Obama Proposes to cut NASA's Constellation Project

You claimed wars to be good for the economy, and I'm asuming you meant the American economy.

I fail to see how an increase in debt and inflation is good for the economy. And as Ron Paul also points out, it takes away from the domestic spending.
 
Sithious said:
You claimed wars to be good for the economy, and I'm asuming you meant the American economy.

I fail to see how an increase in debt and inflation is good for the economy. And as Ron Paul also points out, it takes away from the domestic spending.
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Ah yes. Well I'm not defending that point of view really, I said 'wars are good for the economy' in a slightly ironic way that America uses that excuse to invade everywhere. But I dunno, western Europe boomed economically in the few decades after WW2, but the people were not necessarily well off.
 
Krumplenump said:
Yes, I thought about that. Certainly many technological and scientific discoveries have been made thanks to the global space race, but I suspect many could have been discovered with direct funding at a much lower rate than space exploration consumes.


Sacrificing living humans for humans that don't exist is futile. I don't give a crap about humans in a few hundred million years time and would much rather the world today benefitted from the huge sums of money involved in space exploration.
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That's pretty retarded. I mean, the point of survival is of the species, not just you.
 
Krumplenump said:
Yes, I thought about that. Certainly many technological and scientific discoveries have been made thanks to the global space race, but I suspect many could have been discovered with direct funding at a much lower rate than space exploration consumes.
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If the money from budget cuts to NASA were funneled directly into the NSF, I might be able to get behind this idea. Even then, targeted large scale "Manhattan projects" often produce research that would otherwise be considered too risky to get NSF funding.
 
Billy said:
That's pretty retarded. I mean, the point of survival is of the species, not just you.
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It's hardly retarded. Making things better TODAY would make things better TOMORROW for my children and my childrens children which are the future ones I care about, not the humans that will (possibly) be around in a few million years time which is when the big fire explosion you described would happen. That notion seems less realistic and more retarded to me.

If the money from budget cuts to NASA were funneled directly into the NSF, I might be able to get behind this idea. Even then, targeted large scale "Manhattan projects" often produce research that would otherwise be considered too risky to get NSF funding.
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Sure, the surplus funds would have be well invested, naturally. I'm not really concerned with the details, I just wanted to voice my stance that the astronomical sums of money spent on space exploration seems disproportionate when put next to the current sufferings in the world.
 
And the even more astronomical funds put into 'defense'...(to make more weapons, and to add to suffering)
 
NASA should stick to doing science, they're great at it and to be honest they're not that great at economical human space flight. I think the private industry is going to start picking up the slack in this regard. The best thing the government can do is get out of the way, maybe pitch some of that money toward competitive DARPA style funding of private space ventures.

And to address the sentiment I got from Billy: there are short-term problems here that deserve more attention than sending people into space 'just because'. The Gemini/Mercury/Apollo programs were inspiring and I don't necessarily think they were a bad idea given the circumstances; however, you don't need the GDP of a superpower to do that kind of engineering anymore. It's actually pretty mundane compared to a lot of other research that needs to be done; there just isn't much economic pressure to get out into space. If you really want to make common human space flight a reality, you should look in instead of up. Developing the technology to build a space elevator (and we are damn close) will fundamentally change the economics of geosynchronous orbital insertion. Chemical rockets just suck way too much for economical and SAFE payload delivery.

Shai Gar said:
You won't say that when the Yeerks come to enslave us.
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OMFG, you so did not just make an Animorphs reference. I was OBSESSED with those books as a kid, they really kicked off my love of sci-fi.
 
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patricky said:
Developing the technology to build a space elevator (and we are damn close) will fundamentally change the economics of geosynchronous orbital insertion. Chemical rockets just suck way too much for economical and SAFE payload delivery.
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Geosynchronous orbital insertion. This sounds, fun :)

What is a space elevator?
 
I think that the United States should develop more efficient ways of getting into space. Chances are that we will be left behind during this next space race.
 
Nah...were moving in the wrong direction. Let's start colonising under sea cities.
 
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