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NASA is a political organization, but that's why the manned space program exists. It long ago ceased to make sense from a cost/scientific-benefit perspective. M

• VMG 15y ago
  It amazes me that on a tech site you are getting downvotes for this. Human space travel is a waste of money from a scientific standpoint. Why a libertarian magazine like reason.com supports human space travel at all is a mystery to me.
  • seagreen 15y ago
    It's probably just a tribal thing. Libertarians know they'll do better as a group if there are places to run. Unmanned space travel doesn't help from this perspective.
    • fennecfoxen 15y ago
      Eh. Libertarians can be dreamers too. There's a vein of transhumanism and immortality-seeking in certain parts of the movement (which I don't particularly respect, but that's another matter). But say you're a Libertarian and have some ideas about how society ought to be structured. Meanwhile, society is clearly structured a certain way which (according to your worldview) is not consistent with that (e.g. the US government, undue tax burdens on the private sector, and bureaucracies like NASA) and it's not particularly likely that you're going to see massive restructuring of it in the near future. Why would that stop you from taking issue with specific irrational policies of those bureaucracies? If space travel (or carbon-reduction or whatever-you-want) is clearly a goal of society, then you might as well try to cope with reality and at least try to make sure they go after that goal as effectively as possible, and limit the damage it's going to do.
  • _dps 15y ago
    I would ask: a waste of money over what time-scale? I agree that the ROI over the next decade or two seems low. But at some point, if we plan to ever get humans to other planets, we're going to have to do the low ROI slog of figuring out the basics. I don't think we will reach a point where getting people to other planets will suddenly become low-hanging fruit. So I think the only real options are: 1) do some low ROI exploratory work to enable higher ROI efforts down the road 2) never send humans beyond earth orbit (seems short-sighted to me over a century-long timeframe, but who knows) 3) hope that somehow it will become much cheaper through windfall technology developments in other fields (not impossible, but certainly not one that I would bet on)
    • ansible 15y ago
      I think we're looking at option 3. With advanced technology, we can modify humans to more easily survive in space. With sufficiently advanced technology, we can just upload them into robot bodies. That will make space missions as cheap as they are now, and without the risk. Because instead of sending up bags of meat that have to be protected from vacuum, radiation, freezing, boiling and dehydration, we can send up AIs or uploaded humans running on rad-hardened processors. It goes back to the discussions about terra-forming. Is it better to adapt an entire planet (which is big, by the way) to human needs, or is it better to adapt humans to just live in that environment as-is? Oh, and this sufficiently advanced technology gives you some other side benefits, including practical immortality, so that is worth pursuing by itself.
      • Jach 15y ago
        While I agree that 3 is the most optimal solution in the sense that "all these other problems are solved given 3", we still don't have a firm time frame on it. It could be 1 year, it could be 50 years. (I wouldn't put it at 100 or above personally, barring global catastrophe.) So we do things in parallel and hedge our bets. Could we get a self-sustaining colony on the Moon (or Mars, or somewhere else) within 50 years if we tried? I think we could. And that instantly protects modern humanity from many existential threats while we continue to work on problem #3.
  • arctangent 15y ago
    > Human space travel is a waste of money from a scientific standpoint. It's hard to weigh up the relative merits of spending money on human space travel now over spending (perhaps less) money a few tens or hundred years from now to achieve the same effect. But if mankind doesn't eventually colonise other planets then we're almost certainly going to be wiped out by a big rock hitting our planet and killing every last one of us. By the time we spot such a killer rock it would probably be far too late to start thinking about how we might go about travelling in space. We need the ability now, just in case.
    • drblast 15y ago
      What's the point? It's not going to occur in a reasonable amount of time, and if you say, "Well, eventually it will..." then eventually everything that exists will cease to exist anyway. Why not focus on things that are problems now?
      • arctangent 15y ago
        The point is that we don't know exactly when an unpreventable extinction-level event will happen. It makes sense to plan for such an event as early as possible.
      • deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      • verroq 15y ago
        Your argument can be further extended as "what's the point of living when eventually everything will cease to exist anyway". But ultimately, it's these small wins along the way that help push humanity forward. I'm not going to open the "what's the purpose of life" can of worms but to dismiss scientific research because of how long it will take is a defeatist attitude. You can not predict what fruits will a particular scientific research will be bring just as you cannot predict the future.
      • CamperBob 15y ago
        Why not focus on things that are problems now? Because those problems will never be solved entirely, no matter what we do?
  • JumpCrisscross 15y ago
    from a scientific standpoint Agreed. But there are other things being looked at in space in the commercial realm (ranging from tourism to resource extraction to energy generation) that require humans. There is also an argument for positive externalities. I don't think anyone concretely foresaw the technological developments shot off the side of the Apollo missions. That's not a sufficient justification. But if one has two nations, one pursuing manned space missions and one not, the technological developments will happen in one and not the other. A more cosmopolitan perspective would be if you had two universes, one with a species that did this and another without... In this entire discussion I'm not bringing up national pride, either, which has real-world significance in terms of how it affects the flow of intellectual talent, i.e. the brain drain.
  • warfangle 15y ago
    Human space travel is a waste of money from a capital market sense, perhaps. Think of all we've learned by putting humans into space. Think of all we'd have to learn to put humans permanently on the moon - from long-term temperature regulation to ecosystem habitats and materials science. It's not the destination of the journey that matters. It's what we need to figure out in order to get there that does.
    • quanticle 15y ago
      So what, specifically, about space travel would cause us to make those discoveries about temperature regulation and ecosystem habitats? Unless there's something specifically about hard vacuum and freefall that makes it easier to study these topics, they could be more easily and far more cheaply studied on Earth.
      • warfangle 15y ago
        Sorry, I was writing more in context of permanent outposts due to recent political rhetoric.
  • tobylane 15y ago
    It made 14x as much for the US economy (including inspiring American children, excluding inspiring other children/nations). Can that sort of success ever be considered a waste over a long enough timeframe?
    • yummyfajitas 15y ago
      Over the short term, that's a great success. But over the long term (e.g., 50 years), it's only a 5.4% return. The S&P or DJIA, for example, had 7% returns over the same timeframe. (Of course the two are not directly comparable, I'm just pointing out that "14x returns over unspecified timeframe" is a faulty argument.)
    • arunbahl 15y ago
      I think the inspiration point is a great one, if difficult to quantify. The American space program fostered a scientific literacy and pop-culture faith in the pursuit of engineering for surmounting important problems. And despite being a national program in a Cold War context, the success of the Apollo missions was bigger in scope than the US - it was a victory for all humans. We'd do well to cultivate these attitudes again.
    • tsotha 15y ago
      The kind of accounting you need to do to arrive at that 14x figure would get you arrested if you put it in a corporate quarterly report, and anyway it totally ignores lost opportunity costs.
  • gojomo 15y ago
    Would it be a waste if we were making the coldly rational mission-oriented tradeoffs Zubrin proposes? Or only because treating it as a jobs program and national festival-of-empathy makes manned exploration insanely expensive? I, personally, am looking forward to a Kickstarter from a credible private team to start work on a space elevator. And I'm only half-joking.
  • rbanffy 15y ago
    > Human space travel is a waste of money from a scientific standpoint. It all depends on your kind of science. For an astronomer, manned space travel is pointless. In fact, space travel is pointless unless we invent some kind of FTL propulsion that can actually put a probe close to some interesting phenomena or allow us to look from another direction. OTOH, a thousand rovers will tell us nothing about how human societies would organize in artificial habitats. A machine cannot tell how it feels to be able to hide Earth from view with your extended hand. That's what manned space travel is for. It's not to bring back measurements or soil samples. It's to bring back stories that reminds us how extraordinary we can be. And to inspire us to be extraordinary.
• Gormo 15y ago
  If something provokes interest and generates demand, then there's an economic case for it. Plenty of people want to see manned missions to Mars, etc. as ends in themselves, and this will motivate independent efforts to explore space. We're at the point where political monopolies are a hindrance.