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Neil deGrasse Tyson: ‘How Much Would You Pay for the Universe?’

184 points by jamesbritt 15y ago

mathattack 15y ago
I love the idea of supporting space science, ut in a deficit ridden economy, is this extra percent of spending more valuable than health care research, lowering the cost of education or solving world hunger? Before going to Mars I would like a decent school on my street.
- DanBC 15y ago
  There are other things where money was spent; in hindsight[1] it would have been better to spend that > $1Trillion[2] on space. And health. And etc. [1] Not just in hindsight, at the beginning for many people. [2] It feels odd to me to write trillion and actually mean trillion and not "some really big number".
- kirubakaran 15y ago
  Space exploration will inspire more children to become scientists and engineers. Space research grows the pie and hence you need not think that it is taking money from schools. Space research spending is rounding error compared to war spending anyway.
- weavejester 15y ago
  It might be more valuable than spending it on the US military, which has over 35 times the budget of NASA.
  - whateverer 15y ago
    Right. Your choices are a) sending a bunch of monkeys in a very expensive and uncomfortable loft to space or b) invest in a multi billion dollar kitten killing machine. Not a false dichotomy at all. Seriously, there's tons of more pressing issues back here on Earth, ranging from real, social one like inequity and discrimination, technical/political ones like the ever growing piles of garbage all over the place, healthcare, climate change and mass extinctions, and say, taking care of that whole cycle of oppression and bloodshed that has been going on for a while now (not that it'll go away, but we're pretty fucking screwed if we don't come up with something which will leave most people content). None of those problems will go away if we send little men on tin cans to space, and in fact, I can think of very little problems that will be solved by that. We're a long way from escaping the mess which we have created here on Earth, and wherever we go we'll do it again, and that's being optimistic in saying that we will actually get a self-sustaining Homo Sapiens population off the planet before our shit catches up with us and we're actually forced to do nothing but deal with the consequences.
    - mathattack 15y ago
      I hate to say I agree with someone named Whateverer, but you hit it on the head. We have issues locally we need to solve. In 100 years we can still go to space. Same with 200 years. And we'll have tons of productivity improvements between now and then. But we don't have a public school system capable of producing scientists. All that said - perhaps... perhaps... Perhaps the minerals and compounds needed to survive as a species are elsewhere in our solar system.
      - rvkennedy 15y ago
        perhaps... Perhaps the minerals and compounds needed to survive as a species are elsewhere in our solar system. Not only that, but more than we could at this point imagine using in a long long time, and an inexhaustible supply of energy. I find it hard to believe that these resources wouldn't help us just a little with the seemingly intractable social problems. Those very often boil down to arguments over limited resources in the end. In fact, I can't think of a major world conflict or problem that isn't at its root about the allocation of resources, and it's all there for us, right above our heads.
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  Much like manned spaceflight the problems of public schools in America is not one of funding. If you look at a graph of average inflation adjusted spending per student at public schools it's just a monotonically increasing line from the end of WWII until today, it just goes up, and up, and up. But does average student educational outcome match such graphs? Not in the least. The problem is that the incentives are all wrong and the money keeps getting funneled to the wrong people. The ratio of administrative staff to students has grown and grown. The biggest influence that active parents have had on schools over the past few decades has not been on increasing educational quality but on driving administrative policy through excessive litigation. Increasingly K-12 public schools are little more than prisons where kids do busy work and if they're lucky the smart ones learn how to teach themselves and most of the rest pick up enough of the basics through repetition or osmosis. Don't expect the results to change until the system changes.
  - mathattack 15y ago
    Indeed, but I hate to believe taxes for the space money is well spent when the taxes for the school down the street isn't.
- johngalt 15y ago
  For schools; we've been turning the money dial up for decades and the results meter hasn't moved it's needle. No amount of cash solves "why should I learn this?". Figure there are 50million kids in public schools and we spend 12k a year per student. So if we spent $11.6k a year per student we could more than double NASA's budget. So a 4% school budget cut vs a 100% NASA budget increase. I honestly wonder what direction educational attainment would go if we made that trade. I wouldn't be surprised if it went up.
- waterlesscloud 15y ago
  What's the point of educating the populace if we aren't doing things like going to Mars? If we abandon grand visions, I honestly don't care if people are educated or not.
- angersock 15y ago
  Yes. Health care research is cute and all, but we don't really have a system that lets it benefit the vast majority of people, yeah? We are doing our damnedest to wall off the research that comes off of it, yeah? We are setting ourselves up for unrealistic expectations and a fantasy world where our loved ones never die, yeah? That's not worth spending money on. Education cost is not the point--other replies covered that better than I can. Solving world hunger? You mean, feeding people who can't feed themselves while we force our own poor into shitty lifestyles from eating junk food, yeah? Giving food to dictatorships in hopes that they, oh lawdy, don't develop nukes? Giving GM crops and their associated IP to fuckwads like Monsanto so that they can get a stranglehold on the food supply, yeah? Space is the least harmful of places we've tried to make policy.
trothamel 15y ago
(This is written from an American perspective, and reposted from elsewhere - but I think it fits.) For much of my life, when we spend money on space, we get not-space. For the money we spent on the X-30, X-33, X-34, and X-38, when Dan Goldin was NASA administrator, what did we get? Not-space. (At least the X-37 is up there spyingflying.) The orbital space plane program, the one that was Sean O'Keefe's thing - neat plans, more capsules than planes IIRC, but ultimately we got not-space from it. The Vision for Space Exploration, under Michael Griffin? Rocket designs that were approximately equivalent to throwing your astronauts into a paint mixer. A system about which the review panel said that "If they gave us the system on a silver platter, the first thing we'd have to do is cancel it, because we couldn't afford the ongoing costs." A lot of money, a launch pad rusting in the Florida weather, and a whole lot of not-space. And for all the money we spend on human spaceflight, we now send Astronauts up as passengers in Soyuz rockets. Now we're spending $18 billion dollars - figure subject to change, always upward - to build the SLS - the Senate Launch System. (Another estimate has it at $40B for development and the first 4 flights.) If all things go as planned, it will launch once every two years, launching an unmanned trip around the moon in 2017 and a manned trip to the moon in 2019. Schedule subject to change - always slipping. Does anyone thing that SLS has a chance of working? Or is it just going to become another not-space program? How about the replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb Space Telescope? In 1997, it was going to be launched in 2007, and it was going to have cost 500 million dollars. Now we've spent 3.5 billion on it, and it will launch in 2018. Maybe. That's a ton of money to spend on not-space - and it's money that's been taken away from the moderately successful bits of NASA, like the Mars program, which doesn't have a mission in it after 2013's MAVEN. I don't mind spending money on space. I like space. I've been following the MER rovers for nearly a decade. I think COTS and Commercial Crew are brilliant, and hope that they will continue to exist with a program structure that rewards results, rather than existence. Commercial space is the last best hope to get a domestic space capability. But times are tight. We're massively overspending as is - borrowing tons of money our grandchildren will still be paying back. So increased spending is far from free. Is it worth it? I say yes. Spend money on space. Where do we get that money? Let's stop spending it on not-space, like we have been.
- redthrowaway 15y ago
laserDinosaur 15y ago
It would be nice to have the video without the damn music so I can actually hear what he's saying :/
- ds206 15y ago
  The first 2 minutes is from this Daily Show interview: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-february-27-2012/neil-degrasse-tyson http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-february-27-2012/neil-...
  - laserDinosaur 15y ago
    Thankyou sir =)
- pavanky 15y ago
  http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=neil+degrasse+tyson&oq=neil+de&aq=0&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=593l1765l0l3092l7l7l0l1l1l0l114l399l5.1l6l0 http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=neil+degrasse+ty... See them. See them all!
  - vibrunazo 15y ago
    I would like to point that the word all isn't emphasized enough in that sentence.
maeon3 15y ago
It was harder for Columbus to reach the west and bring back treasures than it is for us to reach the asteroid belt and bring back exotic materials. What is missing is not technology (need is the mother of invention) but a reason to go. Was Columbus 100% sure his mission would be profitable? What if Columbus waited another 100 years for a safer option to cross the mysterious expanse? History would be much different.
- johngalt 15y ago
  Attitudes toward risk are a lot different now as well. No one would bat an eye at ships being lost at sea, or a ship returning with a quarter of her crew. It was considered inherent that any chance at exploration or glory would come with mortal danger. Our current attitudes towards exploration is more like the large corporation. Playing to avoid loss, rather than playing to win.
  - duck 15y ago
    How Much Is an Astronaut’s Life Worth? http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astronauts-life-worth http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astrona...
    - Jebus 15y ago
      Great article, thanks
  - cheez 15y ago
    You might enjoy this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_space.html http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_s...
- aero142 15y ago
  Huh? Did you just make this up? How can you possibly know the relative risk of those two things?
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georgieporgie 15y ago
I wonder, in a future where space exploration is minimal and performed by robots, and where non-war (by technicality) is waged by drones, who will the heroes be?
- 198d 15y ago
  The tounge-in-cheek response might be the engineers that build those robots and drones.
- angersock 15y ago
  unit tests the people who heroically sacrifice their sanity to write unit tests ( In all honesty, this is one of my biggest concerns about using robots for exploration and war. These are very human activities, and if we don't deign to use humans for them... well... why are we here? )
- sp332 15y ago
  Humanity doesn't really need war heroes. Edit: or the robots will be programmed with markov generators to tweet some stirring last words.
sjtgraham 15y ago
Wow, just wow. That is all I could think while watching that. Neil deGrasse Tyson is such a great orator. It wouldn't surprise me if he becomes President some day.
- nollidge 15y ago
  He's stated explicitly before that he has no interest in politics whatsoever.
  - sjtgraham 15y ago
    He sounds pretty fired up about this issue, which is one of the main reasons why people get into politics.
    - tricolon 15y ago
      He has stated explicitly that he sees himself as an educator. I agree with him. Politicians are, after all, people. Educating people is the best way to change how people think.
    - nollidge 15y ago
      From the horse's mouth: http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2011/08/21/if-i-were-president http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2011/08/21/if-i-... I agree with him. Politicians are a reflection of the electorate. One can have even more of a positive impact by educating and energizing the electorate than as one lone politician.
    - njharman 15y ago
      > He sounds pretty fired up about this issue, which is one of the main reasons why people get into politics. Am I the only so jaded to think that's comically naive? At least at the State+ level people (successfully) get into politics for power and money, period.
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EREFUNDO 15y ago
This is a re-post of an earlier comment but I think it's very applicable to this article: The Chinese explored the Middle East and Africa almost 100 years before the Europeans. Every expedition consisted of 300 ships, some as long as 400 feet with 9 mast and an armada crew totaling 28,000 men. After 30 years of doing it they realized that they were spending too much money on these grand expeditions. The succeeding emperor ended the program. The Europeans on the other hand would send out just a few ships and try to find ways for the expeditions to be profitable (Slaves, gold, land, colonies) in ways the Chinese never thought. These smaller European expeditions could not be stopped by one emperor because Europe was not a unified empire like China. The smaller European kingdoms also competed against each other. This not only made the expeditions sustainable but thrive for the next 500 years. Right now I think we are in China's situation 600 years ago. We stopped the moon landings for the same reason the Chinese stopped landing Eunuchs in Africa. Unless we find a way for these space programs to be profitable I don't see humans colonizing space anytime soon.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  I think the argument about dreams feeding the pipeline of scientists and technologists of the future is a sound one and speaks to the hearts of scientists and technologists everywhere. I know a robot is cheaper and safer than a manned spacecraft, but are we really willing to make our robots live our adventures while we sit on our couches watching TV? Space travel has to be profitable, of course. It also has to be cheap. Now think of the price tag of a single F-22. Or the colossal clusterfuck that the F-35 project became. Couldn't we persuade just a couple nations to dedicate the budget of a single aircraft carrier or nuclear submarine to help fund the dreams of the next generation instead?
  - larrydag 15y ago
    Robots make for great expedition R&D. They can gather a lot of information very cheaply compared to manned spaceflight. I'm not sure space travel has to be profitable. Certainly Christopher Columbus's voyage was not considered (by most people at the time) to be profitable. Yet economies of scale could definitely be taken into account. It is often said that the computing power of the Apollo missions to the moon were less than that of a TI calculator. It seems we should be able to have unmanned missions to the moon by private sector or even partially public funded. After all were sending DIY cameras into near space.
vibrunazo 15y ago
This makes me think of crowd-funded space exploration. Kickstarter is still far from mainstream and making million dollar projects. Petridish.org opens the possibility of tax-payers willingly donate a monthly value to science. Now imagine if all of these went mainstream with a celebrity like Neil Tyson as the front face of a project to help fund SpaceX? Viable?
- deleted 15y ago
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ChristianMarks 15y ago
The NASA remote sensing budget is being cut by 30%. That's very bad news for Earth Science and the validation of climate models, let alone for the exploration of space. Source: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/07/house-appropriators-propose-big-.html http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/07/house-appr...
temphn 15y ago
Great rhetoric by Tyson, but completely misses the point that innovation in space travel is now completely the domain of NewSpace companies like Armadillo Airspace, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic rather than governments. NASA no longer innovates. It's coasting on past glories. If a fraction of the billions spent on NASA were left untaxed in the hands of individuals like Carmack, Musk, Thiel, and Branson -- and allowed to wend their way towards NewSpace investments rather than wasted on NASA boondoggles -- we'd all be much better off. Also, it's not at all obvious that we want to keep focusing on manned missions, which Tyson mentions explicitly. You can iterate much more rapidly on unmanned drones as you need save nothing for the way back, and the costs of failure are far less. Tyson recognizes part of the human psychological factors at play (the motivation of wartime) but doesn't recognize that wanting humans in space instead of far more machines is emotional rather than practical right now. Get the costs of putting things into orbit down with machines, and humans will follow. But let's not put the cart before the horse.
j45 15y ago
It might be a foregone conclusion, but $42. On a side note, I think current and recent generations rarely look to space with the complete awe that say, generations in the 60's and 70's did. How can spacexy be brought back?
joering2 15y ago
it finished when i had wet eyes so I think it was well done. And facts are scary. From monetary point of view, bailout cost more than 50 years of NASA? two years military spending. Gosh, thats sad...
mkn 15y ago
I hate Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Not on a personal level, mind you. He's probably a nice guy to have beers with. But he's a shill for NASA. He's a good shill, but he's a shill, nonetheless. A little background. I'm old enough to have been "inspired" by the Space Shuttle Program near the point of its inception. Imagine a young mkn sitting down with a pencil and paper to work out how much it would cost to buy himself a ticket on the Space Shuttle at the promised $50/lb. I weighed 70 lbs. I knew it would be more than $3500 because I'd have to eat and breathe while I was up there. I wondered if I could go naked to save some cash. But still, it was a nice number. And then, the number changed. The promise went up to $100/lb. Fine. The math was easier. Oh, and the number of launches went from 26/year down to 12/year. Not quite the airline-style operations they had promised, but not bad. And then the price went to $500/lb. 3 or 4 launches per year. And then, the media just stopped talking about the costs and launch frequency, probably because it quit showing up in the press kits. Tyson complains that we don't dream about the future anymore. He's right. We don't. But he complains without the slightest hint of irony. The promise of NASA was that the costs would come down. The promise was that spaceflight would become routine and affordable. The promise tapped into the then-current emphasis on mobility in the American Dream. Tyson is right that we don't dream about the future anymore. But we don't dream about it because NASA has proven to us what the future is. The future is NASA, and the future is stagnation. We have all been "inspired" by NASA. We don't dream because we don't need to. We know. Tyson breathlessly opines about all the amazing things NASA could do with twice the budget. Missions to Mars! To those, I have this to say: Big fucking deal. The promise of NASA was never its "missions". The missions were a vehicle for the promise. The promise was ubiquitous space access. I'm going to see my cousin on the Moon. We're taking a year and seeing Mars. Sending some highly-selected and highly-trained spam in a can for some fahrt around a crater is not the promise. Sending you and me there for a fahrt around a crater is. Somehow or other, that part of the promise has slipped out of NASA enthusiasts memory. Long live NASA! All we have to do is pay twice as much! The imagery of the Shuttle and of the new capsule is especially offensive. It's the easiest thing in the world to verify that the Shuttle was the most expensive launch system ever conceived in the history of manned space flight. It is, as I've hinted above, the primary reason for the complete demoralization of the populace with regards to space flight. And it was promised to be so much better than that. The Orion capsule is all that is left of that disgraced launcher program, the one that retained the disgraced SRBs to placate Morton-Thiokol. NASA can't. That's my new slogan. Unlike other slogans, which are mainly inspirational, mine is intended to remind me of reality. Take any dream you have about space and phrase it as a question, and the answer is "NASA can't". Will we build orbiting habitats in space on a massive scale? NASA can't. Will we ever colonize the Moon or Mars? NASA can't. Will we ever be able to realistically dream of democratic access to space? NASA can't. Every time you hear Tyson speak, just remember: NASA can't. And it ain't for lack of funds. I wish Tyson would other shut the hell up or direct his energies and oratorical gifts at making NASA an agency worth supporting. But, he won't. He's a cheap shill, and he's just going to keep doing his shabby job.
ctdonath 15y ago
“After we stopped going to the moon, it all ended. We stopped dreaming.” Because we saw what it got us. All that money, effort, and enthusiasm got us a couple dozen guys on a dead rock for a few dozen hours. Adding a couple zeros to the budget improves the situation from grey to red rock. Beyond that, we soon get to what some writer (escaping me at the moment) noted: humans just can't comprehend interstellar distances, the vast effort required to achieve even mundane results. Too much cost for too little result. My hopes remain high, but my expectations are more content with what's happening here on Earth. At 44 I realize how short life is.
aboodman 15y ago
Is it just me or does 0.4% of the tax base on Nasa seem really reasonable. If I had had to guess, I would have put it way lower.
sbmassey 15y ago
Assuming that private enterprise isn't getting us into space fast enough, we will need a new cold war to get the world's governments fearful enough to throw money at the problem, and to demand solutions. Perhaps China will do the honors?
tomelders 15y ago
There's some rampant, blind and heart crumbling cynicism is going on in this thread. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too" Or we could just build websites, obsess over stuff that will be forgotten in a year and shit all over other peoples grand ideas.
Ras_ 15y ago
The other major frontier of exploration isn't faring any better: "More people have walked on the surface of the Moon than have visited the bottom of the Marianas Trench. We've even been to the Moon more recently than we have the very bottom of the sea." http://io9.com/5894566/james-cameron-says-the-current-state-of-ocean-exploration-is-piss-poor-hes-right?popular=true http://io9.com/5894566/james-cameron-says-the-current-state-...

184 points by jamesbritt 15y ago

I love the idea of supporting space science, ut in a deficit ridden economy, is this extra percent of spending more valuable than health care research, lowering the cost of education or solving world hunger? Before going to Mars I would like a decent school on my street.

DanBC 15y ago
There are other things where money was spent; in hindsight[1] it would have been better to spend that > $1Trillion[2] on space. And health. And etc. [1] Not just in hindsight, at the beginning for many people. [2] It feels odd to me to write trillion and actually mean trillion and not "some really big number".
kirubakaran 15y ago
Space exploration will inspire more children to become scientists and engineers. Space research grows the pie and hence you need not think that it is taking money from schools. Space research spending is rounding error compared to war spending anyway.
weavejester 15y ago
It might be more valuable than spending it on the US military, which has over 35 times the budget of NASA.
- whateverer 15y ago
  Right. Your choices are a) sending a bunch of monkeys in a very expensive and uncomfortable loft to space or b) invest in a multi billion dollar kitten killing machine. Not a false dichotomy at all. Seriously, there's tons of more pressing issues back here on Earth, ranging from real, social one like inequity and discrimination, technical/political ones like the ever growing piles of garbage all over the place, healthcare, climate change and mass extinctions, and say, taking care of that whole cycle of oppression and bloodshed that has been going on for a while now (not that it'll go away, but we're pretty fucking screwed if we don't come up with something which will leave most people content). None of those problems will go away if we send little men on tin cans to space, and in fact, I can think of very little problems that will be solved by that. We're a long way from escaping the mess which we have created here on Earth, and wherever we go we'll do it again, and that's being optimistic in saying that we will actually get a self-sustaining Homo Sapiens population off the planet before our shit catches up with us and we're actually forced to do nothing but deal with the consequences.
  - mathattack 15y ago
    I hate to say I agree with someone named Whateverer, but you hit it on the head. We have issues locally we need to solve. In 100 years we can still go to space. Same with 200 years. And we'll have tons of productivity improvements between now and then. But we don't have a public school system capable of producing scientists. All that said - perhaps... perhaps... Perhaps the minerals and compounds needed to survive as a species are elsewhere in our solar system.
    - rvkennedy 15y ago
      perhaps... Perhaps the minerals and compounds needed to survive as a species are elsewhere in our solar system. Not only that, but more than we could at this point imagine using in a long long time, and an inexhaustible supply of energy. I find it hard to believe that these resources wouldn't help us just a little with the seemingly intractable social problems. Those very often boil down to arguments over limited resources in the end. In fact, I can't think of a major world conflict or problem that isn't at its root about the allocation of resources, and it's all there for us, right above our heads.
InclinedPlane 15y ago
Much like manned spaceflight the problems of public schools in America is not one of funding. If you look at a graph of average inflation adjusted spending per student at public schools it's just a monotonically increasing line from the end of WWII until today, it just goes up, and up, and up. But does average student educational outcome match such graphs? Not in the least. The problem is that the incentives are all wrong and the money keeps getting funneled to the wrong people. The ratio of administrative staff to students has grown and grown. The biggest influence that active parents have had on schools over the past few decades has not been on increasing educational quality but on driving administrative policy through excessive litigation. Increasingly K-12 public schools are little more than prisons where kids do busy work and if they're lucky the smart ones learn how to teach themselves and most of the rest pick up enough of the basics through repetition or osmosis. Don't expect the results to change until the system changes.
- mathattack 15y ago
  Indeed, but I hate to believe taxes for the space money is well spent when the taxes for the school down the street isn't.
johngalt 15y ago
For schools; we've been turning the money dial up for decades and the results meter hasn't moved it's needle. No amount of cash solves "why should I learn this?". Figure there are 50million kids in public schools and we spend 12k a year per student. So if we spent $11.6k a year per student we could more than double NASA's budget. So a 4% school budget cut vs a 100% NASA budget increase. I honestly wonder what direction educational attainment would go if we made that trade. I wouldn't be surprised if it went up.
waterlesscloud 15y ago
What's the point of educating the populace if we aren't doing things like going to Mars? If we abandon grand visions, I honestly don't care if people are educated or not.
angersock 15y ago
Yes. Health care research is cute and all, but we don't really have a system that lets it benefit the vast majority of people, yeah? We are doing our damnedest to wall off the research that comes off of it, yeah? We are setting ourselves up for unrealistic expectations and a fantasy world where our loved ones never die, yeah? That's not worth spending money on. Education cost is not the point--other replies covered that better than I can. Solving world hunger? You mean, feeding people who can't feed themselves while we force our own poor into shitty lifestyles from eating junk food, yeah? Giving food to dictatorships in hopes that they, oh lawdy, don't develop nukes? Giving GM crops and their associated IP to fuckwads like Monsanto so that they can get a stranglehold on the food supply, yeah? Space is the least harmful of places we've tried to make policy.

trothamel 15y ago

(This is written from an American perspective, and reposted from elsewhere - but I think it fits.) For much of my life, when we spend money on space, we get not-space. For the money we spent on the X-30, X-33, X-34, and X-38, when Dan Goldin was NASA administrator, what did we get? Not-space. (At least the X-37 is up there spyingflying.) The orbital space plane program, the one that was Sean O'Keefe's thing - neat plans, more capsules than planes IIRC, but ultimately we got not-space from it. The Vision for Space Exploration, under Michael Griffin? Rocket designs that were approximately equivalent to throwing your astronauts into a paint mixer. A system about which the review panel said that "If they gave us the system on a silver platter, the first thing we'd have to do is cancel it, because we couldn't afford the ongoing costs." A lot of money, a launch pad rusting in the Florida weather, and a whole lot of not-space. And for all the money we spend on human spaceflight, we now send Astronauts up as passengers in Soyuz rockets. Now we're spending $18 billion dollars - figure subject to change, always upward - to build the SLS - the Senate Launch System. (Another estimate has it at $40B for development and the first 4 flights.) If all things go as planned, it will launch once every two years, launching an unmanned trip around the moon in 2017 and a manned trip to the moon in 2019. Schedule subject to change - always slipping. Does anyone thing that SLS has a chance of working? Or is it just going to become another not-space program? How about the replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb Space Telescope? In 1997, it was going to be launched in 2007, and it was going to have cost 500 million dollars. Now we've spent 3.5 billion on it, and it will launch in 2018. Maybe. That's a ton of money to spend on not-space - and it's money that's been taken away from the moderately successful bits of NASA, like the Mars program, which doesn't have a mission in it after 2013's MAVEN. I don't mind spending money on space. I like space. I've been following the MER rovers for nearly a decade. I think COTS and Commercial Crew are brilliant, and hope that they will continue to exist with a program structure that rewards results, rather than existence. Commercial space is the last best hope to get a domestic space capability. But times are tight. We're massively overspending as is - borrowing tons of money our grandchildren will still be paying back. So increased spending is far from free. Is it worth it? I say yes. Spend money on space. Where do we get that money? Let's stop spending it on not-space, like we have been.

redthrowaway 15y ago

laserDinosaur 15y ago

It would be nice to have the video without the damn music so I can actually hear what he's saying :/

ds206 15y ago
The first 2 minutes is from this Daily Show interview: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-february-27-2012/neil-degrasse-tyson http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-february-27-2012/neil-...
- laserDinosaur 15y ago
  Thankyou sir =)
pavanky 15y ago
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=neil+degrasse+tyson&oq=neil+de&aq=0&aqi=g10&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=593l1765l0l3092l7l7l0l1l1l0l114l399l5.1l6l0 http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=neil+degrasse+ty... See them. See them all!
- vibrunazo 15y ago
  I would like to point that the word all isn't emphasized enough in that sentence.

maeon3 15y ago

It was harder for Columbus to reach the west and bring back treasures than it is for us to reach the asteroid belt and bring back exotic materials. What is missing is not technology (need is the mother of invention) but a reason to go. Was Columbus 100% sure his mission would be profitable? What if Columbus waited another 100 years for a safer option to cross the mysterious expanse? History would be much different.

johngalt 15y ago
Attitudes toward risk are a lot different now as well. No one would bat an eye at ships being lost at sea, or a ship returning with a quarter of her crew. It was considered inherent that any chance at exploration or glory would come with mortal danger. Our current attitudes towards exploration is more like the large corporation. Playing to avoid loss, rather than playing to win.
- duck 15y ago
  How Much Is an Astronaut’s Life Worth? http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astronauts-life-worth http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astrona...
  - Jebus 15y ago
    Great article, thanks
- cheez 15y ago
  You might enjoy this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_space.html http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_s...
aero142 15y ago
Huh? Did you just make this up? How can you possibly know the relative risk of those two things?
- 15y ago

georgieporgie 15y ago

I wonder, in a future where space exploration is minimal and performed by robots, and where non-war (by technicality) is waged by drones, who will the heroes be?

198d 15y ago
The tounge-in-cheek response might be the engineers that build those robots and drones.
angersock 15y ago
unit tests the people who heroically sacrifice their sanity to write unit tests ( In all honesty, this is one of my biggest concerns about using robots for exploration and war. These are very human activities, and if we don't deign to use humans for them... well... why are we here? )
sp332 15y ago
Humanity doesn't really need war heroes. Edit: or the robots will be programmed with markov generators to tweet some stirring last words.

sjtgraham 15y ago

Wow, just wow. That is all I could think while watching that. Neil deGrasse Tyson is such a great orator. It wouldn't surprise me if he becomes President some day.

nollidge 15y ago
He's stated explicitly before that he has no interest in politics whatsoever.
- sjtgraham 15y ago
  He sounds pretty fired up about this issue, which is one of the main reasons why people get into politics.
  - tricolon 15y ago
    He has stated explicitly that he sees himself as an educator. I agree with him. Politicians are, after all, people. Educating people is the best way to change how people think.
  - nollidge 15y ago
    From the horse's mouth: http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2011/08/21/if-i-were-president http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2011/08/21/if-i-... I agree with him. Politicians are a reflection of the electorate. One can have even more of a positive impact by educating and energizing the electorate than as one lone politician.
  - njharman 15y ago
    > He sounds pretty fired up about this issue, which is one of the main reasons why people get into politics. Am I the only so jaded to think that's comically naive? At least at the State+ level people (successfully) get into politics for power and money, period.
- deleted 15y ago
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- 15y ago

EREFUNDO 15y ago

This is a re-post of an earlier comment but I think it's very applicable to this article: The Chinese explored the Middle East and Africa almost 100 years before the Europeans. Every expedition consisted of 300 ships, some as long as 400 feet with 9 mast and an armada crew totaling 28,000 men. After 30 years of doing it they realized that they were spending too much money on these grand expeditions. The succeeding emperor ended the program. The Europeans on the other hand would send out just a few ships and try to find ways for the expeditions to be profitable (Slaves, gold, land, colonies) in ways the Chinese never thought. These smaller European expeditions could not be stopped by one emperor because Europe was not a unified empire like China. The smaller European kingdoms also competed against each other. This not only made the expeditions sustainable but thrive for the next 500 years. Right now I think we are in China's situation 600 years ago. We stopped the moon landings for the same reason the Chinese stopped landing Eunuchs in Africa. Unless we find a way for these space programs to be profitable I don't see humans colonizing space anytime soon.

rbanffy 15y ago
I think the argument about dreams feeding the pipeline of scientists and technologists of the future is a sound one and speaks to the hearts of scientists and technologists everywhere. I know a robot is cheaper and safer than a manned spacecraft, but are we really willing to make our robots live our adventures while we sit on our couches watching TV? Space travel has to be profitable, of course. It also has to be cheap. Now think of the price tag of a single F-22. Or the colossal clusterfuck that the F-35 project became. Couldn't we persuade just a couple nations to dedicate the budget of a single aircraft carrier or nuclear submarine to help fund the dreams of the next generation instead?
- larrydag 15y ago
  Robots make for great expedition R&D. They can gather a lot of information very cheaply compared to manned spaceflight. I'm not sure space travel has to be profitable. Certainly Christopher Columbus's voyage was not considered (by most people at the time) to be profitable. Yet economies of scale could definitely be taken into account. It is often said that the computing power of the Apollo missions to the moon were less than that of a TI calculator. It seems we should be able to have unmanned missions to the moon by private sector or even partially public funded. After all were sending DIY cameras into near space.

vibrunazo 15y ago

This makes me think of crowd-funded space exploration. Kickstarter is still far from mainstream and making million dollar projects. Petridish.org opens the possibility of tax-payers willingly donate a monthly value to science. Now imagine if all of these went mainstream with a celebrity like Neil Tyson as the front face of a project to help fund SpaceX? Viable?

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ChristianMarks 15y ago

The NASA remote sensing budget is being cut by 30%. That's very bad news for Earth Science and the validation of climate models, let alone for the exploration of space. Source: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/07/house-appropriators-propose-big-.html http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/07/house-appr...

temphn 15y ago

Great rhetoric by Tyson, but completely misses the point that innovation in space travel is now completely the domain of NewSpace companies like Armadillo Airspace, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic rather than governments. NASA no longer innovates. It's coasting on past glories. If a fraction of the billions spent on NASA were left untaxed in the hands of individuals like Carmack, Musk, Thiel, and Branson -- and allowed to wend their way towards NewSpace investments rather than wasted on NASA boondoggles -- we'd all be much better off. Also, it's not at all obvious that we want to keep focusing on manned missions, which Tyson mentions explicitly. You can iterate much more rapidly on unmanned drones as you need save nothing for the way back, and the costs of failure are far less. Tyson recognizes part of the human psychological factors at play (the motivation of wartime) but doesn't recognize that wanting humans in space instead of far more machines is emotional rather than practical right now. Get the costs of putting things into orbit down with machines, and humans will follow. But let's not put the cart before the horse.

j45 15y ago

It might be a foregone conclusion, but $42. On a side note, I think current and recent generations rarely look to space with the complete awe that say, generations in the 60's and 70's did. How can spacexy be brought back?

joering2 15y ago

it finished when i had wet eyes so I think it was well done. And facts are scary. From monetary point of view, bailout cost more than 50 years of NASA? two years military spending. Gosh, thats sad...

mkn 15y ago

I hate Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Not on a personal level, mind you. He's probably a nice guy to have beers with. But he's a shill for NASA. He's a good shill, but he's a shill, nonetheless. A little background. I'm old enough to have been "inspired" by the Space Shuttle Program near the point of its inception. Imagine a young mkn sitting down with a pencil and paper to work out how much it would cost to buy himself a ticket on the Space Shuttle at the promised $50/lb. I weighed 70 lbs. I knew it would be more than $3500 because I'd have to eat and breathe while I was up there. I wondered if I could go naked to save some cash. But still, it was a nice number. And then, the number changed. The promise went up to $100/lb. Fine. The math was easier. Oh, and the number of launches went from 26/year down to 12/year. Not quite the airline-style operations they had promised, but not bad. And then the price went to $500/lb. 3 or 4 launches per year. And then, the media just stopped talking about the costs and launch frequency, probably because it quit showing up in the press kits. Tyson complains that we don't dream about the future anymore. He's right. We don't. But he complains without the slightest hint of irony. The promise of NASA was that the costs would come down. The promise was that spaceflight would become routine and affordable. The promise tapped into the then-current emphasis on mobility in the American Dream. Tyson is right that we don't dream about the future anymore. But we don't dream about it because NASA has proven to us what the future is. The future is NASA, and the future is stagnation. We have all been "inspired" by NASA. We don't dream because we don't need to. We know. Tyson breathlessly opines about all the amazing things NASA could do with twice the budget. Missions to Mars! To those, I have this to say: Big fucking deal. The promise of NASA was never its "missions". The missions were a vehicle for the promise. The promise was ubiquitous space access. I'm going to see my cousin on the Moon. We're taking a year and seeing Mars. Sending some highly-selected and highly-trained spam in a can for some fahrt around a crater is not the promise. Sending you and me there for a fahrt around a crater is. Somehow or other, that part of the promise has slipped out of NASA enthusiasts memory. Long live NASA! All we have to do is pay twice as much! The imagery of the Shuttle and of the new capsule is especially offensive. It's the easiest thing in the world to verify that the Shuttle was the most expensive launch system ever conceived in the history of manned space flight. It is, as I've hinted above, the primary reason for the complete demoralization of the populace with regards to space flight. And it was promised to be so much better than that. The Orion capsule is all that is left of that disgraced launcher program, the one that retained the disgraced SRBs to placate Morton-Thiokol. NASA can't. That's my new slogan. Unlike other slogans, which are mainly inspirational, mine is intended to remind me of reality. Take any dream you have about space and phrase it as a question, and the answer is "NASA can't". Will we build orbiting habitats in space on a massive scale? NASA can't. Will we ever colonize the Moon or Mars? NASA can't. Will we ever be able to realistically dream of democratic access to space? NASA can't. Every time you hear Tyson speak, just remember: NASA can't. And it ain't for lack of funds. I wish Tyson would other shut the hell up or direct his energies and oratorical gifts at making NASA an agency worth supporting. But, he won't. He's a cheap shill, and he's just going to keep doing his shabby job.

ctdonath 15y ago

“After we stopped going to the moon, it all ended. We stopped dreaming.” Because we saw what it got us. All that money, effort, and enthusiasm got us a couple dozen guys on a dead rock for a few dozen hours. Adding a couple zeros to the budget improves the situation from grey to red rock. Beyond that, we soon get to what some writer (escaping me at the moment) noted: humans just can't comprehend interstellar distances, the vast effort required to achieve even mundane results. Too much cost for too little result. My hopes remain high, but my expectations are more content with what's happening here on Earth. At 44 I realize how short life is.

aboodman 15y ago

Is it just me or does 0.4% of the tax base on Nasa seem really reasonable. If I had had to guess, I would have put it way lower.

sbmassey 15y ago

Assuming that private enterprise isn't getting us into space fast enough, we will need a new cold war to get the world's governments fearful enough to throw money at the problem, and to demand solutions. Perhaps China will do the honors?

tomelders 15y ago

There's some rampant, blind and heart crumbling cynicism is going on in this thread. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too" Or we could just build websites, obsess over stuff that will be forgotten in a year and shit all over other peoples grand ideas.

Ras_ 15y ago

The other major frontier of exploration isn't faring any better: "More people have walked on the surface of the Moon than have visited the bottom of the Marianas Trench. We've even been to the Moon more recently than we have the very bottom of the sea." http://io9.com/5894566/james-cameron-says-the-current-state-of-ocean-exploration-is-piss-poor-hes-right?popular=true http://io9.com/5894566/james-cameron-says-the-current-state-...