You'll have no argument from me that the agency could be better managed, and that politicians need to stay the hell away from it.
And indeed, other arms of the space industry need much more funding. They will ultimately do all the common varieties of manned spaceflight better, that is inevitable.
The question is, will problems be solved by reducing NASA's budget? I think that is incredibly fucking unlikely. Instead as far as I am concerned we should be shoveling money at all of them like coal into a locomotive. Don't reduce NASAs budget so you can give more to Boeing and SpaceX.. give more to Boeing and SpaceX in spite of NASA's budget.
One half of a penny of every dollar you pay in (federal) taxes goes to science^. That is appalling. For as shitty and expensive as those shuttles were though, that money got us more return than pretty much the rest of that dollar.
If you look at how we budget for science and think "NASA is getting too much" instead of "Science is not getting enough", then you are missing the bigger picture.
^(ie, NASA. the money spent on the NSF isn't even worth bothering to include...)
Or we could take all that money and dump it directly into R&D.
If the government shit canned NASA tomorrow, and took that money and pumped it into the project Google is doing on self-driving cars wouldn't the world be a better place? Space is great, but how many lives could be saved by implementing self-driving cars nationwide?
Or took all that money and pumped it into computer science R&D. Or biotech R&D. Or nanotech R&D.
The argument for NASA often boils down to an argument for R&D, and there are a lot of more efficient ways to fund R&D than spending a bunch of it on non-R&D type stuff.
Why is everyone so insistent on cannibalizing science to fund science? NASA's budget should be pretty damn near the end of the list of programs to take funding from, 1) because all the others are even worse than it is, and 2) because it gets such a fucking minuscule amount of funding compared to the other things.
Furthermore, shitcanning all the non-manned stuff NASA does is a fucking terrible idea. Science without study of the universe is crazy.
And indeed, other arms of the space industry need much more funding. They will ultimately do all the common varieties of manned spaceflight better, that is inevitable.
The question is, will problems be solved by reducing NASA's budget? I think that is incredibly fucking unlikely. Instead as far as I am concerned we should be shoveling money at all of them like coal into a locomotive. Don't reduce NASAs budget so you can give more to Boeing and SpaceX.. give more to Boeing and SpaceX in spite of NASA's budget.
One half of a penny of every dollar you pay in (federal) taxes goes to science^. That is appalling. For as shitty and expensive as those shuttles were though, that money got us more return than pretty much the rest of that dollar.
If you look at how we budget for science and think "NASA is getting too much" instead of "Science is not getting enough", then you are missing the bigger picture.
^(ie, NASA. the money spent on the NSF isn't even worth bothering to include...)