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Comment by cdancette | Hacker News Reader

> Correspondents say any realistic effort will probably need Congress to agree to a big funding boost.

This is the real issue here. Trump can say all he wants, if the Congress doesn't allow more budget, nothing will happen.

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"I want to make America great again but congress is blocking me, vote the dems out of congress"

I actually get the feeling that he's going to do something about pollution and climate change, but on his terms. Probably by suggesting something outrageous off the bat, then winding back to something better than we'd currently expect.

[clarifying: not a trump supporter - just a guy from the UK]

Well, only if someone in his entourage wants to do something about pollution and climate change. And then he will propose $50 millions to do it, while investing billions on other things that pollute and accelerate climate change...

Otherwise, forget it, he hasn't done a single thing, good or bad, in almost a year.

Look on the bright side! No race riots like we had in St. Louis and Baltimore. Record low unemployment. Record high stock market. Record low illegal border crossings.

There's a lot to be happy about, no matter what your politics may be. There's always something good to find.

> There's a lot to be happy about, no matter what your politics may be. There's always something good to find.

With the right optics, maybe. I see white supremacist riots, inexcusable wealth concentration, income inequality, stagnating wages, and high labor drop-out. Overall, it's feeling a lot like the 1920s. The stock market? I hope you time it right, Black Tuesday is coming up.

Low border crossings reflect our underlying economic problem - illegals have been declining for over a decade due to automation, job exports, and declining middle-class jobs... rats abandoning a sinking ship.

As opposed to the other side investing billions in stuffing all the stuff into Chinese landfills, or as we refer to it, "recycling".

> There is bipartisan support for further space exploration but parties disagree over the timeline and budget.

Ironically enough, it's always the anti-government-spending Republicans who veto such efforts. Now that a Republican President is supporting this, they might finally get behind this as well. It's really a clever form of blackmail when you think about it. "Put our guy in the Oval Office, or we'll veto anything and everything in Congress."

>Ironically enough, it's always the anti-government-spending Republicans who veto such efforts.

It's more like appropriately enough, right?

Congress is about to pass a tax cut which adds 1 Trillion + to the deficit. Anyone who thinks we'll be sending manned missions to the moon or anywhere else in the solar system is going to have to reconcile that with a 30 Trillion debt crisis looming on the horizon.

And you can his recent $700 billions in extra spending to DOD, which isn't part of the budget.

Exactly. A common adage in the aerospace world is that it's not aerodynamics that makes airplanes fly, it's money.

Same thing here. The only way NASA is going anywhere outside LEO is with a commitment by congress to spend gobs and gobs of money every year over many years.

Instead of arguing to go to Mars, let's get the military interested in kinetic bombardment systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

Clearly we need one because North Korea or terrorists or sharks or whatever.

It's so expensive to put all that metal into space, they'll get interested in asteroid mining before long. And once there's a market for orbital-velocity asteroid metal... profit!

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