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OzOz · 11-03-2005, 02:10 AM

Serpent7,

Launching satellites not a good idea? This is news to me. They're generally more effective in space than on the ground. What do they do up there that's good? Well, apart from communication, weather observation, military reconnaisance (which you mightn't think much of, but which helped the US to spend billions less than it might have on weapons during the Cold War, since it could get a more accurate idea of what it might face in battle that way), monitoring the health and distribution of different types of crops, keeping tabs on pollution, navigation, air/sea search and rescue, environmental research - apart from these, I guess not much useful. May as well scrap the lot of them.

As for you employing EVERY person in the US, how much money do you think NASA spends each year? Their annual budget is currently around $16 billion. Divide that amongst the entire population of the US (as you suggest) and everyone gets paid about $50 per year. Maybe you're only talking about the unemployed? How many is that? I wouldn't know the figure for the US, but even if it's as low as 5 million, that's still only $3000 each. Not a heck of a lot. $60 per week. I would HOPE that your welfare system over there is better than that! What would you have them doing for that sort of money? I'd bet those "egg-heads with a bunch of degrees" would be bored stupid, and take their knowledge and know-how to other countries.

Which, by the way, is another way in which the money spent is not being wasted. One reason behind the decision to go to the Moon was the perceived national need to not let the US aerospace industry slowly wither away. In Russia, that problem has come up since the end of the Cold War, with a bit of a twist. Many of these "egg-heads" could not be paid at all by the Russian government. Quite a few were forced into work which would leave anyone like that bored to tears. There was another alternative for them - go to work for some dictator somewhere who wanted the ability to build missiles. Not something that most people would want to see happen. So, one of the reasons for undertaking the International Space Station (a project which I'm very critical of, on other grounds) was to help to provide interesting and rewarding work for these "egg-heads" in preference to other, less palatable alternatives.

As for the government giving money to industry to produce new weapons to be "able to kill more people more cheaply", one of the main drives with modern weaponry has been to produce more expensive and (usually) more accurate weapons, to be able to kill LESS people - and to make sure as much as possible that the ones you do kill are the ones you need to kill, with as little collateral damage as possible. One of the more reprehensible pieces of anti-US propaganda I can remember from early 2003, before the US went into Iraq, was a claim from one of our local Aussie politicians that the US military was going to carpet-bomb Baghdad. Carpet-bombing is a tactic from an era when airborne weapons were VERY inaccurate, so you had to saturate an area, attacking with literally hundreds of aircraft, to ensure a reasonably good chance of hitting your intended target. Now, of course, the same job can often be done by one aircraft - the target gets flattened, rather than most of the surrounding city plus tens of thousands of civilians and (maybe) the target.

People often said that we should stop going to the Moon and eradicate poverty. The US stopped going to the Moon. I still see poverty. Ergo, poverty is not the result of space exploration. Giving up space exploration will not solve the world's problems, or cause them to be solved. You can expect that any money that is freed up by abolishing NASA would be frittered away on little projects, mostly designed to make your local senator or member of congress look good rather than to solve the world's problems. The world's problems can be solved - or solved as much as they're ever going to be - while we continue going "out there". They certainly won't be solved by offering to redistribute ~0.25% of the US federal budget.

11-03-2005, 02:10 AM	#44 (permalink)
OzOz Psycho Location: Right here, right now.	Serpent7, Launching satellites not a good idea? This is news to me. They're generally more effective in space than on the ground. What do they do up there that's good? Well, apart from communication, weather observation, military reconnaisance (which you mightn't think much of, but which helped the US to spend billions less than it might have on weapons during the Cold War, since it could get a more accurate idea of what it might face in battle that way), monitoring the health and distribution of different types of crops, keeping tabs on pollution, navigation, air/sea search and rescue, environmental research - apart from these, I guess not much useful. May as well scrap the lot of them. As for you employing EVERY person in the US, how much money do you think NASA spends each year? Their annual budget is currently around $16 billion. Divide that amongst the entire population of the US (as you suggest) and everyone gets paid about $50 per year. Maybe you're only talking about the unemployed? How many is that? I wouldn't know the figure for the US, but even if it's as low as 5 million, that's still only $3000 each. Not a heck of a lot. $60 per week. I would HOPE that your welfare system over there is better than that! What would you have them doing for that sort of money? I'd bet those "egg-heads with a bunch of degrees" would be bored stupid, and take their knowledge and know-how to other countries. Which, by the way, is another way in which the money spent is not being wasted. One reason behind the decision to go to the Moon was the perceived national need to not let the US aerospace industry slowly wither away. In Russia, that problem has come up since the end of the Cold War, with a bit of a twist. Many of these "egg-heads" could not be paid at all by the Russian government. Quite a few were forced into work which would leave anyone like that bored to tears. There was another alternative for them - go to work for some dictator somewhere who wanted the ability to build missiles. Not something that most people would want to see happen. So, one of the reasons for undertaking the International Space Station (a project which I'm very critical of, on other grounds) was to help to provide interesting and rewarding work for these "egg-heads" in preference to other, less palatable alternatives. As for the government giving money to industry to produce new weapons to be "able to kill more people more cheaply", one of the main drives with modern weaponry has been to produce more expensive and (usually) more accurate weapons, to be able to kill LESS people - and to make sure as much as possible that the ones you do kill are the ones you need to kill, with as little collateral damage as possible. One of the more reprehensible pieces of anti-US propaganda I can remember from early 2003, before the US went into Iraq, was a claim from one of our local Aussie politicians that the US military was going to carpet-bomb Baghdad. Carpet-bombing is a tactic from an era when airborne weapons were VERY inaccurate, so you had to saturate an area, attacking with literally hundreds of aircraft, to ensure a reasonably good chance of hitting your intended target. Now, of course, the same job can often be done by one aircraft - the target gets flattened, rather than most of the surrounding city plus tens of thousands of civilians and (maybe) the target. People often said that we should stop going to the Moon and eradicate poverty. The US stopped going to the Moon. I still see poverty. Ergo, poverty is not the result of space exploration. Giving up space exploration will not solve the world's problems, or cause them to be solved. You can expect that any money that is freed up by abolishing NASA would be frittered away on little projects, mostly designed to make your local senator or member of congress look good rather than to solve the world's problems. The world's problems can be solved - or solved as much as they're ever going to be - while we continue going "out there". They certainly won't be solved by offering to redistribute ~0.25% of the US federal budget. __________________ Maybe you should put some shorts on or something, if you wanna keep fighting evil today. Last edited by OzOz; 11-03-2005 at 03:09 AM..