(This is written from an American perspective, and reposted from elsewhere - but I think it fits.)
For much of my life, when we spend money on space, we get not-space.
For the money we spent on the X-30, X-33, X-34, and X-38, when Dan Goldin was NASA administrator, what did we get? Not-space. (At least the X-37 is up there spyingflying.)
The orbital space plane program, the one that was Sean O'Keefe's thing - neat plans, more capsules than planes IIRC, but ultimately we got not-space from it.
The Vision for Space Exploration, under Michael Griffin? Rocket designs that were approximately equivalent to throwing your astronauts into a paint mixer. A system about which the review panel said that "If they gave us the system on a silver platter, the first thing we'd have to do is cancel it, because we couldn't afford the ongoing costs." A lot of money, a launch pad rusting in the Florida weather, and a whole lot of not-space.
And for all the money we spend on human spaceflight, we now send Astronauts up as passengers in Soyuz rockets.
Now we're spending $18 billion dollars - figure subject to change, always upward - to build the SLS - the Senate Launch System. (Another estimate has it at $40B for development and the first 4 flights.) If all things go as planned, it will launch once every two years, launching an unmanned trip around the moon in 2017 and a manned trip to the moon in 2019. Schedule subject to change - always slipping.
Does anyone thing that SLS has a chance of working? Or is it just going to become another not-space program?
How about the replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb Space Telescope? In 1997, it was going to be launched in 2007, and it was going to have cost 500 million dollars. Now we've spent 3.5 billion on it, and it will launch in 2018. Maybe. That's a ton of money to spend on not-space - and it's money that's been taken away from the moderately successful bits of NASA, like the Mars program, which doesn't have a mission in it after 2013's MAVEN.
I don't mind spending money on space. I like space. I've been following the MER rovers for nearly a decade. I think COTS and Commercial Crew are brilliant, and hope that they will continue to exist with a program structure that rewards results, rather than existence. Commercial space is the last best hope to get a domestic space capability.
But times are tight. We're massively overspending as is - borrowing tons of money our grandchildren will still be paying back. So increased spending is far from free.
Is it worth it? I say yes. Spend money on space. Where do we get that money? Let's stop spending it on not-space, like we have been.
> But times are tight. We're massively overspending as is - borrowing tons of money our grandchildren will still be paying back. So increased spending is far from free.
FYI, if you remove all NASA spending from the budget, the total deficit remains the same out to something like 3 or 4 significant figures.
That requires two sign figs to appear so it's not that far off of what i guestimated (1 order of magnitude off: 9.01E11 - 8.83E11 is 1.8E10).
If i had said, "if you remove all NASA spending from the budget, the total budget remains the same out to something like 3 or 4 significant figures," then we would need 3 sig figs to see any impact by NASA's budget (3.803E12 - 1.78E10 = 3.785E12 ~ 3.78 ~ 3.8 ~ 4).
I think my ultimate point that NASA's budget is pretty inconsequential to either the budget or the yearly deficit stands since it is only 0.468% of the budget and 1.97% of the deficit.
Break down the budget categories enough, and you can say the exact same thing about anything. "If you remove tank spending from the budget, the total deficit remains the same out to something like 3 or 4 significant figures." Guess we should keep buying tanks, too.
My point is that the entire operating budget of NASA, not just part of the program, but literally the entire agency, could be wiped from the budget without affecting the budget deficit in any meaningful way.
I'm not breaking down categories nearly as deep you had to dive to get to your example of tanks. Looking at NASA is like looking at the entire operating budget of the Army, the FBI, or the NSA.
This isn't to say that there aren't inefficiencies at NASA that can be corrected. I'm sure there are, but since NASA's entire operating budget is orders of magnitude smaller than the deficit even the most optimistic optimization will have basically no effect on the problem.
Except, historically $1 billion for tanks today meant $1+ billion for tanks for the foreseeable future.
The actual long-term costs of $1 billion military spending are far more than those of $1 billion of NASA spending (and let's not even get into the economic reward of said spending).
Keep in mind, not-space is what justifies much of NASA's budget in the eyes of Congress. Not-space means R&D for the Air Force. Not-space means increased military capacity. Not-space means jobs in congressional districts. Space means spending a whole lot of money for little political gain.
> Space means spending a whole lot of money for little political gain.
But the whole point is that this isn't true. It's not a whole lot of money and the political gain could be significant. The same politicians vote to spend way more money on unpopular wars than they do on potentially popular space voyages. For some reason, NASA is perceived as a money sink that doesn't get votes. But I bet, if put to the test, all that would be found to be hogwash.
Whoever takes the USA to Mars will be a popular person.
>Whoever takes the USA to Mars will be a popular person.
The president who takes the USA to Mars will be a popular person. The congressman who gives up a pet project in his constituency to pay for it will not.
I'd rather have Mars than Iraq any day, but Iraq is a far easier sell to Congress, especially when there's no requirement to pay for it.
I'd argue however that at the present moment, some people in the private sector have just as big of a chance, if not greater to be credited with taking the US(world) to Mars.
Elon Musk's SpaceX is in my opinion just as close as NASA is in sending humanity to Mars if not slightly closer.
Oh, for sure. We were arguing within the context of the popularity of public funding for NASA, but if Musk succeeds in his goals he'll be a hero to many (myself included)
How much do we (US centric, sorry) spend on NASA or other space programs though?
I believe it is around 0.5% to 1% of the current budget. That means 1/2 to 1 penny of every federal tax dollar is being spend on pushing the boundaries of science in regards to space exploration, object tracking/detection, research, capturing the hearts and minds of current and future generations in regards to exciting science, and all the other research and development that goes into making the other things possible. How much is the defense budget? somewhere around 20% I believe.
I keep hearing this argument and I'm always underwhelmed. .5% of the federal budget sounds like a huge amount of money to me. Sure, it's only a small fraction here and space can be important, but this has to be balanced against cancer research, and our social net, and taking care of the mentally ill, and police and name your favorite. According to wiki, the national science foundation will get 7 billion this year. 10 billion for NASA is real money.
You think "space" and "everything you listed" are mutually exclusive? Not so. Products and technologies from space development end up benefiting us right here on Earth.
Medicine? The software that was developed to do image-sharpening on the Hubble pictures turned out to make MRI machines significantly more useful without requiring a change to the hardware.
Social net? NASA has produced a crazy amount of research that would be useful to disaster victims, people in shelters , and assisted living. A couple of examples from the top of my head: safe, stable, long-term storage for high-nutrition meals; long-term emotional impact of environmental factors (colors, scents, etc).
Police: Most forms of wireless communication (including police radios) use SOMETHING that was developed by NASA -- extended-life batteries, transmission protocols, etc.
Even leaving aside the benefits to be head, "$10 billion for NASA" is NOT real money. It's an unnoticeable fraction of the waste in our budgets.
This argument is often trotted out, but it doesn't hold water if you think about it. There may be some examples where the technology has been re-used, but what's their value in terms of useful research quantitatively, rather than hand-wavingly?
Even if it's as high as 20% that can be re-used, you could get 100% of that value by researching image-sharpening, disaster shelters, food storage, wireless comms and all the other things you mention, directly. So you still have to justify the remaining 80% in other ways, the side-effects already accounted-for.
Do you think that the military budget, at 20% of the federal budget, is worth every penny? If you want your social programs and non-space science research to get more money, it would be unwise to take that money from space science research. Much more wise would be to shrink the gigantic 20% military by .5%. When you compare NASA to the military, $10 billion is no longer "real money".
By the way, in 1997 most Americans thought NASA took about 25% of the budget. Not 0.5%-ish. So when arriving at the decision of what a "lot of money" is, compare it not to what you think but to what most people think and you'll find that NASA is vastly cheaper than the average person's expectations.
> Do you think that the military budget, at 20% of the federal budget, is worth every penny?
No, and I advocate against a lot of that spending too. But observing that some other money is spent unwisely doesn't justify spending even more money unwisely on something else. When talking about spending more on NASA, it's pretty much necessary to justify those marginal dollars on their own, not in the context of other government waste.
The other approach can be used to justify essentially any spending, considering how bad the size of our military is for this country. Almost any possible alternate project, including piling up a bunch of money and burning it, would be better than the marginal dollars that get spent on the military.
I do agree that it's worthwhile to correct people's perception of the size of NASA's budget. To be honest, I was quite surprised that it was even 0.5% though.
When advocating for an action (such as cutting NASA), you need to establish that the action is a good use of the time and effort relative to other ways it could be spent (e.g. cutting pretty much any other item on the budget). For example, I could save a whole five cents if I drove to a farther gas station to fill up. You might say, "Hey, five cents is five cents," but actually the time (and probably even gas) cost is much greater than the win from doing it. Cutting NASA is premature optimization at best.
I agree if the argument is "we should transfer money in the budget from X to Y." But if the argument is, "we should add money to the budget to fund NASA," it's a foul to make that argument by saying, "Marginal dollars for NASA are more useful than the least useful marginal dollars we spend (military funding)."
Looking at the OP, it seems like he was making the former argument, which I buy, so good on him.
You could make exactly the same argument, with the "action" as keeping funding NASA. We need to establish that giving ANOTHER $18 billion is a good use of funds compared to leaving it in the taxpayers' pocket. Any economist will tell you that $18 billion in tax revenue actually costs the economy more than that (for example from deadweight losses).
I guess you could make that argument if you liked twisting words and ignoring how the government works. "Leaving it in the taxpayer's pocket" is not what would happen if you defunded NASA. The money would simply go elsewhere.
You seem to be speaking from the vantage of ideology rather than an actual, rational view of reality. Cutting taxes is yet another action (i.e. change from the status quo, like defunding NASA) that you'll need to argue in favor of and outline a plan for. It won't just magically happen even if you cut some budget item.
I think we are getting very little for our 10 billion and I don't think giving them more money will get us more space. As for the military budget, I do believe we spend too much there, but taking that money and having NASA waste it instead doesn't feel like that much of an improvement.
As for the 1997 figure, I guess the .5% argument would be useful for the people so horribly uninformed, and you are right that this probably explains why I keep hearing this argument. Fair point.
We're still getting lots of "not-space" but still beneficial science data out of NASA. I'm working with a team that's tracking pollution dispersion through earth's upper atmosphere right now, and my friend is off at a conference discussing her work on the origin of life. I think those are pretty compelling research topics.
All of this "not-space" spending is still money going towards research and innovation. Going deep into space is essentially the peak of aeronautics innovation; any sort of research like what you listed above is still a decent step towards a final goal.
Note, I'm not saying this money was spent optimally, but I am saying that this money was not wasted by any means.
For much of my life, when we spend money on space, we get not-space.
For the money we spent on the X-30, X-33, X-34, and X-38, when Dan Goldin was NASA administrator, what did we get? Not-space. (At least the X-37 is up there spyingflying.)
The orbital space plane program, the one that was Sean O'Keefe's thing - neat plans, more capsules than planes IIRC, but ultimately we got not-space from it.
The Vision for Space Exploration, under Michael Griffin? Rocket designs that were approximately equivalent to throwing your astronauts into a paint mixer. A system about which the review panel said that "If they gave us the system on a silver platter, the first thing we'd have to do is cancel it, because we couldn't afford the ongoing costs." A lot of money, a launch pad rusting in the Florida weather, and a whole lot of not-space.
And for all the money we spend on human spaceflight, we now send Astronauts up as passengers in Soyuz rockets.
Now we're spending $18 billion dollars - figure subject to change, always upward - to build the SLS - the Senate Launch System. (Another estimate has it at $40B for development and the first 4 flights.) If all things go as planned, it will launch once every two years, launching an unmanned trip around the moon in 2017 and a manned trip to the moon in 2019. Schedule subject to change - always slipping.
Does anyone thing that SLS has a chance of working? Or is it just going to become another not-space program?
How about the replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb Space Telescope? In 1997, it was going to be launched in 2007, and it was going to have cost 500 million dollars. Now we've spent 3.5 billion on it, and it will launch in 2018. Maybe. That's a ton of money to spend on not-space - and it's money that's been taken away from the moderately successful bits of NASA, like the Mars program, which doesn't have a mission in it after 2013's MAVEN.
I don't mind spending money on space. I like space. I've been following the MER rovers for nearly a decade. I think COTS and Commercial Crew are brilliant, and hope that they will continue to exist with a program structure that rewards results, rather than existence. Commercial space is the last best hope to get a domestic space capability.
But times are tight. We're massively overspending as is - borrowing tons of money our grandchildren will still be paying back. So increased spending is far from free.
Is it worth it? I say yes. Spend money on space. Where do we get that money? Let's stop spending it on not-space, like we have been.