• Telorand@reddthat.com
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    2 hours ago

    I’m not celebrating billionaire expenditures either. NASA does science, though, and is not a billionaire. The Artemis missions aren’t a billionaire’s idea. They are the product of scientific curiosity, and in this ultracapitalist hellscape, science and research still costs money.

    Now to be fair, the program cost $93bil…but over 13 years (plus an additional $4.3bil over four launches). By comparison, ICE got $85bil in just a year, and the US DoW budget (because it sure isn’t defense) is $175bil just for 2026; over 13 years, they’d be $1.1tril and $2.3tril, respectively. These missions are a drop in the bucket versus the kind of money they could be spending on science and social programs.

    Could you spend $93+4bil on social programs? Absolutely. But I vote cutting the budgets of actively harmful departments first, whose budgets are 10-20x that of these scientific ones.

    • village604@adultswim.fan
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      2 hours ago

      I remember people freaking out about the cost of the Curiosity rover, but it cost less than Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.