meco03211 comments on Lmao

Lmao (thelemmy.club)

submitted 5 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[–] meco03211@lemmy.world 19 points 5 months ago (4 children)

How well funded have our space programs been? Maybe they aren't diverting massive portions of their resources to war and can actually focus on space.

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[–] turdas@suppo.fi 17 points 5 months ago (2 children)

They were well funded back when their real goal was to develop ICBMs capable of delivering nukes.

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[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 10 points 5 months ago

I get what you are saying, but the Saturn V was never intended to be an ICBM. Depending on what numbers you look at too, they weren’t actually that well funded. Some of the largest estimates that I’ve seen place NASA’s inflation adjusted budget between 1960 and 1973 at just under $600 billion. Or roughly half of what we’re spending in one year on the military currently.

To put it another way, at its absolute peak budget NASA received roughly 4.6% of the current military budget.

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[–] Samskara@sh.itjust.works 1 point 4 months ago

Also to launch big spy satellites into orbit.

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[–] CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

Iirc near that +50% level you end up needing a saturn 5 to launch sputnik, so its more expensive to the degree that it might just be deamed unfeasable, at least at the technology level humans started launching rockets at.

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