Obama to defund NASA's planetary exploration program in 2013

Cutting military budget even 5% would safe nearly twice what NASA gets...

edited 29th Oct '11 5:09:43 AM by Mandemo

Even less if you account for all the money the military gets "under the table" from the goverment.

I mean... the amount of secret spending on the military is way way bigger than the budget NASA has in a decade.

edited 29th Oct '11 5:12:38 AM by Baff

Basically, NASA and the military both probably contribute roughly equal amounts of tech useful to civilian life. The difference is that NASA has much less going over to places we're not wanted, meddling in things that aren't our business, and killing people who hate us mostly for being there killing them, bits involved. Plus it does all its tech developing on a much, much smaller budget. In terms of tech development relevant to civilian life, NASA is a much better investment than the military is.

Plus some of what NASA does directly benefits civilian life even without the spinoff techs. Like the latest weather-monitoring platform they launched the other day.

edited 29th Oct '11 11:16:07 AM by Jeysie

NASA's budget is really low.

edit: only .6% of the federal budget in 2008 apparently.

jasonwill2: how the hell does cutting out less than .6% do anything?

NASA: It doesn't, we keep getting screwed over for political gain

jasonwill2: i suspected so

edited 30th Oct '11 11:58:36 AM by jasonwill2

They should just give them a constitutionally locked in .7% that can go higher if they want to.At least then it'll be a pain in the ass for them to lower it to below useful.

I'm pretty sure that is not the reason. More to do with deficit hawks.

Also, speaking of stagnating society, remember who basically said "fuck it, the Chinese are already doing solar power better, so there's no point in investing in it here anyway" to help justify a cheap political potshot at the president when Solyndra failed? The Republicans, never remind that Solyndra was something like the only business in that program that failed (it had something like 8 start-ups the government invested in and 7 out of 8 beats the hell out of the norm for start-ups).

As someone who is an investor in American solar power companies, I would have to say that all the people crying foul of Solyndra did more damage to the American based solar companies than any actual business dealings. Solyndra failed, but several other companies were prospering. All the hype around the Solyndra debacle destroyed investor confidence in American solar companies and drove their stock value down to the ground floor, which is when I bought stock on Sun Power and First Solar. First Solar hasn't bounced back, which is a real shame because they have the largest American Market Share in the solar business, but I'm up about 4 dollars a share on what I bought into Sunpower with.

The other issue is that one major factor of success for Solar companies and investor faith is based upon government incentives for solar. After Solyndra, a lot of governments dialed down or completely got rid of incentives for Solar, which caused a dramatic drop in market share for the entire Industry in just about every country that isn't China or Taiwan.

edited 12th Feb '13 3:04:15 AM by Barkey

Why was it necessary to necro a thread from two years ago to say that the Democrats are communists?

It wasn't. Thread locked.