Support For NASA Spending Depends On Perception of Size of Space Agency Budget 205
MarkWhittington writes "Alan Steinberg, a post doctorate fellow in political science at Sam Houston State University, conducted a study surrounding the vexing problem of how to motivate more people to support increased levels of funding for NASA. In an October 14, 2013 piece in The Space Review, Steinberg announced the results of a study conducted with a group of college students. Steinberg's approach was based on the findings of a study by Roger Launius conducted in the late 1990s that suggested that the American public believe that NASA spending takes up about 20 percent of the federal budget. It has in fact never exceeded four percent, which it enjoyed at the height of the Apollo program, and is currently about .5 percent. Steinberg was testing a notion advanced by Neil deGrasse Tyson that if people knew the true size of NASA's budget they would be more likely to support increasing it."
Too cool for NASA (Score:5, Insightful)
The public has no idea about the level of US spending. They need to know things like Air Conditioning The Military Costs More Than NASA's Entire Budget [huffingtonpost.com]. Until they understand that NASA does so much for so little they will never want to expand its budget.
Getting me started, man! (Score:5, Informative)
The public has no idea about the level of US spending.
Here is a breakdown on where out money goes. [cbpp.org]Defense, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP - where 2/3rds goes to Medicare.
The perception is that our tax money is wasted on Space, Welfare Queen's Pink Cadillacs and other entitlement programs which I take to be code words for giving money to "lazy (Black) poor people" from folks who want to appear to be PC.
When the truth is we are wasting money on wars and transferring wealth to the old.
And I find it laughable and sad that the Teapartiers are mostly old white people and if they REALLY wanted what they think they wanted, they'd have to shoot themselves in the pocketbook and give up this notion the the US of A has to have a superior military and go off fighting "evil".
Cut military spending to post WWII levels. Stop this one man show when containing roque nations - we need more UN involvement; which is a whole other bugaboo with the Teaparty people and most conservatives.
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That pie chart should be a linear bar graph, and international assistance should be separated from military. That would make the point a lot stronger.
Then again, many people still wouldn't believe it...
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It's not really fair to describe Social Security as transferring "wealth to the old". By this point in time, almost everyone collecting SS paid into it their entire working life. Most people won't collect more than they paid. You're just paying into the fun what you will later withdraw (...if our idiot government didn't treat SS as a piggybank that they can dip into whenever they want).
Because SS is regressive, you could call it "transferring wealth to the wealthy", as the wealthy are more likely to also co
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It's not really fair to describe Social Security as transferring "wealth to the old". By this point in time, almost everyone collecting SS paid into it their entire working life.
Indeed, my uncle died at age 60 after paying in for 40 years and didn't collect a penny. Another uncle collected for 20 after paying in for 40 so probably broke even. This is NOT funded from the general revenue; it's a tax you pay in all your life specifically for SS. Medicare shouldn't be part of the budget, either, since it's also
Re:Getting me started, man! (Score:5, Insightful)
And I find it laughable and sad that the Teapartiers are mostly old white people and if they REALLY wanted what they think they wanted, they'd have to shoot themselves in the pocketbook and give up this notion the the US of A has to have a superior military and go off fighting "evil".
The people you are referring to aren't the real TeaPartiers. They are the Republicans who usurped the Tea Party banner.
Not the same thing. They may think of themselves as Tea Party but they bear little resemblance to the actual, original, Tea Party. Which did in fact want to stop the money wasting and "wealth redistribution".
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I thought the original tea party people were all about stealing a country away from the people they originally stole it for ie ultra super massive wealth redistribution a whole bloody countries worth. Realistically today's modern conservative can't see anything but their own ego, greed and selfishness. NASA is meaningless to them if they can't earn any money out of it, roads and footpaths on the other side of the block are meaningless because they are not in front of their house and that future generations
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"I thought the original tea party people were all about stealing a country away from the people they originally stole it for ie ultra super massive wealth redistribution a whole bloody countries worth."
The original modern Tea Party was all about smaller government. T.E.A. stood for "Taxed Enough ALREADY". And they were a group of mostly conservatives, but there was a relatively large sprinkle of liberals there as well.
"Realistically today's modern conservative can't see anything but their own ego, greed and selfishness."
I can say exactly the same about the modern political Left. And mean it seriously, and even provide examples.
"NASA is meaningless to them if they can't earn any money out of it, roads and footpaths on the other side of the block are meaningless because they are not in front of their house and that future generations choke on pollution out of control is meaningless as long as the tea baggers of today can profit on it today."
The only recent example I can think of where "conservatives" held any money back from NASA was in the recent funding vote, and that was
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I seem to remember the first batch of tea baggers (until they could laughingly exposed to the harsh realities of the name) pointing at the Boston Tea Party participants as being the 'original' Tea Partiers. It being launched on some lame arse financial program, with the whole billionaire funded PR scam by Freedom works (hence the marketing reference to the 'Founding Fathers') to push it in the public eye and it went all over the place as various individuals tried to gain control over for personal for profi
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I've been hearing this since practically the day the term "teabagger" was coined: they were co-opted so fast that they hardly had a moment to define themselves at all.
Being opposed to "money wasting" and "wealth redistribution" is easy. Deciding what programs you want to keep and which ones are actually harmful or insufficiently beneficial is far, far harder. Nobody likes wasting money, and opposing "wealth redistribution" frequently means "opposing the programs that distribute money away from me while sup
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No true TeaPartier would...
Re:Getting me started, man! (Score:4, Informative)
You don't even need to cut the military that much. Cutting back 1/3 would cover the US debt interest payments.
We actually had a balanced budget when Clinton was president (and Republicans controlled congress). That was thrown out the window in order to fund two wars for which the American populace have been told to not worry about or sacrifice for.
The military however is the largest jobs program we have. Since it's an all volunteer army it seems most recruits may be joining in order to get a job or to get the resulting benefits . If you join you get the job training, you get the job, you get benefits. If there just happens to be a war that occurs while you're enlisted then you can get veteran's benefits as well. It's a pretty sweet deal if your local economy is bad and you have no hope of qualifying for or paying for higher education.
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You don't even need to cut the military that much. Cutting back 1/3 would cover the US debt interest payments.
For reference, cutting 1/3 of US military spending would move the US from second place (behind Saudi Arabia) to third (also behind Russia) in terms of defence spending as a percentage of GDP, and still leave them top in absolute terms (spending three times as much as the PRC, in second place) and top in per-capita spending.
It's not entirely clear, however, that reducing military spending would help the US economy. A lot of R&D is subsidised from the military budget, which helps drive US high tech e
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It's not entirely clear, however, that reducing military spending would help the US economy.
If this is a reason to keep spending so much on the military, then we just need to accept that capitalism has failed & that a federally-managed economy is what we're doing.
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You haven't apparently been listening.
It's a foundational point of politics that Conservatives have opposed Social Security forever.
Re:Getting me started, man! (Score:5, Insightful)
"And I find it laughable and sad that the Teapartiers are mostly old white people and if they REALLY wanted what they think they wanted"
The TeaPartiers know just that. Most aren't really against government spending, just spending on the Wrong Kind Of People. There's plenty of right wing conservatives (old white farmers) in Kansas and Texas getting agricultural subsidies.
It sounds like you have no clue what prompted the 21 Century Tea Parties in the first place. It is not spending on the "wrong kind of people", it is an attitude that the government is just too damn big for its own good and infringing upon our rights and ignoring the U.S. Constitution as if it didn't even exist in the first place. I suppose you happen to like having the NSA snoop into everything you've ever done, and want to see the TSA come in and search every car traveling on Interstate Highways since they obviously aren't molesting enough grandmothers and toddlers?
Yes, those involved with the Tea Party also know full well that they are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of cutting pork for their home states and wanting the government to be significantly scaled back on all levels, both federal, state, and locally. It tends to have a very strong Libertarian bent and thinking both Democrats and Republicans are screwing up, and that it will take a huge economic redistribution to "set things right again" that will most certainly hurt a number of people if all of those programs are cut. The hope is that if the government is cut down significantly, that those abuses of authority can be much more easily identified and removed as well. As it is, the government at all levels is so huge that many of the current abuses are really background noise.
I will agree with you that the "neo-cons" who have taken over the banner of the "Tea Party" and trashed any real progress that those involved actually tried to accomplish. These congressmen are largely stateists who really do want their their own special interests (aka campaign contributors) to get government money instead of the special interests of the other guys. The whole thing that is currently happening in DC is just churning my stomach and making me want to barf. Yes, I'm talking about you, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. And they're the best of the lot. Don't get me started on guys like Orrin Hatch and John McCain who are complete sell-outs.
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I think a lot of the core of the tea partiers were also there in the core of the old Reform Party. Ie, disgruntled with the government and wanting to vote for none-of-the-above. Some of the ideas were the same in both movements. But essentially as soon as there's an "alternative" movement that gathers momentum it collects a ton of disgruntled voters like a political katamari. Many of those who follow along really don't have much ideology of their own beyond the "I'm against it!" feeling and thus are eas
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I could have said the same thing about the Occupy movement, other than the fact that the Reform Party had almost nothing to do with what happened in that case. While the specific actions or kinds of people involved may be different, both were a reaction that something is fundamentally flawed with America and that it needs to be fixed in some fashion.
On the other hand, there were some basic principles involved with many in the Tea Party events. I don't mind if there are some basic objections to those princ
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Well, those are their lines, anyways.
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These congressmen are largely stateists who really do want their their own special interests (aka campaign contributors) to get government money instead of the special interests of the other guys.
On the contrary, if they're using the federal government to get money for their state they're still federalists, and they're enjoying abusing the system.
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...never mind that, measured by the tax burden as a percentage of GDP, that "big government" was the smallest it had been in a long time. Teabagger protests were about Obamacare and taxes, about which their complaints were factually wrong, not about civil liberties.
I would rather use the number of federal employees as a yard stick of the size of the government, which certainly was larger under the FDR administration, that still doesn't give the notion that we are living under a less controlling government right now.
Hell, do you really think America as it exists today has the same freedoms that we enjoyed in 2000 (aka before 9/11)?
For myself, I don't give a damn about whatever or whoever calls themselves a "tea party conservative" as the term is meaningless at the mome
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...never mind that, measured by the tax burden as a percentage of GDP, that "big government" was the smallest it had been in a long time. Teabagger protests were about Obamacare and taxes, about which their complaints were factually wrong, not about civil liberties.
That's not actually true. You have to include mandatory spending.
What got the "Tea Party" started was a toxic brew of ignorance, racism, and astroturf.
When I hear people say that, I have to wonder what rock they've been hiding under for the past fifty years. Bad and ineffective government spending doesn't just affect the old, angry, white guys. It affects everyone who depends on government spending.
Similarly, how do you feel about that NSA spying? Or some Republican getting into office and using the same bullshit excuses that Obama currently does for ignoring laws and doing their own thi
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Well, there is mountains of indisputable evidence that illustrates how the Tea Party was funded by billionaires
I wouldn't mind some of those billionaire's funds being sent my way. No doubt there were some of the events that may have had some sponsorship as you suggest, and certainly a great portion of the anger and energy from these groups has been redirected to help support sell-outs. Everything I've ever been involved with has not had a single dime of that money so I know for a fact that you are full of it to even think that it is strictly the actions of a couple of billionaires.
None the less, your "mountains" o
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Ask the average tea partier how much of the federal budget is spent individually on nasa, welfare, foreign aid, food stamps, obama phones, free abortions and qurans for terrorists and their numbers will add up to about 400%. The other half is spent on obamacare.
Re:Too cool for NASA (Score:5, Insightful)
No, we need human spaceflight now more than ever. We need a self-sustaining colony, off-planet, ASAP. I don't care if it's a lunar colony, Mars, an asteroid, or even a city-sized space station at a Lagrange point, as long as it can sustain itself indefinitely. There's relatively little scientific gain to be made from this, but that's not why we should do it.
Tell me, what is rule #1 of computing? "Always keep a backup". Well, right now we're running on a single, non-redundant biosphere, and we seem to be actively sabotaging it. But even outside human-caused damage, there are easily dozens of things that could wipe out our planet's ability to sustain human life. Asteroids. Supervolcanoes. Major climate shift of any sort - anthropogenic or natural, warming or cooling. Oh, and don't forget we have enough nukes to murder ourselves quite efficiently.
Are these slim chances? Yes, but not as slim as I'd like, and considering that a lack of redundancy means the complete annihilation of the human race, I think we can afford a few trillion dollars to get things running.
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"No, we need human spaceflight now more than ever. We need a self-sustaining colony, off-planet, ASAP. I don't care if it's a lunar colony, Mars, an asteroid, or even a city-sized space station at a Lagrange point, as long as it can sustain itself indefinitely. There's relatively little scientific gain to be made from this, but that's not why we should do it."
Exactly. Some things are important beyond consideration of budget.
For example (along a different line from what you were saying, but just as important), most of the big countries like Russia, China, EU are setting their sights on the Moon, while the U.S. is off pissing away money on some jaunt to an asteroid, thanks to Obama.
But the strategic (not economic) value of the Moon cannot be overemphasized. We MUST get there, and stay there, if for no other reason than to keep others from getting too far ah
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For example (along a different line from what you were saying, but just as important), most of the big countries like Russia, China, EU are setting their sights on the Moon, while the U.S. is off pissing away money on some jaunt to an asteroid, thanks to Obama.
The Moon would be useful if we currently knew what to do with He3. Otherwise, not so much.
But the strategic (not economic) value of the Moon cannot be overemphasized. We MUST get there, and stay there, if for no other reason than to keep others from getting too far ahead of us. Whoever controls the moon pretty much controls the Earth. Never forget that.
Well, no. In actuality, whoever controls orbit controls Earth, and there's no evidence that's best done from the moon. The moon is in a predictable orbit, it's a sitting target. Whoever controls the L-points controls the solar system. The moon may be less of a gravity well than the Earth, but it's still one. Better not to be in one at all. And whoever mines asteroids first is likely to also be who refines them in space
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Other than Robert Heinlein, what is your documentation for "Whoever controls the moon pretty much controls the Earth"?
The military "high ground" has been a known principle for over 2000 years. Nukes don't change that, even a little bit.
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"Well, if you're firing missiles from the moon, it's pretty easy to get them to collide with earth at 10 km / sec or so, and you can do it for a lot less gas than it would take from the earth's surface."
Thank you. Particularly what I had in mind, was little different than the "smart pebble" idea from... I think it was the late 70s?
When you have that much kinetic energy behind something, all you have to do is make sure it hits the target. You don't have to do much else.
The original "smart pebble" turned out to be beyond the technology of the day. But it isn't now.
As Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote (this is a paraphrase): "What do you do if you want to destroy something from high orbit? Simple
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They'd also better have a first-rate missile defence shield, because in the two days it would take their projectile to reach Earth, their target would
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Right, and as in Heinlein, that is mostly only useful in broad political strokes where a moon with a large population might be able to gain freedom. But if they were demanding anything important to us down here... rocks up there only need mass. But we have fuel down here. And while a rock dropped from that height might be as bad as a nuke... so are nukes. ;) And a nuke dropped from up there is only as bad as a nuke dropped from a bomber. So you have a fixed position, that we can see, and you're going to add
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"Would a guy spontaneously describe his ass using words like smooth and shapely? I think not."
Well, he might. But there isn't much chance he'd be in my particular circle of friends.
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"Why not?"
Seriously?
Not because I have anything against gay people. I don't. But because flamers (which is NOT the same thing) irritate me vastly.
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Why? The universe doesn't need us, and won't miss us when we're gone. Whether we're on one planet, or a million, nothing lasts forever.
Frankly deferring massive amounts of resources to putting some people in cans on a frozen rock will probably worsen our chances for progress and survival. If we are concerned about our fate and want humankind to do something interesting with our future we should be putting our money in research and pure sciences. I think some sort of manned spaceflight program is probably an
Re:Too cool for NASA (Score:4, Insightful)
The universe doesn't need us to survive. But *we* need us to survive.
Sure, that's probably just evolution talking - species who don't consider their species important enough to protect probably don't last too long. But just because we live in a cold, uncaring universe that would just as soon kill us and forget we ever existed, doesn't mean we have to accept it. Just because it's humanity, alone, against a universe that is larger than we can even comprehend, let alone conquer, doesn't mean we need to just give up.
How much would such a project cost? In the trillions of dollars, easily.
We can afford that. The world has a collective GDP of 70 trillion. Both the US and the EU produce about 15 trillion individually. Hell, we spent nearly a trillion on Iraq alone, and that's not counting the long-term costs of that war (because you know nobody factored that in when they started that war). Even if it costs us a trillion dollars per year for a generation, we can totally afford that. And given the potential costs of failing to do so, I'm not sure we can afford not to.
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For the next 100,000,000 years at least, there are no circumstances under which the surface or near surface of the Earth will be more hostile to survival than space. You've got gravity, water, building material, air...far more practical to build those "backups" in underground or undersea bunkers.
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No, we need human spaceflight now more than ever. We need a self-sustaining colony, off-planet, ASAP. I don't care if it's a lunar colony, Mars, an asteroid, or even a city-sized space station at a Lagrange point, as long as it can sustain itself indefinitely.
While I agree with the first part, the latter part splashes some cold water on it. Where it is is directly related to it being self sustaining, currently. And we don't have a good location.
I'm of the opinion that non-manned space flight is the best way to push the technology forwards, though. A giant farm in the sky operated remotely from Earth would get us a whole lot closer than building moon bubbles just to be there.
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You may be right that the ISS isn't producing much in the way of useful science anymore, and it's certainly no longer doing so cost effectively, but then in your next paragraph you start touting the benefits of robotic rovers and orbiters and you include engineering knowledge as something valuable. The ISS is still producing lots of valuable engineering knowledge, despite the relative lack of new scientific knowledge. Learning how to live in microgravity is essentially impossible without having somebody l
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One thing that the ISS has that is of particular note is the largest solar power farm in space. For all of those who think that the future of energy needs can be obtained by harvesting power from space, I don't know why virtually none of the "space solar power" advocates use any of the lessons learned from the ISS, nor why it isn't being used more actively to conduct tests from orbit.
Keep in mind that the ISS has a solar power plant of about 100 kilowatts, with an effective 30-40 kilowatts of continuous us
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The only thing that could really be done on the ISS related to beamed solar power is actually attempting to beam solar power. Throw a few dozen kilowatt microwave transmitter up there, and actually try to do it. The array itself is big and powerful, but it's nothing we haven't been doing for decades, and not the kind of design you would want to use if your whole mission was power generation.
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The array itself is big and powerful, but it's nothing we haven't been doing for decades, and not the kind of design you would want to use if your whole mission was power generation.
Oh, really? I've seen all kinds of whimsical proposals for space solar power that sort of presumes that the solar panels you can pick up at Harbor Freight (or whatever dealer you can find online or via Amazon) can simply be slapped together with super light weight duct tape and bailing twine and magically be able to transmit that power to the Earth.
From my perspective, the actually transmitters are the easy part of the whole space solar power, not the deal breaker. Instead, you need to find a way to scale
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The array itself is big and powerful, but it's nothing we haven't been doing for decades, and not the kind of design you would want to use if your whole mission was power generation.
Oh, really? I've seen all kinds of whimsical proposals for space solar power that sort of presumes that the solar panels you can pick up at Harbor Freight (or whatever dealer you can find online or via Amazon) can simply be slapped together with super light weight duct tape and bailing twine and magically be able to transmit that power to the Earth.
When it comes to space, the primary thing you're looking for is ruggedness. You don't want to waste a several hundred million dollar launch because your solar array failed. If possible, you surface mount. If you need more power, you unfold an array with the smallest amount of moving parts you can, which means limited or no sun tracking, which means panels instead of focused solar. If your lifespan needs are limited, you may consider cheaper silicon cells. If you need longer duration, you use Ga-As cell
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We've already seen thin film panels made here on earth consisting of many small cells, called Nanosolar. For a while someone was buying up all their output, I have no idea WTF is up now. If you poke a hole in the panel, they keep working, because of the way they're designed.
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Good point! I know from the news the ISS is learning valuable engineering lessons about docking, air locks, and space suits. :)
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The human spaceflight portion of this agency should be entirely decimated. In particular we should end US participation in the ISS. Little good science is returned from that endeavor at this point.
Those who complain about human crews in space simply don't have a damn clue about what it is that people actually do in space.
I'll agree that the current manned spaceflight program is a total joke at the moment, particularly with the infatuation with the manned program for going to Mars that is really nothing more than a jobs program to keep the companies who build ICBMs in business until the next round of missiles need to be developed. The Constellation/SLS programs in particular are a complete and total
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If it wasn't for the Soviet-developed Soyuz rockets, there wouldn't even be a manned spaceflight program.
No, if it wasn't for the Soyuz, we'd have built the fancy new shuttle instead of any of these unmanned Mars programs.
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Computer science analogy: The problem is that sort() calls bubble(). Replace sort() with NASA spending, and bubble() with crony capitalism.
The government doesnt normally do things efficiently. It sometimes does a few things efficiently for short periods of time, but the lack of actual accountability always degrades the situation into inefficiency. So the question we must ask ourselves is not i
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As Ronald Reagan said: "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money."
That wasn't Ronald Reagan who said that. Instead, it was Everett Dirksen [wikipedia.org], who admittedly was a Republican congressman in the 1960's. He supposedly said this on an appearance with the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.
Summary or cliffhanger? (Score:2)
And if you want to know the results, you'll have to RTFA. Submitter must be new here.
One-page answer to question: Why spend on space? (Score:5, Insightful)
Blah, blah, blah. (Score:2)
Almost every federal project is a tiny fraction of the budget, and the same study can be performed on all of them, and since we want clean air, clean water, nice federal parks, more knowledge of the ocean, fewer turtles poached, etc, etc, etc, the results will come out just the same no matter what agency you look at.
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Let me introduce you to a little word named "almost".
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Every individual defense program is a tiny fraction of the whole budget. You can slice anything up enough so it's a tiny fraction. We should stop spending so many tiny fractions.
Funding for space exploration may be good for a country that isn't $17 Trillion in debt. Or a country with a balanced budget. Or a rich country with a healthy economy. For a country like the US, it's just part of the problem -- albeit only a tiny fraction of the problem.
Re:Blah, blah, blah. (Score:5, Interesting)
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The US economy has never been stronger or more productive. The government debt issues are mostly due to the unwillingness to raise taxes.
Taxes naturally go up when the economy improves.. you seem to be ignoring that entirely, that in spite of growing revenue the deficit grows even faster.
The wealth of a nation is the goods and services that its people enjoy, so its no surprise that with the sheer volume of inefficient resource allocation that the government is instigating that we are all poorer for it. Its not the taxes that cost us, its the inefficient spending that costs us.
If the government took in the same quantity of money that it
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At the end of the day, what does
Re:Blah, blah, blah. (Score:4, Informative)
Poll respondents always favor nonspecific measures like "cutting government spending." Then it reverses when you ask about specific programs, especially the ones that actually cost a lot, like DoD and Social Security.
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So if you ask the people how much to fund each item, it will add up to well over 100% of revenue?
Of course it is inconceivable for the federal government to spend more than they receive.
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it will add up to well over 100%
of current spending.
of revenue?
The Kobayashi Maru ploy only works when the other guy doesn't notice what you're doing.
Unmanned, yes, manned no (Score:4, Insightful)
Manned spaceflight only makes sense with a huge breakthrough in propulsion. Otherwise, there is no where to go where a human being would be useful enough to make it worthwhile. As it stands, manned flight serves only to fulfill fanboy Star Trek fantasies.
Until then, I will be a techie steadfastly against more NASA spending. Its not just the general public you need to convince, its at least some of the STEM people too.
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The best work is done unmanned
For the first 30 years of NASA, though, computers weren't small and powerful enough. Thus the focus on manned flight.
Now they have to change that mindset, but it's an incredibly deep way of thinking, and government agencies aren't that well known for their ability to change... :(
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For the first 30 years of NASA, though, computers weren't small and powerful enough. Thus the focus on manned flight.
Nonsense. Pioneer, Mariner, Voyager, etc. All the Earth-observation sats. Even Apollo sample return was within reach of an unmanned program, given the Luna 16 sample return that occurred during the Apollo program. Humans did nothing in the first 30 years that unmanned missions couldn't, except being "humans in space".
The only things humans are better than robots is in-orbit construction and fixing the robots. Two things that NASA is now avoiding like the plague in mission planning.
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There is a pragmatic reason for continuing manned space flight: It is easier to get funding for it from the general public. It could even be that most robotic NASA missions are piggybacking on the manned space program for their funding.
Having said this, is it really that bad that we spend money on manned space flight? Sure, some of it is wasted, but so is much of the money spent on defense, for example. We still get some scientific and technological benefit. The losses are a normal part of the way humans fu
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Hello fool. If you want to see space funding, you must get Joe 6-pack interested. That means putting people in space. Additionally, all the tech that will solve the problems of manned space exploration will improve life here. Finally: ARE YOU EVEN SENTIENT?! Look, if you were sentient you'd know your chance of extinction is 100% unless you get off that cozy little wet rock. You're hundreds of thousands of years OVER DUE for a mass extinction event.
How can anyone sentient be against manned space flight
Nonsense (Score:2)
Why is it NASA always wants just a bit more and their promised discovery is right around the corner? They get used to being funded and hate updating resumes for the private sector. No surprise there and no surprise tax payers mistrust funding them without end.
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Since you bring up ROI, I would have to agree that the money spent on Apollo has ultimately resulted in more money going into the American economy and in the long run far more economic activity from the resulting technology developed than if the money had simply been refunded to the tax payers for them to spend on Super Bowl tickets and other frivolous things. That said, how much of that kind of extreme cutting edge technology is being developed at NASA at the moment?
Computer technology for NASA missions i
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That may be true, but in the 1960's NASA was at the forefront of computing technology. The Apollo Guidance Computer was nearly the very first major device built with integrated circuits. So many chips were used by NASA that it represented something like 60%-70% of the global production for computer chips at the time and one of the reasons why many people associated NASA with computer technology. NASA also created the first real-time operating systems, as well as the notion of a time-share system that wou
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There's a very simple reason why these spaceships are using heavily outdated electronics:
they need to be tough.
Those 16-bit computers you were talking about on the SS, well, were "radiation hardened," not exactly a property you would find in an IBM-PC...
Also, if it ain't broke and the job hasn't changed, why "fix" it? The computers on the STS did the same job when they were retired as they did when they were first built, where's the motivation to upgrade them if they are already working just fine with old well tested (probably more robust) hardware?
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It's a simple mix-up (Score:3)
20%? They're probably confusing it with the NSA.
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NSA's budget is $10b. Less than NASA's $17b.
Supposedly, the unpublished "black budget", for NSA/CIA/etc combined, is around $50b. But that's still only 1.5% of the Federal budget.
Easy solution: measure budgets in Iraq War Days (Score:5, Insightful)
A repost of a Google+ post I wrote a year and some change ago [google.com]:
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From today forward, all federal government expenditures will be priced in "Iraq War Days" (IWD) or "Iraq War Years" (IWY). For quick reference:
Source: "United States Federal budget, 2012" and "Mars Science Laboratory" pages on Wikipedia for budgets, google.com/publicdata [google.com] for US population, National Priorities Project via "Cost of War" Wikipedia page for IWD exchange rate.
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Something I didn't note in my original post that's probably worth mentioning in passing: Social Security is huge, "bigger than the National Defense budget" huge, but it's basically self-funding because it's a retirement investment paid for by payroll taxes (modulo population bumps, e.g. the post-WW2 "baby boom"). Person A pays in, person A cashes out, theoretical net cost to taxpayers $0.
Does this work in reverse? (Score:4, Insightful)
If people knew the budget for the military, would they support it less?
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Re:Defund NASA. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are some things that are best developed by government due to cost, risk and lack of a valid business case for profit that drives private enterprise. Of course, it should be handed over to private enterprise as soon as a business case is found.
How long will it be before there is a business reason to go to Mars? I'm thinking a LONG time.. So NASA is a reasonable expense, if you have the money.
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How long will it be before there is a business reason to go to Mars? I'm thinking a LONG time.. So NASA is a reasonable expense, if you have the money.
I'm willing to bet $5 that Elon Musk lands humans on Mars well before NASA do, and for 1% of the cost of a NASA mission.
Sadly, today's NASA can take any amount of money you give them and blow it on pork without achieving anything.
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Sadly, today's NASA can take any amount of money you give them and blow it on pork without achieving anything.
Spirit. Opportunity. Curiosity.
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It should be of note that even within NASA, programs like those you have mentioned are being cut in favor of SLS & the James Webb telescope. Like all government funding, those projects which go under budget and are efficient tend to get even less funding, while wasteful projects tend to get an ever larger share of the funding. Robotic missions have been cut so severely over the last couple of budget cycles that it is simply amazing that any of the researchers are even bothering to stick around.
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Curiosity, listed as a "success" was way over budget by the time it launched. From wikipedia, "Eventually the costs for developing the rover did reach $2.47 billion, that for a rover that initially had been classified as a medium-cost mission with a maximum budget of $650 million, yet NASA still had to ask for an additional $82 million to meet the planned November launch." That percentage overrun is in exactly the same ball park as James Webb and SLS.
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I'm willing to bet $5 that Elon Musk lands humans on Mars well before NASA do, and for 1% of the cost of a NASA mission.
And do what when they get there? Mars is the Atacama Desert without the thick atmosphere, high moisture content, normal gravity and nearness to civilization.
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And do what when they get there?
Film a better remake of Total Recall than the last one?
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Sadly, today's NASA can take any amount of money you give them and blow it on pork without achieving anything.
NASA spends things at the direction of Congress, so blame them. I believe that most of that "pork" is because of Congress-critters wanting a piece of the hog for their districts...
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There's probably a 75% higher probability that someone will die in the process.
For decades, NASA was quite happy with a launch vehicle that killed the crew one time in sixty. That's shouldn't be a hard record to beat.
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There's probably a 75% higher probability that someone will die in the process.
Explorers have been dying since man started exploring.
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Explorers have been dying since man started exploring.
Not on live TV. It's one thing to be somehow mildly aware that something happens and being a participant to that. Ditto for murders, animal slaughtering etc.
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A society that watches waaaay too much reality TV, Cops and America's Funniest Home Videos, and thinks that Jackass is great shouldn't be too upset by the occasional boom.
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Not on live TV.
Don't worry, a Mars mission will be on a 3 to 20 minute delay.
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Show a specific example of that happening.
SLS.
Unless you count building a rocket that's expected to cost billions of dollars to launch every few years, if any payloads are ever funded, as 'achieving something'.
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Don't blame NASA for the way your politicians wheel and deal to direct spending to thier own constituency. NASA budget and goals can not be approved without politicians grabbing thier bit of pork.
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I'm not from the US so I don't have influence over any of it. But to say "NASA's budget" and then complain about them wasting money on pork is a bit odd as the only reason they have a budget is due to the many strings attached wrt to where and how the money is spent.
The majority of the hardware expenditures are via private companies and have been for a very long time. NASA neither has the means or ability to build much of the hardware or lauch facilities. Has NASA ever built a rocket? Instruments sometimes
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Elon Musk would depend on all of NASA's past work, and the NSF, and DARPA, and, etc. etc.
So would NASA. And it would still cost them a hundred times as much, because the program would be designed to funnel money to ex-Shuttle contractors and other troughers, not to put astronauts on Mars.
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That is Zero point five percent or a half of a percent, not five percent. It was only that high (about 4%-5%) during the Apollo program with the race to the Moon, and hasn't even been close to that funding level for decades.
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That's what you get for trying to read the story.
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It actually seems like a small amount of movement considering how far off they were. And that is an ideal situation where the mistake is pointed out clearly. You would need more than just a few percent changing their view of "too much/not enough" to make it into a political issue where the funding would actually change.
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