591–600 of 667 posts
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> with a pretty great return in research, engineering and education to boot. If a company could spend 24B in research they would probably produce a lot more things than NASA
Google's R&D budget is like $60B. Make of that what you will.
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Whatever you can imagine they could spend the money on, including leaving it with the tax payer or taking on less debt. (And, if you don't like the monetary framing: just look at the real resources spend instead.) However I'm not nearly as harsh on unmanned space exploration.
That's not how resources work. Resources that are used for space exploration aren't magically available for anything else when you don't do space exploration. The economy is not a zero sum game and human capital is not fungible. A rocket scientist/engineer/technician/etc at NASA is not going to work on the thing we "should" spend money on instead if tomorrow you shut down NASA's manned spaceflight programs. They'll p…
> They'll probably go work on ads at Meta instead.
And provide value there, yes! That's how the economy works.
> That's not how resources work. Resources that are used for space exploration aren't magically available for anything else when you don't do space exploration. The economy is not a zero sum game and human capital is not fungible.
Your 'Meta' example was about fungible human capital, wasn't it? In any case, human capital is fairly fungible in the long run: people won't train on the skills necessary to hurl primates into space, if they know that there's no manned space programme in the first place.
And to make my position sharper:
NASA and the world would be better off shutting down their manned space programme tomorrow. A lot of the skills and human capital (but not all!) involved there can be funged into unmanned space exploration.
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It's unlikely computing would have developed as quickly as it did without the Cold War. IBM's Sage and MIT's TX0 were both Cold War projects - one for a national early warning system, the other as an R&D platform for flight simulators. Most US investment in associated tech - including the Internet - came through DARPA. Not pointing this out because I support war, but to underline that the US doesn't have a culture of…
Why does it have to be government R&D?
This is a more balanced take, in my opinion: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/nasa-chief-reviews-ori... Camarda is an outlier. The engineers at NASA believe it is safe. The astronauts believe it is safe. Former astronaut Danny Olivas was initially skeptical of the heat shield but came around. And note that the OP believes it is likely (maybe very likely) that the heat shield will work fine. It's hard for me to r…
If you play a single round of Russian roulette with a revolver, it is likely you will not die, but it is also not safe to do that. The same idea applies here. The foam shedding/impact problem was heavily analyzed throughout the Shuttle program, and recognized as a significant risk. Read the CAIB report for a good history. That report also describes the groupthink dynamic at NASA that made skeptical engineers "come ar…
Fundamentally space travel is not save, it cannot be (atleast at our Technological level) Space is unimaginably hostile to life. We cannot reduce this danger to zero.
I'm literally guest lecturing at a Harvard class tomorrow on systemic failures in decision making, using the Columbia and Challenger disasters as case studies, and changed my slides last night to include Artemis II because it could literally happen again. This broken safety culture has been around since the beginning of the Shuttle program. In 1980, Gregg Easterbrook published "Goodbye, Columbia" in The Washington Mo…
But in the 80s I guess there was the pressure to one-up the Soviets, so everything had to be done yesterday, but Artemis has existed most of my adult life at various levels of maturity (Orion and its predecessors certainly did), and considering its been more time spent between that famous Kennedy speech and the actual Moon landing (where there was apparently no issue with safety culture). Considering how much humanit…
Narrators voice: there was, in fact, issues with safety culture at nasa between Kennedy's speech and the moon landing
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Do you think that car seat mandates (up to age 12 in my state) are good policy if the net effect is: - a small reduction in minor injuries, - worse childhoods and parenting experiences (difficult to quantify, but real), - and a few hundred thousand fewer children being born in the first place, - very few, if any, lives saved? If yes, then cool - but I strongly disagree. If no - then I think the evidence and details v…
In the hypothetical scenario where car seats have only downsides, then of course I’m against a mandate. There is a difference between cherry picking studies that back up your view point and how medical experts set policy though. Experts review all of the data, and ignore outliers like a paper published in a law journal that suggests car seats are the primary reason families have shrunk from having three to two kids s…
There is a non-zero amount of deaths the car seat law would prevent. The burden will discourage larger families and will contribute to population decline far larger than the lives saved.
You’re not only arguing for it, you’re doing it in a way as if preventing death is such an obvious single dimension to optimize that you’re calling people irrational because they are against something that reduces fatalities.
Your same argument is what leads to prohibition and a long list of other things that suck the color out of life in the interest of “safety”.
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But sure everything would be better if any moron was allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe. Yes, I think that we'd all be better off if every person was allowed to have their own personal values, deciding what's more important to themSELVES, rather than piling on and trying to force every one into a one-size-fits-all solution. For my part, I'd much rather have people wishing me "have a rich and fulfilling…
I don't think you should be allowed to recklessly endanger your children. You can endanger yourself all you like, I couldn't care less but you don't get to endanger others even if you made them.
Far more harm comes from that than tail risk elimination mandating car seats between 8 and 12 years.
Would you be willing to make all new parents submit to frequent breathalyzers during pregnancy and after birth? Drinking is a massive factor in infant mortality at birth and SIDS.
Surely there is a difference between "our engineers did the best they could and the mission has a X% chance of failure" and "management overrode the engineers so they can get a launch in before the program is shuttered."
There are a lot of comments here saying something to the effect of "spaceflight is inherently unsafe" or "you can't always guarantee safety." I find this rather concerning. Surely there is a difference between "our engineers did the best they could and the mission has a X% chance of failure" and "management overrode the engineers so they can get a launch in before the program is shuttered."
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It is my understanding that it always was about „rockets are good for dropping bombs on people“.
Well, I highly doubt that the kind of rockets they are developing for Lunar and Mars missions will be mich better, if any better at all, than current ballistic missiles armies around the world already have. Those space rockets are huge and meant to more or less safely carry people over a long distance in space. Warheads are meant to carry explosives while also being hard to detect or stop. I'm no rocket scientist, bu…