I just started thinking about it. Why is space exploration even that necessary? They’re spending so much money on it when we have so much problems in our own planet…
In grand scale of things is it really that much money?
Nah, its even actively harmful / wasteful imo. Under socialism and communism, with society controlled by the workers, it will be difficult to make people do tons of mining, smelting, transport, etc, polluting their land and waters and destroying wildlife, just to allow some scientists far away to do fun rocket building and flying around
Having read my share of early Soviet era sci-fi, I think you’re wrong.
Setting aside all the intangible benefits such as answering why we are here and providing inspiration to generations there are tons of short and long term benefits.
In the short/medium term, research is so much about solving problems and your solutions having unexpected applications in other areas. A lot of our minituarization in tech happened because we needed things smaller and lighter to lift into space, think things like your smart phone camera or laptops. Also things like cordless tools and even memory foam were originally developed for their application in space travel.
In the long term, let’s take a look back, what if we had the same stance when we looked at the ocean, and thought why its even necessary to figure out how to navigate the waters. For our species to propagate or even survive, we need to expand. Right now we are one decently sized asteroid from extinction, but if one day we figured out how to expand to multiple worlds, then we become a heck of a lot of more resilient.
Yes
Not really, at least not with the current technology and problems down here on here. It’s exorbitantly expensive and all of that money could be put to better use improving the lives of real people in real ways.
Of course not, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. We go to space because it’s cool and we can, and that’s a beautifully human thing to do. As for the money, it’s a baseline fact of this world that enormous sums will be spent on things that don’t fix our problems, and space is as good a use as any for that wasted cash. If it were space or solving hunger, solving hunger is the obvious priority, but practically speaking it’s “don’t solve hunger and go to space” or “don’t solve hunger.”
Yes
Space exploration is weight lifting for science.
Literally and figuratively
We had problems on earth before space exploration, and we’ll have problems on earth after space exploration. And if we colonize other planets we’ll have problems there.
Because every time humans solve a problem they create more, bigger, harder to solve problems.
Space exploration doesn’t affect this.
I am of the opinion that space exploration and settlement is the single most important thing humanity should be doing. Currently humanity exists only on this planet, which through the course of its existence has had numerous mass extinction events. It is hubris to believe that we will never be affected by one. Right now all of humanity’s eggs are in this single basket, and if that basket gets kicked over, humanity could cease to exist.
Now I will grant you that there are lots of things down here on earth that we should be spending money on to better the lives of humans generally, but these things are not mutually exclusive. Right now we’re spending orders of magnitude more money and resources waging war on one another than space exploration. In the US in 2025, the US military budget was around $920b, whereas NASA’s was $25b. The military budget was 36 times higher than the space budget. It’s not even close. Space is not where dollars are being wasted.
Studies have also shown that NASA’s impact is a net positive on the economy, consistently generating more economic impact than is put into it. It creates well paying jobs that employees find fulfilling and satisfying, generates public interest in the sciences, and benefits society as a whole as new technologies are developed that we all get to enjoy.
I would argue that what we NEED to do is stop needlessly murdering each other over religious and social disagreements, and spend our resources on feeding, clothing and taking care of one another such that we all have the time, security and ability to watch humans go out into space with wonder in our hearts.
Humanity has already outgrown the cradle called earth, the longer it takes us to leave it behind the greater the risk that will destroy it and ourselves.
- The amount of money spent on NASA is negligible compared to the MIC
- Human intuition about what STEM stuff is useful is very poor. The basis for your ability to securely do online banking is a quirky little number theory equation that was useless for centuries. Or think about the reactionary complaints about “they’re paying scientists to study cat urine” or whatever. Those studies typically have a practical reason for getting some and practical implications once they’re finished. Even the stuff that is practical looks impractical to the layperson. Space travel is very similar in that the technology it enables can have other uses.
- Whoever figures out asteroid mining first is going to make a lot of fucking money
Human intuition about what STEM stuff is useful is very poor.
Funding streams are my big concern here. Government research is mostly toward non-profitable things. I like that NASA takes a decade to develop a robot and cancels the launch repeatedly to make it as safe as possible. Plenty of derived consumer tech will come out of that project and it has the least chance of exploding over my head. Corporate research is mostly toward profitable things. It further enshrines corporate power, limits more technology behind patents, and creates exploitative technologies to generate the most profit for their time. Our intuition goes so haywire with things like tech industry hope-ium, in the opposite direction of NASA considering lots of problems in its slower public research. The best version of an organisation like that is a slow trickle of good data for every field and products for consumer use without restrictions.
There’s a special kind of nerd that I call Puzzle Demons. They have big brains and they get satisfaction from solving puzzles without thinking about them. It doesn’t matter what the puzzle is so long as it’s a challenge to solve. They’ll look back on their work with satisfaction because they solved the puzzle, regardless of what that work is.
Puzzle Demons in the 1940s built V-2 rockets. We gave them space travel and the puzzle became making the rocket leave the atmosphere instead of hitting cities. That space travel made helpful consumer technologies to survive in extreme environments, things that were otherwise too expensive for commercial R&D.
Then we killed NASA in the 1980s. The Puzzle Demons had no socially positive puzzle. They built the tech industry instead. I dated a Puzzle Demon whose fun little puzzle to solve every day was designing the UI for smart locks that go on the bunkers of the wealthy. She was thrilled to make locking herself out of the bunker more user-friendly. There are Puzzle Demons at the social media websites whose entire job is making them more addictive for children. Puzzle Demons gave us crypto, guided missiles, murder robots, AI slop, and corporate efficiency consulting.
We need space exploration to pacify the Puzzle Demons. Without it, the population is still encouraged to go into STEM but most of the STEM jobs are profoundly evil. You stick them in a NASA office and they’re just building useful things. Otherwise the prestige jobs are with defense contractors, tech companies, and multinationals.
Imagine if we had a centrally planned economy. We could throw the puzzle demons at logistics
China is even more STEM-intensive than the US. I would love to study at a Chinese university, but I would be the worst student there. My parents didn’t demand I score well on puzzles as a child so my inner Puzzle Demon is satisfied by grand strategy games but intimidated by anything beyond basic algebra. China has utilised its Puzzle Demons to do so many good things in recent years. They’re supporting their Puzzle Demons in state institutions and as a result they’re the only country able to actually address climate change or field a domestic space station. The Soviets democratised Puzzle Demon science and made their farmers and factory workers participants in projects that weren’t building more lethal drones. They were collaborating with their neighbours to do the little spreadsheet and crunch the numbers and see the result that benefited their neighbours.
The US gives its Puzzle Demons hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt and says the only way to actually pay that off is indentured corporate servitude doing something evil. They numb themselves in the moment to deal with it and find ways to justify it after. Their career history pushes them further into antisocial jobs where they can stomach the philosophical side because they weren’t required to take philosophy classes and were told to look down on humanities students.
Give 'em NASA and sure it’s expensive. Sure most of the results are just cool new space pictures I’ll look at a few times. Sure I’d benefit more from social spending. But I can’t enjoy those parks if the Puzzle Demons are building murder robots that anyone can fly. I want them building really complex rockets that only a handful of heavily screened PhD-tier astronauts can fly. I don’t want them going to SpaceX and making profitable things because that profit enables Elon Musk and restricts development to short-term goals and marketable products. I want them in a strictly regulated government lab using their little graphing calculators to crunch the numbers and be some other planet’s problem. Not the one I have to live on.
edit: And every satellite pointed outward is one that isn’t pointed inward. It’s the same job to build and control either. Fund the ones that point outward and make all the Science Kids want to grow up to look at cool space pictures instead of surveilling their neighbours.
We puzzle demons want that too
It’s what drove me out of emergency medicine. My inner Puzzle Demon was completely satisfied by an environment where the puzzle is doing creative, emotional, technical, moral, manual labour for a noble mission. Keeping track of a dozen metrics and half a dozen textbooks, a constant stream of new puzzles, I got to indulge my need to compulsively read and analyse. But I also felt like a vampire because the US medical system means I save a life only to saddle a profoundly disabled person with an unpayable debt. The only non-Puzzle Demon route I could find was being an MSF doctor right as the west decided that bombing MSF hospitals was okay.
It’s also what drove me into public sector horticulture. I get to spend all day in the sun solving puzzles. Every kind of labour involved except for emotional, but all of that Puzzle Demon energy goes into making meaningful public gardens. With those budgets shrinking and my pay freezing below subsistence level, the better-paying alternative is to be a private landscaper and poison my neighbours while stealing the water from their mouths. The richest assholes in the city get another trophy that I can’t even visit after work and it raises the surrounding property values. All roads lead to Puzzle Demonology without the disarmed public sector providing a sustainable alternative.
Yes. For those who consider it wasteful spending, consider that a lot of problems are not fixable by just throwing more money at them. There’s a saying that “9 women can’t make a baby in one month” even though 1 woman can in 9. Many ills of society are as much about political/social motivation, entrenched opponents/regulatory capture, NIMBYism, etc and not problems that you can fix just by spending more. There’s also the concept of a “marginal dollar” - spending one more dollar in an important area that already has a lot of money (and has problems that aren’t really addressed by just having more money) may not be as impactful as a less important area where that dollar would go a lot further.
Strictly, no. The human spirit yearns for it though, and I think it shoukd be given a treat from time to time.
There are just so many things that should be trimmed first. Like the oligarchy, who hoard money and use it to make the world worse. Space travel is science. Science’s value is intrinsic.
