I’ll put it this way: NASA is on my list of Things To Cut Spending For, but way, way down it.
Especially given the rather sharp cuts in funding NASA has already experienced (as a percentage of overall spending) since 1975 or so.
I do think we need to reduce legal barriers to private space exploration.
Yeah, yeah, a billion here, and a billion there and pretty soon it adds up to real money. Except we’re talking trillions here. And it ain’t exactly like we’re going to take that NASA money and give it to the widows and orphans, what will happen is we take that NASA money and use it to create widows and orphans in Afghanistan.
But hey, it’s worth it, right, because it has a quantifiable metric, how many people end up dead, and the more people end up dead the better.
It is a outflow of ‘art’ with ‘art’ in its broadest usage. Some of our most creative minds create wonders we ‘today’ call science fiction but they are really creating tomorrow inspiring young minds with wonders and the drive to see those ideas become reality (science fiction drives science). Space exploration is that creative gift made real, kill that and you kill the dreams of many children and that of the artists who came up with the ideas that inspired nations.
I’m not saying that disease should be ignored, but that is part of another dream to become reality, they don’t interfere with each other. People are born with a desire of their heart to serve humanity in one capacity or another and that’s where they need to be. Taking a space scientist and forcing him (through space exploration cutbacks) to work on a AIDs cure is not the way as it is not what his heart was for and can’t inspire humanity as well as someone with the compassion for the sick in their heart.
Nope.
The Government gets to spend a lot of money on a lot of different things and you have fuck all to say about it other than your ability to vote for the Government that you want.
Don’t like it? Tough shit. Welcome to the real world.
Sure, but the same thing could be said for just about any item on the Federal budget. I’m not a big social program fan myself- I tend to think that they essentially subsidize chronic poverty, and provide a disincentive to work and be productive. Furthermore, it’s easy for people to game the system.
I’d rather my tax money go to programs where there is tangible progress, rather than touchy-feely BS about helping people.
NASA tends to produce tangible results. There are going to be failures, and because of the space program’s nature, they’re likely to be spectacular. That’s part of the learning curve though.
Then there’s the whole bullshit myth of “The Market” involved too. “The Market” is not some magic hoodoo that automatically decides best. It is short sighted and basically evil in all too many respects.
Let’s turn it around. How about we privatize dealing with the poor and with diseases completely and let the market decide how to deal with these issues without Government interference, eh?
Obviously The Market can come up with some way to make money off the poor, right? There’s got to be some coal mines, mercury refining, chemical and medical testing and downright slavery needs for these people, right? The Market would dictate that people need to pay for their existence, there is no free ride. And if they can’t take care of themselves and Government is so inefficient, then The Market should be able to take care of them and make a profit off them without you and me paying for it, right? Obviously that is for the best. :rolleyes:
AIDS? Well, obviously the best CAPITALIST solution is the same way that we deal with animals in an epidemic. Cull them. Kill everyone with AIDS and all of the people in their immediate families. That’s the MARKET solution, unhindered by Human weaknesses like Morality. After all, like I said, that’s how we deal with such things in our animal markets. Why tolerate this wasteful spending on trying to cure a disease when it can be more readily stomped out by a cull?
Seriously, The Market is not the solution for Space Exploration. There is no real money to be made, just knowledge to be gained, and that knowledge is for the benefit of all Humanity, not just those who can exploit it.
Please note that when Everett Dirksen said that, he was talking in the millions, not billions, of dollars. You can’t hand-wave off the fact that NASA costs this country a lot of money. Just because other things cost more, doesn’t make NASA cost less.
And just in response to the point that kanicbird and some others have alluded to, just how successful is NASA in drawing people into the sciences? We’ve achieved amazing things in the past thirty years, what with the space shuttle, Hubble, those robots on Mars, etc., and the number of Americans studying math and science is in the toilet. This may be the WORST argument of why NASA is needed, because despite relatively stable funding for the last 15 or 20 years, the number of Americans going into the sciences keeps going down.
I guess when you said:
I totally didn’t get what you were saying. Who is supposed to decide what is worthwhile for society to puruse? Governement? Society? The market? In order to have advance and freedom, who should be making the decisions? Also, what does it mean to ‘be a Nazi’ exactly? I’m sorry, but this initial post went completely over my head.
I get to vote for my Government yes, I get to lobby, and tell my representatives how I feel about things. I can also talk to others and promote and debate my views. That’s not “fuck all”, that’s actually pretty significant, considering the types of political systems out there in the world today. I actually DO like it. I’m not sure why the need for the excessive hostility in your post.
There was no, or not much, hostilty intended. Just the facts. We vote for our Government. That Goverment represents all of us, all of our interests. It decides how our collective taxes are raised and spent. Neither you nor I get to say “I don’t want you spending my (relatively inconsequential individual tax) dollars on X”.
Honestly, I get really annoyed by people who cry about how they don’t want their tax dollars spent on any one particular thing. It really is “tough luck, that’s not how it works”. Likewise I have a rather dim view of “Let’s let the market decide”, as this is is just as much of a canard as the idea that we should be able to decide how our individual tax dollars are spent.
I don’t think it’s true that NASA is always dinged in arguments like this. I think the pecking order for dings goes something like:
IIRC the funding for NASA is about the same size as funding for foreign aid which is getting an awful lot of attention at the moment.
We are clearly not gonna bring the budget under control unless we tackle the big three - defense, social security and health (and raise taxes) - but we are also going to need to take a hard look at some of the other things that we spend public money on and decide if we are getting appropriate returns.
In the 50s, 60s and 70s we got many of the benefits enumerated in this thread - inspiring young scientists, sticking it to the soviets, nation prestige. I don’t think we get those benefits to the same extent any more and we should re-evaluate our spending priorities based on that.
I happen to be interested in space exploration and follow it quite closely but, if I am honest with myself, investing in space exploration has about the same benefit to society as spending on arts programs. An elite few who are interested in it get a lot of benefit and there is a little trickle down benefit to aspiring elites of the future.
I don’t have any illusion that we would spend the money we save on something more important. Not spending it at all would be good enough for me.
It’s obvious from the discussions around Simpson-Bowles that both sides are going to have to slaughter some sacred cows to make progress on the deficit. It’s equally obvious that very few people are willing to make that kind of commitment.
Slaughtering a big, very sacred cow like NASA would make a significant contribution to the process, more symbolic than financial, and it would get people to sit up and take notice.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes that these capabilities were a natural result of existing needs. In fact, many innovations develop organically from pure research or application in one area, and then some entrepreneurial-minded individual recognizes a benefit in applying it in another area. No one working at Betchley Park during WWII would have even conceived of personal portable communication devices using digital logic and multiplexing schemes to encode and decode voice signals for transmission across continents, but it is now a multi-billion dollar industry. Now, it is true that many alleged spin-offs that are cited as benefits of the space program are either ancillary or can be better attributed to other sources; in particular, research and development for military applications, which has directly provided funding and impetus for the development of many novel materials, energetic substances, digital and satellite communications, remote and space observation, turbine engine development for aerospace applications, space launch capabilities, large scale software development and systems engineering methodology, and of course, digital computing and networking. Without the non-profit oriented military-oriented research as a funding source and impetus, it is unlikely that much of this would have been developed as quickly or as completely, as the billions spent going down blind corridors of research in order to find workable technologies just isn’t sustainable by a market-driven model of technology development.
The other misapprehension of the o.p. is that “poverty, hunger, cancer, AIDS, and a lack of education in many countries, etc,” are all problems that stem from a lack of scarce funding. Poverty and hunger, for instance, are a result of political gamesmanship, inequality in socioeconomic opportunities, and ironically of the Green Revolution which allowed for higher caloric yields, supporting population growth. Medical research for cancers, AIDS, and other infectious and chronic diseases is hardly lacking in funding, and such fields require fundamental technical breakthroughs in research that are not proportional to funding levels. The notion that it is an either/or dichotomy is a fallacy often used to argue against not only the space program but pure research in general, even though pure research has resulted in nearly every major scientific and technical innovation since the beginning of the 20th Century. Serendipitous discovery or application from direct research is a rarity; most innovations start as someone noodling in a lab with a novel principle or concept, and are later recognized to have broad and profitable application (often previously unconsidered) in the market sphere.
This isn’t to say that the space program, and in particular manned space exploration which takes up the bulk of the budget, doesn’t have a lot of waste. There is no question that the Space Transportation System (Shuttle) and the International Space Station has provided very little even in terms of basic scientific research (based upon the dearth of papers or other developments issuing from STS- and ISS-related programs). I would agree that there is little obvious benefit, either in profit, technology development, and especially scientific research, from proposals for a Lunar base or manned Mars mission. There is clearly a much greater scientific return in value from unmanned exploration, not the least of which because you aren’t spending 99 cents of every dollar just trying to keep a bag of proteinaceous water from freezing, boiling, being irradiated, or rupturing. And many of those efforts are only just starting to yield benefits, such as climate observation. But ultimately, space research may open up the wealth of natural resources available in space to provide a true post-scarcity economy, or allow us to protect the planet from a natural hazard such as a catastrophic meteor impact, which will repay all costs spent from the dawn of space research in spades.
This betrays a gross misunderstanding of how NASA operates and to whose benefit. Although NASA sometimes provides space and sounding rocket launch services (specifically processing and launch facilities, ranges and range support, launch vehicle acquisition, or in the case of the STS prior to the mid-'Nineties, actual receipt to orbit for military payloads) for the USAF and very occasionally the USN, it does so on a re-reimbursable basis. Prior to the legalization of commercialization of space, it also often procured space launch vehicles from the air force, especially in the case of surplus Titan and Atlas vehicles, and still does in the case of sounding rockets based upon former ICBM assets.
However, the relationship between NASA and the military is often a very contentious one; the air force balks at the stringent requirements that NASA demands on their ranges (which exceed normal RCC requirements in many ways) and the costs of operating on those ranges. NASA, on the other hand, resists having outside entities perform top tier systems engineering and program management on “their” vehicles and systems. Back when the USAF was directed to deprecate their own internally developed expendable vehicles based upon Atlas, Titan, and Thor/Delta in order to pump up STS launch rates in an attempt to make that system appear to be competitive, there was much friction between the two organizations, specifically due to the limitations of the STS payload bay size and difficulty handling liquid propellant upper stages, and the cross range requirements that the air force imposed upon the Orbiter design in order to be useful for the intended polar orbit launch-and-return missions. The result was a highly compromised design that was not as capable as the heavy lift Titan and Atlas derivatives, a massive amount of money refurbishing SLC-6 at VAFB to support STS operations, a new design and qual program for a problematic fiber wound composite solid rocket booster to increase payload mass to polar orbit, and a vehicle that ended up costing more per pound to orbit than the most expensive Titan launches despite its alleged re-usability.
If one wants to apply a criticism of venality toward NASA, it should be directed as systems like STS that were designed in Congressional committee to distribute funds to every important Congressional district (i.e. those supporting Congresspeople on the pertinent funding sub-committees) rather than obtain the best technical capability and optimize performance and cost.
Stranger
Okay, I can agree with this. Individuals should probably have no say towards what our government (that is supposed to represent ALL of society) spends their tax dollars on. Our government should decide based on what’s best for everyone.
I also agree that the market mainly serves our short-term interest, and nothing beyond a handful of years into the future, let alone future generations. I didn’t mean to present that idea in a serious manner.
I sure am glad **Stranger **came in and mentioned satellites. How can we seriously dismiss the value of space to the human species, right now at this very moment?
Manned space exploration? We don’t have a manned space program right now. You’re thinking of Russia. We pay them to take us to space.
Thank you Stranger On A Train for that reply. (And thanks to everyone else for their input!) I can say that I mostly agree with you.
As others have said, pure science research can find things that are invaluable later on, even in the short term, and therefore funding should always be maintained, though reasonably moderated.
Just a few points:
It would seem others have misunderstood what I meant by this as well. I don’t mean that poverty/hunger is a result of a general lack of social funds, and could be alleviated by throwing money at it. I was referring to using money, to RESEARCH poverty and hunger and it’s causes, in order to better understand it, and find a cure.
If I were to fund pure science, it would be in the field of health/medicine, because I believe that the potential findings would be some of the most relevant. This stance, however, is purely personal opinion, and I accept it as such.
I can agree. NASA has done many useful things, and satellite techonology is probably the best one I can think of. The fact that satellites are (or are mostly) supported by the market, is proof. I also believe that having vehicles ready to defend our planet in case of a meteor “attack” is also reasonable. As long as some of their more outlandish or inefficient plans are moderated, I’m okay with all of this… mainly manned flight to Mars, for example.
As for military and NASA cooperation, I was more referring to the joint usability of their technologies. Many of the the discoveries and engineering innovations that were made by funding NASA, are used by the military, and vice versa.
Thanks again to everyone for their input - though I’ll be back to read some more if people are willing to post more info!
Don’t forget, there are other countries doing space exploration and if NASA is cut, the US will lose out on any benefits they could have gotten from doing space exploration and fall behind other countries. It’s also a prestige thing in that we need to do it to keep up with and ahead of other countries.
From the list:
“GOLF BALL AERODYNAMICS - A recently designed golf ball, which has 500 dimples arranged in a pattern of 60 spherical triangles, employs NASA aerodynamics technology to create a more symmetrical ball surface, sustaining initial velocity longer and producing a more stable ball flight for better accuracy and distance.”
This alone certainly justifies the money spent on NASA research. 
I know this is a bit of a hijack, but this myth needs a bit of debunking. See here. It is just not true. There are more students going into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields than there are jobs for them. In fact,
The issue is that since the cold war days they don’t get the lion’s share of the very best and the brightest all to themselves. Presumably the business world has pulled many off those paths with promises of far greater recompense.
Back to the op - NASA has been very budget sensitive and has been doing much more science with much less money. When the decision is made to fund one mission it means other mission or missions don’t get funded. As put in this Science article in 2008:
NASA’s budget has been hovering at about 0.6% of the Federal budget for several years now, which is as low as its been since 1960.
Space research happened because there was a need for it and those things were developed because of a need in space research. Later, more mundane applications for the same solutions were hit upon. Without a pressing need for them, how long would it have been until someone thought of that area to do some R&D? I’d rather have the space research and enjoy the occasional side benefit than not have it at all. Plus, I personally find space exploration a worthy goal in and of itself.
I mean, there was no need for Columbus to set sail westward. Perhaps the money spent on his expedition(s) could have been better spent at home. But then Spain would never have had all that gold, or tobacco, or coffee, etc.
I readily admit that our universities are full of science students, I am simply under the impression that there are more and more foreign students attending American universities.
Nothing is wrong with that, our universities should be open to foreign students – I’m just not seeing in that cite evidence of high interest among American students for studying math, science and engineering. Perhaps our space program is a great recruiting tool to get non-Americans to study the sciences?
Social spending is important because you need to reduce the ill effects of existing poverty. But ultimately, the only long term solution to poverty is to create more wealth. And space exploration is an area which there is a reasonable expectation that an investment of money will create new wealth.