I’ve been on both sides but quite honestly space exploration has a notable credibility problem among some who aren’t in fact guilty of “woeful pig-headery…”

It’s an incredibly expensive outworking of a somewhat flawed philosophy we’ve had dumped on us for many decades now. Fund much of it yourselves, space scientists, and many on planet earth will wish you well, along with many more spin-offs, but please… put your hands in our pockets only when it’s actually directly beneficial.

Regards

http://slashedcanvas.info/essays/essays11.htm

Yes, sadly, it seems you must.

We are not “setting fire” to money in Iraq. We are defending this nation, a nation that many of us feel is worth defending, even if you don’t.

The military is maintaining thousands of troops in Iraq and protecting millions of Americans at home. American servicemen and women fight and die in places like Iraq so that you can have the freedom to publish “Bad Astronomy” and badmouth the military.

If you want to make inane comparisons between military budgets and NASA budgets, at least get your numbers right. How many astronauts is NASA maintaining on the Space Station? How many Americans does it protect? How much does the US spend per astronaut? How much per soldier? How many terrorists has the military killed this year? How many has NASA killed?

If you can’t answer those questions, your comparison doesn’t hold water. Instead of just trashing the military out of ideological bias, why don’t you tell us what your agency is doing that’s worth $16 billion? If you can’t do that, you don’t deserve the money, no matter how much the big, bad, nasty military gets.