NASA Is Worth Saving
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
"NASA explores the unknown in air and space, innovates for the benefit of humanity, and inspires the world through discovery."
to Casey's "defend US interests on the civilian side of space."
SLS is an abject failure, indeed, but one whose faults are ultimately Congress's. I see no reason for human space flight to continue to "eat first" given that record of expensive failure. In contrast, astrophysics and planetary science remain--at least for now--world-leading.
> Words like "innovation"
I believe that the rhetoric, actions and results of "tech bro" style companies have managed to demonstrate to people that "innovation" is a thing to be feared, not a thing that improves lives. Widespread "fear of progress" is actually a relatively recent thing, and didn't come out of nowhere. It came from learned experience.
It's a terrible result, but one that tech companies largely don't seem too bothered by.
It used to be "land on the moon" - they've done that. A space telescope - they've done that many times. What is their goal now because I don't know and most Americans don't know but NASA certainly want us to pay millions for their toys. Set a goal, ask for funding. At this point, NASA shouldn't even be ran but the government. Run a patreon and have citizens pony up the money. Those who support NASA can fund NASA.
This is like saying, "We've already built a few computers. What's the point of building any more of them?"
Every new space telescope does something that no previous space telescope has been able to do.
No NASA administrator could bring themselves to tell Congress that?
That's not sarcasm. We do a lot of things that are strictly wastes of money, in order to ensure that we have more than we need of something. It's why we subsidize agriculture: we don't want "just in time" food production. We want too much of it, even if it means wasting some of it.
I don't know if we want to continue to subsidize Boeing, but on the other hand, I think America would feel weird if we didn't have a domestic airline manufacturer. Sure, we could buy them elsewhere, but do we want to?
(Answer: not if it's from the company that keeps screwing it up. But we can't just conjure a new one from scratch, one that doesn't mess up.)
SpaceX can launch a large number of Starships to LEO and have them fail because the turnaround time is a few weeks. You only get to go to Mars once every two years or so, so if it takes 10 attempts, that is 20 years. SpaceX's control system is completely remote control from mission control: they'd need to build something entirely different to work around Mars.
Right now Starship does not have an appealing lunar story. The baseline scenario that astronauts climb out of Orion, spacewalk to a Starship, then go to the moon on a Starship carries about the same payload as the original LEM with a much larger and taller vehicle that is likely to tip over or have its nozzles broken by rocks. It would be cool if you could land and return the full 100 tons but to do that you need to refuel. Some combination of:
-- land 100 tons and turn the Starship into storage tanks/living space/a workshop
-- using some of those 1-way journeys to stash fuel for return trips
-- producing O2 from rocks but using CH4 from Earth
-- producing O2 from electrolysis of polar ice
seem possible with various levels of risk. A H2 + O2 rocket could be fueled entirely from polar ice but not Starship. It's not so clear if it makes sense to use polar ice to make propellants or if it makes sense to use it to accumulate a stock of volatiles that are recycled on a permanent settlement.
A deep space colony might be able to build megastructures such as solar sails, energy converters and shades and deliver them to places like the Earth-Sun L1 point. You can't make anything on Mars that can't be made on Earth and it's implausible you could bring anything back from Mars that couldn't be made much more cheaply here. You're left with the political situation of Asimov's short story The Martian Way, where a Mars colony is caught off from Earth and forced to become self-sufficient. Even if Earth was interested in subsidizing a Mars colony for the time being, the Martian colonists would want to develop self-sufficiently as quickly as possible.
People who look seriously into the problem of space colonization tend to follow the same tracks that Eric Drexler did. His molecular assembler and nanomill concepts have not aged well but I'd imagine that something functionally similar could be pieced together out of 3-d printing, fermentation, genetic engineering, flow chemistry and other pieces. Musk's talk of sending 1,000,000 and neglect of "advanced manufacturing" makes his plans seem unrealistic to me.
And again to the extent the assembler stuff is feasible you have to look at who's doing it. Well the 3D printing in space demos took place on the ISS, with the first being a NASA-incubated, SBIR-funded startup and the second being an ESA initiative involving iconic oldspace company Airbus and some academics. It's certainly not as profitable as owning most of the world's launch capacity and not coincidentally most of the world's satellites, but the people that are doing the low level, high risk stuff are coming out of research institutes and living off agency funding....
I could picture one of those things moving say 80 tons/day of bulk material if it wasn't for the problem of the barrel getting trashed in less than one day.
The design of the catcher is a tough problem though and still unsolved. There are lots of answers that aren't so attractive, such as fielding a big piece of styrofoam that you'll eventually melt and reform or some kind of thing that throws a capture device with a cable attached at passing projectiles.
Floatation is handled by pair of upoer and lower passive guide coils on the wall, just induction current can keep vehicles vertically centered. Propulsion is handled by constant alternating current on alternatingly pointed coils. Speed can be modulated between zero to max by merely modulating strength, not frequency or phase, of vehicle side magnets.
It does need a lot of materials to build one with 3.5km/s max speed on the Moon, though, so a robotic Lunar foundry might have to be built first.
But once that goes up... space megaprojects will be free, and launches from planetary surfaces will mainly be used for humans or valuable items.
How much of that technology and market has SpaceX themselves developed over the past 15 years though? They had to invent Starlink to grow the commercial launch market past the point of saturation.
And while Starship isn't particularly well designed to make round trips to and from the Moon, it can deliver an enormous amount of cargo in a one way trip, plus the ship itself can be repurposed. So if you're going to build a moon base it's a good option.
By way of analogy, radio is a mature market. Maybe a little more than mature, to be honest, it’s well past its prime. In the early days of radios, you know who ran the radio stations? The companies that made radios! Because who’s going to buy a radio without a radio station to listen to? It took years for people to figure out the radio advertising business model but RCA wasn’t willing to wait that long so they just operated a bunch of radio stations as a cost center to encourage people to buy more radios. But then the market matured and the roles of “broadcasting” and “manufacturing home radios” diverged into different companies.
NASA in general is a decent bargain. It's a lot of cutting edge science and engineering expertise for not a lot of money compared to the DoD/DARPA. Cutting it is part of the general national suicide agenda we seem to be in of trying to hollow out all the ways America actually still does lead the world in order to bring back lower value lower margin things America did well in the 1950s.
Forget Mars. I'd love to live in space. Having people in space would solve a lot of Earthly problems (and yes create a whole bunch of new ones). But it'd be cool.
Is there a problem with things being cool even if perhaps low-valued by other measures of value?
Which ones?
You would think we would get really good at the latter before going after the former, and yet I see no interest from people wanting to live in a (shallowly submersed) submarine. It would also be an order of magnitude less expensive and dangerous.
I would also say that scuba diving is probably the closest you can get to experiencing anything close to zero gravity on Earth.
You asked how space was different from a submersible. I gave you one difference, you expanded on that to a second.
If we can't build, say, a 10K-person inhabited city on the south pole, how can we even imagine we can build it on the moon or Mars?
Just off the top of my head:
- different ability to re-stock
You could re-stock your submersible just about anywhere. You're going to have to do a lot more planning for your groceries when you go in space though.
- access to microgravity
This simply isn't available in a submersible. Microgravity provides some interesting manufacturing and biological capabilities.
- completely different pressure profiles
Combining different pressure environments in microgravity is particularly interesting to me.
- different instrumentation capabilities
It's not just the view -- the atmosphere plays merry hell with instruments when measuring the cosmos. And it does so in ways that just aren't relevant to underwater environments.
Plus, adding people into the equation makes it a lot harder. Harder problems mean more creative solutions are required, which means an opportunity to learn.
The tree of possibilities in a timeline where humans live on the surfaces of other bodies and in permanently spacebourne crafts in significant numbers is infinitely larger than the timeline in which we do not. It’s an endeavor with an extremely long timeline of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.
Arguably, the things most worth doing are those with this level of potential impact, with much of what we obsess over in the short term comparatively being embarrassingly myopic bikeshedding. One must avoid leaning too far into this obviously — there are things that truly must be addressed in the short term and cannot be ignored, but the outcome of staring at your feet is just as likely to be catastrophic as staring only at the horizon is. Both can lead you to walk off the edge of a cliff.
Can you list which risks you believe are mitigated by space travel?
We’ll never get good at things we don’t do and the related technology doesn’t just develop itself. Without intentional efforts to push the space forward, it’ll forever be stuck in limbo.
I accept that this is something that depends on an individual’s values, though. Many don’t care about anything that won’t impact them personally while they’re still alive, and in some ways that’s valid, if frustrating.
And no, you’ve gotten my value system wrong. I’m all for investing in both the near and far future, but there needs to be a pretty clear and believable hypothesis as to what that investment will yield.
Space travel is valuable because it will yield space travel is totally unconvincing!
The ability to live on other planets and in freefloating crafts does a few things. First, it cracks open access to vast amounts of resources to support populations and allows many environmentally detrimental processes to be moved away from Earth. Second, it gives infinite space to expand into. Third, it opens up a permanently available frontier for the most resetless individuals to pursue, acting as a societal pressure release valve that enhances stability. More people means more artists, philosphers, scientists, researchers, etc, which naturally means both a greater quantity and wider variety of art and science being pursued, meaning more ideas and more problems solved. By contrast, staying bound to Earth puts a hard cap on everything (especially if sustainability, which necessitates a much more limited existence, is a goal).
Hopefully somebody else can express it more eloquently, but that’s the general idea.
What resources? What "environmentally detrimental processes" actually possibly justify expending the energy required to leave and re-enter earth orbit?
Sorry but I've looked into this, and unless you can provide specific examples I haven't encountered (none of which make sense mathematically), you're just sharing sci-fi vignettes.
And in any case, none of this requires manned space flight.
> Second, it gives infinite space to expand into.
We are nowhere near any constraint on physical space on earth and we will not be near this constraint any time in the near, medium, or even far future.
> Third, it opens up a permanently available frontier for the most resetless individuals to pursue, acting as a societal pressure release valve that enhances stability.
Do you have any evidence for this claim?
> By contrast, staying bound to Earth puts a hard cap on everything.
A cap that we are absolutely nowhere near hitting and that continues to get pushed further away with every dollar spent on technological investment on earth, which space-fetish dollars pull from.
Anything that industries have proven that they can’t be trusted to carry out here on Earth without wrecking things in the process. It’s not just financial costs but associated externalities as well.
And in the long term, assuming significant populations elsewhere in the solar system, economies of scale kick in and it becomes best to manufacture many things in space where you’re not fighting a gravity well on the way out and can sell to as many customers as possible.
> We are nowhere near any constraint on physical space on earth and we will not be near this constraint any time in the near, medium, or even far future.
We’re pretty close if we want to avoid even more environmental destruction than we’ve already caused. Even if we were to expand into deserts, we’d still be wreaking havoc on local and global ecosystems. There’s an argument for bumping up density in already-inhabited areas without sprawling outward, but that has limits and brings its own problems (like cities being concrete and asphalt heat islands that are exacerbated by everybody running their AC).
> Do you have any evidence for this claim?
It’s the natural result of spacefaring becoming commonplace. Prices on it all come down and access opens up, and unlike Earth, every square inch of space isn’t spoken for (and never will be). Sounds like a frontier to me.
> A cap that we are absolutely nowhere near hitting and that continues to get pushed further away with every dollar spent on technological investment on earth, which space-fetish dollars pull from.
But science and technology don’t work that way. The return on investment isn’t anywhere near linear, so it doesn’t make sense to pour more into already well-funded causes. You’ll just hit diminishing returns. The best results come from investing across as wide of a spread of fields as possible, leaving nothing ignored.
And we don’t need to pull from other kinds of research to fund crewed spaceflight anyway. There’s plenty to be had just by cleaning up the egregious waste that’s splashed around on a regular basis. Just imagine how much money has been lit on fire doing and undoing policies between political administrations for example, or how much has disappeared thanks to cronyism in government contracting.
Again... like what? "Assume we have massive economies already inhabiting other planets" is... again... simply asserting your conclusion.
> We’re pretty close if...
You expect colonizing the Moon or Mars to be easier than solving heat islands and air conditioning?
I was asking for evidence that having frontiers to explore (besides the vast frontiers left on earth including the ocean) are some meaningful stabilizing force for society.
> The best results come from investing across as wide of a spread of fields as possible, leaving nothing ignored.
Okay then why wouldn't we take the vast sums spent on space travel and spread it to the thousands of far less-funded fields of scientific development?
Pick any of the industries that’ve repeatedly gotten headlines about being caught polluting.
> "Assume we have massive economies already inhabiting other planets" is... again... simply asserting your conclusion.
Well I mean if you focus on the transitionary phase of anything expensive, it looks difficult to justify and this is no exception.
> You expect colonizing the Moon or Mars to be easier than solving heat islands and air conditioning?
No, but I’m not posing one as an alternative or exclusive to the other.
> I was asking for evidence that having frontiers to explore (besides the vast frontiers left on earth including the ocean) are some meaningful stabilizing force for society.
Frontiers as in new places to settle, not just explore. While I guess it’s technically possible to settle the bottom of the ocean I don’t think very many groups or individuals would find the prospect all that appealing.
This kind of frontier is stabilizing because when people become dissatisfied or frustrated with the state of things where they live, they can band together with likeminded, stake a claim, and shape their own fate to a greater degree than would otherwise be possible. This hasn’t been possible for a long time now.
> Okay then why wouldn't we take the vast sums spent on space travel and spread it to the thousands of far less-funded fields of scientific development?
Because then you’d unnecessarily be letting an entire wing of science atrophy when those other less -funded fields could instead easily be funded by cleaning up waste.
It would obviously be far, far easier to hermetically seal all of these plants and scrub the output and, if you really want to (but don't need to, obviously) you can launch the exhaust into the sun. All would be several orders of magnitude cheaper than building factories in outer space.
> Well I mean if you focus on the transitionary phase of anything expensive, it looks difficult to justify and this is no exception.
No. The majority of things we end up actually doing, we do because there is clear value on the other side of the activation energy. We're both looking at a wall of activation energy, I'm asking you what's on the other side, and your answer is effectively "the other side."
> No, but I’m not posing one as an alternative or exclusive to the other.
... but markets do. If governments start caring about heat islands or air conditioning, the reasonable solution is not colonizing outer space. Obviously.
> This kind of frontier is stabilizing because...
I am once again asking for evidence of this claim.
> Because then you’d unnecessarily be letting an entire wing of science atrophy
The only reason you see it this way instead of right-sizing space investment and preventing other fields from atrophying is because, surprise, you've already concluded space travel is super important -- and for reasons that you cannot articulate.
It’s a theory based on the effects frontiers have tended to have on society in the past. For frontiers beyond Earth’s orbit specifically, presenting evidence is impossible because it’s not something we’ve done. Either way, I think it’s a good thing to have somewhere for people who feel tired and defeated as well as those looking to build something for themselves to go.
> The only reason you see it this way instead of right-sizing space investment and preventing other fields from atrophying is because, surprise, you've already concluded space travel is super important -- and for reasons that you cannot articulate.
I’m not opposed to “right sizing” crewed space investments as long as it doesn’t mean sidelining it to the point of being stuck in a 90s-esque state of dinking around in low Earth orbit forever. I’m not saying to throw everything we have at it and make it all happen ASAP. I’m aware it’s something that will take a long time, and that’s exacerbated by cost. Start small and grow over time. That’s fine. Just keep it moving forward at a steady pace, that’s all I really want.
Agreed that progress on space exploration shouldn't stop. I really have never heard a good argument for manned space exploration, which is dramatically more expensive, complicated, and risky, though.
The risk that risks might emerge?
Absolutely. NASA's focus on one-off probes is the most ineffective and inefficient way possible.
We now have cheap launch capability, and once a probe is designed multiple copies can be made cheaply.
Just think if we launched 10 JWST telescopes instead of just 1.
Basically congress has set a requirement to build a 2025 operating system using Perl with 100% uptime and spread development across 20 companies run by idiots. NASA doesn’t have any extra budget to spend with that horrible mess.
What!?
Can you expand on this? That's horrific. I hope that's just an analogy and not the truth.
This book has many illustrations of alternate designs considered before the Space Shuttle was finalized
https://www.amazon.com/Shuttle-History-Developing-National-T...
as well as the results of late 1980s-early 1990s studies that considered the possibility of putting together Space Shuttle parts in different ways. Say you could have a bigger external tank, four solid rocket boosters instead of two, and a big-ass orbiter which has five engines instead of three. (That one probably is too much of a boondoggle because they'd have to spend a few billion dollars making a bigger launchpad!)
You might think that, with the research done to develop the parts, it would be cost effective to build something new from Space Shuttle parts but in those studies it was always outrageously expensive to build anything out of Space Shuttle parts because... Space Shuttle parts are stupendously expensive.
In an alternate universe something like the SLS (a non-reusable big-ass booster with lots of stages) could be a lot cheaper than the SLS if it was cost-optimized, but cost-optimization itself isn't cheap!
By contrast to that, the Starship model isn't proven either. Reusable Starship to LEO could be a good business, but orbital refueling is still unsolved and even if it is perfected, current plans are to launch 12-20 Starships to land and return maybe 3 tons from the moon. Think of what a huge thing you could build in LEO if you had 20 Starships!
One way to refuel in space is to carry the cargo fuel in a container that can be detached and reattached to another craft.
The craven avoidance of in-space refueling begs the question of what kind of future is NASA imagining for humanity in space, if something as simple as transferring a fluid from one tank to another is too difficult.
Growing up in the 1980s reading the "science fact" columns in Analog magazine I got the idea that we got sold out when we decided to do Apollo the way we did and that instead of a stunt we could have had a much more capable program that would have led to a more durable presence on the moon.
Today though looking at large numbers of plans to get to the moon it's easy to come to the same conclusion von Braun did (from looking at large number of plans), that the Apollo architecture was much more feasible than any of the others. It wasn't just "get it done on Kennedy's timeline" but a matter of being able to do it at all.
It's not so hard to transfer fluids with gravity, still unprecedented to do it without. I studied theoretical physics so I didn't get too into it but I ran into a few situations in labs handling cryogenic fluids where a liquid wasn't a liquid when it got to the other end of a pipe!
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From a mission planning viewpoint also I'm not too impressed with Starship scenarios that involve refueling. That is, I've heard it takes anything from 12-20 Starships to fully top off a Starship to go to the Moon or Mars.
You could imagine one launchpad could launch 1500 tons of cargo to Mars a year (1 launch a day staging fully fueled Starships in a holding orbit to waiting for Earth and Mars to align every 2.5 year or so) but if you can launch 20x the cargo to a destination (as opposed to fuel) you could build a baby O'Neill colony in LEO and have one hell of a space tourism destination. It's not so much a shortcoming of Starship as much as it is the reality that Heinlein was wrong and LEO is much closer to the Earth than other destinations.
(For instance in the 1980s the US fielded an antisatellite weapon that could be launched from an F-15 and kill LEO satellites with just a 2.5 km/s delta-V. Try to shoot down a GPS satellite, however, and that's an entirely different problems)
Starship has been much cheaper to develop and launch because of SpaceX's significantly less conservative approach to R&D, but it doesn't work yet. We should maintain SLS until SpaceX either gets Starship fully developed or it falls apart.
Starship is risky and if we want Space to be a "critical" capability of America, then we shouldn't be putting all our eggs in the SpaceX basket, even if it is significantly more expensive.
How cheap do you think buying Starship services will be when they are LITERALLY the only option for anyone anywhere?
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/high-immigration-is-worseni...
I don't think tax cuts for the rich are very wise given the budget deficit, but continuously increasing government spending, taxes and regulation is not wise either. U.S. government spending as a percentage of GDP is the highest it's ever been, even more than during WW2. Over regulation is a major problem, as seen with CAHSR, and even figures on the left are starting to realize it, e.g. Ezra Klein.
It's only the MAGA few who buy into this whole anti-immigrant rhetoric. Even the Republican party still loves immigrants - as any business-oriented party would! - even if they're forced to pretend otherwise due to temporary political concerns.
All around the world, there are people who feel as though they don't belong where they are. They're minorities in one way or another. Sometimes racial, sometimes intellectual, sometimes sexual. Those people look to the US with starry eyes - as a heaven where they can be themselves and make something for their lives. The economy is really only half the story here.
When we persecute trans people or other minorities we really chip away at that image and culture. And we can directly see the results - people don't look at the US like they used to. This image is becoming less and less popular globally.
Is a large portion of this busywork to give the astronauts something to do?
And so they keep doing the busywork you mentioned, hibernation mode operation at minimum costs. It's still a lot of money on Earth but I suppose not so much in space.
I'm also not sure that NASA needs "saving." It needs continued funding, and it would be nice if they were jerked around less by the whims of politicians, but I don't think it is in crisis. NASA has continued to produce valuable science, even given those difficult headwinds.
I know these things are hard, but there has to be a better way to organize this.
The Webb space telescope is a scientific instrument, not a product. Science instruments are always absurdly expensive and difficult to build. This magic idea that things just get cheaper or easier over time without fail is just an overly reductive idea of how things progress.
"Careful" is expensive and space will always require "careful" because it is insanely difficult to engineer around. It's also wildly unforgiving.
People also thought landing on the moon shouldn't be so difficult, yet lots of independent agencies and organizations are finding out that, no, small and minor mistakes or oversights will just destroy all your planning. That attention to detail will always be expensive.
The loss of institutional knowledge and capability is staggering.
Yes, it needs saving.
Space Shuttle never achieved is core objective and project shelved. Space Launch System is way past deadlines and cost. As far as launching systems NASA has not kept up since Apollo.
I would argue NASA has achieved great progress in Space research. Hubble, Voyager, Mars rovers, Webb telescope have made great advances in discovery. I would have NASA change its core objectives to new research activities.
Trump's NASA cuts would destroy decades of science and wipe out its future
> The US Is A Launch Superpower And NASA Seems Not To Have Noticed
> SLS Is Original Sin
There's your story. NASA might be worth saving, but first you'll have to sacrifice the Senators' pork.
As a kid in elementary school at the time we seemed to be a country moving to embrace science. Heck, even the Metric system was being speed-run (ran?) into the curriculum. (Until it wasn't.)
I would hate to shutter that.
To be sure, public interest waned after a few landings, the follow up Space Shuttle was a bit lackluster — and fraught with some unfortunately spectacular failures. ISS did little better in terms of public enthusiasm.
Is it the Cold War competition that is lacking today? Are we too mired in a gloomy outlook for our future, for our planet's future that we haven't the energy to be excited about anything any more?
I rather doubt that last bit — perhaps in fact we're starving for something to lift the public mood. I think too we were deep in a dark fog after Kennedy's assassination — maybe the youthful Beatles and the space program were two of the prime movers that pulled us (somewhat?) out of that funk (never mind it all despite Vietnam and all the fallout from that).
Perhaps we'll see the Chinese put their citizens on the Moon in the near future. Perhaps that will be our Sputnik moment for the 21st Century.
I kind of think we might need a healthy (one hopes) competition to lift our spirits, perhaps unify us again....
It was less than 11 years from the creation of NASA to Apollo 11 landing on the moon.
It has now been well over 50 years since the last astronauts landed on the moon.
SLS cost about $32 billion so far to regenerate similar capability and people are freaking out.
Also Apollo was never really that popular, except for the few days Apollo 11 was literally on the moon.
NSF is getting a 50% budget cut, at some point, you cut enough budget, it doesn't work.
Which has been lampooned by Robert Zubrin as "the ISS going in circles for decades in order to collect blood and urine samples". Robotic research has gotten more bang for our buck (You can explore an entire world via an orbiter (Cassini, Juno (on the budget chopping block), Osiris-Rex (the extended mission to Apophis is on the budget chopping block), Mars Observer, Messenger, etc to name a few missions) for ~$1B all in , far less than it costs to run the ISS ($3B / year)
> getting rid of green/climate research
Which is basically just a political attack, silencing research you don't want to hear about. It's about as effective as sticking your head in the sand to avoid the consequences of your life choices. It makes about as much logical sense, too.
> getting rid of general management
Possibly the only thing I find useful about the proposed budget cuts. Even then, I'd prefer targeted cuts, rather than throwing out entire department because you don't want to hear about how the Earth is changing, or how the Sun works, or learn enough about asteroids to adequately deflect them.
>They will be... getting rid of green/climate research and general management.
Sing it with me, now!
One of these things is not like the other...
One of these things is ... like the other.
My original comment could have been clearer but the point stands, nothing is happening to NASA. The organization will continue to exist. They will continue to operate as the US's space program, with a larger emphasis on human space flight, these are just budget cuts.
Are you insinuating that I was being disingenuous by using them? The ellipsis simply removed a part of the sentence that was irrelevant to the point, but doesn't actually change what you said. You said nothing is happening to their work, and then immediately pointed out work that's going away. Not that complicated.
/shrug
What else is there for NASA to accomplish scientifically speaking? land on the next planet but for what purpose?
They've got the James Webb out there but what has that revealed for us except better quality images. Do you care if you find out certain planet has O2, C, H20? I certainly don't.
You can argue that NASA has developed some tech that is used in our everyday live but I argue we could have developed that same tech without going to space.