Should We Be Content With Our Paltry Space Program?

StartsWithABang writes: At its peak — the mid-1960s — the U.S. government spent somewhere around 20% of its non-military discretionary spending on NASA and space science/exploration. Today? That number is down to 3%, the lowest it's ever been. In an enraging talk at the annual American Astronomical Society meeting, John M. Logsdon argued that astronomers, astrophysicists and space scientists should be happy, as a community, that we still get as much funding as we do. Professional scientists do not — and should not — take this lying down.

Comments

Re:No we shouldnt

[Anonymous Coward]

Tax religions. Give the proceeds to science.

Re:ROI

[houghi]

Here we all talk about ROI and we wonder why the companies don't do any research anymore. It is because research can never prove what the ROI will be. And if you know what the ROI will be, you won't get something new. At the most something improved, but most of the times something cheaper.

Google is one of the few companies that invests in products that might become useless.

Why not just do things and then see where it leads us. Are we not a curious species? Do we not know what and how just because we crave knowledge?

As a former scientist:

[drolli]

The labs i worked in spent less than 200kDollar/Year and researcher. In average 10-15 impact points in publications per year for each lab. For the cost of the ISS or a moon shot you could finance my expriments a hunred thousand times over, so i really would appreciate if the decisions are made carefully.

What i really love to see is automonous systems in orbit, i.e. telescopes. I would thing if you uses the money for the ISS on other things, maybe we would not have to built radiotelecope arrays on earth, but coul put them in space. Instead of rdeaming of a manned mars mission, we should send many probes to other planets and moons.

The scientific achievement of the rovers on mars (and the comet mission!) are significant beyond anything we could have dreamt of.

Re:No we shouldnt

[TheRaven64]

This is the same argument used for military R&D spending - there are lots of useful civilian results. The problem is that if you throw a big pile of R&D money at anything you'll likely get some useful results. The question is whether you get a good ROI. Compare NASA to, for example, Xerox PARC (Ethernet, the GUI, laser printers, etc.) or Bell Labs (the transistor, access control lists, UNIX, etc.) and see which produced more inventions that benefitted the economy as a whole per dollar spent.

Each shuttle launch cost, on average, $1.5bn. The cost of one launch would fund over ten thousand PhDs, or several hundred DARPA programs. Do you really think that NASA is the best ROI for taxpayers?

Re:ROI

[FireFury03]

That's not really true. You can look at a research lab and measure the ROI retrospectively quite easily and use this to make forward looking decisions, and that's what a lot of companies do. They'll close research labs that haven't produced anything useful in the last 5-10 years, but they'll increase funding to ones that have.

And what about research that takes longer than 5-10 years to come to fruition (which actually isn't very long)?

Lets take fusion research as an example - that has spent decades sucking money out of governments and has produced very little return on that investment. It may never produce much return. But if we ever do crack fusion for commercial power generation, that would be a serious game changer - probably a big enough return to justify a couple of hundred years of otherwise fruitless investment.