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Comment by Nanite | Hacker News Reader

NASA programs typically span multiple decades and run in the billions of dollars, The political pendulum sways from one side to the other side every 4-8 years, every new administration is looking for ways to cut down taxes. It's amazing they get anything done imho.

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I'm pretty sure the big reason Apollo was successful was that they had enough support to get the job done within that 8-year period. And, no surprise, Nixon's election heralded the end, although inertia kept it moving for a few years.

The Soviet Union pretty much quitting a year or so after the US landed on the moon is what did it.

But the same people were in Congress, pretty much.

The problem is the public lost interest in the moon. It's a big dusty rock with nothing much to recommend the billions we were spending to go there.

They should cut the defence budget. 611B/year it's a joke.

Seriously! "The U.S. military budget is higher than the nine other biggest military budgets in the world combined." It's insane.

Btw for 2017 it's 773.5 billion USD.

To get an idea of whan a mind-bogling number that is: Its about the amount of the GDP of the Netherlands. The whole economic output of a 1. World country with 17M inhabitants is slightly smaller than this budget.

[0]: http://databank.worldbank.org/data/download/GDP.pdf

The funny thing is, with the kind of space presence that kind of money buys you (we're talking Clarke-style rotating space stations here), nobody would dare fuck with you.

You don't need an official space weapons program to be able to drop heavy things from orbit. Nor do you need a fancy anti-satellite ballistics system when you can have one of your many astronauts sidle over and hit it with a hammer.

Droping stuff from orbit is cool scifi weapon system, but in practice it is surprisingly hard to do (you cannot just drop stuff, you have to impart it with some deltav to cancel out orbital velocity of the station) and inefficient (you have to get the stuff up there, which when you ignore atmosferic drag requires same amount energy as the projectile would release on impact)

This. Land-based missiles are far cheaper and more effective.

Recently I've seen this quote:

"Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." - Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC

And exactly this thing seems to be the major problem with essentially every space-related weapons platform other than ICBMs. Simply almost every such proposed system uses some expendable ammunition that is significantly more expensive to deploy or even just manufacture than what it is supposed to destroy.

part of logistics is the ability to do something. It doesn't have to be practical for me to drop a heavy thing on you, I just need the ability to do it if you push me hard enough. If I'm governor of a space station I'm better off not turning half my space station into a bomb on your capital, but if you push my hard enough I might feel compelled to do that so you will treat me and my needs with respect.

Problem with this is that it has to be credible threat. Even when you would fill ISS with conventional explosives and somehow arrange for it to land on reasonably precise spot and explode on impact the damage caused will be many orders of magnitude smaller than what you would expedite to do all that (and this holds even when you take the expense as a fraction of relevant defense budgets instead of absolute values)

I wonder if someone could sell Trump on this? After his rumblings about altering Geneva and NATO treaties, I'll bet someone could convince him to ignore the Outer Space Treaty and throw NASA a 10x budget increase.

Slash it in half, give the slashed half to NASA.

Then we can have ourselves a Pluto colony.

Meanwhile people are still dying for lack of access to healthcare, infrastructure is failing, education is remaining poor...

I agree with the slash the defense budget part, but NASA doesn't need 300B/y (and would have a hard time spending it even). They need ~30B/y (i.e. double their existing outlay) to do SLS and continue existing operations, and it needs to be in a lockbox of some kind such that future political swings require a huge amount of horsepower to disrupt it (like a congressional super majority vote).

Money spent on NASA has provided significant breakthroughs in science that includes the internet, MRIs, ear thermometers, automatic insulin pumps, implantable heart defibrillators, fiber optics, light emitting diodes for brain cancer surgery, programmable cataracts, long distance telescopes, solar energy, artificial limbs, memory foam, shoe insoles, smoke detectors, water filters, enriched food, and tons of software.

Smoke alarms alone have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

"NASA did not invent the smoke detector. NASA's connection to the modern smoke detector is that it made one with adjustable sensitivity as part of the Skylab project. The device was made commercially available by Honeywell. The consumer could use it to avoid "nuisance" alarms while cooking. Like the quartz clock, this device is no longer available. "

https://www.nasa.gov/offices/ipp/home/mythbuster/myth_barcod...

edit: actually pretty much none of the things you listed were invented by NASA, several predate its existence.

Yes, they just need steady funding and a process that ensures that the money is spent on worthwhile stuff. After plans have been vetted then the politicians can come in and distribute the money to their districts.

The area where they get things done is unmanned spaceflight. Politicians don't care for that so the people at NASA can just do their work without meddling.

I don't think they have got anything interesting done in manned spaceflight lately.

The manned spaceflight portion of NASA doesn't really get anything done.

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