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…
Let me rewrite your question, and correct me if I’m misrepresenting it:
“Why should we spend resources on X instead of Y?”
Well, for this kind of question, I would prefer to choose a “high value” X and an “important” Y.
Space exploration, and science as a whole, is extremely cheap and good for humanity.
Let’s talk about other expensive “X” first:
- Unnecessary war efforts.
- ICE (if we are taking about US)
- Saving banks when they screw up on their bets.
- Incentives to coal and gas when solar is already more viable …
Maybe you started to think about it because that’s an amazing subject, and it is. That alone should be reason enough for us to want to do it. But it is not the only reason. Space exploration already gave us a lot of tech we rely on today. And still, is a very difficult field that will require more tech advancements, that will benefit us in the future.
The word necessary has a lot of wiggle room here. What are necessities? Going by the bare minimum:
- food
- water
- protection from the elements
- protection from illness/infection
- continuation of the species
That’s about everything we truly ‘need’ to die of old age and not go extinct. Nearly everything people currently do is a subset of those needs. Space exploration can be marked under both protection from the elements and continuation of the species.
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.
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.
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!
Not to mention inspiring people to enter STEM, especially girls who are still hugely underrepresented. Which has incredible benefits.
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.
because it is leaning towards profit focus instead of benefit focus
Now there’s a chorus I’ve heard a hundred times…
Agree completely!
And yeah, VCs doing VC things has really made it a tough industry to be in lately 😭 I miss the early days of new space when we were just a bunch of nerds trying to make the space industry more effective at making the world a better place.
Edit: don’t get me wrong, a lot of VCs are great, and have done wonders for the industry. I’ve had the pleasure of working with a few of them. However, the explosion of a new industry has attracted a bunch who just see a market for a market’s sake.
yes. space exploration advanced technological progress in breakneck speed and gave us more tools to make our home a better place.
humans want to break new boundaries, crossing the oceans used to be an unprecedented endeavour and after mastering it the whole world the gained ability to interact.
the amount of resources needed to collectively reach for the stars is there and if done properly we can explore space without worsening people’s lives. to put it into perspective: a falcon 9 launch costs about 70 million us $, that’s already cheaper than one f35 or 20 tomahawk missiles.
the space race led to the apollo-soyuz program which invited rivals to work together, there`s a beauty in the fact that the need to explore the unknown and work together can transcend even rivalries. The ISS is a monument to that.
imo we (as in humanity) should continue space exploration, but we should ideally not exploit it for capital gain. we should use the useful technology that comes out of it to make life better on our planet. (e.g. GPS, geostationary satellites and and and…)
sure, this field is currently dominated by a circle of pedophiles and nazis (that nazi part has always been part of space flight history for americans >.> ) but the world is currently changing and i see some hope in chinas rapid advancement in this field. they built the tianggong space station and they invited everyone to collectively conduct research in the future. The Artemis Program has been good so far, only now it’s held back due to private contractors not delivering on the moon landing craft.
Ironically, luddites against space exploration in this era call for the dismantling of a titanic field of science that is both directly and indirectly responsible for the very device from which they shart out their oh-so-learned opinions to the rest of the world.
Necessary? No. Not much except eating, drinking and breathing is. Even reproduction is optional from the view of a single individual.
A good idea? Absolutely:
- Exploring space tells us a lot about earth. We currently assume that the moon formed when something big collided with earth and threw lots of material into a stable orbit. This means moon is probably made of the same materials as earth and because there is no erosion nor tectonic activity on the moon, it lets us study what earth may have looked like billions of years ago.
- Lots and lots of things that were originally developed for space are very useful on earth: teflon coating, memory foam matresses, efficient solar panels and many more. Sure, they could have been developed without space exploration but the pressure to get something exactly right helped a lot. And of course we directly use satellites for a lot of earth stuff, too. Think tv, weather prediction, monitoring of climate change, communication, GPS, accurate maps and many more.
- It gives humanity something to unite behind. Even during the cold war, the USA and the Soviet Union ignored their feud for a bit to make Apollo-Soyuz happen. These days, the ISS is one of the biggest multinational projects and I dread the day it gets decommissioned because Russia will have one less reason to talk to the rest of 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.
Yes, but capitalists should not do it. And actually space exploration on today’s scale cost literal pennies compared to military or shareholders loot.
Space exploration is weight lifting for science.
Literally and figuratively
The impact to society from space exploration is immense if not immeasurable.
- Weather forecasting
- GPS navigation
- Earth sciences
- Robotics
- Medical imaging
NASA has a website dedicated to the topic, as do other agencies around the world.
- https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/benefits-to-humanity/
- https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/about/everyday-benefits-of-space-exploration/
- https://www.space.gov.au/why-space-matters
- https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Benefits_of_space_science
There’s also a Wikipedia page on the topic:
The ingenuity and innovation required to make space travel possible (and efficient) is remarkable. Definitely falls into the category of “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” It’s important to continue challenging ourselves as a species.
Yes. Space exploration pushes science and technology forward, which benefits humanity as a whole.
One day, we’re going to outgrow ourselves. One day, we’re going to set aside our stupid petty squabbles, and we’re going to hope for something more.
I want to see us reach the stars, because I think one day we’ll be able to handle what the galaxy throws at us.
The military industry is unnecessary, not space exploration. If saving money is the goal, look elsewhere first. There’s so much unnecessary spending and hoarding of wealth for and by dumb shits respectively.
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.
All attempts to discover how the universe works benefits us. Even a lot of really esoteric stuff has proven useful in fields like medicine and civil engineering.
Honestly if we can pivot our high tech innovation efforts from being mainly driven by military to being driven by basic research (basic in this case meaning researching the natural world directly without any particular goal other than learning), we’d be a lot better off.
