we can’t afford space
http://space4commerce.blogspot.com/2006/…
We can’t afford space. It’s too expensive. We broke the bank just getting a handful of men to the Moon in 1969 – and now we want to send a baker’s dozen at a time? Bah – spend that fortune on something worthwhile like social woes… 0.8 of the GDP is nothing. We can afford that level of spending while holding our breath. It is not, then, about the money spent on space but politics and who controls the spending.
While I’m sure Brian and I are in complete agreement about the desirability and inevitability of humans getting in to space (the phrase ” Manifest Destiny” manifestly understates my enthusiasm), we differ on the implementation details and the schedule, and – as Fran has argued before in his blog – the rights involved. If someone does not have the right to do something (whether knock down my house to build a pharmaceuticals factory, or tax me to fund a space station), then it does not matter if their arguments in favor of it are good or not.
The argument in favor of going to space is a good argument.
…but no one has the right to tax me to make it happen.
If Liftport needs more money, they should float a stock offering, or sell bonds. I’ll buy.
But if NASA wants to launch another batch of spam to the spam-in-a-can astronauts at the ISS, they do not have the right to confiscate my money.
Deontological arguments aside, there’s also the question of pragmatism.
We could have, I assert, built an Apple II in 1960, and put one in every house in America.
However, it would have been the wrong thing at the wrong time. The technology to do it the right way was already scheduled to arrive, and pulling in achievements from the future as stunts via massive cash expenditures often (usually ?) accomplishes little.
As Nick Szabo said just two days ago in his blog:
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/01…
Another application of Tabarrok’s theory: “the” space program. (Just the fact that people use “the” to refer to what are, or at least should be, a wide variety of efforts, as in almost any other general area of human endeavor, should give us the first big hint that something is very wrong with “it”). For global warming we may be letting our fears outstrip reality; in “the” space program we have let our hopes outstrip reality. Much of what NASA has done over its nearly fifty year history, for example, would have been far more effective and self-sustaining if done several decades later, in a very different way, on a smaller scale, on a much lower budget, and for practical reasons, such as commercial or military reasons, rather than as ephemeral political fancies. The best space development strategy is often to just to wait and learn — wait until we’ve developed better technology and wait until we’ve learned more about what’s available up there. Our children will be able to do it far more effectively than we. I understand that such waiting is excrutiatingly painful to die-hard space fans like myself, but all the more reason to beware of deluding ourselves into acting too soon.
January 3rd, 2007 at 11:29 pm
I should be more clear when I write.
That wasn’t a call for Apollo level spending by anyone. It was a response to the
whining and hand-wringing that goes on in some quarters about space, funding,
and how much money is poured down the rat hole.
Not that that level of spending is desirable, but it is doable.
The technology to do it the right way was already scheduled to arrive, and
pulling in achievements from the future as stunts via massive cash expenditures
often (usually ?) accomplishes little.
I’m a fan of that approach – it’s reasonable and seems to work. If we’d gone
with that approach in the 60s we’d have a space station or ten that work,
commercial access to space and stations on the moon.
We didn’t and we don’t.
On the other hand you can’t ROI the cost of Apollo, wrapped up as it was in the
Cold War and the absolute requirement to demonstrate that the American approach to the future was better than the Soviet.
I don’t think it was certain that we would ‘win’ the Cold War, and that it did
so with the collapse of the Soviet Union – without a nuclear exchange – seems
to me to be a very unlikely event.
A win by the Soviet Union (think the Carter presidency – in your face – forever)
would usher in a completely different paradigm for space. We wouldn’t get the technology – or rather it would show up but the environment to use it wouldn’t see their use.