Why should we spend money on space

OK, based on that logic we should set NASA's budget equal to that of the NEA right?

Ho hum.

Old and flawed...

Why did you not conclude that, based on this logic we should set NEA's budget equal to that of NASA?

Fraser asked whether, not how much.

I think this proposal and notion needs to be couched in an appropriate context. I am a strong supporter of space exploration, member of the Mars Society, and so on. Always have been.Compared to other portions of the United States budget, the amount spent upon space exploration is tiny. The amount spent upon the National Science Foundation is negligible. Once upon a time I calculated and posted how much these programs cost in terms of "Iraqi War Days", an idea which came from another blogger. In those terms, NASA cost (I think) 45 days, and the NSF's budget was, well, two days.Note that the Iraq War is not the entire DoD budget, even if it's a big part now. There's a lot spent upon procurement and weapons systems.All I'm asking for is some perspective. I think it's nigh time we had a rebalancing of these priorities. We are spending at a significant fraction of Cold War monies, and the global threat is nothing like it was then. And this excludes monies spent upon Homeland Security.Also, a lot of this could be helped if the government spent money more effectively. We really need to have a look at some of the new weapons systems being proposed. I mean, there's a movement afoot to develop a new strategic bomber to replace the B-2A. That's just rubbish, given the threats we have to face.In the space exploration arena itself, there are better ways to spend money than the Aries and moon base work. I mean, unmanned missions costs almost nothing compared to manned ones, and a direct mission to Mars rather than one via a Moon base has been shown to cost much less.I think a lot of this is motivated by interests which want to make money off the prospect. If the moon base is done, they can get paid to do that, then they can get paid to do Mars. They're not in a rush. They don't care if it's cheap. They'd charge whatever the government had if they knew what it was.Alas, because the United State has spent like an empire for decades, even when it is not necessary, I fear we won't have monies for any of this.Some people said we defeated the Soviet Union because "We spent them into the ground". That expenditure came with a big price tag, primarily funding by foreign institutions and citizens buying up government debt. And it's conceivable that Iraq has "spent the USA into the ground".

Back in the days of Apollo missions someone figured out that overall the return on investment, in terms of taxes, patent royalties, spin offs that in turn created whole new industries was something like a $6 return for every dollar spent (actually think it was quite a bit more but oldsheimers has grand hold on my memory these days). People who think NASA and space expl;oration are a waste of taxpayer dollars simply don't look at the big picture. The return on investment is huge but private companies would be hard pressed to generate the investment first. Can you imagine someone back in the mid 60s going to an investment bank and saying "hey I want to start this company to build a rocket and send a man to the moon" - never going to happen. It takes taxpayer dollars to do this but the treasury has made much, much more in return than it ever spent on NASA.

Rather than being abstract, I'd suggest a practical reason: there's a good chance that we'll destroy Earth in the next couple centuries, so we better get started now in spreading out past this planet. And, as Doug mentioned, it really does have a positive return on investment.

The "it's cheap compared to Iraq" argument doesn't work for me, as pretty much *everything* is cheap compared to Iraq.

I'm all for big funding for NASA, but after the deterioration of pretty much everything over the last 7 years, there are better places for the money. Infrastructure, helping homeless or vets, maybe even pay for training for members of Congress and the executive branch on the constitution (to help avoid another Iraq).

This is interesting to me here on the other side of the "pond". The UK government is having a re-think on whether we should support human spaceflight and admit UK astronauts to the ESA astronaut corps. At the moment Brits have to become US citizens (Piers Sellars and Nicholas Patrick for example) to get in to space. A recent report by the Royal Astronomical Society (http://www.ras.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=928&Ite…) suggested that the inspirational value of spaceflight, especially upon enthusing young children's interest in science is a major benefit.

The Iraq comparison is interesting, in the 1960's everything was measured against the cost of the Vietnam War. Public Understanding of Science experts call it triangulation. The US spent more on Vietnam in 1966 than on the whole of the Apollo Programme.

Are there any arguments that don't use an appeal to emotion? All of the arguments posted here and there are unconvincing to this cynic.
This situation looks similar to the problems I had with the engineering staff. Rather than solve real concrete problems in the software, (and there were many) the developers wanted to add new features. Their features didn't solve the problems but it did give them the opportunity to showcase their programming skills.

There are plenty of utilitarian arguments - showing long term benefit, indirect economic benefit, high public expenditure multipliers and economic drivers.

Usual counterargument is that the money would be better spent directly on the benefits without the senseawondah and science baggage.
Which is true, but no one has figured out how - serendipity in discovery and non-economic motivation for discovery are by definition hard to motivate directly and harder to quantify.
But they are there.

If we are to survive, we will learn to live in space. It's already well-established that "stuff happens" on Earth periodically that causes mass extinctions. Sudden climate change, or NEO's hitting the planet on occasion.

In the unlikely event that homo sapiens is around five billion years from now, we will be facing the death of the sun, and the earth along with it. More likely who ever we have evolved into (or evolved ourselves into, assuming advanced genetic expertise that we are just now beginning to develop) will be around. They'll have a choice to make: perish, or learn to live in interstellar space.

Hopefully we won't continue trashing whole planets along the way (although we probably will when we are a young interplanetary species, given that the mining companies are already thinking about drilling up and carving apart the Moon and Mars).

Technology developed for space applications often can have terrestrial applications as well. What if you could farm food in space - then you could farm food anywhere. That would be very helpful terrestrially.

It all works together and some of our most beneficial discoveries have come when we were trying to solve completely different problems than the one the new discovery addresses.

But the main reason is because we are curious, tinkering animals who are always trying to extend the limits of what we know.

It's our nature to reach out, explore and tinker with our environment, terrestrially as well as interplanetary.

I have trouble understanding why anyone would want to inhibit that aspect of our humanity.

The question should be rephrased as:

Why should we spend public (e.g. tax payers') money on space?

This is an entirely separate question. Of course we are all "pro-space" in the sense that we believe it is desirable and our destiny to settle space. However, are government-funded space programs the best approach to making this happen? Or would it be better off left to entrepreneurs and private industry?

The think the comparative levels of success of the semiconductor and computer industry as compared to, say, NASA and the Tokamak fusion programs makes clear the answer to this question.

Would it be better left to entrepreneurs?
Maybe eventually, but we're not there yet.

NASA has been very successful at many things, not to deny that it has also had a lot of failures.
The problems of NASA and the hot fusion programs are similar in some respects - long lead times, capital intensive and the task is harder than we appreciated at the start.

Why should we spend public (e.g. tax payers') money on space?

As Steinn suggests, we're not yet at the point where it makes sense for an entrepreneur to be spending money on space. Until things are advanced enough that investors can reasonably expect a payoff within their lifetimes, it's unreasonable to expect private funding for space exploration.

As a parallel for long-term investment, I give you the Internet. It was born in the late 1960s as a DoD project to create a communications network that was robust against multiple nodes falling off line (e.g., due to nuclear war). It remained a DoD project, with universities along for the ride, until the mid 1990s when it finally became commercially viable.

As Steinn says, the timelines regarding space exploration are longer than that. But they are still potentially there, and commercialization of the Internet was no slam dunk either.