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NASA requested $1.4B in increase for comparison, Military budget increased from $586B in 2015 to $713B in 2019
by ryder9 7y ago
NASA requested $1.4B in increase
for comparison, Military budget increased from $586B in 2015 to $713B in 2019
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoMaybe they can hitch a ride on that ridiculous new "Space Force"?
- hsnewman 7y agoEven better, we need to build a wall on the moon.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoWhat I'm hearing is if Mexico could land a man on the moon the US would be there tomorrow.
- misterprime 7y agoSpace Force may have a funny name, but with the new threat of predator satellites it seems that orbit may be a legit theater of battle.
- craftyguy 7y agoIf anything, creating a 'space force' will ratchet up the number of 'predatory' satelites. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy..
- misterprime 7y agoHow do you suggest avoiding it? Let other countries take that space while the US holds their head high with the moral high ground? That's not a winning strat IMO.
- kazagistar 7y agoWho cares? Any country that has space war abilities is a country that fighting a war against would nearly end humanity regardless.
- gmueckl 7y agoThe problem is the aggressive language implied in terms like "space force" rather than the capabilities involved. Develop them in secret, store/shelve them until they are truly needed (hopefully never) and never talk about them because that would give others bad ideas.
- phil248 7y agoBy negotiating arms control treaties.
- craftyguy 7y agoAnd making it very difficult for incompetent heads of state to arbitrarily pull out of them.
- jryle70 7y agoI'm all for this, but says if Burkina Faso today demands the US to enter agreement not to weaponize the space, do you think the US would feel the need to respond? how about after Burkina Faso has successfully demonstrated its satellite shoot-down capability?
- craftyguy 7y agoWhy must a country possess the capability to shoot down satellites in order to demand that other countries stop doing it? If Burkina Faso pays ESA to put something in space for them, they probably don't want some hot-shot US commander in chief waking up on the wrong side of twitter and deciding to blast it out of orbit. That seems like a perfectly reasonable excuse to demand others not use any capabilities they possess for shooting down satellites, even if Burkina Faso does not possess the ability.
- booleandilemma 7y agoAnd why is it ridiculous exactly? Where do you think the next frontier is? Do you think that humanity, which has warred with itself for its entire existence, is going to stop warring with itself when it’s living in space? If so, I have a wall to sell you. Do you not want the US to have a military presence up there? Do you want the US to take a backseat while China and Russia build out their own military capabilities in space? You’re like a person in the 1400s laughing at a country for building a navy.
- blackguardx 7y agoThe Air Force already does the job that the Space Force is supposed to do. Creating another military branch would duplicate a lot of administrative functions and not be very cost effective, IMHO.
- taftster 7y ago> "If established, it would be organized as a military service branch within the Department of the Air Force, one of the three military departments within the Department of Defense." [1] So yes, any new military service branch is going to have overhead. But the Air Force already provides the structure and overhead for the space initiatives The Space Force is more about formalizing (and potentially funding) this branch of the AF separately from the main budget of the AF. There will still be a little additional overhead, but not really like you're implying. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force
- Rebelgecko 7y agoAnother perspective— that "little bit of overhead" for starting up the Space Force is almost as large as NASA's annual budget. At least that's if you believe the budget numbers from Heather Wilson (outgoing secretary of the Air Force). Unfortunately, I doubt that standing up a new military service is something that the government would actually be able to accomplish without going over budget.
- 7y ago
- georgeecollins 7y agoOr they just asked for (and presumably will get) an additional $15 B of subsidies for farmers to compensate for the trade war. Nothing against farmers, but if it is so easy to do that, why not fund NASA a bit?
- ianai 7y agoThey could fund nasa at DOD levels and not risk hyper inflation nor any other ills. They could probably be coaxed into helping employ more rural communities too. (Ref: modern monetary theory)
- 2Ccltvcm 7y agoAmerica should reduce corn subsidies. Corn works its way into the American food ecosystem in many ways to the detriment of the Americans' health. It is highly inflammatory by itself and it is processed into compounds which also modulate inflammation in other ways. See high fructose corn syrup and its inflammatory pathways. Processed corn products are a multi pronged attack on Americans' health. End corn subsidies.
- sathackr 7y ago[citation needed] Not that I dispute what you say, but I don't buy it hook-line-and-sinker.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ajross 7y agoI'm not aware of anything specific to HFCS and inflammation that doesn't apply to any other fructose source. It's cheap sugar. Sugar is bad for you.
- behringer 7y agoI think that's the point. By ending corn subsidies, we'd raise the price of sugar.
- broahmed 7y agoGreat way to visualize the size of the military budget in comparison to other programs: https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016 https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016 Looks like the latest year they have for 2016, but still useful.
- api 7y agoFor the current military budget we could probably build O'Neill cylinders in Lunar orbit and start a terraforming project on Mars. (Of course don't get me started about what we could do on Earth for this money.) We are just very clever tool using animals, not yet a truly intelligent species. I don't think we'll truly be "intelligent" until our intelligence is able to overcome both our evolutionary legacy and game theoretic effects that emerge in our economies and societies. A true intelligence would be the master of these things. We are slaves to them.
- magduf 7y agoIf we had the technology to build O'Neill cylinders, I can't imagine why we'd want to bother terraforming Mars. Mars is pretty crappy by comparison: the gravity is too low, it's cold and kinda far from the Sun (and from Earth, compared to Lunar orbit), and it's questionable what kind of resources are there which we don't have easier access to on the Moon or nearby asteroids. Most of the interest in it just seems to be nothing more than nostalgia for planet-based living. Also, I think you'd want to build your O'Neill cylinders in one of the Langrangian positions between Earth and Moon, not Lunar orbit. A truly intelligent species would actually be working substantively on these projects, instead of merely talking about them.
- vkou 7y agoA truly intelligent species would be working on not killing its own planet, instead of figuring out space habitation. The ROI on the former is many orders of magnitude better.
- elsonrodriguez 7y agoA truly intelligent species would be doing both. Also an extinction level event happening on this planet is a certainty, so it's actually an infinite order of magnitude better to figure out how to live in space than to only focus on saving the earth. But again, a truly intelligent species would do both.
- 7y ago
- sambull 7y agoI feel really shitty that we're watching our future generations get outright robbed of living a good life.
- gremlinsinc 7y agotrue, but this is from a split moment in time when we have a dictator-wannabe as president, and an out of touch senate. If a democratic president did half the stuff Trump did democrats would be coming at him w/ a pitch fork and lead the impeachment proceedings, but the GOP rather have a corrupt leader because they're all corrupt and that's just how it works in D.C. in their brain. This is why we need senate term limits, hard to get corrupted by D.C. if you only can serve 8 years. New blood will bring change with it. Back to my point of this being a split moment in time, I honestly believe that pain is coming in the way of automation, loss of jobs, water wars, along with that will come out the pitchforks aimed at D.C. if politicians don't start making life better for everyone instead of enriching themselves. So mark my words, times they are achanging, equality will come back or there'll be a French-style revolution or two before it does.
- clarkmoody 7y agoYou might want to read a little history of the presidents for real examples of dictator-like behavior, from Democrats and Republicans.
- gremlinsinc 7y agoIdealizing Duterte, Kim Jong Un, and the leaders of Russia and Saudia Arabia and creating concentration camps for kids while shitting all over our friendly democratic leaders from UK, France, Canada seems like a good start at becoming a dicator. What makes other presidents more dictatorial, I'd like to know.
- grayed-down 7y agoThat's one view through the leftist lens, but at least you ended your comment with an appropriate question.
- tptacek 7y agoNo, it's closer to $70B, over the 9-year lifetime of the Artemis project. The "$1.6B" this article talks about was a "down payment".
- tjpnz 7y agoNASA got a 1.6 billion USD increase. Around the same time it was announced that Wellington City (the third largest city in New Zealand, also the capital) had been given the equivalent of 4.5 billion USD for a revamped public transportation system. As far as public spending goes the two couldn't be more different. Yet it really did put into perspective the futility of NASA's situation, at least for me.
- InternetUser 7y agoWell, the Military will soon include the Space Force[0][1], so let's see how the funding of space-related activity goes in the next couple years. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force [1] https://www.military.com/space-force https://www.military.com/space-force
- anthuman 7y agoI suspect more and more funding will go to the Space Force and less and less will go to NASA. Looking at the budgets, it's clear that the military has far more pull in washington than NASA. Seems like whatever the military wants, it gets. While NASA has to beg, plead and grovel for every crumb. And if SpaceX, Blue Origin and the private sector become viable players in space, then NASA might be shut down or absorbed into Space Force. With China, EU, Japan, India, etc getting involved in space exploration, it's inevitable that space is going to be a new frontier of militarization and privatization. Space Force and the private sector are natural players in this new arena. Not sure where NASA fits in this picture.
- thowaway9883 7y agoThe majority of NASA's missions are instrument-driven science missions designed to answer questions about space (ex: JWST). Neither SpaceX or Blue origin has displayed serious interest in replacing this function of NASA. They are mainly engineering organizations, and while they are effective at doing what they do, they are organizationally not pursuing models that research fundamental astrophysics, heliophysics, or earth science.
- rayiner 7y agoThe military budget buys you global dominance and never having to bend domestic policy to account for what anyone else thinks. What has NASA bought us? I think space is cool. I have a degree in aerospace engineering because of that. But if you look at space exploration in terms of ROI it has sucked.
- jraines 7y agohttps://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/infographic.view.php?id=11358 https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/infographic.view.php?i...
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoBetter question: what WILL it buy us? Things like asteroid mining, colonization. Worth trillions. No, we don't have a convenient number for what asteroid mining is worth - a better unit would be 'civilizations'? It even could bring space dominance if that's important.
- balabaster 7y ago> What has NASA bought us? I'll leave this here: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html Highlights - - Water purification - Land mine removal - Freeze drying technology - Fire resistant reinforcement - Solar power - Satellite phones - GPS All having significant military applications, as well as public benefit.
- Rebelgecko 7y agoGPS is kind of a stretch
- cr0sh 7y agoI'd also argue SMT technology; while things were moving in that direction before then, it seems like the Apollo program really kicked it in high gear with the need for the compact AGC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer I'd have to think that SMT was available prior to the AGC development, but I don't think it was as widely used commercially (maybe more for the military and avionics?).
- simonsarris 7y agoYour "for comparison" figures do not seem true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#/media/File:Defense_spending.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
- siffland 7y agoYeah but Russia hitting us with hypersonic weapons and China sabotaging us with electronic warfare or North Korea nuking us is a far greater possiblity that may occur than aliens invading. That is why our money is pumped there. But at least Will Smith is still around in case the aliens invade, so i feel safer......
- mLuby 7y agoCome on, you know that "potential damage to US * likelihood of occurring" is not how funds get allocated. If that were true, they'd have ended our dependence on many foreign markets (especially oil), solved global warming (or at least built a great seawall), and headed off a bunch of social issues that threaten the stability and cohesion of the US. Follow the money.