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Trump Administration Wants To End NASA Funding For ISS By 2025 (theverge.com)
According to budget documents seen by The Verge, the Trump administration is preparing to end support for the International Space Station program by 2025. As a result, American astronauts could be grounded on Earth for years with no destination in space until NASA develops new vehicles for its deep space travel plans. From the report: The draft may change before an official budget request is released on February 12th. However, two people familiar with the matter have confirmed to The Verge that the directive will be in the final proposal. We reached out to NASA for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication. Any budget proposal from the Trump administration will also be subject to scrutiny and approval by Congress. But even announcing the intention to cancel ISS funding could send a signal to NASA's international partners that the U.S. is no longer interested in continuing the program. Many of NASA's partners still have yet to decide if they'd like to continue working on the station beyond 2024. The International Space Station has been an ongoing program for more than two decades. It costs NASA between $3 to $4 billion each year, and represents a more than $87 billion investment from the U.S. government. It's become a major hub for conducting both government and commercial experiments in microgravity, as well as testing out how the human body responds to weightlessness.
"Musk's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy will make launches cheap enough for that to be feasible."
Same thing they told us about the %$#@% Space Shuttle. They promised weekly launches and cost of a few hundred dollars a kg to LEO. The best they ever did was 9 launches in 1985. And the average cost to LEO was $60000/kg.
But this time it's different. ... How different? Most likely, not very.
NASA budgets are fueled by taxpayer dollars. And taxpayers don't really see their taxes as an investment with returns, nor do they often raise their hand and volunteer to raise taxes by the billions in order to properly fund specific projects.
Compare and contrast that with Tesla, budgets are fueled by investors. And investors want to see revenue and returns, which require Musk to deliver. Is he on schedule? No, he has slipped, no doubt. But he has managed to innovate and deliver like no one else in the EV market, and reduce the cost of his product over the last 10 years to something that the average consumer can afford, not just the 1%.
Yes, I'd say this time is different. Moving space programs into the private sector is likely the solution to beating $60000/kg.
Your government just recently shut itself down despite one party controlling the house, the senate and the presidency. If that is not a textbook example of gross incompetence, I don't know what is. And just the tip of the iceberg.
As for corruption: well, for one thing the man who campaigned on 'draining the swamp' has appointed more bankers and wall street people into positions of power than any since the 20s. He recently shoved through a tax-cut for himself and the wealthiest americans, while raising taxes on the very poorest.This was done via legal means so it's not corrupt in the legal sense of the term, as you don't have to bribe a wealthy asshole to make him more likely to serve his own interests and fuck the rest, but it's certainly corrupt in the moral and political sense of the word as it is the polar opposite of what he said while he was campaigning.
You do realize Trump claimed he invented the term 'fake' and his go-to defense against any and all criticism is simply stating that it's not true and ignoring any and all evidence that contradicts his position, right? The modus operandi of Trump is to make a decision first, and then come up with some pseudo-factual BS to justify it with or deflect criticism. The entire white house is currently ran on the basis of 'rumors and made up theories'. A quick list of just a few of the things that Trump has either completely made up and keeps repeating in absence of any factual evidence: his inauguration was the biggest ever, he won the popular vote, Obama bugged his residence, the 'last night in Sweden' statement referring to a terror attack that never happened, claiming you guys pay the most taxes in the world, and claiming that his own tax reform will cost him a lot.
These are all things Trump has pulled out of his ass. The way it looks and sounds to me is that he's not even doing it fully on purpose, the man seems to be incapable of using basic logic and grounding his arguments in reality. He can make a statement, and then a couple days later deny he ever said so even if he's on tape saying so. This is the sign of a man who's either a pathological liar, or slowly going senile due to the onset of Alzheimer's or dementia. My bet is on the latter option because the degradation of his speech pattern (slurring and pronouncing words incorrectly, not being able to stay on topic for an entire sentence, increased usage of general vague terms like 'some'. 'all, 'good', 'bad', 'things' etc that he has to keep inserting because he doesn't know/remember vocabulary) and the erratic nature of his personality wherein he seems to lack any impulse control and will outright make statements that hurt himself and his party with no regard to anything resembling a political strategy all point towards a man struggling with old age and a mind that's never been too sharp to begin with starting to go off its rails. And yes, I know he passed the 'cognitive test' of 'can you recognize a camel' but first of all that's not a proper diagnostic test for these illnesses, and secondly, if he is actually going senile there's no way the White House would admit to this on television.
That's just my 2 cents as an outsider who's followed US politics closely and has a grandparent dealing with Alzheimer's so I've seen people go down this path before.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
So privileged in fact that it's the only group you could make this comment about without tens of people jumping down your throat calling you a racist.
Yes, in fact that's the case. The white "race" (actually a social construct employed to divide the working class) has been subjugating others for centuries. Now they start to get a little push back and they act like they're the ones being oppressed. Most white people wouldn't last a month as a black person in the US.