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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

I'm good with NASA being risk averse when it comes to human lives. NASA is about exploration, and space isn't going anywhere. If it takes us 10 or 20 or 100 extra years it's all still space.

Last time NASA rushed it was because of a "war", and even then it was really just a vast international tantrum. Nobody really "won" the space race. Somebody got a trophy and someone got a participation certificate and the world went on as before.

I am glad for the research and I would far rather nations competed via engineering stunts than blowing each other up. Especially when those stunts manage to produce some spinoffs and some science... though any science is bound to produce both.

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Sorry, I have to politely disagree.

Space exploration could save humanity in so many ways. Nevermind the big "what if" discoveries that would impact the trajectory of our entire species, we also discover valuable science along the way - things that help us in our every day life.

More importantly, the country with the most advanced space agency by default has the most advanced weapons. A hostile nation could pretty easily tow a small asteroid toward Earth and wipe our any country they wanted. Rocket technology, fuel technology, etc.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the space race helped to collapse the Soviet Union to some degree, didn't it?

Regardless of whether my last point stands, I think space is incredibly important to humanity's future.

You’re confusing science fiction with reality here. Attacking a country with an asteroid would be an absurdly slow process without engines which are already weapons on their own. It’s like declaring you’re going to launch a full scale nuclear strike in 6 years and not a moment sooner, you spend all these resources which don’t help you until after you’ve lost the war.

The space race had little to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union, for one thing the timing is off significantly. The Soviet union mostly failed due to internal issues that were only tangentially related to the US. Excess military spending was more a symptom than an underlying cause, you can just as easily blame poor manufacturing becoming an increasing issue as technology advances, a culture of mismanagement etc. Corruption, infighting, apathy, ethnic tensions, mismanagement, etc all kept compounding until you got societal collapse.

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