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.

This objection is not theoretical, nor does it only pertain to the Tuskegee Experiments. The space program has its origins in the Cold War, and has provided a crucial role in enabling one of the most frightening aspects of modern human existence: having nuclear warheads pointed at us by all manner of lunatic. Lockheed Martin and Raytheon steal gargantuan piles of tax dollars every year via NASA & friends, and spend the little crumbs left over after the shareholders get their fill to build flying death robots and infrastructure dismantling equipment. We’re crazy, belligerent apes and we’re constantly trying to kill each other.

I feel there is something to the suggestion that it’s criminal to spend so much money on space exploration when so many worthy causes exist here on planet Earth. Take molecular biology, for example. Or linguistics. Or poetry. Wouldn’t it be great if our resources could be put into all sorts of knowledge production — not just the stuff that can be used to kill people? Then maybe the worlds’ various cultural workers (composers, bloggers, History professors, etc.) could do more to expose tyrannical behavior, so space enthusiasts can focus their energies on doing really nifty projects instead of having to stuff shareholders’ pockets and politicians’ coffers at every turn. Like building giant interferometric telescopes, finding a feasible way to make space elevators, putting probes under the crust of Europa, or terraforming Mars.

But, then again, maybe it’s better to spend all our money whipping up intervention opportunities in oil-rich parts of the world.

If you consider the war in Iraq worthless or worse – counter productive, any money spent there is a waste. Same argument, different topic.

We have to keep vocal and remind them a lot of us consider Nasa, and Space, a very valuable and worthwhile endeavor (another pun intended).

Thank you.

Nasa consumes only .7% of the federal budget and pays dividends.

By Walabio on 8/7/2007 9:11:PM

Those saying that we should rechannel the budget of Nasa into social programs on Earth are, to be quite blunt, idiots. The budget of Nasa is only .7% of the federal budget. We could not start a social program on so little money.

The spaceprogram is an investment. It has paid for itself many times over with things like weathersatellites, communicationsatellites, computers, the Internet, medical imaging, WD40, et cetera. Nasa is such a good investment that it would be a good idea to increase its budget to a nice round 1% of the federal budget.

I agree that we need universal healthcare, but we cannot get it by diverting the budget of a small agency like Nasa. That would be like trying to use the change from the couch for buying a brand new car. To fund universal healthcare, we need to divert money from something expensive and wasteful. I recommend defunding the Iraqi War and using the money to fund universal healthcare. Doing so would not only fund universal healthcare, but we would have plenty of money left over for other things.

I don’t know which programs are a waste, but I can point out thousands of NASA projects that are not. Unfortunately, I don’t have the space here (oh, bad pun) to list them, and those who disagree aren’t likely to read that list. Let the detractors list those they would eliminate – but they best be careful, and here’s why:

Use the money to feed the poor? Then don’t eliminate the programs that support weather and earth science satellites. We grow more food with less land and less money than any other time in history because of these programs – without them we couldn’t possibly feed the hungry.

Use the money to cure diseases? Then don’t eliminate manned space exploration! The science discovered and being discovered, and the technology developed and being developed to keep people healthy in space has led and will lead to technologies for diagnosing diseases earlier in people with these diseases. Yes, you could still do the research anyway, but with the impetus to do so gone, so goes the drive for such research. It’s hard to know when what you have isn’t enough until you actually have to use it where it isn’t enough. The side effects of developing space medicine has led to better Earth medicine we could not have discovered any other way.

Use the money to rebuild places destroyed by natural disaster? With the science and technology at hand, we can avert these disasters. It isn’t a failing of science per se that the people haven’t taken advantage of the technology or continue to live where we’ve proven it isn’t safe. Katrina alone caused $25,000,000,000. That’s one disaster. NASA’s entire annual budget, including the parts that got much of the city evacuated before hand, will not cover the cost of repairs. The cost in terms of human lives with out the direct science (not including the spin offs) NASA performs far exceeds that budget.

Let private industry take over? Um, O.K., and which companies are up to the task? Boeing? Lockheed? Aérospatiale? Aeroflot? Airbus? Pick the one or two, or three or four, that could do the job… and convince their stock holders to pony up $15,000,000,000 a year for space exploration. I’m all for private enterprise making money in space. I cheer the successes of companies like Scaled Composites and mourn their failures. But no one is ready to step up to that plate just yet. And when they do, we’ll need NASA or the FAA (who might have to become the Federal Aviation and Space Administration….) to provide “Space Traffic Control.” One thought to remember, the companies that provide the vehicles to get to space now, don’t have the resources to provide that service with out the government backing and oversight, and no one entity puts it all together other than the various national space agencies around the world. That farmer astronaut of the movie does not exist.

Let other countries take the risks? Then they will reap the rewards. That simple.

Oh, and you want back that $100 (if you paid $10000) we took from your taxes and sent to NASA? Well, expect about $700 to missing from your paycheck in return, because that’s what the estimates are for Return On Investment for your money spent by NASA.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that 1 percent is still a very large part of the budget. I have a 300-gig hard drive. That 3 gig video is 1 percent of my space. The U.S. government budget is comparably big.

Clearly the military budget is the first place to start cutting (over 500,000,000,000 this year), but some of NASA feeds into that.

I can think of one off the top of my head: Teflon. Teflon was invented/discovered purely by accident, and it was months before the Chemists at Dow were able to figure out any use for the stuff.

If you consider accidental discoveries/inventions, then you have to call up Pennicillin, galvanized rubber, microwave ovens, and our knowledge of the Cosmic Background Radiation that has allowed us to confirm several of the predictions of Cosmology (just to name a very few).

As far as NASA spinoffs are concerned, a few spring to mind quite easily:
CAT scans, Scratch-resistant lenses, Cool Suits for firefighters, vastly improved composite materials, cordless tools, laser angioplasty, excimer laser eye surgery, and of course, the computer you are currently traces its ‘parentage’ directly to NASA contracts.