Nasa

Has it come to anyone else's attention NASA should get their shit together?

ex: NASA lost a $125million Mars orbiter because half the project staff used imperial measurements and the other half used metric.

ex: Where is the funding for exploration/colonization of Europa?

ex: The $10billion Space-Based Infrared System project that only functioned for 7 seconds before failing completely.

I think if NASA was privatized, innovation would happen quicker and projects would be cheaper.

 

What is your argument?

 

Hasn't NASA been stopped/shut down due to the fact that they lost so much money and there is no need for discovery/travel in space since we (US) are no longer racing against the Russians? Sputnik was way back in the Cold War and I doubt that the tensions between the US and Russia were as bad as they were before.

 

See:

I don't think they have, no, but I agree with you completely. It's a Cold War relic that is no longer necessary.

 

http://www.sythe.org/something-all/...tion-read-before-posting-avoid-forum-ban.html

First bit.

 

I'm not seeing the problem.

 

Your premise isn't strong and it's just like me saying, "I think if cows were nurtured properly, the milk would taste better.".

 

The premise is plenty strong and I cited specific examples.

 

No, your premise has no correlation with your examples.

Privatizing a government agency whose goal is space exploration is stupid. Doing so would set nasa back folds, as their main focus would then be to profit, which as I said wouldn't make sense in their line of work.

Privatizing a federal agency =/= Less failure

 

I honestly have no idea who would want to back up NASA if it was a private business. I see no returns and overall a bad investment. Unless there is a good reason why we spend billions in space exploration when we can be using the money for better things at this moment, I think we should close down NASA for now.

 

Well for one, NASA just doesn't do space stuff. They're also one of the world's top aeronautical and jet propulsion research institute. Not only have we got aeronautical advancements in technology from their labs we also got things like geosynchronous satellites which are vital. They're not in the business of making profit. They're in the business of research and research, for the most part, isn't a very lucrative business. (Unless you're doing defense research or medical research.)

 

The military spends too much of our money into investments of innovative technology, our whole country spends too much money. But in the end, is the spending worth it?

 

I do believe its worth spending the money for research, as we all know space technology is extremly expensive which takes a lot of time and money to construct, i think they are doing a great job as obama announced they want the first humans to step on Mars by 2030, the whole nasa thing just amazes me of what humas are able to do

 

Money should always be spent for scientific research so as to increase the possibility for the greater good. However in this instance i disagree with the amount spent into the research as it could have well been spent for things like education and healthcare. Not to mention America is in large debt

 

You, as well as most others in this thread, are grossly overestimating how much of the federal budget is allotted to NASA. In reality, they hover around 0.5% of the federal budget, and even at their peak in the mid 60s, they reached only 4.4%.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA )

OT: Privatizing a federal agency, as Ghast has mentioned, would not help. Their current funding is small and more than justified, as the research they're doing is invaluable.

EDIT: found an interesting website requesting that NASA receive 1% of the national budget instead of ~0.5%, along with a video about what they believe could be done with this increase in funding.

http://www.penny4nasa.org/

 

it should be privatized and yes more gains would be accomplished. other than that they spend money stupidly, not news.

 

Exactly what i was thinking. We'll see, we'll see

 

We don't even have 100% of our own planet mapped out, it dumbfounds me that we're exploring other planets before we have ours totally sussed.

 

It's out of necessity. Although we have much to learn about our planet the problem of overpopulation won't go away. Learning about a new species of deep sea fish is nice and all but in reality it won't solve the problems we will see if we aren't allowed to expand. I wrote a little rant about it on the time travel thread here somewhere but if we are to just sit on earth and chill for the rest of our existence it would be very sad.

In my opinion the worst problem we face today is a lack of international unity. Much of this is due to religious bullshit and the only way to get rid of that friction is education. I won't go so far as to say everyone should just ditch religion but if it in any way is stopping progress it is a large contributing factor. If the world unified into a single state we would better be able to manage ourselves and expand. Our end goal should be to find other inhabitable planets and live there. This may sound like a sci-fi dream that has no basis on reality but there is no point in the human race existing if it's just going to die off on earth without spreading elsewhere.

It's really sad we don't fund space exploration more and I agree it should be privatised but there is little to no incentive for any corporation to do so. Sure the extremely long term benefits would be astronomical but try explaining a 200 year plan to bag of money. If everyone on earth were on the same team I have no doubt we could accomplish these goals within the next century but much of the world still dwells on the falsities of tradition and culture.

Not enough people are bothered with the extremely long term future of our world. Too many people are arguing about how much tax money is being spent on shooting each other and not enough effort is being put into trying to work together as a fucking species. If there is anything that is dumbfounding about our world today is that we still kill each other in the name of a magical bearded wizard man in the sky.

 

Most of the places we don't have mapped are either uninhabitable or have very few resources. NASA doesn't just explore space, they develop an immense amount of technology.