Comments about SLS miss what’s happening. SLS is inefficient and wasteful, but human spaceflight is not what’s getting cut at NASA. Instead, very productive current and future science missions are getting killed, in defiance of Congress [1].
Until this year, NASA was the world leader in space science. We’re pushing out the experts who build and operate astrophysics missions like Hubble, Chandra, JWST, Kepler, TESS, Swift, and many more in planetary and heliophysics. This is a loss of capacity that will set the US back a generation.
The private sector is irrelevant here: SpaceX and friends don’t do scientific research.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/07/trump-administration-m...
There is this common belief of "I just want to make things work" and that science is really unimportant here and are concerned with things that don't matter. The truth is that science builds the foundation for that other stuff. It is the very ground you stand on. Engineering without science is like trying to run without ground.
In a lot of ways, science is just like engineering (I say this having been both, professionally). Any good engineer knows it is important to find problems. Then you fix those problems. Well... that's really what science does too. When doing science you're just working at the next level of abstraction. It is all about "making things work." Everyone is on the same team here and I'm not sure why we draw these divisions. I mean what would science even be about if it wasn't "making things work?"
So I hear people say that engineering is where we get the real value (especially monetarily), but I'd disagree. It matters, but I think it is framing things weirdly. I'd be willing to wager that the economic impact of Newton and Leibniz's invention of Calculus[0] is larger than the economic impact of any engineering product, ever. I'd make a slightly less confident wager that the economic value of calculus is more valuable than all inventions post 1700. That's just one thing too... even if it was the only Science/Math "investment" then it seems like a pretty good ROI
[0] Yes, math, but I'm throwing under science. Nitpick if you want but you're missing the thesis
I don't know that this is a good argument for science. We should fund science because we want to discover new things, not because we can draw a dotted line to an ROI. Similarly, we should fund the department of giving poor people money for food. Not because there's an ROI somewhere down the line. There's never gonna be a return on that investment, but we should do that because we're humans and we want to lift our fellow human out of misery.
Even if I agree with you, the problem is that we always need to justify our existence as researchers and this is even more difficult if the field or ideas are more exotic...
With the US becoming a fascist state in record time, I do not foresee people following your thinking, unfortunately...
Don't be a purist. It clearly hasn't been working out. Sometimes you have to speak the language of others. Especially if you know what real wealth is ;)
> The truth is that science builds the foundation for that other stuff. It is the very ground you stand on. Engineering without science is like trying to run without ground.
That doesn't mean that government investment in science is necessarily a good idea.
> I'd be willing to wager that the economic impact of Newton and Leibniz's invention of Calculus[0] is larger than the economic impact of any engineering product, ever.
Where they financed by the government? Btw, I can also look at winning lottery tickets and say that their return-on-investment was awesome, but that doesn't mean buying lottery tickets is a good idea.
In the interest of historical accuracy, Newton's work was directly and indirectly subsidized by his government as was the university he attended (that later gave him partial scholarship). He invented Calculus while isolated due to the plague, but had already graduated by then with those scholarship bucks from a university chartered by the British government.
A lot of his work occurred while he was what we'd now call a tenured professor of mathematics, again at a universe with an impressive amount of money being donated directly by the British government.
In general, the history of higher learning is the history of governments (or the wealthy people who constitute them) funding research and facilities. You may not like it, but you shouldn't misrepresent history just to make your preferences sound more normal.
There's also that the Royal Society [0] sponsored some of Newton's work (and Newton was even President of it for a time). That was a group also chartered by the British government (and some centuries financed by it more than other centuries).
(Leibniz had a more complex web of patrons over the course of the decades, including parts of German and French governments and even briefly being a Royal Society fellow. Some of Leibniz's patrons did include private [rich] donors, but it is said that Leibniz was the last scientist/mathematician to find patronage in that way/the last time in history that private donors had shown much interest in direct science/math patronage.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society
You're not making an argument, you're just intentionally misunderstanding. Sorry, I'm not going to respond if all you want to do is troll
I wish more people understood this. An enormous amount of research work sits somewhere between a public jobs program and a waste of resources, and we're at a point where NASA has fallen behind in significant ways. Calling something research doesn't mean we should protect it, and most significant advancements aren't through government but rather private industry.
I wish that more people understood that if they're very wrong/openly lying about the history of scientific achievement, they're probably in the wrong about their conclusions regarding the future of science as well.
And that's Eru (and perhaps you) here. Pubic science continues to make fantastic moves forward, with one notable example being nearly ALL the meaningful research and engineering moving us towards nuclear fusion being based on public research. Historically, major contributors to research almost universally had significant government funding.
It's true that we can gesture to AI research recently as a fruitful place for private research, but even orgs like Deepmind took government grants. Deepmind's publicly called for governments to fund AI research, as have many other (private) researchers.
In any event, taking tax money and giving it back to the betterment of society as a whole is one of the most uniformly good things that could be done with tax dollars. Science consistently betters society as a whole, and it's almost impossible to identify in advance what theoretical or practical breakthroughs in any given field are about to become significant.
Where have I lied about anything here?
> In any event, taking tax money and giving it back to the betterment of society as a whole is one of the most uniformly good things that could be done with tax dollars.
Have you considered taxing less in the first place? So that there's more money for eg private research?
> Deepmind's publicly called for governments to fund AI research, as have many other (private) researchers.
Company in sector X calling for more government spending on sector X seems hardly like news?
> Have you considered taxing less in the first place? So that there's more money for eg private research?
You really think that if the government axed the NSF/NIH, and cut taxes but corresponding amount, the private sector would somehow take all those tax cuts and invest in scientific research?
And the other factor is that private research is going to be geared towards that which is 1) less risky and 2) has some eventual commercial application. Many areas of scientific research are not like this. e.g. basically all of astronomy, and a good chunk of particle physics. The commercial applications have been pretty much zero.
AI is getting a ton of investment by the private sector now, because it is expected to have commercial application.
We must point this out because it's critical to the argument of funding science, basic research, and mathematics. It's easy to lose sight of the time frame or where inspiration was drawn from but it's easier to see with silly examples.
Like who would think studying origami would have ever been useful. The people originally studying it had no direct applications in mind. Yet it is now one of the most powerful tools in engineering. Not just used in satellites but also plays a role in additive manufacturing, robotics, and more.
Or look at Markov. Dude had no interest in applications whatsoever. He invented Markov Chains and revolutionized science purely to spite a rival. It took time for people to see the utility but we wouldn't have our modern AI system without it or even search or even the internet.
Private research is great, don't get me wrong. But they're too focused on right now. You don't get revolutions that way. You get revolutions by thinking outside the box. You get revolutions by straying away from the path that everyone else is doing, which is much more risky. You get revolutions because you do things just for fun. Just for curiosity's sake.
Since Leibniz basically the only funding for this kind of work has come through governments. It's also been declining as we are demanding more and more for people to show the value of their research, which just makes government funds like private ones. I'd warn against taking that path. It's a reasonable one, it makes perfect sense, and it is well intentioned, but it is also ignorant of history.
> Where have I lied about anything here?
You're either wrong or lying about the idea that famous mathematical discoveries have not been financed by governments historically.
You're either wrong or lying about the idea that this is, at scale, lottery ticket mentality. The modern scientific apparatus has flaws, but despite those it's a marvel of modern distributed resource allocation and cooperation rarely rivaled in human culture.
> Have you considered taxing less in the first place? So that there's more money for eg private research?
Sure, but this wouldn't obviously lead to outcomes for the public good. Even if we handwaved away IP and secrecy expectations in your scenario (is the abolishment of IP in your calculus? If not your task is even harder), there are obvious challenges you'd need to overcome:
1. How will non-experts vet the meaning or potential of research to select allocation? How will they even learn the option space to choose from? This is an incredible knowledge burden on the market that has profound implications on what can be researched. I see very little evidence that the public at large can do this, and I ask for an existence proof.
2. Even if you can get past #1, what then keeps outcomes aligned with the public interest? This is the same general objection most people have to Hayek's "the noble purpose of the rich is to have their tastes direct society" idea: the outcomes are mostly around consolidating power.
More broadly, everyone accepts this pooled resource methodology is superior. Even many anarchists[1] don't oppose collectivist resource pooling and management so long as it's voluntary and done in ways tha minimizes hierarchical extent and implications
What you're suggesting is that wealth redistribution is somehow morally wrong for the wealthy, but many of the wealthiest people are wealthy in appreciable part because of the way their endeavors have interacted with redistributive endeavors. Musk and Thiel, as living examples, both have benefitted enormously from redistribution. So why was it good for them, but now it's bad? Why isn't having an explicit force to counter economic attraction bad, given that we can provide and measure its existence?
American science supremacy is not a thing I'm interested in defending. However, it's undeniable that America's redistributive methodology has lead it to be the science capital of the world for generations, and Americans have definitely benefitted from this status more than the infinitesimal sum of money committed relative to their budget. What value are you offering in return? It seems like a "trust me" story at a time when we see not just an attack on science funding but an attack on the idea of a consensus reality contradicting corporate profit motives (e.g., Climate change, RFKs attack on medicine).
I don't know how you get around these objections. I don't even know where you go to find an example of all this working in a purely private methodology that's not counterfactual. It seems like a lot of moral grandstanding and "trust me bro" from out here. You should make these arguments somewhere we can find them if you want us to believe the conclusions.
> Company in sector X calling for more government spending on sector X seems hardly like news?
Indeed! You're the one trying to paint it as bad, misguided, incorrect, or immoral? Even private companies benefit from public research grants. Whatever the pejorative you want to attach, the burden is on you to suggest something better.
[1] Please note we're using the historical definition here in the tradition of Goldman, Bakunin, Malatesta, Chomsky and Carson, etc.
> most significant advancements aren't through government but rather private industry.
Can you back that up? Be sure to only include examples of private industry that wasn't supported or backed by the government and didn't depend on prior government advancements to make their advancements
Government investment in science is...the only way basic science happens, really. I'd recommend reading The Entrepreneurial State [1] here: in essence, basic science pays off too slowly to interest even the most deeply-pocketed capital interests, but it pays off, so wise societies invest in it; Silicon Valley owes its existence to massive formative public investments in underlying technologies.
Not to mention that smart people generally prefer to live in places that value and protect science, so it's _also_ an indirect form of geopolitical talent recruitment. (See brain drain + brain gain impacts of science policy, for instance. There's a strong argument to be made that US mid-20th-century dominance in science and engineering was largely driven by a lot of very smart people fleeing Nazi Germany.)
Basic science isn't so much a lottery ticket as a bond with unknown maturity measured in decades, a _very_ high rate of return, a high minimum investment, and dividend-like payouts created by adding skilled scientists, engineers, etc. to your tax base.
[1] https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state...
Science is incredibly cheap. It can have a long time to mature but interestingly that is dependent on the number of "bonds", with quicker returns when there's more "bonds" issued.
I'd say there's 4 common classes of misinterpretation:
Most of science is performed by grad students and academics. Neither of which are known to make much money and the former is known to make poverty wages lol. I can say as a recent graduate that one summer internship at a big tech company gave me more money than my university's spend for the rest of the year. And as an intern I was still much cheaper than a full employer. My equivalent yearly salary was higher than most professors in my department too.I'd say 80+% of research is being done at this scale. A few hundred grand per year, if even that.
We often hear about the big science projects and this creates the notion that it's expensive but it's usually misleading. You might hear news like the $5.2 billion Europa Clipper mission, but that's spread out over many years. Work began in 2015, construction in late 2019, full assembly in early 2022, and launch in late 2024, where there's 6 years of flight and the budget is for a mission life until late 2034. Amortized that's $5.2bn over 19 years, so $274m/yr ($347m if we conservatively count from 2019). Most mega projects have a cost that's distributed over many funders. Take CERN. It cost about $10b to build, took 10 years to construct, and costs $1bn/yr to operate. That's distributed through many countries, the largest contributor being Germany, which only accounts for ~20% (so $200m/yr), followed by the UK (15%), France (13%), and Italy (10%). There are also occasional contributions by the US. All these numbers are large, but they're also the biggest projects and there's few projects that big. $100m seems like a lot of money to us because we're imagining it in our bank accounts. But that's not the same as money in a government's bank. The US budget is $6.8 Trillion! $100m is 0.0015% of that! In other words, if you had a million dollars to spend each year you're talking about $1.5k (or $1.47 of a $1000 budget). This is not a big ticket item. I'm sure you agree with most of what I've said but I wanted these points "on the record" since we live in a time where we're frequently arguing about $1 from a $10000 budget instead while ignoring the $1000 items. We need to get our heads straight. It's like someone complaining about the cost of your bus ticket while they're buying the latest fully loaded Macbook Pro. I don't think their actual concerned is the budget...Just a note you may find helpful. I feel your post is too long to be digested and responded to in a forum like this.
Maybe I'm wrong, and if so I apologise! But as soon as I saw the essay like format, I knew I wasn't going to spend time on it. I think shorter points that provoke discussion may work better here.
Just a note you may find helpful.
> I feel your post is too long
It’s about 700 words.
It’s thought through, well-written, neatly organized, and it’s a fine set up for further discussion.
If that’s too long for you on this forum, then I’d probably take a look in the mirror and ask some tough questions.
Thanks for the support. I know I can be wordy but I also come to HN to have more nuanced conversations than somewhere like Twitter or Reddit. Honestly, I think a lot of political fighting is caused by removal of nuance and the tendency to be rushing for rushing's sake.
The tricky thing is, long posts like this tend to provoke responses selectively nitpicking about one thing, and then either going way down into the definitional weeds or galloping to the next nitpick without acknowledging any error.
I think the long content is fine as it stands, but it isn't necessarily a good seed for discussion in a comment thread (as opposed to an underlying article).
I'll at least say I sometimes downvote opinions I agree with and upvote opinions I disagree with. That's because I don't see the upvote and downvote as a signal of my personal feeling about the comment but rather about how I feel the comment should be placed in ordering. Sometimes I downvote a comment I agree with because it is a bad argument and I want to discourage that behavior. Or because it is just signaling or ignores the parent. Sometimes I upvote bad comments because there's a conversation I want highlighted. Sometimes because despite it being bad I think they bring up good points others are ignoring.
But I think we can have more in depth conversations on HN. That comment was much longer than I usually write (and I'm wordy) but I think it is a matter of what we want as a community. For example, I always downvote oneliners, memes, or when someone is just trying to dunk on the other person.
What does the community want?
I appreciate the comment, I know I can be a bit wordy. I tried to organize so it's visually easy to get the tldr and each block could tell you the tldr from the first sentence. If you have suggestions of how to distill, I'm open to the feedback. Or if you'd like to add a tldr yourself that's a good contribution.
But also, this is HN. I wouldn't have this conversation on Twitter and I hope we can have more nuanced conversations here, as well as I hope the average user has a bit more intelligence/attention than a place like Reddit. Maybe I'm assuming incorrectly
The point seems to be to cut US scientific capacity (and more generally intellectual research capacity) across the board, as a way of hitting back at "the elites" who have the temerity to call GOP politicians and donors out for their lies and bad behavior.
> a way of hitting back at "the elites" who have the temerity to call GOP politicians and donors out for their lies and bad behavior
True for academic institutions. No evidence this is the motivation at NASA. Simpler: science costs money and leadership believes that money is better spent giving folks like me a tax cut than paying for poor folks' healthcare or basic research.
Fortunately, it looks like Beijing is ready to pick up the torch [1].
[1] https://www.fdd.org/analysis/policy_briefs/2025/03/19/aiming...
The cuts to NASA as well as NOAA, NIH, USGS, USDA, FWS, DOE, etc. are not really saving that much money, but are destroying literally trillions of dollars of future economic value (not to mention all sorts of work whose value can't be easily quantified).
Maybe "smashing things and ruining people's lives and work is fun per se" is a better explanation than anything more complicated. Pretty shitty for the rest of us though.
NOAA, NASA, NIH, FWS, and DOE all regularly push how bad the situation is around global climate change. That's likely why they're getting targeted. The GOP's position on climate change is sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming LALALALALA and having credible government agencies pointing out the ongoing effects is detrimental to this strategy.
Meanwhile the USDA, FWS, and DOE do those pesky regulatory things, like making it so you can't torture animals quite as much in the pursuit of profits, can't build coal power plants in the center of national parks, and can't dump raw chemical waste into your local wetlands. Utter killjoys they are.
Like, not meaning to be shitty to you in specific, but it's no secret why these agencies are getting targeted. If you say anything the admin doesn't like, or dare to tell people with money that they can't do literally anything they want at all times irrespective of it's effects on broader society, you've got a target on your back.
I think it’s even simpler: government is seen as bad. The military and some law enforcement are excepted, but otherwise, dismantling government agencies is a goal in and of itself.
I listened to way too much Rush Limbaugh in the 90s and none of this stuff is a surprise. Distressing, but exactly what this particular segment of Republicans have been working towards.
I could buy that argument if it weren't for the disparity in which organizations are being targeted and the degree to which they're being attacked. Getting rid of all government is just the story they use to appease their base.
There's definitely a Venn Diagram intersection of "small government means 'no Science' because it is a 'waste' of money" and "Science is bad because it keeps talking about Climate Change", but it's not clearly all one set or the other of that chart (it's a full union applying pressure here).
> Meanwhile the USDA, FWS, and DOE do those pesky regulatory things
True and that’s awesome. However to put up some of a counter those agencies also over-regulate. Bureaucracy tends to over-expand.
Musks example of SpaceX having to calculate the likelihood of a rocket hitting a shark in the pacific. Musk is certainly exaggerating a bit, but is speaking to a real issue for many businesses struggling to keep up with absurd regulations.
My grandfather fought for years with USFWS to be able to re-build infrastructure for a small town near a popular wilderness area. A small bridge upstream washed away one year and they refused to allow rebuilding it.
The claim was that rebuilding the small bridge would disturb some endangered fish species. So instead hundreds or thousands of vehicles every summer would drive through that small river instead to get to the wilderness area beyond. That created a lot more destruction and impact on the fish. Trucks and vehicles wash off a lot of oil and chemicals like that.
“ However to put up some of a counter those agencies also over-regulate.”
Musk and DOGE had a wonderful opportunity to analyze these issues and address them and improve government efficiency. Instead they opted to cut whatever they didn’t like or couldn’t understand within five minutes. Musk should be deeply ashamed.
I would caveat that further that they seemingly at least in part targeted agencies that were going after his various companies. Coincidentally I'm sure.
Given Space Xs issues in the subsequent years with complying with environmental regulations, it doesn’t seem that ridiculous to me. It’s not as though the shark question was simply posed in a vacuum: it was part of a broader inquiry into potential impacts of launching rockets into space. And Space X wasn’t singled out. Blue Origin had to do the same paperwork, yet bezos didn’t feel the need to whine about it.
Well if the regulators are worried about sharks getting hit by a rocket, then they’re writing terrible environmental review requirements. It makes me skeptical that they’re going to do a good job protecting the environment if they’re asking such ill thought out questions.
Personally I’d hope for competent staff to be creating thoughtful valuable environmental impact surveys. Hence why the pushback on these agencies is valuable. Bureaucracies generally need some sort of pressure to, you know, do a competent job.
The real issue is essentially: which would you rather have, $1 now or $10 tomorrow?[1]
People see it as savings because they have that money now. That's the way JumpCrisscross used it (and I very much don't think they agree that this is how the gov should be working). But the way you're using it is "I'd rather have the $10 tomorrow".
I'm pointing this out because now people are talking past one another. I'm pointing this out because it is a really common pattern ("now" vs "later") that is used and frequently causes miscommunication due to different assumptions about what we want (e.g. "maximize money now" or "maximize money during x period of time"). Though it doesn't always have to do with money.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705004
[1] Be careful to not trivialize this. The numbers are abstract as well as the points in time. Also consider that $1 now might be far more valuable than $10 tomorrow. For example, if you get $1 now you might be able to afford a bus ticket to a location where you can get $1m, but only if you get there today. That's worth a lot more than $10 tomorrow. So we have to be mindful of what conditions actually exist if we want to actually communicate. Unfortunately, these are usually assumed and not communicated... The people that want to just take the money are well aware of this tendency...
I'm pretty sure that neither money saved today or tomorrow are factors in these cuts. This administration is out to grief science and scientists--it doesn't matter if it saves money or costs money. The whole point is hostility to science. It's not an economic decision.
If you can't differentiate then we'll only be able to talk past one another
> administration is out to grief science and scientists
Is MAGA messaging on these NASA cuts?
My impression is these cuts are being done in the background. The beasts being fed are the military-industrial complex (specifically, its rotation from legacy providers to Silicon Valley) and ICE.
Grievance politics amplified by an assembly of the most astoundingly dumb people you’ve ever seen behind a podium
That’s it! That’s the strategy!
This apologia for the cuts would be more persuasive if they didn’t come in concert with record-breaking increases to the pentagon budget and historic deficits. There’s no calculation happening here with present or future value, they’re lavishly funding things they like and decimating things they don’t. You don’t place a reality TV ‘star’ as the director of any agency you care about.
Sanewashing would be better word ... it is kneed jerk tendency with anything republicans and especially Trump related. Even when what they do is clearly crap, people find ways to rationalize it and make it sound better then it is.
Sometimes better amounts to "still bad" as in here, but it is still a bunch of claims that make Conservatives lead by Trump sound much better then what they actually are.
And you don't think understanding how people delude themselves is good to 1) convince them 2) not fall prone to the same traps?
I'm not excusing anyone. But you are picking fights with people on your own team. So maybe pay closer attention to what people say and not just signaling. Personally I want to fix things, not pick random needless fights. I want to stop chaos, not create more. Picking fights is just what Trump wants you to do
> And you don't think understanding how people delude themselves is good to 1) convince them 2) not fall prone to the same traps?
I think that if you project wrong motivations on them, you wont understand how they "deluded" themselves nor prevent yourself to fall for the same trap. If their motivation is "scientists are liberals and I want to hurt them" or "I want actually Christian conservative religious state and these institutions are threat to that goal", no amount of theorizing about money saving will get you to the understanding.
If you want to start with understanding someone's motivation, you can not start by projecting best most palatable motivations on them. Nor should you start be projecting worst ones ... but that is NOT where we are or were for years.
For years, conservatives and especially Trump had best possible motivations projected on them. And it only served to their benefit. The whole center ended up not believing their goals, even as they stated or wrote about them regularly. The whole center was busy policing those who actually listened to conservatives and very accurately predicted what they will do. Again and again.
> Personally I want to fix things, not pick random needless fights. I want to stop chaos, not create more.
You are not stopping the chaos by making what is going on more palatable by sane washing it. It just empowers the chaos.
> Picking fights is just what Trump wants you to do
No, Trump want us all to act like republicans do. Never argue with him, enable enable enable. Praise him and kiss his behind.
You're right that's there's a breath of opinions and values but you're wrong to be applying such a broad brush, especially when painting with hate.
If you hate Trump so much I highly suggest not supporting him
This is nonsense. Of course we want to be richer tomorrow than we are today, but we're plenty rich today. We -- the United States -- do not have a cashflow issue. We can meet all of our current obligations -- or could if there were any effort at efficient redistribution at all. The US federal government is maybe the least cashflow-constrained organization in human history. We want the $10 tomorrow, without any question whatsoever.
I'm failing to see what you're arguing against from my comment. What did you think I was arguing?
jacobolus wrote:
> The cuts to NASA as well as NOAA, NIH, USGS, USDA, FWS, DOE, etc. are not really saving that much money, but are destroying literally trillions of dollars of future economic value
You, in reply, wrote:
> The real issue is essentially: which would you rather have, $1 now or $10 tomorrow?[1]
I'm saying you're wrong. There is not a choice to be made. We want the $10 tomorrow. No rational person can disagree with this if the person making the choice is the US federal government, who can spend money into existence. If we have some use for $1 now, just spend that $1 into existence too! Then, tomorrow, we'll have the $10 too!
If you agree with the cuts, you must logically agree that they are a bad investment: that $1 today will net us 75 cents tomorrow.
That wasn't my argument? I think you should look at my last paragraph. It starts with "I'm pointing this out because".
Previously I didn't state my position. You *assumed* my position. So allow me to tell you what it is: I agree, $10 tomorrow is better You really should read [1]Actually, you really should read my whole comment and be careful to not read things my comment doesn't say.
To circle back,
A corollary to this is "miscommunication [frequently] happens when we make inaccurate assumptions about the position of others". Let's not go putting words in other people's mouths.I understood your point. I just couldn't fathom any reason it was in this specific discussion other than as a way to legitimize the cuts as one of several "choices" that could be made depending on the assumptions or predilections of the party choosing. In this case, there are no choices to be made (one of the "choices" is literally better in every way and only a fool wouldn't take it), so any suggestion that there are "sides" to this "argument" is de facto an argument in favor of the cuts, regardless of what you claim to believe.
I understand now that you are just making a semi-wanky abstract point about the nature of rhetoric and descisionmaking for its own sake, and I apologize for misunderstanding this.
I appreciate the apology, even with the snipes. I hope you now can fathom a reason, even if it's hard
NASA is “the elites” in a key area: they’ve done a ton of research confirming climate change is real and impactful. I think the general antipathy for education intersected strongly with the wing of the Republican Party which sees climate change as the enemy both because many of them are funded by fossil fuel companies and because they see all forms of collective action or addressing externalities as an existential threat.
> Simpler: science costs money and leadership believes that money is better spent giving folks like me a tax cut than paying for poor folks' healthcare or basic research.
That's a simple explanation but not a good one. All government salaries across all jobs everywhere in the federal government are about 4% of the federal budget.
The DRPs going on are 100% about "draining the swamp", not saving money. This is literally what the administrators of these agencies are saying on TV news. They think science is biased against their worldviews and they want to replace them.
>that money is better spent giving folks like me a tax cut
The federal government now accepts donations if you don't want the money.
> federal government now accepts donations if you don't want the money
This is silly. I prefer the money be spent on things that have a larger ROI, collectively, than I can attain individually. Destroying the money doesn't achieve that aim.
Well, the rest of us disagree. You need consensus for public institutions and no one on the left or the right has been willing to build that.
Actually, the "rest of us" largely agree, as reflected in the laws our elected representatives have established. We have collectively appropriated the money and set up the institutional framework for spending it. Folks smashing down that system are doing a significant part of it illegally, with no credible justification or public support, in several recent cases in contemptuous violation of direct court orders.
> the rest of us disagree
Irrelevant to the silliness of suggesting destroying money as a solution.
The federal government has, pretty much always, accepted donations, but recently the time and effort were spent to make those contributions available via digital instead of the old check and mail method of yesteryear.
The current government would take any money you give them and give it back to rich people in the form of tax cuts.
So no, I don't want to Venmo cash to somebody who doesn't need it.
That has always effectively been how government programs work, even if they launder it through poor people and immigrants first.
Except for in your example, the poor people and immigrants get to eat and sleep indoors and maybe one day become educated.
I won't make any assumptions about your politics, but I'm assuming that doesn't move the needle for you.
I'd definitely donate if it meant that billionaires also had to give a proportionate amount of their wealth.
I think NASA cuts are about giving money to billionaires, so they can build or expand their capitalist version. Obviously, this will be more efficient because it funnels money to the wealthy directly.
>>This is a loss of capacity that will set the US back a generation.
Many people grossly underestimate restarting a stopped process which took tremendous inertia to get rolling at the first place.
For all practical purposes its almost like you permanently lose the ability.
>but human spaceflight is not what’s getting cut at NASA. Instead, very productive current and future science missions are getting killed, in defiance of Congress [1].
Sounds like ye olde Sowell quote[1] about organizational priorities and budget cuts in action.
[1]https://www.pennlive.com/opinion/2013/03/thomas_sowell_budge...
This isn't cogent, IMO, since Republicans control all 3 arms of government. Who would be the target of intentional public outrage? Also, this is far less incendiary than the cuts to public benefits.
I think GP is suggesting that NASA administrators might have an incentive to apply budget cuts to programs that get more public outrage. However I would imagine human spaceflight to be the more visible type of program for the average voter.
Bureaucracies like to grow, and they're very resistant to cuts, so they become inefficient entities poorly suited to current needs. Private companies have competition as a force that forces some amount of accountability, but I have yet to hear a strategy for effectively discontinuing work the government shouldn't be doing.
> Private companies have competition as a force that forces some amount of accountability
[citation needed]
Private companies these days just buy all their competitors to minimize accountability and maximize shareholder returns.
These cuts are absolutely not the ones I would make, but the reality is not as it is being portrayed.
The claim that SpaceX does not do science is false. Not only do they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts, they also do independent science, including the Polaris Dawn and FRAM 2. Along with Axiom, they put science missions on the ISS, and all the NASA science done on ISS is facilitated by SpaceX putting humans there. Finally, literally everything that SpaceX has done or built is a result of science that SpaceX has had to do, including colder than ever propellants, and life support systems, etc. The Polaris Dawn spacewalk was not a replication of the 1960s spacewalks, as it was based on new suit science, etc.
Somehow, people like to pretend that probes landing on other planets is the only form of science that is done.
And the reality is that new entrants from RKLB, SpaceX, Firefly, and a lot of smaller companies are doing exactly this kind of science as well--- but at vastly lower cost.
The inescapable reality-- and this will always be the case with political organizations like NASA-- is no matter how well meaning they cannot do science as effectively as private organizations. NASA slows science down in large part because they are hamstrung by congress.
Yes, it looks like some way too expensive projects are getting cancelled and that means some waste of money. It's not the choice I would make.
But in the next 10 years, nearly %100 of all science will be done outside of NASA.... because the NASA overhead is too much, makes things too expensive, and less reliable.
For example, it's better to blow up 1 falcon one, and 2 falcon 9s, to get 500 successful falcon 9 launches at 1/100th the cost per kilogram of mass to orbit than to have a completely successful SLS system that launches only 2-3 times a decade.
The former accelerates science, lowers the cost of all science and more science gets done per dollar than the latter.
That transition is happening whether government, the senate and congress is aboard.... or not.
> they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts
Exactly. Like if I am an uber driver and I bring a surgeon to a hospital, it counts as me doing surgery since the most important part of surgery is the process of driving to the place where it happens
so ambulances do nothing, got it.
They do, but it's not surgery.
> but the reality is not as it is being portrayed.
This is exactly how anyone would describe your reply. Your claim is so bizzare and its logic so convoluted that the only reason I can imagine for it is political motivation. But I could be wrong and don't want to get into a flamewar. So let's ignore the reasons and reassess the logic instead. Most of the counter I can come up with are variations of what the other commenter replied, so I will leave that to them. Instead, let's look at why your argument never pans out.
Private companies always look for short to medium term profits, since it affects their balance sheets and ultimately their survival. That constraint isn't favorable for scientific research and science missions, because there is a long lead time for the research results to be converted into a commercially viable products. Some companies with a large product portfolio and steady profits still do some research, as long as it isn't too costly or time consuming. An example is the pharma industry.
But science involving the biosphere, atmosphere, astronomy/astrophysics, space, interplanetary missions etc are on the other end of that spectrum - extremely costly and no commercialization for the foreseeable future. The only way private industries are going to do it is if the government funds them with short term profits - in which case, it's the government's program, not the industry's. Even Musk's Mars dream is dependent on government funding in that manner, though his intent isn't science either. What makes you think the private industry will take it upon themselves to fund and conduct research that makes no economic sense?
SpaceX launches stuff. What scientific instruments do they design, what findings do they obtain? Anything beyond just how to launch stuff?