At this point, I say the government should move away from space exploration itself while letting public ventures cruise the heavens. It is becoming more and more burdensome for our American government to firmly pursue something (although, they’ll pursue WMDs until the day they die) and the public sector is much more adept at quickly adopting new technology and innovatively implementing it. For that matter, it’s the private and public sectors that are coming up with all of the new technology these days. Most of the Mechanical Engineering senior design projects here (I think all, actually) are funded entirely by corporations who want the free research, though they sometimes toss in a few fuel cells or prototype engines into the deal.

From looking at the 2007 budget proposal and seeing the energy expenditures lose over 40% of their funding is horrific. We are moments away from a global energy crisis - China is just about to explode in both technological and academic prowess and India is losing factory jobs for white collar programmers at an accelerating rate. Our country is on an ever-increasing demand for electricity but our national government grants the area a meager, let’s just call it crappy, sum for energy production (back to coal scrubbers, it seems).

Anyways. I think space exploration-related research and development is more effectively left to public and private interests. I doubt we will be having wars in orbit any time soon, so American military advances due to space research are perhaps minimized (and, frankly, most government research today clutches onto new technology and sends it straight to our military - see DARPA). But then again, maybe Saddam sent his WMDs to the moon. Now, that would be Shock & Awe.

Do you have a cite for that? I found various resources claiming that defense spending as a percentage of GDP has been steadilyi declining since mid-20th century, but nothing stating flat out that defense was 50% of the entire federal budget.

But the Federal government can’t - and should not - get out of the picture. It’s entirely proper that the Federal government lend a hand via R+D and exploration.

http://www.mprize.org/

I feel space exploration has a lot to hand society in technological advances, assuming the government gets out of the picture. With a defense budget nearing 50% of our entire national budget there is something terribly wrong with the picture. Perhaps, foremost I would hope more government spending would go towards discovering and implementing new energy production methods rather than on more and more researching telling us we’re about to cataclysmically destroy the planet due to energy harvesting.

Anyways. I appreciate you reading my essay and wish your teams the best of luck.

Note that we get a trickle of email from ‘just folks’ that say, esentially, ‘right on’. These aren’t guys in engineering fields but literally just guys and gals and are stuck in mundane 9-5 jobs who take solace that we’re building an SE. Or at least we have some plans along those lines (grin).

I think the public is concerned about it all and space flight at least ignites a little romance in even the flintiest of souls. Joe and Jane Public just don’t see a place for them in the grand scheme of things.