Hacker News Reader

Comment by aero142 | Hacker News Reader

I keep hearing this argument and I'm always underwhelmed. .5% of the federal budget sounds like a huge amount of money to me. Sure, it's only a small fraction here and space can be important, but this has to be balanced against cancer research, and our social net, and taking care of the mentally ill, and police and name your favorite. According to wiki, the national science foundation will get 7 billion this year. 10 billion for NASA is real money.

View on HN

You think "space" and "everything you listed" are mutually exclusive? Not so. Products and technologies from space development end up benefiting us right here on Earth.

Medicine? The software that was developed to do image-sharpening on the Hubble pictures turned out to make MRI machines significantly more useful without requiring a change to the hardware.

Social net? NASA has produced a crazy amount of research that would be useful to disaster victims, people in shelters , and assisted living. A couple of examples from the top of my head: safe, stable, long-term storage for high-nutrition meals; long-term emotional impact of environmental factors (colors, scents, etc).

Police: Most forms of wireless communication (including police radios) use SOMETHING that was developed by NASA -- extended-life batteries, transmission protocols, etc.

Even leaving aside the benefits to be head, "$10 billion for NASA" is NOT real money. It's an unnoticeable fraction of the waste in our budgets.

This argument is often trotted out, but it doesn't hold water if you think about it. There may be some examples where the technology has been re-used, but what's their value in terms of useful research quantitatively, rather than hand-wavingly?

Even if it's as high as 20% that can be re-used, you could get 100% of that value by researching image-sharpening, disaster shelters, food storage, wireless comms and all the other things you mention, directly. So you still have to justify the remaining 80% in other ways, the side-effects already accounted-for.

A government agency running at 20% efficiency? That is a fucking miracle.

Do you think that the military budget, at 20% of the federal budget, is worth every penny? If you want your social programs and non-space science research to get more money, it would be unwise to take that money from space science research. Much more wise would be to shrink the gigantic 20% military by .5%. When you compare NASA to the military, $10 billion is no longer "real money".

By the way, in 1997 most Americans thought NASA took about 25% of the budget. Not 0.5%-ish. So when arriving at the decision of what a "lot of money" is, compare it not to what you think but to what most people think and you'll find that NASA is vastly cheaper than the average person's expectations.

I think we are getting very little for our 10 billion and I don't think giving them more money will get us more space. As for the military budget, I do believe we spend too much there, but taking that money and having NASA waste it instead doesn't feel like that much of an improvement.

As for the 1997 figure, I guess the .5% argument would be useful for the people so horribly uninformed, and you are right that this probably explains why I keep hearing this argument. Fair point.

We're still getting lots of "not-space" but still beneficial science data out of NASA. I'm working with a team that's tracking pollution dispersion through earth's upper atmosphere right now, and my friend is off at a conference discussing her work on the origin of life. I think those are pretty compelling research topics.

(Electrical Engineer at NASA)

> Do you think that the military budget, at 20% of the federal budget, is worth every penny?

No, and I advocate against a lot of that spending too. But observing that some other money is spent unwisely doesn't justify spending even more money unwisely on something else. When talking about spending more on NASA, it's pretty much necessary to justify those marginal dollars on their own, not in the context of other government waste.

The other approach can be used to justify essentially any spending, considering how bad the size of our military is for this country. Almost any possible alternate project, including piling up a bunch of money and burning it, would be better than the marginal dollars that get spent on the military.

I do agree that it's worthwhile to correct people's perception of the size of NASA's budget. To be honest, I was quite surprised that it was even 0.5% though.

When advocating for an action (such as cutting NASA), you need to establish that the action is a good use of the time and effort relative to other ways it could be spent (e.g. cutting pretty much any other item on the budget). For example, I could save a whole five cents if I drove to a farther gas station to fill up. You might say, "Hey, five cents is five cents," but actually the time (and probably even gas) cost is much greater than the win from doing it. Cutting NASA is premature optimization at best.

You could make exactly the same argument, with the "action" as keeping funding NASA. We need to establish that giving ANOTHER $18 billion is a good use of funds compared to leaving it in the taxpayers' pocket. Any economist will tell you that $18 billion in tax revenue actually costs the economy more than that (for example from deadweight losses).

I guess you could make that argument if you liked twisting words and ignoring how the government works. "Leaving it in the taxpayer's pocket" is not what would happen if you defunded NASA. The money would simply go elsewhere.

You seem to be speaking from the vantage of ideology rather than an actual, rational view of reality. Cutting taxes is yet another action (i.e. change from the status quo, like defunding NASA) that you'll need to argue in favor of and outline a plan for. It won't just magically happen even if you cut some budget item.

I agree if the argument is "we should transfer money in the budget from X to Y." But if the argument is, "we should add money to the budget to fund NASA," it's a foul to make that argument by saying, "Marginal dollars for NASA are more useful than the least useful marginal dollars we spend (military funding)."

Looking at the OP, it seems like he was making the former argument, which I buy, so good on him.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com