Where’s the beef?
Cheaper to find out if there’s really anything worth going out there for with these (relatively) inexpensive probes. No sense funding a 100 billion dollar manned mission to Mars if there’s nothing there worth studying. Now, if one of those probes detects life? Then 100 billion would be cheap to go check it out.
So let me see if I have this about right. We know the moon has no atmosphere, it’s gravity is much less than ours and we want to know about our solar system. So instead of building a base on the moon with a great telescope and other useful things, we spend a considerable sum of money on sending probes to asteroids and other planets we won’t be ready to explore for the next what, 250 years? Check that, at this rate lets make that 500.
Once again, what is the NASA budget and what have we gotten for the hundreds of billions spent over the last 35 years?
We went to the moon in about eight years. It will be at least 40, perhaps even 50 before we get back there. Is this really the proof that the unmanned space program is accomplishing all we want in space? If we’re just spending $10 billion a year, and I don’t think that is true, that’s $480 billion dollars. I’m not actually sure if that includes JPL’s budget, which does the majority of the heavy duty assessment of NASAs data recovery.
Sorry about that. Check the $480 billion figure and replace it with $350 billion plus. Thanks.