ARRGH! When will there be a message board that automatically saves your replies as you write them? (Don’t sit there and blame the user by telling me I should be drafting them in Word - which, of course, is what I am now doing.)
OK, let’s see if I can recreate what I pulled together over the last hour or so. I’ve found at least some sites to support my thesis, but I must also admit that a fair amount of what I’m reporting comes courtesy of my father, a mathematician and computer scientist who worked in the space program in the 60s and has served with NASA scientists on various NSF panels since then.
Let’s start with gist of my reply: Billdo, I respect your opinions on many issues but in this case you’re trying to justify bad science with worse economics.
We’ll start with a few facts. According to an editorial in Scientific American, each shuttle launch costs approximately $500 million, and as we all know after today’s events there have been about 110. And that may be lowballing - other sources I found claimed as high as $650 million. But let’s use the lower number, in which case the cumulative launch cost is somewhere around $55 billion.
Even the most expensive of American rockets, with equivalent payload capacities, have a launch cost less than half that of the shuttle (scroll down). And other rockets, such as the Russian and European competition, have much lower cost profiles.
That we could call the price of trying to sustain human life while propelling objects from earth into (at minimum) orbit. That’s huge, but would be justified if the program regularly produced compelling science.
It hasn’t. There is, in the opinion of my father and quite a number of (non-NASA) observers, astonishingly little that manned space exploration has produced that could not have been accomplished at a fraction of the price on unmanned missions. Worst-case scenario: we might have lost the Hubble. Guess what: at the cost of five flights - five! - we could’ve built and launched ourselves a new one.
And the space station, with space colonization? Let’s start with the former. Its budget has, so far, ballooned from 18 to 30 billion, and will probably go much higher, despite criticisms that it is little more than a make-work project designed to keep the uneconomic shuttle in business.
More fundamentally, it’s based on the second idea: colonization, which in turn relies on a neomalthusianism dear to economically illiterate environmentalists, but pretty thoroughly disproved over the last decades by economists.
We are simply not “running out” of any major commodity, as demonstrated in the famous Erlich-Simon Bet. Even fresh water, which is our greatest challenge in some parts of the world, can be rationed or desalinated quite effectively; and in virtually every other commodity, real prices have dropped dramatically. That’s microeconomics at work: although temporary shortages do happen, they’re pretty well guaranteed to remain just temporary, as hitherto-uneconomic supplies suddenly become sustainable (e.g. Alberta tar sands). Worst thing governments can do is try to interfere in the process, which is a major part of the reason the only sub-Saharan African country still in a serious famine (as of recent New York Times reporting) is Zimbabwe.
Population? Estimates of population growth keep diminishing, even at the UN, which most enthusiastically supported neomalthusianism in the mid-1970s. And there’s little hard evidence that even the worst case scenarios would see a significant exhaustion of commodities, for the reasons stated above.
So, let’s see: we have a program that doesn’t achieve much, other than feed Buck Rogers fantasies about colonies in space. It costs a sonuvabitch and squeezes out other, much more eminently justifiable, astronomy programs. Its major appeal was public relations…and I don’t think we need debate that right now. (I keep thinking of Lady Bracknell: To lose one shuttle may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.)
Kill it. Let a thousand Galileos and Voyagers bloom.
