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NASA programs typically span multiple decades and run in the billions of dollars, The political pendulum sways from one side to the other side every 4-8 years,

• mikeash 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure the big reason Apollo was successful was that they had enough support to get the job done within that 8-year period. And, no surprise, Nixon's election heralded the end, although inertia kept it moving for a few years.
  • ApolloFortyNine 9y ago
    The Soviet Union pretty much quitting a year or so after the US landed on the moon is what did it.
  • gozur88 9y ago
    But the same people were in Congress, pretty much. The problem is the public lost interest in the moon. It's a big dusty rock with nothing much to recommend the billions we were spending to go there.
• Thaxll 9y ago
  They should cut the defence budget. 611B/year it's a joke.
  • Tepix 9y ago
    Seriously! "The U.S. military budget is higher than the nine other biggest military budgets in the world combined." It's insane. Btw for 2017 it's 773.5 billion USD.
    • maze-le 9y ago
      To get an idea of whan a mind-bogling number that is: Its about the amount of the GDP of the Netherlands. The whole economic output of a 1. World country with 17M inhabitants is slightly smaller than this budget. [0]: http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GDP.pdf http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GDP.pdf
  • yellowapple 9y ago
    Slash it in half, give the slashed half to NASA. Then we can have ourselves a Pluto colony.
    • awalton 9y ago
      Meanwhile people are still dying for lack of access to healthcare, infrastructure is failing, education is remaining poor... I agree with the slash the defense budget part, but NASA doesn't need 300B/y (and would have a hard time spending it even). They need ~30B/y (i.e. double their existing outlay) to do SLS and continue existing operations, and it needs to be in a lockbox of some kind such that future political swings require a huge amount of horsepower to disrupt it (like a congressional super majority vote).
      • maxxxxx 9y ago
        Yes, they just need steady funding and a process that ensures that the money is spent on worthwhile stuff. After plans have been vetted then the politicians can come in and distribute the money to their districts.
      • julius_set 9y ago
        Money spent on NASA has provided significant breakthroughs in science that includes the internet, MRIs, ear thermometers, automatic insulin pumps, implantable heart defibrillators, fiber optics, light emitting diodes for brain cancer surgery, programmable cataracts, long distance telescopes, solar energy, artificial limbs, memory foam, shoe insoles, smoke detectors, water filters, enriched food, and tons of software. Smoke alarms alone have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
        • fmblwntr 9y ago
          "NASA did not invent the smoke detector. NASA's connection to the modern smoke detector is that it made one with adjustable sensitivity as part of the Skylab project. The device was made commercially available by Honeywell. The consumer could use it to avoid "nuisance" alarms while cooking. Like the quartz clock, this device is no longer available. " https://www.nasa.gov/offices/ipp/home/mythbuster/myth_barcodes.html https://www.nasa.gov/offices/ipp/home/mythbuster/myth_barcod... edit: actually pretty much none of the things you listed were invented by NASA, several predate its existence.
  • dTal 9y ago
    The funny thing is, with the kind of space presence that kind of money buys you (we're talking Clarke-style rotating space stations here), nobody would dare fuck with you. You don't need an official space weapons program to be able to drop heavy things from orbit. Nor do you need a fancy anti-satellite ballistics system when you can have one of your many astronauts sidle over and hit it with a hammer.
    • Bartweiss 9y ago
      I wonder if someone could sell Trump on this? After his rumblings about altering Geneva and NATO treaties, I'll bet someone could convince him to ignore the Outer Space Treaty and throw NASA a 10x budget increase.
    • dfox 9y ago
      Droping stuff from orbit is cool scifi weapon system, but in practice it is surprisingly hard to do (you cannot just drop stuff, you have to impart it with some deltav to cancel out orbital velocity of the station) and inefficient (you have to get the stuff up there, which when you ignore atmosferic drag requires same amount energy as the projectile would release on impact)
      • gozur88 9y ago
        This. Land-based missiles are far cheaper and more effective.
        • dfox 9y ago
          Recently I've seen this quote: "Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." - Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC And exactly this thing seems to be the major problem with essentially every space-related weapons platform other than ICBMs. Simply almost every such proposed system uses some expendable ammunition that is significantly more expensive to deploy or even just manufacture than what it is supposed to destroy.
          • 9y ago
• dolson 9y ago
  The manned spaceflight portion of NASA doesn't really get anything done.
• maxxxxx 9y ago
  The area where they get things done is unmanned spaceflight. Politicians don't care for that so the people at NASA can just do their work without meddling. I don't think they have got anything interesting done in manned spaceflight lately.