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Comment by Alive-in-2025 | Hacker News Reader

Alive-in-2025

You are missing that the money and research into figuring out how to solve many engineering and scientific challenges related to the missions had tremendous benefit to industry later.

As we gain ability to do my re in space more cheaply it will get more important

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It's not clear that concentrating so much money on a single government project fosters more benefit than having the money go to a variety of other projects. It is easy to see the items developed by something like the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program, but we often miss the innovations created by private industry when you compare a similar total spend (Bastiat's "seen and unseen"). One example of the alternative is how (private) demand for cellular telephony has triggered many innovations, from powerful and efficient microcontrollers to bright LCD screens, and fast-charging lithium-ion batteries.

I'm thinking that Apollo covered 90% of the useful spin-offs from developing tech for manned travel to the moon or Mars. And at least 90% of what's left was either covered by the ISS, or could be covered by a few small LEO space stations.

The economic cases for manned moon or Mars programs look really iffy these days. The US has poured tens of $billions down the SLS rat hole, with very little to show for it. And Wienersmith's A City on Mars is a pretty damning dissection of the whole concept of Martian colonies.

The SLS is widely understood to be less about research and development, and more about pork barreling, and jobs program. I don't buy that humanity should avoid investing in space travel because US Congress and surrounding governmental beaurcracy is not running projects effectively. That argument would stop just about any human activity.

It's pretty difficult to predict what spinoffs would come from attempting to put a colony on Mars. I would imagine to succeed we would need to solve a lot of challenges with human biology, genetic engineering, automation, and many novel engineering solutions.

But economics is not the only reason to do things, and I bet you don't expect everything humans do to have a purely economic rational.

If you want to do research to benefit industry, you can just do so. There's no particular reason research funding tied to human space flight should get better results.

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