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Comment by yummypaint | Hacker News Reader

Going to the moon is not a good value proposition as far as science per dollar. SpaceX and other players only care about supporting science to the extent it makes them money. In my opinion NASA never had the budget for a moon mission anyway. Scrapping space telescopes and other far more useful instruments to pull a publicity stunt would be irresponsible. NASA is still the only party willing to support the less glamorous but more important work. This division of labor is good. Companies can do things that make good marketing material and NASA can continue managing the science that motivates the entire excercise in the first place.

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I think if SpaceX only cared about things to the extent it makes them money, they would have picked a simpler business and made a lot more money by now.

I agree with you about science-per-dollar, but I don't think that was ever the criteria for large projects like this (or ISS). Sometimes the payoff is in learning to do the next hard thing, building the next generation of tools, etc.

You're just ignoring how fucking insanely out of this world rich are SpaceX shareholders going to be in 30 years. Space mining and manufacturing at scale will turn the world on its head, and Musk is the king of scaling technology. The first mover advantage of having thousands of rocketships with a convenient refuel stop and human settlement mid-trip to the asteroid belt is gigantic. Do you think he's really trying to bore tunnels under Las Vegas or wherever? Nah, that boring machine is going to be stuck to the nose of a Starship. SpaceX will be the CHOAM and Spacing Guild of our age.

Yeah, Musk could've made money faster. He also could've simply retired after PayPal. Evidently he's not a person who'd do that.

Indeed SpaceX is basically controlled by Musk ("Owner Elon Musk Trust (54% equity; 78% voting control") and he's said he's kept it private basically so he can work on making humanity multiplanetary without having to answer to shareholders as to whether that increases shareholder value or not.

I think if there's money to be made, there's a business that will pop up to fill that niche.

The missing part here is that there needs to be enough money to be made to offset the risk and startup costs to justify upfront investment.

The last decades have been dominated by tech giants building mostly software, and this has set the bar for risk/expectations when ideas are competing for dollars.

It is not at all obvious to me that a hugely expensive and insanely high risk venture such as putting humans on the moon would magically materialize as a product of a hypothetical free market in today's world.

Moonshots require risks and rewards shared by larger society. It would be impossible, for example, for NASA to capture the complete value of technology developed to go to the moon. However, the body of knowledge filtering out into society at large justifies NASAs continued funding (that and jobs in key states /s).

It would be hard to justify that SpaceX was a rational business venture without hindsight. And many emoyees who work for SpaceX are known to have made economic tradeoffs. There is definitely something beyond "free market" to the story.

> SpaceX and other players only care about supporting science to the extent it makes them money.

In some ways true, but it's hard for me to accept they're a cold, calculating money-grubber despite the common refrain that corporations only exist to make money. SpaceX will gain an absolute massive amount of public goodwill by bringing humans back to another celestial body after 50+ years. That goodwill pays off over the long term in money terms.

A corporation exists to do whatever its owners wish to do with it. It is only true that "corporations only exist to make money" when that's the sole or primary wish of their owners. Musk owns over 50% of SpaceX equity (and over 70% of voting rights), and it is pretty clear his primary motivation is not simply "make as much money as possible". On the contrary, I think his primary motivation with SpaceX is to try to make the science fiction stories he read as a kid come (partially) true, and to try to leave his mark on human history. Making money is just a means to that end, not the end-in-itself.

(The remainder of SpaceX is owned by investment funds, Google, etc, whose motivation is much closer to just "make money".)

> That goodwill pays off over the long term in money terms.

no it doesn't. Goodwill merely keeps the company in the limelight, and if they sell some goods/services, this goodwill is "free" marketing. Good will doesn't pay debts nor obligations.

> it's hard for me to accept they're a cold, calculating money-grubber

better accept it, and the sooner, the better!

It's not about science. Just like the ISS it's about engineering. It's about developing space infrastructure to enable both future science and future space migration/exploration.

The goal of NASA, or spaceflight at all, has never been to maximize science per dollar. That is a new invented benchmark.

The goal was, and IMO still is, to put ourselves in space.

Science/$ is something of a "new invented benchmark", but I think it's useful to a point.

I fully agree that "put ourselves in space" was the prime driver for NASA up through Apollo, and has certainly played a role since, but NASA as a driver of scientific discovery has become, I think, the main NASA thing.

"Science" isn't even a fungible unit, so you can't even say "science/$". Even a specific type of science, say "Earth Science", isn't even a fungible unit. So it doesn't make much sense to talk about "Science/$".

This can be true when trying to compare science A against science B. However, there is no controversy when comparing a program designed to deliver an instrument package with one designed to build a brand.

Also, there are frameworks for evaluating science output per dollar. This is what funding agencies do when creating and managing grants. There is alot of subjectivity involved which is why DOE program managers, for example, are pulled from practicing experts in the relevant field and tend not to serve very long in those positions before circulating back.

My only reference to something like this is Kerbal Space Program, which uses science as a pseudo-currency to unlock new items etc. I figured it was just a video game thing and did not reflect real life at all.

This is strange to think about. Are these valuations public? Can science be traded between government agencies or other countries? Does science that gets made become devalued over time? Is there like venture capital where VCs deploy science instead of dollars? Has the value stabilized yet such that we can predict how much science we'd get with an arbitrary amount of money or vice versa?

Genuinely interested in learning more since it feels like if we can properly tie "science" to $, we can predict the future by looking at budgets, no?

NASA evolved from NACA, they have always been an aeronautical research group with a focus on practical application. They do way more than just (manned) (space)flight.

> Scrapping space telescopes and other far more useful instruments

A moon telescope is actually a very promising idea.

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_...

That depends on how much it costs to go to the Moon.

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