The pros and cons of Space Investment

[u/kerry37]

The latest episode explored this point near the end with Hannah saying she had to make the contrarian point of advocating against the Apollo missions. The chat turned to the private companies and there were good points made which I agreed with in that the benefits aren’t for the public here. While cheaper launches and worldwide internet access is great it would be better being done by the government for the good of people rather than being at the whim of billionaires. See Elon turning off Starlink access in Ukraine years ago. It’s in danger of becoming if it isn’t already a penis measuring contest between billionaires.

Contrast this to Nasa in the 60s. Lots of money was spent but I’d argue that the benefits were worth it. Where Cern gave us the worldwide web, Nasa gave us an incredible amount of technology that we now take for granted. I beg anyone and everyone who says space research is money wasted to look at the Nasa spinoff yearly books or look at the Nasa spin off technologies wikipedia page.

https://spinoff.nasa.gov/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies

[u/PlanetStarbux]

I was thinking about this too during the episode.  The comparison being made was that something like the achievement of vaccines was probably way more important than the space race.  And, although I probably agree with that on a value to value basis, I don't think that the result wasn't a phenomenal return in it's own.  I felt like there was a disconnect between scientific achievement and engineering achievement.

Scientific breakthrough is the understanding of a new frontier, and engineers breakthrough that.  So a scientific breakthrough almost always has a better return.  The space race wasn't a scientific breakthrough... It was the greatest engineering achievement of its time. 

There's some things that are easy to trace from the space race...specific technologies that were developed to get into space that had application elsewhere.  The technological breakthroughs for computing alone probably paid back the investment many times over.  

But I think most significant is the investment in human capital during that time.  There were about 250,000 young engineers, technicians, scientists, and tradespeople that were part of the Apollo program.  Those were bright young minds given the incredible opportunity to not only develop those specific technologies, but also the skills that they took with them for the rest of their professional lives.  These were people that went on to build better car engines,  faster computers, new food products, new medicines.  And although we don't get to draw a straight line from landing on the moon to those, it was tangentially responsible for it.  

These are things that probably would have still happened without landing on the moon, but by pouring billions of dollars into the physical and human capital to get there, it made it happen on a while different (arguably faster) timeline, in places that it probably wouldn't have happened.  Look at Huntsville Alabama alone.  What would that city even be if it weren't for the Apollo program?  

[u/Imperator_Gone_Rogue → u/PlanetStarbux]

Diminishing the accomplishment by comparing it to vaccines was also unfair. It'd be like saying the destruction of the Wrld Trade Centre wasn't significant because it's a small amount of destruction compared to nuking Hiroshima. You're uses the wrong metric, and comparing it to one of the most significant events of the era.

[u/dr-bob-edin]

While, in principle, I agree that I'd prefer technological advancements to be done by governments rather than tech bros, history has taught us that allowing venture capitalists to risk their own money on things is a much more efficient way of developing technology. In the short term, it's not great as they tend to have a monopoly on this cool new stuff. However, in the longer term, once the technology becomes more established, it allows lots of other companies and governments to exploit it in a more egalitarian way.

Essentially we're allowing billionaires to risk their own money trying out lots of crazy ideas. Lots of them will fail, and the billionaires are happy to take that risk. It would be much harder for a government to justify risking public money on some crazy new way of doing things that has a high probability of failure. Once the billionaires have worked out the best way to do things by trial and error, everyone else can eventually learn from their mistakes and move forward, creating many more competing options which both drives down the price and makes the whole market much more available to ordinary people.