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One thing the article doesn't cover is that whilst the pessimists had a point about the moon landing itself not achieving very much except some prestige and cool pictures[1] considering the proportion of US national income spent, the Apollo program ended up generating an enormous number of inventions later used in everyday life, from freeze dried food to flight computers, and other tech that could only have come out of a space program like satellites are an essential part of the functioning of the modern world. Estimates suggest the ROI wasn't just non-negative, it was hugely positive (NASA claims $7 for every $1 spent)

That was more evident in 1989 than when people were wondering whether it was a massive waste of money in 1969, and certainly than in 1959

[1]the sci-fi optimists' predictions of it leading to permanent colonies and starships within a generation or two have aged worse.

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> ended up generating an enormous number of inventions later used in everyday life, from freeze dried food to flight computers,

NASA has been promoting that claim for years. But it's not real. Freeze-drying goes back to at least the 1930s and was used for medicines in WWII, but cost too much for wide use.[1] Flight computers came from the USAF missile programs of the 1950s.[2] Nor was NASA responsible for Velcro, Teflon, or Tang.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/801137/

[2] https://www.afmc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2190783...

I don't really care if any of these things originated in NASA or had previously been invented—the bigger question for me is if they would have been widely used if NASA had not put the effort into making them practical. If NASA's moon mission caused them to go deep in the archives of forgotten technology and resurrect ideas that had long been discarded, they deserve credit for that.

(I'm not saying this is the case, but you're also not saying that it's not.)

> I don't really care if any of these things originated in NASA or had previously been invented—the bigger question for me is if they would have been widely used if NASA had not put the effort into making them practical.

Probably.

IMHO, the US military was and is probably far more effective at making emerging technologies "practical" than NASA is. Their budget's bigger and they buy more stuff, often mass-produced. NASA does a lot of one-off and small-run projects.

The US military as a guaranteed purchaser, maybe. The US military as an organization, definitely not.

> The US military as a guaranteed purchaser, maybe. The US military as an organization, definitely not.

What do you mean? The military will ask for pretty aggressive improvements in capabilities, then be willing to pay essentially infinity dollars to get what they ask for. That was especially true during the Cold War. For instance, my understanding is the military played a crucial step in productizing semiconductors, because they were willing to buy them at volume when they were far too expensive for nearly every civilian use case. That volume allowed for the R&D to drive prices down and make civilian use practical. If the military hadn't been interested, things would have gotten to a much slower start.

We're on the internet which originated as a DARPA project, DARPA is part of Dept of Defense.

The US military and NASA enjoy a fairly flexible revolving door for technology and talent.

For example, see the Hubble vs the two prior spy satellites having the exact same tech.

No, they don't. The scientists at NASA are as good as those in the private sector. If the private sector needs it badly enough, it'll make it without government interference.

This is a really shallow strawman.

No one has been arguing that NASA scientists are better than private sector scientists. The argument is that having a seemingly-stupid goal that takes a lot of work can spawn off legitimately useful technologies that would never have been targeted by the private sector because moonshots aren't good investments. The theory is that it's a good way to very quickly iterate through many different ideas.

I agree.

This is just my opinion, but I feel like stuff is way more likely to be actually be accomplished if there's a tangible goal. A goal, even an arbitrary one, helps you actually figure out the limitations of a theory or design, and if you don't have a goal it is far too tempting to handwave away important questions and live in theoretical land.

In a similar vein, F1 racing has an enormous amount of engineering effort put into it in the name of winning a race and those efforts can have positive impacts outside of F1.

It does sadden me that these days their designs are much more restricted, as I enjoyed the wacky ideas we would occasionally see when the rules were less restrictive.

And sports, especially after the leagues/OIC fell hard on drugs, are pushing nutrional science (and medecine) like crazy.

Even in weird ways: my sister can afford to pay her rent/food herself while studying because she prepare meal plans for a water polo team, which helps her study and find ideas for her college projects. Hopefully she can get through her studies without working in a kitchen again.

There aren't that many NASA scientists btw and they mostly are drafting requirements for the private sector scientists to actually do.

Was that true during the Apollo program?

Yeah.

The Apollo missions flew on Rockets designed and Manufactured by Boeing (S-IC), North American (S-II), and Douglas (S-IVB).

The lunar lander was designed and manufactured by Grumman.

That said, a lot of engineering goes into setting good purchasing requirements and assessing the results.

no they wont bc the private sector cant sustain long term interest in projects that dont have profitable application on a 5 at most 10 year horizon.

Electric cars also existed 100 years ago, but that doesn't mean Tesla doesn't deserve credit for completely reestablishing the category.

Their engineers do get much credit, but Tesla cars (well, at least for another decade) will be known as douche-mobiles.

Not an insult. I'm highlighting a business branding issue. A mistake Apple, for example, would never have been so careless as to make.

Well, one difference is that Teslas sort of are luxury products. Given Apple marketshare in the US among consumers, it's hard to consider their products as luxury goods in the same way.

Funnily enough in many countries (India, China?) iPhones are definitely considered luxury/premium (compared to the competition, i.e Android).

Apple are the premium choice in the US as well. Green bubbles are seen as for plebs.

The fact that there's some percentage of status-conscious high schoolers (or whoever) that think that blue bubbles make them special doesn't actually make it so. They're idiots.

"Hey, look, he's a default!"

Green bubbles are annoying because they’re just way less feature rich, and are entirely antiquated. Every green message is logged and listed on my phone bill and the transcripts routinely are revealed in court proceedings?

Sorry it’s got nothing to do with classism, just objective differences.

How can something be premium when it has 60% market share? The iPhone is almost the norm in the US with Android being the knock off.

It’s like bringing Sams Club soda to a picnic when people are use to Coke and Pepsi

Marketing, M&A, and price?

See, it's a vicious cycle, the aggressive M&A strategy leads to a need to increase sales, which leads to a larger marketing budget, which finally trickles down in to the price. Now price is actually segmented itself, in terms of up-front elasticity and "walled-garden" elasticity, which Apple can monitor independently of device sales through marketing novelty through the app store and seeing if the nibbles are elastic onto services, say like Apple+. Historically they also have segmented product (XR, Pro XR) to get more data points for the degree of price elasticity, which is probably most responsive because they're the most expensive thing on the broad market.

Apple has only done two large acquisitions in 30 years. Next for $700 Million and Beats for $3 billion.

Even Apple’s cheapest phone - the iPhone SE is over $100 more expensive than the average Android phone sold in the US.

Apple has usually sold this years model, last years model and the year before that concurrently. Sometimes when the n-1 model is too expensive to sell at a discount they introduce a new phone (ie the iPhone 5C)

Sure. That's why I specified US. Hardly surprising. US-based company and higher income levels.

I didn't say you're wrong, just added it as an aside/addendum :)

Tesla is working on a Model 2 I believe they're hoping to market at $25K. I see them as similar to Toyota, Ford, etc who have luxury models or lines, but also want to service the lower end of market too.

Considering the first Cybertruck just rolled off of the production line, after being announced almost 4 years ago, and they've never produced the second gen Roadster after announcing it 6 years ago, I wouldn't put much stock in their development pipeline.

Can you elaborate what douche mobile means? And example of a non douche one?

Not OP but Teslas I've seen around the Bay Area while driving around have Big Altima Energy. If someone's driving high above the speed limit, swerving through slower traffic like their life is in danger, or doing a U-turn on a two-lane street in the middle of rush-hour its usually a Tesla Model 3. On the other hand, where I grew up it always seemed to be Nissan Altimas that had this kind of energy. I think the stereotype is not really about individual drivers so much as its about the popularity of the vehicle and its performance characteristics.

Both the Nissan Altima and Tesla Model 3 sell very well and are entry level ("entry level" here meaning entry level for the class of vehicles one is looking for, there are entry-level Mercedes' for instance) sedans with power behind them. So you have a lot of them both on the road, and thus more people who likely treat them as disposable and thus drive them recklessly. Any car that is super popular usually is popular enough that enough of the wrong kind of drivers have it, and so you can start stereotyping them. I think Model 3s have a lot of the wrong kind of drivers on the road. Maybe many of them care about saving the environment but they don't drive like they care about the car.

> Not OP but Teslas I've seen around the Bay Area while

How do you say you’re in a bubble without saying you’re in a bubble…

I thought it was obvious that what I was saying was Bay Area specific when I said Tesla drivers are like Nissan Altima drivers I’ve encountered elsewhere but go off.

A vehicle driven by people who engage in douchebag behavior.

The stereotype in the US is anyone driving a BMW, and any sort of lifted pickup. A non douchey vehicle, as a class of vehicles, would probably be a minivan, a Camry, or a Civic.

Not original commenter, but I think metrics of douchery probably vary person to person. Personally, the number of pithy vanity plates specific to the vehicle's energy source is what does it for me. I think it speaks more to the occupant and their outward projections & posturing than the vehicle.

thinking of the South Park fart smelling prius meme.

FTR - I have no problems with EVs, but I do give myself a good chuckle when I see someone who was proud enough of their vehicle purchase to turn their it into a billboard advertising something / someone (Musk) who has fallen from social grace.

I was gonna say the Prius, but that has its own douchey reputation.

I guess maybe a Camry? That’s a boring practical car that doesn’t carry much stigma.

One associated with Mr Elon Musk, and one which is not.

You choose who and what you associate with in this world, and your car is one of the things which, whether you like it or not, will define perceptions of you.

A premature rocketulation man-baby is not who I want to associate with or help fund.

reminds me of that one episode of South Park with hybrids causing a cloud of "Smug" pollution

And in San Francisco

> Freeze-drying goes back to at least the 1930s and was used for medicines in WWII, but cost too much for wide use.

Okay, so... the tech existed but was too expensive to actually use, NASA threw a bunch of R&D at making it practical, and now it's cheap enough to use. I'd say that's a great case for NASA getting credit for making the tech useful; that they didn't literally invent it from scratch seems rather beside the point.

Do you know that it was NASA's R&D that made it practical or is that conjecture?

From Institute of Food Technologists (IFT):

Freeze-drying was invented by Jacques-Arsene d’Arsonval at the College de France in Paris in 1906. Later, during World War II, it was widely implemented to preserve blood serum. Since then freeze-drying has become one of the most important processes for preservation of heat-sensitive biological materials. During the 1950s, industrial freeze-drying of foods began. Freeze-drying is currently used as a preservation method for foods, pharma-ceuticals, and a wide range of other products.

https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-ma...

So you're a hypothesis is that NASA was instrumental in figuring out how to reduce the cost or mass produce freeze dried food because... That was necessary for 4 astronauts?

Surely the military was more instrumental here...

Apollo CM and LM had the Apollo Guidance Computer provide very advanced digital fly by wire for the time. (in fact I think it was one of the first DFBW systems). Later DFBW research on F-8 Crusaders started out using the actual AGC as well, interestingly enough.

AGC was also one of the first machines to use integrated circuits (to keep it light, no doubt) so you could say that the apollo program also advanced computer research by quite a bit.

Those missile computers of the day were mostly analog, lots of gears 'computing' trajectories. Really amazing inventions but not really adaptible to changing circumstances. Which makes sense in an ICBM because it has all the facts known in advance. This is where the much more interactive Apollo computer was really new at.

Nike was analog. (I've seen the ground-based analog computers at Site SF-51 in Marin). Atlas was digital, but in the early models the guidance computer was on the ground, with the ground sending commands to the booster during boost phase. [1] Navajo seems to have been the first missile with onboard digital computing. Polaris was self-contained and digital; it had to be, since the sub had no uplink. Missiles showed steady forward progress.

Apollo had to solve many technical problems, but often specialized ones, such as how to handle liquid hydrogen in bulk and how to get stable combustion in a big engine. A major criticism of Apollo is that it produced too much specialized technology that was never used again.

The Space Shuttle had a different set of problems. It was supposed to be a practical space transport, but only the orbiter was re-usable and it needed a months-long major overhaul after each flight. Not until the Falcon 9 did something cost-effective finally get built.

[1] https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_arc_402577

> [1]the sci-fi optimists' predictions of it leading to permanent colonies and starships within a generation or two have aged worse.

Space-romantics tend to wildly overestimate the benefits of space colonization relative to the difficulty and cost.

Space is... kinda shit. Including all the other rocky bodies in our star system. In the best case, it's like if Earth suffered a half-dozen biosphere-ruining apocalypses and was yet worse than that, even.

The "why?" needs a damn good answer, and we just don't have one, certainly not for long-term human habitation. Even "colonize Mars as a humanity backup" isn't great. There are cheaper ways to achieve most of that supposed benefit, and maybe do it even better, possibly even involving space in some capacity, most of which projects we could kick off today if we really wanted to—yet we don't bother with any of those, no, we fixate on Mars because of the romantic and pop-culture appeal, not because it's the most efficient solution.

Colonizing Mars or the clouds of Venus or putting dome-cities on the Moon or whatever is undeniably cool as hell, but when you sit and really think about it... eh.

The why is because humans like exploring and colonizing. Our most successful civilizations (in the evolutionary sense, not the meritocratic or moralist sense) were good at exploring and expanding, so a lot of people are wired to want to do that. There are only 2 accessible frontiers - space and the ocean.

This is exactly the romanticism I was writing about.

Very little of the expense of historical exploration was undertaken just so people could scratch their exploration itch. Besides, we have a pretty good idea of what we'll find most of these places, now, without having to send people there, and certainly without needing them to live there. We don't have a strong history of bending entire economies to support these kinds of projects just for exploration's sake, but for expected returns. We can do most of the preliminary exploring of our star system cheaper with robots and closer-to-home remote sensors, now.

Would we have funded so many expensive expeditions, in the age of sail, to explore the Arctic and northern Canada if we'd had satellites to tell us there was no Northwest Passage? Just for the sake of exploring in-person? I doubt it, but that's the conclusion one must draw from the "the need, deep in the human heart, to explore is enough justification! It's our nature!" (see the romanticism?) position if one supposes that justifies massive human space exploration and colonization programs, today, barring new information.

> This is exactly the romanticism I was writing about.

And you don't think the people allocating the resources subscribe to it? That's more or less my point about why they're doing it. The VOC and British India Companies may have done it for profit, but the romanticized version has been drilled into our barons and leaders.

I'm 80/20 on Musk's Mars thing being a way to get great PR in certain circles at near-zero cost. His periodically erratic behavior is the only reason I allocate the 20. Who else is seriously talking about space colonization and even kinda putting their money where their mouth is? Which money, conveniently, would have had to have been spent for much-lesser goals anyway... I'll be convinced he means what he says, on that front, when he starts spending serious cash on projects that have little purpose other than reaching and/or colonizing Mars. For now, I believe he wanted to own a rocket company, and wanted to have a stated mission that might make recruiting easier and buy him some goodwill points.

We have an entire continent which is far more hospitable than either space or the ocean and we don't dare attempt to really colonize it. Hell, Africa is a perfectly fine piece of land and first world countries don't invest any money into building anything worthwhile past the Mesopotamian cradle because they'd rather keep the people poor and exploit them for their resources.

NASA was presumably an expensive way to get any inventions not related to space. You could just fund normal research, after all.

People similarly laud military research, but it's not as if you need the military to carry it out. Governments were just willing to fund the research as part of a military effort.

That wasn't one of the choices.

I really love the book "The decision to go to the moon" because it chronicles not apollo itself, but the years leading up to the decision to do it.

Remember: The soviets had just successfully launched sputnik and were years ahead of the US. It was perceived to be a matter of national security and pride, we had to do something.

The choices were:

1 - do it, but as a secret CIA/Pentagon thing focused on military power, objectives, run by the military leadership.

2 - Do it as it was done, as a civilian, public thing for us all to share in.

I, for one, am very grateful they chose 2.

I didn't write anything against creating a space program, or state an opinion on who should have run it.

Can you double check the title and maybe add the author? I’d like to pick a copy of this up for my dad.

Its: John M. Logsdon The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest

I think its out of print. I had to buy it used on Amazon for like 80 bucks when I bought my copy.

Ah there it is, thank you! Is it worth the $50 i see on Amazon?

Yes! It's very different than the other books I have on Apollo, which are mostly about the engineering and astronauts. This book really answered a lot of questions I had about all the rest of it. The greater economic political and social things going on at the time, the background before. At first it seemed dryer than the other books but it's actually become some of my favorite facts and most discussed details about apollo. If you're into apollo, yes. If you're just into the engineering details and not as much in the politics and societal part maybe not.

Yeah, but if you just fund research without an objective you just waste money because it creates an opportunity for a grifter like me to go there and just not get any results of value.

When you place an objective like the Moon in front, at the least your research has to result in it getting closer. The hope is that this broad objective results in something as opposed to something narrower you might want.

There's a lot of wisdom here. Stupid but hard goals are still hard goals. Necessity -- not taxpayer largess -- is the mother of all invention.

The corresponding risk is in the resulting cargo cult around arbitrary constraints whose reasons were forgotten. I bet if we committed to building the Panama canal with only spoons we'd have ended up with a lot of amazingly useful spoon-platform earth moving technology, and the commercial sector would've ended up with highly optimized spoon-based machines, and it'd all be very stupid compared to what we got instead.

Let’s look at Apple before Steve Jobs and Parc research. There was a lot of useless research being done without focus on a shipping product.

While NASA and the military only fund effective research with practical applications?

The ROI for R&D isn't exclusive to space programs, the space race was just an impetus/motivator for blank check by-all-means research. As a general rule shouldn't as much money as possible go into that sort of research until the marginal return is below $1 for each dollar spent?

Not without a focus.

The mission to go to the Moon wasn’t just a mission to go to the Moon, it was also a mission to come back from the Moon. This was basically a blank check and a massive cross-disciplinary exercise.

Our next focus should be on Mars with exactly the same criteria: get people to Mars and also get them back as part of the same mission. It will be much more difficult than getting to the Moon and back and that’s exactly the reason to do it.

Going to Mars with real live squishy humans would no doubt be cool. Getting them back in 1 piece would be even cooler. I'd argue capturing near-earth asteroids and starting to build a functional zero-g industry around earth is more useful though. I think those two things are pretty orthogonal.

I'd love to see a Mars space race between China and the USA. If there's another cold war brewing let's at least only keep the cool aspects of the last one and leave the saber rattling bullshit behind in history...

Invest ridicolous amount of money, time, effort and passion to space colonialism instead of solving problems with my neighbours sound hypocritical for me.

Science budgets are already so absurdly low that this idea of getting people to Mars will just sap them further. This just isn't wise spending given the priorities that we have, like not destroying the planet further.

For half a century we have been massively slashing science spending. From a peak of 2.5% GDP in 1962 steadily down to about 0.5% today. There's not much left.

The research was a side effect of a very well defined goal, which was achievable albeit extremely hard. Investing in achieving a goal (with the research being a side benefit) is different from just investing in research because it changes the motivations of the researchers (from "how do we get our next research grant" to "how do we solve this problem").

That's not to say you shouldn't invest in abstract research with no obvious goal at all, but probably you should consider it a much higher risk investment and not fund all your research that way...

There's also the fact that money now is more valuable that money later even if you adjust for inflation (one of the reason countries run a deficit) so the expected return should be much higher than $1 to be worth investing in.

Next, there's the fact that investment is finite, so the expected return has to be higher than the expected return you would get elsewhere.

Finally there's the fact that as you invest more, the effects of all three of those factors increase, so it has diminishing returns.

The most hand wavy R&D propositions ever, a very common take on Reddit. I hate when people assume the specific ROI gained when developing rocketry, when it was still very novel in the 1950-60s, can be used as a general rule for spending money on NASA or related gov projects today.

Our R&D today will go towards items that are today’s equivalent of 1950-60s rocketry. You clearly recognize the giant leap in hind sight. Now imagine the next giant leap and corresponding benefits. That is why it’s worth it both in advancements and ROI.

> Now imagine the next giant leap and corresponding benefits.

That's always the problems with these types of discussions though, isn't it? You can't know what that next leap is going to be and how it is going to benefit everyday life.

For some, like myself, that next leap will be just as revolutionary and will send us to the stars. We imagine a blank check with a direct, long-term goal leading to things we can't even dream of today.

For others, however, they struggle to see what that leap will be. For them, it's just getting to Mars and maybe coming back, maybe with some new tech for the military. Nothing that will affect their own lives or the lives of their children. That was the problem in the 50s and 60s that led to so much backlash against the projects. And even though we saw the fruit those projects bore, who is to say it will happen a second time?

Some people just can't or won't imagine what might come from another Apollo-esque program. And that's who you have to convince.

I think one of the next big leaps will be in technologies that are not possible without extensive international cooperation. A few examples:

   - shipping solar energy to the dark side of the planet 
   - ending the COVID-19 pandemic (N95s, air filtration, far UV-C, timely vaccine updates)
   - intercontinental high speed rail (low emissions travel)
   - preserving the biosphere by removing deforestation incentives w/ international assistance, technology transfer
   - interplanetary space infrastructure incl. orbital launch
   - high quality durable goods that barely break and are easy to service

Our competitive framework is currently inhibiting our incredible technology from working at full effectiveness.

> The ROI for R&D isn't exclusive to space programs […]

Cold War spending probably kickstarted Silicon Valley:

* https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

No, because the time value of money is a thing.

Even a 700% IRR can be not worth it, if you have alternatives with similar or lower risk with a higher annual return.

> blank check by-all-means research

Sorry to derail, but I'm utterly confounded that cancer research, life extension research, brain-computer research, etc. haven't been given this "by-all-means" approach. It's one thing to defeat a geopolitical rival, it's quite another to escape annihilation for just a bit longer.

One might assume religiosity is the cause, but atheist nations aren't investing in it either.

If anything was deserving of another moonshot / Manhattan project, I think that would be it.

It’s because there’s no roadmap to success here.

The Manhattan project and the moonshot were implementation problems, not theoretical ones. By 1939 we knew that a runaway nuclear reaction was possible and Werner von Braun probably could have worked out the fuel you’d need to get to the moon on the back of a napkin. It took a lot of ingenuity to get there, but both problems seemed achievable given enough resources.

On the other hand, we don’t even know where to begin to “cure cancer”, because it’s thousands of different diseases with different causes and prognoses. There are cancers that essentially are curable with enough of a headstart. Of the ones that we’ve “cured” there’s little in common in their origins and they all have wildly different treatments. Curing cancer isn’t dumping money at solving one achievable problem - it’s an open-ended investment in tackling thousands of independent problems.

There are ideas for universal treatments for cancer and aging - hundreds of them. Which ones do we dump our billions and billions into investigating?

Of course we know how to begin. We're doing it as we speak!

Cancer survival rates are constantly getting better. The payback for investment in biotech research has been huge and even bigger dividends are on the horizon.

Look at the Hepatitis drugs and weight loss drugs that actually work. These along will address the leading causes of death today.

Coming soon is xenotransplantation. Already we're experimenting with hearts. The outlook is that in 10 years we'll routinely be doing this. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10143783/

> There are ideas for universal treatments for cancer and aging - hundreds of them. Which ones do we dump our billions and billions into investigating?

There really aren't. The basic technology is mostly the same. And we have a system for deciding what to spend money on: scientists write grants, get some funding, show results, and then we repeat at a bigger scale seeing who can deliver the best results. It's not perfect, but it works.

Cancer deaths today are a choice we make as a society to not invest in research. We can't "cure cancer" tomorrow, but even with the tiny resources allocated today we're making significant progress. We could do so much more!

For example, in the 70s 5-year survival across all cancers was 58%. Now it's 85%.

The point is that it's a problem where "9 women can't make a baby in a month". It's a slow, iterative, grinding advance in many different directions more than something that could be cracked in a decade with sufficient resources.

Even the Manhattan project didn't have an unlimited pool of top-level scientists. At some point, pouring in more money [ADDED: especially to somewhat vague goals] doesn't give a lot of incremental results. I'd be a lot more convinced if there were evidence that there were top-level, productive scientists in important fields that would be producing world-changing results if they were only given more money. (Of course, they all would like more money and resources.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_cancer

I'm pretty sure Apollo was a political model for this ongoing "war on cancer" launched in 1971.

Don't confuse results with effort.

"Cancer" is a nebulous area. You can't really study "cancer". Cancer isn't a disease. It's a class of diseases characterized by a breakdown of your own cells' reproductive process. Not to mention, it's a breakdown that can just happen. You can take every precaution, avoid every carcinogen, and still get cancer. The biggest predictor to whether or not you will get cancer is time. The longer you live, the greater your chances.

And we might "get" cancer far more often than we realize. It's just that our bodies do have ways to excise cancer from our own bodies. It's just that sometimes, it's not enough.

And there is a lot of research that goes into cancer prevention and treatment. But it's not like one day we'll have the anti-cancer pill. That's just magical thinking.

Life extension research is also in a weird place. Because, like cancer, there isn't just one thing that ends our life. It's a host of things. And a lot of those things are being looked into. And we've already made amazing strides. We are able to get way more people to advanced ages than before. Prior to modernity, it was basically luck as to whether or not you'd make it to 60.

And I don't even know what you want to mean by "brain-computer" research. But I assume it would eventually involve fucking around with living brains. You absolutely cannot make a mistake there. You don't go poking around in the brains of healthy people unless you want to make them very unhealthy, very quickly.

So each of the things you've picked out are vague and/or fraught with their own perils.

Chucking a meat-filled metal tube at a space rock and getting the meat back is an objective with a clear goal.

And also, I'd like to point out, that failure was an option. Michael Collins was trained in everybody's job just in case he had to come back alone. During the first orbit, when he was out of contact with everybody for 48 minutes, he had no idea what he would find when he came back around. That and this was a process of years. The mission that landed on the moon was Apollo 11. Preceded by the Gemini program, whose main purpose was to lead into the Apollo program. 8 years for the singular goal of having a man go to the moon and return.

"Curing cancer" is not the same. "Brain research" is not the same. "Life extension" is not the same. Pick one thing. One simple goal. Not "cure cancer", but something like "make non-nauseating chemotherapy". Then dedicate 8 years to achieving that one task, no matter the cost. Which is something they do do. Any time you see something about "targeted cancer medications", that's to end-run around chemotherapy. Because chemotherapy is kind of like setting your house on fire to get rid of termites.

The US government does this a lot, maybe not blank checks, but certainly very large checks. The military in particular hands out astonishing volumes of money in the pursuit of pie-in-the-sky dreams.

Outside of blowing stuff up, the NSF distributes roughly $10 billion a year to research. And while a lot of that funding gets redirected back to universities, a healthy amount of it goes directly towards research that all of us benefit from tremendously. Think about how much open source software was developed at universities, funded directly, or indirectly via NSF or similar grants.

One of the problems with indiscriminate spending on science is people who oppose to the spending will attack it. We often see news articles like, "government gives professor $4 million to study of shrimp". Of course, the article is biased, so it ignores that half that that money goes back to the university to pay for "research facilities" or that the research may have direct military application. So people get the impression that there's these scientists out there playing around with aquariums and getting paid millions to do it.

> while a lot of that funding gets redirected back to universities, a healthy amount of it goes directly towards research that all of us benefit from tremendously.

It's a crime that all of that money isn't accessible to people outside of universities...

> So people get the impression that there's these scientists out there playing around with aquariums and getting paid millions to do it.

I mean... that's the optimistic case. At least in your imaginary scenario there's actual work happening from 9am to 10:30am and from 3:00pm to 5:00pm...

I think a lot of people don't understand that R&D is like flushing money down the drain until one day you happen to invent interplanetary teleportation.

It's hard to really grasp, kind of like insurance which I swear a lot of people also don't really get but in reverse (where you throw a lot of money seemingly down the drain until possibly the day where it completely makes up for it).

How do you tackle budgeting for something with zero guarantees? Not very easily.

> I think a lot of people don't understand that R&D is like flushing money down the drain until one day you happen to invent interplanetary teleportation.

I wouldn't say that at all. There are lots of small, tangible positive outcomes that occur along the way. Inventing interplanetary travel is great. But even a failed project gives smart people experience, generates research that might have application elsewhere, funds general economic development.

Lots of indirect development comes from R&D. Think a chemical engineering PhD student designs some software to solve a problem specific to their research, then finds out that there's a broader market for that kind of software and leaves his research to pursue that as a business.

I think that a lot of people think R&D is only about achieving a specific goal. When, in reality, it's about researching and developing a lot of smaller things in the general direction of a particular goal.

I definitely was over-simplifying but R&D can feel that way sometimes.

I'm generally supportive of this type of spending, but it's important to realise opportunity costs and the fact they are both invisible yet very real.

Invisible in rich coutnries like the US, I mean. The USSR space raced itself into recession.

> The USSR space raced itself into recession.

Did they? The USSR had a lot of expensive losses, from the war in Afghanistan to the cleanup of Chernobyl. But I'm not sure the space race fits in that category; like in the US it pushed tech advances within the USSR as well, and their launch capabilities generated a lot of revenue for them down the line.

The USSR had massive internal contradictions and inefficiencies. By the end it was brittle, and it couldn't weather shocks, like the late 1980s to early 1990s oil shock, very well, and attempts at reform magnified internal dissent until the constituent republics and satellite states could only be satisfied with complete independence.

http://www.energycrisis.com/reynolds/SovietDecline.htm

> To summarize, the period 1988 to 1992 was the world's third oil crisis in 20 years. This one brought down the powerful Soviet Empire.

That document is 90% assertions without evidence.

>It is suggested that because the Soviet Union had out-of-date oil technology that production decreased. However over time, even in a closed system such as the Soviet Union, information about technology and technology itself must increase.

Why? The Soviet Union had numerous important failures in technology that killed their advancement, often caused by valuing personal loyalty (often treated as party loyalty) over all else, an act that will drive any system to failure eventually.

>There is no reason to believe that management was much better in the 1960's when oil production skyrocketed then in the 1980's when it stagnated

Again, asserted without evidence, as if there aren't hundreds of examples of good management being replaced with bad management, regardless of economic ideology or societal structures.

>Subsequent discontent pushed them toward democracy. The Soviet Union was left trying to simply keep NATO troops out of Eastern Europe but still letting the Eastern Europeans become democracies.

So now rolling tanks into at least one of the revolting countries is "letting the eastern Europeans become democracies"? Russia fought, and continues fighting to this very day, any and all "I don't want to be a part of russia anymore" ideology, including with lethal force.

The Soviet Union degraded over time because it was structurally and socially organized to encourage rewarding people who were loyal and projected strength than people who got things actually done. From the very top with Stalin himself, the way to move up was completely divorced from the way to improve efficiency. This importantly isn't about the economic system, but the ideology of leadership. The Soviet Union would have run into plenty of troubles with a system based on syncophantry even if it were a free market capitalist system. Allowing that kind of blatant corruption and suffusing it through all levels corrodes society. Or at least this is my opinion.

This might be a better cite for the "oil shock" thesis:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24808741

Assuming JSTOR still works for anyone.

Regardless, my thesis wasn't that the USSR collapsed entirely because of an oil shock. It was that the USSR had severe structural problems and couldn't weather adversities such as the oil shock.

flight computers were already designed and built for the missles that predated Apollo- in fact, that's why the team that built them for Apollo was able to be so productive.

freeze dried food predates the space program by decades.

Any money spent on a goal that leads to valuable side effects, could instead have been spent on researching the valuable side effect directly.

>Any money spent on a goal that leads to valuable side effects, could instead have been spent on researching the valuable side effect directly.

What a wonderful tautology.

These things were researched because they were necessary. You don't just sit down and think of new things to invent, you invent things to fix a problem. Without a problem to solve, how is one supposed to suddenly decide what to research?

But how many of these actually practical and useful things were invented by NASA? I would assume in many case the issue was that some technology existed but it was expensive and difficult to deploy at scale which is not exactly what NASA was trying to solve..

> But how many of these actually practical and useful things were invented by NASA?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

> I would assume in many case the issue was that some technology existed but it was expensive and difficult to deploy at scale which is not exactly what NASA was trying to solve..

In many cases yes, they didn't invent the technology per se. But in those cases they improved or refined the tech and by virtue of being a public agency released the information freely for public use.

Right, the computers were built for the preliminary programs which ... were stages on the way to Apollo! Yes, theoretically, but sometimes you need a big bold exciting goal or everyone will say "why are you wasting my tax dollars inventing flight computers? these don't seem very valuable...". The side effects may even be the point of the project, but the goal is essential to getting the politics right.

They really came out of gun targeting and were later developed into ballistic missile targeting (including sub-launched). Not that the AGC wasn't a significant achievement but the basic technology had already been proven out in Polaris and earlier.

I heard--probably from someone who worked there--that the Apollo Guidance Computer was pretty much the only no-bid system in the Apollo program.

It was a cold war exercise, and viewed through that lens it almost certainly was a better expense than say the Vietnam War. I suppose a more apt hypothetical would be considering what the return spending that money on various additional DARPA projects would have been.

> […] he Apollo program ended up generating an enormous number of inventions later used in everyday life […]

See perhaps:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

Space skeptics came in two flavors: the first being the classic "the money could have been better spent elsewhere" variety, but second was "If they can put a man on the moon, why can't they $PETPEEVE". Frankly I miss the days of "Why can't they" vs the trend of vocal minorities simply decrying any and all science, because at least the critics acknowledged the space program actually happened.

These days unfortunately the conspiracy theorists of the world have made their own discoveries like internet forums and Twitter which just help propagate their points of view far more than a mimeograph of dense text and filled with arrows and diagrams stapled to a telephone pole ever did.

"Spend" is a loaded term when it comes to the way governments work.

If I have $100 then I can choose to spend it on say a book. I have a book, my $100 is clearly gone.

But when the govt spends say $400 mil on a lunar landing, they get the lunar landing, but they also get a bunch of money back. Firstly, a chunk of that money goes to salaries, so a decent chunk comes back as primary taxes (income tax etc) and secondary taxes (sales tax, gas tax, taxes on booze and smokes).

What isn't taxes is mostly then circulating in the economy (generating yet more taxes) while giving the economy a nice boost.

Now we can argue about opportunity cost etc, but the govt has no issue borrowing all the money they like - so there's no real lost opportunity.

We can quibble about edge-case budgets all day long, but its hard to avoid the jobs program that is "military spending". In truth what does all that money buy? The lunar program, the Mars program, curing cancer, these are rounding errors compared to the military budget.

I'm gonna get crucified for saying this, but what do invasions of Iraq, or occupations of Afghanistan for 20 years actually really achieve? Instead of picking on NASA it might be time to wonder what the Defence trillions get us?

Which brings me back to my first point- most of those trillions circle round in the economy anyway, so its all funny money.

If you think the moon landing money comes back to the government, the defense money does the same, with the added benefit of providing security!

I think both are basically wasted, but that's because I don't buy the premise of your argument. Money is constantly circulating, at a given velocity. Each economic actor chooses a balance of investment and consumption, and spends at a certain rate (some take longer to allocate funds than others). The question for me is whether another actor would have either allocated the money faster, or towards an investment with a higher positive externality. My answer is yes.

> If you think the moon landing money comes back to the government, the defense money does the same, with the added benefit of providing security!

Did it provide security? I remember 2 towers collapsing...

I think it's called "speed of money" or something similar, but I do wonder how much of which federal dollars end up as profit in an account versus circulating the economy. Wages to USPS employees - probably spent very quickly/high speed. Money sent to Raytheon - probably fifty/fifty on IC wages and COGS (high speed, ish) and fat cats (boards, CEOs). Yes, yes, they go put money in the stock market, but that's fairly low speed.

My guess is defence spending is much lower speed than NASA or medical programs.

Usually it's called velocity, not speed, but point stands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money

I smell a heavy dose of MMT here.

First, the government might not have issue borrowing infinitely, but deficit spending/printing cash from thin air leads to inflation. And considering how 'beautiful' that past couple of months have been, I wouldn't dismiss its impact on livelihood.

Secondly, the government might distribute money into the economy, but it's always done inefficiently. That's where we get $20k trash cans [0] and $28 million spent on camouflage uniforms that don't blend in (for use in Afghanistan).

Arguing that government spending is mostly good because it gets money into people's hands is just the broken window fallacy at work - that cash could have been used for more productive investments in the private sector.

Thirdly, I wouldn't trust the ROI figures published by a government agency, especially since the US government has a 'use it or lose it' approach to budget allocation. They have every motivation to just make up figures to channel more cash their way.

> What isn't taxes is mostly then circulating in the economy (generating yet more taxes) while giving the economy a nice boost.

This part entangles monetary policy with gov’t spending, which to some extent is politically inevitable, but IIUC is a very bad idea in general[1–3].

[1] https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/07/magical-monetary-...

[2] https://www.cato.org/commentary/magical-monetary-theory

[3] https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/tAThqgpJwSueqhvKM/frequen...

>> In truth what does all that money buy?

If you're a well paid 'military spending' contractor then you can take a nice vacation to the EU and see what the US could afford were the US not spending it all on it's military. Free* health care, free* college, public transit, etc.

>the govt has no issue borrowing all the money they like - so there's no real lost opportunity

This can't be true forever, and to me it seems like it is the underpinning of the entire modern world order. Something seems fundamentally warped, I'm just not educated enough to know what it is.

> I'm gonna get crucified for saying this, but what do invasions of Iraq, or occupations of Afghanistan for 20 years actually really achieve?

I'm going to answer with another question. For the past thirty years, how many countries have traded crude oil in currencies OTHER than the dollar, and of those countries, which ones have NOT been invaded by the United States?

Petrodollar explained: https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/petrodollar/

This doesn't really have anything to do with NASA budget but deserves a lot more scrutiny than it gets, IMHO.

How is the $100 spent on the book not circulating in the economy?

I think what they're saying that the government will get a large amount back and you, personally, will get less than 1% back. So you would effectively be spending $99.99 on the book and the government would effectively be spending $45, as an example.

> it was hugely positive (NASA claims $7 for every $1 spent)

Could you share this source? I want to read more analysis

The 7X multiplier was what we used when I worked in a university's advancement office to justify funding alumni events. Seems to be very common with justifying sports stadiums, festivals, and many other things that require public spending.

There's an argument that all those things would have been invented eventually anyway. There was no need to spend 100s of billions of dollars for basically a photo-op.

"Eventually" is a pretty long time. If you were in 1959, would you press a button that caused satellites and freeze-dried food and flight computers to arrive 20 years earlier if it cost $10 billion to press? That saves billions of lives over the next 50 years and dramatically accelerates humanity's technology tree, so it seems like it's worth it.

freeze dried food was invented in France around the time of WWI.

Flight computers predated Apollo- they were originally developed for missles. most of the folks who worked on the AGC had previously developed very successful flight computers already.

Inflated numbers. Also counterfactual reasoning: "had it not been for the space program, we wouldn't have developed these technologies and billions of lives wouldn't have been saved."

Also – billions? Seems like an overreach.

> freeze-dried food

The modern process was invented in 1890, and used extensively in WW2.

For blood plasma and penicillin, not food

What kind of argument is that?

Might as well not send any boats out to find new continent, they will be discovered anyway!

We have far more real technology today than we would have, all thanks to us moving some made up money around 60 years ago...

People really do just get on here and confidently say absolute nonsense.

> Don't bother doing something because it will be done eventually anyway.

Not my argument. Just saying it's different when it's taxpayer money and there is no popular support.

$25 billion, for the coolest photo-op in history. Hell yeah. We flush orders of magnitude more money down the drain for shits and giggles any way, might as well do something no one else has ever done before.

Maybe, but what's the point in not generating 7 dollars of economic activity for every dollar spent, inspiring millions, and bootstrapping the process?

If it was "basically a photo-op" it wouldn't have generated so much economic activity in the long run, even if perhaps it wasn't the most cost effective way to get there (in some eyes)?

$7 for each $1 is marketing math. Someone is being very generous in attributing too much economic activity to the space program.

I mean, even if it was 2 for 1... or 1 for 1... why not do it? Pretty neat to go to the moon.

> Maybe, but what's the point in not generating 7 dollars of economic activity for every dollar spent, inspiring millions, and bootstrapping the process?

Because not spending that dollar on putting a guy on the moon could have generated 20 dollars elsewhere.

It could have, yes. Would it?

This is why historians are leery of counter-factuals; unless you have very strong evidence that it would have happened, you have nothing but a "could have" hypothesis.

Yea, seems pretty loose to assume those dollars would have generated three times the economic impact of the space program if they'd been left in individuals hands.

Companies certainly innovate, but the government innovates a _lot_ (primarily through research grants which are eventually developed into products by entrepreneurs as far as I can tell, also the military).

Speeding up our technological timeline by decades, and it was decades, has saved tens of millions to hundreds of millions of lives. The Integrated Circuit revolution wouldn't have happened at the same pace without Apollo. Apollo (and to a lesser degree the defense program) funded the industry for the first few years of its existence. Something like 2/3rds of all ICs produced until the mid-to-late 1960s were used in the program.

They were extraordinary customers — willing to fund R&D, patient with bad results but extremely demanding. Without them, I suspect we'd be at least one to two decades behind in your computing timeline. Given how many lives these machines save on a daily basis... it's not hard to do the math.

Eventually, a century or two later. I mean it has been 50 years and we still couldn't send a human to the moon again despite technological advances

Yeah and Bell Labs had developed cellular technology in the late 40s. When did we get commercial use for that tech? Oh yeah, nearly 40 years later.

there's a (small) chance that the moon landing was the first time a living organism successfully chose to visit another celestial body in the entire history of the universe.

"basically a photo op" is such a strange way to think of that.

What's the argument?

That those things would have been invented anyway, because science and technology progresses even without gov't intervention.

Is this a brownian motion/maxwell's demon argument or are you suggesting that progress is guaranteed by some principle?

Yep. Same for the military industrial complex, unfortunately.

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