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I seriously doubt the lack of space travel is because we spend money on the military, if anything it might be the only reason development is still being done. S
by Shivetya 12y ago
I seriously doubt the lack of space travel is because we spend money on the military, if anything it might be the only reason development is still being done. Social programs are where the money is truly going, in the US alone there are over two thousand assistance programs at the Federal level.
Space doesn't get money because space doesn't get votes. Military accounts for a large portion of the science of similar hardware because its development and deployment can be spread around and people can relate to it easier.
Still giving the every day person a choice, go to the moon, protect us from the bogeyman, build schools, or free prescription drugs, I know pretty much the order it will go in.
- BugBrother 12y agoThe amount of money involved is not really the problem. I've seen arguments from the end of the 80s (sci.space.tech, Henry Spencer et al) that if the launch costs went down, the costs of building hardware would go down. From that, there should be elastic demands when e.g. universities can send their own probes. They also discussed how to do it (Big dumb booster etc). The point was, not that much more money would be needed for this (just check the really expensive launcher being developed by NASA now!). To lower launch costs is the key and it might be rocket science but, well, not rocket science. The reason this haven't happened until Space X seems to be mainly NASA's need to protect the shuttle (which was really, really expensive) and oligopolies in the launch business for military contracts. So maybe not the military, but the military contractors are involved.