It's sad it won't be NASA that puts the first person on Mars. The country's dying space program will have to go privatized in order to survive. Nobody looks up at the stars anymore. They are too busy looking down googling about them. 

I'm, on the other hand, glad AF it's done not out of my pocket. More power to [rich and benevolent] people.

Your post made me think of how there's actually very little distinction between the two types of agencies in a lot of science fiction stories; space exploration generally gets folded up under the same military umbrella as the Navy or Air Force.

Starfleet in Star Trek and the Earth Defense Force in the recent Independence Day sequel are two examples that immediately spring to mind of what you'd get if you merged NASA with the military. And the Colonial Marine Corps from Aliens would be what you'd get if you merged the marines with NASA, hehe.

It's crazy when you think about how much more money is prioritized for the military than for space exploration. If we spent the hundreds of billions of dollars on space programs instead, it's hard to speculate on what we could have achieved by now.

That's a good point, in terms of science fiction - though realistically I suspect that any large scale space work will be based on corporate development the more we go into the future.

I'll just throw it out there...

The only time govt should be involved with NASA money-wise is when it comes to national defense. The space travel and exploration should be privately funded. I don't think govt should be sending people to the moon. I'd pay to send some politicians to the moon though. I'm glad to see the commercialization and to an extent privatization of NASA. You go, Elon.

The military is the most important place for your tax dollars to go, that is the government's #1 primary job and responsibility.  The US military is many hundreds of times more powerful than today's generation believes it too be.  Iraq was militarily defeated in three weeks, we did not have a "10 year long war" with a minor nation of insignificant military power... they were defeated in the same three weeks that we can defeat any nation on earth except for Russia.  Everything after that, "Mission Accomplished" (Remember, the day the war ended?) was what is called a "post-war occupation", and a completely successful one.  No nation on earth, other than Russia, can last more than 3 weeks against the US military.  China would last the same three weeks as anyone else.  The idea of a "Chinese Navy" is a complete joke, we could sink the entire "Chinese Navy" in less than 24 hours without using a single ship of the US Navy.  There is enough air power on Japan, Guam, and Taiwan to very easily do that.  People today underestimate the US military by hundreds of times what it's true power is, because they believe that a minor nation "took the US on for ten years" which is complete nonsense.  It's dangerous, actually, because "the aura of invincibility of the United States" is the #1 thing that keeps WWIII from breaking out.  The primary thing that maintains peace in the world.

People also have backwards ideas about military equipment.  The F-22 Raptor, for example, is not a broken waste of money.  It is the true god of the skies and in a war war would clear the skies of enemy air superiority planes like they were sitting ducks.  And the B2 stealth bomber is really useful against second rate powers, but the B1-B that everyone thinks was some kind of embarrassing failure is actually, far and away, the best bomber ever built.  The B1-B was the dream of the Soviet Air Force, which we immediately made a 100 times better version of the moment we saw theirs, haha.

Thinking of money spent on defense is silly.  When the crowd of enemy warriors comes charging over the hill to slaughter you and your family to take what you have, then you appreciate the need for defense.  It is one of, if not the main reason that civilization even exists.  Is to have a mutual defense.  Since the end of WWII the US philosophy, based largely on Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower's philosophies, has been "Peace Through Strength".  But Ike took it even farther than that, "the aura of invincibility of the United States".  We intimidate other nations out of having wars through the fact that we cannot be defeated, and they know that.  This is why we wind up being "the world's policemen" (the source of the reason for why that happens).  And it works, or at least it has since the end of WWII.  There hasn't been a big war since then.  Only tiny, little, itsy-bitsy ones.

In WWII more soldiers would die in 30 minutes than died in the entire War on Terror combined.  WWI was even worse.  Our post-WWII system for keeping the peace works better than any other known to history, by far.  The rest of history is a story of near constant continent-wide warfare.  People forget that by comparison, "Pax America" is the most peacful and bloodless era of all of recorded history.  The wars of the cold war and beyond era are tiny, and very few people die as have in past wars that usually involved most of a continent over a decade or longer.

We need to

GET OUR ASSES TO MARS

To find the Prothean Ruins!

[e digicons]:cylon:[/e]

Moving this out of the Founders area. Lets keep the Founders area to game specific topics so we can keep it easy to manage.

While I'd never argue for NASA being a good idea, it's not exactly a budgetary problem, it sure as hell isn't because of military spending being too high.

The US is $20 trillion in the hole because it spends over $2 trillion a year on social programs.  Discretionary spending, in totality, is only about $1 trillion, that's all of the military funding, NASA, the entirety of government operations, the works.

The other $2.5 trillion is almost entirely entitlements.  Welfare programs, medicare, medicaid, social security, etcetera.  We could disband the miltary entirely, cut off the support programs for ex soldiers, the works, and we'd still be in a fiscal hole that gets larger every year.

The US has spent very little time at war since the end of WWII, actually, and the period since the end of WWII is the most peaceful in recorded history.  You obviously have no idea what the world was like before WWII.  WWII changed everything, and ever since "Pax America" has created the most peaceful period in all of recorded history.  You really don't know much about history if you can't see that.

The US has "had it's fingers" in just about everything since the end of WWII, which is why there hasn't been a major war since WWII.  It's the only reason why.  The US military prevents war, and has created the most peaceful era in all of recorded human history.  Those "wars" you list were actually tiny little short battles compared to the constant continent-wide warfare of the 4,000 years that came before it.  WWII, and nuclear weapons, most definitely did completely re-define and change the world.  You live in the unprecedented peace of the age of nuclear weapons, and the vast majority of people don't realize it.  You live in the most peaceful times that there have ever been, thanks mostly to Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower.  They wrote this book.

Compared to what would have happened during that time without "Pax America", yes it is.  Nothing at all.  If the last 80 years had been like any other 80 years of history, that number would be in the millions.

And, roughly half of that number you gave comes from Vietnam, "Kennedy's War", so be sure you put the blame for those deaths in the right place... John F Kennedy and Harry Truman, the two men who started the Vietnam War.