Armed Services: hundreds of billions of dollars more than they asked for
Postal Services: [shafted]
Space Exploration Services: [b0rked]
Heath Services: [rofl/gtfo]
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
148 points (97.4% liked)
News
23387 readers
2526 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
My favorite description of America is "Three weapons manufacturers in a trench coat pretending to be a government"
I’m a scientist who is contracted through NASA and work at one of the NASA facilities. As an early career scientist, working here is a dream job. I get the opportunity to work with absolute world class scientists everyday. That said, the funding situation is dire at all NASA facilities due to funding cuts. The current saying is “flat is the new up” in terms of funding. That means if NASA maintains its funding, it’s a win. As a result, NASA would rather maintain science and engineering with the limited budget, but at the expense of the facilities themselves. I can attest that it is a stark difference between someplace like the Applied Physics Lab at Hopkins (lots of military contracts) vs Goddard Space Flight Center in terms of the quality of the facilities.
The problem is Congress looks for funding cuts in discretionary funding. Mandatory funding consists of social security, healthcare, and veteran programs. Discretionary funding is everything else, which makes up only roughly 25% of the rest of the budget. Military takes half of the discretionary budget. Democrats nor Republicans dare to touch the military budget despite the fact they fail their audit every single year. This leaves 900 billion for everything else. NASA gets about 4% of that.
Since the tax code is totally fucked up in this country, the richest people pay the least percentage through loopholes and corporations barely pay anything (9% of the total revenue), it’s up to the working class to make up the difference. Since understandably no one wants their taxes raised, in order to reduce spending they look to the “everything else” part of the discretionary budget. And NASA is part of this and is considered expendable. It’s sad to see such an important institution for the U.S. slowly dying. I want to believe the outlook is promising, but I just can’t see the future looking any brighter.
Have you guys considered not being broke bums? /s
I read the title as "Eminem officials..." and tough it was about Eminem testing some recording facilities for NASA or something.
I'm space radio, the real space radio
All the other space radios are imitating
So won't the real space radio, please stand up
Please stand up, please stand up
It is not democracy. This is the gutting of the US in favor of a neo feudal dystopia.
I've got a love-hate relationship with private space companies.
Love:
- More and cheaper access to space is ultimately a good thing (gotta get to the Star Trek future somehow)
- What SpaceX has done with reusable boosters is game changing. I hate Musk, but I try to not think about him when I think of SpaceX
Hate:
- It's more "socializing the cost, privatizing the profits" where much of their funding came or continues to come from government grants/contracts. It's almost the same model as the pharmaceutical industry.
- It's a billionaire's game, and we're all being exploited to fund it (beyond tax dollars at least partially funding them).
As far as NASA facilities getting their funding: Remember that SLS exists and is made entirely out of pork. So at least those facilities will continue to get funding because they're essentially jobs programs for a handful of states.
Yet they just keep giving away the NASA budget to private for-profit companies.
Well, that's really an attempt at saving money. And it's a strategy that actually works with some of their contractors. (Not so much with Boeing and ULA)
The problem is that they really need more budget. There's absolutely no reason they couldn't have five times the funding they have now. The US military had a budget of 820 billion last year, NASA used 200 million. Meaning, that you could quintuple NASA's budget with an additional 800 million by shifting 0.1% of military funding their way.
Personally, I think NASA is more than 0.1% as important as our military, but that's just me.
Just to put that in perspective: that's less than a dollar per American for NASA and over a thousand dollars for the military.
This was by design to kickstart the private industry for space development.
NASA could have just kept building and flying space shuttles, but since the retirement of the space shuttle program in 2011, they were renting payload space on Russian rockets to get stuff into orbit.
Getting off of dependence on Russian rockets turned out to be tremendous foresight.
Just to add some context: the entire space shuttle program, over its entire life from 1972 to 2010, was reportedly 200 Billion.
In 2010, the yearly U.S. military budget was ~650 billion. And they killed the shuttle for being too expensive because that wasn't spread over enough lunches. (meaning it cost 1.6Billion per launch).
In 2024, even adjusted for inflation, Starliner has already blown past 1.6 Billion per launch (total cost is about 5.8 Billion)
Only Crew Dragon, at 2.4 Billion, has reached parity with what the shuttle cost per launch (inflation adjusted). (Dragon 1, which flew 23 cargo missions, was drastically cheaper).
And both of these are dramatically simpler designs than the space shuttle was.
So it appears that the trajectory is correct, space travel is getting cheaper, but it took a shitload of work to get there, and that's building on top of what the Shuttle program taught us.
Space will be inevitably be dominated by corporations that are multinational. This is early days with a mix of government and private companies that are not so global.
It’s just how economics work. I think there will be a handful of companies later
it will be a Weyland-Yutani corp
Heh, as our reach into space increases, we may end up with "multiglobal" organizations. (Interglobal?)
This man has never set foot in an industrial site.
the not-uncommon tendency in a constrained budget environment to prioritize initiating new missions as opposed to maintaining and upgrading existing support assets has produced an infrastructure that would not be viewed as acceptable under most industrial standards,
In the end, space will become like ships, rail and air. Initially it was funded by government, then grew out of that funding model. We're going to see the same with space.
Then private industry will claim it was all their hard work and boostrap pulling that made development into space possible, so they deserve all the profits instead of their workers.
And the cycle will be complete...
Damn. That’s depressing. Around maybe 10 years ago, I did a tour through Johnson Space Center and thought it all looked a bit rundown even then.