Lack of funding??? NASA gets 17 Billion a year and typically around 10 billion is for manned space flight - 2011 has 9 billion.
How much more does NASA need?
> NASA gets 17 Billion a year
I say give them what they say they need, not what internet armchair economists say they need. None of the alternative uses for that money that the US government is finding are as important.
And now we have the so-called Space Launch System. Another boondoggle jobs program that is so ridiculous that fundamentals of its design have been specified by the Senate itself. The Planetary Society, Space Access Society, and the Space Frontier Foundation have all called for the SLS to be cancelled. It's a poorly designed rocket, a huge waste of money, and overall a project that is not likely to succeed.
I love space exploration. I love rocket engineers. But I cannot abide either being abused to serve as pawns in congressional pork-barrel spending games.
This is not a question about what NASA manned spaceflight "needs", it's a question about where the Senate wants to funnel money.
NASA manned spaceflight has spent a quarter of a trillion dollars over the last 4 decades.
A quarter of a trillion dollars.
That is the cost of the Shuttle legacy and the ISS. Does anyone think that we, the American taxpayers, actually got a pretty good return on that money? Before you answer keep in mind that we could have easily paid for 150+ Saturn V rockets as well as the appropriate payloads and spacecraft for them for less money.
Meanwhile, companies like SpaceX have managed to build entire orbital launchers from scratch for less than the cost of a single Shuttle flight.
None of the alternative uses for that money are as important? How about using that $10 billion a year to buy commercial flights on Boeing, LockMart, or SpaceX rockets? Right now only a fraction of NASA's funding is actually serving the purpose of advancing the state of the art or improving access to space.
There is an argument about whether the amount of money governments spend on various activities could be better spent on spaceflight.
This is not that argument and has no bearing here. This is an argument about whether NASA is a good conduit for spending money on manned spaceflight activities. And there is overwhelming evidence that despite a handful of successes it has not been. Over time it has gotten less efficient, less safety conscious, and less capable. There is every indication that with Apollo era budgets in place the NASA of today would not be able to get back to the Moon in 10 years or even 20 years.
The unmanned spaceflight portion of NASA still does some pretty good work, but the manned spaceflight portion has become a bureaucratic infused pork-barrel shell of its former glory. There are lots of reasons for that, a lot of them due to consistent political meddling from without, but it's still the truth.
And indeed, other arms of the space industry need much more funding. They will ultimately do all the common varieties of manned spaceflight better, that is inevitable.
The question is, will problems be solved by reducing NASA's budget? I think that is incredibly fucking unlikely. Instead as far as I am concerned we should be shoveling money at all of them like coal into a locomotive. Don't reduce NASAs budget so you can give more to Boeing and SpaceX.. give more to Boeing and SpaceX in spite of NASA's budget.
One half of a penny of every dollar you pay in (federal) taxes goes to science^. That is appalling. For as shitty and expensive as those shuttles were though, that money got us more return than pretty much the rest of that dollar.
If you look at how we budget for science and think "NASA is getting too much" instead of "Science is not getting enough", then you are missing the bigger picture.
^(ie, NASA. the money spent on the NSF isn't even worth bothering to include...)
If the government shit canned NASA tomorrow, and took that money and pumped it into the project Google is doing on self-driving cars wouldn't the world be a better place? Space is great, but how many lives could be saved by implementing self-driving cars nationwide?
Or took all that money and pumped it into computer science R&D. Or biotech R&D. Or nanotech R&D.
The argument for NASA often boils down to an argument for R&D, and there are a lot of more efficient ways to fund R&D than spending a bunch of it on non-R&D type stuff.
Furthermore, shitcanning all the non-manned stuff NASA does is a fucking terrible idea. Science without study of the universe is crazy.