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.

Yes. Even if you don’t think the goals of space exploration are important, we’ve made huge developments in medicine, engineering, solar panels, telecommunications, and road safety based on NASA technology. You’re probably reading this on a phone that wouldn’t exist with space exploration research. Scientific research is never a linear set of goals or inventions, and the ancillary benefits of our pursuit of space have already changed the world.

Cutting founding for space wouldn’t mean that the founding goes to a good thing on earth.

Why is this argument always brought up?

Theoretically we have enough resources to give everyone a home food, education, healthcare and go to space.

I thought this was about factorio. :(

Why not. Not like that money would be put to better use elsewhere.

We should explore space with semiautonomous robots. We can do space exploration at maybe a quarter of the cost of sending humans to do it.

Flood Mars with exploratory rovers for years. Then mining robots. Then manufacturing robots. Have them build facilities that build more robots to expand the process exponentially .

Then, if we decide it’s even worth it at that point, have them build a city and send people.

I think it’s human nature to push boundaries and it’s how we progress as a society and as species. The resources used also really pale in comparison to what is spent on stuff that is clearly more useless, like mega yachts for the super rich and bombs that get dropped on children.

Few things are more important than Exploration. In all avenues exploration leads to discovery which leads to growth. What else should we be working on? Cos atm the western world (which I inhabit) focuses most human effort on making ‘line go up’ and it feels entirely wasted and pointless.

Yes. Space exploration pushes science and technology forward, which benefits humanity as a whole.

Yes, but capitalists should not do it. And actually space exploration on today’s scale cost literal pennies compared to military or shareholders loot.

Yes, realizing that Earth is the only home we have really makes you think twice.There is no other planet for us to conquer. Mess this one up, and we’re a doomed species.

In grand scale of things is it really that much money?

Yes. For those who consider it wasteful spending, consider that a lot of problems are not fixable by just throwing more money at them. There’s a saying that “9 women can’t make a baby in one month” even though 1 woman can in 9. Many ills of society are as much about political/social motivation, entrenched opponents/regulatory capture, NIMBYism, etc and not problems that you can fix just by spending more. There’s also the concept of a “marginal dollar” - spending one more dollar in an important area that already has a lot of money (and has problems that aren’t really addressed by just having more money) may not be as impactful as a less important area where that dollar would go a lot further.

I think so.

How high the priority should be is a debate worth having, but space has many ways to wipe out a planet. Having two planets, having a permanent space station, could go a long way to increasing survivability.

Not only that, building in a vacuum, building in zero G, even building things under great pressure, all can allow us to build new materials with brand new properties.

Also, being able to sustain a small group of people somewhere completely contained an inhospitable can be utilized on earth to feed people at home, or recycle water at home.

Human space exploration seems a bit gratuitous to me. Probes can do almost anything crew can do, and many things that crew cannot. The only thing human space flight seems to do is help us get better at human space flight.