I have to wonder if the lack of exposure towards military spending is one of the reasons it gets so much funding.
It is a case of anti-intellectualism and a strong desire for guns, war, etc and to shun science and basic research. It is born from greed and selfishness and probably also fear of the unknown.
NASA is and has always been really really cheap for what it does. But there has been a multiple-decades-long battle to convince Americans otherwise.
Edit: Here's a citation on that survey I think: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1000/1
Republicans make the poor and working poor the enemy of the America's middle class. People are fine with CEOs making millions but you say $15 an hour and they will go crazy. Talk about trillions of dollars in debit and they believe welfare checks are the cause.
That may be so, but I've never met one or heard from one. They would seem to me to be such a small minority I did not even know of their existence until today despite being both a democrat and a fan of space and science research.
> And many Republicans that are very pro-NASA for bragging rights and national security implications if not other reasons.
"For bragging rights?" But I'm talking about support for basic research and science in general. If they show support for NASA publicly for "bragging rights" but then vote party-line items on bills that hurt science research then they are not actually Pro-NASA or pro-science at all. I would even say that's true if they are not extremely vocal every single day about how bad most Republican policies are for science in general.
You've never heard Barack Obama speak on TV? http://www.nbcnews.com/id/35209628/ns/technology_and_science....
> "For bragging rights?"
1980/1990s Republicans were pro-NASA to the extent that it proved America was the best country in the world. At that time, Democrats were mostly anti-NASA, believing the money could be better spent on other things. Then, both parties underfunded NASA, but Democrats tended to underfund NASA more severely than Republicans. In the mid 2000s, as Republican opposition to global warming and evolution grew, Democrats became more mixed on NASA, as Republican opposition to NASA could be spun as part of a larger "Republicans are anti-science" narrative (a narrative that remains popular today). Simultaneously, Republican concerns about the deficit grew.
Truth be told, the situation is not that different today than in the 80s and 90s. Twenty years ago, neither party funded NASA fully, but the Republicans were slightly more willing. Today, neither party will fund NASA fully, but the Democrats are slightly more willing. There are cynical reasons to think that greater willingness is political in both cases.
Nope. Not about this anyway.
> http://www.nbcnews.com/id/35209628/ns/technology_and_science.
What's that supposed to mean? It does not show anything like Obama not supporting NASA, or being a Democrat who thinks space isn't a priority, or anything like that. Not sure what point that link is trying to make in this discussion.
What you're trying to prove? That Obama gave more money to NASA?
> President Obama's 2011 budget request for NASA cut the agency's Constellation program completely, effectively canceling a five-year, $9 billion effort to build new Orion spacecraft and Ares rockets.
It's always sort of a misnomer that the President sets the budget... they really only get to approve/reject what congress lays out (but take all the credit/blame). Of course a president can wish for certain things, and veto a proposed budget that doesn't meet their political goals, but ultimately it's congress that sets the budget.
If I recall, it was the 2016/2017 budget proposal under Speaker Paul Ryan that sought dramatic increases in the NASA budget.
And I agree both Orion spacecraft and Ares rockets where poor uses of Nasa's funding.
Cancellation of Constellation program
On May 7, 2009, the Obama administration enlisted the Augustine Commission to perform a full independent review of the ongoing NASA space exploration program. The commission found the then current Constellation Program to be woefully under-budgeted, behind schedule by four years or more in several essential components, with significant cost overruns, and unlikely to be capable of meeting any of its scheduled goals under its current budget.[26][27] As a consequence, the commission recommended a significant re-allocation of goals and resources. As one of the many outcomes based on these recommendations, on October 11, 2010, the Constellation program was cancelled, ending development of the Altair, Ares I, and Ares V. The Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle survived the cancellation and was renamed the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), to be launched on the Space Launch System.[28]
PS: NASA had a related test launch in 2014, but GAO says even a 2023 launch date is optimistic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...
See (or hear) Gil Scott Heron's "Whitey on the Moon".
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/gil-s...
I'll watch the video in a bit.
He specifically calls out NASA as getting more funding under Republicans.
It's about what the money is spent on and where it goes. I very much suspect that the Republicans who are in favour of increasing NASA's budget are doing it to secure 'jobs' in their own districts and are not doing out of the goodness in their hearts or their desire for more knowledge in the USA about science or space.
They often say as much in their speeches. "We will bring jobs!" etc. NASA is a means to an end for a lot of Republicans specifically, as they focus on economy and jobs from the spending bills, not the resources developed or the knowledge learned or the science experiments done or the kids they have inspired to become engineers or anything like that at all.
Republicans rarely support basic research, even at NASA.
So... they only fund science because they care about how investment in science improves our lives? I find it much harder to fault them for that than you do.
I'm not sure how you arrived at that conclusion from what I wrote. I wrote the opposite. Many Republicans are seemingly interested in funding NASA only because of misunderstood economics and logical fallacies.
Perhaps you arrived at the conclusion you did by thinking that by default, job creation and decisions based on expected economic outcome are things that "improve our lives"? But that simply isn't true. Jobs for the sake of jobs makes no sense and creates massive waste and inefficiencies in the world.
Republicans chanting "jobs jobs jobs!" are hurting their constituents, not helping them. This is especially true of the current batch of Republican politicians in power, who chanted about bring back the dying and polluting coal jobs for years and years. Those jobs and policies are not helping the people they claim to be.
Back to NASA. Sure, if someone gets a job that helps them out. But the policies in place are not meant to help that person. The policies in place are meant to entrench the Republican in power, for better or worse, and are not made while considering the actual well being of the people who live there.
This is evidenced more clearly in other policies, that keep the poor poor and the uneducated uneducated. The policies implemented by Republican politicians in the name of "jobs" are rarely good for the people who live there.
FWIW, the crazy "omnibus" spending bill that just passed by a Republican Congress included a $2 Billion increase to NIH and $1.3 Billion increase to NASA.
Your post here specifically states that Republicans care about being #1 in the world financially, and you imply here it is not about helping their constituents live good lives or anything like that. The Republican apparatus here is specifically an attempt at a short-term money-making one, not one that improves lives or even makes money in the long run.
If you are right and Republicans are funding science because they want the US to be the global financial leader, that is massively fucked up and massively wrong. It will also backfire, because funding things for the reason of being a leader is like making a startup to try to become a billionaire. It will fail. You must work on the core things like basic science, quality of life, etc, to improve the country's stability and economics across the board.
In 2004, the GWB administration created an initiative ("Vision for Space Exploration" = VSE, see [1,2]) that substantially refocused NASA on human spaceflight. Significant money was redirected from technology research to launch vehicle development. This is (partly) visible in the dip in the gray portion of the funding strip-chart in [2] ("aeronautics and science"). It looks small, but its effect was much larger.
The original VSE implementors were highly motivated, but attention wandered, after a few years the launch vehicle effort (Orion/Constellation) stalled, and the BHO administration cancelled Constellation.
Outside observers wondered whether the GWB administration really cared about the VSE, or just wanted to do a favor for the large manned spaceflight centers in Houston and Florida. It is probably not a coincidence that GWB is a Texan, then-House-Majority-Leader Tom DeLay's home district abuts Johnson Space Center in Houston, and Florida was in the GWB camp in the prior election by just 537 votes.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/aldridge_commissio...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_for_Space_Exploration
Like the "shrimp treadmill" research that was purported to have cost $3 million and been useless research, but actually cost under $100 and was described by the scientist like this:
"Simply put, my colleagues and I were studying how recent changes in the oceans could potentially affect the ability of marine organisms to fight infections—an important question, given that the amount of bacteria a shrimp is able remove from its body is directly related to how much bacteria could potentially end up on seafood-filled plates. And since shrimp are active animals in nature, it was logical to study the immune response of shrimp during activity."
"It is disingenuous for the Republican-controlled House Committee on Science, Space and Technology to promote the idea that scientists are wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to run shrimp on treadmills based on a 30-second video clip. Given that every teaspoon of seawater can contain millions of bacteria, it does not take a mental giant to understand that the health of marine organisms and the safety of the seafood we eat are closely related.
The health of the organisms that inhabit the largest ecosystem on the planet and the potential bacterial contamination of the food we eat are serious and important questions. I, like many of my colleagues, are deeply concerned by the minimization and politicization of our work."
I don't have the time, but I would be really interested to see a chart showing funding changes for NIH, NASA, etc. by year with the party in control of Congress at that time. Seems like that would give you a much better picture.
[Mar 21] > The House Appropriations Committee released its version of the final FY2018 “omnibus” appropriations bill this evening. It provides $20.7 billion for NASA, an increase of almost $1.1 billion over FY2017. Almost all of NASA’s programs would benefit from the increase, but science, education, and a second mobile platform for the Space Launch System are big winners.
https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/nasa-budget-to-soar-over-...
Here's an article talking about the Obama administration recommended budget which cut funding to NASA. It's worth acknowledging here that Trump's requested budget ALSO cut funding for NASA, but the Congressional Republicans over-ruled him.
I dont think the charts give a clear winner to either republicans or democrats.
Maybe the prospect of China and India in space will jump start the politicians. We might end up with the correct result but for the wrong reasons.
Indian here. You are have looked at it the wrong way. India spends very little on ISRO, almost a negligible amount of money is given to ISRO.
ISRO has achieved a lot over the years. But its no way close to what NASA has done or is doing.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/121886/CDC-Tops-Agency-Ratings-F...
I think you will find that people's ignorance about budget particulars are reasonable--it's simply not a day-to-day concern of anybody outside of the GAO or similar bodies. But to say that people are anti-intellectual is just wrong. People are fond of the CDC and NASA, and if NASA's budget was wrongly said to be 25 percent, it probably reflects people's misunderstanding about the good government does (that is, they think it does more good than in reality).
Wait, what? I never did that! The closest thing to an 'attack' I can imagine anyone reading from my post would have to have been about
> Republican politicians
which is surely a few thousand people at the most, it has got to be like 0.001% of the population that I said something negative about.
> But to say that people are anti-intellectual is just wrong.
Some people are. Some very important, prominent and influential people are in fact anti-intellectual and that is not wrong to say. Many Republican politicians are proudly anti-intellectual. They even say that. The GOP in some states like Texas specifically call out education as a problem in their party platform documents. They are, as a group, overall an anti-intellectual group. That is not a false statement, that is composed of their own words.
> it probably reflects people's misunderstanding about the good government does
Yes, that's my point. People have been brainwashed over decades to assume that the government does no good.
> (that is, they think it does more good than in reality).
I'm not sure I follow - I've never met a person in my life who thinks the government does good overall, certainly not more good than bad.
[citation needed]. That's just not true.
> Democrats are as guilty as Republicans.
More false words have never been spoken. You are incorrect. The current political situation should show that clearly. No Democrat has ever lied about so many things as the current Republicans in power: even simple, verifiable facts like crowd size are made into lies and distributed as propaganda by the current group of Republicans in power in the US House/Senate/Executive/etc.
It's likely not true that the left is as bad as the right on this matter, however the left has some big black marks on its record.
The anti-vaccination and anti-GMO crowd is overwhelmingly dominated by people from the left.
You see a lot of pop anti-science, anti-technology crap come out of both the fringe and mainstream left. That has been the case for the entire period post WW2. Anti-GMO is mainstream on the political left as one example.
You took my quote out of context. I was saying that it is mostly Republicans and not Democrats who tend to be anti-science "when the science in question contradicts their party line."
There is no party line to speak of with the Democrats and vaccinations and GMOs. Yes there are crazy people everywhere. It is not that these people are told by Democrat politicians to hate GMOs! That does not happen like it does with Republican politicians encouraging their constituents to think that high school education leading to further education is a bad thing.
"There's also a political difference. Republicans divide evenly on whether genetically modified foods are safe or unsafe. Independents rate them unsafe by a 20-point margin; Democrats, by a 26-point margin."
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97567&page=1
"Republicans are more skeptical of the theory of evolution, though by a surprisingly slim margin with 39 percent of them rejecting it as compared to 30 percent of Democrats. When it comes to other scientific matters, the waters are even muddier. For instance, Democrats and Republicans believe in the false link between vaccines and autism at roughly equal levels."
"Only 45 percent of Democrats support expanding the use of nuclear energy, as compared to 62 percent of Republicans"
https://reason.com/blog/2016/07/15/are-republicans-or-democr...
"The poll also shows more Democrats (9 percent) and independents (10 percent) say the measles vaccine isn't safe than Republicans who say the same (5 percent)."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/09/he...
A quote from the article: "As to whether liberals or conservatives are now more likely to be opposed to vaccination, some researchers have suggested that, while anti-vaccination beliefs have spread to libertarians on the right, the anti-vaccination movement originates and finds its strongest support in the political left. A later article by the same researchers similarly argues that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) evidence shows that states that voted for Obama in 2012 have higher rates of nonmedical vaccination exemptions.
Yet, other research suggests that it is in fact conservatives who are more likely to believe that vaccines cause autism, that it is liberals who are more likely to endorse pro-vaccination statements and that the more strongly someone identifies with the Republican Party, the more likely he or she is to have a negative opinion of vaccination."
[0] http://theconversation.com/anti-vaccination-beliefs-dont-fol...
For better or worst, public approval and funding are not always strongly linked. In this particular case, I personally find it sad that funding is split on party lines. Like you, I wish I could reallocate some of billions of dollars going to the military to projects like this which somehow embody the human spirit.
[1] http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1000/1 [2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/03/nasa-popular...
Of the remaining 75% at least 50% is spent on foreign aid :-)
The "welfare" vs "social security/medicare" numbers there are off, of course (just about backwards, though if you count Medicaid as "welfare" that puts an 11% floor on the "welfare" number right there).
It’s absurd to think about. The annual budget of nasa is less than the monthly interest on our national debt. Well two months.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program#C...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littoral_combat_ship#Budget_ov...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#Contro...
The R&D cost to develop the F35 isn't more than a hundred times $8 billion. You're making a bizarre comparison.
There's a big gap between saying the F35 program is too expensive (it obviously is), and comparing the 30 year cost of building and maintaing 3,500 planes to one telescope.
Did the F-22 program generate benefits to industrial manufacturing practices or increase knowledge within the material sciences domain with value beyond the tangible, per-unit costs?
Edit: grammar
The F22 is an extraordinary plane. Their primary mistake was not building several hundred more while the production lines were up and squeezing the production costs down if possible. The F35 is a dog by comparison to that plane.
With the F35, its cost projections are mostly a joke anyway. There's no scenario where even half the 3,500 estimate will ever be built. A thousand would be a surprising build number for the US. They're up to maybe 300 now. They'll pre-emptively shut the program production down and move on to the next thing.
Well, yea, this discussion is about high-cost government programs, and the fact that they didn't do things like this to reduce production costs is kind of the point.. Nevermind that such an aircraft may not even be necessary.
Adding more F-22 would absolutely have reduced the per-unit cost of production. But unless you can lower the cost of flying them, it will just make the operational, ongoing cost of your fleet go way up.
What makes you think that? Its predecessors (F-15/F-16) are both 40+ year old designs with most of the current airframes being 25-30 years old. They're all still slated to fly until at least 2030, IIRC. Then there's the B-52, which is a 70 year old design with all of the airframes being 50+ years old and no end in sight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
Program cost: US $1.508 trillion
Space missions come at chicken feed expense.