NASA Needs Better Funding

[herpguy]

Recently, George W. Bush gave NASA a 1% increase in funding for 2007, but I still don't think that is enough. After the hurricanes, NASA needs to rebuild some facilities, on top of working on missions to go to the moon, mars, and beyond. In fact, the Europa Mission may even be canceled if NASA does not recieve the funding it needs. So, I believe more money needs to go to NASA, and the U.S. government needs to stop spending so much money on other less important things like paying farmers to not grow food, etc.

 

Please tell me your thoughts.

[zyncod]

NASA does not need to go to Mars. It gets too much money already for what are essentially esoteric and useless projects, although they are interesting. They are way overfunded at the moment, while many other worthy science projects go begging for money.

[JustStuit]

Useless.......space exploration is of course not important.

(sarcasim if you do not know me)

I hope you were talking about certain projects at NASA and not it in general.

[padren]

I personally think it should get at least the same funding now % wise of the budget as it did during the apollo program. It got us to the moon in under a decade, and it spurred many other technologies that helped the nation get ahead.

 

It would be nice to have something worthy of national pride again in my lifetime.

[Pangloss]

I'm actually in favor of the Mars plans, but frankly I question NASA's overall purpose and institutional capabilities, and I would like to see a plan instituted that gradually moves NASA out of the launching business over the next couple of decades, and into the business of supporting, training, research/evangelism and monitoring of private enterprise space ventures.

[Pangloss]

By the way, that if my prediction is true, NASA will actually have a vast *surplus*, even if it launches all of its current non-manned projects. IMO the shuttle will never be launched again, and that's 30% of NASA's budget right there.

 

Of course, being a government agency, it will attempt to spend every dime it is allocated, whether it launches shuttles or not. What are we going to do about that?

[john5746]

The US is in decline and must be revitalized. Deep spending cuts are needed. NASA isn't mandatory, so should have been cut, IMO. As Pangloss mentioned, the shuttle is history.

 

The Defense budget should be cut also - yes cut. I hope we don't plan on doing any more Iraq type invasions. If we need to invade Iran, get in and out quickly. We simply cannot afford to make the world over in our image.

 

Privatizing something just means - go to China or India, so might as well just let them do all the space exploration. Let them push the new frontiers, spend some money, etc.

[bascule]

NASA's budget for FY2007 is $17.9 billion

 

The DoD's FY2007 budget is $439.3 billion (not including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which Slate estimates brings the total amount of defense spending up to $580 billion)

 

This is a $20 billion increase over the $419 billion DoD budget for 2006

 

The increase in the DoD's budget alone is more than the entire NASA budget for 2007.

 

When you add in the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined ($509 billion)

 

The next biggest defense spender in the world is China ($67 billion)

 

Maybe we're spending... excessively on defense? Maybe some of that money could go to NASA?

[JustStuit]

Agreed. This war and defense is getting quite costly for seemingly little results.

[Pangloss]

The White House is touting the fact that the defense budget is only an increase of something like 7%, but overall under the Bush administration it's up something like 25%, or around $100 billion (very rough figures). But if I remember correctly, it actually rose by an even higher percentage under Clinton.

 

In fairness, much of this is due to deferred spending that took place under the Clinton administration. That's not necessarily Clinton's fault -- a number of recent presidents have had to make tough long-term research and development calls that affected future presidencies, and if anything Clinton can be credited with ending the "two theaters of foreign war" policy (although it didn't actually end until Bush). Examples of programs that have recently come to deployment (i.e. appropriations) include two new fighter planes, a new transport plane, and a complete revamp of the equipment deployed to our ground forces (the development of non-tracked armored vehicles was a fascinating but almost completely unnoticed story during the Clinton years).

 

For the rest of the increase, it's almost impossible to conceive that any president would be able to do anything about that either. Ike warned us about the military-industrial complex. We didn't listen.

 

So even if Al Gore were president today, the budget would probably be exactly the same as it is at the moment. Give of take a few dozen billion dollars (say, a handful of NASA budgets). (sigh)

 

As Senator Everett Dirksen famously never said, "a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money". Today we have to multiply that rule of thumb by a factor of one hundred before anybody even bothers to blink.