
Neil deGrasse Tyson: ‘How Much Would You Pay for the Universe?’  - jamesbritt
http://www.openculture.com/2012/03/neil_degrasse_tyson_how_much_would_you_pay_for_the_universe.html
======
EREFUNDO
This is a re-post of an earlier comment but I think it's very applicable to
this article:

The Chinese explored the Middle East and Africa almost 100 years before the
Europeans. Every expedition consisted of 300 ships, some as long as 400 feet
with 9 mast and an armada crew totaling 28,000 men. After 30 years of doing it
they realized that they were spending too much money on these grand
expeditions. The succeeding emperor ended the program. The Europeans on the
other hand would send out just a few ships and try to find ways for the
expeditions to be profitable (Slaves, gold, land, colonies) in ways the
Chinese never thought. These smaller European expeditions could not be stopped
by one emperor because Europe was not a unified empire like China. The smaller
European kingdoms also competed against each other. This not only made the
expeditions sustainable but thrive for the next 500 years. Right now I think
we are in China's situation 600 years ago. We stopped the moon landings for
the same reason the Chinese stopped landing Eunuchs in Africa. Unless we find
a way for these space programs to be profitable I don't see humans colonizing
space anytime soon.

~~~
rbanffy
I think the argument about dreams feeding the pipeline of scientists and
technologists of the future is a sound one and speaks to the hearts of
scientists and technologists everywhere.

I know a robot is cheaper and safer than a manned spacecraft, but are we
really willing to make our robots live our adventures while we sit on our
couches watching TV?

Space travel has to be profitable, of course. It also has to be cheap. Now
think of the price tag of a single F-22. Or the colossal clusterfuck that the
F-35 project became. Couldn't we persuade just a couple nations to dedicate
the budget of a single aircraft carrier or nuclear submarine to help fund the
dreams of the next generation instead?

~~~
larrydag
Robots make for great expedition R&D. They can gather a lot of information
very cheaply compared to manned spaceflight.

I'm not sure space travel has to be profitable. Certainly Christopher
Columbus's voyage was not considered (by most people at the time) to be
profitable. Yet economies of scale could definitely be taken into account. It
is often said that the computing power of the Apollo missions to the moon were
less than that of a TI calculator. It seems we should be able to have unmanned
missions to the moon by private sector or even partially public funded. After
all were sending DIY cameras into near space.

~~~
EREFUNDO
Of course they don't necessarily have to be profitable. The Chinese continued
their expeditions for 30 years without being "profitable". My point is that if
you want a sustained program that will grow, being self sustaining would be
necessary. Eventually it has to pay for itself. I don't think the Europeans
would have continued their expeditions if all the returns they got were 100
years of financial losses.

------
trothamel
(This is written from an American perspective, and reposted from elsewhere -
but I think it fits.)

For much of my life, when we spend money on space, we get not-space.

For the money we spent on the X-30, X-33, X-34, and X-38, when Dan Goldin was
NASA administrator, what did we get? Not-space. (At least the X-37 is up there
spyingflying.)

The orbital space plane program, the one that was Sean O'Keefe's thing - neat
plans, more capsules than planes IIRC, but ultimately we got not-space from
it.

The Vision for Space Exploration, under Michael Griffin? Rocket designs that
were approximately equivalent to throwing your astronauts into a paint mixer.
A system about which the review panel said that "If they gave us the system on
a silver platter, the first thing we'd have to do is cancel it, because we
couldn't afford the ongoing costs." A lot of money, a launch pad rusting in
the Florida weather, and a whole lot of not-space.

And for all the money we spend on human spaceflight, we now send Astronauts up
as passengers in Soyuz rockets.

Now we're spending $18 billion dollars - figure subject to change, always
upward - to build the SLS - the Senate Launch System. (Another estimate has it
at $40B for development and the first 4 flights.) If all things go as planned,
it will launch once every two years, launching an unmanned trip around the
moon in 2017 and a manned trip to the moon in 2019. Schedule subject to change
- always slipping.

Does anyone thing that SLS has a chance of working? Or is it just going to
become another not-space program?

How about the replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb Space
Telescope? In 1997, it was going to be launched in 2007, and it was going to
have cost 500 million dollars. Now we've spent 3.5 billion on it, and it will
launch in 2018. Maybe. That's a ton of money to spend on not-space - and it's
money that's been taken away from the moderately successful bits of NASA, like
the Mars program, which doesn't have a mission in it after 2013's MAVEN.

I don't mind spending money on space. I like space. I've been following the
MER rovers for nearly a decade. I think COTS and Commercial Crew are
brilliant, and hope that they will continue to exist with a program structure
that rewards results, rather than existence. Commercial space is the last best
hope to get a domestic space capability.

But times are tight. We're massively overspending as is - borrowing tons of
money our grandchildren will still be paying back. So increased spending is
far from free.

Is it worth it? I say yes. Spend money on space. Where do we get that money?
Let's stop spending it on not-space, like we have been.

~~~
joshAg
> But times are tight. We're massively overspending as is - borrowing tons of
> money our grandchildren will still be paying back. So increased spending is
> far from free.

FYI, if you remove all NASA spending from the budget, the total deficit
remains the same out to something like 3 or 4 significant figures.

~~~
jlarocco
What's your point?

Break down the budget categories enough, and you can say the exact same thing
about anything. "If you remove tank spending from the budget, the total
deficit remains the same out to something like 3 or 4 significant figures."
Guess we should keep buying tanks, too.

~~~
leot
Except, historically $1 billion for tanks today meant $1+ billion for tanks
for the foreseeable future.

The actual long-term costs of $1 billion military spending are far more than
those of $1 billion of NASA spending (and let's not even get into the economic
reward of said spending).

~~~
luigip
And $1 billion to Nasa today means another billion next year, and the year
after that...

------
temphn
Great rhetoric by Tyson, but completely misses the point that innovation in
space travel is now completely the domain of NewSpace companies like Armadillo
Airspace, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic rather than governments.

NASA no longer innovates. It's coasting on past glories. If a fraction of the
billions spent on NASA were left untaxed in the hands of individuals like
Carmack, Musk, Thiel, and Branson -- and allowed to wend their way towards
NewSpace investments rather than wasted on NASA boondoggles -- we'd all be
much better off.

Also, it's not at all obvious that we want to keep focusing on manned
missions, which Tyson mentions explicitly. You can iterate much more rapidly
on unmanned drones as you need save nothing for the way back, and the costs of
failure are far less. Tyson recognizes part of the human psychological factors
at play (the motivation of wartime) but doesn't recognize that wanting humans
in space instead of far more machines is emotional rather than practical right
now.

Get the costs of putting things into orbit down with machines, and humans will
follow. But let's not put the cart before the horse.

------
vibrunazo
This makes me think of crowd-funded space exploration.

Kickstarter is still far from mainstream and making million dollar projects.
Petridish.org opens the possibility of tax-payers willingly donate a monthly
value to science. Now imagine if all of these went mainstream with a celebrity
like Neil Tyson as the front face of a project to help fund SpaceX? Viable?

------
mathattack
I love the idea of supporting space science, ut in a deficit ridden economy,
is this extra percent of spending more valuable than health care research,
lowering the cost of education or solving world hunger?

Before going to Mars I would like a decent school on my street.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Much like manned spaceflight the problems of public schools in America is not
one of funding.

If you look at a graph of average inflation adjusted spending per student at
public schools it's just a monotonically increasing line from the end of WWII
until today, it just goes up, and up, and up.

But does average student educational outcome match such graphs? Not in the
least. The problem is that the incentives are all wrong and the money keeps
getting funneled to the wrong people. The ratio of administrative staff to
students has grown and grown. The biggest influence that active parents have
had on schools over the past few decades has not been on increasing
educational quality but on driving administrative policy through excessive
litigation. Increasingly K-12 public schools are little more than prisons
where kids do busy work and if they're lucky the smart ones learn how to teach
themselves and most of the rest pick up enough of the basics through
repetition or osmosis.

Don't expect the results to change until the system changes.

~~~
mathattack
Indeed, but I hate to believe taxes for the space money is well spent when the
taxes for the school down the street isn't.

------
tomelders
There's some rampant, blind and heart crumbling cynicism is going on in this
thread.

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not
because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve
to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that
challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to
postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too"

Or we could just build websites, obsess over stuff that will be forgotten in a
year and shit all over other peoples grand ideas.

------
sjtgraham
Wow, just wow. That is all I could think while watching that. Neil deGrasse
Tyson is such a great orator. It wouldn't surprise me if he becomes President
some day.

~~~
nollidge
He's stated explicitly before that he has no interest in politics whatsoever.

~~~
sjtgraham
He sounds pretty fired up about this issue, which is one of the main reasons
why people get into politics.

~~~
nollidge
From the horse's mouth:
[http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2011/08/21/if-i-...](http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/read/2011/08/21/if-
i-were-president)

I agree with him. Politicians are a reflection of the electorate. One can have
even _more_ of a positive impact by educating and energizing the electorate
than as one lone politician.

------
laserDinosaur
It would be nice to have the video without the damn music so I can actually
hear what he's saying :/

~~~
ds206
The first 2 minutes is from this Daily Show interview:
[http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-
february-27-2012/neil-...](http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-
february-27-2012/neil-degrasse-tyson)

~~~
laserDinosaur
Thankyou sir =)

------
Ras_
The other major frontier of exploration isn't faring any better:

"More people have walked on the surface of the Moon than have visited the
bottom of the Marianas Trench. We've even been to the Moon more recently than
we have the very bottom of the sea."

[http://io9.com/5894566/james-cameron-says-the-current-
state-...](http://io9.com/5894566/james-cameron-says-the-current-state-of-
ocean-exploration-is-piss-poor-hes-right?popular=true)

------
ChristianMarks
The NASA remote sensing budget is being cut by 30%. That's very bad news for
Earth Science and the validation of climate models, let alone for the
exploration of space.

Source: [http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/07/house-
appr...](http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/07/house-
appropriators-propose-big-.html)

------
sbmassey
Assuming that private enterprise isn't getting us into space fast enough, we
will need a new cold war to get the world's governments fearful enough to
throw money at the problem, and to demand solutions.

Perhaps China will do the honors?

------
j45
It might be a foregone conclusion, but $42.

On a side note, I think current and recent generations rarely look to space
with the complete awe that say, generations in the 60's and 70's did.

How can spacexy be brought back?

------
ctdonath
“After we stopped going to the moon, it all ended. We stopped dreaming.”

Because we saw what it got us. All that money, effort, and enthusiasm got us a
couple dozen guys on a dead rock for a few dozen hours. Adding a couple zeros
to the budget improves the situation from grey to red rock. Beyond that, we
soon get to what some writer (escaping me at the moment) noted: humans just
can't comprehend interstellar distances, the vast effort required to achieve
even mundane results. Too much cost for too little result. My hopes remain
high, but my expectations are more content with what's happening here on
Earth. At 44 I realize how short life is.

------
aboodman
Is it just me or does 0.4% of the tax base on Nasa seem really reasonable. If
I had had to guess, I would have put it way lower.

------
joering2
it finished when i had wet eyes so I think it was well done. And facts are
scary. From monetary point of view, bailout cost more than 50 years of NASA?
two years military spending. Gosh, thats sad...

------
mkn
I hate Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Not on a personal level, mind you. He's probably a
nice guy to have beers with. But he's a shill for NASA. He's a good shill, but
he's a shill, nonetheless.

A little background. I'm old enough to have been "inspired" by the Space
Shuttle Program near the point of its inception. Imagine a young mkn sitting
down with a pencil and paper to work out how much it would cost to buy himself
a ticket on the Space Shuttle at the promised $50/lb. I weighed 70 lbs. I knew
it would be more than $3500 because I'd have to eat and breathe while I was up
there. I wondered if I could go naked to save some cash. But still, it was a
nice number. And then, the number changed. The promise went up to $100/lb.
Fine. The math was easier. Oh, and the number of launches went from 26/year
down to 12/year. Not quite the airline-style operations they had promised, but
not bad. And then the price went to $500/lb. 3 or 4 launches per year. And
then, the media just stopped talking about the costs and launch frequency,
probably because it quit showing up in the press kits.

Tyson complains that we don't dream about the future anymore. He's right. We
don't. But he complains without the slightest hint of irony. The promise of
NASA was that the costs would come down. The promise was that spaceflight
would become routine and affordable. The promise tapped into the then-current
emphasis on mobility in the American Dream. Tyson is right that we don't dream
about the future anymore. But we don't dream about it because NASA has proven
to us what the future is. The future is NASA, and the future is stagnation. We
have all been "inspired" by NASA. We don't dream because we don't need to. We
know.

Tyson breathlessly opines about all the amazing things NASA could do with
twice the budget. Missions to Mars! To those, I have this to say: Big fucking
deal. The promise of NASA was never its "missions". The missions were a
vehicle for the promise. The promise was ubiquitous space access. I'm going to
see my cousin on the Moon. We're taking a year and seeing Mars. Sending some
highly-selected and highly-trained spam in a can for some fahrt around a
crater is not the promise. Sending you and me there for a fahrt around a
crater is. Somehow or other, that part of the promise has slipped out of NASA
enthusiasts memory. Long live NASA! All we have to do is pay twice as much!

The imagery of the Shuttle and of the new capsule is especially offensive.
It's the easiest thing in the world to verify that the Shuttle was the most
expensive launch system ever conceived in the history of manned space flight.
It is, as I've hinted above, the primary reason for the complete
demoralization of the populace with regards to space flight. And it was
promised to be so much better than that. The Orion capsule is all that is left
of that disgraced launcher program, the one that retained the disgraced SRBs
to placate Morton-Thiokol.

NASA can't. That's my new slogan. Unlike other slogans, which are mainly
inspirational, mine is intended to remind me of reality. Take any dream you
have about space and phrase it as a question, and the answer is "NASA can't".
Will we build orbiting habitats in space on a massive scale? NASA can't. Will
we ever colonize the Moon or Mars? NASA can't. Will we ever be able to
realistically dream of democratic access to space? NASA can't. Every time you
hear Tyson speak, just remember: NASA can't. And it ain't for lack of funds.

I wish Tyson would other shut the hell up or direct his energies and
oratorical gifts at making NASA an agency worth supporting. But, he won't.
He's a cheap shill, and he's just going to keep doing his shabby job.

~~~
res
Definitely a bit intense, but I agree with the sentiment here. It's a shame
that someone (judging by the popularity of his reddit AMAs) so talented at
communicating science and technology to the public could be so shortsighted in
his view of spaceflight's future. In regards to affordable spaceflight, NASA
can't, but perhaps SpaceX and other private companies with brave entrepreneurs
at the helm can. It would be nice if Neil DeGrasse Tyson were to meet with
Elon Musk and hear his vision of humanity's future in space.

~~~
ugh
Question: Who pays SpaceX? Where is their revenue coming from?

------
maeon3
It was harder for Columbus to reach the west and bring back treasures than it
is for us to reach the asteroid belt and bring back exotic materials. What is
missing is not technology (need is the mother of invention) but a reason to
go. Was Columbus 100% sure his mission would be profitable?

What if Columbus waited another 100 years for a safer option to cross the
mysterious expanse? History would be much different.

~~~
johngalt
Attitudes toward risk are a lot different now as well. No one would bat an eye
at ships being lost at sea, or a ship returning with a quarter of her crew. It
was considered inherent that any chance at exploration or glory would come
with mortal danger.

Our current attitudes towards exploration is more like the large corporation.
Playing to avoid loss, rather than playing to win.

~~~
duck
How Much Is an Astronaut’s Life Worth?
[http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-
astrona...](http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astronauts-
life-worth)

~~~
Jebus
Great article, thanks

------
georgieporgie
I wonder, in a future where space exploration is minimal and performed by
robots, and where non-war (by technicality) is waged by drones, who will the
heroes be?

~~~
sp332
Humanity doesn't really _need_ war heroes.

Edit: or the robots will be programmed with markov generators to tweet some
stirring last words.

