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| ▲ | WarmWash an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | The military budget is a jobs program that also keeps a (near bare minimum) level of industrial capacity afloat. Its why no politician left or right is really interested in cutting it. If you browse open contracts, you'll see they that they overwhelmingly buy rather banal things and spend comparatively little on the "killing people" parts. | | |
| ▲ | malfist an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | What do you think NASA is? NASA is so expensive because it's a jobs program. There's no other reason for Boeing to have factories in so many states for building satellites. | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | You're not wrong, and no one is turning down NASA contracts, but the scale isn't comparable. NASA buys mostly highly specialized parts that can be pretty narrow in scope and utility. OTOH the DoD will buy 150,000 aluminum water canteens, which is probably the only thing keeping the one decent job in Wagatah, Maine from closing. Which happens to be of only a handful of shops in the country with the tooling for this. Wagatah, of course, is not known for it's aerospace engineering. But thankfully water is pretty important for soldiers, and the new design is x% more efficient, so Wagatah gets another 5 years of work, the DoD gets to keep a domestic source of water canteens, and if NASA needs 5 space grade aluminum storage boxes, a company in Wagatah can make them. | |
| ▲ | pc86 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | OK so maybe they're both jobs programs, but .mil is bigger and employs more people (almost certainly at a lower per capita cost). |
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| ▲ | manoDev 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The military budget is how the US enforces Bretton Woods. The jobs part is just a nice side-effect of any govt. spending. | | | |
| ▲ | tclancy an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Great. Can we change it to just be the non killing part for a few years until the bad project ideas fully die off? | | |
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| ▲ | cg5280 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In 2024, the average American spent about $17,000 on taxes. Nearly $4000 of that went to the DoD, about $3500 went to interest on federal debt. I think it’s fun to think about it in this way. I personally spend hundreds of dollars a month on war. | | |
| ▲ | tshaddox 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Those numbers look way off. Are you making the common mistake of ignoring mandatory spending? In 2024 defense spending and net interest were each about 13% of federal spending. | |
| ▲ | jocaal 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Funny how people complain about federal debt, when the people complaining benefitted the most from the system. It is your children who will be paying the interest, while the older folk enjoyed a heated economy with high government spending. Economics is just as fundemental as physics. There are conservation laws that cannot be violated. However you can make other people hold the bag. | |
| ▲ | germinalphrase an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You have a source to share for that framing of the tax spend? | | | |
| ▲ | ck2 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Defense spending in the USA is double what is publicly published There are all kinds of dark budgets and stuff spun off into "civilian" programs that actually aren't The published cost of Iran War is like $30 Billion when it is obviously over $100 Billion by experts and that doesn't including replacing all the missiles TWENTY-ONE TRILLION DOLLARS since 9/11 spent on defense 2001-2021 * https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz... imagine how much food clothing shelter for the US and WORLD that would buy we'd have humans on Mars already with that budget not even knowing now how to stop space-blindness and bone-loss | | |
| ▲ | kccqzy 37 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > imagine how much food clothing shelter for the US and WORLD that would buy President LBJ proposed his Great Society agenda, which he defined as “a society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled.” At the same time, the country also increased its defense spending due to the heightened tension in the Cold War and the Vietnam War. The country can really do both. |
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| ▲ | chris_money202 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Or hear me out, we improve life here on Earth... | |
| ▲ | avmich an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Can we really accelerate any probe to faster than 1% c? Or 2% c? | | |
| ▲ | kimixa 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | No, not even close. The issue is simply exhaust velocity and reaction mass, that leads us into the tyranny of the rocket equation - in that you have to carry that reaction mass with you and accelerate that mass too. Even if you had magic infinite energy - e.g. it's supplied externally by a laser or similar. Using the theorized maximum of 31km/s exhaust velocity of project orion (much higher than any current high impulse propulsion technologies) you'd need to have thrown out something similar to 10^42 times the probe's mass out the back at that 31km/s velocity. That means to accelerate a 1kg probe to 1%c you'd need to start with a spacecraft holding a reaction mass equivalent to a few trillion suns worth of mass. Hardly seems worth it. It's all about exhaust velocity - increase that and it scales down quickly. Using the theoretical max of 500km/s of VASIMIR for example means it's only 400x the mass of the probe of reaction mass - but that's still theory and max thrust limits means it'll take the order of millions of years to reach that sort of speed. | | |
| ▲ | blauditore 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | And why not accelerate using swing-bys on moons and planets? Of course this gets harder the faster you're already moving, but IIUC Voyager 1 has roughly 0.01% c, and this was launched 50 years ago. | | |
| ▲ | kimixa 3 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It might help a bit, as you mentioned that Voyager is currently going about ~17km/s, so nearly 0.005% c, so it's already nearly 1/200th of the way there to our target of 1% c. But then you're at a velocity so far beyond the escape velocity of most bodies you'd need to be skirting stars, then black holes to get anything more, and that's where it dives straight into "sci-fi" rather than anything even close to theoretically possible. How far away even if a body like that? Will this "probe" even survive such an encounter? So even with that sort of slingshot it's well within the "Estimate Rough Error" of my intial numbers. They're "order of magnitude back-of-the-envelope calculations" of spherical spaceships in a vacuum already unrealistically biased to make the numbers smaller (just reaction mass, no thought of any mass of the engine or spacecraft body itself, or containing the reaction mass itself, or anything like that). |
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| ▲ | zer00eyz 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > No, not even close. 10% of C is theoretically possible with a space sail, and lasers. Will it work? Well we don't know cause we haven't tried. | | |
| ▲ | kimixa 30 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Space sails are super low thrust though, even lower than my VASIMIR example - so will take even longer to reach the desired speed - though they have the advantage of not having to carry the complex and heavy engine I ignored that in the rough estimates anyway. So by the time they're theoretically close to the desired speed they'll be on the other side of the galaxy at least, even if it took millions of years to get there at the much slower average speed. |
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| ▲ | altruios an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One idea that stuck out to me was an array of giant thin solar powered spinning metal Crookes radiometers magnets in a line to make a railgun-like launcher. Materially cheap to do. Related, but not exactly what I was thinking of: https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/08/05/a-rotating-probe-...
The original source I'm thinking of may be lost to time :( I'll keep hunting. edit:found! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDM1COWJ2Hc | |
| ▲ | patagurbon an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We have the physics but not the engineering. See the Breakthrough Starshot project for instance | |
| ▲ | ck2 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think the idea is tic-tac sized probes with nano circuitry (that doesn't exist yet) accelerated by lasers so they don't have to carry the power source Obviously stopping is the problem, they can never stop but at some point no need | |
| ▲ | r2_pilot an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, with lasers or nuclear energy | |
| ▲ | tclancy an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Per new Space Force regulations, we are using F for an adjusted speed of light. We are currently able to achieve 1.48F. |
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| ▲ | zer00eyz 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Can we swap the US Military and NASA budgets for just one year please? It would be nice. There is a pretty well known interview of Admiral Grace Hopper by David Letterman, where she talks about her famous "nanosecond" and explaining (to Generals) why it takes so long to get a message to a satellite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE2uls6iIEU (As an aside, Grace was a name she lived up to in a way few others could, if you have never seen that interview it is well worth a watch!) The valuable and well understood lesson is that latency is tyrannical, and unavoidable. The only real customer for "data centers in space" is spacex for war fighting. You don't want that data, and it's analysis going back around the world. You don't want to put compute close to the front lines, and you certainly cant deploy it for the kinds of "special operations" that the US has been doing for the last two decades. Is there a civilian use? Maybe. Ships, oil platforms, and remote locations could all see a use for this, but it isnt going to be that impactful. Realistically, getting military spend back to more "dual use" applications would be great. We have a LONG history of this in the USA. Tons of Army core of engineers projects. The interstate highway system was born out of a need for better logistics. NASA was about missiles, space was incidental. The US computing industry's foundations fell out of the navy code breaking efforts of WWII. The internet (ARPANET) was a DARPA project to start with. Spread Spectrum and its roots in Torpedos (navy again). GPS, the auto injector (epi pens). Most of these are far in the past, recently the biggest thing we have gotten out military investments is TOR (and one could argue its in decline). I think we don't see as much coming out of the modern military because it is grossly mismanaged. It's become reliant on private industry to "innovate" and that has a relentless focus on the bottom line. Yes it would be nice if we did that spending swap, but it will never happen realistically. I think a change of leadership, of intent could result in far less waste and much more benefit for the American public. We have proof we can, we just need to figure out how and make it happen. | | |
| ▲ | lstodd 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Durum-burum latency. In fact, internets slowed down compared to 2010s, and CDNs helped only to delay that. LEO orbit latency is nothing compared to what you lose to stuffing your link with useless web crap. |
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| ▲ | mschuster91 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Or even what we fund Israel's 2/3 of all their weapons are bought by US And all of the money the US gives to Israel is earmarked for American products. | | | |
| ▲ | throw48842975 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | The US gives Israel $3.8B a year (and 2/3 of their weapons are _sold_ by the US not bought). The budget of Nasa is $25B. But by antisemite math and logic says we’ll get 10% light speed. | | |
| ▲ | amanaplanacanal 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Being against military aid to Israel isn't necessarily antisemitic. | |
| ▲ | ck2 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | anti-israel-warmongering != antisemite but nice try US has given Israel over $20 Billion directly since 2023 alone Since 2023 NINETY THOUSAND TONS OF WEAPONS Enough already Israel has universal health care, let them buy build their own weaspons US must only sell Iron-Dome ONLY, defense only, they are warmongers |
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