China Scrubs Moon Mission Plans

Jim McCoy writes "CNN is reporting that according to China's state media, plans for a manned moon mission have been shelved due to cost. They are planning on a space station though..."

Comments

Re:Such a shame

[jaoswald]

This sort of thinking misses the point: it usually falls under the name "broken window fallacy." For instance, after every hurricane, you hear about how there is a boom in home construction and window repair to fix damaged buildings. If you just watched the local news on TV, you might naively wonder "if hurricanes are so good for business, why don't we break windows all year round?"

The answer is that all the resources (capital, raw materials, and labor) that went into fixing the broken windows could have been used, in the absence of a hurricane, to build new structures, so that over the same period, you would have had more buildings, instead of the same number of buildings returned to pre-storm condition.

You can't simply count the money and claim that it is a net benefit to the nation's welfare (in the sense of happiness/utility). If we paid billions of dollars to dig a hole in the ground and billions more to fill it up, you should agree that is a net waste of resources, even if that money got paid to Earthlings. Sure, the hole diggers and fillers will claim all sorts of spin-off benefits (better technology to dig holes!) and "jobs created" by their efforts, but it doesn't make it a good policy.

Any government-mandated spending has the effect of distorting capital, labor, and resource markets, in ways which might (might: I'm not some die-hard starve-the-government type) reduce overall welfare.

Spending billions of dollars to place robotic go-karts on Mars, for instance, is not self-evidently the best way to spend the money.

Re:What doesn't make sense about it?

[Allen Zadr]

I'm really not sure what one has to do with the other.

By the basic logic, then I should not sit and read SlashDot until my house is paid off. But my house will not be paid off for 30 years. Perhaps I should not purchase internet access, as the $50 per month that I spend would do better paying off my house, regardless of what other benefits internet access might give me.

Seriously, if you want universal healthcare... tell your congressman and representative that you will vote for whomever is willing to support it. Tell your friends that this is what you are doing. Then, actually vote that way. Same idea for big oil... Vote green, ride a bicycle.

In the mean time, some people (at least me) think research is usefull and worth some tax dollars.