The best way to fund science is to cut taxes on capital and to cut tax rates on the wealthy.
Do the wealthy fund long term scientific research projects?
Why we need a space program
21–30 of 35 posts
Re: Why we need a space program
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not "any", but "most". Government is still a good choice for military, police, and funding building roads. Letting government to spend money in most of other directions is a waste. Space exploration is just one of many such wasteful examples.
> Space exploration is just one of many such wasteful examples. Only if you place low value on the scientific returns. Science research is one thing the private sector does poorly, and it's something NASA does a lot of. The other main area is human spaceflight which you could say is wasteful, but NASA did a lot of the high cost low return R&D for human spaceflight. Now private companies can go into the effort with ti…
I do not value scientific research in directions that are not important to me.
If I don't need spaceflight in the next 100 years, there is no point spending valuable resources on researching human spaceflight. 100 years from now such research would be significantly less expensive and more meaningful.
I'd rather see valuable resources spend on what's important. For example on better rating system on HN.
Government is not capable of doing things like that.
Re: Why we need a space program
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Space exploration is just one of many such wasteful examples. Only if you place low value on the scientific returns. Science research is one thing the private sector does poorly, and it's something NASA does a lot of. The other main area is human spaceflight which you could say is wasteful, but NASA did a lot of the high cost low return R&D for human spaceflight. Now private companies can go into the effort with ti…
I do not value scientific research in directions that are not important to me. If I don't need spaceflight in the next 100 years, there is no point spending valuable resources on researching human spaceflight. 100 years from now such research would be significantly less expensive and more meaningful. I'd rather see valuable resources spend on what's important. For example on better rating system on HN. Government is…
Sometimes it's hard to tell what ends up being important. Would you have valued scientific research into space travel in the 50's? Especially if there wasn't a cold-war powered space race? Because I sure enjoy GPS and other satellite-backed technologies.
Re: Why we need a space program
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not value scientific research in directions that are not important to me. If I don't need spaceflight in the next 100 years, there is no point spending valuable resources on researching human spaceflight. 100 years from now such research would be significantly less expensive and more meaningful. I'd rather see valuable resources spend on what's important. For example on better rating system on HN. Government is…
Sometimes it's hard to tell what ends up being important. Would you have valued scientific research into space travel in the 50's? Especially if there wasn't a cold-war powered space race? Because I sure enjoy GPS and other satellite-backed technologies.
It would be much cheaper to develop space missiles 20 years later. Especially if saved resources would have been invested by private sector into more useful technologies such as chemistry, computers, machinery etc.
Re: Why we need a space program
#25NASA, like most government institutions, is wasteful and inefficient. The private sector can develop cheaper, safer, more efficient rockets, in a fraction of the time. Elon Musk, among others, has laid out ambitious goals; much more ambitious then the previous goals of NASA. This is not the end of space exploration; on the contrary - things are going to start advancing at a much faster pace.
Exactly. I buy that we need a space program, but as far as I am concerned a government space program has had its chance.
Re: Why we need a space program
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not value scientific research in directions that are not important to me. If I don't need spaceflight in the next 100 years, there is no point spending valuable resources on researching human spaceflight. 100 years from now such research would be significantly less expensive and more meaningful. I'd rather see valuable resources spend on what's important. For example on better rating system on HN. Government is…
Sometimes it's hard to tell what ends up being important. Would you have valued scientific research into space travel in the 50's? Especially if there wasn't a cold-war powered space race? Because I sure enjoy GPS and other satellite-backed technologies.
That argument is too powerful. What if we spent the money we're dumping into a rather ineffective space program on $RESEARCH_X instead? Who knows what aspect of $RESEARCH_X will be important?
You haven't proved money should be spent on the space program, you've proved money should be spent on X for all X. Though this does bear a certain resemblance to our budgetary priorities of late.
Re: Why we need a space program
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not "any", but "most". Government is still a good choice for military, police, and funding building roads. Letting government to spend money in most of other directions is a waste. Space exploration is just one of many such wasteful examples.
> Space exploration is just one of many such wasteful examples. Only if you place low value on the scientific returns. Science research is one thing the private sector does poorly, and it's something NASA does a lot of. The other main area is human spaceflight which you could say is wasteful, but NASA did a lot of the high cost low return R&D for human spaceflight. Now private companies can go into the effort with ti…
Science research is one thing the private sector does poorly, and it's something NASA does a lot of.
Yes, but... NASA does very little space science compared to non-scientific human space travel. Their budget for launching humans into space (Apollo, STS, ISS, Constellation) -- for shits and giggles, basically -- is orders of magnitude greater than their budget for actual science. Icy Moons, James Webb, LISA -- real science, real discovery -- tends to get budget-axed to make more room for politically-savvy STS, ISS, Flags on Mars.
Icy Moons -- first substantial progress in space probes in decades, long-delayed trial of nuclear electric propulsion -- not important enough. (Wikipedia says it was cancelled because of "shift in priorities" towards manned missions.) Order-of-magnitude greater I_sp than chemical rockets. Massive (1.5 tons payload), high-powered (200 kWe available) science juggernaut -- exploring Jupiter's moons, one by one. New frontiers in experiment capability: scanning mysterious moons with high-powered radars, spectrometers. Total budget less than the cost of cleaning up astronaut shit on ISS.
James Webb -- Hubble's successor is killed. Hubble has no successor! This is a national shame. A hundred times more powerful, the greatest space telescope of all time, so perceptive it has to be positioned in sun-earth L2 to get away from earthshine.
LISA -- undiscovered gravity radiation? Resolving relativistic emissions of distant black holes, making new tests of Einsteinean general relativity? Sounds like nerd stuff, who cares.
In theory, it is nice that we have a government agency funding pure exploration of the cosmos (any funding, at all). In practice, NASA is a case study of how badly putting science funding in the hands of a political bureaucracy can go wrong. Very few Americans, sadly, actually understand or care about the comparatively bland-looking experiments which are science, which advance human understanding, compared to TV-friendly astronaut acrobatics tripe. So science gets marginalized; the political nature of NASA favors useless shit.
I say euthanize NASA, it has no life left.
Re: Why we need a space program
#28We need advancement towards spacefaring. We don't need space programs. There is need for government basic research, infrastructure and science programs. There is need for healthy commercial ventures, reasonable scale and agile development with quick cycles and multiple concurrent paths. Spaceflight could well be more routine, reliable and affordarble if there never was an Apollo or Shuttle.
Exactly. One problem that they need to solve before leaving the gravity well again is creating sustainable biospheres - capable of recycling all CO2, waste and water, producing food and, most importantly, keeping the people inside happy, healthy and sane. To my knowledge this has never[1] been achieved, and we need to work out how to do it before setting up any kind of "off world colony".
1. Biosphere 2 was a high profile, but ultimately unsuccessful example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
Re: Why we need a space program
#29NASA, like most government institutions, is wasteful and inefficient. The private sector can develop cheaper, safer, more efficient rockets, in a fraction of the time. Elon Musk, among others, has laid out ambitious goals; much more ambitious then the previous goals of NASA. This is not the end of space exploration; on the contrary - things are going to start advancing at a much faster pace.
It's sobering to think, nothing the entire private space industry put together has proposed comes close to what NASA was sitting on in the 1960's, with nuclear pulse propulsion. Now it's unthinkable. But with a slightly different historical path, we could today be launching thousands of tons at a time into orbit, on a trail of small atomic bombs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsi...
Re: Why we need a space program
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes it's hard to tell what ends up being important. Would you have valued scientific research into space travel in the 50's? Especially if there wasn't a cold-war powered space race? Because I sure enjoy GPS and other satellite-backed technologies.
That argument is too powerful. What if we spent the money we're dumping into a rather ineffective space program on $RESEARCH_X instead? Who knows what aspect of $RESEARCH_X will be important? You haven't proved money should be spent on the space program, you've proved money should be spent on X for all X. Though this does bear a certain resemblance to our budgetary priorities of late.
This is exactly the problem - why should the government decide what is useful research? When you let the government do anything, it instantly becomes political. Nowadays professors have to constantly jockey for research dollars.
I say that private markets/individuals do a pretty good job deciding what technologies are worth long term investment dollars/charitable donations. Let them figure out what research programs they should be funding.