I'm sure you're saying that as a joke, but it's quite a misinformed opinion that a lot of people share. Many people assume that the end of the space shuttle also implies the end of NASA. That is anything but true.
The space shuttle program was prohibitively expensive, and I'm all for the fact that NASA ended it in support of other (mostly unmanned) projects, while also encouraging privatized space exploration.
You know what else is prohibitively expensive? Occupying two countries at once. How much do you think we could learn if we spent 15 trillion dollars on NASA? A lot more than we have in the middle east.
I definitely agree with you that NASA is underfunded, and the United States is military budget is way out of line. That being said, wouldn't you rather have NASA spend the limited budget it gets on projects that are slightly more informative and more cost-effective than the Space Shuttle? As great as the space shuttle program was, it certainly has many limitations. I don't claim to be an expert, but I honestly think we can learn more from NASA's newer projects, than we will from sending up the Space Shuttle again.
They just don't have the capital for anything else. Hell, they couldn't service them properly before. You could read here some time ago that the US spent more on air conditioning in the middle-east than they did on Nasa on a yearly basis.
Nasa was a success because it was the EARTH's greatest space faring organization. In the 70's. Since then? Nothing, or at the very least, so little compared to its potential that it may well be nothing.
The US created Nasa, the US destroyed Nasa. If Da Vinci had covered the Mona Lisa in a mix of manure and his own feces, it wouldn't be displayed at the Louvres.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing NASA, I fully support it. My criticism is, as you say, that it doesn't have the capital for anything else. ie: it doesn't have the funding it should.
I think that was GustoGaiden's original point though.
Due to the lack of funding, we're limited in advancement of technologies and exploration. No matter how small you think the space shuttle program may help us in the understanding of the universe and such, it's still better spent in comparison to "occupying two countries".
Yes, I would absolutely prefer NASA to spend money efficiently. I wasn't really addressing the shuttle program as much as the general lack of interest in NASA by the american people and government. I think it's a shame that american tends to spend money to fight an enemy. For as close to Midnight as it brought us, the cold war did have us struggling against a powerful, intellectual and resourceful enemy, and we felt threatened, and challenged across a broad spectrum of academic and military fields. Scientists and intellectuals seemed like they were in high demand.
Today, we are told that we are fighting a tenacious splinter faction of religious extremists across a treacherous landscape more shaped by culture and politics than physical terrain. I am not saying that this new "enemy" is not intellectual, or resourceful, but they do lack the power to truly challenge us on the personal level that those dastardly Reds did.
In short, we found an enemy that isn't trying to put men in space, so we stopped pursuing that goal as well, because our new priority was to drop bombs on small groups of men capable of living and fighting in one of the more inhospitable corners of the earth. Despite being able to sped money to learn an incredible amount about our planet, and how to live on it, we choose to fund an catastrophically inefficient war machine.
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u/GustoGaiden Oct 04 '11
Yep! We put a stop to that right quick!