[GMoromisato]

This is a common sentiment, but I don't share it.

Crewed spaceflight is no worse and no different than spending money on Hubble, JWST, or the Voyager missions. We pay for those missions because they inspire us. For many, gaining knowledge about the universe is its own reward, even if it doesn't lead to cancer cures or longer-lasting batteries.

In the same way, sending people into space connects us to all those nameless explorers who sailed into the Pacific in rickety boats, or conquered the Americas (the first time) via the Bering ice bridge.

When I think of the Apollo 8 astronauts seeing the Earth from the Moon for the first time, I can almost feel what they felt: awe, perspective, loneliness, and maybe even that primal fear that we all get from being so far from home. I truly cannot wait to watch (and to have my kids watch) astronauts walking on the Moon.

Sure, we can argue about whether we should spend more money on X and less money on Y--that's what democracy is all about. But to say that NASA shouldn't be sending humans into space is, in my mind, missing the forest for the trees.

[dehrmann]

> For many, gaining knowledge about the universe is its own reward

But is putting humans in a low Earth orbit really gaining knowledge about the universe at this point? Surely we've hit the point of diminishing returns by now.

[chippiewill]

SLS isn't about putting humans in low earth orbit

[JuanPosadas]

> Crewed spaceflight is no worse and no different than spending money on Hubble, JWST, or the Voyager missions.

If you ignore the huge difference in efficacy and results, sure.

[GMoromisato]

Ultimately, we spent billions on (e.g.) JWST because it makes us feel good. We're not going to get new cancer cures or end homelessness, right? We're just going to get knowledge about the universe. But why? Why do we need to know the shape of the earliest galaxies? It's not going to improve the GDP. We seek that knowledge only because it makes us feel good to know. That's it.

In the same way, we send humans into space because it makes us feel good. We like to see people strap themselves to a controlled explosion and head out into space to explore.

Just as seeing pictures of the universe makes us feel awe, inspiration, and perspective, seeing humans in space gives us perspective on our beautiful, fragile world, and our role in the universe.

[adammarples]

I think it's a little reductive to say that JWST is little more than pretty pictures that make us feel good. The drive to understand the universe is more important than the desire to see a cool launch mission.

[sgnelson]

It depends on what your definition of "efficacy" and "results" are.

If all you want is to collect data on the cosmos for the sake of pure science, then absolutely human space flight is a waste of money.

If your goal is to inspire, create an atmosphere that instills interest in a space program (of all types, including manned and unmanned), promotes STEM fields, and is a jobs program, then you'd probably find it very useful and cost effective to sink money into a human spaceflight campaign.

Guess which one of those goals is NASA's true mission.

These sorts of conversations so often ignore that NASA is an organization controlled by politicians and is ultimately responsible to them and the US public who elects them. It's not the engineers and scientists employed or using the data that NASA creates. At the end of the day, those politicians want to have their name connected with inspiration, not just data on the water content of mars.

How many kids do you know that say they want to be an unmanned rover on mars when they grow up? How often do you hear JFK saying "We go to the moon, not because it's hard, but because sending rovers is really cheap and we'll get a much better bang for our buck." How often do you hear someone replaying "Surveyor 1 has landed, one small step for a robot, one giant leap for mankind."

You don't. And there's a reason for that.

You don't have to like it, but you also can't ignore that in reality, NASA has goals that are not just about the science.

[kjkjadksj]

We conducted crewed spaceflight in the 1960s because of the state of robotics at the time. To continue with crewed spaceflight today with the present state of robotics is honestly pretty crass in terms of the risk put on human lives. Not to mention the additional resource drain having to build and transport life support systems.

[bnralt]

This is a good point. The government started investing in spaceflight because it was seen as important to defense. In the early 1960's, the best plan for spy satellites were manned space stations (see the planned Manned Orbital Laboratory). But as time progressed, we saw that we were much better off using automated systems for space. Yet we had already started manned missions, so those just kept shambling on, even long after the reason for them no longer existed.

[ajross]

> Crewed spaceflight is no worse and no different than spending money on Hubble, JWST, or the Voyager missions. We pay for those missions because they inspire us.

That's true only in a very strained and tautological sense of "inspire".

Science has quantifiable results. There are facts that we know and theories we've understood (and discarded!) because of telescopes and probes that we would not know had they not flown. Whether that knowledge has value or not is, I guess, subjective. But it's not only "inspiration" except insofar as you declare that the only reason for wanting to know about martian geology or the early universe or whatever is "because it inspires us". Which is to say: you're making a semantic argument, not a profound one.

[josh-sematic]

There are also facts we know and things we’ve built because someone watched a manned space flight as a kid and decided to go work in STEM because it’s just so freaking cool. Discounting “inspiration” on the grounds that it has no immediate, tangible results is pretty shortsighted.

Also if you’re willing to count facts like “details of Martian geology” as potentially valuable, then one can also say that by doing manned space flight we have learned a lot about how to transport humans to space and keep them alive there, no?

[ajross]

I'm not "discounting" "inspiration", I'm saying that the upthread comment only makes sense if you choose the correct definition for "inspiration", which makes the argument sort of specious.

The simple truth is that there are quantifiable justifications for preferring spending finite resources on science instead of manned space flight. The metrics used might be subjective (because at the end of the day everything is subjective), but that doesn't make them merely "inspiration".

Again, what you're doing is playing a semantic trick with words to respond to what is clearly an almost wholely objective opinion held by other people. That doesn't work. You declaring something "inspiration" does nothing to convince me that launching humans into orbit isn't a ridiculous waste of money.

[mannerheim]

Even accepting this premise, there's no reason to pick the most expensive option for manned spaceflight.

The ISS cost $100 billion to launch and assemble (and $3 billion to maintain). Tiangong about $8 billion, reportedly. Mir, some $4-5 billion.

The total project cost of Dragonfly mission to Titan (to be launched in 2027 and landing 2034) is projected to be $1 billion. Even the JWST, which had massive cost overruns, still only cost $10 billion. If the NASA built a Tiangong instead of an ISS, who knows what they could have done with the remaining $90 billion. Maybe for a few billion, they could have sent a probe to Europa to search for life under the ice.

[GMoromisato]

I used the word "inspire" as a short-hand for "benefits which have no practical value".

We agree exactly on this: "Whether that knowledge has value or not is...subjective."

Ultimately, we're talking about whether spending money on X has value. If you agree that the value of both crewed spaceflight and robotic probes is "subjective", then by definition there is no objectively correct answer.

We support Hubble because it yields knowledge, and having knowledge is something that we (as a society) value.

We support crewed spaceflight because we (as a society) value seeing humans explore space.

[ajross]

"We" don't though. Plenty of people like telescopes but not meat cans (not least because you can get like twelve telescope for one meat can at the going rate!), and you can't short-circuit that (subjective) debate by just declaring "inspiration". At some point you need to convince people of a value proposition.

[GMoromisato]

I like both.

And since the US Congress is currently funding both, it's actually you who needs to convince people to stop funding "meat cans". Good luck with that.