Seriously, I'm mean what else are you going to do with a bit more than a billion dollars? Develop a full line of Google rockets and disrupt the space industry or something? :-)
But you raise an interesting point, what should we expect from 6 years of effort and 1.1B$ ?
Sure, but that really hits on the "big thing" about the moon Mercury/Apollo missions. They had a funding model that allowed them to spend incredible amounts of money with absolutely no expectation of return on that investment.
If you put 10000 really smart people to the task of solving big problems while giving them nearly unlimited resources, they could get a lot done.
Of course that's not how entrepreneurial funding actually works. For better or for worse it takes a really unique financier (like the government) to make that happen. The moon landing was the product of a really unique time in our history, I wish we'd stop using it as an example I guess.
As far as I can tell, your argument boils down to:
$125B+ (inflation adjusted) was worthwhile for inspiring people about what was possible.
Listen, I don't disagree that there were some benefits of the space program. But $125B+ is a lot of money for Velcro and inspiration. Let's keep a sense of scale here: if you assume YC invests $25k per company, $125B is 5 million startups (and 15 million or so founders). [1]
Just remember that the resources have to come from somewhere, and that if you're going to do it through government, you're spending other people's money to get things that you want. Someone else may not care about technology or the moon, and may prefer to spend that money on social programs or farm subsidies. Once you open the door that government takes the money and spends it, how can you possibly determine whose value system is better?
Also, to tie this back around to where we started, whether you support the idea of spending other people's money on projects that you like or not, my initial point was simply that risking money that isn't yours is not brave, whatever else you want to call it, because the politicians are not personally at risk of any loss. Worthless boondoggles don't even seem to negatively affect their reputation, and may even get them called bold.
[1] Note that I'm not proposing that the government should have invested in 5 million companies, but that an equivalent amount of resources was removed from the economy -- resources that could have built other things that people want.
The most hand wavy R&D propositions ever, a very common take on Reddit. I hate when people assume the specific ROI gained when developing rocketry, when it was still very novel in the 1950-60s, can be used as a general rule for spending money on NASA or related gov projects today.
They spent 30 years wasting the vast majority on ridiculous things like the Space Shuttle. Multiple billions of dollars to launch what Elon Musk will be launching for a measly 2 million.
Their science was always a rounding error on their pork.
It's funny because the Soviets did it right, in that they funded smart people and gave them control. The Nasa's approach was to have people create proposals and get approval for funds.
We have forgotten that the "fund smart people and let them do what they want" is the best approach. Look at Xerox Parc, Bell Labs, etc. Nasa's modern approach with SpaceX and other companies seems to reflect these hard learned lessons.
I think people forget how much US national effort was dedicated to the space race. These guy's did incredibly well, even with modern advances for the money they are working with.
>Estimates of the return on investment in the spaaace program range from $7 for every $1 spent on the Apollo Program to $40 for every $1 spent on spaaace development today. [1]
That money is generally spent in the US, on good, high-paying jobs.[2] The products NASA has created are EVERYWHERE[3] — The general rule of thumb is if it's wireless, fireproof, or small, it's using technology based off NASA work.
I still remember the bygone days when we praised the astronauts and the engineers for their bravery and intelligence, and their astonishing feats of human ingenuity that inspired us to dream higher. It seems the zeitgeist of $current_year is instead to praise the financeers for bravely hiring the engineers and bravely skimming the surplus value.
All undeniably incredible achievements. I look at Nasa's budget [1] and see the government achieve something incredible in the apollo project and take their foot off the gas on the most exciting (and potentially unifying) frontier. I also look at the corruption and stagnation in US rocket systems like SLS and the sinkhole of hours and dollars it has been [2].
I am very excited about space and the future, I just think that in the years since Apollo the story has been emblematic of wastefulness, contractor level benign corruption (cost plus contracting) more than it has been inspiring with the stories you mentioned. just my opinion.
Yeah, so we spent a trillion dollars sending a dozen guys to the moon because people in Kansas were shitting themselves thinking about Soviet space superiority. Now tell me about the dozens of assholes who said we'd be terraforming Mars by now, or be flying between Tokyo and LA in 2 hours on hypersonic planes. Heck, tell me about DRAM latency since 1995, the fact that power generation is still dominated by coal plants that are less than 2x more efficient than they were a century ago, or the fact that the sexiest thing in aerospace right now is a company trying to get back to where we were in the 1960's.
Any elementary student of history can tell you how bad an idea this is. Apollo 1 almost ended the program. A backlash in public opinion will crater SpaceX in the market and legislature.
There is no space mission in the near decades worth the loss of human life. Economy in terms of money is no priority if you are to undertake human space flight. Move fast and break things is cute for a global search index or regressing public discourse and attention span; it's astronomically stupid and not acceptable for safety of human life.
If this were a billionaire playboy stroking his ego and putting his own money and life on the line who cares. It's not, he's using my tax dollars and is going to hurt others for negligible gain.
The lack of government funding for a space exploration program makes me as sad and angry as anyone. However, I find Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan's argument against commercialized space-flight lame.
They say it would be less safe than a NASA program and that "To be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second- or even third-rate stature..." Note though that some of their argument was directed at the cancellation of NASA's planned moon missions.
With that in mind, let's consider the shuttle program. In 135 missions, it had an abysmal safety record that claimed the lives of 14 astronauts, making it the deadliest spaceflight program in history. It's budget cost $196 billion dollars over the craft's lifetime instead of the estimated $43 billion (adjusted for inflation), while making around half of the promised flights. The shuttle was an important (for both good and bad) craft that helped accomplish great things, like build the ISS and Hubble space telescope. But nationalist pride shouldn't make us blind to the fact that NASA's last program probably set progress in spaceflight backwards, or at least slowed it, and never attempted to leave low-Earth orbit. Those astronauts may not like it, but Elon Musk has a clearer vision and more ambition than NASA (or the politicians) have had for a very long time.
This isn't an efficient market of valuing accomplishments with enthusiasm coins. We could go all day with the "who deserves more enthusiasm/respect?" debate. The cancer researcher? The AIDS researcher? The clean water specialist? The billionare philanthropist, who paid for all of the above? Space travel captivates a lot of people on HN. That's just the nature of the community; it doesn't intend to debase the work of others.
Compare the costs of automation development vs the cost of life support systems development, launch and maitenance and it's not even close.
Yeah I know it sucks when someone poo-poos on your (and my) heroes. I know. "For a successful technology... " etc. Feynman wasn't perfect either. Astronauts continue to be selected according to an ideal of how they will come accross to the public, from Alan Shephard on. And there was something very impressive about all of them that played well in the media. It took 30 years to find out so many of them are also pretty weird and not people you'd take scientific advice from.
Experiments on humans in space are mostly interesting in research for space life-support. You do different, arguably vastly more bang for buck experiments if you're not using humans to do them.
The space race was literally cold war propaganda (and wonderful, beautiful stuff at that - vastly better than most propaganda). NASA continues to put PR front and centre. You can disagree, that's fine, decide to what extent the PR is influencing you and if you're sure it's minimal I can't ask for much more, right?
The ideal would be if NASA had basic science front and centre rather than the incredible waste frittering away vast wealth on the pretence of children's astronaut dreams. And I want a flying car too but reality should win out.
Their passion helped, but it consumed 4.4% of the US federal budget at peak and might well have been cancelled if JFK hadn’t been assassinated — for basically the same reason no human has returned there since Apollo or gone to Mars at all, and for the same reason Space Station Freedom was cut back and morphed into the ISS — or if NASAs work hadn’t been deliberately spread through most states to make it a pork barrel for senators looking to boost their own state using the Federal budget.
It’s basically only now that we have a new space race run by absurdly rich space-nerds that we don’t need active public support, merely that the criticism is limited to grumbling.
Most people will remember the achievements and not the bold claims.
reply