[declan]

I'm sympathetic to what you're saying -- these articles are great reads -- but remember there's also the opportunity cost of taking money via taxes from entrepreneurs and private-sector innovators who, in aggregate, would surely have come up with some of their own innovations with additional resources. And perhaps they would have been even more useful to humanity.

[pedrocr]

As far as I know the argument for that is not very strong. Despite all the mythology around entrepreneurship startups are known to be good at piecing together existing technology into scalable businesses, not primary research. Moonshot level breakthroughs need large sums of money being thrown into the unknown. And that is something for the state like in the foundation of SV[1] or large monopolies like Bell Labs inventing the transistor.

[1] http://steveblank.com/secret-history/

[declan]

Ah, but I wasn't talking only about startups.

NASA has received something like $800 billion in funding in current dollars. I suspect you would agree that, if that sum had been left in the private sector, some interesting and innovative things would have come of it. Obviously we can disagree about the amount.

There's also the separate argument that lavishing so much funding and authority on NASA allowed it to squash the private space industry for many decades, setting humanity back many years. This was the case until fairly recently, when the 1998 Commercial Space Act helped to change this.

Here's an article I wrote in 2007 about NASA. Unfortunately the original appears to have disappeared in a CNET site redesign last month but (sigh) FreeRepublic copied and pasted it here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1908035/posts Space, by contrast, until recently has remained the domain of NASA. Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer famous for building a suborbital rocket plane that won the Ansari X Prize, believes NASA is crowding out private efforts. "Taxpayer-funded NASA should only fund research and not development," Rutan said during a recent panel discussion at the California Institute of Technology. "When you spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build a manned spacecraft, you're...dumbing down a generation of new, young engineers (by saying), 'No, you can't take new approaches, you have to use this old technology.'"

Also remember that government bureaucracies aren't exactly known for their careful use of funds. The Space Shuttle concept was pitched to the public as costing only $5 million a flight; it ended up costing $1.3 billion a flight, with a 1-in-50 chance of disaster upon each launch.

[pedrocr]

The options aren't 800billion for NASA or 800billion for Burt Rutan. The options are 800 billion for NASA or a slightly lower tax rate for millions of people and corporations, mostly the wealthier ones (as those pay the most tax). Do you still think those dollars would have generated as much innovation in the private sector?

I agree that NASA hasn't done the best use of its money, the space shuttle was particularly useless. But the solution for that isn't to not have these large well-funded research programs. It's probably to make more efficient use of the private sector to run parts of them. But even NASA does that already. This article itself was about an underwear company designing a space suit because NASA contracted it out. Do you think these guys would have developed the technology they did if it wasn't for the Moonshot?

Even your article just seems to argue that NASA is late in letting go of now mature stuff and letting the private sector take over. Do you actually think we would have ever gone to the moon without the USA/USSR space race? Even the aviation comparison is suspect. How much of the technology in the modern airliner is the result of large governments funding military aviation?

[efiftythree]

I'm hopeful, based on organizations such as SpaceX, that these innovation vacuums will continue to be filled by private organizations rather than via government agencies. Not only do I hope that will be the case I think at this point when considering the financial state of most governments around the world it appears in my mind to be the only real working solution.

We know all too well that the process to taxation to output results in cents on the dollar reaching its destination.