US Space Policy under McCain, Clinton and Obama...

[Dogsbd]

According to the bad-astronomy blog, NASA's budget is between 1/4 and 1/3 that of the Department of Education. That seems an astonishingly high percentage. Shouldn't education rank a bit higher than that?

A few points:

The US DOE budget represents only a fraction of the money spent on education in the US. Education money also comes from state budgets. The federal government also appropriates money to education projects outside the normal DOE budget.

Just because one program is more important than another doesn't mean it will require more money. I rate having food to eat and a house to live in as more or less equal in importance, yet my monthly mortgage payment is almost twice as much as I spend on food each month. Likewise the cost of education vs the cost of space exploration do not necessarily represent their relative values.

 

[SiberianTiger]

Well, the whole world's space programmes are not dependent on NASA.

India already has plans for a manned mission sometime in 2015. And China will also probably be more active by then. Development of the Dragon capsule is also coming up really good I think.

Well, let's suppose USA and Russia stopped investing into _manned_ space programmes altogether and Europe never begun its own one. Speaking frankly, the whole purpose of Chinese and Indian manned space programmes are gaining political significance. A hidden decision in China, an open debate in India - it does not matter how, but the conclusion will be the same: anything what might be obtained by manned mission is already here, they are out of world's fashion anymore. With all the nifty electronics we have, let's better invest into commercial space and national defence.

Any need to say about lesser space powers?

And again, I won't believe in a commercial manned space until the first private customer is launched into orbit in a private craft atop a private launcher and returned back alive and happy. And ten more vote for the next mission with their money.

 

[Urwumpe]

Another problem is, that we have almost no independent national manned spaceflight except in China. Russia relies on US infrastructure as much, as the US rely on Russian infrastructure and ESA uses some of both.

If the USA drop out in a extremely stupid decision, ESA and Russia could together keep a pretty space program running, but that would only work if ESA takes the lead and solves all political problems inside it. Russia may have the experience, but the ESA countries the money - and who pays decides the tune. Russia could maybe join ESA, but chances are higher that hell freezes over.

And ESA alone would be nearly impossible as long as no country is willed to take risks.

 

[bujin]

I wonder how much politics will have to say in it later down the line.

The US only really has a manned space programme because the Russians threatened to do it first, and beat the US in a number of ventures.

Perhaps once the Chinese start seriously looking at manned missions to the Moon and Mars, it might spur the US into action again. Ok, the US has already proved that it can do the Moon, but Mars is still unclaimed territory.

 

[Dogsbd]

The US only really has a manned space programme because the Russians threatened to do it first, and beat the US in a number of ventures.

The US had a satellite program before Sputnik was launched and a manned spaceflight program before Gagarin flew. The Russian program didn't force the US to have a program, but it did force it to develop much faster than it would have otherwise.

I don't see any US president / congress ending US manned spaceflight, but I could a time where some would make it little more than a flag carrying "side show" stuck in LEO that accomplished little of any real value.

 

[mjessick]

According to the bad-astronomy blog, NASA's budget is between 1/4 and 1/3 that of the Department of Education. That seems an astonishingly high percentage. Shouldn't education rank a bit higher than that?

The vast majority of U.S. education spending is by local governments. How local? My "school district" covers my city of 30,000 and a neighbor of around 20,000 people.

In Texas, I pay around 1.5% of the assessed value of my real property (house and land) every year for local earlier-than-undergraduate education and "community colleges" (vocational schools, 2 year degrees and less expensive first two years of undergraduate for some people before transferring to 4 year universities.) This amounts to around 20% of my entire monthly housing bill and is relatively high compared to other states. Some states in the West were able to set aside large tracts of timber land when they were organized as states to help fund education.

State governments pay for the non-private universities (Undergraduate and graduate schools).

At the federal level, I think the Department of Education just hands out grants occasionally. (They only have about 5000 employees.) I think that the only schools actually run by the federal government are the service academies, that are not under the Department of Education.

 

[Andy44]

According to the bad-astronomy blog, NASA's budget is between 1/4 and 1/3 that of the Department of Education. That seems an astonishingly high percentage. Shouldn't education rank a bit higher than that?

On the contrary; the federal government shouldn't be spending a dime on education, that's the job of state governments. The U.S. system was set up as a system of federalism (decentralized powers), but in the last 50 or so years federalism has been largely forgotten in favor of central control, much to our detriment.

ETA: mjessick said it well: if you are a real property-owner in the U.S., your local and state taxes are what is funding most education. If you are a high-school graduate and cannot afford to go to a large university, you can likely get assistance to go to a local community college, and if you have to you can go part time and work your way through it.

 

[adamb193]

On the contrary; the federal government shouldn't be spending a dime on education, that's the job of state governments. The U.S. system was set up as a system of federalism (decentralized powers), but in the last 50 or so years federalism has been largely forgotten in favor of central control, much to our detriment.

ETA: mjessick said it well: if you are a real property-owner in the U.S., your local and state taxes are what is funding most education. If you are a high-school graduate and cannot afford to go to a large university, you can likely get assistance to go to a local community college, and if you have to you can go part time and work your way through it.

Well they did design the federal government to be inefficiant, so the states would do the work, but people seem to think the federal government has magical powers, and can solve anything.

 

[ijuin]

According to the bad-astronomy blog, NASA's budget is between 1/4 and 1/3 that of the Department of Education. That seems an astonishingly high percentage. Shouldn't education rank a bit higher than that?

On the other side, this year the military will get about THIRTY-FIVE times as much money as NASA. In other words, cutting THREE PERCENT of the Pentagon's budget would save the government more money than completely eliminating NASA.

 

[mrspacely]

Why worry about space when you can happily worry about attackin Iran?