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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

About the last point:

At this point in time, manned space exploration should come out of our entertainment budget. The same budget we use for football or olympic games.

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I've often thought world leaders, upon election/selection, should get a free few orbits of the earth, to give them some perspective on the job they're about to undertake. Maybe offer the first one on Artemis II, a deferred one for the current US administration?

James May of Top Gear has flown with a U2 spy plane once [0][1]. When they reached to the edge of space, May said "If everybody could do that once, it would completely change the face of global politics, religion, education, everything".

I can't agree more.

Another thing I believe needs to be watched periodically is Pale Blue Dot [2].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-COlil4tos

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtsZaDbxCgM

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g

I think you overestimate the effect that would have on the kind of people that most need that sort of humility.

Look at what happened with William Shatner and Jeff Bezos when they came back from space. Shatner started to say something about what an impactful experience it was, but Bezos cut him off and was like “Woo! Partay!” and switched his attention to a magnum of champagne.

There's probably a strong self-selection factor going on, in terms of the kind of person that typically seeks out that kind of experience.

And if the actual U2 pilots (air force pilots and CIA operatives) had come back profoundly changed, someone might have cancelled the programme...

Astronauts are regular smart people capable of making good and bad life decisions too.

I met someone a couple years ago who was a U2 pilot (which are still in active service). He'd flown F-16s until he reached the point in the promotion ladder where flying stopped, then switched to U2s to keep being a pilot. After hitting 20 years, he was taking his retirement and training to fly Grumman S-2Ts with CAL FIRE.

Very down-to-earth guy who knew what he wanted and made his choices. Didn't at all seem like the sort to find edge-of-the-atmosphere flying a mystical experience.

Jeff went up two flights earlier, in July 2021 on NS-16. Shatner was on NS-18 in October.

I don't know if it's a thing that wears off, if Bezos was just in business-mode the entire time, or just didn't want someone monologuing right after getting back.

Extra tactless considering Shatner is a recovering alcoholic.

Exactly what I thought of as well

"If everybody could do that once, it would completely change the face of global politics, religion, education, everything".

You could have the same effect with LSD/Psilocybin for quite a bit less $$$$.

Yeah, that (and Carl Sagan) was what made me think of the idea.

>I've often thought world leaders, upon election/selection, should get a free few orbits of the earth, to give them some perspective on the job they're about to undertake.

Perhaps, but they should also get a few free orbits of the Earth *after* their term ends, on a launch system built by whichever contractor has given the most "campaign donations" to politicians. Surely they'll trust it to be safe, right?

That would only work for countries with a space programme.

I would also say give them a year of free vacations in various places. Say a maximum security prison in general population, any type of dark camps, hospitals, mental institutions and care homes.

Give them the rest and recreation they need in these wonderful places.

Do you think sociopaths like current 'leader' would change significantly upon such experience? I unfortunately don't share such optimism.

"Houston, this is Golden One. I'm looking down on the big, beautiful, blue world. They love me down there. They all love me. I'm the greatest astronaut ever in the history of mankind. No one has ever orbited like this before."

Yeah, you may be right.

Made me chuckle :D

Maybe he should ride on the Artemis II mission?

Strapped to one of the boosters?

You don't have to be an optimist. You have to try.

Trying and seeing what happens is also science, after all.

Scientists don't try everything. First they run it through expert critical review. This candidate wouldn't make it past the theory stage.

I mean, we can probably predict what will happen based on existing data.

"I've seen things up there that are huge, absolutely huge. And let me tell you, astronauts, they came up to me, they were crying, big men crying. Earth, it's a good name, but it's not big enough, not grand enough. So, I'm thinking we rename it. How about 'The Trump Sphere'? It's got a nice ring to it, doesn't it? And let me tell you, nobody would argue with that name!"

The point with the last bit was that they should be put in an unsafe craft.

Based on some rough numbers, NASA's budget (around $24B) would be <4% of the US's total spending on entertainment, with a pretty great return in research, engineering and education to boot.

I also looked up the NSF's 2024 budget, which, at $9B, was much lower than I expected.

NASA does both manned and unmanned stuff. Don't conflate those when you are looking at returns.

Look at this joke of a list https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/20-breakthroughs-from-... for an illustration. And those were the 20 best things they could come up with.

There are actually a lot of really interesting discoveries on that list. I haven't thought deeply about whether it represents value for money, but I would say that that is anything but "a joke of a list."

And 'Stimulating the low-Earth orbit economy' is a joke. Spending money not as a means to an end, but as the end in itself?

Apart from the research into the effects of microgravity on humans, pretty much everything else could have been done cheaper and better without humans.

Or take this example:

> Deployment of CubeSats from station: CubeSats are one of the smallest types of satellites and provide a cheaper way to perform science and technology demonstrations in space. More than 250 CubeSats have now been deployed from the space station, jumpstarting research and satellite companies.

Cubesats are great! But you don't exactly need a manned space station to deploy them. Similar with many other 'achievements' like the 'Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer'.

See also how they don't mention any actual impact. Only stuff like "This achievement may provide insight into fundamental laws of quantum mechanics."

And this is supposed to be the list of highlights. The best they have to offer.

> Spending money not as a means to an end, but as the end in itself?

Welcome to the macroeconomics practical, where we'll dig a ditch, refill it, and count it as a productive addition to the economy both times!

If doing it lowers the cost of earth movers and gets 20 other groups to each dig their own ditch, that's actually money well spent.

No, it depends on what else you could have spent the money on. Perhaps that would have been even better?

This is a typical argument for state intervention in the marketplace, but it is weaker if one makes different assumptions about the state of the market absent the intervention. In order to show that it was money well spent, you'd have to show that it's better to have more groups digging, and that there wouldn't have been enough diggers without GovDitch.

Well, also that spending on needless digging would have been the best use of the resources. Instead of spending on something more immediately useful (or leaving the money with the taxpayers).

There's really many, many more lower-hanging fruits in tax spend even in science funding alone, that's significantly more of a "waste of resources" than manned space program, and drastically more so in tax spending in general. Why not focus on those more, instead of attacking one of the few remaining things where people still try to do something ambitious, constructive, and forward-looking, and one that has a hugely disproportionate and positive impact on promoting interest in science and engineering?

But I've already noticed that some people think sportsball and adtech salaries are enough to build society's mythos around, so whatever.

Also, it's NASA, so they can't come out and say "stopped soviet rocket technology and expertise from proliferating" which was a large motivator for the ISS.

> with a pretty great return in research, engineering and education to boot.

If a company could spend 24B in research they would probably produce a lot more things than NASA

Absolutely! Think of the many new ways to display advertising that are being neglected while we foolishly launch people and things into space.

Well, NASA itself is a good counterexample here:

NASA could do a lot more good science, if they didn't (have to) launch primates into space.

The track record of NASA sending stuff to space is pretty bleak

Google's R&D budget is like $60B. Make of that what you will.

Of course, that's partially a tax optimisation.

Hard disagree. some of our best technologies came about to solve problems related to space travel which we later found useful for mundane problems at home. gps, digital cameras immediately come to mind. The only other phenomena I can think of with similar effects on human progress is war... I'll take a space race thanks

Have you heard of opportunity costs?

About war: in our universe we got the first digital computers because of military efforts during the second world war. However, without a war IBM and Konrad Zuse and others would have gotten there, too. With much less human suffering.

It's unlikely computing would have developed as quickly as it did without the Cold War. IBM's Sage and MIT's TX0 were both Cold War projects - one for a national early warning system, the other as an R&D platform for flight simulators.

Most US investment in associated tech - including the Internet - came through DARPA.

Not pointing this out because I support war, but to underline that the US doesn't have a culture of aggressive government investment in non-military R&D.

NASA and the NSF both get pocket money in budget terms. And at its height Apollo was a Cold War PR battle with the USSR that happened to funnel a lot of of money to defence contractors.

The original moon landings were not primarily motivated by science.

Why does it have to be government R&D?

It doesn't, but it was, because it was tied to administration and nuclear physics and then rocketry.

Private sector doesn't do much without obvious short-term gain, and it especially doesn't do basic research. It may be good at fitting more pixels in ever thinner phones, but it wouldn't get to that point if not the government that needed number-crunching machines for better modelling of nuclear fission some 80 years earlier.

As I said, IBM and Konrad Zuse were already on the cusp of general computing.

because companies are very not likely to pay for foundational research.

I believe you are making the same argument: the GP prefers space race over war for large technological development at less or no human suffering.

I have a hunch that space race is not for "peaceful technological progress of human race at large", or "let's see how this behaves in 0G, it might be useful for some global problems" anymore.

It is my understanding that it always was about „rockets are good for dropping bombs on people“.

Well, I highly doubt that the kind of rockets they are developing for Lunar and Mars missions will be mich better, if any better at all, than current ballistic missiles armies around the world already have. Those space rockets are huge and meant to more or less safely carry people over a long distance in space. Warheads are meant to carry explosives while also being hard to detect or stop. I'm no rocket scientist, but I believe that huge space rockets would defeat the purpose, as they would consume a lot of fuel for nothing, while also being much easier to spot and stopped by shooting something at them.

So I think the opposite: we are way past the point of space exploration being directly useful for weapons.

The point now isn’t having better rockets for (ballistic) missiles, since satellites became a thing the game has been infrastructure. Future (hypothetical) missions to the moon and mars might not be for military research purposes directly, but the infrastructure that both needs to be and now can be set up to support those missions will absolutely be co-opted for military purposes.

The race is now to bootstrap your nation’s permanent presence in space, because at the moment there is a first mover opportunity for what is slowly but surely becoming just another frontier for economics, geopolitics, etc. to play out over (granted this is already happening, I suppose I’m talking about a step change in scale).

Well, it never hurts to be prepared for the war against Europaeans (aliens from Europa, satellite of Jupiter).

LOL

Well, getting your toes cut off is better than losing your whole foot, yes.

Now do the opportunity cost of AI model virtue signalling to investors for several years

As long as they mostly spend VC money, who am I to judge? It's no worse than rich people buying yachts.

Just don't spend tax payer money.

But they dodge taxes, so they're effectively spending it anyway.

Are you talking about legal tax optimisation, or illegally not paying your taxes?

Firstly how is this related to opportunity costs. Secondly, no one said that to create digital computer you should start a war. It's just that war is already present, regardless of you invent digital computers or space travel.

What opportunity is being lost out on because of space exploration?

Whatever you can imagine they could spend the money on, including leaving it with the tax payer or taking on less debt.

(And, if you don't like the monetary framing: just look at the real resources spend instead.)

However I'm not nearly as harsh on unmanned space exploration.

That's not how resources work. Resources that are used for space exploration aren't magically available for anything else when you don't do space exploration. The economy is not a zero sum game and human capital is not fungible.

A rocket scientist/engineer/technician/etc at NASA is not going to work on the thing we "should" spend money on instead if tomorrow you shut down NASA's manned spaceflight programs. They'll probably go work on ads at Meta instead.

Who said anything about adjustments being instant?

> They'll probably go work on ads at Meta instead.

And provide value there, yes! That's how the economy works.

> That's not how resources work. Resources that are used for space exploration aren't magically available for anything else when you don't do space exploration. The economy is not a zero sum game and human capital is not fungible.

Your 'Meta' example was about fungible human capital, wasn't it? In any case, human capital is fairly fungible in the long run: people won't train on the skills necessary to hurl primates into space, if they know that there's no manned space programme in the first place.

And to make my position sharper:

NASA and the world would be better off shutting down their manned space programme tomorrow. A lot of the skills and human capital (but not all!) involved there can be funged into unmanned space exploration.

You are serious? Up until this point I thought you're writing in jest, because all the things you mention are actually good ideas - including especially funding manned space flight from entertainment budget, because:

1) It's better aligned with mission profile (inspirational, emotional, but not strictly necessary;

2) There's much more of it to go than NASA gets;

3) It would be a better use of that money than what it's currently used for.

I'm saying manned spaceflight is a waste of money and resources.

We'd get more and better science by spending it on unmanned space stuff. Or you could even just leave the money with the taxpayer.

Space spinoffs are grossly exaggerated.

Broken window fallacy much? The amount of money spent on space race could have been spent somewhere else and you have no idea how to evaluate of this was a valid set of outcomes.

could the government rent out monopoly grants for televised football on the moon in exchange for sponsoring manned space exploration?

If the NFL were to somehow become involved, you can bet that they'd somehow manage to turn the financials around and get some of that sweet government money flowing in their direction, just like the dozens of taxpayer-funded or otherwise tax-advantaged stadium deals in the past 25 years that allow us to thank Big Football financially for gracing us with the presence of football teams.

It is astounding to me how such a successful, rich group of companies manage to get subsidies in quantities that groups you'd think deserve or need it more, from valuable science endeavours to orphans dying of cancer, can only dream of.

Is there any research on the effect of apparent gravitational field strength on sports? I’d be willing to bet that rocketry and artillery takes account of 50mm/s2 difference at the equator. While the difference is obviously tiny, the margins in modern sports are also miniscule.

Do Fijian rugby games see a 0.5% increase in longest drop goal distance?

I have no idea about the 0.5% increase in drop goal distance, but tongue-in-cheek, I would say only 0.5% as many attempted drop goals - given the Fijian team's emphasis on a ball-in-hand style of play instead of kicking the ball away.

On a slightly related note, I always found the games played in Pretoria in South Africa fascinating. It's 1350 m above sea level, so kicks all go 10% to 15% further (my estimate) which makes quite a difference when there are players kicking penalties from over halfway even at sea level.

Which government? The moon doesn't belong to any one government.

Though the US could just do it. Who's to stop them from selling these pieces of paper?

just wait until influencers start flying there. Not on SLS of course. Flyby on Starship cattle class - say 100 people (500 for LEO and "SFO to Shanghai" while for Moon - several days would require better accommodations, thus 100) - at $5M/launch, 10 launches (9 of them - tankers) - thus $50M 3 day roundtrip for 100 people. Half a mil per person.

No no no. Space will be colonized. At least our local solar system will see sustained human exploration and inhabitation. This requires physical presence. This is one of those black swans which seem silly when looking forward, but obvious in retrospective. The future belongs to those who do seemingly silly things today. The first industrialists often faced ridicule because they spent time designing machines instead of doing the task and making the immediate money. Set aside your need for immediate gratification. Hard things lead to good outcomes.

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