Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study

Re:Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study by wnkrshm on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @05:41AM (#18282015)

I always wonder why people think that there's so much money you can take away from space exploration R&D when the whole sector is basically really tiny and funded on a comparable magnitude of public broadcasting in some countries (e.g. NASA's yearly budget of 16 billion EUR vs. Germany's public broadcasting budget of 8 billion EUR).

The discussions ensuing about the usefulness of space exploration are always passionate and of course argue the humanitarian point of using that money to better our planet before doing anything somewhere else.

How much combat ship, Nth generation fighter, railgun and hypersonic weapon R&D do you get for the same price?

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Re:Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study by novaRom on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @08:18AM (#18282691)

> NASA's yearly budget of 16 billion EUR vs. Germany's public broadcasting budget of 8 billion EUR

Please note, every household in Germany pays a special tax, so called "GEZ TV tax" which is approximately 250 USD per year per household. Additionally, every company, every small business in Germany pays 250-44000 USD per year (depends on how many people are employed by this business).

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Re:Mars likely to have enough oxygen to support life: study by wnkrshm on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @11:52AM (#18284430)

Fair point, I'm German myself so the public broadcasting budget could just be inflated - the yearly budget of the BBC is about 6 billion iirc.

Still, it's a drop in the bucket against the military budget of the US.

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