To those who think scrapping manned spaceflight is a good idea ...
NASA Signs New $335 Million Deal to Fly Astronauts on Russian Spaceshipshttp://www.space.com/news/nasa-russia-astronaut-contract-100406.htmlWe are "renting seats" to the ISS at a cost of $55.8 million per person from the Russians. Yeah that is how far backwards we have fallen. The worlds most powerful economy, the country who put a man on the moon is "bumming a ride from the Russians".
Nobody spends money "in space". In the past the money was was spent right here on Earth and in the United States. Every single dollar has been spent HERE. We built things, bought steel from steel & aluminum from metal companies, produced our own rocket fuel. Hired physicists, engineers, mathematicians. Along the way we needed to invent solutions to problems. Improved material strength, perfects alloys, composites, and plastics.
That pays back dividends a 100 fold in sometimes unexpected ways.
Here is just one example:
Ever look out the window of a passenger jet and notice the little "winglet". It is the part at the end of the wing that sticks straight up. Ever wonder what it does? It reduced fuel consumption by about 2% by eliminating chaotic vortex of air at tip of the wing. Imagine 2% on every flight everywhere in the world for past 4 decades. How much oil has that single invention saved? How many millions of tons of CO2 avoided?
NASA perfected the technology and gave it away for free.So killing the space program won't save money. Instead it is just another thing we will outsource. More money flowing overseas. Rather than employ American engineers we will hand giants bags of cash to Russian engineers. Rather than the US perfecting the next flight computer or winglet it will be companies in foreign countries. Don't worry I am sure they will sell that technology back to us. We our paying our competitors to come up with innovations that they will use to gain an advantage over us in the future.
I am saddened by the amount of science bashing I see here. Theoretical science is just that, theoretical. Nobody knows what a mission to moon or mars will accomplish. It isn't suppose to turn a profit. American Idol is a profitable venture. Not everything has to be about profits.
The NASA budget is a ROUNDING ERROR on US economy. Still there will be challenges and necessity is the mother of all inventions. In trying to perfect water reclimation NASA may discover a method to make waste water processing safer on Earth. In trying to manage energy budget they might make a breakthrough on fuel cell technologies. In trying to perfect the spacecraft material strength they might find an alloy that is useful in civilian applications.
Now we won't do any of that. So we can sit back eat a Big Mac, watch American idol and in 20-30 years 99% of worlds innovation will be outside the US. FUCK SCIENCE!