They've tried everything except actually funding NASA, and they're all outta ideas.
NOTE: China WILL overtake NASA, the same way they are dominating the renewable energy sector — because they invest heavily in science, and they do it early. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand this shit.
That goes double for our educational system, which has been aggressively gutted by the GOP: People aren't just born engineers and scientists. These greedy assholes have doomed us as a country.
EDIT: GOP stands for Grand Old Party, which is the Republican party in the United States.
Also to whoever asked and deleted their comment: There's nothing wrong with asking questions when you don't know what something means or otherwise want clarification.
No, it won't. They'll just relocate to China, or maybe a super yacht out in international waters. They'll continue milking every last cent out of the US until it's a dead dried up husk of a nation and then they'll just move to the next one. Their supporters are too stupid to realize where the end of the path they've been told to walk is going to take them, and they'd rather blame anyone else but themselves for all the problems they face. So no, a space race with China won't fix shit.
Gee whiz, maybe we should have been properly funding our space program all of these years instead of wasting it on making the military industrial complex filthy fucking rich and the world less secure overall?
Especially stupid considering last time they gave the space program appropriate funding, it led to a lot of advancements that the military industrial complex could use.
People behind the scenes are siphoning NASA space research money and turning it into space profit instead. The growth of private space companies starting in the US is no coincidence. Blame oligarchs for steering the country into a dead end.
Hate on spacex and its competitors as much as you want, im not saying you dont have cause.
But defunding NASA caused this. Those billionaires looked and said holy shit, the entire nasa budget is only that much? And they arent building rockets anymore? I can literally fund my own space program? Ide be crazy not to
To be fair, it's not as if those things are mutually-exclusive. For example, you know how the Hubble Space Telescope is this extremely unique and nigh-irreplaceable scientific instrument that cost a pretty big fraction of NASA's entire budget?
Well, it turns out we actually have dozens of the damn things; it's just that we couldn't be bothered to actually point more than one of them away from Earth instead of towards it.
Hell, a decade ago the National Reconnaissance Office gave NASA a couple for free 'cause they just had 'em lying around, but (as far as I know) NASA hasn't managed to scrounge up enough money from the couch cushions to spruce 'em up and launch 'em yet.
They certainly don't have to be, but there is a well established pattern of the US government getting waaay too chummy with corporations to the point that it can undermine what's best for the people in pursuit of corporate interests.
US: continually decides to not fund scientific exploration of space
Also US: GUYS! BE AFRAID! ANOTHER COUNTRY DID DECIDE TO SPEND MONEY ON IT! NOW WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO IF…UM…WELL, I GUESS IF THEY TAKE OVER SPACE…? Or…wait, what are we concerned about? Ah, fuck it. Cut NASA’s budget again. We got genocide to fund and taxes to cut for the wealthy.
The only thing that won't work for space is the thing we're doing now:
Maintaining a vice-like government control
Using that government authority to choose not to move forward
Progress only stops under a narrow set of conditions that need to be actively implemented by the government. Progress is actually natural, and progress stopping requires enormous centralized effort to interfere with people getting things done.
But as someone who works in the industry, it is a bleak outlook. NASA absolutely needs more funding for its human spaceflight exploration, Earth Science, robotic exploration, and astronomy/astrophysics.
Dang maybe we should take a fraction of the trillions we spend on the military to fund scientific research, and also health and education while we're at it so we'd get even more potential scientists.
Export all your technology and jobs to cheaper labour to make more profit. Now you will slowly become bankrupt, as no one can afford the enshitification products and services.
So they had no issue relying on Russia to service the ISS ever since they shutdown the space shuttle, but now they're afraid of China... doing space science faster?
Ignoring the fact that this is not even a real concern, maybe don't spend morbillions on free munitions for Israel or Lockheed's next stupid idea.
They defunded NASA so hard that they started hallucinating about going back to the moon with 15% of the Apollo budget.
At the time, Russia wasn’t as…..problematic. We had been working with Russia as an International Partner since the very early days of ISS and even during Shuttle/Mir.
Obviously they did become problematic, but we didn’t have other options until SpaceX. Now that’s….obviously got its own issues, but Russia is vastly different than China when it comes to space. Russia needs the money, China already has it.
The fact that NASA had to rely on Roscosmos in the first place is shameful. It highlights long standing issues facing the space program. I think some of these problems trace back to the cost of the ISS. It's been hard to convey the importance and investment into the future the station provides.
For China their station provides proof of concept that they can achieve similar results one day both to themselves and the world watching.
The amount of money spent on Apollo was insane. A reduced budget should have been sufficient. It's just been weighted down by shit cost-plus contracts and the abomination that is SLS.
The fear of China here is that they are basically single handedly their closest competitor. They're the only other nation thats managed a Mars Rover landing, building space station, and have their own plans for Moon and Mars with taikonauts( astronaut equivalent) on the ground in the future.
Their station has like three modules (with plans to add 3 more) and capacity for 3 people. The ISS has at least 16 modules (maybe over 30 depending on what you count as a module) and capacity for over a dozen people.
Like many things from authoritarian countries, it looks nice but isn't even close in terms of capabilities.
Anyone concerned that the US will be "overtaken" by anything coming out of China right now needs to go read about what's been happening in China for the last 5 years.
While US youth are rotting their brains via china's tiktok, Chinese youth are actually learning about science and other useful skills. Of course this is going to happen
Wait. This is a joke right? You really think all youth in america is just messing around on tiktok (yeah just forget facebook, twitter, myspace, instagram and whatever other social media we've had) and ALL youth in china is doing science?