"NASA currently uses less than 1% on the national budget."





NASA is burning $19 billion a year. About half is the equivalent of "durable goods", i.e. IP that we can use in the future. The rest is essentially turned into heat energy, i.e. entropy that we won't get back anything useful but the memories.





This Mars thing will double that to $40 billion per year.





I unfortunately see our economy on the verge of going into an exponential "runaway" where the debt service grows faster than we can tax to pay for it. We essentially are on the verge of blowing up.





We need to pay down that debt and invest for the future in good equity, not just burn it with bridges to nowhere, cash for clunkers, or Mars for Mars.





We will get to Mars and the entire solar system with efficient LENR or some new kind of nuclear soon enough. Let's invest in that, not putting Matt Damon on a one way mission to sit around and write reports from the surface. It's a boring mission anyway compared to going to Europa or better to another star system with a Bussard Ramjet or something. Our Eugene Mallove was into starflight (before he was murdered for evicting a tenant from his single family rental). We have better economic uses for our money than burning it into entropy. We need to think efficiently.