Understanding the Payoffs From Investing In Space Flight

A story at MSNBC.com explains how the technological benefits reaped from investing in the US space program are numerous, but often indirect or difficult to explain. Quoting: "NASA has recorded about 1,600 new technologies or inventions each year for the past several decades, but far fewer become commercial products, said Daniel Lockney, technology transfer program executive at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. ... 'We didn't know that by building the space shuttle main engines we'd also get a new implantable heart device,' Lockney said. 'There's also a bunch of stuff we don't know we're going to learn, which leads to serendipitous spinoffs.' ... But some innovations do not appear as a straight line drawn from NASA to commercial products. The U.S. space agency may not claim credit for computers and the digital revolution that followed, but it did create a pool of talent that perhaps contributed to that transformation of modern life. NASA brought together hundreds of the brightest scientists and engineers in the 1970s to work on the guidance computers that helped the Apollo missions land humans on the moon. When the Apollo era ended, many of those people dispersed to private companies and to Silicon Valley."

Comments

Re:None

[Joce640k]

...except that the entire amount that NASA has ever spent since it was formed is less than the current wars or bailouts.

citation

Re:Eh

[drinkypoo]

You have to look at the opportunity cost with things like this. All new research and development has unintended benefits. And NASA has been such a pork loaded boondoggle lately, it's hard to believe the money couldn't have been better spent.

The argument has been made that without NASA the money wouldn't be better spent.

I realized today that the entire I405 improvement project cost as much as 1 space shuttle launch.

And yet, it is essentially evil; the interstate highway project was about control, not about any of the bullshit excuses you may have heard. The freedom of automobile ownership is illusory since your vehicle and indeed your right to use any vehicle on public roads can be revoked at any time and for any reason including none and you still have to take a bus or get a ride to the hearing to get your license reinstated... and indeed, your vehicle can be seized at the least provocation, and you can be fined outrageously for its storage, and incarcerated if you do not pay the fines.

To put it bluntly, there's no way the cost of 115 space shuttle launches could have been worth benefits.

To put it bluntly, without NASA that money would have been spent by the rich on luxury yachts and there would be no benefit to technology at all.