what we should have done already

Alright, lets start this off with a number. 3.539.000.000.000.
That is the amount of money the united states spent last year (2012). That year we spent a total of 1.030 to 1.415 trillion of it on defense. That said, the united states gave 16.014 billion dollars on NASA. We spent 88 times more money on rockets and guns than we did on advancing human kind and getting to learn more about the Universe. I hate (i don't hate to say it) say it but what the hell. I mean I am someone that thinks that world peace will never happen, and i actually think that war is a good thing, in the sense that most of all good and important advances in technology come from war. But we don't need to almost a trillion and a half dollars on that stuff. So what i am going to theorize in the following is what i think we could do with that money with out leaving us defenseless and still letting us move forward. Not only that but also Actually let us jump ahead of all other countries and become stronger and more advanced than any other country on earth.
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First lets take a look at our currant space station shall we?
It orbits earth at 230 miles above earth.
Its approximate speed is 4.791 miles a second.
We put it into orbit on November 20. 1998.
 And finally it cost a total of 150 billion us dollars to make.

This is all easy stuff to know, i mean hell you can just look it up. What a lot of people don't know is that it can only hold at most 6 people. I don't know about you but when i think of a Space Station its a place where more than 50 people can live. Its Not a place where there are only a few places where a person can stand fully upright. Now this thing we call a space station cost a total of 150 billion dollars, and we paid for more than half of the full thing. If we took just 25% of what we spent on all of defense we have almost two and a half more money than we spent on the current space station. With this money and the amount in advancement in technology we could make something so much greater for something near the same price.

So lets imagine that we build a larger space station that is large enough to host up to 50 adults. This ship is also able to reduce the amount of radiation absorbed by the astronauts to only increase their chance of getting cancer down to 0.5% from 3% which it is right now.
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In this situation the next step humans or this nation could do would be to make some other ships that would be capable of going to the Asteroid belt. or just past Mars. If thought out it would be capable to have rotating 'crews' of men, some would stay at the space station while others are out at the Asteroid Belt Mining.
The importance in mining this belt is that one of the reasons we don't have more things in space is that it is super expensive to send things into space in the first place. So if we can get the materials we need to build things already in space than we don't have to pay that expense. this would let us build Bigger and better things making in natural to more forward.
Not only that but the Asteroid Belt is filled with elements that are semi-rare. If a country was able to do this than they would suddenly become much more powerful than all other countries.
If started now you could have this sort of thing just finished by the year 2025, only 5 years after when the current space station is going to be ordered down.

Next post i am going to move on from here in the suggested human advancement, or rather where i think we should go.