Why are MP's paid so much?

Never knew that (did know it's one of the most profitable).

I imagine that's down to it being almost exclusively private sector driven. In order to get about £600mn from the government that had to be met with planned private finance of about £10bn.

If current projections are correct then by 2030 we could have 10% global market share and 200,000 jobs supported.A great (and unknown) success.

As far as I understood it, the UK has the only profitable space industry.

The first British person in space went up in 1991.

Aside from which sending people up is not hard in comparison to sending probes, satellites and telescopes and keeping them working so again i ask how their programme is more advanced,

As far as I understood it, the UK has the only profitable space industry.

I'm guessing that was as part of the US space program? Not too sure I'd agree with the bit in bold. After-all there were satellites and machines in space before humans.

That is because it is commercial and not innovative/research-driven like NASA, RFSA, ESA etc.

The failure rate of probes, satellites and space telescopes is pretty high. Kepler was only designed to last 3 years. Time's a killer in space, getting things up there is relatively easy. We did it from Australia until the 70's and then the ESA since.

Russian. We were the third country to get a satellite up though in 1962 and sent a probe to Mars in 2003.

Point being that currently neither China or India are more advanced and the UK will actually increase its market share.



I'd say it's innovative looking at Skylon for example but yeah..

China has actually sent people to space.

Hmmm....the name Helen Sharman really should be imprinted on the minds of people in this country, but it isn't.

Project Juno wasn't part of the American space programme.

Yea it was part of the Soviet space programme.

Yea it was part of the Soviet space programme. As you can see China did send a man to space:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_space_travel_by_nationality

1. 4th not third. Using NASA technology and jointly working with NASA (of course India and China use recycled technology as well).

2. Nothing has come of Skylon as of yet. From what I've read it's looking to simply make improvements on current spaceships, rather than re-inventing them (so to speak).

Bottom line is that if there was a betting match on who will get a man on mars first (for example) I'm sure China and India will be much higher then UK.

Private companies will get man there long before the state.

What incentive do private companies have in a Mars mission? Something like asteroid mining; yes, I'd expect that to be led by private companies. But not a Mars mission.

Believe it or not there are hundreds of very decent and hard working MPs in the commons. They should be paid more, not less.

whilst I agree some of them are doing a good job (regardless of whether I like that job and how they do it), I really don't think you can argue they should be paid more, they are already paid £65k a year (thrice the average wage) and expenses on top of that which includes the cost of a second home (most people can barely afford one home), that is a very generous salary for what is at the end of the day a job they should be doing out a sense of public duty rather than personal financial gain.

http://www.parliament.uk/about/mps-and-lords/members/pay-mps/
From 1st April 2013 the average MP salary is £66,396 not including expenses. Why are these parasites on so much money, considering that far more intelligent and useful people, eg teachers, University lecturers and such are on so much less? I know many of us would happily be an MP for £25,000 or less, so why are MP's paid so much?

Its closer to twice the average wage for the UK.

Most people don't work four days a week several hundreds of miles from where they live/work the other other three days.

Could the same 'public duty' not be said of any public sector post?

If they were paid lower they'd be more likely to be open to bribes or corruption.

I'm not particularly outraged by their incomes, however I'm not impressed by the quality of them either.