Folks who suggest dealing with poverty before launching machines to space: the economy doesn't work like that, FYI.
If a country acquires deep technical know-how on engineering, it means the country can use it to spin out new industries and export that utility. That is how a country makes money.
After world war II, Germany didn't give away all the remaining money to war survivors. They built rock-solid airplane engines and cars, which in turn improved the economy overall.
The thing that irritates me more than anything about the argument that sending people to space is a bad idea is the unique bias people have against space technologies.
No-one ever says "We spend billions on Football; let's spend it on poor people instead", or "We spend billions on the music and film industries, let's shut those down and instead tax everyone for the average entertainment spend and send the proceeds to developing nations". Or defense for that matter.
Hell, you hardly even hear people say that about other, dubiously cost-effective science projects like the LHC.
The difference is people voluntarily pay for football tickets and TV/online subscriptions. Same with music. They are self sustaining industries.
Experimental space flight is coming directly from tax payers and public funding. I still think it’s a worthy use of public funds because we get so much out of it that is intangible while supporting both scientific research and some of the most advanced R&D work on the planet (which is fed back into the economy in many ways).
But I still think it’s healthy for people to question it when their local day-to-day problems seem so much bigger than the universes, which is abstract and studied by academics and advanced private industry who aren’t their working class neighbours. Which is a big reason why we have elected officials to make balanced policy.
People complain about stadium subsidies all the time. I’d presume the amount of people who complain about them would be somewhat proportional to the amount of people who know they exist.
I am very much against the subsidies for sports but (being from football country) there are many secondary effects why countries support it. From better population health to higher patriotism (international matches are only time people see the flag and anthem) and even crime rate. Its good for kids to have heroes/role models and sport heroes are usually the ones kids prefer.
> No-one ever says "We spend billions on Football; let's spend it on poor people instead"
That one is said constantly (at least in the US). It comes up as a matter of routine as it pertains to the extremely high salaries that professional athletes get paid and with regard to the construction of new stadiums (which often cost a billion dollars or more now, are frequently taxpayer subsidized, and are often replacing functional 30 year old stadiums).
The top 500 NBA, NFL and MLB players earn more in salary than the CEOs of the S&P 500. The MLB payroll is $4 billion for ~750 players. Just the top 30 players in the NBA are earning one billion dollars per year combined. NBA teams are spending near $4 billion per year on salaries for ~450 players, or around $8 to $9 million per player. The 32 NFL teams are spending nearly $6 billion per year.
Between the NBA, NFL and MLB, there is around $13 to $14 billion in salaries.
I did mention Defense and other science projects. 2 things that are mostly publically funded, although morally I don't see where the difference lies. If you believe in a kind of Peter Singer redistribution of wealth then why stop at public money.
But I'm willing to bet that if SpaceX or whoever ever do become fully self-sustaining, a large proportion of people will continue to view space technology as frivolous and unnecessary toys for rich people, instead of valuable research and development that helps everyone.
I agree generally (when the two are entirely separated), however on the actual context the interesting thing about so much taxpayer subsidization for stadiums in the US, is that it means the entire thing becomes partially taxpayer subsidized including player salaries. The players often can earn so much in part because the stadiums generate so much (varies depending on the league and TV contracts, etc). Taxpayer funds have directly & persistently assisted, decade after decade, in the sports leagues being built up financially. I think cumulatively it is to such an extent that you could never say there is such a thing as wholly private spending in any of the major US sports leagues (I realize this varies country to country).
I think it really depends on who you ask, so I don’t think you can generalize how people feel about this.
As for myself, I’d love to see space tech thriving in India.
But all of the extremely poor people I encountered during my time in India, I can’t imagine that they would be pushing for this or even think about it beyond their daily struggles.
> No-one ever says "We spend billions on Football; let's spend it on poor people instead", or "We spend billions on the music and film industries, let's shut those down and instead tax everyone for the average entertainment spend and send the proceeds to developing nations". Or defense for that matter.
People say both quite a lot. Well, in case of the more general "industry" it's more like "let's roll back the spending quite a lot, except defense, shut that one down".
Computers are an even better example. Their early usages were incredibly primitive, limited, and astronomically expensive. You had governments dropping very large amounts of money on what were glorified calculators. If you would have even suggested that these 'computing machines' would lead to what we have today, it would have sounded like fantasy. The most remarkable thing is that the transition from effectively no computers to them revolutionizing our entire species happened in less than a single human lifetime.
And I see no reason to expect anything different with space. Developing the technology to sustainably colonize other planets will bring opportunities that we cannot even imagine today. And I think we can all see such things, but it's easy to get mind-locked in the drama of the present while forgetting about the longer path that we are already set well upon. It is interesting to consider that the saying "When a wise man points to the moon, the fool examines the finger." is, itself, many centuries old.
I have a lot of reasons to suspect "colonize other planets" or any such things won't happen in less than a lifetime. Unlike computing, physical challenge is daunting, and economic challenge is more so. As saying goes, if we would colonize Mars, why aren't we colonizing Antarctica, which is infinitely easier?
Antarctica is a really interesting topic in its own right. One major reason there is minimal development there is because development is literally illegal. The Antarctic treaty system [1] prohibits any sort of non-scientific research, specifically ban things such as material exploitation, and also sets strict 0-impact laws. For instance it is, again literally, illegal to take a piss on Antarctica during a voyage. It needs to be bottled up and brought back to base where it can be extensively processed before being 'returned' to the sea. Disposable trash that cannot be recycled is packaged up and returned home for disposal processing.
But there's something much more interesting about Antarctica. The intuition is like you said, colonizing it is a million times easier than e.g. Mars. But this is not so simple. Antarctica is a pretty brutal place. It's not that just exposure to the climate entails death but there are also often violent storms. And the perpetual darkness of the Antarctic winter is why the population plummets from thousands to about a thousand during winter. Mars, by contrast, has a low pressure atmosphere, unbreathable air, and high radiation levels. This means you can only go outside with substantial protection which is comparable, though of course more extreme, than Antarctica. On the other hand, it's otherwise a very tame place. The most violent storm on Mars would feel like a slight breeze. This is one of the very few things thing that the book/movie "The Martian" intentionally faked. It's extremely telling that a hard sci-fi book had to resort to fantasy to create a disaster scenario on Mars.
Mars also shares a number of oddly convenient similarities with Earth. It shares a near identical day/night cycle, and even oddly enough has a near identical pattern of seasons due to near identical axial tilt. Because of this it doesn't sense to speak of 'Martian' temperatures since when/where are quite important. Summer near the equator gets right balmy at about 70F, though the lack of any meaningful greenhouse to trap in the heat does mean nights are still very cold. And of course Mars has absolutely abundant mineral resources. The red color itself is from iron oxides - rust. 0.3G will also offer unimaginable opportunities. For the most predictable launching vessels from Mars will be exponentially easier on Earth, and all the resources necessary to establish such industry exist in abundance on the planet. It will also undoubtedly spur on tourism, new sports, and so on. Some exciting potential!
The above is already longer than I thought it'd be, but really it's also necessary to mention something about computing. Try to mentally take yourself back some decades ago. Computers are literally the size of buildings with extremely fragile hardware, have enormous costs associated with them, cost millions of dollars, and need to be operated by large teams of highly skilled professionals. And in exchange for all of this you get again what were glorified calculators - the ENIAC [2] for instance was the first general purpose computer, and it achieved a blistering 35 divisions per second. Imagine somebody said soon you'd have computers sold for tens of dollars, capable of fitting in a pocket, that operate on the billions of operations per second. They'd become so ubiquitous and cheap you'd see them in practically everything. It's easy to take what we've achieved for granted, but we live in a reality that was, not long ago, the domain of fantasy.
That's an interesting question. Why aren't we? I figure we basically already have technology-wise so there's not any research left to do and we have no reason to actually move there yet.
This reminds me of the excuses for spending billions of dollars hosting the Olympics. "All the infrastructure improvements will help the locals!" Well, yes, but if infrastructure is your goal there are a lot less costly ways to go about it. I'm sure a country that decided to build an underwater amusement park would end up acquiring some technical know-how on engineering, but that doesn't make that a practical goal.
A lot of Olympic infrastructure is wasted since it involves stuff like building stadiums that are then unused after the Olympics.
Investment for an Olympics-type event can be useful if it results in the creation of durable multipurpose infrastructure like transit lines though.
The US Space Race helped us become a leader in satellite launch, which is a productive industry on its own terms now. Weather satellites, GPS, telecoms all benefit from it and provide tangible benefits to the population.
I’m not sure if Indian investment in space is more toward the useless or useful side of the spectrum though.
There's more than GPS. Human spaceflight has produced many valuable non-invasive wearable biomedical devices because sending up a doctor to monitor the astronaut was not an option. NASA research into nutrition has given us better infant formulas. Research into protection of astronauts' eyes has lead to UV-blocking sunglasses. Etc etc.
Not sure, the Soviets also put men in space, did MIR, and they tried to go to the moon and build a space shuttle too, just failed at it.
The thing that I do wonder is when a country like India is just replicating the work already done by the USA, how much of the innovation / potential has already been tapped. (Or now with the USA return to the moon program, is developing Orion and SLS and the gateway really going to do much that the Apollo program didn’t?)
Life is not linear. You have a proportion of your budget to spend on moonshots (literally). Developed countries can spend more while less developed countries spend a lesser proportion on such moonshots. It’s up to the respective country to decide where they’d like to spend their proportion on. In this case, India decides this mission.
An underwater amusement park would be a nice goal to develop underwater construction technology actually. I could see that being important if the surface of the Earth becomes inhospitable and it perhaps could be popular enough as an attraction to be able to get early returns in the investment.
Space enthusiasts are always trying to sell their fetish with this line, but the fact is that technology development is not some generic facility; if you develop technology devoted to getting things up into orbit, it will basically give you the expertise to do that. It doesn't, say, develop your semiconductor design, biochemistry, medicine, agriculture, or whatever else your country might need. It basically helps you build weapons, the main reason people get so excited about rocketry. This is the last thing India needs.
if you develop technology devoted to getting things up into orbit, it will basically give you the expertise to do that.
The key word being devoted of course. If you fail to acknowledge any benefits from the space program other than getting things into orbit, then yes it'll be hard to see any value in space exploration beyond doing it for its own sake, which you may or may not see any value in since you yourself label it a fetish.
However the larger benefits of technology yielded by the space program are undeniable, including in some of the same fields you mentioned. From wikipedia
>NASA reports that 444,000 lives have been saved, 14,000 jobs have been created, 5 billion dollars in revenue has been generated, and there has been 6.2 billion dollars in cost reduction due to spin-off programs from NASA research in collaboration with various companies. Of the many beneficial NASA spinoff technologies there has been advancements in the fields of health and medicine, transportation, public safety, consumer goods, energy and environment, information technology, and industrial productivity. Multiple products and innovations used in the daily life are results of space generated research. Solar panels, water-purification systems, dietary formulas and supplements, space suit materials in clothing, and global search and rescue systems are but a few examples of the beneficiary spinoffs that have been produced.
You may hand wave and say "oh but that could have been all discovered without going to space." Perhaps, but your thesis seems to be space exploration is a fetish with no benefits beyond making space exploration more efficient, which is patently untrue.
It's not a hand wave - my argument is that those things could all be better developed, and indeed have been, by programs that are directly focused on that kind of technology development. Ancillary technologies are nice, but why settle for ancillary development that MIGHT yield things that are useful, instead of directly focusing your technology development on those useful things in the first place?
Because you get the benefits of space exploration and the secondary benefits as well. For those that support space exploration that's enough. For those that view space exploration as a fetishistic waste of money I don't know what could possibly convince them otherwise. It'd be interesting to know.
Yeah, where would we be without LASIK? I'll also note that that article notably elides things like ICBMs and the other myriad military applications, since it is clearly intended as a puff piece to make us view space technologies as benevolent and positive.
As for my tone, perhaps you are right that I don't need to employ ridicule; but I wish to, because I feel contempt for this position so strongly I want to make it known. Space fetishism is a diversion that exists to bilk engineers into careers and positions that are in aid of the military.
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? That includes name-calling like "fetish", which the site guidelines also ask you specifically to avoid.
Edit: alas, your comment history indicates that you've been using this site primarily for ideological battle rather than curiosity. We ban accounts that do that regardless of what they're battling for, because these two things aren't compatible, the one drowns out the other, and HN is for curiosity. If you'd please review the guidelines and use the site as intended, we'd be grateful.
You might also find these links helpful for getting the original spirit of the site:
Actually, would you please ban me? I'm not sure i agree with you about ideology vs. curiosity, I'd say rather that ideology is one of the primary things I am curious about and something I appreciate about HN is that there are smart people here willing to discuss it.
But I do think my comments suffer from a meanness I'd like to avoid, and that my use of this site is something like a nicotine habit; I'd appreciate the nudge towards quitting.
Ahhh, you're commenting on your contempt for the military, I see that now. I didn't get that at first, from your apparent comment about economics. ("the fact is that technology development is not some generic facility; if you develop technology devoted to getting things up into orbit, it will basically give you the expertise to do that. It doesn't, say, develop your semiconductor design, biochemistry, medicine, agriculture, or whatever else your country might need.")
Both the space programs and the military have well documented positive direct and indirect effects on private business, and both have many spinoff technologies that do benefit society. That is in addition to some well documented negative impacts, not to mention wars and death. But you didn't really want to talk about the economics, right?
If you just don't want to build weapons and don't think we should as a society, that's a reasonable view to hold, I can certainly find some ground to agree with you. Personally, I'll just suggest choosing clarity and not ridicule might help get that point across and convince more people. The sarcasm and ridicule tend to alienate, especially if you're talking directly to people who might enjoy space topics and would otherwise agree with you that weapon building is ugly business. You're choosing to ridicule innocent bystanders, rather than the people making weapons.
> Space fetishism is a diversion that exists to bilk engineers into careers and positions that are in aid of the military.
That makes it sound like a conspiracy theory, as if nobody would be interested in space were it not for the sneaky military. Isaac Newton had a space fetish and died before NASA or the US military industrial complex began. You didn't get tricked into a NASA career, right? I know a few engineers that have worked in space & military applications, and all the ones I know participated knowingly.
Well, at least in the case of India, most of what you pointed out has been directly benefitted by the space industry. India has its first major semiconductor foundry operated under the Department of Space. And the space agency spends a significant part of its on-ground budget on developing outreach programs for farmers to teach them how to use meteorological and soil data to get a better, more reliable harvest. Also, India is one of the few countries to have a civilian space agency led solely by engineers. The only time it rubs shoulders with the military is when it sources spacecraft and launch vehicle parts from the national defence supplier or when it shares data with the military in order to satisfy the government's political mandate.
Most industries get their start in the military because that is where the money always is; however, semiconductors have definitely moved on to other applications, whereas rocketry remains mostly about making missiles.
The poor aren't paying taxes in India. They are exempted from paying any tax. Taxation in India only begins if you are in the lower middle class. And even then, you only start by paying 5% Income Tax. If you take in deductions you can also be tax free for upto 7.5 lakhs (almost 10,000 USD). India's Per Capita Income is 7000 USD (4.8 lakhs).
On the other hand, India has already lifted 271 million people out of poverty in 10 years [1]. Can you name a single country that has achieved this feat in such a short span of time?
I think the poster's point was that NONE of us here are poor, hence this is a very different discussion than if we involved that poor part of the population. Not only is the poor fraction of the population huge, they would also have a very different take on whether the space program is worth it.
Except the country already acquired all that via globalisation. This isn't 1952. There are few walls up on many technologies. India has acquired most of its know-how by undercutting developed nations and getting them to teach them how to do the work.
Is it?
Agriculture is the country’s major occupation, yet it imports rice polishing machines from switzerland.
Indian market is one of the fastest growing smartphone market. Yet the biggest players are Chinese, Korean or American.
Railways has been the primary source of connection across the country and within cities. Yet metro trains are made by Japan and european companies.
In the cities IT services are the main source of economy, yet India never shipped its own microprocessor until very recently.
I can go on, but you get the point. Having a vague idea of how to do something vs shipping a world class product are two different things. What’s happening with the moon mission is the latter, though at a very beginning stage.
The UK used to know build how to most those things, indeed invented them; they now buy them from abroad. Globalisation and the economics thereof dictate that.
India to some degree skipped a step on the way. Much like central and rural African countries skipping broadband and going straight to mobile internet.
Yes. UK’s biggest company is not a train engine company. UK learned that it could generate far more revenue by selling financial services with its rich legacy along that line, than export train engines that it invented.
India took a similar path in 90s, selling IT services. But it isn’t simply enough given the size and the population of the country. The only sustainable way forward is to become strong exporters of good products along with services.
Some knowledge only can be learned by doing. Also, space technology is, due to its close tie to missile technology, one of those few modern technologies with walls up.
India didn't acquire launch technology "via globalisation". In fact, when India attempted technology transfer from Russia, US objected citing Missile Technology Control Regime, and India had to develop their own.
Yea. They basically went back to first principles on relativity I hear. They had nothing to go on. No well understood science in the public domain at all.
And the objection was around the seeker technology more specifically
If you want to keep going back in time why not go all the way back to Science that was founded in India and was taken and adopted by the West? How about we go all the way back to the numeral system (which originated from the Brahmi numerals) without which there would be no foundation for any future Scientific discoveries? It is ridiculous to keep going back in time to justify something that is happening today. Every race has contributed to Science in its own way. To ridicule the efforts of the present day Scientists by continuously invoking the past is absolutely uncalled for. No matter how much you try to hide scientific discoveries it will eventually find its way out of your grasp. That is how it has been since time immemorial and will never change just because you wish so.
Please don't do nationalistic flamewar on HN, regardless of how provocative some other comments are. Everyone needs to make an effort here to prevent discussion from degrading into battle.
How about you calm down and pay attention to the discussion. Total lunatic. I was stating my point around the closed science of the cold war era. India was doing nothing around that time. It then benefited, like everyone else in the world when the huge post war advances were done in public in peer reviewed science. When you do something ow, it is not from scratch. Its not an insult as you seem to think it is.
Your behaviour is scandalous and anathema to any reasonable discussion. You simply invent your own argument to have with yourself. I'm finished here.
A lot of developed nations are piggybacking on the educated, talented people from India.
It's only fair India got its fair share back.
More importantly, corruption and backstabbing has so far ruined such talent, spilling into developed nations; so if there is a somewhat level playing field being established through ISRO and via Indian startups for Indians, then that's a great start.
Lol, you must be joking, in fact it's the opposite. It's majority of Indians who are doing cutting edge research and innovating just look at what's going on any day in Silicon Valley or any top Universities. Now they are starting to do the same in their country while being creative with lost cost solutions.
EDIT: Since Hacker News won't allow me to post a reply. I am editing this post here.
You misunderstood what he said. He said that "majority of Indians" are doing cutting-edge research in foreign Universities. Not "majority of cutting-edge research" are being done by Indians. Both have different meanings. Most Indians who travel to foreign countries get higher education grants/fellowships to work on cutting-edge research. Very few Indians actually travel for undergraduate courses. India has prestigious universities like IITs/NITs which are equal to and in some cases better than Western counterparts. The reason why Indians travel to Western countries for research is because of lack of research grants to carry out Scientific experiments that might run into many millions/billions of dollars. In other words, this is brain drain at its finest.
>Folks who suggest dealing with poverty before launching machines to space: the economy doesn't work like that, FYI. If a country acquires deep technical know-how on engineering, it means the country can use it to spin out new industries and export that utility. That is how a country makes money.
Technology doesn't work like that, either. A country can "acquire deep technical know-how on engineering" by doing earth-bound R&D and working on its infrastructure problems...
Not to mention that they're not learning much new -- they just repeat what other countries have done since decades, most of which their engineers already know (they already send satellites and make military rockets and such).
Let's not pretend space vs local infrastructure is not an opportunity cost.
You must see whether the money used in something is from the te sector or if it was stolen from the people through taxation. If it is the former, it's none of your business and indeed it doesn't make anyone poorer. If it is the later, it's of everyone's business, unfair, and bad. I'm not into Indian space endeavours but probably the money comes from poor taxpayers who would be way better off if they weren't plundered in the first place.
> I'm not into Indian space endeavours but probably the money comes from poor taxpayers who would be way better off if they weren't plundered in the first place.
If you don't know then it's best not to talk because it only helps perpetuate the already negative stereotype that most have. The poor aren't even taxed in India. Indians are only taxed after they have a minimum salary of 7.5 lakhs per annum (accounting for all the deductions). Which is around 11,000 USD. And no this amount isn't low by Indian standards (the per-capita income is 7,060 USD). The cost of living in India is extremely low and inflation is well controlled (< 3%) so this amount is actually pretty decent to live in a Tier-1 city with a nice 2-bedroom apartment on rent. You can call this the lower middle class. And even they pay lesser tax until they hit the 20 lakhs per annum (30,000 USD) bracket (5%-20% based on where you fall in the slab rates).
And almost 70% of the rural households practice Agriculture in India. All these people are exempted from paying both Income Tax and GST. And if they have a bad season sometimes their loans are also waived.
India is a 3 trillion $ economy. India needs to find new ways to get to a 10 trillion $ economy if it wants to improve standards of living for all Indians and lift the remaining 300 million people out of poverty (it has already lifted 271 million people out of poverty in 10 years [1]. Can you name a single country that has achieved this feat in such a short span of time?). One of the areas where India can earn big is Space. ISRO is already a profitable enterprise for the Government. There is no reason why anyone will want it to be shutdown for anything. Especially when it is making huge profits.
If a country acquires deep technical know-how on engineering, it means the country can use it to spin out new industries and export that utility. That is how a country makes money.
After world war II, Germany didn't give away all the remaining money to war survivors. They built rock-solid airplane engines and cars, which in turn improved the economy overall.