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Originally posted by Jack_Crossitt
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Originally posted by messierhunter
Quote:
Originally posted by Jack_Crossitt
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Originally posted by Chewy
Thing is the money is an object, who cares? we should go to space
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You could say that money is an object - but George Bush also has a budget and even though it is only 1% of the total budget, it is still too much money for something which we really don't need to know much more about
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We need to know a LOT more about what's out there. It could lead to breakthroughs in new forms of energy production, the spinoffs of technology designed for spacetravel has given us huge health and living benefits on earth. Pace makers, tennis shoes, personal computers, radiation hazard detectors, emergency rescue equipment, self-righting life rafts, safer mammography x-rays, all are things that are either made possible by, or enhanced by space technology spinoffs. Without space travel you wouldn't have these things. Early hurricane detection, warning, and tracking? Forget about it, without funding space programs your accuracy in tracking storms will falter. We cannot afford to stop funding the space program, it's only a tiny part of the budget and the benefits are priceless because they save human lives.
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I can only agree with the positives you have mentioned, but we need to look at what is happening in our own world first and every pound/dollar thrown into space is a pound/dollar less spent on more pressing priorities and personally I feel it is a waste of money. Every dollar that George Bush and his predecessors have spent on space has been very useful indeed and I couldn't agree more, that they need to continue spending some amount, but the amount should be halved, as we have come to a point now where we seem to be wasting billions of dollars.
If $7 billion was enough and there was $8 billion spare, then they would find something to spend that amount on. Pointless ventures in space which are just not needed. We have really learnt enough and a smaller budget would give us what we require, but a bigger one is a waste of money and from what I read, George Bush wants to increase that amount
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On what basis do you say that we should halve the amounts of space exploration spending? NASA's budget is strained as it is. Any further cutbacks of that extreme nature will either stall robotic exploration or manned exploration indefinately, depending on which is cut. Shouldn't we be cutting back on truly wasteful spending FIRST and then decide how much we can afford to spend on space and everything else? We wated 100 million in UNUSED airline tickets at the federal level between 97 and 03. They didn't even bother to get a refund when it was available. Federal student loan programs have 21.8 billion in defaulted loans and an unknown amount of fraud probably accounts for a large part of this. We know that there are cases of fake students applying for loans and getting them with totally forged documents. Medicare overpays for drugs and equipment so much so that fixing it could save 20 to 30 billion a year without reducing any benefits at all. THAT is wasteful spending, where you don't get anything out of your money. If you cleaned this up it could easily pay for NASA's budget entirely and then some.
I see no reason at all to reduce NASA's budget by a single penny until this and the rest of the completely wasted government spending are fixed. There should be no priority higher than some of the things that are covered by space exploration and technology such as storm monitoring, national security, and planetary defense/NEO monitoring. There should be no higher priority. If you cleaned up the completely wasted dollars, even mostly, then you'd have more than enough money to fund all kinds of feel-good social programs without having to raise taxes nor cut any other useful spending.