Obama to defund NASA's planetary exploration program in 2013

But we've got the biggest and the best. What's the point in developing your own stuff when you can get the exact same stuff, only better, at bargain basement prices?

I doubt the government wants them to have our stuff. It's our stuff, or some shit like that.

Anyway, as far as I'm aware we're still working with the Russian's program to send up our astronauts on joint missions. We're just not sending them up there ourselves.

The only way I could think of to (maybe) justify this is if all that money was going to NOAA, seeing as we have very little of the sea floor mapped.

That's what's going on now. I would assume that axing all of planetary exploration means axing the astronauts themselves and no longer making any joint ventures with other countries.

edited 26th Oct '11 10:01:16 PM by CDRW

I dunno why, but... why do I always read about US goverment defunding NASA, but increasing funding of Army? I mean, I don't know for sue but I bet you could safe a lot more if you cut military funding even slightly and it wouldn't even hurt much.

Space exploration is pretty much key to human survival. We are burning trough Earths resources faster than it can replace them, so we need to look outside our planet now to prepare problems of tomorrow.

Because the army really needs those fucking flying humvees. Or planes that shoot laser beams. That'll be the key to humanities evolution right there. Who cares if we're stuck on a single planet doing butt fuck all? We've got freaking laser beams!

Well the logic that we can't worry about solving the problems of tomorrow because we have so many problems today.

But the problems of tomorrow are bigger than the problems of today!

Well, we're drawing our troops out of Iran/Iraq? (God, I keep mixing those two up) right now, so that will hopefully cut down on what we're spending on the military currently. Also, Republicans care about spending more money on being overseas to "protect our interests" even though the vets are then treated like shit once they get back here and need medical care. *shrug*

Also, I consider the whole "find a new planet before this one is dead" to be a poor way to deal with the pollution problem.

Well, considering that the cost for sending them up is shared, they have less of a reason to draw our astronauts away from this. Besides, the article seems more like "we're not going to build any more manned rockets right now" than "we're going to recall all our astronauts". I would need further information to believe that we're no longer sending people up.

Fucking ninjas, that last was meant to respond to CD.

edited 26th Oct '11 10:09:05 PM by AceofSpades

Being a leader sucks doesnt it?

Ironically NASA is just about to launch a new satellite: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/mission_overview/index.html that will provide better monitoring of all manner of weather conditions here on Earth, including ozone, pollution, climate change, natural disasters, etc.

I think they're still sending that up, Jeysie. I've seen nothing that suggest they're going to stop sending up unmanned satellites and junk.

Aw man, can you imagine how much it would suck to be an unemployed astronaut?

That is kind of depressing, but I think they draw their talent pool from sources like the Air Force. So I don't know if they would be unemployed, just not astronauts anymore.

"I'm sorry Timmy, but we really needed that flying humvee. I guess you could you could immigrate to Russia or China if you really want to be an astronaut."

The Army doesn't have, nor is making, a flying humvee. Not to my knowledge, anyway.

I saw an article about that, actually. It's in the design stage right now, but all things considered I don't see it getting very far. Because well.... flying humvees aren't all that practical in battle. (It's supposed to be some sort of transforming machine? I think. *shrug* It was a confusing article.)

Yeah, but think about this.

We won't fund NASA but we'll fund the kind of people who come up with flying humvees.

And people who come up with flying humvees later come up with flying cars.

See? Technological advancement either way.

Logic behind idea "find new planet before this one is dead" goes something like this:

We tax our planet too much, thus it's resource are running out way faster than e can ever hope to replace them.

We do not have technology that wuold allow us to decrease this resource demand.

People aren't ready to give up their lifestyle now in such extend, that it would drop resource demand to acceptable level.

Thus, getting resources from other planet will allow us to give Earth a moment of peace, to certain extend and decrease the tax on it, allowing it to replenish certain resource(Trees, for (bad) example).

It's less "planet is dying, we need to get off" more "unless we find way to tax less our planet, it will die".

That doesn't necessarily require space travel. New and improved energy storage could decrease the rate we use resources.

I have to agree with defunding NASA. We need the money right now, and if it's technology you're after there are plenty of other ways to get it.

Your spelling is generally good, Mandemo, but sometimes your grammar is difficult to parse out.

Anyway, we can figure out how to tax our planet less without leaving it. Considering the cost to benefit ratio, we would have to figure out how to tax our planet less even if we were going full steam ahead with space exploration. Going out and finding new resources has pretty much gone in the "hey we found this new source of awesome shit, let's mine the fuck out of it". Basically, I think we need to get into the practice of using our resources wisely before and in concert with space exploration and finding new planets to live on. The ratio of possibly livable planets and how long it would take us to get there pretty much nixes your theory even with full support of NASA and other country's space programs. It's not feasible to do that.

We have the tech now, and we have people willing to work on it. We just need to alter the culture so that sustainable practices become the norm. Which is happening, but very, very slowly.

The problem is that the same amount of money could be taken somewhere else where it wouldn't do as much damage to research. For example tax reduction for corps, military (the U.S. spent a good trillion on Iraq), this kind of useless things.

When you want to save money, save it by defunding useless services, not those which give you a technological edge over the world.

edited 26th Oct '11 11:32:21 PM by RufusShinra

As far as I know they are defunding the more useless research. Military equipment is not useless. NASA, on the other hand, isn't really doing anything for us that other companies can't.

So logically, defunding NASA is the better thing to do.

We really don't have that much need for more military equipment, and NASA has the expertise and (formerly) the funding to do exactly the kinds of things other groups couldn't.