Why do we spend money on NASA and space exploration?

[even_sven]

@Sam_Stone

I don’t want to live in a world where we all turn inward and gaze at our navels and our highest calling is to make each other as comfortable as possible while we wait to die.

Really? Without a space program, the world is just one big nihlistic pit with no meaning? Greek civilization…worthless because they had no space program. The American revolution…worthless, no space program. Renaissance? Ancient China? All pretty useless since they were earth bound.

Nobody is saying we can’t ever have a space program, just that it’s not the best choice for us right now at our current state of technology. If the ancient Mayans had a space program, would they have been better? Probably not. They needed to invent the wheel first. There will be a time when we can make meaningful advances in space at a reasonable cost, but those times are not now. Since the sun isn’t set to explode for quite a while, I don’t think we need to rush into it.

I want to live in a world where we celebrate the best and brightest, rather then knocking them down because they have too much or are too smart or in the interests of ‘fairness’ to the less able and less motivated.

What does this have to do with space? Are you saying the only good use of the best and the brightest is on the space program? There is literally no other useful enterprise very smart people can do? Medical research, engineering, green technology…not as good of a use of human resources as setting our best and brightest at throwing stuff into space.

I want to live in a world where we celebrate astronauts and deep sea divers and scientists and explorers instead of worshipping Oprah and the latest NBA all-star.

Okay. I want to live in a world where doctors, peace negotiators and economists are worshipped. I’m sure my cousin wants to live in a world where we celebrate manga artists. Bob the potato farmer probably wants more respect for cultivators and food technicians. Your dream is not the one true dream of humanity. It is not the actual real purpose of life. It’s just your thing. There are plenty of other things with value to plenty of other people. Your affinity for outer space does not actually mean it’s the most valuable thing we can do.

I want to live in a world where my child can look up at the moon or the stars and think of the people up there, risking it all to discover things we could only dream of in previous generations.

I want to live in a world where my child watches a commercial for the Olympic games in Addis Ababa and laughs at the improbability that there used to be people starving there (kind of like our kids now look at the games in Beijing and can’t comprehend in 1960 millions were dying of starvation in China…progress can happen.) I want my kid to look at the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the same way we look at the Spanish flu (they died of what?!)

I want to be part of a species that is continually pushing the boundaries of knowledge and exploration, constantly fighting to see what’s over the next hill, knowing that one day my ancestors will look back on Earth from distant worlds.

I want my species to survive and thrive, and ultimately that means I want them separated from the rock we live on so that a common disaster cannot wipe us all out and erase all the glorious achievements we have made in the last 10,000 years.

Ok, but you realize that no matter how much we spend, we are not going to be making much progress towards that in your lifetime, right? Even if we pushed our entire global GDP into space, we’d still only manage to get a tiny, tiny bit done. The technology isn’t there yet.

I find it incredibly sad that we as a society will spend tens of billions of dollars a year on movies and video games that offer us pretend adventure, while refusing to fund actual adventure.

So you want to, what? Force them to spend money on what you consider proper “adventure?”

I think the best way to improve education is to give young people a dream - a promise of adventure and the potential of taking humanity farther than it’s ever been - so long as they get good grades in math and science. I want astronauts to be their heroes - not Charles Barkley or Mark McGwire.

Chalres Barkley and Mark McGwire? What decade are you living in?

Anyway, there are plenty of dreams for humanity. I agree that cutting NASA would not end world famine, but if malaria eradication or universal education took the role as our common dream, we could get it done. Indeed, we are getting it done through the Millenium Development goals. Your dream is just one of many. It’s not the only worthwhile thing.

I’m not a fan of government spending, but NASA has returned more bang for the buck than any government agency I can think of. NASA has accomplished great feats on shoestring budgets. NASA has given us some of the great stories of triumph, courage, and dedication of our age. Apollo 13, the lunar landings, the courage of the shuttle astronauts… We should be singing songs and writing epic poems about those achievements. Instead, we shut them down, turned our backs on what we accomplished, and squandered it all away in favor of a little more comfort and a little bigger social program here or there.

A dude stood on a rock, briefly, at great cost.

I know you find space stories incredibly compelling, but not everyone does. Not everyone is caught up in the romance of it. And it’s just a lot of money to pay for a few inspiring stories that catch a limited percentage of people’s imagination. The people coming on here and saying they don’t find space interesting are not wrong. They are not misguided by Charles Barkley worship. They have different dreams and different priorities.

In a thousand years, no one will care about our retirement plans and our GINI index and our school bureaucracies. They will care about what we accomplished in science and space exploration.

Awesome. When I’m dead, people will respect me. And that is supposed to be what is important to me.

Said like only a financially comfortable upper-middle class man.

My greatest fear is that we will bankrupt ourselves trying to cushion our lives and to make ourselves as comfortable as possible, and one day in the far future people will tell stories about the age when mankind came close to conquering the stars - and turned their backs on it, never to return. And children will ask their parents, “Why would they do that? Why did they let it all fade away?” And the parents will reply, “I don’t know. I guess they traded their future for a more comfortable present.”

Because if we don’t invest in space now, we can never ever ever invest in space again.

I want to know why we let people die of easily preventable disease. Why we came so close to eradicating malaria and then gave up. Plenty of good questions.

[mrklutz]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

We have about as many troops in Germany, Korea, and Japan.

That’s true, but that doesn’t make it any less misleading to say we have “left” Iraq. We haven’t, any more than we have left Korea. The fact that we have large troop deployments in Germany, Korea and Japan doesn’t make the expenditure in Iraq unquestionable. Quite the reverse: we should be questioning why we have those troop levels in Germany, Korea and Japan.

[Dan_ch]

@Borzo

But when you put money towards applied research, in order to solve a current and pressing problem (eg AIDS), you can weigh the cost/benefit. Sure different people will weigh it differently, but the cost (in $ value) and the benfit (saved X lives) is somewhat measurable.

Absolutely. FTR, I think that most of our resources should go into healthcare and education. I have no doubt about that. What I am  disputing is the idea that money spent on fundamental research is simply wasted on some nerdish fantasy about planets and fancy rockets.  
Research seems to be one of the main targets when budget cuts are discussed. Yes, it seems no big deal to cut funding for a project which would bring practical results in 50 years, at best. But the effects are more subtle than that: you'd also loose people with expertise in the field and it will be much harder (and costly) to start again from scratch. Not to mention that for getting quality results one also need time; spending 1 million/year over 10 years will probably get you better results than spending 10 millions in 1 year. 

In fact, the availability of a pool of people with cutting edge expertise is one of the often overlooked advantages of a well funded research policy. They can, and often do, go to work in various companies.

@Borzo

But when it comes to unknown discoveries… how do you do this? If the probe to Mercury would have found life, or found some rare but valuable metal, or some blueprints left behind by aliens, we’d all be yelling “JACKPOT!” How do you decide how much to invest in something when you have no idea how much you might get out of it? How do you balance pure science research and applied research?

The honest answer is: I don’t know. Heck, If I’d know what’s the benefit of sending a mission to Mercury, there wouldn’t have been necessary to send it in the first place!
What I’m advocating here is not giving more money to fundamental research. I’m just saying that fundamental research is needed as much as education and healthcare, and money spent on it are not lost. As such, research shouldn’t be regarded as an expensive and dispensable gadget. And it shouldn’t be the first target when funding cuts are called for.

@Borzo

An interesting point I’d like to add: I spent many years doing pure science research. We got millions of dollars to study certain biological processes. There were some standard experiments we did repeatedly and frequently. At the start of my work, we spent something like $10,000 per run of the experiment. After 4 years, new technologies had been developed such that repeating that experiment, using the new equipment, only cost $100. If sending the probe to Mercury isn’t likely to result in significant breakthroughs, couldn’t we just wait 10 years and instead of spending $450m, we could get away with $4.5m? While I suspect space will always be expensive, not everything is like this. Of course, people will say that research in general will drive the cost of future research down - and I can understand this… but once again: How do you decide what to research now, versus what to put off by 10 years and save money?

Well, I suspect no one has an answer to this question. Nevertheless, I think you made several assumptions which are not entirely true.

First, as you’ve already noted, things need to be invented first. There is no point in waiting for a cheaper technology in 10 years if you’re the only one working on it.

The second assumption is that the prices are always going down. This is not always true for scientific equipment and not even for products available to everyone. As an example: prices for photo cameras went indeed down a lot during the last 10 years, but not the price for professional lenses. Of course, you get better equipment for your money, but it is better by a relatively small factor, not by orders of magnitude.

 Basically, every device currently in use was at some point a prototype in a scientific laboratory.  Which brings me to the third point: the price of the said device goes down by orders of magnitude only if it's suitable for mass-production. The best example which comes to mind is computers: everyone has one, they're dirt cheap and a 299$  puny notebook wipes the floor with a supercomputer from 20 years ago. But this is mainly because electronics industry has decades-old  involvement in this field and they're putting money (and serious amounts of it) into continuous R&D. In short, the miracles of mass-production + sustained (surprise, surprise) research. Problem is, a research laboratory needs some items which are of no interest for the general public, and these will always be rather expensive.  Moreover, companies invest money into R&D only if they're nearly certain that they'll get a lot of money back and in a relatively short time.   

Of course, scientific research creates its own market and companies (which, BTW, are sometimes spin-offs of research projects) are happy to provide equipment for it, but it is far from mass-production.

Essentially, all the points above boil down to this: research (fundamental and applied) does prototyping. This is always expensive and there is no way around it. Creating something from scratch is difficult and costly. Of course, one should try to cut costs, but this involves a lot of testing various techniques and materials. Sometimes the testing itself reveals easier and cheaper way of getting the desired result…but you still have to do the tests first.
Which brings me back to space missions and their cost. I’d guess that they cost a lot because a significant part of each mission is a one-of-a-kind device. A Jupiter orbiter will be very different from a Venus lander and both will have little in common with a mission for studying solar atmosphere. Moreover, usually each mission carries several sets of instruments. Therefore, I don’t think the price of space missions will decrease significantly in the next decade. And, in general, I don’t think we should bet that a cheaper solution will emerge anyway in the future.

Truth is, researchers sound sometimes completely disconnected from this world’s problems, with their rambling and excitement about crazy things that no one else understands a iota about. They may be bad at PR, true, probably because they assume that everyone else knows that research is indispensable.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

@Triskadecamus

Well, even I could not have made the point so clear.

Let’s eliminate exploration, and research, and invest all that money in genocide.

:rolleyes:

Tris

I have been supporting space expoloration. And elimination of the Taliban threat does not require genocide any more than the elimination of the Nazi threat did.

@mrklutz

That’s true, but that doesn’t make it any less misleading to say we have “left” Iraq. We haven’t, any more than we have left Korea. The fact that we have large troop deployments in Germany, Korea and Japan doesn’t make the expenditure in Iraq unquestionable. Quite the reverse: we should be questioning why we have those troop levels in Germany, Korea and Japan.

Because in the former it is a good base of operation between here and the Middle East and in the latter due to North Korea and China.

[even_sven]

If it’s about the common dream, why not let China do it?

China seems more than happy to spend money on space exploration. Russia is coming up with ways to monetize it. Why should we have to shoulder the burden of space research? We bitch and bitch about how we pay for the world’s drug research. Why not let someone else pay the price this time?

If humanity needs to get off this rock, does it have to be Americans who do it? Does humanity’s heart not beat as excitedly when the person pushing the edges of science is Chinese?

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

@even_sven

If it’s about the common dream, why not let China do it?

China seems more than happy to spend money on space exploration. Russia is coming up with ways to monetize it. Why should we have to shoulder the burden of space research? We bitch and bitch about how we pay for the world’s drug research. Why not let someone else pay the price this time?

If humanity needs to get off this rock, does it have to be Americans who do it? Does humanity’s heart not beat as excitedly when the person pushing the edges of science is Chinese?

Because, China, as of right now, is not exactly a bastion of human freedom and democracy. It will use space not to expand freedom but rather to extend their system of socialistic-fascistic-collectvist oligarchic technocracy throughout the Solar System and beyond.

Plus as an American patriot, it is in the strategic interests of America to preserve space as something of our preserve just as the British did with the high seas in the 19th Century.

[DSeid]

@even_sven

If it’s about the common dream, why not let China do it?

China seems more than happy to spend money on space exploration. Russia is coming up with ways to monetize it. Why should we have to shoulder the burden of space research? We bitch and bitch about how we pay for the world’s drug research. Why not let someone else pay the price this time?

If humanity needs to get off this rock, does it have to be Americans who do it? Does humanity’s heart not beat as excitedly when the person pushing the edges of science is Chinese?

In fact less and less of the leadership in space and even more so high energy particle physics is being done by America. That which we do do is more and more as part of international partnerships, and increasingly ones in which America is not playing the leading roles.

Certainly America should not have to and is not shouldering the burden … the issue is if we want to be part of the big question items at all or cede it all to China and India and the EU (Russia barely counts, really). Being part of a partnership in scientific progress is one thing, becoming the increasingly junior partner in the pursuit of the big questions is another.

[mrklutz]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

Because in the former it is a good base of operation between here and the Middle East and in the latter due to North Korea and China.

That’s overly simplistic. My point is that if we’re talking about cutting funding to perform fundamental research, we should be looking much harder at the military, where we spend far more public money. We should be asking hard questions about which missions we can perform with fewer resources, and which missions we should not be undertaking at all.

In the case of Korea, for instance, the mission of the troops there has often been described as acting as a tripwire – i.e., the primary purpose is to ensure that North Korea knows that any invasion of South Korea will necessarily involve attacking US troops and getting the US involved. 3000 troops are probably just as effective of a tripwire as 30,000.

Reducing our global military footprint would not only save far more money than shutting down NASA, it would make us less likely to become embroiled in another ill-considered war like Iraq.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

@mrklutz

That’s overly simplistic. My point is that if we’re talking about cutting funding to perform fundamental research, we should be looking much harder at the military, where we spend far more public money. We should be asking hard questions about which missions we can perform with fewer resources, and which missions we should not be undertaking at all.

In the case of Korea, for instance, the mission of the troops there has often been described as acting as a tripwire – i.e., the primary purpose is to ensure that North Korea knows that any invasion of South Korea will necessarily involve attacking US troops and getting the US involved. 3000 troops are probably just as effective of a tripwire as 30,000.

Reducing our global military footprint would not only save far more money than shutting down NASA, it would make us less likely to become embroiled in another ill-considered war like Iraq.

I do support cutting funding on the military, so has the Secretary of Defence and the President especially in various weapons or shipbuilding projects.

[Ravenman]

Just a bump for some relevant news: a private company is preparing to launch the biggest rocket since the Saturn V, which is billed as being able to carry very large payloads or humans.

And neither NASA nor the Air Force paid to develop it. PayPal did.

Link.

[Grey]

Falcon Heavy - 53 tonnes to LEO vs. Delta V Heavy’s 23 tonnes.

Still Delta V has actually flown but it is cool SpaceX is developing engines/rockets.