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Comment by scotchmi_st | Hacker News Reader

The thing that irritates me more than anything about the argument that sending people to space is a bad idea is the unique bias people have against space technologies.

No-one ever says "We spend billions on Football; let's spend it on poor people instead", or "We spend billions on the music and film industries, let's shut those down and instead tax everyone for the average entertainment spend and send the proceeds to developing nations". Or defense for that matter.

Hell, you hardly even hear people say that about other, dubiously cost-effective science projects like the LHC.

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The difference is people voluntarily pay for football tickets and TV/online subscriptions. Same with music. They are self sustaining industries.

Experimental space flight is coming directly from tax payers and public funding. I still think it’s a worthy use of public funds because we get so much out of it that is intangible while supporting both scientific research and some of the most advanced R&D work on the planet (which is fed back into the economy in many ways).

But I still think it’s healthy for people to question it when their local day-to-day problems seem so much bigger than the universes, which is abstract and studied by academics and advanced private industry who aren’t their working class neighbours. Which is a big reason why we have elected officials to make balanced policy.

“They are self sustaining industries.”

So, you don’t know about all the subsidies for stadiums, etc?

https://money.cnn.com/2015/01/30/news/companies/nfl-taxpayer...

People complain about stadium subsidies all the time. I’d presume the amount of people who complain about them would be somewhat proportional to the amount of people who know they exist.

I am very much against the subsidies for sports but (being from football country) there are many secondary effects why countries support it. From better population health to higher patriotism (international matches are only time people see the flag and anthem) and even crime rate. Its good for kids to have heroes/role models and sport heroes are usually the ones kids prefer.

In the USSR the cosmonauts were heroes.

Football isn't. We do spend billions paying for stadiums, and the infrastructure to allow people to drive to them.

> Experimental space flight is coming directly from tax payers and public funding.

Oh the irony.

Indian is giving tax, tax is getting spent on space flight, the said Indian is getting pumped.

Finger wagging by NYTimes.

> No-one ever says "We spend billions on Football; let's spend it on poor people instead"

That one is said constantly (at least in the US). It comes up as a matter of routine as it pertains to the extremely high salaries that professional athletes get paid and with regard to the construction of new stadiums (which often cost a billion dollars or more now, are frequently taxpayer subsidized, and are often replacing functional 30 year old stadiums).

The top 500 NBA, NFL and MLB players earn more in salary than the CEOs of the S&P 500. The MLB payroll is $4 billion for ~750 players. Just the top 30 players in the NBA are earning one billion dollars per year combined. NBA teams are spending near $4 billion per year on salaries for ~450 players, or around $8 to $9 million per player. The 32 NFL teams are spending nearly $6 billion per year.

Between the NBA, NFL and MLB, there is around $13 to $14 billion in salaries.

Well the obvious difference is public vs private spending. People do complain about public funding for stadiums.

I agree generally (when the two are entirely separated), however on the actual context the interesting thing about so much taxpayer subsidization for stadiums in the US, is that it means the entire thing becomes partially taxpayer subsidized including player salaries. The players often can earn so much in part because the stadiums generate so much (varies depending on the league and TV contracts, etc). Taxpayer funds have directly & persistently assisted, decade after decade, in the sports leagues being built up financially. I think cumulatively it is to such an extent that you could never say there is such a thing as wholly private spending in any of the major US sports leagues (I realize this varies country to country).

I did mention Defense and other science projects. 2 things that are mostly publically funded, although morally I don't see where the difference lies. If you believe in a kind of Peter Singer redistribution of wealth then why stop at public money.

But I'm willing to bet that if SpaceX or whoever ever do become fully self-sustaining, a large proportion of people will continue to view space technology as frivolous and unnecessary toys for rich people, instead of valuable research and development that helps everyone.

I think it really depends on who you ask, so I don’t think you can generalize how people feel about this.

As for myself, I’d love to see space tech thriving in India.

But all of the extremely poor people I encountered during my time in India, I can’t imagine that they would be pushing for this or even think about it beyond their daily struggles.

> No-one ever says "We spend billions on Football; let's spend it on poor people instead", or "We spend billions on the music and film industries, let's shut those down and instead tax everyone for the average entertainment spend and send the proceeds to developing nations". Or defense for that matter.

People say both quite a lot. Well, in case of the more general "industry" it's more like "let's roll back the spending quite a lot, except defense, shut that one down".

People say that all the time (we could take all that money from X and invest in Y). It's called a false dichotomy.

It’s a convenient intellectual term for us, but if you ask the guy who is starving then he would likely disagree with you.

Why is it false?

I do think human spaceflight is a bad idea for now, but Chandrayaan-2 is a robotic mission.

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