Understanding the Payoffs From Investing In Space Flight 264
A story at MSNBC.com explains how the technological benefits reaped from investing in the US space program are numerous, but often indirect or difficult to explain. Quoting:
"NASA has recorded about 1,600 new technologies or inventions each year for the past several decades, but far fewer become commercial products, said Daniel Lockney, technology transfer program executive at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. ... 'We didn't know that by building the space shuttle main engines we'd also get a new implantable heart device,' Lockney said. 'There's also a bunch of stuff we don't know we're going to learn, which leads to serendipitous spinoffs.' ... But some innovations do not appear as a straight line drawn from NASA to commercial products. The U.S. space agency may not claim credit for computers and the digital revolution that followed, but it did create a pool of talent that perhaps contributed to that transformation of modern life. NASA brought together hundreds of the brightest scientists and engineers in the 1970s to work on the guidance computers that helped the Apollo missions land humans on the moon. When the Apollo era ended, many of those people dispersed to private companies and to Silicon Valley."
Branding (Score:5, Insightful)
If they were allowed to put their logo on everything they were involved in, then people would start to realize how important they are. Nothing garish, just something like the tiny UL logo you see on everything.
An ad campaign like the Army's would also help.
Re:Branding (Score:5, Funny)
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MrQuacker
An ad campaign like the Army's would also help.
softWare3ngineer
A budget like theirs would also help :)
It's just a wild guess, but I think he may have been referring to the Army's budget vs NASA's budget.
Re:Branding (Score:5, Insightful)
If you'd invested NASA's budget in materials or medical research, you'd probably have a similar number of developments. Probably more, because you wouldn't be blowing a lot of the budget on PR stunts like the space shuttle.
Yes, and if we spent the military budget on educating the world and promoting equality (as opposed to pushing economic interests, which is what practically every military conflict ever fought has been about) we could probably achieve world peace. But we won't spend the money on that any more than our government will spend it on pure research for anything but military purposes. Alt energy research, for example, supports military goals by increasing range and the ability to project power. There is always a military objective, and it is always financially motivated. The space shuttle program was compromised by its redesign for military missions, but it probably would not have received the funding it needed to proceed without that military purpose in the first place.
It is not enough to look at what can physically be done, but what will socially be achieved. From that standpoint, NASA is utterly necessary, because we will not do the research needed to make the same advances without it, whether we are capable or no.
Re:Ah yes, overrated mods. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not a mod, but I can say that while not overrated, your proposition is, well, naive.
There is a reason why nearly all attempts at mass social engineering has failed utterly. There's also a reason why most attempts at marketing for world peace has failed.
The reason that social engineering has failed on a mass scale has to do with culture, tradition (folks do cling to those), and a total disregard for both by those who are out to build a 'perfect society'. 100 years ago, we had the likes of Lenin and the Bolsheviks who were trying to engineer a perfect society, and on the surface, it sounded ultimately equitable and fair ('from each according to his ability, to each according to his need', was a good summary of the ideal). Folks bought the ideal, but history shows the results, no? Now you're going to propose that we do something like that again? We also got to see, 80-some-odd years ago, what the other extreme brought (national/racial/ideological). Long story short, the biggest cause of human suffering and death in the 20th century wasn't famine, pestilence, or disaster... it was war and the internal miseries brought on by political experimentation gone horribly wrong. To be fair, maybe your political/social scientists might have a different idea altogether, but having seen where both extremes (communism and fascism) went, most folks are rightfully horrified at the idea, and prefer to stick with their imperfect-but-workable solutions.
The reasons that marketing for world peace has failed? Much simpler... most other folks have their own ideas, and it usually involves advantages gained at your expense. After all, it's drop-easy for the EU member state politicians and citizenry to preach about world peace and not really needing an army... they have more than sufficient security and backstopping provided courtesy of the US military. Same with Japan and South Korea, or numerous other nations.
Personally, I like the idea of not spending so much money on US military effort. We can start by proposing that we withdraw from all but a small handful of logistic-critical bases globally. Of course, every time the subject comes up, suddenly the population there isn't too keen on the idea. Even the most strident US-hating socialist cringes when the idea of defending themselves comes up (see also South Korea in the 1990's when the population wanted US personnel out of there... until the US began to consider the idea, leaving the whole peninsula practically defenseless against North Korea. Suddenly the South Koreans were all kinds of happy to see a US soldier in their neighborhood).
To sum it all up, things are a lot more complex than you propose, you know?
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Not true. When you have pure research versus research to scratch an itch you wind up with completely different results. The later tends to be more practical. Furthermore, the result of the research itself is frequently effected by the specific nature of the itch in question.
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NASA's entire budget for 2010 was $18.7 million dollars. In 2010, Pfizer spent $9.4 billion on R&D and Amgen spent $2.894 billion on R&D (http://www.genengnews.com/keywordsandtools/print/3/22569/).
So even with "PR stunts" like the shuttle launches, it seems to me that NASA's R&D dollars return better bang for buck.
Try Again [wikipedia.org]. You are off by a few orders of magnitude. NASA's budget is still small compared to a lot of other things, but $18 million probably just barely pays for the cheapass US Government clicky pens.
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Where on earth did you get those numbers? NASA wouldn't have been able to afford a single shuttle launch on a budget of $18.7 million. I just checked, and you got the most significant figures right, but not the number of them before the decimal point. NASA's budget was $18,724,000,000 for 2010. The National Science Foundation, in the same year, received about a third of this amount, of which about 80% is spent on research (most of the rest on education). Take a look at the papers published acknowledgin
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The thing that makes NASA's programs and resources so important is that the challenges they face are unique, daunting, and require out-of-the-box thinking that you'd never get in materials and medical research.
Yes. But the problem with doing space research is also that it is unique. NASA can design a one-off space thermal expansion insulation widget which solves Problem X45 for Program Z23, accommodates only the Program Z23-J power connectors, is built to fit inside the Z23-Delta launcher, and enables Experiment Y14 to run. Great, that'll cost you $10 billion. Here's your Z23 program and your X45 widget. Now the Z23 program is over, what do I use an X45 for? Um.... well, we could pull out the K29 sub-chassis asse
Re:Branding (Score:5, Insightful)
The US federal government has awful, awful branding. It's just terrible. How could half of social program recipients believe that they have "not used a government social program" [boingboing.net]?
In Canada, the federal and provincial governments make sure you know what they're doing. Every advertisement/public service announcement from the feds has the Canada wordmark [wikipedia.org], a simple "logo" with the word "Canada" and a Canadian flag above the last "a" (on TV and radio ads someone always says "A message from the Government of Canada"). But it's not just media advertising -- movies and tv shows that get tax credits from the government show it, correspondence (taxes, welfare, etc.), worksites partially paid for by government funding, and it goes on and on.
That's not to say that the branding gets to politicians' heads: our stimulus had a massive amount of advertising that many thought was flagrant self-promotion of the current government's policy, as opposed to ads which are usually along the lines of "Don't bring things across the border you shouldn't" or "Here's how young people can get help finding a job" or "Come visit our national parks". The current government even made it such that anyone who accepted stimulus money had to purchase a sign at their own cost extolling the benefits of the stimulus and the plan, post it on-site and send two pictures (one wide shot, one close-up) back to the feds before getting the money.
But when I look south, I'm at a loss to figure out who's responsible. Is the national guard a state or federal program? Is the FDIC run by the banks, or is that freecreditreport.com site run by the government? Who funded that study I read online? And the US government's websites all look completely different, so you don't know if it's the government or some independent agency or someone else (.gov notwithstanding -- who looks at URLs anymore besides /. readers?). Maybe if people knew all the services provided by government they wouldn't hate it as much (or maybe they would hate it more, but at least they would better understand everything they want to cut). It also lets you judge information more easily based on its source (your choice whether that improves your opinion of the information or the opposite).
Up north, I see this great anti-speeding ad [youtube.com] and the Quebec flag at the end of the word Quebec and I know where it's coming from. Or this anti-fraud ad [youtube.com]. France has their wordmark/logo too [youtube.com].
77% of people interviewed in a 1999 survey [archive.org] reported seeing the Canada wordmark, 60% in the previous 12 months. Over 85% of them reporting seeing the wordmark made them have more confidence in the information and make them "feel proud to be Canadian". And they almost unanimously agreed that the wordmark should be on websites, publications, advertisements, worksites and buildings. The key is that this doesn't happen overnight; the FIP started in 1970, and this is what they were running 10 years later [youtube.com].
If you want people to know that the government does important things besides building roads and national defence, make sure that when you spend tons of money on an ad buy, people know who's spending it. Get some cohesion going, US government; it's in your interest.
Re:Branding (Score:5, Insightful)
Aww, it seems someone needs a BIIIIIIGGG hug here. Those poor tax payers, they always get the short end of the stick. You want a tissue? Here, take the whole box, you'll need it.
The truth is that in any civilized society everyone is a tax payer, and everyone benefits from those taxes. And yes, there will be some people that get more out of the system than they put into it, but they will be rare, especially if you average over a lifetime, and those rare cases usually have a good reason, such as a severe mental or physical disability.
Respect for your fellow citizen is always good, but people that use food stamps or free medical care also contribute to society, and also deserve respect.
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And yes, there will be some people that get more out of the system than they put into it, but they will be rare
Uh, isn't this another way of saying that government is extremely inefficient? In an efficient system, shouldn't those who get more out be roughly the same as those who put more? And if we are doing the 'tax the rich' thing, shouldn't those who get more vastly outnumber those who put more? You should think about this a bit more.
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On (1) - assuming they're involved enough in the economy in question for taxation to be relevant, either they're too poor to pay taxes (in which case taxing them would make things worse) or they're rich enough to figure out a way around taxes (in which case they're cheating, morally if not technically)
On (2) - everyone in the given state/economy for which taxes are levied generally benefits in *some* way - direct or indirect. The imposition of safety regulations on products (such as food or cars?), the main
A slight correction... (Score:2)
On 1 - unless those individuals live off sunshine and rain (and discarded food and other items) and never EVER pay for anything.
They are paying taxes through the cost of items/services they pay for, which have their own taxes and levies included in the price, which is then pushed on to the final consumer.
Basically, if you are using the "coin of the realm" you are paying taxes - through the wonder of inflation.
On 3 - First problem with defining contribution to society is that it can't be defined no more than
Re:Branding (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that only the first and third of your corrections are even arguably true, and the third is deeply disingenuous.
Besides, and this is something you "tax is theft" people never get - when you cut off social assistance, the people relying on it don't magically disappear. The things keeping them down don't magically stop, either. What happens is they get more desperate, and often turn to crime in order to provide for themselves. And, frankly, that's the rational decision, if it's between your kids starving or stealing some shit or mugging some asshole you don't know.
It's like the relationship between the dismantling of mental health support during the 80s and the increased homeless population - those patients haven't gone away, and people haven't stopped going crazy - it's just that now, when they do, they end up on the street, unmedicated.
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I recommend shifting to a policy of "if you like what NASA does, then enter your credit card details on this site to donate" which would leave people free to choose whether the money they earn is used in this way. Surely choice like this would be a good thing?
Re:Branding (Score:5, Insightful)
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Someone mod parent up, I already made a comment. More people need to know about how the Department of Justice has been funding the drug war by buying guns for the drug smugglers. It's called "Project Fast and Furious", Google it.
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Needs some fixing (Score:2)
No - that's why you need entrepreneurs risking their own money to fund stuff. Politicians don't want to do anything unless they see the immediate reelection. Accept donations from $SPECIAL_INTEREST and feel instant gratification. Do the right thing, and there might be something in 10-15 years being developed because of it. No, we can't trust the government (who are actually people just like the "public") to fund something that's 10-15 or even more years down the road.
FTFY
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It's true, I think I read somewhere that for every penny that is invested in NASA, there's a full dollar that is returned
Decades ago, some organisation worked out that every dollar spent by the government produced $7 in GDP. This somehow got picked up by NASA promoting science-writers as "Every dollar invested in NASA has returned $7 to the country!" (And now, apparently, that has been exaggerated further, into pennies for dollars.) It's crap though.
Also crap is...
I don't know what Obama was thinking...
Obama requested an increase in NASA's budget. Republican dominated congress cut it. You seem to be blaming the wrong side.
Space shuttle program was ending anyway (Score:2)
Constellation was a joke created primarily as space industry welfare and Obama was right to end it.
Spacex has done more in 3 years in getting a new rocket system off the ground than NASA did in 10 years
at 1/10 the cost. I have every reason to believe that the Falcon Heavy demo flight will launch next year and dragon
capsule will be ready on time to supply the space station.
Obama has done nothing but scrap unrealistic uberexpensive programs and focus on what is achieveable with what we actually
have which is r
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Probably one of the better cartoons I've seen lately. Too bad nobody under 40 will get it.
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And, because they don't get the reference, assume it's racist.
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Michigan J. Frog is the reference, but the way he's drawn - in an evocation of the "Minstrelsy [wikipedia.org]" shows - is indeed going to strike many people as racist, intended or not.
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Why doesn't anyone ever mention all the technology we need for airplanes? How much technology came from Boeing? 747s?
Well, lets talk about airplanes. First, lets expand NASA's acronym - National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Note that Aeronautics is first. NASA spends quite a bit of time and money on basic research for terrestrial flight. To be fair, the military has also contributed to the advancement of flight, perhaps more than NASA, but poke around on the NASA website and you will see a lot of unsexy, quiet research into everyday flying.
The cost of not having a space program. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I saw NASA get disbanded at the end of Apollo and wondered why we didn't take the talent and brains assembled and say "ok, now go cure cancer" or "solve world hunger". I bet they could do it.
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It's not just about rockets, even though that's the most visible aspect of space flight. NASA people have figured out how to keep someone alive in the damnedest environments, so they know a thing or two about the human body. NASA has 18,000 people working for it and part of them are at several medical institutes: The Cleveland Clinic Center for Space Medicine, The National Space Biomedicine Research Institute in Houston, The John Glenn Biomedical Engineering Consortium which includes medical Universities an
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As for world hunger, I'm not sure where we're going to get enough food to feed 10 billion people by 2050. Somebody should start figuring that out
Maybe we should figure out how not to have 10 billion people. Wait, we already have... starve 'em. Maybe we should figure out a way to get some new leaders who give one tenth of one shit about human life.
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Whatever the Payoffs were in Investing in Space Flight, it's more than offset by the lost time spent arguing about whether all of that money should have been spent or not...
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It's also measured in fewer research jobs, and fewer researchers drawn to the field. If they end up in related fields anyhow, and don't miss the prestige of being a "rocket scientist", this may be minor... but again, we can't tell.
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the guys who would have worked on it still exist though and those inventions might still be made, even if nasa didn't fund. because of the nature of nasa money though if you'd have anything that's even slightly related to space tech you would go and ask them for money, making them involved even if they just provide the coffee and cookies. advanced re-breathers, many materials, the computer chips etc. would have had other funding too if nasa didn't exist, so to say that they wouldn't exist without nasa is na
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Otherwise known as the broken window fallacy. What is seen and not seen. This is the most insightful post in this whole thread.
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Moore's Law (Score:2)
Intel didn't start until 1968 (Score:2)
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nasa is just a tiny, tiny, tiny factor in driving microchip miniaturization. they just buy what chips are available and that's mostly dictated what chips are produced for others, and those "others" is the market that's been worth of trillions of dollars in commercial profit. and well, the apollo guidance computer was built from discrete circuits - and it seems it's design was influenced by ICBM guidance computer built before it. not many apollos were built but a shitload of minutemens were. the nasa funding
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NASAs place in the budget constrained reality (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with NASAs contribution to research. However I don't agree with their day to day involvement with launches and maintenance of space vehicles.
We need NASA to continue doing research, creating cutting edge technology and building solutions like the Mars rover.
However the space shuttle didn't deliver on their main objective of affordable space launches.
The larger issue at hand is to end each and every lie to the cost of government projects. This applies to defense, space and other technology government projects.
If a project goes 20% over budget, there should be a huge fine that someone in the private sector pays for. Something that spells a full and complete end to cost overruns.
Trillions of dollars have been wasted in the last 20 years due to projects being priced at 50% or less of their real cost. This applies to the F-35 program, space shuttle, for instance.
The larger question is how to instill cost awareness into traditionally cost insensitive government workers.
There should be an end to all open cost projects. Everything should be fixed cost. Split it into stages.
One example of success is the SDB and SDB phase II bomb programs. The SDB bomb came on budget and ahead of schedule (something more like in record time) and is already completely functional helping the US military win the war on terror.
One example in the space arena is the SpaceX project that is almost ready to replace some of the space shuttle features to resupply the ISS. A contract that is completely fixed budget, with transparency standards that are causing serious concerns on the traditional space suppliers like Boeing, Lockheed-Martin and others.
I can think of a few innovations... (Score:4, Interesting)
Edible toothpaste, Infrared ear thermometers, freeze dried food, scratch resistant and UV blocking eye-glasses, memory metal (flexible) eye-glasses & anti-scalding showers, silver ion bacteria-resistant home water filters/softeners, eco-friendly water treatment plants, carbon monoxide detectors, wireless headsets, air-chambered sole "athletic" footwear, liquid metal/metallic glass (stronger than titanium), temper foam, shock absorbing foam (for helmets, etc), cordless vacuums, high performance solar cells, the list goes on, and on...
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Don't forget Fisher Space pens...
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The sad thing is that I think that list was not meant ironically. Up until the point at which he mentioned carbon monoxide detectors, I was pretty sure it was ironic. Maybe it's because he led off with edible toothpaste and followed up with freeze dried food. After that, almost anything sounds like it's part of a joke.
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how is that ironic?
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Kind of depends on your particular circumstances, there. From NASA's page on edible toothpaste:
Well, it didn't happen *quite* like that. (Score:5, Interesting)
"NASA brought together hundreds of the brightest scientists and engineers in the 1970s to work on the guidance computers that helped the Apollo missions land humans on the moon."
No they didn't. NASA contracted with MIT Instrumentation Laboratory to develop the Apollo guidance systems. (The Instrumentation Laboratory then turned around and based the design on one the USN had paid for - the Polaris guidance computer.) NASA's main contribution was oversight, review, and general bureaucratic paper shuffling. They didn't even program the damn thing - that was done by the Instrumentation Laboratory as well.
Not to mention, it's not really a MSBNC story linked to above - it's an MSBNC rewrite of what amounts to a NASA press release.
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He was responding to the contention that NASA should be patted on the back for bringing that pool of talent together, the point being that they were already working together when NASA got around to contracting the group. Their "ownership" wasn't in dispute.
Eh (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to look at the opportunity cost with things like this. All new research and development has unintended benefits. And NASA has been such a pork loaded boondoggle lately, it's hard to believe the money couldn't have been better spent. I realized today that the entire I405 improvement project cost as much as 1 space shuttle launch. And no new science comes out of launching the space shuttle, they've been doing that for 30 years. To put it bluntly, there's no way the cost of 115 space shuttle launches could have been worth benefits.
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Wow, you're taking the "we ain't got no reason ta' be explorin' no space when there's goddamn potholes in fronta muh house" thing literally.
When it comes down to it, exploration is what has kept our species alive, so far. It's who we are and it's what will keep us from expiring. We have one planet. One home. No backup. If something goes down here, it's the end for every last one of us. To put it bluntly, I'll take furthering our reach into space and eventual ability to leave this festering shithole to stren
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you will leave this festering shithole much quicker than mankind, its been 30 + years we have not advanced with this program, its time to move on
Re:Eh (Score:5, Insightful)
"And NASA has been such a pork loaded boondoggle lately..."
The problem is not the "pork" it's human beings underestimating realistically how long it will take to achieve the next advancement, people want advancements tomorrow but there are often huge speed bumps in the advancement of knowledge or technology. Intel thought we would have 10 Ghz processors today but it turned out heat and leakage disrupted those plans and we have multi-core processors instead. One can look at all the boondoggles of the private sector to see natural laws often rub up against our naive beliefs in progress.
There are tonnes of things like that, that the average human being doesn't understand because they don't understand the immense undertaking it is because of their ignorance.
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which is even more reason to let public sector space flight die
Re:Eh (Score:5, Informative)
You have to look at the opportunity cost with things like this. All new research and development has unintended benefits. And NASA has been such a pork loaded boondoggle lately, it's hard to believe the money couldn't have been better spent.
The argument has been made that without NASA the money wouldn't be better spent.
I realized today that the entire I405 improvement project cost as much as 1 space shuttle launch.
And yet, it is essentially evil; the interstate highway project was about control, not about any of the bullshit excuses you may have heard. The freedom of automobile ownership is illusory since your vehicle and indeed your right to use any vehicle on public roads can be revoked at any time and for any reason including none and you still have to take a bus or get a ride to the hearing to get your license reinstated... and indeed, your vehicle can be seized at the least provocation, and you can be fined outrageously for its storage, and incarcerated if you do not pay the fines.
To put it bluntly, there's no way the cost of 115 space shuttle launches could have been worth benefits.
To put it bluntly, without NASA that money would have been spent by the rich on luxury yachts and there would be no benefit to technology at all.
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No new science came out of the I405 project either. We just got a marginal extension on the life of a deeply inefficient way of moving people around.
Opportunity cost (Score:5, Insightful)
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Seriously, if you want to slash spending, start with the real parasites, and not with science.
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And if we're having an honest talk about pure-dollar ROI, you'd have to figure out how much technology came out of the military for that war.
A lot of the replies on here (almost all, in fact) are missing a key fact. NASA didn't bring these teams together -- for the most part all of these companies and teams existing *and were already working on most of the technology*. These were all defense contractors and sub-contractors. They were focusing all the tech and development on the moon shot, but we were still
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Would the directed investment really have a higher payoff? I'm not so sure. There's the part of technological progress that involves applying what you already know, isolating the optimum test cases, taking a problem and just staring at it for a while. Then there's the part that involves sheer inspiration. It's the reason all the most brilliant minds in the world can putter about unable to make any great progress on a particular problem in physics, until some random guy points out that maybe energy can o
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One of the problems with this argument is it ignores the very simple concept of "opportunity cost". That is, what else could we have done with the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the space program over the last few decades?
That is a stupid question because we live in the real world and you are ignoring that. The real question is what else would we have done with the hundreds of billions of dollars. The probably answer is bombing brown people [youtube.com].
If it's commercially useful technologies you want, for instance, I strongly suspect you'd get a whole lot more of them by simply giving the National Science Foundation a whole lot more money to fund scientific research,
Oh good, maybe then we'll get more wonderful things like water carried in PVC pipe, or wire whose jacket must be PVC by code. Thanks, NSF!
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One of the problems with this argument is it ignores the very simple concept of "opportunity cost". That is, what else could we have done with the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the space program over the last few decades? If it's commercially useful technologies you want, for instance, I strongly suspect you'd get a whole lot more of them by simply giving the National Science Foundation a whole lot more money to fund scientific research, rather than funding the development of technologies specifically related to space flight, only a small fraction of which will find commercial applicability elsewhere.
The key contribution NASA makes is in taking the research and turning it into useful objects - once people see what can be done they start seeing other things that can be done as well. Research is once, but researchers often are interested in research, not developing something that actually is useful. That's why they are researchers, not engineers.
And while S in NASA gets a lot of play, the first A is pretty impressive as well. NASA does a lot or aeronautical research that has direct application to aviati
What if they'd spent the money on other research? (Score:2)
What we will never know is what would have happened i
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Since research IS about discovery and invention you absolutely must include all the spin off techs in determining it's value, they're much of the point.
Mycroft
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While those discoveries and innovations are nice, they were simply side effects of the primary intention, so can't really be used as a justification for it.
That's not how cost-benefit analysis works when the goal is scientific progress. Any scientific progress is benefit and should be weighed against cost. If your goal is to produce a very specific scientific development then your point is valid, but what is being argued here is the overall benefit, not just the benefit to space travel; indeed, it is the entire point of the conversation, and to ignore it is to have a different conversation. Why not try having this one with us?
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Because the argument that space exploration led to many useful spinoff technologies implies that space exploration was more likely to produce useful spinoff technologies than other projects that might have been chosen.
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That's exactly it. I keep seeing arguments that the space program was justified by all the spinoff technologies. There's a similar argument, with more sinister implications, that most technical innovation comes from war.
The real lesson, it seems to me, is that if you provide lots of resources for solving a big technical problem, you're likely to solve that problem and invent a lot of other useful things along the way. And if that's the case, why not choose a big technical problem that we have a clear practi
Are you seriously asking that? (Score:2)
Almost unable to calculate (Score:2)
Realistically its almost impossible to calculate the payoffs from raw science and entities like NASA that do it.
its so huge and pervasive.
There is nothing magical about space (Score:2)
The most famous, but least know is.... (Score:2)
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Silicon valley owes its life to NASA.
No, it doesn't. NASA did little for the semiconductor industry. They were never a big customer. Most NASA stuff is one-offs. Much of the early push for semiconductors came from the USAF, which was a big customer and bought in quantity. NSA and the AEC also played a part; they funded much computer development up to 1970 or so, when the commercial market took off. By the mid-1980s, the commercial market was so much bigger than the government market that Silicon Valley pretty much ignored the government marke
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No, it doesn't. NASA did little for the semiconductor industry. They were never a big customer.
To be fair, for a few years in the 60s NASA (through MIT) was the biggest or one of the biggest customers for the IC business. But even without that the IC would have taken off almost as rapidly; in the worst case we might be a few years behind where we are today, still using Core-2s rather than Core-is.
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why cause they bought a computer in the 60's? so did a lot of organizations but I don't hear anyone saying post grains or mobile oil shat out the pc industry
Carl Sagan on the value of Space Exploration (Score:3)
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without the small package transistors, and integrated circuits already in development, that would not be possible
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Also IBM developed HASP which is still in use today on mainframes, in a more advanced version. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Automatic_Spooling_Priority [wikipedia.org]
Re:Terrible Reasoning (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're going to credit NASA for all the things the people they trained did after they left NASA, you also have to count against NASA all the things those people would have done had they not worked for NASA. True, if you're going to weigh the costs of the space program against the benefits, you have to include all the benefits. But you have to include all the costs too. NASA drained the country of engineering and scientific talent that could have, and would have, done many other things.
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NASA didn't drain the country of anything. NASA doesn't (for the most part) have their own engineers and scientific talent. They have contractors and research organizations they work with. And NASA did exactly what it was intended (and, in fact, designed and funded) to do -- pump money into those organizations precisely to keep those people employed where the skills were available for long-cycle defense contracts. If its going to take 15 years to go through the early contract work for the next generation of
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NASA drained the country of engineering and scientific talent that could have, and would have, done many other things.
Citation needed. I personally believe that the effort would have been spent on making superior turnip twaddlers and pocket motherfuckers. Further, how many people have got into science because of the existence of NASA? Some of those people must necessarily not have made it into NASA, but are still capable of doing useful science. I think you're going to have a hard road to prove that funding NASA actually retarded scientific progress, in spite of moderators' love for your unfounded assertions.
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yes cause GE has never done anything unique in the companies history ever
Re:This is a lack of PR from NASA (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because Hubble was such a horrible failure. Why would we ever want to repeat that...
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Hubble was enormously more expensive than it needed to be. For what we spent trying to shoehorn it into the Shuttle program (the most outrageously expensive and dangerous launch vehicle ever developed) we could have built and launched a whole series of Hubble Telescopes.
And launched a whole series of Hubble telescopes with what? Giant rubber band sling shots?
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You can't run an empire with no gold
Empires are run off the gold of the subjugated peoples. That's the main reason for wanting them.
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Then stop spending all the fucking gold you bring in, plus more that you aren't bringing in. Spending more rather than spending wisely is a pretty fucking idiotic idea.
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FTFY.
Also, don't confuse "tax rate" with "tax revenue" - they are not the same and do not move in lockstep. For a good example, see capital gains taxes: when the rate has been reduced, revenue has increased.
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You can run it on less gold then. Not as little gold as we currently collect, but less.
Re:Tax cuts are all that matter (Score:5, Insightful)
So, hey - it turns out that the problems of widespread rebellion and overtaxation are different in kind from the problems of under-taxation and repressive government policies. Who would have thunk that different problems require different solutions?
I mean, I could quote any number of irrelevant historical situations - but shit, who has the time for worthless endeavors. Short version - in our own history, the same trends we're seeing now (rampant power transfer to corporate entities, drops in collected revenue, reduced regulation) during the Gilded Age led directly into the worst depression the country has ever suffered. OH SNAP IT'S A RELEVANT HISTORICAL PRECEDENT! RUN! IT'S GOING TO GET YOU!
Re:None (Score:4, Informative)
...except that the entire amount that NASA has ever spent since it was formed is less than the current wars or bailouts.
citation [wikipedia.org]
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yes cause dealing with problems that effect thousands of people are less important than some dingleberry floating in space for the umteenth time
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