicted, thought once to be observed at CERN, etc. But turns out opposing theories could also account for it, and so perhaps it wasn't after all. the search continues...
In other words, when the public get disinterested, and the private philanthropists don't see any return, we throw them a bone - real or not - and hope they refill the trough from which we feed. Astronomers see things they can't explain, and turn to particle physicists to bail them out, who use it as a wonderful excuse to dream up new exotic matter that exists only in their minds, and not reality.
So, if NASA were to accept something more akin to the truth - such as the Electric Universe theory, then a lot of things would change on the research front, and unfortunately, it would cause a seismic change in the written papers we accept, the physics behind what we accept, and many fantastic mysterious fairytale ideas of what our universe is, and how it works, as well as it's creation, can go back to the pixie dust thinking from whence it came.
But then what? The consequences of the truth will put a lot of well paid or not so well paid people out of a research job, and so like the electric lightbulb that won't go pop - the patents disappear, and we're forced to continue as before. in this case, funding to find answers we already know, to keep well educated people in a job that might eventually pay for their mortgage.
Compare NASA to, for example, Xerox PARC (Ethernet, the GUI, laser printers, etc.) or Bell Labs (the transistor, access control lists, UNIX, etc.) and see which produced more inventions that benefitted the economy as a whole per dollar spent.
Each shuttle launch cost, on average, $1.5bn. The cost of one launch would fund over ten thousand PhDs, or several hundred DARPA programs. Do you really think that NASA is the best ROI for taxpayers?
The problem with NASA is largely the senators dictating how the money will be spent, which leads to a huge amount of wastage. The shuttle is a good example - NASA could only get the funding if they made a space craft that fitted some fairly mutually exclusive specifications - the result was a space craft that could do none of those things especially well and almost certainly more expensively than building several separate craft tailored to specific jobs.
Look at the A-3 test stand as another example: it was designed for the Constallation programme, and when Obama cancelled the programme the partially constructed test stand was of no use. Congress demanded that NASA keep constructing this useless piece of hardware and they spent about $200M on it _after_ it was known that there was no use for it. How can you expect NASA to be value for money when it is treated as a jobs creation programme and forced to waste money like that?
SLS is probably another good example - insanely expensive, not least because congress are actually dictating the engineering requirements, and no doubt the government will order NASA to scrap it before completion, completely wasting all the money that was invested in it. Despite its huge cost, I kinda hope that SLS doesn't get scrapped, because then at least the money has gone into something that can be used instead of yet another useless cancelled project.
Far better would be to just give NASA a lump of money and tell them to do with it as they please - the money would still end up invested in paying people to do jobs (the jobs might not be in the various senator's chosen locations, but they would still happen), and we'd probably have a lot more science at the end of it instead of a huge pile of half-completed scrapped projects.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
That's right. Call his bluff. You'll find that a lot of people are willing to cut spending across the board. And incidentally, lack of agreement on social welfare programs is a good reason to cut those programs. But it's not the only reason for or against cutting spending in a given program. There should be a consideration of return on investment which is usually completely missing from consideration in advocacy for increasing NASA or social welfare spending.
NASA's been at this now for 50 years. In order to make space travel exciting, it needs to start adding economic value to the world directly; it will never take off because private industry is not interested and they're not interested because the money to get it going is astronomically large without any recognizable return. Private money will not just throw away all of their fortunes without some tangible benefit; no one is willing to do that.
I like SpaceX but in this case they don't count; they're a private company doing well but their only customer is NASA who has a shrinking budget, so they're just a private component of the same issue. If NASA wants to get funded they need to fill in the blanks on this formula: The side technologies like microwaves don't count either; those were a fortunate side effect but aren't direct economic impact.
Space -> [blank] -> [blank] -> [blank] -> Consumer product.
How will that materially affect you, other than hurt your ego?
The US enjoys its current leadership position in the world, and its current high quality of life largely as a consequence of its technological superiority between 1950 and 1990. That superiority brought some exceptionally bright and talented people from all over the world to US schools and to the US market, and those people helped to fuel US dominance. Its "ego" is a consequence, not a cause of that condition. So, looking up to an Indian moonbase or a Chinese Mars base would encourage those talented innovators to see China and India, rather than the US or Europe, as the places where cool stuff can be developed. It will encourage the next Elon Musk or Sergei Brin to move not to the US, but to China.
There just aren't enough smart people in the US (or in any other country for that matter) to maintain dominance. If a country can't poach the smartest people from other countries, then it's going to decline. Government policies hostile to the advancement of science and technology make it harder to recruit those scientists and engineers.
Is this a factor of science spending or, as the summary has to hint around, the fact that it spends SO MUCH on its military?
In the 60's it was a different situation and getting satellites into the air was a military advantage. And, don't forget, the military is close to NASA.
Once that advantage was secured / no longer relevant, quite why would they bother to keep dropping money into it? That's the problem you have - science got a boost because military needed it to happen. Once it happened, science took a back-seat again.
Sorry, but even science + welfare + healthcare all added together would take only a percentage of what's spent on the military.
Your problem is not that science isn't funded. It's that all your money is going to stupid foreign "wars" instead. And there's no military advantage, until someone builds some new type of space-based weapon or some country decides it owns the Moon if it can get there, to be got from funding anything more.
Wait until the Chinese or Russians start building a space-base in earnest, and you'll have all the money you can dream of to do space-related missions. Until then, you'll have to settle with working in THE MOST EXPENSIVE region of science, with getting some of the SMALLEST practically-relevant scientific results back from it.
I'll take these calls for funding increases seriously when they work on making existing NASA programs far more efficient than they currently are. As I see it, you already lose an order of magnitude in return on investment when you go NASA rather than with a private party that is actually interested in results and outcome. NASA doesn't get routinely embarrassed only because they spend more than an order of magnitude more than any private competition.
They should take it bent over after the complete stupidity of the Shuttle program and the egregious errors of numerous high profile, extremely expensive missions that were "big vision" changes rather than the critical, day to day work of really building out a space program. Fire most of them, give 20% of their funding to SpaceX, and get us *back in orbit!!!!*.
Do you really know anyone that believes the Earth is 6,000 years old?
Yes, unfortunately. Quite a few.
Vague statements about technological advances probably won't cut it either. Of the small percentage of people who actually care about general technological advanced, an even smaller percentage are convinced it's best done through dangerous and expensive space programs.
A friend of mine works for a contractor that produces NASA's "Spinoff" publication, which highlights the broad contributions from NASA research and programs: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/. Several of us were ribbing him about how NASA does a pretty bad job of publicizing the publication designed to showcase its public benefits.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Tax religions. Give the proceeds to science.
Ain't it funny how common sense is fucking hilarious?
In the middle ages, the land belonged to the king. Who granted it to the lords. Who permitted the peasants to work in it in exchange for having tax collectors come around and steal a certain amount of the results periodically. Say, on the Ides of April.
You want real rugged individualism, go back to the stone age. Ogg kills rabbit. Ogg starts to eat rabbit. Snorg punches Ogg in face and takes rabbit. OK, says puny little Ogg. I get Oog to defend my rabbit. He bigger than Snorg! Ogg say's OK. I protect rabbit. But first you give me part of rabbit.
Manned space flight is a luxury, the amount spent on it should rise and fall with our economy- Unless we have a specific goal, worth suffering for, to justify a continuing budget. Robotic spaceflight and exploration (actual science) should be continually funded, because it happens over a very long time frame and a gap in funding would ruin the investment.
Tax religions. Give the proceeds to science.
You don't really want that. If churches were taxed, they would have the could act like any other corporation. The only thing that keeps them from being able to say "Vote for Joe Blow or you will go to hell" is their tax exemption. If you look at the books of most churches, they really don't have a lot of income after expenses, so the taxes would be low. The only taxes you would gain would be property taxes and sales taxes, but since most of their expenses are in employee payroll, it would really just be property taxes.
Don't tax the churches, it removes the gag order on what they can say in the public forum!
It would be better to tax people that have 8 years or less of formal religious training. Jesus told us we would always have the poor. He didn't say to make a career out of it. Do you really know anyone that believes the Earth is 6,000 years old? Compare that to the number of people walking around with their hand out.
What we really need is a tax on stupidity.
Or just tax the job creators who are increasing their wealth instead of creating jobs.
America was never a strong "Science" country. The education system sucks (on average), the people don't care about science (on average), STEM gets no respect (in general). But America had a secret weapon, money. They could recruit the best and brightest from the whole world and fund the R&D and Apollo projects that nobody else could or would. Now that the money is gone America has to rely on its own capabilities, and that's not looking so good.
Maybe it's because I haven't had my morning caffeine but I can't follow your train of thought at all. Again, maybe it's just me but I think those tracks must have been laid on now-melting permafrost.
Are you really talking about punishing people for not having formal religious training? What are you, some kind of monk?
"Do you really know anyone that believes the Earth is 6,000 years old?"
YES! Too Many! And... some of them have only recently come to believe that. It's getting worse!
I don't know if it is a fair comparison to say 20% of discretionary spending back in the 1960s and only 3% today. It seems like we could possibly be comparing apples and oranges. Maybe a better statistic would be what was spent in the 1960s adjusted for inflation compared to what is spent today. Even that could be more refined and look at the costs only related to research then and now. I would hope that increases in technology make is so fewer researchers can do more than in the past.
Of course one could argue that the Apollo program skewed the spending and research and the amount spent in the 1960s was unusual. Similarly, if we look at the cost spent on the military today, versus during WWII, it is less than what it was. Does that mean we should increase military spending?
You have to be careful with how you quantify how the government spends money. Take a fire department for instance. Traditionally, they have been budgeted by the number of fire calls they made. The more fires, the more fireman needed and the bigger the budget. But, using the number of fires put out doesn't take into account efforts made to prevent them in the first place, through inspections, education of the public, etc. If the fire departments increases its efforts by shifting more resources to prevention and the number of fires go down, should their budget for staff be cut? If yes, then they do less prevention and the fire rate goes back up.
My point in all of this is that the mission of NASA was very different in the 1960s than it is today. And you simply cannot compare the two just looking at spending as a percentage of total budget. More data is needed to make informed decisions.
Remove the mortgage interest deductible. Give the proceeds to math education.
Please distinguish between the manned pork missions (ISS, SLS, and Orion) with the real science being done with robotic probes such as the Mars rovers, the Pluto mission and the Ceres mission.
"was a national interest that a majority of the country could get behind"
From my understanding a majority of the citizens at the time were not behind the Apollo program when the program was created. It wasn't until Kennedy was killed and they were close to actual moon launches before public opinion swayed to a more positive status.
As some bureaucrat once said: work expands to fill the budget available. Fund researchers to spend years developing an experiment, and they won't have it ready next Wednesday.
Really, who paid for the developmental science of tang? Teflon? Transistors, ic circuits? High frequency electronics? Plastics? Explosives? What business? Government grants to university's? And worse yet atomics? Gm was paid to develop by the navy for that, durn, what business had the money to do it on their own, Boingg developed airplanes after the wright bros? Damn, that was an army contract, I wonder, cars? Ford, Chevy developed power steering? Damn, army. Rocketry? Damn, Chinese government. Keep going down the list there has to be something, musk , damn, contract to supply the iss. Where?
Don't be so mean to the SLS! The Senate Launch System shows every sign of performing exactly as intended and efficiently delivering a stream of respectably-laundered welfare to the appropriate districts. Who says rocket transportation isn't a reality?
The IRS hasn't really been enforcing that rule.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/pr...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"The education system sucks (on average), the people don't care about science (on average)"
Science doesn't get done by people caring about science. Your mom or dad caring, or your friends caring or not caring doesn't matter. The guy on the news talking about or not talking about science doesn't matter.
I think you must subscribe to the spontaneous combustion idea of science, where caring or not caring just makes things happen. This also means you really don't know what science is --- except what someone in the media tells you it is.
Hard work by a few with experience in their respective fields and funding make things happen.
"America was never a strong 'Science' country."
What does that even mean? Where did all the machines and cell phone towers and paved roads and fields of corn come from?
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
This is the same argument used for military R&D spending - there are lots of useful civilian results. The problem is that if you throw a big pile of R&D money at anything you'll likely get some useful results. The question is whether you get a good ROI. Compare NASA to, for example, Xerox PARC (Ethernet, the GUI, laser printers, etc.) or Bell Labs (the transistor, access control lists, UNIX, etc.) and see which produced more inventions that benefitted the economy as a whole per dollar spent.
Each shuttle launch cost, on average, $1.5bn. The cost of one launch would fund over ten thousand PhDs, or several hundred DARPA programs. Do you really think that NASA is the best ROI for taxpayers?
Some people argue graft (Senate) and others are the key to the waste.
But, even granting the waste, I bet I COULD make the argument that NASA is the better ROI. Look at their spinoffs. Look at Heinlein's articles on NASA. How many PhDs has NASA funded? (It's a large number) Want to guess the number of projects that have overlap with DARPA and NASA? Kennedy's launch facilities are right next door to the Air Force's Cape Canaveral (speaking as a guy who used to cross that puny bridge all the time).
I remember some people whining about the Mars Rovers driving into a ditch. Until I pointed out, even with the speed of light, the lag between action and the device actually moving.
Old people breaking their fragile bones costs America a lot of money. You can't do the kind of bone research on earth, that is done in microgravity.
BOYS! Calm down!
The actual figure is 1/2 penny for every tax dollar.
The original poster up there was partly right, but saying his math is "Way off" shows what an idiot FlyHelicopters is
Thank you Raven64 for clarifying, this pointed me to the original reference which was to Neil Degrasse Tyson arguing for increased NASA funding.
Respond with facts not mindless criticisms next time and cite facts, don't give attitude.
Ron Raymond
Except for roads, which easily can be private, I have friends whose families don't use any of those things. They don't live in cities. They appear happier than most people I know.
Do they depend upon industrial-age products made in cities by city-dwellers? Sure. But when you are fairly self-sufficient, it's harder to justify paying for other people's convenience of not being so self-sufficient.
Nah, we call that "Good enough for Government work."
... to explore in the future, when we have paid our bills. Unless NASA can invent a time machine, Outer Space will still be there when we have the budget under control.
I don't LIKE saying this. But I tell my kids, space was great, their great grandparents invested in space exploration, but they shouldn't expect space travel anytime soon because the bills are too high. We may not like that we have to pay bills for wars and entitlements, and should be concerned about the exponential growth of "end-of-life-care" expenses, and teacher pay and national security etc etc... in a future tense context. But even if an investment pays off in the future, we have to pay our bills today based on the decisions made by people we voted for a decade ago. You can't refuse to pay your water bill because you have a chance to buy stock in an IPO. Protesting that "space exploration" is a good investment makes sense only when we can pay the past due bills.
Gently reply
If churches were taxed, they would have the could act like any other corporation.
Meaning churches still wouldn't pay taxes?
No. Modern aviation, satellites, all these were direct improved by NASA and could not came from other R&D projects.
Our space exploration program is what's going to, eventually, save the human race from extinction when our planet becomes uninhabitable for ANY reason. That's our long-term goal. And it's a worthy one.
However, we have a lot of other things that could lead to our extinction in the shorter term. Some of that stuff is environmental, yes. But a lot of the problems are social. This istuff that is NOT solved by leaving the planet behind. So going broke on a space program, and leaving other, more immediately necessary things undone could be a recipe for disaster in the short term.
The big thing is, there are LOTS of programs run by our government that have NOTHING to do with EITHER of these sets of problems. And THOSE programs are the ones sucking up all the available capital. And is our government going to prioritize away from "pork"? The answer, from our government at least, is unambiguous.
"Fuck no! Fuck you! You're un-American for asking! Someone arrest him for terrorism please?"
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The same is true of military spending, of which TCP/IP and the Internet itself are prime examples. The point is, exploration for the sake of just exploration doesn't really fire up common folks' interest all that much.
The reason NASA was so well funded before was because of the cold war and one-upmanship, not because Americans in the '60s were more science-minded.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
What has Sergei Brin or Elon Musk ever done for me? Or, for that matter, anyone other than their shareholders and employees?
There's an awful lot of economic activity in Silicon Valley. That economic activity feeds everyone from Google employees to coffee shop barristas and grocery store clerks. The taxes paid by Google, their employees, and the supporting economic activity support city, state, and federal government functions that benefit you. Vibrant economic activity provides social stability that benefits you.
It's sad that the only benefit you seem to recognize is a personal check.
Joe Biden is a square shooter. Joe Biden for 2016!
... Can be answered with "No" correctly. This /. post is no different.
I would gladly pay more if I knew it was going to NASA.
Are you suggesting communism is superior? Because that's worked out so well for the USSR, Cuba, etc.. Any pure unadulterated system is bound to eventually become corrupt, because without some elements of other systems to provide the checks and balances that a hybrid system provides, it tends to evolve to the extreme, at which point, human nature inevitably taints it with greed and the desire for power. This is true of mega-=corporation as well as overly powerful governments. In the history of the US, it seems every year the separate states have less say in matters and the federal government grows and grows (along with the mega corporations); the only exceptions I can think of are the recent marijuana laws.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I agree in general in principle, but I'm sure that the A-3 will get lots of use over time. Probably not enough to justify its cost, but "gigantic vacuum chamber capable of withstanding the thrust of a huge rocket" is not something that's going to sit idle forever. I'm more concerned about what it'll cost to reactivate it in the future, though... I mean, if it takes a long time and sits idle for 10-15 years, will they have to spend another couple hundred million dollars to get it back into working order? Is it just going to rust away, or will it last?
Wonder if they could make it into a massive freeze-drying facility in the meantime ;)
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
That is exactly the point you three have missed while you have been lubing up and stroking your own egos furiously..
The point is simply that nasa is underfunded, but instead of getting lost in semantics over a big dick swinging contest between nerds, which is laughable...
can we just move the discussion along and agree on the major point that the republicans have hijacked enough of the science spending in the US for long enough?
Good lord for supposedly smart people, you guys can be very unusually stupid and short sighted.
Moderators! mod these 3 threads down as trolls where they belong so we can move on!
People forget about the costs when they get their bread and circuses, and landing on the freaking moon was pretty much the ultimate circus.
As far as circuses to help ensure that NASA keeps getting the funding it needs to do actual science, rather than a multi-hundred-billion-dollar boondoggle like Constellation or a Mars colony, I really like the idea of capturing a small rocky asteroid (maybe a dozen meters in diameter) and dragging it back to a high-Earth or lunar orbit, then sending humans to explore it and try to learn to mine it. The surface features on small asteroids can be pretty crazy-looking so it'll make for good footage (even if small), it has enough "wow" factor to it to impress (not to mention that any yokel with a 6" telescope could see it with their own eyes), and there's enough legitimate science they could do there (we know next to zilch about mining other celestial bodies, not that much about asteroids in general, and have almost no experience working in such microgravity environments) that you've got that axis covered as well - that could actually be useful data. But such a retrieval mission is only a few billion dollars, so that plus a few billion to pay for whatever field trips you want to make to it once you've got it... it's really an affordable option. Stretch out the build over most of a decade, siphon as much money from it as you can to "multi-use tech" for other more pure-science projects (fission-powered VASIMIR for the tug, perhaps? Maybe a new network of observatories for the asteroid selection phase? Etc), and I think you might have something.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
Whenever this debate comes up I'm reminded of two snippets from the HBO series From the Earth to the Moon. In the first episode, there is a pre-meeting to discuss what to present to JFK. The head of the national science advisory, ironically played by Al Franken, scoffs at a manned moon mission saying that all we'd get for our 20 billion dollars are some rocks. Later in the series as they show actual historical footage of man-on-the-street interviews as Apollo 11 is making its landing. There's one beatnik who says, "It's a groovy trip but there are a lot more important things to do first." Usually, those folks spout off about eliminating world hunger or affecting world peace or eliminating poverty. Those things, while noble causes, are wholly intractable problems. Americans have spent trillions on trying to deal with them and all we've gotten are more Ship B people. The dreamers still believe that they can be solved by hiring more Ship B people and creating more government programs. These are not engineering problems that are solved by designing something tangible and making it function. Solving engineering problems has the added benefit of being able to apply the knowledge to other engineering problems. Devoting resources to intractable problems only results in increasing the parasitic economy.
Not at all, I'm just saying that without a serious communist competitor the US loses all motivation to better itself.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Great idea. There should be a new tax of for those above a certain annual cap, say a $1,000,000 per year. Anyone in this category would then see their taxes raised by 80% of any any income over the $1,000,000, with a tax credit determined by how many new jobs they can demonstrate they created that tax year. Jobs should be categorized so that higher skilled jobs and higher paying jobs gain a greater tax reduction. That way the entire "trickle down" theory of economics can actually be made to work. Somehow, I doubt a single one of those GOP "jobs", "jobs", "jobs" politicians would actually support such legislation. For them, the facade and hypocrisy are far more important than "jobs", "jobs", "jobs".
Don't tax the church. Tax the pastors and church elders by limiting their ability to claim their 47 room mansions and fleet of 35 vehicles including private jet as a legitimate religious expenditures. Funny how doing this might actually reveal to all that the purpose of churches and religion is the same as it is for other business, namely to make money.
Yes, but who are their customers? Its still Joe Tax Payer.
The only thing differentiates privatized space exploration industry from the old NASA is the number and composition of the middle men. At least with government funding, it used to be that the best science called the shots. Now, we simply have to settle for decisions being made on the basis of greed, megalomania, and political ambitions.
I would love for more money to be spent on space exploration and colonization, but I'm not sure NASA is where the bulk of that money should be going. These days their purpose is less about space exploration and more about funneling money to politically connected companies/districts and defense contractors. Maybe NASA should do some basic administration & advanced research/exploration, but actual work on achieving specific goals should probably be done via a combination of independently awarded fixed price contracts and prizes (kind of like the X Prize).
Since you raised the altruism card, would it not be better that those talented folks stay in their own country and help develop their own economy, to the benefit of their people? Seems you want it both ways
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Don't tax the church. Tax the pastors and church elders by limiting their ability to claim their 47 room mansions and fleet of 35 vehicles including private jet as a legitimate religious expenditures. Funny how doing this might actually reveal to all that the purpose of churches and religion is the same as it is for other business, namely to make money.
Pastors and church elders are required to report the fair market value of their room and board, at least for self-employment taxes. For income taxes, however, if their employer requires them to stay there, which is the case, it is just like any other employer/employee requirement and it is not taxable. Clergy are in a unique situation where they are considered employees for income tax but self-employed by the Social Security Administration. If you want to tax the housing for them for income tax purposes, you would have to do it for everybody that any other business pays housing for as part of their job requirements. That probably won't fly with the public because it is a large number of people.
If churches were taxed, they would have the could act like any other corporation.
Meaning churches still wouldn't pay taxes?
Correct. Taxing churches for the most part would be a moral victory but not do any real harm to the churches, but also wouldn't bring in additional revenues. While it might make many people feel good, it would also allow them to act like any other corporation and the public probably doesn't want them to wield their influence unchecked. In short, there is little to gain by taxing them and a lot to lose.
The IRS hasn't really been enforcing that rule.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/pr...
There are many times they do enforce it. OTOH, churches are allowed to talk about issues, they aren't allowed to tell you who to vote for. So, depending on how they phrase it, they could pass the IRS test. You aren't supposed to say "Vote for John Doe," But you can definitely say "Vote only for candidates that uphold our belief on marriage or abortion or whatever." It is a gray area, that hasn't been tested in the courts as to whether you can say "Don't vote for John Doe, because his position on is contrary to our faith." Technically, you aren't telling the people who to vote for and technically, the negative endorsement is still about a faith issue. The rules are definitely complicated and somewhat subjective, but that is because churches and their ministers have a right to public discourse, too.
We should be able to pay for it ourselves, and reap the rewards individually
So you're saying if some people don't agree with nuclear research they should have their electricity cut from nuclear planets, even when nuclear planets become the only type of power planets? What about their kids? What about people who disagree with environment preservation or food safety, or military defense?
We've wasted tons o' dollars on Solyndras, bailing out automakers, paying welfare to illegal immigrants, making the military safe for the few percent of the population that are not heteronormal. We've wated NASAs time on outreach to mohammadeans to make them feel like they've contributed much of anything over the last 800 years. So, if you wonder why our space program sucks--figure it out
Quite true, but how much less might we have actually spent to achieve the same results if we had explicitly set the development of such technologies as specific goals rather than funding a man on the moon?
With the amount of money spent on "space research", humanity could have gone a long way to discover, identify, name, and study interactions of the millions of species on this planet that make it habitable, before they actually go extinct. Although we depend upon for them for our survival, because we instead spent billions on "space research", we now face the consequences of global warming and other human induced changes that are now crushing ecosystems worldwide. Sadly, its probably too late to do that and humanity will now have to settle on just taking our chances as most world biodiversity disappears completely in the next couple hundred years, because now ignorance likely to be our only option.
The overhead of wasted money like the large tower built by NASA at the Stennis Space Center in Hancock County Mississippi at a cost of $350 million that was closed the day it was completed and never used for the purpose intended strongly suggests why public support for space research has dwindled over the years.
The only thing that keeps them from being able to say "Vote for Joe Blow or you will go to hell" is their tax exemption... Don't tax the churches, it removes the gag order on what they can say in the public forum!
I guess you don't believe in free speech, huh? I don't see anything forcing you to believe what they say, do you? In other words, are you not free to ignore and mock them? That would be far better than gagging anybody.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"they're a private company doing well but their only customer is NASA"
I think MDA Corp, SES, Thaicom, Orbcomm, AsiaSat, US Air Force, NOAA, TNSA, SpaceCom might argue that point with you. NASA is definitely one of their better customers, but far from their only customer.
If supporters of space exploration really want to be convincing, they need to do more than make excuses.
No, it was Joe Taxpayer. Give credit where credit is due. Not to the middle men who spent the money. Otherwise, one never makes any case for government spending as opposed to tax breaks for billionaires.
They are crying because they don't get a big percentage of the pie.
but in real dollars, they are getting over half what they got at peak of the race to the moon.
The really scary thing from the graph is how much the size of the whole pie has increased.
Just out of curiosity, what makes you think or "unadulterated democracy" we have now is somehow devoid of the same corruption?
The only reason that useless monument NASA recently built and then immediately closed at the Stennis Space Center at a cost of $350 million is not called "corruption", is because it is so politically impolite and so politically inconvenient.
All the more reason to close it down completely and start over.
The only thing that keeps them from being able to say "Vote for Joe Blow or you will go to hell" is their tax exemption... Don't tax the churches, it removes the gag order on what they can say in the public forum!
I guess you don't believe in free speech, huh? I don't see anything forcing you to believe what they say, do you? In other words, are you not free to ignore and mock them? That would be far better than gagging anybody.
I do believe in free speech, however, churches, to keep their tax exempt status with the federal government have restrictions on exercising it. Since they are not required to be a not-for-profit, it isn't considered a violation of their free speech.
Exactly, since we know exactly what we will get when we cut off funding and force millions to live in poverty in the streets. At least scientists can "vote with their feet" and move to China, India, Europe, and Japan, where there is still interest in building a space program.
"There will always [sic] be at least one person opposed to any sensible project. There needs to be a way for representatives of a majority of the people to be able to fund sensible science and technology projects even if someone objects."
We already have that. Its called Congress. The problem is that we continue to elect people to Congress who are corrupt, too poorly educated to lead, and consistently place special interests before the common good despite reams of rhetoric to the contrary. Politicians are now just a commodity like everything else in our capitalistic society. They are bought and sold with little other useful purpose. Sadly, the problem is that they are merely a reflection of ourselves. Poorly educated yet brimming with hubris.
> Part of the reason those shuttle launches were so expensive was that they carried a lot of science.
Nope, that's not factored into launch costs. The Shuttle required a complete tear-down, rebuild and re-assemble after every flight. This was astonishingly expensive. Airline travel would be just as expensive if it had drop-tanks or launch boosters and required re-assembly after every flight. This is why single-shot rockets continue to dominate launches, the cost of the equipment is rarely as much as the cost of putting it back together.
I think it would be more beneficial to quit wasting billions of dollars in space exploration in the first place.
The cost to benefit ratio simply isn't high enough. If we spent as much money on researching and resolving problems on this planet, there would be little need to go elsewhere.
It makes more sense to send robots and rovers into space than humans. It's also a lot cheaper and has fewer risks with similar rewards.
Go read Socrates and Plato complaining about anti-intellectualism.
And file it in the same drawer as "Kids these days can't (INSERT)" and "The World is going to hell".
Anti-intellectualism isn't new. The Hebrews had a word for it: envy. I think they wrote about it on their stone tablets.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
The population of the USA is about 320M, so that works out at 160M, or $1.6M. NASA's budget is actually around $17,647M, so you're off by three orders of magnitude. Do you, by any chance, work for Verizon? It's actually about $55 per person in the USA (including children).
As opposed to the useless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which cost abut $6 trillion or $75,000 for every American household.
Screw all that.. Just make them pay the tax like everybody else. Religion is a multi-billion dollar business. If you can't tune out, it is not their problem.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
> Really, who paid for the developmental science of tang?
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/01/tang-was-not-invented-for-the-space-program/
> Teflon?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/molecule-of-the-month-teflon-the-nonstick-myth-that-stuck-did-you-think-that-your-hitech-frying-pan-was-a-spinoff-from-the-space-race-john-emsley-explains-that-the-truth-is-the-other-way-around-1414648.html
> Transistors
Bell Labs all the way, totally private. This is well recorded in any number of great books. You might want to try "Silicon Fire".
> , ic circuits?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_integrated_circuit
> High frequency electronics? Plastics? Explosives?
None had to do with NASA, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. But them again I'm not sure what any of the remainder of your poorly-spelled and almost unreadable rant is supposed to be saying.
Screw all that.. Just make them pay the tax like everybody else. Religion is a multi-billion dollar business. If you can't tune out, it is not their problem.
Maybe on the revenue side, but you can go online and look at their various filings to find out that their net income, the only part that is taxable, is not that great. But, why stop with churches. The Red Cross and the United Way are also multi-billion dollar businesses, why not tax them, too?
"Vote for Joe Blow or you will go to hell"
They do this anyway. Openly. It's supposedly illegal but Fox News and the conservative media propaganda cabal would churn up such a shitstorm if the law was ever enforced. The pundits would be furiously ejaculating in their pants if they ever had the chance to say things like "IRS attacking God!" on the air.
Sad that we're cowed by a bunch of hate media hacks owned by a Australian media baron.
If you have a commercial venture, and the only thing running it is greed and megalomania, then the business will fail. You don't get very far with those traits if you don't have either a good business model, or you are running on past glory and savings (which the private space industry is not).
That is, it will fail unless it gets a government subsidy or something. This is an important consideration.
The commercial market is self-correcting, as long as no one steps in to save it.
I think there should be real 100% private exploration. However, it has to actually be private. It can't be a jobs program and it can't suck down taxpayer money to keep itself afloat. If is does that, then yes, greed and megalomania can become a business model, because the business doesn't have to actually produce money with its product, it just becomes a vehicle for assigning taxpayer money to private industry.
Its debatable whether the government would ultimately fund "better" science, it is really too soon to make that sort of judgement. I concede that a private business would focus on more practical applications rather than pure science. Still, I don't think that's actually a problem, because solving practical problems with space exploration is important, if not groundbreaking.
There are roughly 325,000,000 Americans, which at $0.50/American would bring NASA a budget of $162,500,000. The NASA annual budget is instead $18,400,000,000. It is, however, true that NASA is 0.5% of the entire US annual budget.
You shouldn't confuse where the 0.5 figure originates, as it makes those supporting space research appear as though they have poor math skills. Also you shouldn't confuse the two lest you be asked to pay your annual share of approximately $566.15. Should I report you to the IRS for failing to pay your full share? I won't because I find your willingness to pay $2,830.77 to support science laudable, even though I think you would do better by spending more of that $2,830.77 on biological science that addresses the consequences of global warming on our rapidly deteriorating ecosystems, while there is still limited time to save them from almost certain extinction. If we solve that problem in time, there will be plenty of time and opportunity to conduct "space research". If we don't, then all the space science in the universe will be moot.
Yep. Obama's church got caught stumping for him (remember the "God Damn America" sermon?) and the IRS did absolutely nothing about that. Despite the fact that the larger church organization literally had Obama give a speech to their members. (Yes, Protestants have a church organization just like Catholics.)
Guess whether this went anywhere? Of course not, Obama's IRS only goes after conservatives.
Ah. Sorry. I agree. I should've had more coffee before replying. Yeah, the cold war actually did wonders for our tech development, as did post WWII sentiment. I guess the perceived threat of nuclear annihilation tends to do that though. ;-)
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I don't believe we have it perfect, far from. It's a hell of a balancing act. I just believe the best system is a hybrid system. There are certainly lots of socialist elements to our capitalist system, and that's why we no longer have child labor and 16 hour work days, why we have have an Interstate highway system, etc... OTOH, we still allow people to make most choices for themselves, and even become stupid rich if that's what's really important to them.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Ask your congressman.
If you think having a preacher scream "God Damn America" is somehow stumping for anybody in any election anywhere in the US, you are clearly an idiot.
" Isn't that worth something?"
It almost certainly will be to opthamologists, as extended time in outer space results in permanent human eye problems.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I want my very own nuclear planet, that would be cool.
Perhaps you meant power plant? Planets are big and round and float in the sky, plants are on the ground pumping power into the grid.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
... on geopolitical rivals. If you want a real space program, it is going to have to be private.
The billionaires are trying, chaps. Beyond that, nothing we can do unless we free up money in the budget by both making the US less responsible for global military matters OR shut down the welfare state.
Absent either of those things there is no money left for space.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Strictly speaking the "God Damn America" sermon was an attack on Bush White House. Still political, but not directly endorsing Obama. But it's the sermon that made the news cycle, so if you're going to remember Obama's church at all, you're going to remember that sermon. Check the link I posted for details on how the larger church organization helped support Obama's campaign. It was enough to get the IRS to investigate, but not enough to get them to do anything about it.
Lets not forget about IKEA!
If, instead of pure research, NASA had concentrated on near-earth practical applications like ubiquitous free satellite phone/internet, large scale solar power generation, medical habitats and zero g manufacturing, we wouldn't be having this discussion today. Nobody would dispute the value of NASA and space. Moreover, it would be paying for itself by now.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
How do you calculate ROI on research such as fundamental science research?
You're right. I mean, who needs people like Brin and Musk? We should keep all foreigners out. Even if they would start a business here and help our economy. Because your cynical armchair economics and science is sooo much better than anyone from NASA, Google or Tesla.
Such brilliant armchair economics. Seriously, I want to listen to you for advice on business and science. Google is bad because it changed things and has not produced anything except for dying industries like Android...er newspapers!
It is obvious the space program needs lots more money.
Sending humans to Mars on the current budget will only work if you do not intend to bring them back alive.
And while Jupiter and Saturn have been explored pretty well, all that research just showed how much more there is to discover. And don't even get me started on Uranus (just think of all the jokes that will come out of that research!) or Neptune!
Space is really big place, and so the budget for space exploration needs to be really big as well.
(And do not talk to me about world hunger - if we got rid of our ridiculously bloated militay budgets, we could both feed the world AND go to space big time! Plus, fewer people will get killed - everybody wins!)
Consider how many kings claimed mountains for their own, humanity named the same mountains quite a few times. In the great scheme of things, life as we know it is nothing but a complex chemical reaction occuring on the surface of the Earth. Earth went from being a ball of lava, to having a surface full of gas, to this mostly water structure, freezing and thawing, until pretty lights started glowing on its dark side, sattelites looking down at the very people who made them, should it all just end here?
I suppose we should first get people thinking about caring for the "next generation", and hopefully space exploration will eventually take shape as well. Otherwise we can just continue killing each other to limit the population, hope that a super virus doesn't come about, and just procreate until the planet gets swallowed up by our mid-age Sun. I think the former sounds better.
Yet, the brass probably spends more than 3% of that same budget on steaks and wine so they can have "business meetings". That's the problem with engineers. We're the smartest group of people, yet the stupidest at the same time. The "We should be happy that we get anything at all" attitude is widespread amongst engineers and scientists, and it ensures that we are and will always be underpaid.
Why are we not crowdfunding this? Government bureaucrats are quite literally the worst people to try and allocate funding for this kind of thing and joe average on the street has his own life to worry about. NASA should do some competitions online, pitch in $20 and you can vote on the next round of experiments to carry out. Let's face it, we'd all send ourselves bankrupt throwing money at them
Negative Nancy.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
just get rid of all deductions and have sensible tax rates to begin with.
I don't have one, you insensitive clod!
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Exactly, since we know exactly what we will get when we cut off funding and force millions to live in poverty in the streets.
Or not as the case may be. Just because you claim bad things will happen when funding is cut off, doesn't mean it's actually true. And we also need to keep in mind that good things happen when you cut off funding. For example, those taxpayers can keep that money and use the money to build things or employ people.
At least scientists can "vote with their feet" and move to China, India, Europe, and Japan, where there is still interest in building a space program.
And do what exactly? What would be the point of employing a NASA scientist even if you do have a space program?
The way funding works in the new world as cemented by Citizen's United (Which benefited both Democrats and Republicans equally despite the wailing from the Democrats) is something like this:
Hello Mega-Evil-Corp? This is your friendly neighborhood party apparatchik. I'm prepared to offer you an exorbitant sum of the people's money, but you have to agree to "donate" a percentage of that money to our favorite super-pac. Don't worry, we fixed it so nobody can ever know! Mega-Evil-Corp does a financial analysis, and if the numbers look good, they accept. Next, the Party's central command pays some high dollar PR agency on K Street to craft the spin, and then an executive decision is made as to which lie, er, messaging will be used to sell this latest money laundering and/or vote buying scheme. The groundswell contingent gets their talking points, and they flood the comment sections of the news sites, the lies are honed and turned into heart tugging stories, and if it's a lot of money a fake crisis is precipitated behind the scenes. And then the money flows, the votes get bought, the wheels of the engine spin. Everybody makes out like a bandit except for YOU, the taxpayer, you get screwed beyond screwing. When it's all said and done, a few years later, the numbers come in and the whole thing was a colossal boondoggle, but this is quickly swept under the rug and nobody wants to talk about it anyway.
So one of the early actions of the greediest administration yet was to "privatize" space exploration. Wonder why? I just explained it to you. It's win win for everybody, the wheel of blame is off the government (Right: Look! That thing blew up! This proves big government doesn't work!). The wheel of blame is entirely on the private sector, which DUH benefits the left they cut the deals initially and just look who they picked to be the winners, certainly not evil Rethugnican companies DUH. If it fails, they can swoop in and use the crisis to great an even more giant theft engine, and if it doesn't, they can steal taxpayer money using PAC donations. It is so win win - and as usual science, technology, the advancement of the species, well who gives a shit about that when there is money to be made!!!
This is how ALL the schemes work, and have always worked, be it HealthCare, the Environment, Alternative Energy, Fracking, Drilling, Military Spending, Roads, Bridges, Infrastructure, Education, Public works projects, the border fence, you name it. So keep arguing stupid ideology folks, and pretend that your thieving party is so superior to the other thieving party, that's exactly what they want you to do... What I am describing is how the real world works, whether you like it or not, there's more truth to what I am saying than fiction.
Murphy was an optimist
Are you sending chickens into space now then? Or maybe Turkey's would be more patriotic.
Better yet!
Puit a fw lines in every bible and koran that say that Jesus and Mohammed command the payment of such taxes!!!
Btter thought: They would just ignore this part in the same way they ignore all the "share and be caritative" parts of their holy books anyway.
Nevermind.
-- 29A the number of the Beast