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Why do people always pass judgment on spending on things they don't agree with as if the money is destroyed. It's not like they pile all the cash onto the rocke

• donw 12y ago
  Exactly. Projects like this generate huge amounts of value for a country -- not only because they help to push money around the economy, in terms of salaries and invoices paid to rocket-building companies -- but also in terms of the skills gained by everybody that works on the project, as well as the international capital of being a spacefaring country. Right now, launching satellites in the US is a pain in the ass, thanks to the combination of ITER[1] and the lack of a replacement for the shuttle. If India can become a launch destination for US companies looking to throw birds into orbit, that's big. Doubly so because it's not like they don't have plenty of engineers. Hell, this might be the case already, and I just don't know. [1] okay, now EAR, but still.
  • jonwachob91 12y ago
    The shuttle was never primarily used to send Satellites into space... It was used primarily for maned missions. The Atlas V is the current standard for putting satellites into space. Sierra Nevada Corporation puts a satellite into orbit almost once a week. The pain you speak of is non existent.
    • leoedin 12y ago
      > The pain you speak of is non existent. That's simply untrue. Access to launchers is the bottleneck to satellite development. Large institutional customers have access to space, but almost nobody else does. The commercial satellite industry has been shaped by the shortage of launchers, with satellites designed to be launched infrequently with long design lives. As a result everything is tremendously expensive. This is changing slowly with the advent of SpaceX and the develoment of launchers by other countries. There's no reason launches can't be an order of magnitude cheaper. The fuel cost is actually a minimal part of the cost of a rocket system. I work in the space business. Getting access to a suitable launcher for smaller lower priority projects is hard.
      • Retric 12y ago
        That's completely untrue. At several points rodket production has been ramped down because demand was so low. The real issue is getting mass to orbit is stupid expencive. So, minimizing how much stuff needs to be in orbit is a huge priority. At the same time it takes little effort to give satilites a fairly long lifespan because solar power is abundant and most orbits are stable. PS: In the end there is a fairly small list of things satilites can do, they can measure things, relay information, or act as a beacon. Useful, but we don't exactly need 10 independent world wide GPS platforms.
      • TeMPOraL 12y ago
        > with satellites designed to be launched infrequently with long design lives That's good and let's hope it doesn't change soon. We're already risking Kessler syndrome[0], and allowing any poor schmuck to launch throwaway satellites as a way to earn money is a huge, global tragedy of commons waiting to happen. [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
        • nickik 12y ago
          Nowdays you can just launch anything, you have to prove that befor it dies you can fly it out to another orbit or burn it.
          • TeMPOraL 12y ago
            But it still requires enough money that people won't be launching spacecraft equivalents of leaflets, i.e. worthless trash that is an artefact of fierce competition.
      • Solarsail 12y ago
        Doesn't this assume that SpaceX will succeed at reducing launch costs? If you look at volume, I don't see what you're getting at here. Almost nobody except for maybe Ariane V is operating at capacity. Delta IV tried selling commercially for years, they've yet to have one sale. Torus (I) and Athena were never exactly booked full. A point I believe Antonio Elias made a couple years ago (I quite him a lot...) was that the satellite market is currently quite inelastic. Both when Russian launchers became available to the west, and with cheap Chinese launchers hit the market, global launch rates didn't really increase. Clients just moved around, and pocketed the difference.
  • vermontdevil 12y ago
    What is EAR?
    • JumpCrisscross 12y ago
      Export Administration Regulations (EAR). While the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) contains the U.S. Munitions List, EAR contains a Commerce Control List, which includes dual-use technologies. Both require registration with the U.S. Department of State's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls.
  • tcheard 12y ago
    Do you mean ITAR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_Regulations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_R...)?
    • donw 12y ago
      Ah, yes. Brain-keyboard interface appears to be a bit wonky today.
  • innguest 12y ago
    > Projects like this generate huge amounts of value for a country Wow, I'm interested. Let's hear them! > they help to push money around the economy (worker salaries and equipment invoices) But that already happens with any new enterprise. Any new company created helps push money around through employee salaries and equipment invoices. What's special about a space mission in this regard? > but also in terms of the skills gained by everybody that works on the project But that already happens naturally in the free market. We have an explosion of tech jobs now that are increasing everyone's skills. It's almost a given now that an employee must be computer literate. Advances in technology have required that people have more skills. What's special about a space mission in this regard? > as well as the international capital of being a spacefaring country A.k.a. bragging rights. Do you really think international investors care if a country is throwing rockets when deciding to invest in that country? That they are that frivolous?
• tn13 12y ago
  On top of that ISRO is a profit making organization [1]. ISRO regularly launches satellites for other countries and makes money in the process. ISRO's expertise is also helpful to advance India's defense capabilities which could have otherwise remained hostage to USA's Military Industrial Complex. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antrix_Corporation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antrix_Corporation
  • hangonhn 12y ago
    The US doesn't really supply weapons to India. India develops it domestically, collaborates with Russia, or buys it from Russia.
• SamReidHughes 12y ago
  > A large proportion of the expense of this mission goes to paying the wages of domestic scientists and engineers in India. This money will in turn get taxed and spent by the recipients and pumped back into the local economy. This is a completely nonsensical line of reasoning, that's why. They're still paying folks to do ostensibly wasteful activities, and you're not going to successfully counter that with your perpetual motion economics.
  • skybrian 12y ago
    Well, it's not completely nonsensical since economics isn't anything like physics. More spending stimulates the economy regardless of how the results are used. (Hence the jokes about dropping money from helicopters, or burying money for people to dig up.)
  • tjradcliffe 12y ago
    "Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day. Train someone in rocket science and they'll be able to create wonders." This is the logic of "useless" expenditures on space programs, and it is not some theoretical claim, but one that has been borne out many times in the US and elsewhere. This ground has been covered so many times in the past fifty years it isn't clear why anyone still believes that investment in space exploration is not a wise way to spend a modest fraction of taxpayer's money.
  • HCIdivision17 12y ago
    It's sort of astonishing to call it perpetual motion, when there really is an enormous multiplier at play. Money is not like mass: it can be created and destroyed; one of the primary roles of central banks is to create and destroy money to stabilize the economy. Moreover, 'zizee is talking about something even more powerful. Space programs can act as huge multipliers on an economy. A country's economy is sort of a closed system, but that doesn't mean it can't undergo a multitude of phase changes that free up resources after spending money (even waste fully). Astonishing amounts of infrastructure is needed to support a space program, and a lot of it translates to other industries well. Just as a plant opening in a town may only directly employ a few hundred people, the support infrastructure - from welding shops to hardware suppliers to diners - is huge. Many thousands will be affected by those few hundred workers. A US example: a plant engineer goes out to lunch. Their salary has already been taxed through withheld federal payroll taxes. At the diner, a 10 buck blue plate special is ordered, and a tip left. The town has a tax on prepared dishes, which is added, and the wait staff will have their wages (and possibly tips) taxed - a wage which some portion of which is was from the lunch. That lunch also goes to support a local farmers group and a national cattle company. And so on; the piece gets smaller and smaller as it splits and redistributes through the local and national economy (and these days likely global). At some point, that money is spent. But there's no zero sum here. Hopefully, at every step of the redistribution, at every split, some wealth was generated. A service was performed where it wouldn't have without some money. Some taxes were collected and put back into infrastructure which added a new light to the two-lane Main Street making it safer and faster for trucks to go through, a state grant to the local colleges, and a federal appropriation bill that supports local green farmer groups. The light makes more business possible on the far end of town, and drives down the plant's shipping costs a little, leading to a buck fifty more on the quarterly bonus the laborer a got later that year. And I'm leaving the other two alone, as this gets out of hand fast. At some positive, non-zero rate, the economy very slightly accelerated. A decade later, two more plants from other industries are opening. The town is small, but has been friendly to industry. The first plant has some skilled labor that is sorely needed for these plants, and a few leave for slightly higher wages. The old plant has an established reputation in the town, and eagerly hires some replacement twenty-something's, both for their cheaper cost to stay competitive and to train fresh minds (to correct what they learned from the first ten years of mistakes). Those skilled workers who got hired for a little more money, just for their exposure to the industry and a few skills picked up applicable to the new plants? They are going to get a blue plate special, but this time with pie. That could yield an extra buck or two to the diner - a buck or two that would never have been bought if the workers didn't get the raise from the minor skills gained from the plant that hired a couple hundred people ten years ago. Space is like that, but with the accelerator to the floor. Technology from space programs infuse industry across the board, and require skilled labor from every level: from rocket scientist engineers to the guy painstakingly polishing the special steel alloys in a clean room. And they're all becoming slowly more valuable as a result, and they'll earn higher wages, eventually. And that money, gained from that wealth in knowledge and skill, generates more wealth - and eventually money. Keep that up for long enough, and you've got enough skilled people to keep an economy running indefinitely. Which I suppose detracts from my initial statement: it sorta is a perpetual motion machine. Bootstrap it well, and the system will, in fact, continue to grow. Economies are big, governments are big, and they're only closed systems if you insist on zooming in and putting dotted lines around only money flow. Amendment: contrast this perhaps with the Superconducting Super Collider. A boondoggle of there ever was one, many thousands were hired for no appreciable result, many hundreds of millions of dollars were literally sunk into a super high tech [partial] ring in the ground, and millions in equipment was manufactured and purchased. And yet, foolish as it turned out to be, it still payed many thousands a wage for a few years, fueling nearby industries with displaced highly skilled laborers now without a job, and apparently local wineries can make use of the stupefyingly expensive tunnels. All the while, the boondoggle pumped money into the hands of people who spent it, who then went on to spend what they received, all of which is getting taxed over and over. Some of that money absolutely had to end back up with the government, just as some of the air you breath was likely also breathed by any arbitrary other human. Even wasteful, such an endeavor was at least useful for it's multiplier effect. (Personally I would have loved to work on the SSC and think it was a shame to kill it, but holy geez it cost a lot - but at least can learn from a cool tech who tested components in an EM anechoic chamber, which inspired a trick I've used to help make windows slightly more reliably energy efficient. Side effects.)
• pravda 12y ago
  >A large proportion of the expense of this mission goes to paying the wages of domestic scientists and engineers in India. >This money will in turn get taxed and spent by the recipients and pumped back into the local economy. Your fallacy is... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
  • gamblor956 12y ago
    The broken window fallacy is that of breaking things and repairing/rebuilding them to generate economic activity, i.e., an endless cycle. The OP is arguing that this mission creates new economic assets and activities that expand India's economic base.
    • rz2k 12y ago
      In fact it is a similar situation if you believe that the mission itself does not produce sufficient value. The salaries are not merely money being cycled around in the economy if the labor being paid for results in the scientists not having time or inclination to produce other labor. Furthermore, it is likely that the resources launched off of the planet could have been used for something else. Whether or not it is equivalent to the broken window fallacy really does depend on subjective assessments of the value produced by the missions. However, it is also worth noting that even the broken window fallacy is not some universal law, and relies on its own assumptions. In certain market failure conditions destroying something and fixing it as a mechanism for increasing the velocity of money could have a net benefit. Although it is very useful to distinguish between the real economy and money transactions as though money is an abstraction for resources being traded around, the best policies also acknowledge the existence of money, as well as friction in the economy.
      • HCIdivision17 12y ago
        I think you're spot on here. And reading `tn13's comment [0], I think it's clear their goal is to produce real, tangible value with their space program. There's an enormous amount of waste in developing an industry, and I would just as soon write off a Mars mission as part of that. (After all, if you want credibility for your satellite launch operations, safely hitting Mars is a pretty good indicator!) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8364792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8364792
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• Arjuna 12y ago
  "Why do people always pass judgment [...]" I wonder this as well. I would like to share one story and one HN comment that I think are both eloquent and highly relevant to the discussion: Why Explore Space? http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html Who Saves Lives? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025495 * * * I commented in an earlier story today, but I think this mission will serve to kindle a fire in young people, stoking their interests in technology, science, orbital mechanics, etc... particularly in India, but will hopefully resonate throughout the world. In the broader picture, this mission represents the seeds of inspiration being planted for a future generation. Imagine the scientists and engineers that this event will bring forth and blossom.
• gorekee 12y ago
  The question is: will the society as a whole benefit more from money spent by scientists and engineers or from a better health and education system. I think this is a "win win win" situation for a specific range of wealthy people and not the society at all.
  • Shivetya 12y ago
    quite a bit of India's problems are culture based. There was big to do about building toilets all across India in an effort to improve sanitation and health. Guess what, people would not use them because going to the bathroom in town was taboo. They would walk past the new toilet facility and use the woods.
    • bushido 12y ago
      Please correct me if I am wrong. Wasn't there a cost associated with using these washrooms? I recall reading a study that surveyed people and found: a. The primary target market found the cost to high b. The primary market who had always used the woods were embarrassed of not knowing how to "use" the facilities and embarrassed to ask anyone about it. c. There were some free locations, that were filthy.
      • roywiggins 12y ago
        Outdoor defecation is a huge problem in India. It's very much a cultural thing, though obviously access to attractive facilities is a huge problem too. http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21607837-fixing-dreadful-sanitation-india-requires-not-just-building-lavatories-also-changing http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21607837-fixing-dreadful-... > Evidence is growing that India must urgently correct its cultural practices, though it is sensitive to say so. Studies of India’s population show how since at least the 1960s child mortality rates have consistently been higher in Hindu families than Muslim ones—though Muslims typically are poorer, less educated and have less access to clean water
        • known 12y ago
• innguest 12y ago
  - Everything the government does is more expensive than that same thing done by the free market (this is by definition, as the government creates bureaucracy around each of its endeavors) - Is the Mars mission the best allocation of those resources right now? - Could this money generate more wealth, or the same wealth faster, if it were allocated elsewhere? (for instance, savings generating higher interest rates and more small business loans) I can't understand how people think these programs are a good idea. I'm not against exploring Mars, mind you, and I think it's a good idea. But what we have to do is create incentives to encourage entrepreneurs to come up with ideas.
  • TeMPOraL 12y ago
    > Everything the government does is more expensive than that same thing done by the free market (this is by definition, as the government creates bureaucracy around each of its endeavors) This is stupid and definitely not true by definition. Free market is full of zero-sum games (like advertising) that waste resources and government can be significantly cheaper by the sole virtue of not having to compete with anyone. Even if free market is often better in practice, that observation is far from allowing for a general declarative statement like yours. > I can't understand how people think these programs are a good idea. (...) But what we have to do is create incentives to encourage entrepreneurs to come up with ideas. Because they provide hard to quantify mid-to-long-term benefits, and little profits short-term, which is the exact blind spot of entrepreneurs. Look, capitalistic economy is a greedy optimization algorithm (with the computer-science connotations of the word greedy); if something isn't immediately profitable, it won't be done, period, no matter the long-term benefits. People like Elon Musk do space in spite of free market, not thanks to it - he had a dream and enough money to push cheap rockets down the market's throat whether it wanted them or not.
    • nickik 12y ago
      I generally agree with your post. However, > if something isn't immediately profitable, it won't be done, period, no matter the long-term benefits. This is not true. Many companys make huge amount of long term investments that will not be profitable for a while. Companys that fail to to do these kind of things will have long term problems when the market changes and they have nothing new to offer. > People like Elon Musk do space in spite of free market, not thanks to it - he had a dream and enough money to push cheap rockets down the market's throat whether it wanted them or not. This is also a strange phrasing. Musk could not do what he does without market demand for his product, he has lots of money but not enougth to fully devlop everything he wants without profit. He might not have started the project to make space flight cheaper, but thats the effect the market cares about and thats why its a substainable project. Space flight is also very special because regulation are way beyond what you normally face. Goverments around the world are not to friendly to people building these kinds of rockets. SpaceX for example only has americans working there because of these regulations.
• nickik 12y ago
  I dont agree, this is economly false. Im not particularly against investing in space stuff. > Let's just forget for a moment that valuable skills and infrastructure are being created for India This does not take into account what the money would have done otherwise. Since we can not know what the money otherwise would have been spent on its hard or impossilble to say it it is better for india. > A large proportion of the expense of this mission goes to paying the wages of domestic scientists and engineers in India. The money would alternativly also have been spent on thing bought in india, also gone into the pockets of shops and other things. This money would also have been taxed, just the same as it is now. You are completly ignoring the counterfactual, you only look at the things that did happen, and not at the things that did not happen because of this. So its not a win win win. It might be a win win lost. Or maybe a win lost lost. Again, im not against spending on space programmes, but your economic analysis is completly flawed. People who want taxes to build sport statums make much the same case and also ignore the counterfactual. The spending of taxes should be done on the merits of the direct effects you want to achive and not some nebulus things that money will do later.
  • eric_cc 12y ago
    While I can see what you're saying on an economic level, I can think of very few things more important than space on an objective level. On a personal level, I can think of nothing more important than space.
    • innguest 12y ago
      How does your here-unjustified opinion help move the discussion? I don't mean to be rude, but so what that you think this or that is more important? The discussion should be based on the merits of each investment, not eric_cc's list of most important things on an objective level. Get off your high horse.
    • dragonwriter 12y ago
      > I can think of very few things more important than space on an objective level. "Important", unqualified by a specific concrete, objectively measurable goal that thing are judged by importance to, is inherently subjective.
• nickik 12y ago
  I dont agree, this is economly false. Im not particularly against investing in space stuff. > Let's just forget for a moment that valuable skills and infrastructure are being created for India This does not take into account what the money would have done otherwise. Since we can not know what the money otherwise would have been spent on its hard or impossilble to say it it is better for india. > A large proportion of the expense of this mission goes to paying the wages of domestic scientists and engineers in India. The money would alternativly also have been spent on thing bought in india, also gone into the pockets of shops and other things. This money would also have been taxed, just the same as it is now. You are completly ignoring the counterfactual, you only look at the things that did happen, and not at the things that did not happen because of this. So its not a win win win. It might be a win win lost. Or maybe a win lost lost. Again, im not against spending on space programmes, but your economic analysis is completly flawed. People who want taxes to build sport statums make much the same case and also ignore the counterfactual. The spending of taxes should be done on the merits of the direct effects you want to achive and not some nebulus things that money will do later.
• innguest 12y ago
  You misunderstand money. Step by step: - Government charges people taxes. - Government uses tax money to pay scientists and equipment. - Government makes tax-over-tax profits by charging taxes again on scientists salaries (which were already paid with tax money, but now will be charged tax again) and on equipment purchases (sales tax will be charged on equipment that is already being bought with tax money). Everything the scientists spend their income on will also be taxed again. This is just a ruse so government makes more money. It fools people every time.