Depressing State of US Space

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

(07-29-2017, 09:07 AM)GMDino Wrote: While spending as dropped since the 60's/70's it has remained pretty constant for the last decade or so.

Pretty constant, but still shrinking. '00 to '15 shows a drop of roughly 0.25%, which considering how 2016's budget was just shy of $4t, so 0.25% would be ~$10b.

I mean, I am glad the private sector is starting to pick up some of the slack, what with SpaceX and such, and NASA is still doing some cool stuff, like the New Horizons probe, until you realize it was launched in '06, meaning it used funding from previous years to build. The Juno probe is more recent (launched in '11, so build using '09-'10 money, probably).

Just kind of depressing when you realize that almost 60 years ago we had the ability to put human beings on the moon, and now we don't even put our own astronauts onto the ISS.