The military budget is a jobs program that also keeps a (near bare minimum) level of industrial capacity afloat.
Its why no politician left or right is really interested in cutting it. If you browse open contracts, you'll see they that they overwhelmingly buy rather banal things and spend comparatively little on the "killing people" parts.
What do you think NASA is? NASA is so expensive because it's a jobs program. There's no other reason for Boeing to have factories in so many states for building satellites.
You're not wrong, and no one is turning down NASA contracts, but the scale isn't comparable.
NASA buys mostly highly specialized parts that can be pretty narrow in scope and utility.
OTOH the DoD will buy 150,000 aluminum water canteens, which is probably the only thing keeping the one decent job in Wagatah, Maine from closing. Which happens to be of only a handful of shops in the country with the tooling for this. Wagatah, of course, is not known for it's aerospace engineering. But thankfully water is pretty important for soldiers, and the new design is x% more efficient, so Wagatah gets another 5 years of work, the DoD gets to keep a domestic source of water canteens, and if NASA needs 5 space grade aluminum storage boxes, a company in Wagatah can make them.
Those numbers look way off. Are you making the common mistake of ignoring mandatory spending? In 2024 defense spending and net interest were each about 13% of federal spending.
Funny how people complain about federal debt, when the people complaining benefitted the most from the system. It is your children who will be paying the interest, while the older folk enjoyed a heated economy with high government spending. Economics is just as fundemental as physics. There are conservation laws that cannot be violated. However you can make other people hold the bag.
> There are conservation laws that cannot be violated.
Modern Monetary Theory on line 2 for you!
There is no possible sense in which "economics is just as fundamental as physics": the latter concerns the behavior of the physical world with or without humans in it; the former describes the dynamics of a human created system featuring humans interacting with each other and the physical world.
Defense spending in the USA is double what is publicly published
There are all kinds of dark budgets and stuff spun off into "civilian" programs that actually aren't
The published cost of Iran War is like $30 Billion when it is obviously over $100 Billion by experts and that doesn't including replacing all the missiles
TWENTY-ONE TRILLION DOLLARS since 9/11 spent on defense 2001-2021
> imagine how much food clothing shelter for the US and WORLD that would buy
President LBJ proposed his Great Society agenda, which he defined as “a society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled.” At the same time, the country also increased its defense spending due to the heightened tension in the Cold War and the Vietnam War. The country can really do both.
It's like when people comment "This is why the US doesn't have healthcare" around military or war boasting.
No, the US absolutely can afford to have a gigantic military and massive welfare. That's what being the richest country on earth means
But for some reason we spent the past 50 years insisting that we are better off just letting a few individuals direct that wealth instead of making some choices collectively and democratically.
People might come to their senses when the second gilded age once again leaves a third of us unemployed and parents dying in ditches.
>Defense spending in the USA is double what is publicly published
Show your work.
>There are all kinds of dark budgets and stuff spun off into "civilian" programs that actually aren't
How much, though, as a percentage of the federal budget? Also, DoD does a lot of stuff that doesn't involved national defense, like breast cancer research or canal and levee maintenance.
>The published cost of Iran War is like $30 Billion when it is obviously over $100 Billion by experts and that doesn't including replacing all the missiles
Those missiles will be replaced in future defense budgets.
No, not even close. The issue is simply exhaust velocity and reaction mass, that leads us into the tyranny of the rocket equation - in that you have to carry that reaction mass with you and accelerate that mass too. Even if you had magic infinite energy - e.g. it's supplied externally by a laser or similar.
Using the theorized maximum of 31km/s exhaust velocity of project orion (much higher than any current high impulse propulsion technologies) you'd need to have thrown out something similar to 10^42 times the probe's mass out the back at that 31km/s velocity.
That means to accelerate a 1kg probe to 1%c you'd need to start with a spacecraft holding a reaction mass equivalent to a few trillion suns worth of mass.
Hardly seems worth it.
It's all about exhaust velocity - increase that and it scales down quickly. Using the theoretical max of 500km/s of VASIMIR for example means it's only 400x the mass of the probe of reaction mass - but that's still theory and max thrust limits means it'll take the order of millions of years to reach that sort of speed.
And why not accelerate using swing-bys on moons and planets? Of course this gets harder the faster you're already moving, but IIUC Voyager 1 has roughly 0.01% c, and this was launched 50 years ago.
It might help a bit, as you mentioned that Voyager is currently going about ~17km/s, so nearly 0.005% c, so it's already nearly 1/200th of the way there to our target of 1% c.
But then you're at a velocity so far beyond the escape velocity of most bodies you'd need to be skirting stars, then black holes to get anything more, and that's where it dives straight into "sci-fi" rather than anything even close to theoretically possible. How far away even if a body like that? Will this "probe" even survive such an encounter?
So even with that sort of slingshot it's well within the "Estimate Rough Error" of my intial numbers. They're "order of magnitude back-of-the-envelope calculations" of spherical spaceships in an already unrealistically biased to make the numbers smaller vacuum (just reaction mass, no thought of any mass of the engine or spacecraft body itself, or containing the reaction mass itself, or anything like that).
I probably should have stated my assumptions - in that "Can we accelerate a probe" I assumed that:
- The "probe" is a significant size - if we define a "probe" as a "Single Ion" then we already do that at CERN and similar pretty regularly - 1kg was my assumption of "Useful Probe Mass"
- "We" - in that "humans" as we know them today, preferably in the realisic age of civilizations as we know them, or even better within the lifetime of a currently living human.
Also there's different levels of "theoretical". VASIMIR has only ever been shown in lab settings, so still "theoretical" as a propulsion technology. something like Project Orion is "theoretical" in that it's never been built, but likely just an engineering effort. IKAROS showed solar sails are "possible", but so many orders of magnitude away from what would be required it'll still be a significant engineering and development effort to even show the same idea at the required scale is possible. Things like lasers as remote energy sources haven't really got off the drawing board. And then at the extreme we have "theoretical" ideas like fusion rockets, which are more "Not show to be /impossible/" rather than anything we could even start at really building today.
And each step along that "further out into theory" path means more risks, and more changes that method is shown to be less useful than really desired.
Space sails are super low thrust though, even lower than my VASIMIR example - so will take even longer to reach the desired speed - though they have the advantage of not having to carry the complex and heavy engine I ignored that in the rough estimates anyway.
So by the time they're theoretically close to the desired speed they'll be on the other side of the galaxy at least, even if it took millions of years to get there at the much slower average speed.
You can't use a solar sail for this, but if you use lasers, you can get a few newtons / GW of incident laser power. Sci-fi stuff but if you can make a very very light reflector that can somehow be cooled (microscopic IR dipoles come to mind), and a very very focused and powerful laser, you can go a long way. Not sure what the purpose of moving a thin metalized foil at a fraction of lightspeed would be, though :)
Yeah, many of the theoretical solar sail ideas fall down on what I consider a useful "probe" is, and what it can mass. As mentioned in my other comment, if you define the "probe" to be "a single particle" we /already/ do this all the time in particle accelerators. But it's clearly not a useful "probe" I believe the original thought experiment implied. A few grams of super thin solar sail material is still very much in the "Not A Probe" definition in my mind.
Plus even the best laser dispersion quickly gets significant at the distances required to give the sail the time to accelerate at such a low thrust.
One idea that stuck out to me was an array of giant thin solar powered spinning metal Crookes radiometers magnets in a line to make a railgun-like launcher. Materially cheap to do.
> Can we swap the US Military and NASA budgets for just one year please?
It would be nice.
There is a pretty well known interview of Admiral Grace Hopper by David Letterman, where she talks about her famous "nanosecond" and explaining (to Generals) why it takes so long to get a message to a satellite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE2uls6iIEU (As an aside, Grace was a name she lived up to in a way few others could, if you have never seen that interview it is well worth a watch!)
The valuable and well understood lesson is that latency is tyrannical, and unavoidable. The only real customer for "data centers in space" is spacex for war fighting. You don't want that data, and it's analysis going back around the world. You don't want to put compute close to the front lines, and you certainly cant deploy it for the kinds of "special operations" that the US has been doing for the last two decades.
Is there a civilian use? Maybe. Ships, oil platforms, and remote locations could all see a use for this, but it isnt going to be that impactful.
Realistically, getting military spend back to more "dual use" applications would be great. We have a LONG history of this in the USA. Tons of Army core of engineers projects. The interstate highway system was born out of a need for better logistics. NASA was about missiles, space was incidental. The US computing industry's foundations fell out of the navy code breaking efforts of WWII. The internet (ARPANET) was a DARPA project to start with. Spread Spectrum and its roots in Torpedos (navy again). GPS, the auto injector (epi pens).
Most of these are far in the past, recently the biggest thing we have gotten out military investments is TOR (and one could argue its in decline).
I think we don't see as much coming out of the modern military because it is grossly mismanaged. It's become reliant on private industry to "innovate" and that has a relentless focus on the bottom line.
Yes it would be nice if we did that spending swap, but it will never happen realistically. I think a change of leadership, of intent could result in far less waste and much more benefit for the American public. We have proof we can, we just need to figure out how and make it happen.
They published an official press release on this on the 22nd.
https://rocketlabcorp.com/updates/victus-haze/
Also,the mission to rescue the Swift telescope made news this week.
Soon I'll be seeing a sign for a "Joe's Satellite Repair Service" shop right next to the local autobody shop.
https://www.mos.org/article/space-news-deep-dive-saving-swif...
Joe and Buzz Aerospace Supply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB-ZCmvFIXo "accents"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keKDA7523_c "Nerdneck"
Good spot by whoever noticed it!
Can we swap the US Military and NASA budgets for just one year please?
Just one year
It would be AMAZING
Or even what we fund Israel's 2/3 of all their weapons are bought by US
We'd have 10% speed of light probes going outside of solar system already
Well at least Nancy Grace Roman L2 Telescope is launching, hope it goes perfectly
The military budget is a jobs program that also keeps a (near bare minimum) level of industrial capacity afloat.
Its why no politician left or right is really interested in cutting it. If you browse open contracts, you'll see they that they overwhelmingly buy rather banal things and spend comparatively little on the "killing people" parts.
What do you think NASA is? NASA is so expensive because it's a jobs program. There's no other reason for Boeing to have factories in so many states for building satellites.
You're not wrong, and no one is turning down NASA contracts, but the scale isn't comparable.
NASA buys mostly highly specialized parts that can be pretty narrow in scope and utility.
OTOH the DoD will buy 150,000 aluminum water canteens, which is probably the only thing keeping the one decent job in Wagatah, Maine from closing. Which happens to be of only a handful of shops in the country with the tooling for this. Wagatah, of course, is not known for it's aerospace engineering. But thankfully water is pretty important for soldiers, and the new design is x% more efficient, so Wagatah gets another 5 years of work, the DoD gets to keep a domestic source of water canteens, and if NASA needs 5 space grade aluminum storage boxes, a company in Wagatah can make them.
OK so maybe they're both jobs programs, but .mil is bigger and employs more people (almost certainly at a lower per capita cost).
The military budget is how the US enforces Bretton Woods. The jobs part is just a nice side-effect of any govt. spending.
Bretton Woods was formally terminated in 1973.
Great. Can we change it to just be the non killing part for a few years until the bad project ideas fully die off?
No it would obviously lose its purpose then.
You could have a jobs program that builds infrastructure instead.
In 2024, the average American spent about $17,000 on taxes. Nearly $4000 of that went to the DoD, about $3500 went to interest on federal debt.
I think it’s fun to think about it in this way. I personally spend hundreds of dollars a month on war.
[delayed]
Those numbers look way off. Are you making the common mistake of ignoring mandatory spending? In 2024 defense spending and net interest were each about 13% of federal spending.
Funny how people complain about federal debt, when the people complaining benefitted the most from the system. It is your children who will be paying the interest, while the older folk enjoyed a heated economy with high government spending. Economics is just as fundemental as physics. There are conservation laws that cannot be violated. However you can make other people hold the bag.
> There are conservation laws that cannot be violated.
Modern Monetary Theory on line 2 for you!
There is no possible sense in which "economics is just as fundamental as physics": the latter concerns the behavior of the physical world with or without humans in it; the former describes the dynamics of a human created system featuring humans interacting with each other and the physical world.
You have a source to share for that framing of the tax spend?
Although not quite exact, here's spending data for 2024 (https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/static-data/published-report...) - about 14% of tax dollars went to defence, 0.14*17000=2380.
Defense spending in the USA is double what is publicly published
There are all kinds of dark budgets and stuff spun off into "civilian" programs that actually aren't
The published cost of Iran War is like $30 Billion when it is obviously over $100 Billion by experts and that doesn't including replacing all the missiles
TWENTY-ONE TRILLION DOLLARS since 9/11 spent on defense 2001-2021
* https://ips-dc.org/report-state-of-insecurity-cost-militariz...
imagine how much food clothing shelter for the US and WORLD that would buy
we'd have humans on Mars already with that budget not even knowing now how to stop space-blindness and bone-loss
> imagine how much food clothing shelter for the US and WORLD that would buy
President LBJ proposed his Great Society agenda, which he defined as “a society where no child will go unfed, and no youngster will go unschooled.” At the same time, the country also increased its defense spending due to the heightened tension in the Cold War and the Vietnam War. The country can really do both.
It's like when people comment "This is why the US doesn't have healthcare" around military or war boasting.
No, the US absolutely can afford to have a gigantic military and massive welfare. That's what being the richest country on earth means
But for some reason we spent the past 50 years insisting that we are better off just letting a few individuals direct that wealth instead of making some choices collectively and democratically.
People might come to their senses when the second gilded age once again leaves a third of us unemployed and parents dying in ditches.
>Defense spending in the USA is double what is publicly published
Show your work.
>There are all kinds of dark budgets and stuff spun off into "civilian" programs that actually aren't
How much, though, as a percentage of the federal budget? Also, DoD does a lot of stuff that doesn't involved national defense, like breast cancer research or canal and levee maintenance.
>The published cost of Iran War is like $30 Billion when it is obviously over $100 Billion by experts and that doesn't including replacing all the missiles
Those missiles will be replaced in future defense budgets.
Or hear me out, we improve life here on Earth...
Can we really accelerate any probe to faster than 1% c? Or 2% c?
No, not even close. The issue is simply exhaust velocity and reaction mass, that leads us into the tyranny of the rocket equation - in that you have to carry that reaction mass with you and accelerate that mass too. Even if you had magic infinite energy - e.g. it's supplied externally by a laser or similar.
Using the theorized maximum of 31km/s exhaust velocity of project orion (much higher than any current high impulse propulsion technologies) you'd need to have thrown out something similar to 10^42 times the probe's mass out the back at that 31km/s velocity.
That means to accelerate a 1kg probe to 1%c you'd need to start with a spacecraft holding a reaction mass equivalent to a few trillion suns worth of mass.
Hardly seems worth it.
It's all about exhaust velocity - increase that and it scales down quickly. Using the theoretical max of 500km/s of VASIMIR for example means it's only 400x the mass of the probe of reaction mass - but that's still theory and max thrust limits means it'll take the order of millions of years to reach that sort of speed.
And why not accelerate using swing-bys on moons and planets? Of course this gets harder the faster you're already moving, but IIUC Voyager 1 has roughly 0.01% c, and this was launched 50 years ago.
It might help a bit, as you mentioned that Voyager is currently going about ~17km/s, so nearly 0.005% c, so it's already nearly 1/200th of the way there to our target of 1% c.
But then you're at a velocity so far beyond the escape velocity of most bodies you'd need to be skirting stars, then black holes to get anything more, and that's where it dives straight into "sci-fi" rather than anything even close to theoretically possible. How far away even if a body like that? Will this "probe" even survive such an encounter?
So even with that sort of slingshot it's well within the "Estimate Rough Error" of my intial numbers. They're "order of magnitude back-of-the-envelope calculations" of spherical spaceships in an already unrealistically biased to make the numbers smaller vacuum (just reaction mass, no thought of any mass of the engine or spacecraft body itself, or containing the reaction mass itself, or anything like that).
I probably should have stated my assumptions - in that "Can we accelerate a probe" I assumed that:
- The "probe" is a significant size - if we define a "probe" as a "Single Ion" then we already do that at CERN and similar pretty regularly - 1kg was my assumption of "Useful Probe Mass"
- "We" - in that "humans" as we know them today, preferably in the realisic age of civilizations as we know them, or even better within the lifetime of a currently living human.
Also there's different levels of "theoretical". VASIMIR has only ever been shown in lab settings, so still "theoretical" as a propulsion technology. something like Project Orion is "theoretical" in that it's never been built, but likely just an engineering effort. IKAROS showed solar sails are "possible", but so many orders of magnitude away from what would be required it'll still be a significant engineering and development effort to even show the same idea at the required scale is possible. Things like lasers as remote energy sources haven't really got off the drawing board. And then at the extreme we have "theoretical" ideas like fusion rockets, which are more "Not show to be /impossible/" rather than anything we could even start at really building today.
And each step along that "further out into theory" path means more risks, and more changes that method is shown to be less useful than really desired.
> No, not even close.
10% of C is theoretically possible with a space sail, and lasers.
Will it work? Well we don't know cause we haven't tried.
Space sails are super low thrust though, even lower than my VASIMIR example - so will take even longer to reach the desired speed - though they have the advantage of not having to carry the complex and heavy engine I ignored that in the rough estimates anyway.
So by the time they're theoretically close to the desired speed they'll be on the other side of the galaxy at least, even if it took millions of years to get there at the much slower average speed.
You can't use a solar sail for this, but if you use lasers, you can get a few newtons / GW of incident laser power. Sci-fi stuff but if you can make a very very light reflector that can somehow be cooled (microscopic IR dipoles come to mind), and a very very focused and powerful laser, you can go a long way. Not sure what the purpose of moving a thin metalized foil at a fraction of lightspeed would be, though :)
Yeah, many of the theoretical solar sail ideas fall down on what I consider a useful "probe" is, and what it can mass. As mentioned in my other comment, if you define the "probe" to be "a single particle" we /already/ do this all the time in particle accelerators. But it's clearly not a useful "probe" I believe the original thought experiment implied. A few grams of super thin solar sail material is still very much in the "Not A Probe" definition in my mind.
Plus even the best laser dispersion quickly gets significant at the distances required to give the sail the time to accelerate at such a low thrust.
One idea that stuck out to me was an array of giant thin solar powered spinning metal Crookes radiometers magnets in a line to make a railgun-like launcher. Materially cheap to do.
Related, but not exactly what I was thinking of: https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/08/05/a-rotating-probe-... The original source I'm thinking of may be lost to time :( I'll keep hunting.
edit:found!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDM1COWJ2Hc
We have the physics but not the engineering. See the Breakthrough Starshot project for instance
I think the idea is tic-tac sized probes with nano circuitry (that doesn't exist yet)
accelerated by lasers so they don't have to carry the power source
Obviously stopping is the problem, they can never stop but at some point no need
Yes, with lasers or nuclear energy
Per new Space Force regulations, we are using F for an adjusted speed of light. We are currently able to achieve 1.48F.
> Can we swap the US Military and NASA budgets for just one year please?
It would be nice.
There is a pretty well known interview of Admiral Grace Hopper by David Letterman, where she talks about her famous "nanosecond" and explaining (to Generals) why it takes so long to get a message to a satellite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE2uls6iIEU (As an aside, Grace was a name she lived up to in a way few others could, if you have never seen that interview it is well worth a watch!)
The valuable and well understood lesson is that latency is tyrannical, and unavoidable. The only real customer for "data centers in space" is spacex for war fighting. You don't want that data, and it's analysis going back around the world. You don't want to put compute close to the front lines, and you certainly cant deploy it for the kinds of "special operations" that the US has been doing for the last two decades.
Is there a civilian use? Maybe. Ships, oil platforms, and remote locations could all see a use for this, but it isnt going to be that impactful.
Realistically, getting military spend back to more "dual use" applications would be great. We have a LONG history of this in the USA. Tons of Army core of engineers projects. The interstate highway system was born out of a need for better logistics. NASA was about missiles, space was incidental. The US computing industry's foundations fell out of the navy code breaking efforts of WWII. The internet (ARPANET) was a DARPA project to start with. Spread Spectrum and its roots in Torpedos (navy again). GPS, the auto injector (epi pens).
Most of these are far in the past, recently the biggest thing we have gotten out military investments is TOR (and one could argue its in decline).
I think we don't see as much coming out of the modern military because it is grossly mismanaged. It's become reliant on private industry to "innovate" and that has a relentless focus on the bottom line.
Yes it would be nice if we did that spending swap, but it will never happen realistically. I think a change of leadership, of intent could result in far less waste and much more benefit for the American public. We have proof we can, we just need to figure out how and make it happen.
Durum-burum latency. In fact, internets slowed down compared to 2010s, and CDNs helped only to delay that.
LEO orbit latency is nothing compared to what you lose to stuffing your link with useless web crap.
> Or even what we fund Israel's 2/3 of all their weapons are bought by US
And all of the money the US gives to Israel is earmarked for American products.
Just more American tax dollars going to American defense contractors.
The US gives Israel $3.8B a year (and 2/3 of their weapons are _sold_ by the US not bought). The budget of Nasa is $25B.
But by antisemite math and logic says we’ll get 10% light speed.
Being against military aid to Israel isn't necessarily antisemitic.
anti-israel-warmongering != antisemite but nice try
US has given Israel over $20 Billion directly since 2023 alone
Since 2023 NINETY THOUSAND TONS OF WEAPONS
Enough already
Israel has universal health care, let them buy build their own weaspons
US must only sell Iron-Dome ONLY, defense only, they are warmongers