If they were truly concerned, they’d start giving it the funding it deserves.
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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They've tried everything except actually funding NASA, and they're all outta ideas.
NOTE: China WILL overtake NASA, the same way they are dominating the renewable energy sector — because they invest heavily in science, and they do it early. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand this shit.
But hey we tried giving a shit load of money to a billionaire space nazi instead!
Won't someone think of the investors!
Maybe we need to give more to the space phallus that the other asshole billionaire built. Maybe that’ll fix it.
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Maybe we should give money to fund education and research instead of banning books and attacking each other.
I came here to say exactly this.
Perhaps a space race with China would rekindle the motivation for our money grubbing demagogues to actually fund it.
No, it won't. They'll just relocate to China, or maybe a super yacht out in international waters. They'll continue milking every last cent out of the US until it's a dead dried up husk of a nation and then they'll just move to the next one. Their supporters are too stupid to realize where the end of the path they've been told to walk is going to take them, and they'd rather blame anyone else but themselves for all the problems they face. So no, a space race with China won't fix shit.
Judging by the state of the US, you're much more likely to be right than I am, you cynical bastard!
😂
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Gee whiz, maybe we should have been properly funding our space program all of these years instead of wasting it on making the military industrial complex filthy fucking rich and the world less secure overall?
Especially stupid considering last time they gave the space program appropriate funding, it led to a lot of advancements that the military industrial complex could use.
You make it sound like the military advancements were an unexpected byproduct, as opposed to the real goal.
The goal was optics. Kennedy didn't know what advances would result from Apollo. He wanted to show that the US was better at science and technology than Russia.
The science of putting a ballistic payload anywhere, including heaven.
The space race was awesome because it let the two countries measure their dicks (specifically their military dicks) without actually obliterating the planet.
The "for all mankind" angle was a great way to frame things for the population of Earth, for sure. But just like mobile chemical WMD labs in Iraq, sometimes the given justification and actual justification are two different things.
Don't get me wrong, there absolutely were beneficial optics. Something doesn't have to just be for one thing. But it was always primarily about practical demonstration of weapons capacity under the facade of human exploration.
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Nonsense, surely their shortsightedness will pay off in the long run!
People behind the scenes are siphoning NASA space research money and turning it into space profit instead. The growth of private space companies starting in the US is no coincidence. Blame oligarchs for steering the country into a dead end.
Don't worry, I do.
Hate on spacex and its competitors as much as you want, im not saying you dont have cause.
But defunding NASA caused this. Those billionaires looked and said holy shit, the entire nasa budget is only that much? And they arent building rockets anymore? I can literally fund my own space program? Ide be crazy not to
The government has funded SpaceX, not musk.
To be fair, it's not as if those things are mutually-exclusive. For example, you know how the Hubble Space Telescope is this extremely unique and nigh-irreplaceable scientific instrument that cost a pretty big fraction of NASA's entire budget?
Well, it turns out we actually have dozens of the damn things; it's just that we couldn't be bothered to actually point more than one of them away from Earth instead of towards it.
Hell, a decade ago the National Reconnaissance Office gave NASA a couple for free 'cause they just had 'em lying around, but (as far as I know) NASA hasn't managed to scrounge up enough money from the couch cushions to spruce 'em up and launch 'em yet.
They certainly don't have to be, but there is a well established pattern of the US government getting waaay too chummy with corporations to the point that it can undermine what's best for the people in pursuit of corporate interests.
US: continually decides to not fund scientific exploration of space
Also US: GUYS! BE AFRAID! ANOTHER COUNTRY DID DECIDE TO SPEND MONEY ON IT! NOW WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO IF…UM…WELL, I GUESS IF THEY TAKE OVER SPACE…? Or…wait, what are we concerned about? Ah, fuck it. Cut NASA’s budget again. We got genocide to fund and taxes to cut for the wealthy.
One can only hope.
The last time that happened, we explored the moon and developed the space shuttle program. We got microchips and memory foam.
Ideological rivals encourage congress throwing money into big science. Apollo returned $14 on the dollar. It's a good investment.
Choosing Musk and SpaceX for Artemis is likely NASAs biggest mistake.
It was always part of Musk's plan to cripple NASA funding and pump that money into SpaceX.
If you look at the Artemis mission and think starship is the weakest part of the plan, you are simply not being objective.
At least for ISS, the choice is either Musk or Putin.
I don’t know which one is worse, especially considering Musk is aiding Putin via Starlink in Ukraine.
Ukraine claims Russian forces using Musk’s Starlink in occupied areas
But as someone who works in the industry, it is a bleak outlook. NASA absolutely needs more funding for its human spaceflight exploration, Earth Science, robotic exploration, and astronomy/astrophysics.
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Have they considered renaming it X and firing all their expert staff to make NASA more profitable?
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This is a good thing. Competition with the USSR made NASA what it is.
Only if the US actually competes. Given the fuckwits in congress, that is far from assured.
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Who would have imagined that decades of funding cuts and pressure to rely upon Musk would allow another nation to take the lead? (Sarcasm)
Dang maybe we should take a fraction of the trillions we spend on the military to fund scientific research, and also health and education while we're at it so we'd get even more potential scientists.
Yes, race harder please.
I'm sure throwing more money and contracts at Musk and SpaceX is going to help solve the problem any day now. /s
Export all your technology and jobs to cheaper labour to make more profit. Now you will slowly become bankrupt, as no one can afford the enshitification products and services.
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So they had no issue relying on Russia to service the ISS ever since they shutdown the space shuttle, but now they're afraid of China... doing space science faster?
Ignoring the fact that this is not even a real concern, maybe don't spend morbillions on free munitions for Israel or Lockheed's next stupid idea.
They defunded NASA so hard that they started hallucinating about going back to the moon with 15% of the Apollo budget.
At the time, Russia wasn’t as…..problematic. We had been working with Russia as an International Partner since the very early days of ISS and even during Shuttle/Mir.
Obviously they did become problematic, but we didn’t have other options until SpaceX. Now that’s….obviously got its own issues, but Russia is vastly different than China when it comes to space. Russia needs the money, China already has it.
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Looking at their space station, I think China already has overtaken NASA.
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Anyone concerned that the US will be "overtaken" by anything coming out of China right now needs to go read about what's been happening in China for the last 5 years.
We all live on this rock. Floating through space.
Anyone who doesn’t want to spend more time looking out is someone with something in their closet you don’t want to look in.
Ad Astra per Aspera
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