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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

What's worse than having a mission you can't accomplish? No mission at all. What's worse than no mission at all? A changing mission every 4 or 8 years as a new administration takes office.

I'm finding it really hard not to say something political -- pretty angry right now. I'll simply note that for whatever reasons manned spaceflight at NASA has lost its luster with large hunks of the American public. And like every other political spending program, if there is not a large group of people pushing for it, it's going to get cut.

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People tend to think it's a lot more of the federal budget than it is: "For example, in 1997 the average estimate of NASA's share of the federal budget by those polled was 20 percent." From http://bit.ly/aAg7I3 Er, try 0.58%. But this misconception is a real problem: if people think there's just tons of money in there, cuts don't seem like a big deal; in fact, they seem entirely reasonable.

Add to that the unwillingness of our political class (both parties) to do anything about spending and cost growth on defense, medicare, and medicaid and you've severely limited "what you can cut" to NASA and a handful of other programs, even though cuts to those are a fractional percent of the budget and barely enough to even register over a 10-year window.

Leadership takes hard decisions. Our "leaders" have shown no interest in same.

That's a really fascinating poll. I'd really like to see similar data on the perceived cost vs. actual cost of other federal programs -- do you know if anyone has conducted such a study?

It would be interesting to see how people respond when asked only about one or two pieces of the budget, vs. being asked to "complete the pie" by estimating the federal budget when looking at it as a dozen (or so) components totaling 100%.

Not to mention that out of the 50 states only 3 really benefit from the NASA budget. Aerospace tends to be highly concentrated around Alabama, California, Florida, and DC (obviously). Without the support of the 47 other states NASA becomes an obviously easy target.

Well, what do you expect? At the moment, we're a country of conservatives in the midst of a depression. Everyone's interested in markets and commerce, while great swaths of our population regard climate scientists "skeptically", as though they are purposefully deceiving us to some end; regard evolutionary scientists as liars; regard science and scientists in general as untrustworthy because they're too far removed from "blue collar Joe".

The decisions of our government are the result of our culture, not the other way 'round.

I might've hated the decisions to wage war in the Middle East on a number of grounds, but I had to admit that those decisions had massive popular support.

This is just a continuation of that same culture in action, and any historian could tell you what's likely coming next.

as though they are purposefully deceiving us to some end

That end being "getting funded". Which, given the revelations coming out of the CRU, is a valid concern regardless of the science.

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