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Neil DeGrasse Tyson Urges America To Challenge China To a Space Race
An anonymous reader writes: According to a Tuesday story in the UK edition of the International Business Times, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the celebrity astrophysicist and media personality, advocates a space race between the United States and China. The idea is that such a race would spur innovation and cause industry to grow. The Apollo race to the moon caused a similar explosive period of scientific research and engineering development. You might prefer the Sydney Morning Herald piece on which the IB Times article is based.
How about collaboration, a team can do more than single entity
We can't afford to goof around in space Neil. If private companies want to mine asteroids and go to Mars, that's on them.
New meme?
What we need to do is encourage people to realize that by making everything about the accumulation of money, we have become so short sighted that real innovation just isn't possible anymore.
As long as we measure "success" by quarterly P&L statements then the best we can ever hope for is incrementally improved mediocrity.
Nothing brings a species together like breaking the moon into lots of tiny bits and dropping them on the planet we live on.
No thanks. They steal.
I'm not sure the analogy of this period to the russian us space race is cooked right in NDGT's head.
China owns 7 percent of our country, likely far more. Not to mention they are the people literally manufacturing almost everything. USA and China are on the same technological level.
So why would we, the smaller, collapsing country want to spur innovation for China on the offchance that some piece of technology actually proves profitable enough for one of our corporations to charge us money for?
NDGT is aware, right, that technology doesn't reach civilllian hands on its own merit. If it did, if it even reached government hands appropriately, we'd be far more advanced.
If you are competing to be #1 there are two strategies.
Make sure you perform better than the rest.
Make sure the rest performs worse than you do.
If your goal is to be #1, the easier strategy will be the one taken.
If say the US is more focus on just advancing then being #1 then our efforts will be to build up other countries, and at the same time we will grow much further.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If he hasn't noticed China is already racing ahead. We've rested on our laurels for too long.
And, why is he supporting the Republican position that we must flush money down the drain with even more corporate welfare. These Republicans and their schemes to steal money from WIC are disgusting. They literally are starving children.
Considering how many cheating and thieving Chinese students we admit to our college/university STEM programs and eventually American engineering jobs, we cannot win.
It would be worth funding a space race if we could ship Neil Degrasse Tyson off-planet and never have to hear from him again.
Media hound? Yes! Destroyer of Planets? Certainly! But astrophysicist? Really? I know he takes care of signage at the Hayden Planetarium, but what has he really done as an astrophysicist? I can't find any contribution that Neil DeGrasse Galactus has made to astrophysics.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
If a space race would spur innovation through rivalry, why stop there? A full cold war would really get the rivalry juices flowing... Rah, Rah, go Team America and defeat the communist yellow man. [/sarcasm]
This idea is very childish. The heated passion of rivalry does not make for good policy and planning decisions. As great as Apollo was for tangible technology spin offs, from a space policy perspective it was disaster. It did long term damage and did much to keep man in low orbit for following 50 years or longer. Another "space race" would just be a repeat of one step forward, two steps back that epitomized Apollo. Instead, if we are to venture into space, lets do it soberly and with calculation required to actually start long-term exploration and colonization efforts. Or, at least step out of the way and encourage those who want to explore and colonize space in an adult manner.
Umm. Tyson is a democRAT.
China asked to join in on the ISS and we vetoed it. China said that they would launch their own space station. This is scheduled for 2020. We have already started a space race and are quite simply, waiting for the Chinese to catch up. They just got to a person into space in 2003 and landed something on the moon in 2007. Their proposed time table has them returning moon rock to earth in 2017, launching a space station in 2020, and a moon walk in 2024. So arguably, in a little less than ten years from now, they will have caught up with where the US was around almost two decades ago. Still, China proposes lots of things and fails to come through on them. If they actually get a space station launched and the ISS is retired with no replacement in the works, then I expect that the US will pay attention and start running again rather than walking.
Personally, I expect Musk to have his own space station up sooner.
The original space race was a lot more about nuclear weapons fears and saber rattling than I think Neil appreciates. It may have been publicly perceived as a fun thing, but behind the scenes it was about military paranoia and a Cold War that came all-too-close to becoming VERY hot.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
How about being the first to build a city in the deep sea. That's more feasible than going in outer space where you will have no quick access to materials, food and what not.
Judging by the last round of elections, we're focusing more on getting out of the race, actually.
It we want to actually be in the race, we need to stop electing people like Jim Inhofe and Rand Paul.
I still find the Apollo Program amazing and audacious considering the technology of the time. Now a race would be just a question of political will and funding, not nearly as exciting.
love is just extroverted narcissism
For example, China and the US could have a bet -- loser's premier/president has to sing the national anthem of the other on international television. Or they could bet a really nice dinner in Paris. Or maybe they could bet, I dunno, world domination and possession of all lunar resources in perpetuity. I know which one The Brain would pick...
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
...we'd LOSE. And even if we WON, what would we claim? "OUR Chinese engineers are better than YOUR Chinese engineers?"
Tired of this guy and his cocky attitude. Go away please.
we are not willing to make the necessary sacrifices to win. Not in money, personnel, safety, environmental concerns, none of them.
We'll spend "Apollos" worth of entitlements annually to keep the inner cities appeased, sacrifice our industry to allow other nations to increase particulate output, and shut down entire industries because of the possibility of someone getting hurt, much less suing said organizations into oblivion if someone turns an ankle on an unrelated project. A songbird nest in the wrong place will be a decade long shutdown.
China floods entire ecosystems and bulldozes more, villages and individuals are grist for the mills of Progress-their labor or their livelihood makes no difference if National Pride is on the line. Even biological ethical concerns are ignorable if one can "breed a better taikonaut".
They would win ANY contest, because any contest the Chinese choose to enter, is worth winning at any cost. If they don't think the effort is worth it, they simply won't enter.
We battled the soviets because they were a national security threat.
The chinese and americans make too much money off each other to go to war with each other.
Look, Neil... on slashdot of course we all want to go to space. We're a tech community and we like all that space shit.
But a lot of people don't. I had a high school teacher that had a big sticker on his wall that said "no space cadets"... and he was talking about the space program and how he thought it was a waste of money. He wanted to spend it all on social programs.
that is just the general public. What we need to do is take it out of the politician's hands. the government is if anything backsliding on space. The future is private space exploration. it is going to be different than what the government was doing but if they can actually figure out how to make money up there then there will be an explosion of development that will never stop.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Manned missions are expensive, risky, and provide very little of value for the money other than knowledge of space's impact on the human body.
Manned missions also take money away from robotic missions, which have proven to be far more scientifically valuable per dollar spent. I'd rather see a Titan boat probe and a Europa submarine probe than a manned near-orbit asteroid sampling mission.
I believe other technologies have to catch up to make humans-in-space practical, such as automated dwelling construction and mining, and automation of space-based manufacturing and repair. It requires a lot of labor to make a self-sustaining colony, and space-suits make such impractical and risky. We need better helper robots first. Otherwise, we are just spinning our wheels. These problems will NOT be solved by yet more manned missions alone.
Robotic probes are highly effective and efficient, while humans-in-space is currently very clunky, wasteful, risky, and expensive at this point in time. We are doing it wrong. Let other tech catch up first.
Table-ized A.I.
One of the things that people seem to not realize is that, even though they are trade partners, there is another Cold War going on. It's not the nuclear kind, but it's definitely there in the form of Chinese state policy vs. the US's policy. China is willing to pour any amount of money into infrastructure and other projects to keep its economy growing...look at all the spending that is happening post-2008. (Google "ghost cities".) China is also able to do whatever it wants regardless of public opinion, which is directly opposed to the US way of doing anything. For example, they are literally picking up and moving millions of people from the countryside into the cities they have built to improve service delivery...try that here and see how far you get. These things, combined with a population advantage, guarantee China's success long-term absent any other forces.
The only thing that could tip the balance is ideology-driven races like this. The Apollo program was similar to current Chinese policy -- pour anything and everything into it as long as we win. Same went for all the Cold War spending, because people were convinced we would be destroyed otherwise. You can argue the military buildup was a waste, but look at the employment and technology transfer it enabled. It also hammered home the need to educate scientists and engineers, and real dollars were put behind that (see the 50s-70s buildup of the national labs and state university systems as an example.) In the current US political climate, funding education and fixing roads is evil socialism and money should never be spent on public projects. Focusing people's limited attention spans on an external power might be a good thing.
How do we get technology? Space Race How do we get a space race? Cold War
ISS is worthless. Proponents of the status quo (democrats) want a program that looks down at our warming, miserable planet. George W. Bush wanted a program to explore space, the Moon, asteroids, Mars. Today's democrats are a far cry from Kennedy. They choose to do things because they are easy.
Bush wanted a plan to explore space, the Moon, asteroids, and Mars when it was a nice speaking point on his state of the Union addresses, but he never even allocated any money to NASA to begin such programs. Year after year, he said we were going to Mars but had nothing but words to back that up. Their budget had a hard time keeping up with inflation. Additionally, if we were really going to Mars, not only would we need the ISS, we'd probably have to build another one to do all additional research needed for a Mars mission that couldn't get done there. Normally, I wouldn't reply to an AC troll who doesn't know what they're talking about, but the above was always a sore point with me.
Great idea! Let's borrow billions of dollars from China to have a space race with China! I'm sure all the borrowed money will be wisely spent.
Something else to passively aggressively show that the US is thinking about separating from Russia and having a possible three way space race, or even giving China some aid.
so says George Jones..... http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics...
From the Sidney Morning Herald:
In the search to find the high-paying jobs and industries of the future, Neil deGrasse Tyson has an idea for a novel solution. How about a militarised space race to Mars?
More specifically, the famed American astrophysicist says that if he could just get China's leaders to leak a memo to the West about plans to build military bases on Mars, "the US would freak out and we'd all just build spacecraft and be there in 10 months".
Ignoring the fact that the US and China (and over 100 other countries) have signed the Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits establishing military bases on other planets, just who would you be defending from / attacking from a Mars military base? Martians who want a second War of the Worlds?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
And we can cut medicare and medicaid to pay for it.
And on the back side pay a lot of more pay the costs of prison + doctors for people who are locked up just to see a doctor that will take them.
Let China have space. We're too fucked up in our religious bullshit to deserve space travel.
How about a Manhattan project to install a continental smartgrid in the US powered by renewables, first?
I've you want to spend a trillion or so, THAT is the way to go.. not to the moon, nor Mars, or on a war built on lies in Iraq.
Lower the actual cost of energy into the economic and production equations, build shit tons of robotics, and tell China to take a hike.
THEN we get back to the 'nice to haves'.. like space exploration.
Who allocated funds in the budget? You overestimate the worth of the president if you think he wrote the budget. The president gives the overall goals, congress funds them, and the agencies do them.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
We could challenge them to a dance off.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
A budget? How quaint.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Their first space station is modest single cylinder unit, sort of like 1970s Skylab. I think a couple of their manned missions will dock to it.
The second station around 2020 plans to have over four units and a couple docking ports. Several people can live there for over a month. That is about half the size of1990s Russian Mir station.
The ISS has around 23 units and six can live indefinitely. Although Soyuz lift-rafts have to be recycled within six months.
Instead, let's challenge China to create the most carbon efficient economy on the planet. That way even the looser wins. Wasting precious time on another space race, while the Earth warms at an exponential rate will only produced losers, no matter who "wins" the space race.
Our current gap is not really in space-specific technology. An "AI race" and/or 3D-printer/replicator-race would probably better serve the goal of living in space than a "space race" that only focuses on space-specific technology. We should focus on the bottlenecks, and those bottlenecks so far appear to NOT be space-specific.
Think of how difficult it would be to do space exploration in general without compact computers. Computer technology is not space-specific, but computer technology miniaturization happened to be a giant enabler of space exploration. Dumping tons of money into ONLY space-related stuff would not have been nearly as beneficial (being we've mostly plateaued on the mechanical and chem rocket side of things since the late 1950's.)
Similarly, AI and/or flexible manufacturing automation appear to be areas that help in other industries AND space exploration/colonization. Let's try to launch two birds with one rocket.
Table-ized A.I.
How about collaboration, a team can do more than single entity
Because it won't work. There is a reason we have competitive markets instead of collaborative markets. Collaboration works on a small scale but you need to harness competition to really push the boundaries quickly. Not to say collaboration is a bad thing but it simply will not make things happen. Sad but true.
NdGT makes a very good point that the only technologies that are really expensive (like space travel) that get funded are either in response to existential threats (i.e. nuclear war, etc) or for tangible financial gain. When it comes to space exploration you simply cannot quantify the risks sufficiently to get a return on investment so financial gain is off the table for anything on the frontier of our technology and knowledge. We went to the moon because we were in a (cold) war with the Soviet Union at the time. That underpinned everything we did in the Apollo missions. Once the Soviets cancelled their moon missions, so did we and we haven't been back since.
Does China even have a man rated launcher yet?
There is this thing called Wikipedia that is just chock full of answers to questions like that.
The heated passion of rivalry does not make for good policy and planning decisions.
Sometimes it does and sometimes it does not. What is certain is that competition gets results. Our entire economy is based on it. The ONLY reason we went to the moon was because we were at (cold) war with the Soviets. Take away that driver and the Apollo missions simply would never have happened. Once it was clear the Soviets weren't going to the moon, the Apollo program was folded like a cheap tent and we haven't been back since.
As great as Apollo was for tangible technology spin offs, from a space policy perspective it was disaster. It did long term damage and did much to keep man in low orbit for following 50 years or longer.
I have seen no compelling argument or evidence to support this assertion and you certainly haven't presented either here.
What the hell kind of race do you wait for the opponent to catch up?
If the opponent can never catch up then it isn't a race. A race is a competition by definition. If one side can never win then it was never actually a competition in any meaningful sense of the word.
... thank you."
China is busy going after resources.
The South China Sea is a land grab for oil.
The Moon is a land grab for minerals.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I like NDT, but we would have no chance in hell at beating China to anything. We would have so much B.S red tape to deal with and security concerns, they would fly past us. Hell, China already has all of our plans, and anything new they would copy in short order, they have a stronger industrial base now with a lot less regulation.
But a lot of people don't. I had a high school teacher that had a big sticker on his wall that said "no space cadets"... and he was talking about the space program and how he thought it was a waste of money. He wanted to spend it all on social programs.
His mistake is that he thinks we don't already spend the money on social programs. Our government expenditures on social programs outpace our expenditures on NASA something like 50 to 1. It's not even close. Sounds like your "science" teacher was a clueless fool.
What we need to do is take it out of the politician's hands. the government is if anything backsliding on space.
Ok, how do you propose to do that? Private enterprise isn't going to do basic research and exploration - not at a meaningful scale anyway. Exploration of the frontiers of knowledge and basic research is almost entirely government funded. Don't believe me? Take a look at who is behind almost all research grants. (hint, NIH, DARPA, NSF are good places to look)
The future is private space exploration. it is going to be different than what the government was doing but if they can actually figure out how to make money up there then there will be an explosion of development that will never stop.
No it isn't and it never will be. Not at the real frontiers of exploration anyway. I'm an accountant and I can assure you that you cannot make a credible financial business plan for a trip to Mars for example such that it will get financial backing. Why? 1) The risks are unknown and unquantifiable. We simply don't know what we don't know. 2) The financial capital required is huge and there is no reasonable guarantee of a return based on past experience. 3) The only institution that can fund exploration on a large scale without an expectation of a financial return is the government. Once the boundaries have been moved then private enterprise can come in behind (ala SpaceX) and make it more efficient and useful but you simply CANNOT make a credible business plan and get it funded for something like a manned mission to mars. Companies do not fund big things unless they can have some reasonable expectation of a return on their investment.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is the guy who claimed that Columbus was "government financed":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In fact, he is wrong on numerous accounts. First of all, these voyages were not all that expensive, probably less than $100 million in modern dollars; they were less than 10% of what Spain paid that year to get the Moors out of Spain. And Queen Isabella was a totalitarian ruler who effectively invested her private money in this venture, and she very much wanted a return. Furthermore, the expedition to the new world was insured by private insurers, so it was actually the private sector taking the risk; much of the expense of such exploration was, in fact, for insurance. Finally, about half of the money for the expedition actually came from other private investors.
So, when deGrasse Tyson advocates that we should engage in a government-funded space race with the Chinese, he is guided by numerous wrong assumptions. deGrasse Tyson always sounds like he is very authoritative (it's the voice and the delivery), but his actual knowledge of economics and history seems to be poor. And don't kid yourself, the guy is lobbying in his own interest, because once private space exploration takes off, people like him will become irrelevant.
When he says that it is wrong that "if we had given the money we spent on NASA to the private sector, we would be on the moon and on Mars more cheaply", he is, however, absolutely right. He is right because it makes little difference whether government pays its cronies in the private sector directly or through NASA; the error in both cases is that government takes the money and reallocates it in ways that are driven by lobbying and politics, not efficiency and results.
What we need is an Olympics for technology. The US will be embarrassed into accelerating development to not fall on its face in front of the world.
How about a green energy race while we're at it?
The whole idea rests on some questionable pop history. Much of what people claim to be the product of the "space race" was developed far earlier for military or commercial uses. Velcro, for example, commonly cited as NASA breakthrough was actually patented in Switzerland in 1948. If we're going to pour resources into something, instead of doing a pointless vanity project like a moon landing let's do something useful this time. Nuclear fusion, for example, or diabetes research.
TFA and the smh.com.au source it parrots are both long on paraphrasing and short on actual quotations from Tyson. What did the man actually say? This sort of thing seems unusually inflammatory for someone of his character.
You do know that the Japanese has been bitterly complaining about how their financial aid to China were "repackaged" as Chinese and given to even more backward countries...?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Sorry, Neil. While I would love for it to happen, America has allowed itself to be numbed by entertainment and distractions of the Internet, TV, smartphones, and such.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Gg9CqhbP8
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Then wut?
Borrow the money from China to fund it?
Add to that Christine McEntee, the "Health Care" 'Professor' of the AGU who funneled millions of membership fees into the pockets of James E. Hansen and Michael E. Mann through the AGU's MacEntee's Child the 'Climate Scientists Defense Fund'. One problem is that several million is cash was re-driected to a Swiss Bank Account owned by McEntee and she never mentioned this in her IRS statements. HA HA What A FUCKER CROOK and now NABBED!
The funny pages at the AGU always give big laughs.
Ha ha
Because I don't pick fights that I can't win.
We should fence off the US and go to sleep for 50 years while China and India have a space race!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
any more. Maybe we should challenge them to a prayer race instead...
> such a race would spur innovation and cause industry to grow
Gaah. This is the worst economist's voodo. I mean: I'm for investment into R&D. I'm strongly for *public* investment into R&D because I strongly believe fundamental research is a public affair.
But investing from public debt into industry (as the USA has been doing the last 45 years) only lasts so long. Some day, the USA economy will be overwhelmed by its debt (the day foreign creditors [China!] don't take the dollar at "fac value"). Then there'll be an abrupt end.
Think subprime gone supernova.
The real war between China and the USA is happening right now in the South China Sea - Spratly Islands.
China is winning.
I would rather compete with the Chinese in a space race than the terrestrial/aquatic competitions we spend outrageous amounts of money on every 2 years. At least space research has beneficial spin-off technologies.
Except he gets his facts completely wrong. For example, Columbus' Voyage was privately financed, and the risk of such voyages was generally privately insured.
You might want to check your facts. It was financed out of the royal treasury and commissioned by the Queen.
The asteroid belt alone is so full of easily reachable resources that there is almost no risk and spectacular gains being made. That's why the private sector is gearing up for private (robotic) space exploration and mining.
"Almost no risk"? Are you kidding me? Anyone who thinks asteroid mining is a viable business within the lifetime of anyone reading this is delusional and/or hasn't thought the economics through. Professionally I am an engineer and I'm also a certified cost accountant. What that means is that I evaluate business costs and risks for a living. Anyone who says there is no risk in asteroid mining has no idea what they are talking about. It might be feasible a long time from now but there will have to be a huge amount of government financed research before it is ever possible that private enterprise will go there.
The financial risk alone is enormous and there is no guarantee of success and basically none of the necessary technology currently exists. A mission like this is hugely expensive (many many $billions if not $trillions) and and good luck getting insurance since the risks are unknown and unquantifiable currently. We do not have ANY equipment capable of mining an asteroid nor any near term reasonable prospect of seeing any - particularly from the private sector. (When Caterpillar starts working on it then you should sit up and take notice) We don't have any equipment capable of refining such minerals in space either so that will have to be developed (along with an adequate and robust power supply) or you'll have to return raw ore to Earth.
As for the "spectacular gains", that requires returning the (hypothetically) mined minerals to Earth which is the only place they currently are useful. Even if you somehow manage to return a huge amount of a valuable mineral to Earth you'll disrupt the market value of that mineral most likely causing prices to drop while your costs (many many $billions) will remain fixed and large. While that doesn't preclude it being a profitable enterprise, it does make evaluating the return complicated. And I'm a certified cost accountant so I know first hand how hard calculating the ROI would be. (borderline impossible FYI)
Worst of all any mined materials have to be returned to Earth in large (heavy) quantities. If you drop a large amount of minerals onto the surface of the Earth from space, congratulations! You have just created a Weapon of Mass Destruction. If you can return an asteroid from orbit you can just as easily drop it (on purpose or on accident) on someone to catastrophic effect. Even the remote risk of someone accidentally doing this means the risk of this technology is enormous.
When reuseable space craft by SpaceX are a reality (likely later this year) there will be no economic need for a space elevator. Its the same reason we will probably never build super high speed rail systems over most of the US. The cost benifit just is not there. When the cost of going to space is reduced to mostly a matter of fule space is very accessable very cheeply. Not much more expensive than a flight in the concord was. The real cost is throwing away the rocket everytime you use it. Build rockets with the reuseability of jet airplanes and presto cost to space is no big deal. No one talks much about building high speed rail across the ocean because an airplan can get you accross very fast for a tiny fraction of the cost of the rail system. Same with space. Build a 30,000 mile elevator to space at $1,000,000,000,000 or a $50,000,000 space ship that burns $300,000 worth of fuel per flight.
We started to the moon because JFK needed a spectacular - but once the cost estimates started coming in, he started seriously considering backing off. We went to the moon because JFK took a bullet to the head allowing LBJ to push it (and the associated pork) as a monument to JFK.
Citation please?
Apollo was essentially cancelled in the budget battles of '65-'67. The Soviets didn't get serious about their lunar programs until around '66-'67. (And most of them weren't cancelled until '72 or so.)
Hmm, let's see. The Soviet programs were cancelled in '72 according to you (actually that's not quite right but it's close enough). When was the last mission to the Moon? Oh that's right, December 1972. Quite a coincidence that...
An informed expert opinion based on thirty years of studying the Apollo program. (Actual studying, not just reading pop histories or getting my urban legends from other equally ignorant people on the 'net.)
Pretty much, yeah it's a coincidence. Either way, your original claim as to the order and connection of events is incorrect.
Who cares what that media whore thinks?
Oh Neil. Poor sweet, stupid genius. Are we forgetting the original purpose of the space race? It was not some good-natured, friendly competition between two great nations seeking to further the cause of science for the sake of science. It was part of an arms race for global supremacy that resulted in hundreds of millions of people being irradiated by thousands of above ground nuclear bomb tests which only ended because of corruption and economic collapse of one of the nations involved. We are very fortunate that it didn't go sideways and end up with nuclear winter.