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NASA Considers Putting an Asteroid Into Orbit Around the Moon
Renegade:
I have a much better idea, let's spend that $2.6 billion on our own economy. I'm not anti-NASA or anything, but this is somewhat extreme even for NASA, especially for that amount of money that could be better spent elsewhere....
-Tinman57 (January 05, 2013, 06:23 PM)
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and
And I'd much rather see that kind of money spent paying people to build rockets as government employees or their subcontractors rather than being given away as handouts through Social Services because there aren't enough jobs.
-SeraphimLabs (January 05, 2013, 06:28 PM)
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and
And there is a lot to be learned, and a lot comes to us also in the way of advances from the discoveries of the vast expanse that exists beyond our atmosphere.
-wraith808 (January 05, 2013, 06:52 PM)
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While there is a lot of scientific value in space exploration and experimentation, and it does create jobs, it still seems to me that $2.6 billion could be better spent somehow to create jobs that get people off the dole.
As with Tinman, I'm not anti-NASA, but I do with they'd stop covering up the alien invasion and that Obama has been replaced with a look-alike alien clone with mind control powers, and that they'd finally admit that the moon is an artificial hollowed out satellite with alien races on the inside, all vying for power & domination over the human race in their eternal conflict with the alien races living inside the hollow earth! This asteroid business is obviously a ploy by the Venusians to destabilize the moon, crash it into Earth, and once again regain their hegemonic power in the solar system as the dominant species so that they can launch their long awaited invasion of Saturn without fear of reprisal! (Everyone knows the Jupiterians are cowards, the Plutonians don't even come from a real planet, and the Uranusians just plain stink!) :P ;D
Tinman57:
Oh I'm perfectly aware of the benefits that NASA provides. I mean, if it wasn't for NASA we wouldn't have velcro, just as an example. But as much as it provides for jobs and such, it's normally jobs related specifically to the aerospace and chemical industries. Those BILLIONS still come out of our taxes. Surely NASA can put their heads together to better things than mounting rockets to asteroids. That's all I'm sayin'.....
Renegade:
Oh I'm perfectly aware of the benefits that NASA provides. I mean, if it wasn't for NASA we wouldn't have velcro, just as an example. But as much as it provides for jobs and such, it's normally jobs related specifically to the aerospace and chemical industries. Those BILLIONS still come out of our taxes. Surely NASA can put their heads together to better things than mounting rockets to asteroids. That's all I'm sayin'.....
-Tinman57 (January 06, 2013, 08:55 PM)
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On productive use of $2.6 b and hot dogsI think a good way to measure the benefit is to ask how many tables did it put food on? How many households did that $2.6 billion support (not by way of hand outs, but by way of creating actual productive employment, e.g. not government jobs)? etc.
I don't know the numbers there, but it seems to me that putting an asteroid in orbit around the moon probably wouldn't support as many households as something like having an economy that actually supports manufacturing jobs rather than eliminating them.
As for NASA doing something more productive, well, I think it's pretty hard for them to be very productive as they're really more of a research & exploration operation. I suppose the question is whether they can create productive employment from that research. Seems tough though. I don't think licensing logos really is much of a productive business. Would you pay $0.50 more for "NASA Lettuce" at the grocery store for zero benefit? Then again, that might be a better way for them to fund themselves rather than getting tax payers to pay for their work/antics. :P If people really believed in space exploration all that much, they'd be free to fund it. Get yer NASA hot dogs! $15 each! :P :D You'd only need to sell about 217 million hot dogs at that rate, assuming around $12 of it goes to NASA. Call 'em space dogs! Or moon dogs! Of course at $15 per hot dog, that makes them pretty much unaffordable for the roughly 25% or so of the world's population that needs that $15 to last 1 or 2 weeks. I don't think they'd be all that interested.
wraith808:
While there is a lot of scientific value in space exploration and experimentation, and it does create jobs, it still seems to me that $2.6 billion could be better spent somehow to create jobs that get people off the dole.
-Renegade (January 06, 2013, 07:17 PM)
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Really? Look at the last time we spent money to get people in better positions. How did that work out? Despite the article I linked, we really don't know with all of the politicking, and I don't think we ever will.
Sorry...that's my cynicism showing through... :-[
wraith808:
I don't know the numbers there, but it seems to me that putting an asteroid in orbit around the moon probably wouldn't support as many households as something like having an economy that actually supports manufacturing jobs rather than eliminating them.
-Renegade (January 06, 2013, 09:27 PM)
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To do that, Americans would have to be willing to pay more for good produced. And there are ways to make that more than a feel-good type of thing, by making gains on quality, time to market, and service. But we're only willing to look at the short term bottom line. And I suppose, to be fair, it's hard to look past that when you're already living from paycheck to paycheck, and someone is looking at raising prices for no immediately tangible benefit.
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