I'm in favor of NASA's science missions. In fact, many of them are focused on Earth - on agriculture, on severe and normal weather, on climate, etc. And, our investigation of the universe is also important. Also, the international space station has been a good science investment. However, I don't agree that men on the moon is an efficient investment in science. There is all sorts of opportunity in science, and moonmen is stupendously expensive. Plus, there is nothing about our planned missions to the moon or Mars that cause us to know more about the Moon or Mars. I don't even slightly agree with this one. We don't know of any resource on the Moon or Mars that will EVER be cost effective to bring back to Earth. Suggesting that exists with zero evidence is not a sound argument method. When/if our exploration finds a resource that would justify the stupendous expense of bringing that to Earth, we can figure out how to do that. And, the method would likely have a lot to do with what it was we found. Is it super heavy? Can it withstand the heat of reentry? Does it require spacemen to mine it? It's a totally arbitrary expenditure to make HUGE investments in something we don't even have a clue about. Manned missions are NOT designed for the purpose of gaining knowledge about anything other than spacemen. The rest of NASA is working on science. We're landing on Mars with various equipment for scientific exploration. We're going to have a drone that can fly around the surface of Mars - something spacemen can't do. We're landed technology that can bore into the surface. We've had missions to every planet and to many of the moons in our solar system. We have telescopes that have found thousands of planets and have found the direction and speed of more than a million stars. We have telescopes that can peer back to this universe's origin. We have developed at least 6 different ways to determine how fast our universe is expanding - which is one of the principle approaches to understanding why our physics is broken - why quantum mechanics and Einstein gravity do not give the same results. We have plans for space based gravitational wave detection, giving a huge advance from our Earth based LIGO capability for exploring the universe in the gravitational wave realm - a whole different view from our stadard electromagnetic spectrum. We have plans for HABEX, a satellite that will be able to image the surface of Earth like planets circling distant stars. There is a TON of science going on. Flying humans around space is certainly a very difficult engineering project, but I don't see any value to science that could possibly justivy the GIGANTIC expenditure - an expenditure that is highly likely to reduce NASA's spending on science. I know I'm probably in the minority on this. And, I DO think there are manned missions that would be important for science. For example, we absolutely need space based manufacturing and construction. Launching fully complete satellites from Earth is a BIG loser. Beyond that, having a space station farther from Earth than the ISS would be a huge improvement to satellite communications. Today, every satellite has to have enough communication power to penetrate to Earth. And, plaecs we want to go don't always have a clear path to Earth. China is solving part of that with a lunar satellite that gives communication capability to the far side of the Moon - something they need for their science operations there. There is too much science to do to squander the NASA budget on spacemen.
I think NASA would be fun and good but only when we can afford it. Federal government can't even make payroll without printing or borrowing money.
Eliminating NASA would mean nothing to our budget. NASA is 0.48% of our federal budget. I know our budget is death by a thousand cuts, but going after NASA isn't really going to solve anything. ... Or, it won't long as long as we don't decide to put spacemen on other planets, etc. That could be a significant increase depending on what we decide to do. Plus, NASA budget goes to gathering information that is needed by industry in the USA as well as the world. NOAA contributes to gathering this information, too. So, killing NASA would leave us with no tracking of hurricanes, etc. Trump HAS pushed for huge decreases in NOAA, too, of course. NASA does some work for our military. Our DoD budget does not include all our expenditures on our military. I doubt the military would easily give up the missions and work that NASA does for them, so it would probably just get moved somewhere else. NASA does the US part of the international space station - a major part of that mission. There is a lot of science being done there - it's totally oversubscribed. There are moves to increase it's size to include facilities for corporations to buy time for commercial purpose. It's also a case of serious international cooperation - something which I think has value. Deciding to destroy that space station seems like a bad idea to me. Also, NASA does science outreach in several ways. Keeping the US aware of advances in science and promoting science careers, etc., hits me as high value.
For a government that can't afford payroll without more money expansion and debt, every dollar counts. Well we really need to gore your oxen, my oxen and everybody else's oxen. We are heading full tilt to a deadly cliff and nobody want's to recognize it let alone fix it. I don't argue the scientific value of NASA. There is plenty of that. We just can't afford it. We can't afford the dept of education or the interior department or most other departments either. We have no business subsidizing business or subsidizing anything else. We can't even afford the dues for membership in the UN and NATO. We really are in fiscal trouble.
There needs to be a rational prioritization that includes consideration of value. The largest issue right now is that of getting COVID under control some business can start picking up. That means people can pay their rent and food, not die, and get economically active so we start seeing revenue. Let's remember that we gave the military a GIGANTIC increase under Trump - an increase at a time when we're withdrawing!! Let's also remember that NASA has been building all sorts of stuff, and that is all done by private enterprise. So, we're getting employment and taxes back from NASA expenditures. If you want to cut something out of NASA, how about cutting the quarter of a BILLION dollars dedicated to figuring out how to land a human on the Moon? And, that's the tip of the iceberg of the cost of spacemen. For example, there is budget now for multiple moon trips that are needed to prepare facilities on the Moon for a human landing there. Plus some strategies call for a reasonably permenant station in lunar orbit, there for the purpose of landing a human on the moon. As I've repeated over and over, the cost of landing a human on the moon is huge. And, I don't see ANY justification for it. I'm a big NASA fan, but money isn't free.
