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

Branding

[MrQuacker]

If they were allowed to put their logo on everything they were involved in, then people would start to realize how important they are. Nothing garish, just something like the tiny UL logo you see on everything.

An ad campaign like the Army's would also help.

Re:Branding

[softWare3ngineer]

A budget like theirs would also help :)

Re:Branding

[telso]

The US federal government has awful, awful branding. It's just terrible. How could half of social program recipients believe that they have "not used a government social program"?

In Canada, the federal and provincial governments make sure you know what they're doing. Every advertisement/public service announcement from the feds has the Canada wordmark, a simple "logo" with the word "Canada" and a Canadian flag above the last "a" (on TV and radio ads someone always says "A message from the Government of Canada"). But it's not just media advertising -- movies and tv shows that get tax credits from the government show it, correspondence (taxes, welfare, etc.), worksites partially paid for by government funding, and it goes on and on.

That's not to say that the branding gets to politicians' heads: our stimulus had a massive amount of advertising that many thought was flagrant self-promotion of the current government's policy, as opposed to ads which are usually along the lines of "Don't bring things across the border you shouldn't" or "Here's how young people can get help finding a job" or "Come visit our national parks". The current government even made it such that anyone who accepted stimulus money had to purchase a sign at their own cost extolling the benefits of the stimulus and the plan, post it on-site and send two pictures (one wide shot, one close-up) back to the feds before getting the money.

But when I look south, I'm at a loss to figure out who's responsible. Is the national guard a state or federal program? Is the FDIC run by the banks, or is that freecreditreport.com site run by the government? Who funded that study I read online? And the US government's websites all look completely different, so you don't know if it's the government or some independent agency or someone else (.gov notwithstanding -- who looks at URLs anymore besides /. readers?). Maybe if people knew all the services provided by government they wouldn't hate it as much (or maybe they would hate it more, but at least they would better understand everything they want to cut). It also lets you judge information more easily based on its source (your choice whether that improves your opinion of the information or the opposite).

Up north, I see this great anti-speeding ad and the Quebec flag at the end of the word Quebec and I know where it's coming from. Or this anti-fraud ad. France has their wordmark/logo too.

77% of people interviewed in a 1999 survey reported seeing the Canada wordmark, 60% in the previous 12 months. Over 85% of them reporting seeing the wordmark made them have more confidence in the information and make them "feel proud to be Canadian". And they almost unanimously agreed that the wordmark should be on websites, publications, advertisements, worksites and buildings. The key is that this doesn't happen overnight; the FIP started in 1970, and this is what they were running 10 years later.

If you want people to know that the government does important things besides building roads and national defence, make sure that when you spend tons of money on an ad buy, people know who's spending it. Get some cohesion going, US government; it's in your interest.

Re:Branding

[Dutchy Wutchy]

People don't always do what is in their best interest. Taxation and government spending can get things done that people would not otherwise do of their own volition.

Re:Branding

[mean pun]

Aww, it seems someone needs a BIIIIIIGGG hug here. Those poor tax payers, they always get the short end of the stick. You want a tissue? Here, take the whole box, you'll need it.

The truth is that in any civilized society everyone is a tax payer, and everyone benefits from those taxes. And yes, there will be some people that get more out of the system than they put into it, but they will be rare, especially if you average over a lifetime, and those rare cases usually have a good reason, such as a severe mental or physical disability.

Respect for your fellow citizen is always good, but people that use food stamps or free medical care also contribute to society, and also deserve respect.

Re:Branding

[drinkypoo]

If you'd invested NASA's budget in materials or medical research, you'd probably have a similar number of developments. Probably more, because you wouldn't be blowing a lot of the budget on PR stunts like the space shuttle.

Yes, and if we spent the military budget on educating the world and promoting equality (as opposed to pushing economic interests, which is what practically every military conflict ever fought has been about) we could probably achieve world peace. But we won't spend the money on that any more than our government will spend it on pure research for anything but military purposes. Alt energy research, for example, supports military goals by increasing range and the ability to project power. There is always a military objective, and it is always financially motivated. The space shuttle program was compromised by its redesign for military missions, but it probably would not have received the funding it needed to proceed without that military purpose in the first place.

It is not enough to look at what can physically be done, but what will socially be achieved. From that standpoint, NASA is utterly necessary, because we will not do the research needed to make the same advances without it, whether we are capable or no.

Re:Branding

[Count Fenring]

Except that only the first and third of your corrections are even arguably true, and the third is deeply disingenuous.

Besides, and this is something you "tax is theft" people never get - when you cut off social assistance, the people relying on it don't magically disappear. The things keeping them down don't magically stop, either. What happens is they get more desperate, and often turn to crime in order to provide for themselves. And, frankly, that's the rational decision, if it's between your kids starving or stealing some shit or mugging some asshole you don't know.

It's like the relationship between the dismantling of mental health support during the 80s and the increased homeless population - those patients haven't gone away, and people haven't stopped going crazy - it's just that now, when they do, they end up on the street, unmedicated.

The cost of not having a space program.

[softWare3ngineer]

..is measured in what we won't produce and is therefore something we will never known.

Well, it didn't happen *quite* like that.

[DerekLyons]

"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."

No they didn't. NASA contracted with MIT Instrumentation Laboratory to develop the Apollo guidance systems. (The Instrumentation Laboratory then turned around and based the design on one the USN had paid for - the Polaris guidance computer.) NASA's main contribution was oversight, review, and general bureaucratic paper shuffling. They didn't even program the damn thing - that was done by the Instrumentation Laboratory as well.

Not to mention, it's not really a MSBNC story linked to above - it's an MSBNC rewrite of what amounts to a NASA press release.

Eh

[mosb1000]

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. I realized today that the entire I405 improvement project cost as much as 1 space shuttle launch. And no new science comes out of launching the space shuttle, they've been doing that for 30 years. To put it bluntly, there's no way the cost of 115 space shuttle launches could have been worth benefits.

Re:Eh

[blahplusplus]

"And NASA has been such a pork loaded boondoggle lately..."

The problem is not the "pork" it's human beings underestimating realistically how long it will take to achieve the next advancement, people want advancements tomorrow but there are often huge speed bumps in the advancement of knowledge or technology. Intel thought we would have 10 Ghz processors today but it turned out heat and leakage disrupted those plans and we have multi-core processors instead. One can look at all the boondoggles of the private sector to see natural laws often rub up against our naive beliefs in progress.

There are tonnes of things like that, that the average human being doesn't understand because they don't understand the immense undertaking it is because of their ignorance.

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.

Re:This is a lack of PR from NASA

[GameMaster]

Yes, because Hubble was such a horrible failure. Why would we ever want to repeat that...

Opportunity cost

[Goonie]

One of the problems with this argument is it ignores the very simple concept of "opportunity cost". That is, what else could we have done with the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the space program over the last few decades? If it's commercially useful technologies you want, for instance, I strongly suspect you'd get a whole lot more of them by simply giving the National Science Foundation a whole lot more money to fund scientific research, rather than funding the development of technologies specifically related to space flight, only a small fraction of which will find commercial applicability elsewhere. Space science and engineering, particularly that relating to crewed missions, should be funded or not funded on its own merits, rather than relying on arguments about better toasters and pacemaker batteries. They're a useful bonus, and advocates should treat them as such.

Re:Tax cuts are all that matter

[Count Fenring]

So, hey - it turns out that the problems of widespread rebellion and overtaxation are different in kind from the problems of under-taxation and repressive government policies. Who would have thunk that different problems require different solutions?

I mean, I could quote any number of irrelevant historical situations - but shit, who has the time for worthless endeavors. Short version - in our own history, the same trends we're seeing now (rampant power transfer to corporate entities, drops in collected revenue, reduced regulation) during the Gilded Age led directly into the worst depression the country has ever suffered. OH SNAP IT'S A RELEVANT HISTORICAL PRECEDENT! RUN! IT'S GOING TO GET YOU!