Pluto Like You've Never Seen it Before

[starroute]

9. Hardly a sliver of a sliver

I'm finding it hard to come up with exact figures, but the Forest Service seems to spend up to $2 billion a year on firefighting -- and in bad years, they take money away from other forest restoration and preservation projects to cover it.

NASA's budget runs about $18 billion a year, but my understanding is that much of that is military, while space exploration has been cut to the bone.

When two worthy efforts are both seriously underfunded, it makes no sense to wish that one would be handled more generously at the expense of the other.