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Comment by efiftythree | Hacker News Reader

There really needs to be more, very public, displays of stories like this one. Whenever I hear someone ask why we should invest in missions to Mars and/or the Moon this is the kind of thing I think about. How many amazing things that we take completely for granted were created in order for us to send humans to the moon and live in space?

Setting our sights on harsh and distant destinations creates a massive vacuum of technological innovation. I firmly believe that solutions to energy, hunger, conservation/human impact on ecosystems can be found on our journey to the further reaches of space.

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It always pains me to see the space program justified on the basis of its spin-offs. The main (civilian) problems that the space program solved were in getting to space, putting a man on the moon, developing a re-usable orbiter, and building the space station. Similarly, if we really want to solve problems of energy or hunger, why not create a dedicated alternative-energy or anti-poverty 'Apollo program'?

One of the greatest engines of technological development in the 20th century was WWII. Fortunately few people argue for new wars by citing the potential for spin-off technologies. But the logic would be about as good. (Arguably the space program itself was a product of the Cold War.)

Aside from that - the linked article doesn't say anything about spin-offs. It says that very prosaic, existing technology for daily life on Earth was adapted for use in the space program.

We already have solutions to all of those problems. People just don't want to put them into practice because nuclear power is so dangerous it causes like 0.05% of the deaths of traditional energy sources and eating mostly vegetarian diets is just unbearable, etc. What they want are solutions that are indistinguishable from what we have now but still somehow solve the problem. I don't think Mars is going to offer us a free lunch.

As the old saying dictates Mars certainly isn't a free lunch. However, I wouldn't necessarily agree that we have solutions to the problems I mentioned. I'd agree that we have some potential solutions most of which are in very early stages and often quite expensive. Both issues have kept wider adoption from occurring.

Vegetarian diets are neither a new thing nor wildly expensive. They're old as dirt and can be far more economical than heavily meat-based diets. People don't want to adopt them just because they prefer the diets they have now.

I'm sympathetic to what you're saying -- these articles are great reads -- but remember there's also the opportunity cost of taking money via taxes from entrepreneurs and private-sector innovators who, in aggregate, would surely have come up with some of their own innovations with additional resources. And perhaps they would have been even more useful to humanity.

As far as I know the argument for that is not very strong. Despite all the mythology around entrepreneurship startups are known to be good at piecing together existing technology into scalable businesses, not primary research. Moonshot level breakthroughs need large sums of money being thrown into the unknown. And that is something for the state like in the foundation of SV[1] or large monopolies like Bell Labs inventing the transistor.

[1] http://steveblank.com/secret-history/

Ah, but I wasn't talking only about startups.

NASA has received something like $800 billion in funding in current dollars. I suspect you would agree that, if that sum had been left in the private sector, some interesting and innovative things would have come of it. Obviously we can disagree about the amount.

There's also the separate argument that lavishing so much funding and authority on NASA allowed it to squash the private space industry for many decades, setting humanity back many years. This was the case until fairly recently, when the 1998 Commercial Space Act helped to change this.

Here's an article I wrote in 2007 about NASA. Unfortunately the original appears to have disappeared in a CNET site redesign last month but (sigh) FreeRepublic copied and pasted it here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1908035/posts Space, by contrast, until recently has remained the domain of NASA. Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer famous for building a suborbital rocket plane that won the Ansari X Prize, believes NASA is crowding out private efforts. "Taxpayer-funded NASA should only fund research and not development," Rutan said during a recent panel discussion at the California Institute of Technology. "When you spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build a manned spacecraft, you're...dumbing down a generation of new, young engineers (by saying), 'No, you can't take new approaches, you have to use this old technology.'"

Also remember that government bureaucracies aren't exactly known for their careful use of funds. The Space Shuttle concept was pitched to the public as costing only $5 million a flight; it ended up costing $1.3 billion a flight, with a 1-in-50 chance of disaster upon each launch.

The options aren't 800billion for NASA or 800billion for Burt Rutan. The options are 800 billion for NASA or a slightly lower tax rate for millions of people and corporations, mostly the wealthier ones (as those pay the most tax). Do you still think those dollars would have generated as much innovation in the private sector?

I agree that NASA hasn't done the best use of its money, the space shuttle was particularly useless. But the solution for that isn't to not have these large well-funded research programs. It's probably to make more efficient use of the private sector to run parts of them. But even NASA does that already. This article itself was about an underwear company designing a space suit because NASA contracted it out. Do you think these guys would have developed the technology they did if it wasn't for the Moonshot?

Even your article just seems to argue that NASA is late in letting go of now mature stuff and letting the private sector take over. Do you actually think we would have ever gone to the moon without the USA/USSR space race? Even the aviation comparison is suspect. How much of the technology in the modern airliner is the result of large governments funding military aviation?

I'm hopeful, based on organizations such as SpaceX, that these innovation vacuums will continue to be filled by private organizations rather than via government agencies. Not only do I hope that will be the case I think at this point when considering the financial state of most governments around the world it appears in my mind to be the only real working solution.

We know all too well that the process to taxation to output results in cents on the dollar reaching its destination.

Why don't we make energy, hunger, and conservation the moonshots themselves instead of trying to make a literal moonshot and hope that we solve those problems as a side effect?

Because those things are incremental things, not all at once things.

We slows transition to nuclear power, not all at once. We slowly provide inorganic fertilizer and irrigation water to everyone, not all at once. We slowly increase living standards so that people have extra energy and money to care about pollution.

So is space exploration, but you can set concrete goals (i.e. produce all of Germany's energy from sustainable sources) that work as moonshots and put the kind of energy and resources behind them that you would put behind a moonshot, and at the end, you have just as much incidental technological development as you would from an actual moonshot, plus sustainable energy production for a G7 country instead of a pointless flag on the moon.

That just brings up another problem and that is defining your goals.

Germany is not using sustainable energy, Germany thinks they are, but they are actually importing their energy from China.

But to get back to the main topic, in a moonshot you need to research and then implement, but here the research is done, it's the implementation that is left - it makes for a very different type of thing. One is exciting and dramatic, the other is slow and plodding.

But even a modestly beneficial "moonshot" goal would be better than a literal moon shot, which provides zero direct benefit.

The space program was not an idealistic quest for knowledge. It seems like you like your spin-offs to be the product of nation state v. nation state. Maybe blame al-qaeda? We have drones instead of mars rockets because UBL hid in caves and not on mars.

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