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Comment by dpatru | Hacker News Reader

> If that isn't a reason to be investing in Space, I don't know what is.

To justify government research, the results need to be compared to the alternative. Had NASA scientists not been working for the government, they would have been working for private companies engaged doing useful work. The Soviet Union had similar resources to the US, yet their research budget was spent wholly by government, whereas a large portion of the US research during that time was directed by private companies. If you want to restrict the comparison just to the US, ask yourself what would the massive wealth that was dedicated to NASA had produced had it been directed by private interests? What would NASA engineers have produced had they been employed by in Y-Combinator-style startups? (or even big private companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc.)

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A couple points:

1) It's not like the Soviet Union was a terrible hellhole for research. It had impressive research output for decades.

2) That's almost beside the point, however. Let's take it as a given that more good research, whatever that is, is a worthy goal for a society, and that the market under-invests in it in favor of short term profits. It's obviously not a binary of either 100% government funding or 100% private; it's not even really a one-dimensional continuum, because for the large capital expenditures typically involved in research, the government always has a heavy involvement, either in tax breaks or grants or collaboration. The question is, how do we allocate money to produce the best research? It's undoubtedly at some value that's somewhere between 0% and 100%.

3) There's a whole lot of money floating around now that makes endeavors like SpaceX practicable. That wasn't the case in, say, the Sixties. Even if the arguments for government spending on research were weak now, they'd be stronger in the 1960's, particularly for things like space exploration that required substantial concentrations of capital.

As great as SpaceX is, at least half of its funding comes from NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Funding

I believe that SpaceX would have no problem securing funds from either BRIC, Arabs or even AlQuaeda for that matter.

> (or even big private companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc.)

Or IBM, or everyone's favourite, Tesla.

A similar argument always crops up with people always looking at how much technology came out of war-time efforts. The opportunity costs are huge.

While you're considering alternatives, what would the massive wealth dedicated to the DOD have done in the hands of NASA and private non-military researchers?

The real reason is, all the solar cell numbers are fake. Its dark around here (and everywhere else) an average of 50% of the time. In space, its bright (brighter than on the ground) around 90% of the time.

Terrestrial solar cells MUST account for this when comparing efficiencies. So this new cell is 23% efficient, versus 46% if deployed orbitally, before accounting for the increased solar intensity in space.

Elon Musk is famously quoted as criticizing space-based solar plants because of the supposed inefficiencies in transmitting power to the ground. Somehow he missed this massive difference due to the unavoidable daily 'terrestrial eclipse' e.g. night. Also he failed to consider social/political costs (securing land rights near where the power is needed, the ecological impact of killing millions of acres of vegetation etc) but he's good at ignoring that it appears, recall the HyperLoop plan.

So this new cell is 23% efficient, versus 46% if deployed orbitally

That isn't how you calculate conversion efficiency. If there is no input to convert, you don't count that as a conversion loss.

Exactly. So lets talk about a different, important number. Watts per dollar per day. The only one your accountant/investor cares about. Its something like double or triple for space-based solar cells, if you can deploy them efficiently.

a. they have to be in space so your capital outlay is insane

b. you have massive efficiency losses in wireless power transmission

Both are VERY debatable points. capital outlay in $56 million per launch for Falcon 9. Is that more or less than buying up hundreds of square miles of urban land? Deployment/construction is also different, and perhaps very much cheaper, under zero-gravity.

As for efficiency losses, I don't know what figures you used but its essentially the same problem to receive photons on the ground from a maser in space as the original task of converting sunlight in the first place. Efficiencies there are in fact very high (re: OP).

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