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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.

Great. Can we change it to just be the non killing part for a few years until the bad project ideas fully die off?

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.

You have a source to share for that framing of the tax spend?

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

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 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 have used a reaction mass equivalent to a few trillion suns worth of mass.

Hardly seems worth it.

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.

Per new Space Force regulations, we are using F for an adjusted speed of light. We are currently able to achieve 1.48F.

We have the physics but not the engineering. See the Breakthrough Starshot project for instance

Yes, with lasers or nuclear energy