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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)
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
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.
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.
Nasa's current budget amounts to about 1/2 a cent per American.
I for one am fine with being taxed 1 penny per year if it doubles what Nasa can do.
That is not too much to ask, in fact I would personally pay 5 cents per year if I could.
The commentary by John M. Logsdon that researchers should be 'happy' is a value judgement that is is not in a position to make.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
bunch of gay negros Co8Imunity at Pallid bodies and keed to be Kreskin
Making an argument on an unreadable site: Priceless.
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.
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.
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
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
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...
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.
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"
My ox is being gored!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
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!!!!*.
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
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.
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.
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.
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"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
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.
... 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
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!!!
Joe Biden is a square shooter. Joe Biden for 2016!
... Can be answered with "No" correctly. This /. post is no different.
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.
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).
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
"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.
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.
All the more reason to close it down completely and start over.
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
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.
Ask your congressman.
" Isn't that worth something?"
It almost certainly will be to opthamologists, as extended time in outer space results in permanent human eye problems.
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... 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.
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.
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.
I don't have one, you insensitive clod!
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
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.