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I love space exploration, so please don't take me wrong... I've got an unpopular opinion: For me, the state-sponsored space exploration of space (particularly,

• danboarder 5y ago
  "It's impossible to say for sure but had not a lot of resources been taken from civil society for these projects, there is a chance that there'd be a demand to do it in a more effective and long-term way from the very beginning, and this is my point." Would you say the same thing regarding the Department of Defense and the Pentagon budget? I have heard good arguments that the military industrial complex is largely a bureaucratic deadweight cost to society, with few benefits (and generates the largest loss of life through Democide: https://hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM https://hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM ). Anyway, I think perhaps your argument fits military waste spending even more than it does with regard to the space race and NASA. Or maybe it's just a characteristic of State spending in general (like the infamous story of a $640 toilet seat https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/only-the-pentagon-could-spend-640-on-a-toilet-seat/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/only-the-pentagon-... ).
  • henvic 5y ago
    Yes, and yes. To the point that it's mere noise compared to the waste and destruction of wealth caused by wars and conflicts caused by politicians. Economically speaking, the waste caused by the industrial-military complex worldwide is probably 10000 times worse, at least. Going off-topic: However, even though I'm a capitalist pig, the problem with this goes even far worse than economics: most murders recent history are related to state-sponsored conflicts, not the John Doe carrying a gun around to commit petty theft and accidentally murdering someone. It's hard to become aware of it as institutions like UNODC never includes armed conflict between states in the count, for starters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
• ncmncm 5y ago
  It is clear that the space shuttle was a disaster for US space exploration. It is a miracle that outer solar system exploration was not gutted, and we got New Horizon, Cassini, Galileo, and the foolish excess of Mars rovers, and Hubble and solar, x-ray, UV, IR, and other observatories. There is no way the space shuttle would have happened without stupid politics.
  • Tuna-Fish 5y ago
    The tragedy of it is that the stupid politics were an intended feature of the original program. NASA got really spooked when the Apollo program got castrated just when they were starting to do real science instead of just testing hardware and delivering flags, and so they strived to make the program after that impossible for congress to kill. Jokes on them, the contracts started then are still impossible to kill today, and none of them have produced anything of real value for 20 years now.
    • SEJeff 5y ago
      Not fully true. Much of the initial NASA tech was transferred over to the Department of Defense and is used for ICBMs and various missiles. There is a lot of overlap with NASA and the DoD when it comes to these things. The difference is that the DoD basically has infinite budget when they really ask and NASA has a paltry percentage.
      • ncmncm 5y ago
        Except, it isn't used in ICBMs. Expensive parts of STS are not used in anything except maybe X37, which by all indications is useless, spending years parked in orbit just so it doesn't look totally disused.
      • greedo 5y ago
        I think this is backwards. The majority of the launch technology used by NASA (the rockets themselves, not the capsules etc) were military. It wasn't until the Saturn system that bespoke rockets were being used, IIRC.
• Teever 5y ago
  > It's impossible to say for sure but had not a lot of resources been taken from civil society for these projects, there is a chance that there'd be a demand to do it in a more effective and long-term way from the very beginning, and this is my point. What would have been the economic imperative that would have jump started the development of rockets in the first place? Like there has to be some sort of reason for people to develop rockets in the first place, otherwise they're not going to do it, even on a whim because it's so outrageously expensive and required the development of so many technologies to make it possible.
  • retrac 5y ago
    Just "what's up there?" was driving some early experimenters before WW II. Smaller rockets are not so complex and large (and expensive). Small-scale exploration of the upper atmosphere with sounding rockets would have proceeded, which would have driven development of better small rockets. At some point, someone would start seriously thinking of putting a small telecom or geonav satellite up there. But I do tend to think that without the public investment we saw along military and PR lines that space research would have been very seriously delayed. Something like $100+ billion in public funds between the US and USSR to develop ICBMs, which then translates to heavy satellite launch and etc.
  • cloutchaser 5y ago
    What was the economic imperative to build a ship to cross the Atlantic? Why send humans to their death out into some unknown massive ocean? Why get together funding for that?
    • tomrod 5y ago
      Wealth. Columbus wanted in on the spice trade and convinced backers to support him. At the time, we had ships that floated on the ocean. The space race's initial run was motivated by national pride and defense. The costs to keep it up have been high, which is why SpaceX's approach at reducing fixed pre-launch costs have found success.
      • 5y ago
• imtringued 5y ago
  The economy must grow, no matter what. The problem is that if the economy stops growing but productivity keeps going up we will have to work less and less. However, we don't have a solution to sharing jobs. We think it is more efficient to employ a single full time employee which makes some people perpetually redundant while simultaneously running into the paradox that these individuals could work but don't have to. We still blame them if they don't work. We blame them even though the products the full time employees produce have no market other than these unemployed people.
• mellavora 5y ago
  I sense an underlying assumption along the lines of "industry is better at organizing capital and labor to deliver a product/service than government" the truth of which depends on many things, including - how "better" is defined, - the timescale of the product/service, - the value creation/capture equation of the product/service, - the robustness of the product/service to disruption - the delivery cost vs profit margin distribution (some customers cost more to serve than others, think rural mail delivery vs urban) On any number of these, it isn't clear that the development of space tech from say 1935 to 2000 would have been faster if private industry was in charge. vs. now, when lots of the basic tech exists (Musk's rockets are based on Soviet missile tech, if I remember) ALONG WITH a proven market for that tech, yes, it does become more feasible for a commercial venture to leverage that existing tech/knowledge to create a product for the existing market.
  • kiba 5y ago
    Or you know, who your boss is? vs. now, when lots of the basic tech exists (Musk's rockets are based on Soviet missile tech, if I remember) ALONG WITH a proven market for that tech, yes, it does become more feasible for a commercial venture to leverage that existing tech/knowledge to create a product for the existing market. IIRC, Elon Musk tried to buy soviet rockets, but otherwise all the engineering works are his company's own creation. As far as standing on shoulder of giants, they likely stand more on NASA's than on Russian rocket designs.
    • hungryforcodes 5y ago
      All rocket technology is based on German WWII rocket technology.
      • dnautics 5y ago
        Well not Goddard's work. Probably solid rockets have a different lineage, too.
        • hungryforcodes 5y ago
• Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
  Indeed the premise of "private industry always better" is ideology more than fact. There are many cases were private industry is better at developing technology, like cell phones, but areas where it would be a fail miserably, like proving the existence of the higgs boson. Each approach (private-led or government-led) has strengths and weaknesses. As for space exploration, especially in the early stages when it didn't have an obvious path to profit because who knew how much it would cost to get things working, the government approach was key to rapid development.
  • avs733 5y ago
    I would add a corollary to this...when facts are posited in support of this ideology, you should be highly suspicious of them. Because more often then not the guy who built the house is telling you the foundation was irrelevant. Private industry often has the option to NOT do something. When they leverage that option, if the thing really does need to be done, it is typically left to government. That puts government led initiatives at an inherent disadvantage when private industry also dictates the metrics of success. Government is forced into doing things that private industry doesn't want to or cannot do - and we point to the government like its a failure. See USPS vs. FedEx/UPS - USPS treats its employees well, delivers to everyone, and controls prices to make basic services accessible to all citizens. Private versions do none of those things but we view them as more successful because 'they don't lose money'. Example from when I used to live in Arizona: * they introduced a school voucher program * theoretically, charter schools could not discriminate against students with disabilities * students with disabilities are more expensive to educate, in a public school the ratio of able bodied to disabled students helps lessen the burden of those costs * shockingly, Charter schools in practice wildly discriminated against students with serious disabilities. They used the language of 'would not succeed in our rigorous academic environment' * Students with major disabilities (e.g., Down's Syndrome) became enormously overrepresented in public schools * For public schools - costs per student went up, relative test scores went down. Some argued that this was proof that public education was failing and they needed to expand the voucher program and grow the number of Charter schools. I would argue it didn't - the ideology of industry better than government just changed the rules, broke the system, and claimed a victory. Space-X and Blue Origin and [insert space startup here] exists because of NASA in the 60s and 70s and everyday since. It isn't just that NASA did the early parts and now industry can do now. NASA literally used that time to write the standards that all of these companies now rely on. They generated the knowledge base required to succeed in spaceflight. They literally generated the standards - e.g., 3D printed spaceflight parts https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/msfcstd3716baseline.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/msfcstd... that are a starting point for anything they do.
• rkangel 5y ago
  > state-sponsored space exploration Let's be clear - we are talking about organisational structure not about funding. A lot of SpaceX's income comes from the US government. The money that they have used to develop Falcon was a result of NASA contracts, they get paid by NASA to deliver people to the ISS, they're getting paid by the DoD etc. I think it's a good thing that public money is paying for exploration, it just turns out the legacy players in the industry were incapable of innovation and a blank slate was needed.
• marcus_holmes 5y ago
  SpaceX is government-funded. The government is their customer. But same with the internet: The government funded the raw science, with military objectives in mind, and then it became commercially viable for private industry to make money from. Arguably, you could then make the claim that the private industry ruined it for everyone. I hope this doesn't become true of space.
• fsloth 5y ago
  "For me, the state-sponsored space exploration of space (particularly, the Space Race) slowed down progress in the sciences and even for space exploration in the long run." I strongly disagree. A rocket engine is so complex, I think nation state level investment in a war economy moved it forward at least half a century, if not more. It took them seven years just to create the first turbo-pump! Without Nazi-Germany bankrolling von Braun and his Space Nazis, USA and Soviet Union would not have had the seed to start their ICBM programs. Which then fed everything else. Without Apollo program, you would not have had the huge airforce talent to figure out how to operate in space. Space has nothing trivial in it. Each step has required carefull engineering. I kind of agree that with modern computing we probably could make a few leaps, but difficult engineering up to this day has required century or more of groundwork. For example Nokia did not become the fallen giant due to some VC investment in the 80's but because they had long tradition of radio engineering going back to 20's. And so on. SpaceX is now so succesful, because they have a century of aeronautics training, research and culture - bankrolled to a large extent by US taxpayers (for which we in other countries should be grateful for facilitating the future of space faring humanity) to lean on. It's still a huge achievement but without the century of defense spending it would not be even remotely possible. I would say that the tech is only now mature enough to facilitate the public ventures. But that's just me, you might be correct as well :)
  • wnkrshm 5y ago
    I want to add: If you look at the tools and theoretical underpinnings spaceX uses to develop their vehicles, they didn't develop them themselves. Numerical simulation methods, especially for hypersonic flow, powder-bed fusion, CAD etc. - those were invented by other people and for the most part all of the numerical methods involved come from DoD work, where they were first developed and verified. FEA? DoD. Finite-Differences? DoD. All kinds of clever methods for mechanical/thermal/optical simulation? DoD. It's almost sad how much of modern engineering depends on that basis. Edit: If you look at old papers for numerical methods, especially in wave optics, most of the time you see a fighter or a bomber in the results - gotta estimate that radar cross-section for when the cold war gets hot.
• wycy 5y ago
  Disagree. Space exploration requires a minimum base of technology to be available before it even has a glimmer of commercial viability. The state was able to solve that by pouring an incredible amount of resources into a field that no company could have conceived of touching at the time. No commercial effort would have expended those billions knowing it would take decades to maybe see any payoff. The interests of companies are overwhelmingly simply to increase next quarter's profits and return value to shareholders.
  • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    During the space race the state got a level of results society could not (sustainably) support by lighting money on fire (at an unsustainable rate). Fast forward half a century and it's commercially viable for certain types of activities. Similarly, Columbus's initial explorations were state sponsored "light money on fire in the hope we get useful knowledge out of it" (like a path to the indies that cuts out the middle man) endeavors. The initial conquest of SA by the Spanish for low hanging fruit type resource extraction (stealing gold) in the 1500s is roughly analogous to "BigCo" commercial viability (draw your comparisons with the very expensive telecommunications satellites of the 80s) and by the 1630s even marginalized religious extremists could afford to settle on the other side of the ocean. Space is in that same process of moving down the economic ladder of viability.
• arcbyte 5y ago
  I think this is a very interesting idea. I've thought the same about railroads and the USA. The federal government largely subsidized the rapid expansion into the west with railroads that meant that expansion was haphazard and unsustainable. The poor way railroads developed has left impacts on how society works today. If they'd expanded more slowly, we'd have had a more adapted and sustainable infrastructure today. Maybe we'd even have high speed rail everywhere.
• HillRat 5y ago
  I think around here that's not exactly an unpopular opinion. :) The problem is that there's no obvious return on investment for space exploration once you get out of Earth orbit, since you need to overcome a vast number of complex scientific and engineering challenges, costing at least tens of billions of dollars, before you can even start to pursue speculative enterprises. Even if we stipulate there being opportunities in zero-g manufacturing or mining, the companies positioned to extract value from those markets are not companies that have any kind of aerospace core competency, so you have an innovation deadlock due to information asymmetries and ambiguous cost/value estimates. No board is going to sign off on tens of billions of dollars of investments with a high probability of failure, poorly-forecastable costs, and no defined market value on the other side of the equation; instead, the highest-value play is to let someone else own the cost and risks and, if they prove feasibility, to only then aggressively apply capital -- essentially, free-ride on the first-mover. In a scenario like this, it's likely that the technology never gets created until the government steps in with funding to break the deadlock.
• reso 5y ago
  The space industry was created by massive state-sponsored investments. There were (and still are) no private entities capable of putting forward the scale of investment that was required to initially develop space technology. Its not possible that states "slowed down" progress in the long-run, because the industry would not exist without state action.
• e_y_ 5y ago
  I would actually pose this question another way. Absent the obvious political reasons (Cold War), did we go to the moon too early? The Apollo program was a combination of bleeding edge innovation (some of the first uses of transistors) and brute force (massive industrial efforts, orbital math using paper and slide rules). Suppose that never happened. Suppose we had ICBMs and satellites but never felt the need to go to the moon or even develop human spaceflight. If we were to spin up a new space program today, we would be missing decades of human spaceflight knowledge, BUT we would have the advantage of modern robotics, aerodynamic modeling software, 3d printing, and everything else. For that matter, we might have been able to go to Mars in the 80s if we were willing to "brute force" the problem (see von Braun's books). But maybe the smart move is/was to invest in other areas instead and wait for the progression of technology to make such endeavors more affordable, and by extension, sustainable instead of being a one-off novelty project like Apollo. On the other hand, history doesn't exist in a vacuum. As expensive as they were, I think Apollo and the Shuttle got multiple generations interested in space; not just science fiction but the pairing of imagination with reality, so it's impossible to predict where the public (or even billionaire-class) excitement about space would have be without them.