[philipallstar]

Is it possible that their arguments haven't been noticed to be debunked? These are apparently the authors:

> The book was written by married couple Kelly Weinersmith, an adjunct professor at Rice University in the BioSciences Department, and Zach Weinersmith, a cartoonist known for the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

[slumberlust]

Its a good read. I'd encourage you to read it and come to your own conclusion on your question. Personally, they earned my trust but other members of our book club did not agree.

Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth first. But the Trekkies have a tough time with that answer because its a bit of a let down.

[philipallstar]

> Its a good read. I'd encourage you to read it and come to your own conclusion on your question. Personally, they earned my trust but other members of our book club did not agree.

I'm not saying I'm dismissing the arguments for that reason, at all, to be clear! Thanks for the recommendation.

> Space is very very unforgiving and they ultimately conclude humanity is better served focusing our resources here on earth first. But the Trekkies have a tough time with that answer because its a bit of a let down.

Well - it's a tricky one because that is susceptible to slippery slopes. If we hadn't gone to space at all and focused on Earth first we wouldn't have GPS, for example. We can always spend more on Earth to achieve a temporary boon for the current population. We could have not spent money on developing Golang and used the salary to dig wells in Africa, for example.

Spending a tiny amount on space for the chance of a permanent upgrade for the species does sound like quite a good idea, and I'm personally glad the American taxpayer is doing it.

[randallsquared]

> glad the American taxpayer is doing it.

For Starship development specifically, the American taxpayer is mostly not doing it; Starlink customers worldwide are contributing most, if I understand correctly.

[philipallstar]

Maybe you're right. I assumed that SpaceX's revenue is mostly from US government launches, but I don't know if that's true.

[compsciphd]

why do you assume we wouldn't have seen value in satellites if we didn't see value in going to the moon (or mars)?

There's clearly an extraordinary value in satellites from a military perspective, for instance to enable spying. Heck, Hubble directly benefited from the work that went into spy satellites and NASA was afterwards gifted 2 uneeded spy satellites to use for scientific exploration (1 is (was? as in finished) being converted to be used, the other AFAIK is still in storage).

GPS wasn't created to enable us to do anything in space, but to focus down here on earth. i.e. what was needed to fight wars better. One can argue if that was "necessary" but it was clearly earth focused.

[philipallstar]

I'm not saying we wouldn't have seen value. I'm saying it's always possible to argue value is somewhere else and point at someone in poverty, perhaps. It's easy to see short term and hard to see long term, and I'm saying a balance is required.

[vel0city]

> If we hadn't gone to space at all and focused on Earth first we wouldn't have GPS

I'm not sure if you're actually suggesting it or not with this statement, but we didn't need manned space flight to have GPS. We started launching satellite-based navigation systems a little bit before Yuri went to space, though the system wasn't in fully operational service until after a few human spaceflights.

[philipallstar]

I'm saying if we'd decided that Earth-bound spending was more important and we should dig (and then maintain) wells in Africa instead of ever going to space, we wouldn't have useful things like GPS.

[vel0city]

Let me start off by mentioning I'm generally for spending on space science programs and think the US should generally be doing more of it not less.

But I'd once again push back against the idea that GPS wasn't "Earth-bound spending". Its entirely an Earth-bound thing. GPS is useless on the moon, its useless on Mars. It doesn't help space probes go to other plants. It doesn't help our space telescopes. We didn't really learn new things about going to space by building our GNSS (although IIRC we did confirm some concepts related to time dilation). We didn't build new rocket designs to put them in orbit. They weren't the first things we put in space (although they were some of the earliest things). They were not space science systems. GNSS are inherently Earth-focused spending (global being a key word there).

We didn't build Transit or GPS or GLONASS or Galileo to explore space, we did it to measure things on the Earth. GNSS are very much Earth-bound spending, and would have happened regardless of us putting a man on the moon or sending probes to Mars or beyond.

We didn't even originally build the rockets launching a lot of this for science reasons or for looking towards exploring space, we originally built them to blow up people far away from us. The Atlas LV-3B for Mercury was a modified ICBM. The Gemini Launch Vehicle was essentially a modified Titan II, a nuke-capable ICBM. These rockets were being built and launching payloads regardless of if we put people on them and did science with them. IMO its a good thing we also did science with them, but its not like they were originally built for public science like NASA programs.