NASA Funding: what percentage of the federal budget?

In your imagination.

 

I wouldn't take much from those answers. And by the way, I don't consider Mr Clutch to be "right wing," but rather conservative on some issues, moderate on others. People are often hard to pigeon hole. Rimrocker and I disagree about this topic, but are in accord on a host of others. And some may not vote at all because they don't see the option they agree with. I'm in that category.

 

For me space exploration is a Quixotic goal, out there to dream about but I don't see it as doable for homo sapiens or particularly urgent. If we screw up this planet we aren't starting over on another one. Maybe replicating AI as guardians of our genetic code will in a hundred years but we have to survive 100 years.

What is urgent is using the perspective of Space to live on this planet, observing, monitoring, experimenting. Second we need to be thinking asteroid protection because that is an actual "big" task with real justification. It's estimated that over the last 10,000 years we have been struck by 350 asteroids as big as the Tunguska event and scientist believe that there are some 500 to 1,000 near-Earth asteroids larger than one kilometer in diameter. Advancing space science as insurance that our extinction is not subject to the whims of gravity seems logical,

 

Can you really blame Conservatives for turning on NASA? NASA hasn't done anything major in a long time and a company like SpaceX designed a spacecraft from scratch with their own delivery system. It really makes NASA look bad and feeds the conservative "private sector is always better" narrative.

Like I said, we have to rebuild trust in NASA to do its job. We're finally on a path forward that is looking ok. We finally have administrators who aren't morons. This is all good news. NASA needs to make Orion work. No more failures. The margin for error is so small now. As a government agency, you have to prove yourself to be worthwhile to defend your funding. Badly run agencies dont get funding increases very often. (unless you're the DoD, then you get funding increases even if you ask for cuts)

 

If I were allocating dollars for exploration, it would be in the design of relatively cheap, remotely operated and/or automated drones, and in the transmission of HD images/video/audio.

Manned exploration doesn't give enough benefit vs. the time/money/physical limitations of trying to keep people alive. It's pure romanticism.

We can send a thousand drones out in different directions. Not so with manned exploration.

Of course, a drone could discover something that would justify a manned exploration (intelligent life for example).

But Mars doesn't cut it.

And SpaceX may be privately run, but I'm not sure how privately funded it really is.

 

Pure romanticism is one of the best investments we could make.

 

yeah, blow your own money on dalliances like that, not the taxpayer

or get Richard Branson and James Cameron to fund it

 

So what is your plan if/when a large comet or asteroid is detected on a collision course with Earth? Are you going to send a "robot" to do something about it? Look at what happened to the EU robotic spacecraft that recently landed on a comet, a brilliant achievement. It took half an hour for signals from Earth to reach it. When the probe landed, it bounced around due to the failure of a couple of components that were supposed to anchor it to the surface, ending up in the shadow of a cliff, quickly running out of battery power because its solar cells weren't getting sunlight. And, of course, it took a decade to reach its target. Do you seriously want to depend on something that doesn't exist? A robotic ability to move an incoming large object from space, out of constant communication with Earth, decisions being made on the spot by computer? A capability we currently don't have, and probably won't have for a couple of decades?

I don't.

 

This is a really great point. I think cataloging asteroids and developing methods of defense against impacts should be the primary focus for NASA.

 

What could a manned craft do that a probe couldn't once it's landed on the comet/asteroid?

 

What? I've never been called libertarian before.