I should have qualified that last part. That DOD needs the giant budget it gets. Wasteful spending is a hallmark of the DOD, billions are wasted every year on programs that have shown little utility on the actual battlefield. The DODs ability to move from the Cold War stalemate to a 21st century warfare environment has proved poor, and that’s being generous.

I think your wrong, there is absolutely no way the Bush administration could have justified the astronomical (pun intended) amounts of money to be spent in Iraq if it were spent on other things. Only pointless war could ever attract that amount of spending. But if your so sure that it would have been spent elsewhere, then what would be so wrong about giving some of it to NASA? Space exploration is like rock climbing, it shouldn’t be done with equipment simply because it was the cheapest available that fit within budget. If we can’t afford it we shouldn’t do it, though I suspect we could easily afford it if we would prioritize better.

The problem with people who think that NASA money is a waste is that many of them don’t actually realize the tiny amount of the federal budget NASA consumes. You give it a rest, find a necessary war we have fought since 1945. DODs necessity is a myth, like the myth that NASA spends huge chunks of the budget.

“Radwaste” is my job. I will assume you have one, because you are posting here, but I must also assume that it has nothing to do with Federal funding or politics.

In the meantime, when you merely feed people who are unemployed, you get more unemployed people. Look around and count the project housing. Has it gone down? No.

Since Apollo was quit, different forces are at work producing the rich, the poor and the in-between. What Apollo and similar projects do is inspire people to be other than a simple wage earner. That’s the value of manned missions: showing people what can be done. Alas, most of the things the Apollo astronauts were doing remains a mystery to apathetic Americans, clamoring yet again to know what a politician can do for them.

[[The pols just lined their pockets, putting people working on Apollo out of a job to feed people who wouldn’t get one.]]

Yeah, right, Rad, all those unemployed people were unemployed because they wanted to be.

Have you ever considered trying to live in the real world?

While the DoD gets most of the criticism for its size, the DoHHS (Health and Human Services, the “welfare” department, formerly HUD) is more than half of the national budget all by itself. It spends more than twice NASA’s annual budget EVERY DAY.

I use this to counter the “starving people” argument. If NASA’s entire budget was cancelled and put into HHS, it couldn’t even be measured.

Remember, too, that a large chunk of the DoD budget is R&D, and a lot of that technology filters into civilian space programs (the HST optics owe a lot to some PR satellites of the ’70s) and eventually into consumer items and medical treatments.

- Jack

The first is the result of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board’s work on that disaster (you can Google for the Board’s report, and it’s in Barnes & Noble and Amazon). NASA crippled itself by not determining what the end use of the funding it received would actually be. Apparently, depending on the fiscal year, “use it or lose it” fundraising produced an environment with dozens of projects underway that had no hope of reaching space. Thus, the National Vision for Manned Space Flight. As Roger Tetrault said in his visit to Savannah River Site (producer of the isotopes for Cassini’s RTGs), “I don’t care if you agree with the ‘vision’, it’s important that we have one.” This is because it establishes a purpose for any funding.

The second is that if you really, really want to free up funding for your project, you should get it from assorted other Federal agencies, like HUD, not the DoD. Check their budgets. When Edmund Muskie and fans gutted Apollo with visions of starving Americans, the result was abandoned hardware for complete missions through Apollo 20 or so and the exodus of enthusiasts in the space business (can you imagine Gene Kranz or Kurt Debus on vacation over the Valentine weekend while Columbia’s wing was holed? Not me. But I guess that’s because I went to school with the sons and daughters of KSC ground crews).

And we still have starving Americans. The pols just lined their pockets, putting people working on Apollo out of a job to feed people who wouldn’t get one.

Back to the future of manned space flight: don’t forget that many of the costs may be reduced with automation there, too. The Russians did nicely with Buran.

NASA also got a big boost from the Cold War grandstand stunt to get to the Moon before the USSR. Most likely thanks to von Braun again.