Do you think the government should be spending billions of dollars for space projects?

Question

I'ts not like we'll be alive in 500 years. We probably won't even be living in communities in space by then. This is just a method for the fat cats in congress to spend our money on hookers and expensive cars and so on. I want my money back.

Answer 1

NASA's Budget
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/168653main_NASA_FY08_Budget_Summary.pdf

Set at approximate $17 Billion per year... advancing about 2% per year (barely matching the inflation rate)

The money spent on space research is returned a hundredfold in advances in technology that benefit humanity.

Can the same be said of the Trillions spent on War?

Answer 2

Surely Yes. The government is spending much more for space projects.I'm just trying to find out how much money NASA actually spends on their missons and other projects. Are the missions, projects, and all those testings worth the amount of money the government is giving NASA? How much did the Government just give them for 2007? I heard it was something like $750 Billion.. I don't know if I'm correct on that, but I can't seem to find an exact number..

So much money are spent to discover space and other planets. To have a sattelite Tv and so on.... these money could eliminate poverty in all over the world. What's your opinion? Should government spend so much money to discover other species of life in the outer space

Answer 3

Yes, I do.

Because I like to think ahead, instead of in the present...if we have the same mentality that you do, we're going to be stuck at this level of technology and never move on, over-colonizing the planet, and finally onto mass extinction.

So yes.

Edit:

Re-reading your explanation, I'm kinda baffled why you think that we won't be colonizing space 500 years from now.

In the past 100 years alone, we went from cars that could only reach 40 mph at most to cars that can hit 250 mph easily, we invented computers (and developed them to be small enough to fit in your hand [Pocket PC's]), we made Kevlar (Which I regard as the one of the best inventions of the 20th century)...I could go on forever.

Don't underestimate the power of technology. If we went from hardly any technology to technological supremest in just a century, then I'm sure by 500 years we'll be colonizing space.

Answer 4

Yes, we should. Simply because they are profitable. What we reap in these space expeditions are billions of capital investments. Think about GPS, and space sattelites. Once, we loose more than billions of dollars because of the imperfections of these technologies. Thanks to our space projects, we have perfected them, and now we save big because of that. Think about the thousand of gadgets and technologies that pop out in your tele ads and appear in the front window of shops. They are technologies that were refined thanks to the space projects. Also think of how our multi-million dollar sports stars are helped by finds in the space projects like the ISS or the Shuttle. (We just have to hope these sports stars pay good taxes.) Space is a very good testing ground for the theories we earthlings have made, and if we have never tested these in space, we would never have reaped their benifits.

Answer 5

Yeah, hookers like me who work 15 hour days trying to figure out what the hell is going on in this universe before it kills you. If you want your money back, the military got more than 100 times as much as NASA - and they're using it to kill people.

Answer 6

i think your '500 years' statement is extremely short sighted, since there are plenty of things on our own planet that need attention that will take a lot longer to fix than a single human lifespan. we may not be alive to benefit from them, but if everyone thought that way, we'd be in a shitload of trouble. i think its fair to say that a good portion of the worlds leaders are older than 60, and with an average lifespan in the developed world of ~77, what have they got to gain from trying to make the world a better place?

Answer 7

they are going to and they should. they are makeing discoverys that will allow us to travel to distant stars and this is what we need to do , we need to leave our planet and populate other planets. people say its impossible to travel from star to star but its not true. if you travel at 99.9 percent the speed of light time dialation will allow us to get to where we need to be. getting a craft to travel near the speed of light takes enourmous amounts of energy if you do it with brut force and the craft would be torn appart but if you reduce the crafts gravity you can cheat the energy problem and enertia problem as well they are working on antigravity fields right now but they only admit very little about it.if you stick a piece of paper faceing braud out of the window of a moveing car it will creat drag and cause the paper to tear or to fly out of your hand. if you turn the paper on its side the drag is lost, but the mass is the same it just is effected differently by the speed. same goes for a space craft. if you reduce the crafts gravity to near 0 you allow yourself to esselerate to the speed of light without the problems of enery and enertia. we will eventually learn and be able to reach the holy grail of being able to go over 99 percent of the speed of light and time dialation will take effect when this happens our crew will expierence time differently than we will a 30 light year trip will take a matter of days or weeks for our crew. this will make settleing a planet possible and makeing our sciecies intersteller. if you can count th enumber of stars in any direction lets say 100 light years they would number in the millions . so imagine haveing 1000s of craft going to an d frow through the area it might take them 20 years to get to a star an d back but the crew would not age and we would always have craft comeing back to earth. not to mention that maybe ETS might be waiting for us to reach our hands out to the cosmos, imagine the benifits to the human race if we knew we wernt alone. they might enen share technology. If you watch star trek they have a prime directive that prevents contact until a spiecies makes there own steps into space.

Answer 8

Yes we should.
first I agree with the previous answer.
second, that flow of money is one of the few things keeping the US economy afloat. high level research is one of the few things that the US produces and can sell to the rest of the world.

Answer 9

Yes.

And everyone else pretty much explained why.