I made a petition to the US Gov't so they can increase NASA's budget for a manned Mars landing by 2030

[RizzoTheRat]

10 hours ago, AngelLestat said:

haha, only 99997 to go..  You need a full marketing help..   

It's amazing how these things can swell fast.  In the UK petitions on the government website that get 100,000 signatures get debated in parliament.  A petition to ban Donald Trump from entering the UK got over half a million   https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/114003

 

Global military spending is an interesting one though, the US's spending is huge, but as said that's keeping a lot of people employed too.

According to this the US spends 54% of its discressional spending on the Military, and only 3% on science.  But how much does the DoD then funnel back in to science with research contracts?  Presumably DARPA's $3Bn/year comes out of the military funding pot not the science pot?

[tater]

41 minutes ago, RizzoTheRat said:

IAccording to this the US spends 54% of its discressional spending on the Military, and only 3% on science.  But how much does the DoD then funnel back in to science with research contracts?  Presumably DARPA's $3Bn/year comes out of the military funding pot not the science pot?

Yes, but discretionary spending is only about 1/3 of federal spending, the other 2/3 is social programs that are automatically funded.

I don't know how regional government works elsewhere, but on top of US Federal spending, each US state has a substantial State budget, many of those budgets are in fact as large as national budgets in other countries. State budgets are almost entirely spent on education, other social programs and healthcare, BTW. Total State budgets are 1.6 trillion, compared to the ~4 T Federal budget. SO of total US government spending, state and local, about 75% is social programs, and about 13.5% is military.

The US military spending is not just keeping people employed (though it is), it's also protecting places outside the US, reducing the cost for those countries to protect themselves. It's easy to spend less on the military if someone else is doing it for you...

[RizzoTheRat]

14 minutes ago, tater said:

The US military spending is not just keeping people employed (though it is),

Agreed (not trying to dis the military, they keep me employed too), but I meant people will quite often complain about the amount of money governments spend on various things as if it disappears in the ether, when in fact that money is not only directly employing a lot of people, but also buying stuff from manufacturers, who in the US military's case are mainly US companies, so the majority of that money goes back in the countries economy.

In the UK we're starting go down the devolved route with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland having their own assemblies with their own budgets, and able to set their own laws, so similar in a way to the US states, however the English don't have a devolved assembly and Scottish/Welsh/Irish MP's get to vote on English stuff while the English MP's don't get to vote on their stuff, which is a bit weird.

[tater]

Yeah, I wasn't even thinking of the employment to supply the military---and many contractors are also in fact space contractors, there's a lot of overlap there.

People (like OP) all have their priorities. I'd imagine there are a lot of people who would rather see the bulk of the NASA budget go to something like cancer research, as a large % of people are impacted by cancer, and few will see any life-changing impact due to space exploration. I think the realistic route is to spend the money they have as efficiently as possible.

[RizzoTheRat]

46 minutes ago, tater said:

and few will see any life-changing impact due to space exploration.

The benefits of scientific research are often hard to quantify in the short term, especially the more blue skies stuff.  Current MRI and CAT scanners use image processing technology originally developed for the space programme for example, and NASA have led the way in battery technology for a long time.  When people first developed lasers I doubt they expected them to be sued for microsurgery, and messing around with cathode ray tubes might have seemed like a waste of money until the invention of the TV.

Having worked in R&D it bugs me that a lot of general public (however I suspect a much lower proportion of KSP players :D), and therefore politicians, don't see the value of science if they can't see an immediate benefit for it. 

[tater]

Note that I was not talking about myself, but the public at large. I think science is worth doing just for science. Manned Mars is sort of anti-science in the sense that even a minimal mission would use more resources than a far more capable robotic mission. That said, I also see the benefit in exploration by people in person in a far more nebulous way... you can't show direct benefit quantitatively, but I think that it matters to see people pushing the boundaries. To sound trite, "the human spirit" or something.

Edited February 9, 2016 by tater

[Frybert]

I know I'm going to take some heat for this, but here goes:

 

9 hours ago, Nibb31 said:

 

• More money for education
• More money for child care
• More money for medical research
• More money for social protection
• More money for arts and culture
• More money for the environment
• More money for creating jobs
• More money to fight terrorism

For the moment, all of these things are a better use of money than putting a person on mars.

[Darnok]

54 minutes ago, Frybert said:

I know I'm going to take some heat for this, but here goes:

 

For the moment, all of these things are a better use of money than putting a person on mars.

Its like saying that buying a fish is better than buying fishing rod

Maybe to solve those problems we should go further and expand on new territories? Every living thing is expanding over time... we done that in past, but now we only multiply without expansion. We act like dying species, totally against laws of nature, we are limiting our territories instead of expanding it.

Edited February 9, 2016 by Darnok

[tater]

27 minutes ago, Frybert said:

I know I'm going to take some heat for this, but here goes:

For the moment, all of these things are a better use of money than putting a person on mars.

Not really, for most of them. Some of them the government shouldn't even do at all, frankly.

[Darnok]

23 hours ago, tater said:

This is simply not true given their task. If the US did not exist as a military power, someone would need to invent a replacement with ports in both the Pacific and Atlantic. The US is in a unique, geopolitical position. We also end up shouldering a lot of the defense expense for the entire western world, even as they hate us for it. Go figure. Someone has to have a credible strategic deterrence force, even now (and it was bought back when the requirement was far more easy to see). Someone needs to have naval and air forces, well, everywhere. We can argue about the cost, and I agree it could be cheaper, but it's not all spent on overpriced "stuff," even though a lot is certainly overpriced. The military would love to dump many bases, they try all the time, then Congress pairs it back to whichever delegation can't trade the right votes.

It's less about profits (which are a small %), and more about total spending/jobs. The same is true of NASA, and always has been. There is a reason why military bases and contractors have always been spread around the country, it's the same reason Johnson Space Flight Center is in Houston, TX, and launches are mostly in FL (then CA). Then Marshall, JPL, Ames, Goddard, White Sands, etc. The launch site is physics/safety-dominated. The rest is spreading the pork around.

IMO you are trying to use old concepts for new world.

Look what has changed since last 50 years under US hegemony? Nothing? Rich people are getting richer and poor are starving. While before that, when US and USSR were fighting each other we reached Moon. They were developing revolutionary technologies, while today revolution means we have +100 pixels resolution in TV each year.

We don't need single super strong single country or world wide union... we need countries that are ready for participating in evolutionary race. They should try to expand as much as possible and change their societies in way they are going to adapt new ways of thinking. Corporations have technology to expand on Moon or even further, but they will use it only if someone will try to win this race. They won't bother if their profits are stable and high enough on Earth.

[Uthgood]

signed...although I'm a little dissapointed that im number 6

 

[tater]

18 minutes ago, Darnok said:

IMO you are trying to use old concepts for new world.

I'm just a realist. 

[Guest]

25 minutes ago, Darnok said:

IMO you are trying to use old concepts for new world.

Look what has changed since last 50 years under US hegemony? Nothing? Rich people are getting richer and poor are starving. While before that, when US and USSR were fighting each other we reached Moon. They were developing revolutionary technologies, while today revolution means we have +100 pixels resolution in TV each year.

We don't need single super strong single country or world wide union... we need countries that are ready for participating in evolutionary race. They should try to expand as much as possible and change their societies in way they are going to adapt new ways of thinking. Corporations have technology to expand on Moon or even further, but they will use it only if someone will try to win this race. They won't bother if their profits are stable and high enough on Earth.

[peaceful political talk]Unfortunately, there are these things called 'terrorists' and 'Nazis' who don't give a damn about this stuff.  All they want is to destroy us.  If you kill our military, there won't be a nation to defend.  We can't just rely on diplomacy for dealing with these kinds of people.  What they want is to destroy us.  Yes, there are many which can be solved with diplomacy, which should be the first choice, but there are the select few who aren't peaceful.  We have the olive branch for peace and diplomacy, in the right foot of the eagle, to represent that we will be peaceful whenever possible, but we also have the arrows being held in the left foot, to show that we will still go to war whenever necessary. Now, maybe instead of defending our military, maybe we should defund other organizations which shouldn't be funded by the government.  I'm not going to get specific, because that will cause an extreme debate which has nothing to do with this topic.  If we defunded some of what I have in mind, we'd have much more money for space exploration.[/peaceful political talk]

Now let's get off this subject, as it's really starting to go against the forum rules, which is why so many of the threads in Science & Spaceflight end up getting locked.  Let's try to keep it off of that topic, or at least peaceful so we can continue to discuss the without having to get the thread locked.  I think every one here is mature enough to understand that, and that's why I love this community.

[Vanamonde]

Please leave politics and national policies out of the space science discussions here, guys. It never ends well.