[zaroth]

These types of ultra long open-ended research projects with no driving commercial or defense need, or real-world short term deliverables are just the kind of project you can dump billions of dollars into and get roughly nothing back in return.

At the Starship even a couple weeks ago Elon quipped when it comes to schedules, "Long is wrong, tight is right." The point is that humans respond well to aggressive but achievable goals with big payoff in the short-term. It focuses the effort on what is actually needed to achieve mission success.

To put it more succinctly, necessity is the mother of innovation.

[Reedx]

Yeah, it helped when NASA had this:

"We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills; because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win"

[jonshariat]

Doesn't that help his point? They aimed to do it in just 10 years that was a very short deadline considering.

[roymurdock]

We needed to beat the russians to the moon, it was part of the cold war effort, as much as I agree with these ideals they need to be tempered in reality and politics. We have no comparable political need for space exploration today.

[robbiep]

Unless you’re concerned about us as a species not making it out of the local minima of the comfort of earth before an extinction level event wipes us out. Which, fair enough, most politicians aren’t.

[roymurdock]

We are so, so far away from being able to leave earth and terraform/colonize other planets. A better argument is that we might find new technology or make new observations that help raise the standard of living on earth through designing to the requirements of space survival and exploration. But it's hard to translate potential ROI into spending when there are much more pressing problems here on earth.

[nwah1]

Not true. We've had sufficient technology for a long time. We've been sending robots to Mars for decades.

We just haven't made it an objective to terraform Mars. We've even been quite cautious about avoiding even the possibility of transporting microbes there and "contaminating" it.

But the basic mechanics of how to terraform are known. Elon Musk mentioned nuking the poles of Mars as an option. Changing the gas composition could be done, albeit slowly, with enough resources and motivation. You can send robots in advance of human settlers to prepare things.

Self-replicating robots would be more ideal, and that is not a solved problem, but you could likely build partially self-replicating robots that are replenished with "vitamins" much like how the RepRap project does.

Various NASA theorists have written about such things

http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/

[jjoonathan]

Yes, and the equivalent of 175 billion dollars per year (4% of federal budget times 4.4T$/y). I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that the money may have helped, too.

[TrueDuality]

That is not how inflationary comparisons work with government budgets. The entire documented cost of the Apollo program[1] was $25.4 billion over 11 years. Adjusted for 2018 dollars that's $153 billion over 11 years, which works out to just about $14 billion per year.

The total expenditure in the 2018 United States budget was $4.109 trillion[2] or %0.34 of yearly expenditures. Budgets do not follow inflationary trends even remotely, the 1961 expenditure[3] was $181.588 billion (wow that's pretty crazy). For the year that makes the Apollo program %1.2 of the federal expenditure.

Another useful point of reference, the entire NASA organization in 2018 had an operating budget of $19.2 billion and this has to cover all of the mandated projects such as the SLS. They're also responsible for maintaining and monitoring a lot of infrastructure for other agencies (the weather service, DSN, etc) which wasn't the case during the Apollo mission. NASA itself is kind of left with scraps.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_federal_bud...

[3]: https://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/spending_chart_1960_1970USb_...

[jjoonathan]

> That is not how inflationary comparisons work

Right, but normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget, which is not excellent for this purpose, as you point out.

In any case, thanks for digging up more numbers.

I stand by my claim that money (and enough assurance of continued money to bet everything on one large project) is key.

[Dylan16807]

> normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget

No it's not. Maybe normalize to the median income if you don't like bread and milk, but how much the government spends on education, health care, interest, military fleets, farm subsidies... that's not relevant to NASA's budget.

[h3throw]

> Right, but normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget, which is not excellent for this purpose, as you point out.

The CPI is composed of much more than that: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2016.pdf

[twh270]

The money was necessary. But if it had been run like a typical government program, it would have been 25 years before we landed on the moon.

[papito]

I agree. Give me one year for a software project, and I will procrastinate. Give me 4 months, and I will get my shit together, I will be frugal with my time and resources.

In the same fashion, I would get the same or MORE work done in less than an 8 hour work day, because I would just not have time to be on HackerNews.

Smaller, achievable goals are more productive.

[wallace_f]

Elon is also kind of like a dictator of his economic resources. NASA has thousands of stakeholders clamoring over getting a bigger slice of pie.

[isostatic]

Musk is the most powerful man in history. Everyone else with the ability to wipe out cities has had some form of government controlling their actions or relied on armies to do the deed, and they couldn't do it anonymously.

Musk can.

[zie]

Well sure a couple F9's dropped on a city would cause some problems for sure. or maybe you are thinking launching a bunch of titanium rods and dropping them.

Sure he could definitely DO that, but I don't think he could do it anonymously.

Once Starship is up and running, his ability to cause destruction def. goes up, but he would have even less anonymity.

Fans (and I'm sure govts) closely monitor all of SpaceX launches/development/etc. Also, once you got a bunch of rods or rockets or whatever you were going to drop, they don't exactly hide in space, they are pretty easily tracked, and publicly tracked even.

Since they are backlogged with rocket orders, it would cost a LOT to do and lead to to economic decline, if not financial ruin of the SpaceX business.

So could he do it? sure, easily? Not really, but certainly WAY easier than Bezos or anyone else. But anonymously? I really doubt it. Plus who else even has the single handed capabilities? The US Air Force, Russia, India and China. That's pretty much it. Bezos maybe in a few years.

[krapp]

Elon Musk doesn't have the ability to wipe out cities anonymously.

Even if he had the ability to wipe out cities, which he doesn't, by definition being the only private citizen capable of doing so would make the suspect list pretty short.

[jandrese]

I don't know, it seems like more of a Bezos move.

[jahlove]

they're also the kind of project that never gets followed-through to completion because a new administration has its own ideas for how to direct NASA.