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A comment on Astronaut Selection. Parent comment

Re:Astronaut Selection by bitJericho on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @06:47AM (#10695845)
Are you aware of just how little we actually spend on space?
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Re:Astronaut Selection by andyjohnson0 on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @07:15AM (#10695938)
Not much gets spent on space. Some numbers:

NASA's budget for 2014 was $17.647 billion, which is approx 0.5% of US federal government spending [1].

Total ESA budget for 2015 was €4.28 billion (US$5.51 billion) [2].

Everyone else (including Russia) spends not very much at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

[2] http://www.esa.int/For_Media/Highlights/ESA_budget_2015

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Re:Astronaut Selection by LukeB_UK on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @08:43AM (#10696251)
To put it in perspective, the US spent $581 billion on defense in 2014 [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...

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Re:Astronaut Selection by andyjohnson0 on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @10:00AM (#10696688)
It is also worth noting that NASA doesn't only do space exploration. It also does important work on civil aviation technology, remote sensing, climate studies, etc.
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Re:Astronaut Selection by odonnellryan on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @11:10AM (#10697211)
Yeah! NASA is doing really awesome stuff that makes our lives better in general.
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Re:Astronaut Selection by mmcclellan on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @08:25AM (#10696156)
We always frame our arguments to support our claim; here you represent $17 billion as small compared to a $3.7 trillion bucket. If you were arguing the other way, you might have said we spend 3 times as much on NASA as we do homelessness [1].

[1] http://usich.gov/resources/uploads/asset_library/FY2015_Budg...

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Re:Astronaut Selection by andyjohnson0 on Tuesday December 08, 2015 @10:26AM (#10696863)
In fact I just copied/pasted the bit about the NASA's percentage of the overall US budget from the referenced Wikipedia page. It wasn't an attempt at editorialising.

Homelessness is certainly an important problem, but is it more important than (for example) tackling antibiotic resistance ($450 million budget in FY2014 [1])? For any deserving issue/problem it is possible to play this game all day, as illustrated by the Fallacy of relative privation [2].

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/os...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation

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