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.
I am skeptical of the success rate of rich benefactors for a technology with only a century of practice, vs. boats that have been used for thousands of years.
>In current dollar terms, R&D spending is double what it was in the 1970s.
>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.
Oh this argument in here is ridiculous. Sure the U.S. space program was expensive but the amount of bi-products of that program has far since justified the cost.
And if that had been the only benefit then of course the whole program would be questionable. You asked for examples for the moon program and LHC, and you were given them in ample supply. If they aren't satisfactory in budging your opinion, this flow of discourse puts the burden on you to say something intelligent, and cherry picking only a single, and perhaps least relevant example doesn't really accomplish that.
There's no lack of material demonstrating that NASA's accomplishments contribute more to the economy than they drain in tax dollars [0] and it's difficult to ignore the volume & leaps of technical advancements achieved by earlier missions. You clearly have a different view though, so perhaps sharing that in a constructive way would be more beneficial than posting shallow comments that obviously ignore the information you requested.
The ROI for R&D isn't exclusive to space programs, the space race was just an impetus/motivator for blank check by-all-means research. As a general rule shouldn't as much money as possible go into that sort of research until the marginal return is below $1 for each dollar spent?
Current technology will always look archaic from the future, I hope in 20 years we get to say something like: I can't believe we didn't build our spacecraft out of some kind of super space crystals!
I see things like the Apollo program as a massively expensive (and yes, wasteful) R&D program. Private space corps, unless they reach some kind of massive scale, will have a hard time justifying throwing enough money at something for real innovation. They will continue to focus on getting satellites up there a bit cheaper than the other guy.
The reason people (geeks especially) love to rah-rah the space program is because it is a wonderful form of waste. Instead of bailing out a corrupt financial system, or spying on it's own citizens, or building some kind of doomsday weapon, we could have our Star Trek fantasy and maybe find some really cool innovations while we are at it.
My original argument was that the ROI is debatable in terms of how much we spend on space these days. Is it worth billions of dollars for the things we have talked about? Probably not in the grand scheme of things (Im not knocking space, or research just the fact that people bitch about how little we spend when it sort of makes sense to me).
0.1% the budget because they didn't have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to research and build the last 60 years of space technology - rolling progress forward one painful, costly mistake at a time - to do it. Hardly seems reasonable to use such a comparison or make such a point given the actual context.
"Estimates of the return on investment in the space program range from $7 for every $1 spent on the Apollo Program to $40 for every $1 spent on space development today."
Yes, because they are basically exercises in bullshit. You might think they went and catalogued in detail what the benefits were, but they're actually just based on macroeconomic assumptions about what the return on R&D is.
I mean, think: for spinoff arguments to work, you need to have some notion of how technology would have progressed without NASA. How could one possibly figure out that contrafactual?
I think a lot of people miss that R&D is expensive and it is often takes those who can 'throw away money' to help fund it. This is on top of any subsidies that may exist for that R&D.
Look at cars, cell phones, computers and airplanes ("[1930's] Most people still rode trains or buses for intercity travel because flying was so expensive. A coast-to-coast round trip cost around $260, about half of the price of a new automobile. Only business executives and the wealthy could afford to fly.)"
I would love to travel to Space one time and I hope some day I can take a flight into space. Right now, space flight will literally be a "luxury vehicle that only serve as a novelty for the rich." There is no way I'll ever be able to afford it unless it is first affordable by the rich.
I do not have a source for the generic example number.
If you want sources for government spending too much on things, those exist all over.
> Calling it bloat and inefficient because it takes more money per launch then another 100% experimental and unproven platform is incredibly myopic.
No, that's not what people are saying. The problem is that the main companies NASA contracts to are running in an extremely inefficient way and they get paid more when they waste money.
This is a problem that would exist even if SpaceX never became a company.
> That money employs engineers and scientists and generates demand for high specs engineering firms and supply chains. The bang for the buck is this impact on the economy, stimulating education, R&D etc.
The problem is the dollars that aren't going to engineering and R&D.
Dollars that just stimulate the economy are bloat when they're going to some big company out of a budget that's supposed to be doing things like exploring space. If you want to just send out dollars to stimulate the economy, send them out to people with low incomes and they'll have a much bigger impact.
I suggest you look at what was spent on the Space Shuttle, which turned out to be non-reusable (it was re-manufactured after each flight for up to a year.) No ROI there.
Fun facts: NASA knew from the very first flight that they were losing several tiles during launch, and no tiles were optional. Also, NASA managers were given photos of Columbia's damaged wing, which had a gaping hole in the leading edge, before re-entry, and sat on them. I wouldn't fly a Cessna 152 like that.)
NASA has received something like $800 billion in funding in current dollars. I suspect you would agree that, if that sum had been left in the private sector, some interesting and innovative things would have come of it. Obviously we can disagree about the amount.
There's also the separate argument that lavishing so much funding and authority on NASA allowed it to squash the private space industry for many decades, setting humanity back many years. This was the case until fairly recently, when the 1998 Commercial Space Act helped to change this.
Here's an article I wrote in 2007 about NASA. Unfortunately the original appears to have disappeared in a CNET site redesign last month but (sigh) FreeRepublic copied and pasted it here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1908035/posts
Space, by contrast, until recently has remained the domain of NASA. Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer famous for building a suborbital rocket plane that won the Ansari X Prize, believes NASA is crowding out private efforts. "Taxpayer-funded NASA should only fund research and not development," Rutan said during a recent panel discussion at the California Institute of Technology. "When you spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build a manned spacecraft, you're...dumbing down a generation of new, young engineers (by saying), 'No, you can't take new approaches, you have to use this old technology.'"
Also remember that government bureaucracies aren't exactly known for their careful use of funds. The Space Shuttle concept was pitched to the public as costing only $5 million a flight; it ended up costing $1.3 billion a flight, with a 1-in-50 chance of disaster upon each launch.
While I appreciate the sentiment, it's not exactly a fair comparison. The first government rocket launches surely had cost overruns. But were the most recent shuttle launches vastly over-budget?
Launching a satellite these days is a relatively known quantity whereas many horrifically over-budget government projects are doing things no one has ever done before.
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