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Does SpaceX have any contracts that aren't for the U.S. government? Aren't most of their aeronautical engineers former NASA employees? I'm sorry to get stuck

Does SpaceX have any contracts that aren't for the U.S. government? Aren't most of their aeronautical engineers former NASA employees? I'm sorry to get stuck on the Elon Musk side comment, but NASA is still doing really important stuff such as the Mars rover, comet landing, etc. Defense R&D spending is way higher but nondefense spending is still keeping up with inflation [1]. There are some agencies who have had reduced budgets, such as National Institutes of Health, while DoE and NSF have enjoyed increased budgets. [2] Overall I find your post hyperbolic and not consistent with the stats and figures. I'm assuming that your university's research was defunded and that's why you have adopted this world view. It's consistent with your experience but I believe that it doesn't represent funding in general. [1] http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/DefNon_1.jpg http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/DefNon_1.jpg [2] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=5703 http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=5703

varelse 11y ago
I'd throw stupid money at NASA any day, just maybe not so much for manned exploration until it's cost-effective. We both want more space probes I suspect. But from the above articles, I see two trends. From (1) Nonmilitary science funding has been effectively flat for a decade while military research was increasing annually roughly until a year or so into the Obama administration. From (2) and its responses, the money itself is being misallocated to the top (just like everywhere else) and also into a metastasizing tumor of administrators: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-11-21/the-troubling-dean-to-professor-ratio http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-11-21/the-troublin... And then there are articles like this: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/report/2014/03/25/86369/erosion-of-funding-for-the-national-institutes-of-health-threatens-u-s-leadership-in-biomedical-research/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/report/2014/... http://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/nsffundhist_files/frame.htm http://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/nsffundhist_files/frame.htm which imply the NSF is relatively OK but that the NIH is increasingly underfunded relative to GDP, no? It's not like we've cracked mortality, figured out our own minds, or even cured a whole bunch of nasty diseases yet.

varelse 11y ago

I'd throw stupid money at NASA any day, just maybe not so much for manned exploration until it's cost-effective. We both want more space probes I suspect. But from the above articles, I see two trends. From (1) Nonmilitary science funding has been effectively flat for a decade while military research was increasing annually roughly until a year or so into the Obama administration. From (2) and its responses, the money itself is being misallocated to the top (just like everywhere else) and also into a metastasizing tumor of administrators: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-11-21/the-troubling-dean-to-professor-ratio http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-11-21/the-troublin... And then there are articles like this: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/report/2014/03/25/86369/erosion-of-funding-for-the-national-institutes-of-health-threatens-u-s-leadership-in-biomedical-research/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/report/2014/... http://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/nsffundhist_files/frame.htm http://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/nsffundhist_files/frame.htm which imply the NSF is relatively OK but that the NIH is increasingly underfunded relative to GDP, no? It's not like we've cracked mortality, figured out our own minds, or even cured a whole bunch of nasty diseases yet.