Thread: Science Science is Cool....
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Old 08-20-2013, 09:24 PM   #981
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GloryDayz View Post
The competition isn't with other people in the field, it's with the interest of the general public, and their desire to stay interested in the research of something that they won't be part of (really). I think we (the whole planet basically) all know we'll never travel to the moon, much less Mars, so going to watch a quasar, up close, isn't going to happen either. So, now that we have a picture of one, why keep funding what we'll never see? Because each new picture that takes billions to get, is cooler than the last. So they feed us cool enhanced pics and we all say NASA needs to keep its funding and the kids in Africa can find a meal of their own. And when cool pics don't work, we move on to relevant facts , like, for every $10B NASA spends, we get awesome technology like a digital watch.

Don't get me wrong, I get it, I support it, and I'm the first to say the kids in Africa have been starving for, well, EVER (!!!); so the money we put into NASA and science in general (some more GloryDayz-life-impacting than cool pics of the horse-head nebula), need to stay funded because GloryDayz like cool stuff and cool pics...

But yeah, astrophysics is an expensive luxury because I'll never go to Mars...but that's OK, I'm worth ever $1B of it.... Now, if they find a earth-ending meteor some other science doode figures out how to put Bruce Willis on it to blow it the **** up before it hits earth, they're useful to me beyond benefiting science overall by entertaining me.
You couldn't be more wrong... and you've obviously missed the entire point of this thread. Saying NASA does nothing but provide pretty pictures is downright ****ing insulting. An expensive luxury? Just because you can't personally experience the manned mission to Mars? JFC.

What do you think NASA really costs?

A study has shown that many people incorrectly assume NASA’s budget is 20% of the total US budget. In reality, funding for NASA is only represents 0.6%. The entire history of NASA does not add up to the amount spent on the military in a single year.

Quote:
Americans in general have no idea what NASA’s "cost" is. In fact, most members of the public have no idea how much any government agency’s budget is. What we do know — and have recently documented — is that the public perception of NASA’s budget is grossly inflated relative to actual dollars. In a just-completed study, we asked respondents what percentage of the national budget is allocated to NASA … NASA’s allocation, on average, was estimated to be approximately 24% of the national budget (the NASA allocation in 2007 was approximately 0.58% of the budget.)
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/ba.../#.UhQpk5K1GkB



Interactive version with more info: http://public.tableausoftware.com/vi...g/USPriorities

Quote:
A lot of people think NASA is a waste of time and money, and maybe this is why; they have a grossly overinflated idea of how much NASA spends. When NASA loses a $150 million probe, that’s a lot of real money, but hardly a drop in the bucket compared to what we spend as a nation (and remember, we spend $11 million per hour in Iraq).

I’ve written about this before, on what NASA does with its paltry percentage. NASA faces a clear issue here: they do an incredible amount of work and exploration with a small amount of money. People think that they don’t do very much at all and spend vast amounts of money. All NASA needs to do is educate the public on their real budget. Once it’s put into perspective, really made clear, I bet public support for NASA would go way up.

To be sure, a huge amount of NASA’s budget is wasted (I am not a big supporter of the space station or the Shuttle because of cost and mission, though I do not deny how cool they are), and that is a priority. But at the same time, if they could get the public to truly understand how little of the national budget they get, they might be able to actually get them to rally behind a real project, like getting back to the Moon, or building even better probes to the planets, moon, comets, and asteroids in our solar system — not to mention building bigger and more sensitive telescopes that can see the Universe across the electromagnetic spectrum.
In 2010, Americans spent just as much money on pet food, as they did NASA's annual federal budget. Think about that..

And NASA creates jobs too..

Quote:
And those who complain that it is a waste to spend money in space forget that NASA creates jobs. According to the agency, it employs roughly 19,000 civil servants and 40,000 contractors in and around its 10 centers. In the San Francisco area alone, the agency says it created 5,300 jobs and $877 million worth of economic activity in 2009. Ohio, a state hard-hit by the Great Recession that is home to NASA’s Plum Brook Research Station and Glenn Research Center, can’t afford to lose nearly 7,000 jobs threatened by NASA cuts.

Even more people have space-related jobs outside the agency. According to the Colorado Space Coalition, for example, more than 163,000 Coloradans work in the space industry. Though some build rockets for NASA, none show up in the agency’s job data.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2...esearch-center
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