The NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return mission has been canceled (science.org)

Former Soviet people might...

People took issue with the cost of space exploration in context of "the good the money could do here on Earth", but then when we shifted resources that way, the money did absolutely no good here on Earth.

What view do you have on the trajectory of the U.S.? Is America ascending or declining?

The success China is having isn’t something that’s occurring in isolation. There is a void and they are filling it.

And ironically the US very much considers itself to be in a race with China including in space, it's just run by such thundering morons that most of the moves they make advance China's interests more than theirs. Now the cancellation of Mars Sample Return isn't that big an issue in terms of strategic benefit or decline narratives, nor is it a particularly massive surprise (the program's issues are longer term than just current administration cuts). But there is a certain irony in some of the people most interested in scorekeeping with China (and for that matter Mars!) being the ones likely to ensure China pulls off the sample return first.

The Chinese rise is also remarkable in its own terms, but it's not the subject of discussion here. The subject here is how the US is under cutting its former preeminence in science.

They are co-occurring facts in the same area and the only reason China’s success is relevant in this discussion is because it is co-occurring with and in the same field as the American decline that is (unlike the tangential Chinese angle) directly relevant to the story here.

So, in this specific case, if we are going to mention China at all, the answer is yes. Not because the two things are so linked that they ALWAYS need to be discussed together, but because that is the relevant nexus between the present subject and China at all.

These are smart people, they’re not going to make major life decisions based on simplistic takes from political opportunists.

Yeah classic woke stuff that

> TRTech-PGR: NSF BSF - Recombining Allelic Diversity via Genome Editing for Dissecting Complex Plant Traits

This would be funny if it wasn't happening in real life. Clearly they did "ctrl-f diversity" and didn't actually read what they were cancelling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment

In fact, that kind of standing order for a new Curiosity every year is exactly how you would keep the technology alive in practice.

The "powers that be" chose to lose a completely optional and ill-conceived war on your dime. Instead of science or helping people they decided to spend money blowing up schoolgirls.

The reason why NASA ended the Apollo program is because the American public 1) was never as committed to Apollo as younger people seem to believe they were with most people being indifferent to it and plenty of people being outright against it as wasteful, and 2) even the modicum of support it had on the Apollo 11th landing was gone by the next mission. Famously, Apollo 13 was notable for regaining the attention of the public, which it almost certainly would not have had if it weren't for their lives being on the line.

The public has almost never voted for more funding to NASA. The Kennedy Administration put a shitload of money into NASA hands, without real public approval, for geopolitical goals. It was never for public anything. The public just cannot be assed to spend even a few dollars on things they don't like, and they've never cared for generic space science.

The general public can in fact do whatever they can manage to fund, including through enormous debt, which is how we spent like $40 trillion on stupid wars in the desert for no reason. I was never really in agreement with doing that, but for some reason such a suggestion was "Unamerican", as claimed by the very people bitching about the debt right now. Who just so happened to be mostly the same people voting on doing those stupid wars.

It doesn't matter how many games you want to play with how "the system" makes it hard to vote for the right people, or how the incentives are constructed, but even in such a system, the Trump power bloc is still based around voting people out if they get in his way. The power always comes down to voting. The people in our government do all the shenanigans they do because it's how you capture the votes. They pander to giant businesses because those businesses pay for their political ads, which always go up in price so that only the largest businesses can afford to control them. But politicians do it because those ads get them the votes. If just doing their job better got them more votes, they would do that, or be replaced with someone who would.

The powers that be are the voters, with caveats and nuance.

What makes you think the poster you responded to agrees with the Iran war expense? He simply commented on how difficult it is to cut anything from the Federal budget. He's right. Remember when all the lunatics were out keying Teslas a few short months ago?