The current funding of 7.81b euros is 35% that of NASA’s.
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Yes. But only if the money gets spend within Europe. No American or Chinese space tech
Yes, but not right now.
It’s more important to develop a version of Linux to replace all Apple, Google, and Microsoft operating systems spying on us, and then one good social medium to replace all USAn/Chinese social media manipulating us, including dating sites sabotaging our birth rates, and job sites misdirecting our productivity to short-sighted economic fads.
For Linux, there are plenty already.
One good social medium is a big point of failure. It enables a lot of power concentration.
The fediverse alongside with media literacy among all, is what we need instead.
Proper government funded tooling for office work and scientific research would be great.
I can not imagine an alternative to the office suite would need much more investment than the European Union spends each year in licensing it.
Licensing of scientific software easily goes up to 100k/year per user.
This is why need to grow the EU economy to be larger than that of the USA, to have more spare money for the program.
We have the educated people for it.
Hopefully EU-Inc can help us make that happen.
I believe we need a European Republic. And one of its responsibilities should be more funding for european space agencies!
Too big. Look at all the big places and they’re all fucked up. Except Canada I guess, but they’re basically uninhabited. I just don’t trust big countries full of people, it always goes wrong.
Yes. Solely because the USA is steering far away from a Star Trek future of combined global efforts to advance humanity in cooperation into space, preferring instead to advance billionaire space playthings and defund all science research.
The EU is the new horse to back.
I think these agencies should all have higher funding. I don’t care whether NASA or ESA gets more, I just want science to be a higher political priority in general. It takes decades but over time the benefit for everyone will come back many times to help people here on earth
Funding should follow needs and accountable wants not ideals. What do you want and is the ESA the best org to do that?
The exception is infrasture and administrative tooling. Invest the hell out of that almost always. If an org should exist it should exist in the most efficient and effective way possible
I wouldn’t mind if a serious chunk of the NATO budgets were diverted to the ESA. Even if it’s only for military purposes, it would still fund research and development that benefits the civilian sector and it would make launches cheaper because of economy of scale.
Yeah, it would be beneficial for the spinoff tech alone - not to mentioned the strengthened collaboration between EU nations and with the rest of the world.
No.
Just as the famed US DoD budget contains enormous amounts of social welfare (Veteran healthcare, GI bill, dependant care,etc.) that is covered in EU nations by the standard social welfare systems the NASA budget is extremly focused on hidden economical subsidies,especially for some obscure senators. This is already a major ESA problem and just as defence spending shouldn’t be increased just for the sake of it to reach a quota it is even less worth doing so in terms of space egos. We need to reducue this kind of behaviour massively all over EU spending.
Do we need to put someone on the moon just for the sake of it?Hell no. Should we do so when we have a good reason for it? Yeah. Absolutely.
So basically should we invest in reaching feature parity? Yeah. But not for the sake of spending.
Isn’t further technical advancement and human civilization making itself on the way to become spacefaring a good enough reason?
Absolutely. That’s why I said: If we have a scientific reason for it? Go for it.
But not just for the sake of it.
I mean it’d be sad/annoying if we did the same thing like in the Apollo missions but I think an expanded scope makes sense. Even if it might look like it to outsiders I think for nearly none of these scientific mission like ever is the purpose the act of executing the mission itself. In most cases its what we learn and build from it to advance technology. I would say Artemis in that regard probably qualifies
The thing is: For the same money that has been spent on putting a crewed mission around the moon we could easily have done multiple non-crewed missions to/around it OR done multiple missions that focus on long distance crewed missions.
We will see. Atm everyone I know who is remotely knowledgable in that field has a somewhat stern opinion on the mission.
Just think about it like this. This isn’t money taken away from actual science. Its just that this administration values prestige projects more than proper science. I believe looking at other budgets that there would be enough money to satisfy a lot more fields. The return in human missions isn’t as immediate or apparent but I think there is still benefit behind it.
