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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.
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.
"as a former scientist"... I hope your employers made you preview your work before posting it.
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!
> But if we ever do crack fusion for commercial power generation, that would be a serious game changer
I'm afraid not, not unless we can fuse plain hydrogen. Deuterium and Tritium are actually quite rare and expensive to refine. (http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/article/the_trouble_with_tritium) They come mostly from fission sources, which would be far more efficient and economical to use directly: The only source of large enough quantities of deuterium and tritium to support world-wide fusion production is solar sails. And if you've got solar sails that large, they can be used far, far more efficiently as direct solar mirrors.
The only effective fusion plant available, using plain hydrogen, is the Sun itself.
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.
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".