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How Can NASA's Road To Mars Be Made More Affordable?
MarkWhittington writes: The Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger published a piece that touched on one of the most vexing issues surrounding NASA's "road to Mars," that being that of cost. How does one design a deep space exploration program that "the nation can afford," to coin a phrase uttered by the old NASA hand interviewed for the article? The phrase is somewhat misleading since one of the truisms of federal budgeting is that the nation can afford quite a bit. A more accurate phrase might be, "that the nation is willing to spend."
Obviously the least expensive in terms of consumables.
Just cancel the F-35 project. That will buy you about 5 trips to Mars.
Well, yes. It's affordability too, but try to imagine how soured on space the general public would get to see people slowly dying in an under-resourced "base" on Mars.
If you want to make Mars at all realistic, you need to start by building a set of space and mars-dust hardened machinery capable of doing remote controlled construction. What we send would need to have the ability to tunnel, create cement from Martian soils, smelt, and construct buildings. All to create an environment that might be capable of sustaining life. This is because keeping astronauts alive is orders of magnitude harder than anything else we might conceivably do.
Technologically, we're no where near there yet. Counter-intuitively, the hardest step is the first one: getting out of our own gravity well. The minimal amount of material that we would have to get into orbit to be able to construct a settlement is considerably larger than the International Space station, which is, I remind everyone, the most expensive human construct - at $100 billion dollars. The next most difficult stage would be landing on Mars with precision, not breaking anything.
One way I can see to make things cheaper is to use the Interplanetary Transport Network to ship the bulk of the material needed for a settlement. But I'm quite sure someone better qualified than I am already took this possibility into account. The ITN has already been used to send probes, after all.
There's nothing like $HOME
I'm pretty sure "the nation" is not willing to waste so much money on the military, but yet here we are.
How Can NASA's Road To Mars Be Made More Affordable?
By not sending people when there is no compelling reason to.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The long-term goal should still be human habitation, but there is a huge amount of work that needs to come first.
This is the understatement of the century.
People came to america because it was "the land of plenty" (Pretty much the opposite of Mars)
People go work on oil rigs, the arctic, deep sea, etc... because it's "temporary misery for great (pay/research/experience)"
Mars is neither "the land of plenty" or "temporary misery for great pay".
In order to make a mars colony viable, then you need to make people WANT to go there and not just the few crazies.
Until then, you're much better off building condos in the sahara with nice swimming pools because that will be a a lot cheaper and a MUCH MUCH easier sell.
take all the money we spend killing people, all the money wasted on sports, and tax churches.
We'll be on mars next year.
Power it by the massive amounts of BS produced by politicians.
We can harness sunlight, wind and waves etc for electricity so this should be our next big step for green affordable energy.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Defining "what for" for one.
Also the conquest of space is not a game for short attention spans. The distances are great and the challenges are monumental.
The "game changing" technology that is needed is self replicating resource and infrastructure.
We need to put a lathe on the moon and a robot to work the thing.
Crowdsourcing, 3d printers, and Elon Musk. Managed by Donald Trump using software written by Lennart Poettering.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I have looked and I can not seem to find a complete budget for the road map. Before we ask if it is affordable we need to ask how much will it cost.
You want to go to Mars? How about Saturn? Or a neighboring star or galaxy? Maybe even skip to an alternate universe all together?
Hollywood does it every year for $50-200M a pop. Most of the people in this country believe all the impossible stuff they do in the movies is real anyway, and couldn't tell if even the basic physics was so screwed up as to be laughable. Heck, even the school systems and police - you know, the "smart ones" we let teach our kids and the experts on explosives - get all their bomb identification training from Hollywood.
You want these people to fork over real money for real science when fake science that makes them feel good can be had for $11.50 a seat and a $4 soda?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
People came to america because it was "the land of plenty" (Pretty much the opposite of Mars)
Well rather a lot of them were running away from something. That side would be true of Mars volunteers too.
not just the few crazies.
With a world population of 7 billion, there's plenty of people that want to go to Mars, and yet are not so crazy they can't be allowed to go.
Until then, you're much better off building condos in the sahara with nice swimming pools because that will be a a lot cheaper and a MUCH MUCH easier sell.
Right. And instead of visiting the moon they could have... But I'm glad they visited the moon.
In an international project?
Surely a few of them have a few dimes clinking around in their pockets?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
What is the nation willing to spend? The true question would be: Why should the nation be willing to spend anything? To go back in history: Why was the nation willing to spend what it did to land on the Moon? The answer is: Because it wanted to show off. Because it wanted to show that its system was better than that of the "other nation".
And we are at a very similar point now. Because what we are fighting now is not a nation but a wave of religious nuts who think that all the laws that humanity needs where sent down to our planet by some God 1400 years ago, literally. While we believe that man has only to obey the laws of nature and then those that he makes up for himself.
So we should offer those nuts a bet: Let them try to pray one or more of them onto the surface of Mars and we try to land one or more of us there by learning about and applying the laws of nature and lots of good old engineering. Who wins that race is right, who loses it crawls back under his stone, with his holy book or without it as he wants.
What we need to do is to demonstrate that rational thinking and getting things done just BECAUSE WE WANT TO is what makes us human. That we're tool-using apes and we're proud of it. So let us make some awesome tools to make clear that religion is a private thing and that the book that defines us is still being written. By us. So let us turn another page.
The new (not entirely) Cold War is about exactly that. It's about clear thinking and rationalism versus magic thinking and religious madness. And mind you, this is not a war just between nations anymore. There are nuts among us too. Teach them a lesson.
What you said is essentially the Obama doctrine. It kinda sounds nice. Has it worked? Are relations with Russia better? Is China better? Is the middle east more stable?
I've said it before... what we need to do to make manned space travel a permanent thing and not an expensive luxury is to find and develop order-of-magnitude improvements in launch costs, lighter and stronger materials, and much more reliable systems.
The long pole in the tent on costs nowadays is getting to orbit. If your launch costs to orbit are tens of thousands of dollars per kg your mars mission, which would require hundreds of tons of material put into orbit, will rapidly eat up any imaginable budget. If you can cut launch costs by factors of ten or a hundred the whole thing becomes a lot more doable.
How would you do it? For bulk materials and fuel, I'd probably go with a space cannon. Just because it sounds so damned cool. For getting people and more delicate things into orbit, I'd probably want do something like the black horse space plane concept using mid-air refueling of oxidizer and a non-cryogenic fuel. Actually emerging nanotechnologies have a lot of promise in novel fuel formulations that have very high energy to weight and are non-cryogenic.
You've understood an important point, but missed a critical companion point. You're correct that cash doesn't normally disappear, it circulates. But the money represents _value_, resources. _Value_ can disappear , resources CAN be squandered.
If scientists spend $1 million of their time doing anything else, such as working on vaccines, you end up with $1million worth of vaccine research done, and still they spend their salaries on stuff. If the engineers design safer cars, we get safer cars (millions of them), and the engineers still spend the cash. On the other hand, if the engineers spend their time designing a space probe, we get a space probe (one) and then literally send that value off into space.
When we say "spend $100 million on mars " what that means is "spend $100 million worth of engineer's time, rather than spending that time on making cars safer, making high speed internet more affordable, etc.)
You CAN argue that it's better to spend that money (engineering time, etc) on a mars probe than to spend it on anything else. And that's exactly the argument you have to make. Because we only have a certain number of engineers , and they only work a certain number of hours. Dollars are a way to put a consistent number on all of the different resources used up in a project, including people's time.
Right. And instead of visiting the moon they could have... But I'm glad they visited the moon.
Yeah, it put a feather in our hat but that's about it. That's why we haven't been back. But, more importantly, there is a HUGE difference between a one week trip to the moon and back and a 6 month+ trip to mars. I would much rather spend money trying to figure out how to make the trip cheaper than I would trying to get there with current technology. I think the first step would be to get launch cost to under $100/pound. A space elevator might be one alternative. If you could get stuff to space for $100/pound then building a proper vehicle with shielding, 24 months worth of air, an exercise room, private quarters, etc.. becomes a possibility.
Just for kicks, a carnival cruise line weights about 140 million pounds and holds about 2000 people. At $100/pound that would be about 14 billion to get a ship like that to space. Obviously way more than you need and still pretty expensive but definitely in the realistic realm for price versus current prices where my calculator can barely do the math. Using the cruise line example, that still comes out to about $7million a person but is still a much more workable number than the $2000/pound or whatever the current going rate is.
Maybe we should wait until the "private sector" can manage to do what the US government did over half a century ago...put a human into orbit.
The "private sector" can't find it's ass with both hands, tax breaks and a Federal Reserve subsidy in the form of 0% interest rates. How is it gonna make it anywhere near Mars?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Until then, you're much better off building condos in the sahara with nice swimming pools because that will be a a lot cheaper and a MUCH MUCH easier sell.
Yes, that makes perfectly sense. Because as we all know sahara is immune to all extinction level events.
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The private sector isn't putting people in orbit, on the moon, or on Mars, because it's a colossal waste of money. And it was a colossal waste of money half a century ago as well.
Hopefully it isn't, because there is nothing of value on Mars, and there is no value in settling Mars at this point.
Oh, "the private sector" is excellent at identifying risk-free boondoggles, crony capitalism, and government handouts, which is exactly what a manned NASA mission to Mars would be... and what you advocate.
I've often wondered if NASA could even get us to the moon again, let alone Mars. Typical of recent bureaucracies, I wonder if they could manage the finances as well as the technical development of another manned lunar landing. Heck, we can't even shuttle a person to the ISS today.
NASA seems to have stopped its ability to accomplish complex tasks as they have in the past IMHO.
If you cannot see the value in making humanity a multi planetary species, I cannot see the value in you.
Or figure out how bears hibernate and apply it to humans on the journey out and back.
I am against a manned mission to Mars. I'd rather see the money spent on something that will do some good, like infrastructure investment.
We didn't do the moon missions until after the interstate highway system was built and we had Social Security and Medicare. We have to prioritize better.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Apollo: 25B
STS: $200B
It's not unreasonable to estimate that a major space undertaking will be an order of magnitude larger by the time things are done. I could be shy by 20-30%, but I think 2 Trillion is a fair over-under cost.
It will never happen with the current budgets. Even if you stripped out all the pet projects and tail chasing and gave over all the launch vehicle research to private industry you'd still only have 3-5 Billion to spend. There are many technical challenges which exist which still need to be solved in parallel for this to happen, and my predicted $2T isn't going to happen at $5B/yr.
The second mission to Mars will be quite a bit easier, and the 100th will be as simple as putting a comm satellite in GEO. Note that GEO is still a wickedly expensive endeavor, but it's so routine now that private industry can do it. It is worth noting, however, that supersonic flight - though pretty much perfected by the government, still isn't practical or affordable for commercial use.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yes, that makes perfectly sense. Because as we all know sahara is immune to all extinction level events.
What type of global extinction level event are you talking about and how many people are you going to send?
Many of them would also affect mars and/or would not affect something at the bottom of the ocean.
Let's say by some miracle you get 1000 people to mars and they are self-sustaining. That's still probably
not enough to prevent extinction. Much better to spend the money to get launch cost down first before
wasting money trying to send a few dozen colonists to mars.
Kindof like sending a generational ship to the nearest star. Using current technology, it's likely that a newer
ship launched a generation later would beat you there.
There's a 1001 things that could go seriously wrong on Earth without it affecting Mars, and very few that would affect both.
Gamma ray bursts and something wacky happening to the sun are the only things I can think of were a Mars colony probably wouldn't help.
The list of possible extinction level events on Earth were a Mars colony would help - asteroid collision, supervolcano, nuclear war, sudden rapid climate change (>8C change), airborn virus with long (contagious) symptom free incubation period and extreme mortality rate, + a hundred more we haven't thought about yet.
We need a large colony on Mars. Preferably > 100 000 people.
That's not going to happen this century, BUT - if we keep putting off doing ANYTHING, nothing will ever happen.
We need to start solving some of the problems and create a plan for putting a long term manned research base on Mars.
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I was referring to the UK, France, Canada, Australia, etc.
NASA is stuck in a the 70s mode of space exploration, and they have no means of getting out of it even if they wanted to (thanks to Congress).
You are absolutely correct. Planning for a mission 30 years out is preposterous. No one working at NASA today will still be there by then. And the politics in Washington will have flipped hands at least 4 times by then.
An even better idea would be to do it as an international collaboration - but a real international collaboration based on international treaty (like CERN) not a US-controlled project with other partners (like the ill-fated SSC). Not only do you share the costs but it might also help to reduce the need for those F-35s.
"In order to make a mars colony viable, then you need to make people WANT to go there and not just the few crazies."
Hummm... maybe that's the hidden agenda of some politicians... Just making this planet less and less palatable (wars, global warming, famine, religious bigotry...) so people WANT to go to somewhere even as inhospitable as Mars.
Pass campaign finance reform
Let NASA build what it needs for the lowest cost without interference from the politicians. Stop treating NASA as a way to distribute money to the districts and spreading projects throughout the country.
Social Security and Medicare are financed separately from discretionary spending. They are also heading for bankruptcy.
Furthermore, the "interstate highway system" is never actually "built"; it is something that requires constant upkeep and continuing spending. But Congress chooses to neglect that and instead hands the money to politically connected businesses, the military, public sector unions, and powerful voting blocks.
So why do you make fun of the private sector when the private sector pursues rational policies, while the public sector engages in massive corruption and crony capitalism?
"Rational policies"? I'm going to have to ask for a citation there. Anything in the past decade will do.
You are welcome on my lawn.
We know how to do this, and NASA has known how since at least the mid 90's.
Mars Direct is the answer. This would get boots on Mars in 10 or so years, and if we cancelled SLS and put that money into Mars development and commercial crew, this could happen without even increasing the current budget.
The problems are NOT technical. They aren't even budgetary. The problems are political - spasmodic direction every term or two from new presidential initiatives, the use of NASA solely for vote-buying pork by congress, and the institutional dysfunction of NASA administration, favoring the most complicated, expensive, and high-risk technologies possible with these plans. If people get educated about mission profiles like Mars Direct, and start recognizing initiatives like "road to Mars" for the political pandering that they are, perhaps we can see some sanity restored to the space program.
Our relationships with the UK, Canada, and Australia have improved under the Obama doctrine? Because Bush and Blair hated each other?
In international relations, there are two major ways tight alliances are formed. First, economically- you like other countries to buy stuff"from you, because that gives you money. Second, you know they've got your back - that they can and will come to your aid militarily. Those are the big two.
Canada doesn't really have or need a military navy, their navy is similar to the US Coast Guard. Canada's navy has fewer sailors than ONE US carrier group. Why doesn't Canada have a military navy? They don't need one because the US has them covered.
Under Obama, are we buying more stuff from Canada, are"we hping them export more? Or are we reneging on previously negotiated projects and blocking their exports, spending 10 years performing repeated "environmental studies" of major pipelines from Canada, when study keeps showing that the pipeline is environmentally superior to the alternatives?
Does Canada feel MORE protected because the US military they depend on is STRONGER under Obama, or has he WEAKENED rhe military, and weakened the perception of US strength, thereby encouraging Soviet aggression? (Russia is right next to Canada, FYI. Canada wants Russia to be scared of us, not have Russia invading wherever they feel like invading while Obama frowns, not even making a strongly worded speech demanding that they stop invading neighboring areas.
Why this obsession with "round trip"? Just send the bears to mars -- one way.
if we keep putting off doing ANYTHING, nothing will ever happen.
We are doing plenty. We are developing better materials, robots, and lower cost launch vehicles. Those things are way more important for long term space colonization than a one-off mission to send some meat to Mars.
...and let it solve the problem. It can send tiny self-replicating nano robots to mars (and the rest of the solar system) and terraform those ugly, hostile lumps of rock and ice and gas to our heart's content. No need to send soft, squishy, inefficient bags of meat across several AUs when you can use a sturdy swarm of several trillion nanos to do the job.
And while they are at it they can clean up Earth too.
Just make sure we survive the singularity and won't turn into grey goo!
Good read on the topic of ASI:
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
-- Truth suffers from too much analysis.
You know it is possible for someone to see the value in extending human civilisation beyond Earth, but recognise that Mars has no role to play in that process.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I'm sorry you misunderstood. I'm not interested in debating with you the degree of rationality of the private sector in general, the "rational policies" we are talking about here are the pursuit of manned space flight.
So, my citation is you. You stated that manned space flight is irrational; the public sector pursued manned space flight, the private sector chose not to. Which of the two actors acted more rationally when it comes to manned space flight?
Apparently they have no budget problems, and happily deploy to remote shitholes for millions of dollars per day.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Rational? I don't know about that. But I do know it's the public sector's job to do the things that the private sector is unable to do. Things that don't show immediate profit.
If you doubt that there was profit from the Apollo program, I suggest looking at the device on which you are reading this.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"a $4 soda"
There is no way you can get a soda in a movie theater for $4.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Getting 100,000 people who want to go to Mars would take about the amount of effort it takes to put an ad in the proverbial paper. You don't need to convince people to go with a conspiracy, they already want to.
I'll grant that if everything is perfect on Earth, people might find less interest in going, but honestly, most people don't want to leave to get away from Earth, they want to go so they can go to Mars.
I guess I didn't make it clear enough. To clarify, let's use two synonyms for money - cash and resources (or if you prefer, dollars and value).
Cash (dollars) REPRESENT resources (value). Those are two different things. Resources (time, gold) are real . Dollars are just notes on paper which represent a claim on resources.
When we say "spend $100 million" what we really mean is "use up $100 million worth of resources". If you buy a car for $20,000 and light it on fire, the dollars still exist, while the car (the thing of value) is gone. You're essentially arguing that it's not wasteful to buy a car and then immediately light it on fire, because the cash you used to purchase the car still exists. Yes, the cash still exists, but it now represents a claim on a DIFFERENT thing of value. The value of the car ($20,000 worth of value) has been destroyed.
If engineers spend ten years developing some thing, that ten years of work is used up, it's gone. They can't use that same ten years on something else of value. Trading pieces of paper around doesn't change that fact.
The private sector isn't "unable" to do them, it is unwilling to do them because it isn't rational to do them.
There was lots of "profit" from the Apollo program: all the military contractors that got government handouts as part of it made tons of money.
What you seem to be arguing is that there was also an overall benefit to society (although computers and the Internet are altogether the wrong example for that). You're right: there was indeed a social benefit from the Apollo program; unfortunately, it was a lot less than the opportunity cost.
The problem with government programs is not that they have no benefit, it's that their benefit is almost always less than the opportunity cost. But since the people who want those programs to happen have big lobbies and the opportunity costs are more difficult to understand (viz your failure to comprehend), we keep ending up with more and more government programs.
Show the business world that there is money to be made off-world and you'll get plenty of investors interested in funding it.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
You mean SpaceX?
The private sector is quite capable of investing things that do not show immediate profit.
Case in point: All tech start ups.
And in that case, they're quite capable of investing in things that never show a profit.
The reason that the private sector does not engage in human launches and human landings and such is that it does not have a path to profit where the risk is worth it yet for companies that new. They need to build up their capabilities and income before accepting those sorts of risks.
The difference between government and private business isn't simply profit, but the "path to profitability" and what risks can be sustained against investment.
Taxes we know we'll probably never get back what we put into it. We accept that, but also expect that money to be used for "important things". Businesses have investors, and the investors will accept risk, but controlled risk, because the investors are relying on their investment to make money back for them. That makes them slower to do revolutionary things, but they do find the way to take the revolution into a sustainable process.
If engineers spend ten years developing some thing, that ten years of work is used up, it's gone.
Absolutely wrong. Every penny you paid those engineers was recycled into the economy.
Whoa there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
make it look like a NASCAR car. hang a camera outside it all through the trip to broadcast the sponsors back to earth. put sponsorship stickers all over the astronauts' suits too, like NASCAR drivers.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
"In order to make a mars colony viable, then you need to make people WANT to go there and not just the few crazies."
Hummm... maybe that's the hidden agenda of some politicians... Just making this planet less and less palatable (wars, global warming, famine, religious bigotry...) so people WANT to go to somewhere even as inhospitable as Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Lighting a car on fire shows that when money is spent on something stupid, value is actually lost. GP got confused and thought that as long as cash isn't burned, value isn't wasted. Burning the car is a vivid way of showing that spending money on something wasteful does in fact "use up" money aka resources.
So we've established that a mars mission does in fact use up resources which could have been used elsewhere. Now you can argue that the Mars mission is (or isn't) the BEST use of those resources.
The next Mars rover costs about $2.5 billion. If spending $2.5 billion on traffic safety would be expected to save 25,000 lives, you can now argue that what we learn about Mars is more important than 25,000 lives.
Maybe you can make a convincing argument that sending another probe to Mars is more important than traffic safety. What you can't do is claim that all the resources used in building the Mars probe weren't actually used, because those resources were paid for. They were paid WITH MONEY THAT COULD HAVE INSTEAD BEEN USED ON TRAFFIC SAFETY.
I said you're confusing cash versus work, resources, value. You replied:
> > that ten years of work is used up, it's gone.
> Every penny you paid
You're STILL thinking they are the same thing.
I buy a car for $20,000. I light the car on fire. Did the value of the car go up in smoke? Yes, that value is gone. Even though the cash I paid to acquire that value still exists.
The "ten years of work" is the actual time they spent out of their professional careers, and the work is used up. They won't get that ten years back, and when they were working on that project they weren't working on another. The money is just accounting here.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
They're certainly working at it. However, they're not going to the Moon, let alone Mars.
I think working at commercial spaceflight is not only positive, but necessary for the future, but what they're doing barely qualifies as spaceflight.
"Until then, you're much better off building condos in the sahara with nice swimming pools because that will be a a lot cheaper and a MUCH MUCH easier sell."
Building them in Southern California worked. Just fix the plumbing in the Sahara, problem solved. Ditto for Mars, though NASA seems to think they only need some pipes on the planet, not pipes all the way back to Earth.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Don't forget to make the return mission independent of surface assistance. They will be on their own, right?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
That one may be conquered: http://www.newser.com/story/21...
With a world population of 7 billion, there's plenty of people that want to go to Mars, and yet are not so crazy they can't be allowed to go.
But when you're talking about people who would willingly take a one way ticket to Mars, I think you can legitimately speculate on their suitability and level of craziness.
Anyone who chose to live in a cramped cave/dome for the rest of their lives working in discomfort and surrounded by danger at all times would only be making a sane choice if the alternative was the death penalty.
And it's not a lot different if you're talking about a 10 or 20 year stretch. Madness.
Astronauts volunteering for a three year round trip is a different matter.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
A planet worth properly colonising would require a breathable atmosphere, human-tolerable gravity, easily available water and so on. It's not going to be anywhere in our Solar System.
Of course, you could have a sort of mining/research outpost where people lived and worked for a year or two at a time, like an extended version of Arctic research scientists or oil rig workers, but who else is going to want to live on Mars permanently?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If you cannot see the value in making humanity a multi planetary species, I cannot see the value in you.
None of the planets in our solar system are worth considering as long term homes for humanity, unless we miraculously discover a way of terraforming them.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Simple - make it illegal for NASA to exist Sell off all its assets to highest bidders. Privatize the lot. Shocking what happens next. Thousands of space faring companies spring up everywhere.
You know what's stopping thousands of space faring companies springing up everywhere now?
The cost/benefit analysis.
Even if a consortium could raise the $100bn (or whatever) to get a manned mission to Mars, where's the payback?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Social Security and Medicare are financed separately from discretionary spending.
It's all basically government money raised from borrowing and/or taxes.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The private sector is quite capable of investing things that do not show immediate profit.
Case in point: All tech start ups.
They may not expect immediate profit, but they certainly expect profit at some point.
And in that case, they're quite capable of investing in things that never show a profit.
That is no longer a rational decision.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
No, it's not "government money", it is money that you and I and everybody else pays.
In any case, PopeRatzo's version of history is that our benevolent legislators made tough tradeoffs and prioritized between different long-term "investments", namely putting the "interstate highway system" and "Social Security and Medicare" ahead of the moon missions.
That reading of history is bullshit. There were no real tradeoffs involved (Social Security, for example, cost next to nothing when it was passed), and those decisions were largely made as handouts to special interest groups and the military. Among them, the Interstate Highway System was the most useful, but Eisenhower was motivated in large part by the German Reichsautobahn and its military applications.
But when you're talking about people who would willingly take a one way ticket to Mars, I think you can legitimately speculate on their suitability and level of craziness.
No you can't. A person simply having a different desire to you is not evidence of mental illness.
The "ten years of work" is the actual time they spent out of their professional careers, and the work is used up.
Correct. And very usefully so. And their work has produced things and knowledge of value.
But the money is NOT used up. It just keeps circulating.
Lighting a car on fire shows that when money is spent on something stupid, value is actually lost. GP got confused and thought that as long as cash isn't burned, value isn't wasted. Burning the car is a vivid way of showing that spending money on something wasteful does in fact "use up" money aka resources.
No one is arguing with the fact that resources can be used up. It was there in my first post, but you missed it.
But money (such as tax) is not used up. It just keeps circulating. Trying to restrict the amount to which the government circulates the money via tax and spend is bad for the economy.
Maybe you can make a convincing argument that sending another probe to Mars is more important than traffic safety.
Why would I do that? The answer is for the government to spend on both. It's not necessary to chose. That's a false dichotomy.
The point is this: Is it a worthwhile thing. Then the government should spend on it. If not then they shouldn't. They don't have to choose between worthwhile things because some small-government people don't understand economics. There are no choices between spending on this worthwhile thing or that worthwhile thing - they are false dichotomies.
Your burning of a car example is excluded simply because it's not a worthwhile thing for a government to do. No other reason.
A mission to Mars should simply be judged on whether it is a worthwhile thing, employing people for a worthwhile result, not on whether it's more important than some other arbitrary government spend.