[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.