[gauravk92]

Historians will look back at this time as a fundamental shift away from America as the leader of scientific exploration. It's a shame Europe is leading the search at the microscopic (LHC) and macroscopic scales (this), and we're considering reducing funding for NASA when their budget is already puny. Not to make this political, it just sucks.

[planetguy]

It's not a zero-sum game, and I think you need to get some perspective. It's great that the ESA is sending a probe to Jupiter's moons, and I'm totally excited about it. On the other hand, NASA currently has:

1. One spacecraft at Saturn (Cassini)

2. One spacecraft en route to Jupiter (Juno)

3. One spacecraft at Mercury (MESSENGER)

4. One spacecraft at Vesta (Dawn)

5. One spacecraft on its way to freaking Pluto (New Horizons)

6. Three missions [I think] still in operation at Mars (Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Opportunity) with a fourth on its way.

7. A few other comet/asteroid missions I've lost track of, plus

8. A bunch of other stuff, with the big highlights being Hubble and Kepler.

NASA's "already puny" budget is three times that of the ESA and easily exceeds the rest of the world put together, so one really can't complain too much.

That's not to pooh-pooh the ESA, by any means, they're doing some good stuff. But they have a long, long way to go before they catch up with NASA.

This will be the first non-American mission to the outer solar system, incidentally. NASA so far have sent eight. (Two Pioneers, two Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini, New Horizons, Juno.) All but Galileo are still in operation.

[gauravk92]

Most definitely true, but do you believe we are currently at the forefront of scientific exploration as we have been for the past few decades? I believe a shift has occurred, we are still the 800 pound gorilla but in 50 years, that may be a different picture. That's what I care about, the fact that our lead is waning and we're not doing much about.

If we were truly still leading the way, the supercollider we had plans for that was 3 times as powerful as the LHC would've been funded, in the 70-80's. I can't argue that point effectively though because I have read that project was plagued with issues and most likely wouldn't have been an effective use of funds, but we could've focused on fixing those issues or finding a scaled back project instead of letting it die, and leaving it to the EU.

[angersock]

You aren't giving enough credit to engineering. Science is all well and good, as is basic research, but honestly engineering is what carries the day.

People who fetishsize -~=!SCIENCE!=~- and ignore the sheer quality of engineering that the US produces are frankly fools.

I don't mind losing big projects like the supercolliders or even the goofy NASA stuff if it means that we can let the funds end up in the hands of lean, strong, and awesome engineering teams.

Besides, your supercollider builds no homes, makes few jobs, and really is just a chance for a lot of particle physicists to stroke off on things that aren't really useful to most of mankind. Sorry, but your "science" is super fringe.

[sandfox]

Can't tell if trolling... Or genuinely ignorant. The super-colliders are incredible feats of physical and software engineering, and you guys are building them too! The positive spin-offs are far greater than the stuff that makes it in the headlines of the news.

[mturmon]

"goofy NASA stuff"? This isn't coming across as well-informed.

There's a lot of engineering that goes in to all these spacecraft. The goals are usually scientific (except for tech. demonstrations), but the means are highly coupled to engineering advances -- new sensors, materials, algorithms.

[JumpCrisscross]

Speaking as a Swissman living in America who studied aerospace engineering, yes, America is at the forefront of scientific exploration but no, not by the margin it had following a world war when every other great power bombed itself to the third world with the one exception, the USSR, starting to shred apart a quarter of a century later.

You are over-generalising the particle physics example - think about bioengineering, materials sciences, and aerospace engineering more broadly. A not-insignificant part of this is the extraordinary US military budget, a budget that will continue significantly eclipsing Europe for the foreseeable future. Now speaking as a former trader, America's scientific eminence will not be threatened by Europe - for that risk, look across the other ocean.

[planetguy]

Well, I'm not a European or an American so my own national penis remains unaffected, however...

Your lead is waning not because America is doing less science but because everyone else is doing more. American scientific dominance lasted from the 1930s 'til circa now, but that was only because Europe (previous title holder from the 15th century onward, at the very least) had mostly blown itself up and the rest of the world was far too poor. It's not a good or a natural state of affairs if a tiny minority of the world's population are doing all the scientific heavy lifting, so it's a great thing that other countries are starting to pick up some of the white man's burden.

As for the superconducting supercollider: meh, I'd rather see a thousand small scientific projects than one ridiculously expensive one. Who cares what country it's built in?

[jessriedel]

> As for the superconducting supercollider: meh, I'd rather see a thousand small scientific projects than one ridiculously expensive one.

It's perfectly fine to not think the SCC is worth the money, but it doesn't make much sense to me to have an a-priori preference about the size distribution of your scientific projects. The optimal size distribution should be very sensitive to open scientific questions and the expected returns on investment.

The reason the LHC exists is because the question it intends to answer is profound, not because $6 billion is a roughly the right amount that should be spent on the largest particle physics project. The reason the ISS was a waste is because the science was fantastically uninteresting for the money, not because $100 billion is too much to have concentrated in one place.

[mturmon]

This is insightful and well-informed.

There are also a lot of Earth-orbiting instruments that help us understand weather and climate (too many to list; way beyond taking Landsat-style pictures), the recent lunar missions (LRO, GRAIL), several solar missions (Stereo, SDO), and cosmology/astrophysics (Planck, Spitzer, Chandra).