I just started thinking about it. Why is space exploration even that necessary? They’re spending so much money on it when we have so much problems in our own planet…
I just started thinking about it. Why is space exploration even that necessary? They’re spending so much money on it when we have so much problems in our own planet…
Firstly, people have such a massive misconception about the cost of space exploration. It is such a miniscule part of our overall expenditure it is a drop in the ocean. (It’s important now to distinguish between overall Space budgets and the exploration budgets since we spend a lot of money in space that’s not for scientific development nowadays).
The Artemis program for example was 93 billion over 13 years, ~7 billion per year (2012-2025).
The Iraq war cost ~5 trillion over 8 years. Or 625 billion per year.
The entire Artemis program could have been funded by winding down the Iraq war a couple of months earlier.
The annual cost of the NHS is 275 billion per year.
The extra knowledge, research and development in everything from materials, human biology, life support systems, to just engineering management improvements yield absolutely massive benefits to life on earth, greatly outweighing the alternative.
Not to mention inspiring people to enter STEM, especially girls who are still hugely underrepresented. Which has incredible benefits. Hell, even just making people excited about science and technology instead of so distrustful of it is so so important and intangible.
Even if you extend the budgets to the entire space industry, it’s still a drop in the ocean, and most of the space industry budgets go directly to economic or defence benefits. Supply chain resilience, climate change policing, communications services, wildfire detection, industrial efficiency gains (e.g. data driven farming). As well as existential threats from space like solar storms and asteroids (although that’s an admittedly tiny portion of funding).
This is coming from a space engineer and senior manager who has mostly fallen out of love with the industry because it is leaning towards profit focus instead of benefit focus. But it’s still one of the best bang for buck industries that exists.
This is the non-linear aspect of research, where discoveries and improvements in one field may prove useful for other fields as well. Not all research pays off, but you can’t predict what will and won’t, so the “duds” that end up going nowhere are just part of the cost for the bangers that change the world. And who knows, maybe one of those duds may end up going off much later still!
More brains and perspectives examining a given problem increases the chances for useful solutions. Getting women into STEM isn’t a diversity measure for diversity’s sake, but an enrichment of the mental resource pool.
Now there’s a chorus I’ve heard a hundred times…