>No offense but, you sound like an arrogant high school student >who’s pissed off about his science final.
no offense taken but, methinks there are a lot of overpaid government-sponsored geeks in this thread
>50 years ago when the laser was invented, nobody thought it >had a useful purpose. If you find something new, someone will >find a use for it.
Sure, and no one knew how useful Riemann spaces would be, or Galois groups, but that doesn’t justify circular research: lets study the effects of weightlessness so we can then stay in space longer to study the effects of weightlessness. If NASA’s budget was allocated to unmanned vs manned space flight, or even solid state physics, I think we’d have more toys and gadgets than we do now.
The current thread about going to Mars has some points relevant to this debate.
To claim that the world gets nothing out of the space program, is absurd. Considering the benefits the world gets from the space program, the amount we’re spending on it is ridicuously low.
yes. Humans don’t add much to the signal extraction, but cost many more times. Thus you get the banal ‘high school teacher’ emphasis, which is supposed to be essential for making it interesting to kids. News flash: good science is done by people sitting in little rooms, analyzing data and reading papers. Even data gathering is much less sexy than the Indiana Jones caricature. If a kid only gets turned on to science by the mistaken impression that it has a large ‘hands on’ component, they will never last through a first-year college physics course anyway. And if this impression is deemed necessary to bring science to the masses (who would otherwise be bored), our future patrons will continue to fund skewed priorities.
Humans haven’t had a chance to really add to the on-site signal in the first place. The Mars Pathfinder robot looked at rocks within a what, 10 ft radius? Thank god there was nothing interesting or odd at 11 ft, or sparkly up on the hill.
Look, most people have only the foggiest understanding of what “Science” is, and for most high school kids the idea of sitting down and pouring over mountains of experimental results is likely next to root canal on their “things I must do before I die” list. Trying to make space sciences more human is simply an attempt to make it more relevant to their lives. That it can possibly keep the agency funded doesn’t hurt either.
Unless, of course, you are getting older. For some odd, unknown reason, the loss of bone mass due to weightlessness mimics the loss of bone mass due to growing older.
With the average population of the United States (sorry, no data on other countries) getting older, I think this is important research. Is NASA the only one researching this? No, but they are the only ones who can give researchers other data points besides studying the elderly.
Until the dots are connected and this puzzle is solved, we will not know if manned space flight contributed to the answer. That is, unfortunately, the nature of research.
Unmanned probes do little more than take splended close-up pictures of planets. They are NOT capable of monitoring and conducting experiments into bacterial growth or such.
Further, as someone else pointed out, unmanned probes are utterly incapable of repairing or upgrading the Hubble.
< hijack >
You put it in your ear. As it consumes mild amounts of your brain-wave energy, it excretes a brain-wave-matrix that modifies your brain’s decoding of any language you are hearing and enables you to understand absolutely any language spoken to you.
This is such a mindbogglingly useful creature that could not possibly have evolved by chance that pundits have used it as a proof of the nonexistence of God.
Unmanned probes do much more than “take splended close-up pictures of planets.”
I am all for manned space missions, but I think you are selling the probes a little short. Past, current, and future probes have done or will do such things as planetary mapping, atmospheric study, soil analysis, solar observations, comet and interstellar dust collection and more. (Bad Astronomer, help! )
This site , while a few years old, lists quite a few probes with links to their missions.
If you are referring to private consultants under government contracts, you are probably correct.
However, if you are referring to government employees, you are way off base. The pay disparities between government employees and private individuals is so great in some fields Congress created special salary rates in order to attract, let alone retain government employees.
You can view these Congressionally authorized special pay rates on your own. While Congress created these pay rates, the actual figures are still below comparable pay rates in the private sector. Bush has made the disparity even worse.
Regarding tech advances from the space program, most of these spinoffs take years to filter through industry to the consumer, and by then the consumer is unlikely to know or care where the new tech came from, much less appreciate NASA for it.
That doesn’t mean it’s not an important advance, just that people tend to say “This works, it’s good, who cares who invented it.”
FTR, for the last 25 or so years, NASA’s budget has been around one percent (or less) of the entire federal budget.
Then again, each manned mission to repair or upgrade the Hubble costs roughly 400 million dollars. We could practically build and launch a whole 'nother space telescope for that amount.
One thing to remember is that the space program is an almost trivial cost to the federal government.
NASA’s budget is about 14.5 billion dollars. I believe less than half of that goes towards manned spaceflight. The rest goes towards aeronautical research, education, administration, and a number of other things NASA does.
This, by the way, is only slightly more than the United States gives to the rest of the world in economic support.
Now compare that with the rest of the government. There are eight government agencies that receive more funding than NASA, and six that get funding in the same range. The military is going to spend 350 billion this year. The Department of Housing and Urban Development spends twice what NASA does. Health and Human Services spends almost four times as much. Hell, even farm ‘Safety Net’ funding has 1/3 the funding of NASA.
Now think about what NASA has meant to the United States. How much of the U.S.'s technological lead in the world is due to the inspirational effect the space program had on children? How much of America’s self-image built around the space program? How much value is it to the United States of having the ability to launch rockets into space whenever the need should arise?
Now ask if all that NASA has brought the U.S. and continues to bring is worth $43/year. Because that’s all that Americans pay for it. You pay just about that much for a magazine subscription.
NASA is one of the few bargains in government. Of all the agencies soaking up billions of dollars, NASA has maintained a reputation for incredible professionalism and brilliance. It is the shining pearl of the government. It’s the LAST agency that should get a funding cut.
I dunno. Hubble originally cost 1.5 billion to plan, build, and launch (and has cost almost 4 billion to date).
Ever upgrade your computer? The cost is often almost as much as just buying a new computer. Know why? Because, for all intents and purposes, after the upgrade it IS a new computer.
A major purpose of NASA is to subsidize the American aerospace industry by paying them to develop new technologies. Once the technology is developed and tested on a NASA mission, it can be applied to commercial aerospace applications. It also insures that there is a stable pool of skilled engineers and technitians in the country. Without government contracts, companies may shy away from high-cost high-risk development projects and as a result, money will flow to foreign aerospace companies which are subsidized by their governments. This alone is a huge benefit to the country as a whole.
If in a $350 Billion military budget, just 4% of it were “wasted” (in $2,000 staplers, dud bombs, programs running just to keep a Congressman’s pet project alive, or unauthorized use of DoD credit cards to pay for access to naughty websites) , that would be 14 billion, what has been mentioned as the NASA budget.
While I support most of our efforts to explore space, I think the International Space Station (ISS) is largely a waste of resources. It’s a program without any scientific mission.
At least one well-respected physicist, Dr. Robert Park, has referred to the ISS as “flag-pole sitting.” He posts a weekly column here; searching through the archives of his stuff can be addictive.
Oh please, Park’s claims that the US has conspired to trick the Chinese into a space race so that they’ll go bankrupt! :rolleyes: The space program didn’t bankrupt the US back in the 1960s, didn’t bankrupt the Soviet Union, and it’s not going to bankrupt the Chinese. Cite.
originally posted by Sam Stone
One thing to remember is that the space program is an almost trivial cost to the federal government.
The argument that since it’s only 1% of total spending it’s inexpensive is not very cogent: you could justify any spending with that criteria. I think the scientific journal reference per dollar is lower for manned space flight than most alternative scientific expenditures.
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