Thanks for doing the legwork on this response. I'm so tired of the "defund NASA" bullshit. Been fighting that red herring for more than 25 years now. I'll add the one point you missed: NASA's budget is a microscopic portion of the national budget. Less than 1%. So people who make the argument to "save the money and spend it on something else" are morons. There is orders of magnitude more money spent on other stupid shit. No need to start with NASA. And the other side of that coin is that, for a mere 1% of the budget, we get the intermittent utterly amazing thing, like the Internet. And taking 1% of your income and giving it to some of the smartest people in the world is a pretty damn good lottery ticket, as far as I'm concerned.
2013 report on consolidating anti-poverty programs WARNING PDF. Obama's White House in 2013 proposed a consolidation of Federal anti poverty programs and cut to redundant management without impacting the money going into the hands of the people who need it. Those cuts totaled $24 billion a year. That same year, NASA got $17.7 billion. We spend roughly $80 billion per year on corn and ethanol subsidies, $130 billion on fossil fuel subsidies, we spent $8 trillion on TARP, roughly $2 Trillion so far on Iraq, and I could go on from here. The problem as I see it is this. Most Americans don't have any clue what their tax dollars do. That is a flat out failure of the media as their role of watchdogs. Maybe we can say education as well, but more of a news issue IMO. As I said in a rant that got badged last week, the important stuff is boring. Regional zoning and transportation planning commission reports don't even make the news, but the derby hats of celebrities are all over the local media. The federal R&D budget was amazingly easy to find and is roughly $140 billion in 2016 out of a budget of $3.5 Trillion. That basic R&D is what builds the engineering of tomorrow. It's peanuts and we can fund a whole decade of it by killing the F-35. Which gets into a Guns vs Butter debate that I don't want to hijack a thread for. The point is the money is there for the stuff that matters if we pay attention, the costs are minuscule, and it is building foundations that will have benefits for more than a generation.
The underlying thinking here is why I became a delegate for Bernie Sanders. America has plenty of money to do everything it could ever want to do. We have trillions and trillions of dollars available to us that we get to choose how to spend. Sadly, more than 60% of that money goes overseas to fund stupid empire-building exercises... while our bridges here at home crumble underfoot. The question is not whether we fund malaria eradication programs, or NASA, or give every student a basic living wage until they are 25, or whatever. We can do any of that we want to, and we could do it tomorrow, if we decided to. All we need to do is re-evaluate our spending priorities. Shit, the US Army lost a steel shipping container full of cash in Iraq War I. That single shipping container has NASA's entire budget in it. And it just disappeared into the desert without a trace. "Sorry. Can't find it. Dunno what happened." All the US needs is to rethink our spending priorities. It ain't about raising or lowering taxes, it ain't about breaking or supporting international treaties, and it ain't about the debt ceiling or how much of our debt China owns. All of that is line noise, if we can take a hard look at where our money goes, and think closely about our priorities.
I agree that NASA's portion of the budget is small, and there are much larger programs that deserve more criticism. But I don't think the right argument to make is: "It's only a little bit of money, so we don't have to worry if it is being used responsibly." Ten billion dollars a year is small compared to larger programs. But it is large compared to the National Malaria Eradication Program, which produced great benefits. If NASA is free, and we don't have to give anything up to pay for space research, then we should have a hundred NASAs. What are we actually giving up in order to have NASA, does anyone know? To determine if NASA is a good way to invest resources, we should examine the costs and the benefits of having NASA. The Internet is not one of those benefits.
Wrong. You are absolutely wrong in the wrongest way a wrong person could be. It's called basic research. It is the human endeavor to learn, to discover, to figure out the universe and how it works. Basic research can never have a value placed on it because it is basic. Elemental. It underpins every other idea, concept, invention, and innovation that follows it. I used to work for NASA's Office of Technology Commercialization. The job of the OTC was to take NASA's inventions, and give them to private sector companies to turn into products. There were like, 20 people in this department! And we couldn't even get through all the amazing shit we had to give away. (Why give it away? Because NASA is a publicly funded agency, so WE - the taxpayers - own what NASA produces. That's why the OTC exists. It gives OUR research back to US so WE can make money on it, invent things, create jobs, and continue being amazing and innovative.) I'm done with you. You choose to live in ignorance, and then espouse moronic opinions completely unencumbered by facts or the practical experience of generations of humans. If we spent 10x on NASA's budget, we still wouldn't be paying "market rates" for the amazing shit they create that makes our modern lives possible. The whole space thing is the flashy "marketing" part of NASA. The real value is the thousands and thousands of scientists, working diligently away in labs, with too little funding, and yet still producing brilliant work that benefits all of us - worldwide - that deserve your respect. And your nickel.