RE: James Webb space telescope axed
July 12, 2011 at 6:53 pm
(This post was last modified: July 12, 2011 at 7:06 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(July 12, 2011 at 6:24 pm)Moros Synackaon Wrote: As Min notes, the USS Ronald Reagan cost a shit ton, but we saw no threats to cancel such.
$5 billion is the acquisition cost of the bare carrier. The airwing without which she would just be another waterfront eyesore costs $7 billion to buy. It's fleet of mendatory escort vessels to keep her from being blown up by Muslim suicide boats, to say nothing of Chinese anti-carrier ballistic missiles, cost another 5-6 billion to procure. Keeping just the carrier herself running cost about $0.5 billion a year, not counting the cost of the airwing and escort vessels. Over the life of a carrier, the total cost of all aspect of keeping her running is >$30 billion
In defence of the outgoing secretary of defence, he did broach the subject of reducing the US active carrier fleet from 10 ships to 9, noting the current budgeting environment, the need for collective belt tightening, and the fact that the USN would still outnumber the rest of thr world combined by 2 carriers. But the congress expressed unspeakable outage at the prospect of saving $30 billion over the life of that carrier. So he had to beat a hasty retreat.
Appearently having 3 more carriers than the rest of the world instead of 2 more carriers than the rest of the world is worth 5 times as much as knowing more about our universe, especially if such knowledge might sow the seed of "no need for god" in the minds of god fearing Americans.
Incidentally, the pathological need to give American such overwhelming numerical superiority seem to belie all the patriotic bullshit reflexively sprouted about how American fighting men is the best in the world. Either we are good and loved and can get by on numerical parity with our few enemies, or we suck so much and is so inept at diplomacy that we need to outnumber the rest of the world +2. Too bad our economy fall short of outnumbering the rest of the world by a factor of four. In 2009 out economy has done something it hasn't ever done before, that is it was out produced, out manufactured, by the Chinese. But we rest assured knowning the Chinese are collecting interest on each of the 9 carriers we will continue to outnumber them by.
