Photo via The Silicon Graybeard.
Sure, NASA spends taxpayer money like a drunken sailor. Sure, Congress is using this program to throw taxpayer money at favored corporations.
But today, no other country can do what we are doing, just like what Old America did half a century ago. And no other country has a SpaceX waiting in the wings to drop mission cost by a factor of 40.
Considering the epic amount of fraud from California's (and other states) Medicare programs (not to mention Learing Centers), all I can say is that this is waste I can get behind.
6 comments:
NASA spends money, and a lot of it, but think of the machine shops, the suppliers, and machine tool builders that supply the means to manufacture rocket engines and systems. Then think of the peripheral vendors that feed and clothe and house the builders of spacecraft.
A lot of people think that NASA just hauls money off to space, but instead, they create worthwhile jobs here on planet earth.
A country $40 trillion in debt doesn't need to be spending 1 cent on pretending to go to the Moon again.
Thanks for the link and mention, Borepatch!
Let me share my favorite two factoids about Lockheed-Martin's Space Launch System (LockMart - your one stop defense shop). The first is really well known. Each launch is somewhat north of $4 Billion dollars and probably varies in every launch based on how both launches so far required tons of work on the ground to get them to work.
My second favorite factoid is far less well known. Yes, the SLS will launch a bigger payload than SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, but only about 25 or 30% bigger. So you buy two Falcon Heavy flights, launching two FH flights instead of one SLS and it costs you 8% of that $4 Billion dollar SLS, about $320 million. You could launch a fleet of 12 Falcon Heavies for less than one of SLS's $4 billion - and part of the savings is from everything being reusable instead of used once and dropped in the Atlantic.
That's just awesome. - Brigid
Not to be a party-pooper... but ... it's not over till they're safely home. Pray for them, this is damned dangerous work.
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Something really not mentioned is that this mission is going to take 10 days. If they lost all life support and needed to get back down in a hurry, it's still a 10 day mission.
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