• Telorand@reddthat.com
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    22 hours ago

    I’m not celebrating billionaire expenditures either. NASA does science, though, and is not a billionaire. The Artemis missions aren’t a billionaire’s idea. They are the product of scientific curiosity, and in this ultracapitalist hellscape, science and research still costs money.

    Now to be fair, the program cost $93bil…but over 13 years (plus an additional $4.3bil over four launches). By comparison, ICE got $85bil in just a year, and the US DoW budget (because it sure isn’t defense) is $175bil just for 2026; over 13 years, they’d be $1.1tril and $2.3tril, respectively. These missions are a drop in the bucket versus the kind of money they could be spending on science and social programs.

    Could you spend $93+4bil on social programs? Absolutely. But I vote cutting the budgets of actively harmful departments first, whose budgets are 10-20x that of these scientific ones.

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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      13 hours ago

      Valid. The government needs a lot of reform, AND re-prioritizing. We care far too much about the wrong things.

    • village604@adultswim.fan
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      22 hours ago

      I remember people freaking out about the cost of the Curiosity rover, but it cost less than Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

      • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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        13 hours ago

        The cost of presidential campaigns is obscene, and is one of the things ruining this nation.

        Campaign Finance Reform is the issue from which ALL other issues flow. If we intend to seriously reduce corruption in government, we must start by getting money out of campaigns. Any attempt to fight corruption without addressing Lobbying, which is the engine of corruption, fueling campaigns with quid pro quo deals for campaign contributions, is just theater. If a “government reformer” isn’t demanding reforms for lobbying and campaign contributions, they are a liar, and have no intention of really fighting the status quo.