Someone Asked Me Why Have A Space Program?

[Knowledge_Seeker]

(This Is For The Sake Of Arguemnt)
My frined once asked my why we should spend millions upon billions of dollars each year on NASA and other such programs when we put so much input and not receive much output?

Supposedly there is no benifit. We are wasting money. Why have a space program when we can spend that money into something like education, or health benifits, etc.

[Knowledge_Seeker]

In the title i meant,

"Someone Asked Me Why Have A Space Program?"

[jkmccrann]

What on Earth does this person do? What about all that money wasted on lavish Hollywood productions? How do they help?

If you look around this forum, I can assure you that you'll find plenty of contributions that completely debunk that sort of spurious and ill-infomred argument.

Has this person ever used a cell-phone? Because they're being completely hypocritical if they have.

[Knowledge_Seeker]

Yeah, i agree but one can assume that a reply to you would be that hollywood is entertaining. and NASA is.......expensive.

but personally i say that its in our nature. we as humans ask questions. i mean we observe, experiment, and think.

we search for the answer to the questions we ask. but the answer in itself is also the question. so what is the answer?

this is what we have to discover. this is what we have to do to satify our hunger for knowledge. that's why im... knowledge seeker

wow that was so deep for me

[tony873004]

Satellite TV, which drives a massive industry, employing perhaps millions when you consider the production of the programs. Those who don't give a damn about space but love football would quickly appreciate the space program if the geosyncs failed.

Weather. Most of New Orleans fled before Katrina hit. How many more people would have died in Hurricane Katrina if they didn't witness on TV a giant bullseye heading straight for their city.

Hundreds of other hurricanes and the hundreds of thousands of lives saved by satellite warning since the dawn of the space age.

Lightweight plastics developed for space which are now used in automobiles, increasing mileage and keeping pollutants out of the air.

Tylenol.

[Sticks]

For the record it was not me, and I have voted yes

[Maksutov]

Then there's the whole range of devices, the development of which was driven inpart by the space program, that resulted in a machine which would allow someone to vote "No" on this poll.

Without the need for lightweight, miniaturized, high-speed, low-power, in-flight control systems, data acquisition and relay systems, etc.,, the home computer would probably still be close to what was predicted those IBM and DEC executives way back when, and limited to a few models affordable by a few.

[Swift]

Check out this thread for our most recent discussion along these lines. I gave my thoughts there.

[Saluki]

Small minds think of the economy as a zero-sum game. In other words, they think like this: "If we spend 900 million on this space probe, we have 900 million less to cure cancer or feed the hungry."

In reality, the economy is far from zero-sum. If we spend 900 million on a space probe, that money goes to employ many hundreds of workers in the aerospace industry, government, academia, etc. These people pay taxes, consume products, and do many other things that stimulate the economy. That just covers the primary beneficiaries. We also have secondary beneficiaries such as news reporters who have a story to report, web sites who get more advertisers and more money per ad because the site is getting more hits because people are interested in the project, the guy who owns the hot dog cart that he wheels near the people who watch the launch, the caterers who serve food to all the people working on the project, etc.

The list goes on and on, and we have not even started discussing the more intangible benefits of advancement of human knowledge.

[aurora]

Besides money spent on any kind of science, space or not, is money that is not spent on war. I won't go any farther in that direction for fear of pushing this to politics, I'm speaking of war in general, not specific examples.

As to another benefit, I really like GPS. I take my GPS along with me now when I travel, and it sure is nice being able to drive from an unfamiliar airport in the middle of the night to a hotel on the other side of an unfamiliar city and not get lost.

[Eckelston]

Small minds think of the economy as a zero-sum game. In other words, they think like this: "If we spend 900 million on this space probe, we have 900 million less to cure cancer or feed the hungry."

In reality, the economy is far from zero-sum. If we spend 900 million on a space probe, that money goes to employ many hundreds of workers in the aerospace industry, government, academia, etc. These people pay taxes, consume products, and do many other things that stimulate the economy. That just covers the primary beneficiaries. We also have secondary beneficiaries such as news reporters who have a story to report, web sites who get more advertisers and more money per ad because the site is getting more hits because people are interested in the project, the guy who owns the hot dog cart that he wheels near the people who watch the launch, the caterers who serve food to all the people working on the project, etc.

The list goes on and on, and we have not even started discussing the more intangible benefits of advancement of human knowledge.

Aren't all those benefits present when you work to eliminate world hunger or poverty? Or public works projects? Pork barrel? And people having jobs aren't the benefit. It's the cost. They could be payed to do something else in their time.

If the space program cannot justify its existence by the results it provides (knowledge, technology, maybe inspiration) than it has no point. There is very little economic sense in spending money just to give people something to do. Especially since we are talking about people who would have no trouble finding something productive to do with their time.

[Smacklug]

Aren't all those benefits present when you work to eliminate world hunger or poverty? Or public works projects? Pork barrel? And people having jobs aren't the benefit. It's the cost. They could be payed to do something else in their time.

If the space program cannot justify its existence by the results it provides (knowledge, technology, maybe inspiration) than it has no point. There is very little economic sense in spending money just to give people something to do. Especially since we are talking about people who would have no trouble finding something productive to do with their time.

Uh, if we take away funding for space projects, it will probably just be spent on the defense budget.

[Doodler]

(This Is For The Sake Of Arguemnt)
My frined once asked my why we should spend millions upon billions of dollars each year on NASA and other such programs when we put so much input and not receive much output?

Supposedly there is no benifit. We are wasting money. Why have a space program when we can spend that money into something like education, or health benifits, etc.

Ok, enough of this... (Note: This isn't intended as an attack, just a rant answering the question)

1) Hunger. We send billions of dollars abroad to other countries in an effort to stabilize their governments so they can feed themselves. The problem here, those governments waste the money we give them. They still starve. Wanna feed the hungry? Spend your own darned money on charities designed to handle it. Government hand outs don't solve a thing.

If they're starving in the United States, I find that an inexcuseable situation when unemployment is at the lowest level on record. Get a job, feed yourself. Can't feed the kids? Give them up for adoption and stop having them. People use the excuse of hunger for begging for a government handout as a means of shirking responsibility for their own lives and the lives they create as if survival was an entitlement, not something you go out into the world and bust your butt for. I do not pity them, nor will I miss them when they are gone. People fail in life, people die for no other reason than they were dealt a bad hand in life. That's the way it works. It sucks, but that's the downside of a free country.

2) Federal money for education. We did that, we now have No Child Left Behind. Pardon me, lunch is coming back...

3) Government health benefits. Sure, European countries have socialized medicine. They also pay income taxes sometimes double the rate we do in the United States. Good luck selling THAT idea in an election.


Governments represent the interests of its constituents by providing them with opportunities to better themselves, they don't do it for them. They do not feed them, they do not house them, they do not educate them, they do not heal them. At some point, you either grow up and make your own way in the world, or you die. Its that simple. More money is wasted in promoting the denial of this than is spent promoting the dreams of those who acheive success in life. That is a human tragedy to me.

Sorry if this comes off brutal, but I'd rather be honest than be nice.

[Ara Pacis]

I think you make some good points, Doodler, even if some of them get close to political. Some anthropologists define a civilization as having a system for the distribution of wealth and a system for division of labor, which may be minimized in the "make your own way in the world" mentality. I'm not saying you are wrong, just that such a system is considered by some to be less than civilized.

The question is a legitimate one, even if the inquirer in uninformed and asks the question out of ignorant assumptions of reality. Could we have developed some of the spaceborn technologies without going into space? Many communications functions may have been (and may eventually be) performed with landbased radio or landline systems. Making spacecraft lighter may have started the computer revolution, but the semiconductor industry has not been propelled by aerospace needs much since then. Sure, they make good money off of spaceflights, but I would bet they may much more selling PCs and other consumer electronics.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but consumers are its wetnurse.

[Dave Mitsky]

What on Earth does this person do? What about all that money wasted on lavish Hollywood productions? How do they help?

If you look around this forum, I can assure you that you'll find plenty of contributions that completely debunk that sort of spurious and ill-infomred argument.

Has this person ever used a cell-phone? Because they're being completely hypocritical if they have.

What bearing does the activity of a private enterprise that is meant to generate profits have on a tax financed government program?

Dave Mitsky

[ChrisRT]

I've no time to read all of the replies so I have no way to see if anyone has said this but think about it...

*There is a limited set of resources (the more the population grows the faster they become depleted)
*We've only been keeping accurate records for a fraction of the Earth's age and we do NOT know what it, or the Sun is capable of
*We are a warring people (up to this point in our history at least)

Think about it, between asteroids, Earth failure, war, disease, dwindling resources and whatever else you can think of we need not to put all of our 'eggs' in one basket. We must strive for the stars be it government funded or privately funded. If we don’t we are surely doomed...

[Doodler]

I think you make some good points, Doodler, even if some of them get close to political.

Believe me, there was a knot in my stomach the whole time I wrote that because it treaded close to the border. The problem is, you can't discuss government spending priorities without getting near it, so either you dare the pain of a ban, or you beat about the bush and have a discussion on space program spending that goes nowhere.

[Fr. Wayne]

"Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward- pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.
Mankind flung its advanced agents ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weighless sea of outwardness without end.
It flung them like stones.
These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth- a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions.
Only inwardness remained to be explored.
Only the human soul remained terra incognita.
This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom." Sirens of Titan -1959

[Hugo Drax]

Doodler said it - all govt. spending decisions are political, so there is only so much you can do to avoid getting into politics.

I would argue that the Space Program makes sense from a govt. spending IF you can get a better return on the investment than if you spent the money in other ways. Although it is true that, as Saluki said, money is never wasted, some types of spending generate more returns than others (and "waste" is used to refer to spending that generates mininum returns). GPS is a good example of money well spent; it led to the creation of an entire industry for civilian uses etc.

[novaderrik]

NASA is the R&D division of the federal government. it is like a centralized melting pot where all the best and brightest minds to get together to make stuff that's faster, cheaper, and better than what we already have.
all the pretty pictures from Hubble or the people floating in space 200 miles up or the robots running around on Mars or orbiting other planets are also just r&d vehicles for new technologies that will trickle down to the general public thru the products put out by the private companies that developed those things.
what % of the federal budget is spent on NASA every year? isn't it less than 1% or something like that?
in light of some of theo ther ways our government spends our money, i'd say that 1% being "wasted' on space travel is a pretty good bargain.

[Argos]

In reality, the economy is far from zero-sum.

Yep. What most people donīt know is that wealth can be created.

[Hugo Drax]

But wealth creation is not the same as the economic growth/expansion that happens when people merely spend money/consume. Wealth creation is about added value and big returns on investment.

If you give me $1000000 and I spend it all on chocolate bars, then yay for the makers of chocolate bars. If you give me $1000000 and I invent/develop something and create a sustainable business etc., then yay for a lot more people. Compared to the latter (genuine wealth creation), the former is a waste of money.

[Argos]

But wealth creation is not the same as the economic growth/expansion that happens when people merely spend money/consume. Wealth creation is about added value and big returns on investment.

If you give me $1000000 and I spend it all on chocolate bars, then yay for the makers of chocolate bars. If you give me $1000000 and I invent/develop something and create a sustainable business etc., then yay for a lot more people. Compared to the latter (genuine wealth creation), the former is a waste of money.

Agreed. The space program qualifies as a good investment. The satellite business, for example, is a sustainable (and expanding) economic activity. Wealth being created.

[Saluki]

Aren't all those benefits present when you work to eliminate world hunger or poverty? Or public works projects? Pork barrel? And people having jobs aren't the benefit. It's the cost. They could be payed to do something else in their time.

If the space program cannot justify its existence by the results it provides (knowledge, technology, maybe inspiration) than it has no point. There is very little economic sense in spending money just to give people something to do. Especially since we are talking about people who would have no trouble finding something productive to do with their time.

You missed my point entirely.

[Doodler]

Doodler said it - all govt. spending decisions are political, so there is only so much you can do to avoid getting into politics.

I would argue that the Space Program makes sense from a govt. spending IF you can get a better return on the investment than if you spent the money in other ways. Although it is true that, as Saluki said, money is never wasted, some types of spending generate more returns than others (and "waste" is used to refer to spending that generates mininum returns). GPS is a good example of money well spent; it led to the creation of an entire industry for civilian uses etc.

Caveat, the GPS was a military system, not a NASA system. A better example of NASA science money having a net positive impact on the economy would be SOHO.

The fact that we have a near constant observer capable of reporting solar weather to Earth has saved us a LOT of money in satellites that would have otherwise been barbequed had their owners not been alerted to take precautions. You can count every penny saved in satellites that do not need to be replaced or supplemented by new systems as a definite positive for SOHO. Communications disruptions can now be somewhat prepared for and alternatives arranged in the event of a major CME or flare. Like any other form of weather, there's not a lot we can do about the Suns conniptions, but the ability to semi-reliably prepare for them, knowing they are out there happening, makes a lot of businesses a lot more profitable by keeping them aware of what's happening above.

There was another Earth observing satellite that went offline about a year or two ago that had been a godsend in weather prediction down here because it could give extremely accurate reports of ocean currents and temperatures. I wish I could remember its name...I think it might have been a Japanese bird, though.

[Jerry]

The universe has to expand into something. Where would it expand without a space program?