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Comment by benwerd | Hacker News Reader

NASA is a wonder of our modern age. If we're going to have a planned economy (and we are), let's do it through science, technology and knowledge rather than military power.

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700B for DOD, versus 8B NASA. 87x difference. If NASA would have 87x more money, by now we would have a Martian base and most likely missions where civilians could buy a ticket and fly there for a honeymoon.

Yeah funny how much we spend on stuff that blows up (or never does because it's never used and we have to spend even more billions dismantling them).

But at the same time the USA spends more money on space programs than all other countries combined.

Guess this is because no other country has that level of expertise of space program like US.

Your causality presumption may be reversed.

It could simply mean that running space programs in the USA is far more costly than in other countries. Someone did say that NASA of the recent age is less about research and more about massive employment.

I would say, the price difference adjusted budget of NASA is also much bigger than that of any other nation. Do you see the Russians walking on the moon or driving nuclear cars on Mars?

TSA gets more money than NASA!

(and TSA is just a tiny part of "homeland security (theater)" )

To be fair, a lot of money that went into ICBM research ended up being applied by NASA.

But I agree with you. If only we could convince the five top military spenders to cut back just a little, we'd be terraforming Mars and Venus by the end of the week. ;-)

Interesting, what makes you so sure we are going to become a planned economy when it was partially the governments corruption in the first place that helped lead to this mess.

I know you mean USA. I wonder if the USA would force my country (Australia) to follow suit to? Hard to imagine.

Also isn't China meant to be growing at a unstable rate and is now ready for its own property market collapse. And isn't China the only real example of a working centrally planned economy?

I'm just really interested how you are so sure we are heading towards a planned economy as a system.

I don't see a case to make the funding of NASA greater. What has the recent Dragon (by SpaceX) experiment proved is that NASA usually does things in a more expensive way than private parties. It would more efficient to outsource most of this research to do more with the same budget.

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