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Comment by milesf | Hacker News Reader

My wife's comment: "That's because the Chinese are the only ones with any money to have a space program". Very true dear, very true.

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NASA's budget is still 18 times larger than the Chinese space program:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Space_Administra...

Not to diminish the significance of this accomplishment, but the Chinese space program is still in a catch-up phase, which allows them to make significant advances quicker than if they were at the frontier.

I wonder if China has the same level of waste that NASA does. Elon Musk is making great strides in space exploration because he is willing to embrace new technologies and do the work in-house, as opposed to NASA's way of using only "proven" technologies that are nested 5-6 levels deep in outsourcing, with each level taking a cut.

I'm certain SpaceX could make a dollar go a lot further than NASA can. Perhaps the Chinese even further.

When the lives of astronauts are on the line it seems like a pretty good idea to use proven technologies even if they are expensive. That said, I completely agree that new technologies are needed to make it cheaper to go to space and SpaceX seems to be leading the way here.

Expensive but also lowest bidder.

The US has plenty of money to have a space program, we choose not to have a more active space program.

Just to further this point: NASA receives for its yearly budget 12 days of the military's budget, not counting expenses in the wars.

12 days of the budget for the entire us military sounds like a pretty damn good amount of money. Quick lookup indicates that's something like 21 billion dollars.

The real question is, what makes the military 30 times more important than space exploration, given that we are leaving days of (relative) peace?

At this point, the military is (in-part) a jobs program, both blue collar and white.

Much of the jobs money is coming out of the war money, which is not included in that figure.

Surely we can create a better jobs program with that money?

It's a much larger jobs program

Right. Because a single rover on the moon is more "active" than the 5 active space programs, including 2 active rovers, that NASA has on Mars.

Thanks. And Cassini at Saturn, New Horizons on its way to Pluto, Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, and Planck; STEREO and SDO looking at the Sun, and a host of Earth-observing missions (http://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/missions/), etc., etc.

Some of the comments above are not very well-informed.

No we don't. We operate at a trillion dollar deficit per year. How does that translate into having plenty of money? Should we borrow from the Chinese to compete with them?

> The American public perceives the NASA budget as commanding a much larger share of the federal budget than it in fact does. A 1997 poll reported that Americans had an average estimate of 20% for NASA's share of the federal budget, far higher than the actual 0.5% to under 1% that has been maintained throughout the late '90s and first decade of the 2000s.[16] It is estimated that most Americans spent less than $9 on NASA through personal income tax in 2009

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

Not very true, in a way. Chinese government is not very wealthy, different from what the media portray. It might have a large pile of "money" in reserve, but they can't take that money out easily.

In particular, most of the local government is in great debt, tens of billions in some cases. The Central government has a lot of debt too. Just because there is a pile of money in reserve doesn't actually make the government wealthy.

We should spend more money on space exploration, but you do remember the US landed several rovers on the moon in the last decade.

NASA has sent 5 orbiters and 3 impactors in the past decade, but 0 robotic vehicles (I believe a 'rover' is driven by a person). Here's the list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_the_Moon

> (I believe a 'rover' is driven by a person)

Doesn't have to be.

Curiosity is usually described as a "rover." In-between commands sent from mission control, it operates autonomously.

Until today, the last rover to drive around on the moon was the Soviet rover, Lunokhod 2, in 1973.

It doesn't cost that much to have a space program, relativelyspeaking... (as in compared to the military)

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