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Comment by tc | Hacker News Reader

moon visit would have never happened

This is my favorite example of this type of argument, because the moon visits should not have happened when they did. A handful of government employees spent a few days on the moon (at an enormous cost to other Americans) at least 40 years before there was any useful reason to get there. The evidence of this is that we haven't gone back.

As for your other examples, your claim is as absurd as saying that if it weren't for Edison we wouldn't have interior lighting or if it weren't for Bell we wouldn't have telephones.

If in 1978, we had diverted 5% of GDP for 10 years to building something like Google, we probably could have done it. But in 1988, it wouldn't have been terribly useful, and by waiting 10 years we got Google anyway at a much lower cost (and without coercively spending other people's money).

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In 1978 google could not have been built simply because there was not yet a need for a google to be built. The need for a google came in to being by the combined existence of a large pool of accessible data called the world wide web and the frustration with the search engines of the day, notably altavista and inktomi.

Only when those conditions arose was a google possible, and in many ways inevitable.

To compare the invention of electric light and the telephone with the moonshot is to compare apples with oranges about as bad as I've ever seen it.

Compared to the amount of money wasted on various nonsense projects in their time, SDI comes to mind but there are plenty of other examples the moon saga was one of the high points in the history of humankind.

Sure the telephone and the electric light are great inventions, not a day goes by without use of them for a large portion of the people on the planet.

But they did not inspire a generation of kids to follow the path of science the way the moon episode did. We would most definitely be in a completely different world technology wise had that not happened, it probably was one of the best returns on investment in the history of man.

As far as I can tell, your argument boils down to:

$125B+ (inflation adjusted) was worthwhile for inspiring people about what was possible.

Listen, I don't disagree that there were some benefits of the space program. But $125B+ is a lot of money for Velcro and inspiration. Let's keep a sense of scale here: if you assume YC invests $25k per company, $125B is 5 million startups (and 15 million or so founders). [1]

Just remember that the resources have to come from somewhere, and that if you're going to do it through government, you're spending other people's money to get things that you want. Someone else may not care about technology or the moon, and may prefer to spend that money on social programs or farm subsidies. Once you open the door that government takes the money and spends it, how can you possibly determine whose value system is better?

Also, to tie this back around to where we started, whether you support the idea of spending other people's money on projects that you like or not, my initial point was simply that risking money that isn't yours is not brave, whatever else you want to call it, because the politicians are not personally at risk of any loss. Worthless boondoggles don't even seem to negatively affect their reputation, and may even get them called bold.

[1] Note that I'm not proposing that the government should have invested in 5 million companies, but that an equivalent amount of resources was removed from the economy -- resources that could have built other things that people want.

Space is really the next frontier, I see the moonshot as a taste of what is to come, generations of people have seen what can be done, now we need to find a way to do it better and more cost effective. The rest is spin-offs, if you think the only things that came out of the space program were velcro and some inspiration then that is very sad indeed.

have a look here for some more perspective on this:

http://www.spacecoalition.com/products.cfm

very sad indeed

Hyperbole is the pepper of interesting conversation, and I think the randomness of mentioning Velcro made that intention pretty clear.

For what it's worth, I'm a proponent of space as well. I just think the Burt Rutan / Richard Branson route is more likely to get people like you and I into space in our lifetimes than a government program, which by its nature sucks resources out of the economy that could be used by people like Rutan who have an actual incentive to make it affordable. NASA has had over 50 years and they've done little to nothing to bring the cost of space access down. The Scaled Composites folks, as I understand it, were able to use very very little of anything that came out of NASA (except Velcro [1]), as it was all geared towards multi-billion dollar budgets.

Like you mentioned about Google being more or less inevitable, I believe Burt Rutan and people like him are inevitable (in a free market) when the time is right and the technical and capital foundation is in place.

(And I'll again point out that we're still missing the only point I really wanted to make here, which is that risking other people's money, particularly when they haven't freely given it to you, shouldn't be called brave even if you personally believe it's somehow worthwhile.)

[1] Velcro is actually a bad example anyway; it was invented long before the space program.

Good points, and regarding velcro, nature had it long before we did :)

And I agree with you on the bravery when just looking at th e money side of it.

I wasn't really thinking as much about the money alone though your cut & paste made it look like that as on the combination of expense and technical obstacles to overcome.

Especially the latter will have lots of challenges, a project like this will require a fairly advanced degree of space assembly and/or manufacture.

I can't believe you left out Tang.

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