These are taken from the BBC

Moon plan "comes up short"

Public reaction

A lot of "This money should be spent on better things", "This is immoral" , "we need to look after the environment", and the proverbial starving children in Africa make a cameo appearence. (I seem to be bored with that totem as well I may use crumbling schools and hospitals for a change )

Someone bleeted about why go to the Moon first with a so I have added my threepeny worth (do not know if it will be published there), which was

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Moderations in purple

Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

Hm. Well, I'm not a fan of manned space exploration as a rule, since the only real reason for us to go is so that can say we've gone, in which case, let the private sector deal with it. The number of exiting and interesting missions, such as the JIMO and the Europa diver, that have been put into jeopardy because of the cost overruns from the ISS and the planned return to the moon makes me furious.

What really gets me about this though, is that it ultimately has nothing to do with science, exploration or manifest destiny; it's all just about politics. It feels like yet another of many attempts to get one over on China; since the Chinese sent a man into space, now the US has to prove they're best. It's strange, looking at the simulations; you'd think that NASA would have spent the preceding thirty years developing new technology, but the rocket and the lander are pretty much identical to the last ones. Way to go, human race.

Just curious, but where do you get this garbage? You aren't a United States citizen (unless your location listed as the UK is not true, but I believe you've confirmed it as correct before) so you probably have very little idea as to what the US public wants.

There is no "clamour" to cut NASA funding at all. Is there a "clamour" about how poorly the federal government handling the Katrina disaster? Yes. Is there "clamour" about how our money is being spent on Iraq while our own people suffer in the devestated Gulf Coast? Oh yes. You may be "clamouring" for NASA funding to be cut, but last I looked, you aren't a citizen of the United States. YOUR OPINION is not relavent to how MY country and government spends MY (and my fellow taxpayers) money. Please stop pretending that it is and definitely stop stating your opinion as fact and falsely presenting your opinion as the prevailing one of the public opinion of the United States.

*edited to fix spelling (falsey isn't a word).

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DOOM Master

Yes, but we're in Europe so we believe we have the right to tell people what to do.

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

well, look. I'm an American taxpayer--or I would be, if I made any money*--and I really want manned spaceflight. I disagree that it's just to say we've been; I think humans can accomplish more in space, and I believe those accomplishments are important.

further, I know an awful lot of other American taxpayers, most of which would rather have a space program than (fill in name of government program here). yes, we'd rather have relief efforts to disaster-stricken areas, New Orleans just being a prominent recent example and far from the only one ever. however, just to throw out an example, I'd rather have a manned space program than a war--and the manned space program only takes a fraction of the war's budget. it also provides a lot of jobs, which in turn provides more money for the economy--which provides more taxes to pay for relief efforts and wars.

*well, technically, I do pay taxes--I pay sales tax to Thurston County. however, I doubt any of that goes to NASA.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I'd rather see American money put American astronauts on the moon than see American money feed African kids.

But that's just me. If their countries can't feed them, its not my problem. I don't pay my taxes to promote the interests of any other nation but my own. So if that makes me a cold hearted SOB, I can live with that, after all, I make enough money to feed myself and my family.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

I agree.

Some days I wish I was a tyrant.

"Lord Publius--we have some more spaceflight protestors!"

Put them to death like all the rest--no--wait! We need some forced labor in Alaska for my Bering Strait Bridge...the moon hoax believers have all died from exposure...

Sounds good, just don't shoot the EELV guys, I want my one man suborbital hotrod.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

Special dispensation granted. And how are the collective farms going comrade?

I hear this claim all the time. The money to pay for government spending programs comes from taxpayers; an increase in spending by the government reduces private consumption and/or investment, which are also job creating. Is there any reason to expect that government spending will create more jobs than the private spending/investment it displaces?

You'll have to find some way to keep people from fleeing your country to live the good life in North Korea.

But some of the contributors on this page were from the US and were calling for the money to be spent on the return to the moon on other things. I do not know where this comes from, but there is a rule of thumb over here, that for every opinion publicly expressed in print or on some other form of the media, there are about 50,000 other people with the same views, who have chosen to remain silent.

(I did ask the person that I got this rule off of where he got it, but he could not remember )

I actually defended why we have to go to the moon first before Mars, but from what I read on that page from the US contributors, it did not look good.

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Moderations in purple

Fame, glory adventure, a cyber warrior craves not these things.

not EVERY person in the US wants to go to the moon or mars- but neither do all the people not want to do it.
i'd say most people could care less, and most would actually think it was pretty cool and enjoy the use of any spinoff technologies that might come from it.
i have a hard time trusting any polls. the results depend very much on how the questions are asked.
if the question was worded like this:
"would you rather spend $100 billion to put 4 people on the moon, or spend the same amount to fix New Orleans?"
of course you know how the answer is going to be. fix New Oreleans.
but what is not pointed out is that the money to go to the moon iincludes developing a whole new way of getting people into space, and actually going there without any increase in spending. and doing it over a decade or more.
if someone could find a truly neutral way to do polls, and get the entire populace of a country to take part, then i might start to believe them.

Like heck it is.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

well, the people who have government jobs spend their paychecks, right? besides, it's not like there's a lot of private-sector jobs for, say, road building--or shuttle-building. there may be private-sector jobs for spacecraft at some point, but until there are, those are people who become employed who weren't previously.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

This is part of the problem. If I was to say that $300 billion (taxpayer money) is going to help the people affected by the hurricane, a lot of people would say
"Oh, that's wonderful they're helping those poor people"
Oh, and by the way, NASA just launched a $30 million space probe to study dust in space.
"WHAT?!? How can they waste our money for some stupid dust"

Manned missions to the moon will lead to a permanant base on the moon, which is certainly not useless.

Forgive me, but what use would it be? As far as I can tell there are no experiments you could perform on a moonbase that you couldn't do better on a space station, since all of them seem to involve microgravity, and the Moon has far more gravity than orbit.

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Wikipedia: A MMORPG for self-denialists.

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

Do people who have private sector jobs not also spend their paychecks? Why does government spending somehow create more jobs than the same amount of private spending?

Well, if they won't consider any other type of job, then yes, they would. What happens to the people who had jobs making the products previously purchased by the taxpayers, who now must reduce their spending in order to fund the proposed space exploration program? If we assume the same total labor market inflexibility you assume above, then these are people who become unemployed who weren't previously. Of course, in reality, workers adapt to changing labor markets, and the result of a space exploration program is mostly movement of jobs between sectors. If you think the benefits from government spending on space exploration are greater than the benefits of the same amount of private spending on whatever the public wants to spend its money on, then feel free to make the case for that position. But the job creation argument is fallacious.

So, once more, is there any reason to assume the government spending would create more jobs than the private spending it displaces? How many jobs will be created by the proposed spending plan of $104 billion? And how many jobs will be destroyed by an additional tax burden of $104 billion? Let's count all the effects of the proposed policy, not just those which are convenient.

I think that going to the moon again, just so that we can say we've been again, is reason enough.

Why? Becasue I really want us to go. It excites me and I missed the previous moon landings. Utterly selfish reasons to be sure, but that's all I can base my opinion on as it's not MY tax dollars involved. (Actually, that probably wouldn't change my opinion anyway.)

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The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".