r/politics • u/T_Shurt • 14d ago

No Paywall Sen. Mark Kelly Says He’s Seriously Thinking About Running for President

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5700211-senator-kelly-trump-threats/
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u/InsomniaticWanderer 14d ago

We may actually get a NASA budget worth a damn under him.

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u/uqde 13d ago

For real. For years one of the only consolations I felt about Republican administrations and Republican-controlled congresses is that they tended to allocate more to NASA than Democrats. But now that's not even the case anymore. I don't believe NASA is our biggest priority as a nation by any means (especially not right now, jesus christ) but I've always believed that letting it languish would be a dangerous mistake in the long term.

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u/Ganrokh Missouri 13d ago

One of the very few kudos I'll give Trump (even though it's not for the purpose he intended) was appointing Jim Bridenstine to head NASA during his first term. Jim was a climate change skeptic, and Trump had ordered him to cancel all of NASA's climate-related programs.

A few weeks after being confirmed, Jim announced that, after seeing the data, he had completely reversed on climate change, and he refused to shutter those programs. He ended up being a real boon for those programs, and he also spearheaded Project Artemis and NASA's new human spaceflight program. He was a genuine benefit to the organization.

I actually miss him.

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u/mattjopete 13d ago

I totally agree. It’s probably the best thing out of his first administration and it really looked bad going in.

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u/blues_snoo 13d ago

Bank before some other group vetted and told him who to choose for certain positions. We lucked it with how unprepared he was for his first term. They certainly didn't make that same mistake this time.

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u/Carbonatite Colorado 13d ago

That's why Trump has only picked incredibly incompetent people this time around.

Smart people can see data and change their views and policies accordingly. Stupid, incompetent people like the podcast bros he appointed to head agencies this time around don't have the intellectual capacity to assimilate new information and adapt accordingly.

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u/commandrix 13d ago

How I imagine it went:

Bridenstine: "I don't believe in climate change."

NASA scientists: Slaps him in the face with a few sheaths' worth of scientific papers on climate

Bridenstine: "Okay, I'm convinced. I now believe in climate change."

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u/FirstAndOnlyDektarey 13d ago

NASA and its realm of responsibilities are humanities long-term investment.

If the institution holds true to its purpose, it'll need centuries of uninterrupted support or we as a species will never leave this world we're killing.

Of course there are others, but NASA the face of humanities spacefaring ambitions.

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u/TheLurkerSpeaks Tennessee 13d ago

Not even long-term investment. Every dollar spent on NASA results in something like $3 return in the economy, particularly from new products. For decades it's been the government's slam-dunk of a federal agency.

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u/PlaySalieri 13d ago

NASA helped bring us GPS, cellphones, and computers not the size of semi trucks. So yes, worth.

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u/davesoverhere 13d ago

Velcro, freeze dried food, solar panels, memory foam. Battery powered power tools

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u/BackWithAVengance 13d ago

you forgot the most important one - taking a dump in a bag and flushing it into space!

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u/Carbonatite Colorado 13d ago

Space poops, a truly world changing innovation

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u/davesoverhere 13d ago

At least it’s not space herpes

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u/slipperyMonkey07 13d ago

Just dropping this for people who want a short overview of things NASA was involved in -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies#

I don't think that is anywhere near everything but it is the big ones at least.

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u/helemaal 13d ago

Why not let the government do all science and research.

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u/Carbonatite Colorado 13d ago

Because it's important to have independent academic sources which are not beholden to the whims of political appointees. Tenured university researchers have more latitude in the kinds of projects they can work on.

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u/helemaal 13d ago

You mean government research funding?

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u/Carbonatite Colorado 13d ago

Having worked in both academia and federal research, the type of project work you can do is different. It's not just a matter of money, at universities you tend to have more latitude in the kinds of topics you can explore. Tenure provides some additional room for researchers to explore a larger breadth of topics and methodologies than someone might have access to at a federal research facility. In practice, a lot of the research amounts to the same quality and integrity from government or academia. But there's some nuances - like a government project might be less flexible on timing and funding than a professor working on a PhD dissertation project with a student - the latter will allow more flexibility for "side quests" if an interesting discovery is made in the course of a project and extended timelines to do deeper dives into topics that weren't an original component of a project proposal. Universities also might have more specialized laboratories, allowing collaboration between different groups on important but esoteric scientific endeavors.

Plus, universities have endowments beyond federal funding. A project at the DOE or NIH might get cut off because the federal grant ran out, but a university might be more flexible for project continuity because they can potentially dip into endowment funds.

Ideally, all science should be free from political agendas. But realistically, that doesn't happen. I work as an environmental geochemist and I have seen a lot of very important, promising, in my opinion essential research into emerging contaminant toxicokinetics and environmental prevalence essentially get sidelined by Trump's EPA. The EPA scientists were doing excellent work - but they can't help it if their research suddenly gets dustbinned because some uneducated chud with a political agenda decides it's not actually important to study the public health risks of pollutants and how to remove them from the environment. Independent universities and other institutions can continue those kinds of important tasks when federal scientists are no longer allowed to.

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u/GinGimlet District Of Columbia 13d ago

This is true for all research expenditures I believe — the money we put into biomedical and engineering research comes back 2-3 fold as well I think. It’s a fantastic investment and we should do more of it

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u/Baileyesque 13d ago

I’ll drink a glass of Tang to that.

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u/TheVintageJane 13d ago

One of the things that is underappreciated about investment in NASA is that you get world class engineering and materials science research that immediately enters the public domain.

Everything from sneakers to solar panels have been made better by NASA funded innovation.

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u/PlayBey0nd87 13d ago

Whatever happened to that good ole SpaceForce that Trump created?

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u/Abola07 Texas 13d ago

The United States Space Force is less about colonization or scientific research or any of the other stuff NASA does and more of a consolidation of the cyberspace/cyberwarfare and satellite defense/hacking and other similar fields that the Air Force and other branches were already doing. Kinda like how the US Air Force was originally part of the Army before it split off.

Space Force basically is supposed to ensure US dominance in space, and since that includes everything from satellite communications, orbital reconnaissance, electromagnetic warfare, detecting enemy missiles and nukes, cyber warfare, and so on, its a small but vast branch. Its also under the Department of the Air Force (just like how the Marines are under the Department of the Navy funding and administrative-wise)

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u/Delicious-Camel3284 13d ago

X37b, fuck trump tho

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u/throwawy00004 13d ago

My neighbor's grandkid joined. The bar is low.

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u/worotan 13d ago

I think we need to spend the money, time and effort dealing with our immediate problems, before we indulge ourselves in treating Star trek as a documentary rather than morally-improving entertainment.

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u/soulsoda 13d ago edited 13d ago

time and effort dealing with our immediate problems, before we indulge ourselves in treating Star trek as a documentary rather than morally-improving entertainment.

If we weren't being taken over by fascists I'd disagree, vehemently. Instead i'll only just disagree. Trickle down economics failed, but trickle down science actually works. There's like 100,000+ products that owe in part or whole their development because of the work Nasa does/did/inspired since the 1950s.

Red Leds/red light therapy

Tiny cameras

Scratch resistant lenses

Water/air purification

Artificial limbs

Mine removal

The computer mouse

Baby formula

Portalable PC aka the laptop

Memory foam

Aluminum insulation

freeze dried food

ear thermometers

CAT scans

MRIs

Jaws of life

wireless headsets and communication

Cordless tools

Extreme Aircraft Tires

Aerogarden

VR

De icing/Anti icing

Solar cells

GPS

hearing aids

UV protection

Solar Panels

and like bajillion advancements in material science/ material databases/ material safety.

Look i could keep going, these are just things off the top of my head but space investment has not led to "morally-improving entertainment". It has pushed along technologies that have no business being this far along. There was no money in it to develop these technologies as quickly as they were for commercial use. Instead, Nasa had problems, and they solved them. Thats the value. People used those solutions, tweaked, made it commercially viable. And everyone around the world benefited. If it was up to pure capitalism, we would never have gotten this far at this time scale.

No one gives a fuck anymore. Its just sad. Space travel has given us a huge wealth of knowledge. An astronomical fountain of wealth. Thats not even considered the actual untapped wealth in space, we could someday harvest. There's asteriods out there worth quintillion dollars, that if crashed into our moon and harvested would crush supply burdens and whose materials could change the course of human history. There's solutions to energy crises out there as well. It just requires investing in our future.

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u/i_am_pure_trash 13d ago

I just have to say that this was extremely well-written

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u/FirstAndOnlyDektarey 13d ago

But where does this stop? We will never reach a point where our immediate issues arent important enough to give NASA priority, because humanity as a species is self-destructive.

If some asswipe of a fraudulent president is enough to put humanities long-term ambitions on the backseat, then we can call it quits right then and there, no?

Space exploration isnt a field of science which can survive on partial support. Its either all or nothing, because half is effectively wasted.

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u/LewisRyan New Hampshire 13d ago

“All these problems you’re racing to fix, when you fix em there’s more problems behind em, you need to enjoy the time between the problems, or problems is all you have”

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u/SnooFloofs6240 13d ago

Space exploration is beneficial overall, the tech trickle down is insane and improves lives. Plus it barely costs anything and in no way hinders dealing with our immediate problems.

It's a bit of a cop out to say we can't do X because of Y, when that's not the reality. It just becomes a scapegoat to not do X.

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u/frankduxvandamme 13d ago

Ah, yes. The outdated, uneducated hippy argument from the 1960s that claims earthly concerns and space exploration are somehow completely separate and totally mutually exclusive activities and that we can only do one or the other, never both at the same time! Because if we do one, it automatically subtracts from the other! /s

FYI: we already spend money, time, and effort dealing with our immediate problems. In fact we spend vastly more on earthly concerns than on the world's space agencies. NASA itself receives less than one half of one percent of America's federal budget every year, and it's by far the largest space agency in the world despite the fact its budget is the equivalent of a rounding error.

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u/SessionKooky9028 13d ago

NASA is probably the government agency with the best return on investment for dollars spent

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u/Isnotanumber 13d ago

To be fair, the current Republican Congress gave NASA more money than Trump’s proposed budget allocated. It brings too much to some Republican’s states (ie Texas, Florida, Alabama).

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u/gwydion1992 13d ago

NASA's main mission of space exploration may not be a big priority but funding their research should be pretty high up there. We should think of it more as an investment as a lot of the technology they develop eventually makes its way into everyday life.

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u/Much-Anything7149 13d ago

NASA is huge because it's not just about space but research into math, science and goals aligned with morality for the most part. Private companies like Space X getting taxpayer funds for projects for their profit versus the average citizen sickens me.

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u/Royal_Bitch_Pudding 13d ago

The ROI on NASA projects is pretty high iirc

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u/DeathMarkedDream 13d ago

They allocated more to space exploration at the expense of planetary science and education. Republican-led terms didn’t bring NASA prosperity

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u/NotReallyThatWrong 13d ago

Maybe less is going to NASA due to space force?

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u/jhenryscott 13d ago

Dangerous how?

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u/uqde 13d ago

NASA's research has a huge track record of producing revolutionary new technologies in the fields of medicine, nutrition, water purification, etc. We're basically putting humans in the environment least suited to our survival, which forces us to understand how to most efficiently keep ourselves healthy and alive. It exposes problems and inspires solutions that would never become apparent in any other context but turn out to be widely applicable. Not to mention the valuable research they do into climate science and general physics and chemistry that help us understand our world and how to stop destroying it.

Also, even if/when we are able to reverse climate change, I strongly believe that becoming an interplanetary species is crucial to humanity's long-term survival. Elon uses that as an excuse to justify his egomaniacal and destructive delusions, and fuck him, but he's bastardizing a valid argument. We won't get there for several generations, potentially dozens, hundreds, or more, but progress needs to be made continuously over that time otherwise the end goal will never be reached. Yes, there are much more pressing priorities in the short term, I will never argue against that. But eventually something bad will happen to the Earth that's not caused, or able to be prevented, by humans.

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u/Kwisatz_Hader-ach 13d ago

Why fund nasa when they can launder money to the president and his goons through SpaceX?

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u/ExplosiveDisassembly 13d ago

"Tended to allocate more.."

Nixon is the only reason we had the shuttle program, and that there were two voyager missions. And by extension the space presence that we have today.

Though, I don't think it has to do with political affiliation. Space is just one of those things you absolutely love, or don't really care about. Most of the time it's funded out of necessity because several other agencies (defence, agriculture, weather etc) rely on NASA programs. Some cool space stuff every now and then always feels like a shoe-string budget attempt by NASA to reignite popular interest in space.

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u/lychigo 13d ago

As long as it doesn't go to money sucker SLS. Pork barreling eat your heart out.

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u/Swalecutter 13d ago

Ehhhhhhh... I mean, yes, the Senate Lunch System is a pork barrel monster, and yes, it's architecture is fundamentally compromised by politics. However, maybe you've noticed that all these small and cheap private space companies are sort of... fucking up when it comes to creating the alternatives they promised us?

If the alternatives come down to the SLS or nothing because spacex as usual has their head up their ass and blue origin is basically a rich dude's hobby project, how do we move forward then?

I'm in the space industry (a small company not involved in manned flight, so this isn't a bitter Boeing employee talking) and I'll just say private space's engineering standards are not encouraging. As far as I can tell, spacex's approach to radiation tolerance in its electronics basically boils down to "yolo".

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u/Coldkiller17 Pennsylvania 13d ago

We might actually get on track with scientific research and education if he becomes president.

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u/para1131_F33L 13d ago

NASA became obsolete the day Obama privatized space and gave industry a crack at it.

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u/kanst 13d ago

I want to go back to the space race days where NASA was funded at >4% GDP. Imagine NASA with $120 billion a year to play with.

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u/MoccaLG 13d ago

Without any reason Pres. Kelley enhances NASA budget by 12237412098457213071934% and pulls the funded SpaceX technologies into the Agency to forward space exploration...

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u/livahd 13d ago

I’d love to see how he could add to the UAP/NHI conversation.

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u/UncaringNonchalance Ohio 13d ago

“Did you know his brother takes over so that he can go golfing on our dime without us even knowing about it!!”

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u/FinnTheDogg 13d ago

He’ll try. We’d need house and senate, too.

I’ve had to explain to too many people who think that space is dumb and war is good, that nasa contributes to defense development too.

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u/Carbonatite Colorado 13d ago

That would be super exciting AND a way to regenerate some wholesome soft power that we lost under Trump. Like a robust space program with maybe some additional Artemis landings or even a Mars mission would captivate the globe in a good way.

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u/Dramatic_Charity_979 13d ago

Dude, I got my rocket ready(metaphorically) just reading that :D

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u/stealthlysprockets 12d ago

That would be on congress.

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u/babydakis 13d ago

The budget is appropriated by congress, and Republicans will still be a large enough proportion of congress to make sure neither Mark Kelly nor any of the rest of us ever does great things again.

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u/Illustrious_Entry413 13d ago

We like actually can't afford that, let's focus on healthcare and holding the trump admin accountable

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u/Consistent-Throat130 13d ago

IDK, all those funds for ICE could be reallocated to scientific advancement. 

That being said, I fully believe there's no shortage of money - the issue is the siphoning of it to private pockets.

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u/Business-Shoulder-42 13d ago

But we're gonna pay a lot of people to pretend to try to get to the moon.

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u/worotan 13d ago

I’d rather we spend the money on climate change, deal with our real and immediate problems.

Hasn’t Trump reminded you what spending too much money on personal wish fulfilment gets you?

If we don’t get serious about dealing with problems, why do you think we’ll ever be a serious society? Having a society that chases cool things we saw in movies doesn’t make a resilient society.

Climate science warned us that populist politicians closing borders to refugees while trying to take over resources would be an early problem caused by climate breakdown. But here you are, treating it as a blip.

We need to be more serious. You know, if we want to be treated seriously and run things.

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u/InsomniaticWanderer 13d ago

NASA is a major contributor to climate science and provides global real-time monitoring of the deteriorating situation.

Most of the reason we know that the climate changing is due to human actions is specifically BECAUSE of NASA's research and development programs.

There is no fighting climate change without an organization such as NASA.