Manned space flight in generally is a hugely wasteful money sink. It eats up about 50% of NASA's budget, and there's no real reason for it other than "we're putting people into space because we want to put people into space." People vigorously defend these boondoggles, then finally admit they were a huge waste years after the fact (as we've seen with the space shuttle, and as we're now starting to see with the SLS).
Putting a man on the Moon is something many view as humanity's greatest achievement, ever. Even if we ignore absolutely everything else, I think this alone makes it worth it. People need to be inspired. It's the spice of life.
But if we look the future, the possibilities are even more enticing. Richard Nixon effectively cancelled human space flight after a series of Moon landings. Had he not, we could very well have a civilization on Mars today, industry in space, and who knows what else. I mean there's no realistic argument for why these things should be impossible given what we know today - they're certainly far less to strive for than putting a man on the Moon when starting from effectively nothing.
And these achievements are no longer just flag poling, but stand to genuinely revolutionize humanity - to say nothing how inspiring such achievements will be. Perhaps we might live in a world where our grandchildren will again want to be scientists and astronauts, instead of YouTubers.
> Perhaps we might live in a world where our grandchildren will again want to be scientists and astronauts, instead of YouTubers.
Sending a huge amount of your budget to send people into space because "people need to be inspired" leans a lot closer to YouTuber than science. You're sacrificing the scientific budget for the sake of giving people a spectacle. This comes at the cost of actual technological advancements. Look at the development costs for Falcon and Falcon Heavy, for example, or Starship, and then look at what NASA's spent on the Space Shuttle, SLS, ISS, etc.
The actual science, as I wrote in another reply, ends up being far less important than how NASA frames it (and often doesn't end up being used at all). And even in those cases, it's not at all clear that humans in space are actually needed to get the job done.
> Putting a man on the Moon is something many view as humanity's greatest achievement, ever.
Because the Americans have such an amazing propaganda department and had to rub it in to the Soviets even after flunking every other “space race”.
As for canceling the space programs, if it wasn’t Nixon, it would’ve been done by any of the politicians following Hayek/Friedman economic policies - basically everyone after Nixon.
It has nothing to do with propaganda. It's such an inherently unbelievable achievement that many have indeed begun to doubt we ever actually even did it. And that doubt is very easy to understand because in modern times many have lost the ability to think big, let alone actually do big things. I mean can you believe we put a person on the Moon, let alone at a time when a "super computer" would have had a millionth of the processing power of that cheap phone in your pocket? It's nothing short of stupefying.
It's similar to how we still marvel at how people managed to build the pyramids. There, at least, there can be no doubt that they truly exist - but people have been debating, and aweing, at them for literally thousands of years. The Greeks, no amateurs to construction themselves, were debating how they such a thing could have been constructed all the way back in the 5th century BC!
These great achievements are what define humanity. In the blink of an eye on the scale of time, most of every company, person, and thing you know of today will be gone and completely forgotten. The very few things that will stay with us are these grand achievements that define not only an era of humanity, but humanity itself.
And how do you think putting a man on the Moon sounded at a time when we'd yet to put a single person into space?
Werner von Braun was the head architect of the Apollo Program and viewed the Moon as little more than a step on the way to his vision of colonizing Mars, for which he'd already been working on technical plans with the planned first landings to be in the early 1980s. In fact this is precisely where the Space Shuttle, and to a lesser degree the ISS, came from. They were meant to be tools, with the ISS a very small scale version of the supporting stations planned to come with the Space Shuttle working as a beast of burden during their construction.
He retired from NASA once it became clear the politicians were no longer interested in space after winning the space race. As an amusing anecdote, well before he was the head of Apollo, he also wrote a sci-fi book, "Project Mars: A Technical Tale." In it there was an advanced civilization living on Mars headed by a group of ten individuals who were, themselves, headed by "The Elon."
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Those who lack the ability to think big will, unsurprisingly, never have anything big. Because there's no technological point where colonizing another planet, much like landing on the Moon, will ever be easy or simple. Because you're doing something that's never been done before which means there are a basically infinite number of things that might go wrong, and you simply cannot account for all of them. And this always has and always will be the same story. Technology doesn't simply come to us - we make it happen, and without pushing forward we will stagnate.
You might consider checking out the Weinersmiths' book "A City on Mars." It goes into great detail of what still needs to be developed before we can seriously consider colonizing another world.
It's one of the reasons I support manned spaceflight - sending robots is easy but limited, sending people allows for way more flexibility but needs a lot more knowledge and engineering. We'll never develop that knowledge and engineering without actually sending people into space.
That book seemingly exclusively leans on misleading arguments. For instance, literally their very first effort is to try to 'debunk' the idea of having Mars as a sort of 'backup' to Earth by claiming that even in the case of a doomsday event Earth would still be far more hospitable than Mars. That statement is completely true but also completely irrelevant.
Take a typical doomsday event, an asteroid impact or a supervolcano. Both kill you the same way. It isn't the event itself, but rather the sun ending up getting blotted out for years by mass debris/ash not only causing an extreme freeze across the planet, but also ending photosynthesis rapidly killing all plant life which starts a mass extinction on up the food chain to animals that ate those plants then animals that ate those animals and so on.
This is the sort of event that could easily completely kill off humanity, but it's not because it'd make Earth a worse place than Mars. Even at the climax of mass extinction, Earth would still be dramatically more hospitable than Mars. The reason it will be so deadly is the same reason that more people die in the desert of drowning than of thirst. It's something you simply don't prepare for. An offworld colony in this case would help ensure humanity is perpetuated, Earth is recolonized, rescue survivors, ensure global order, and so on. In fact this is the case for most of all conceivable disasters.
If there's any argument you found particularly compelling from the book, please do share. I have a copy if you simply want to reference the page number or whatever.
Just FYI, my copy's 1500 miles away from me at the moment, so I can't give you page numbers and can only rely on my recollection of the book.
Your scenario would indeed be a "backup" for the species, but only in the very, very long term. It only works if we have a self-sustaining off-planet presence large enough to survive a complete separation from Earth. Most of the book goes into detail about what we still need to develop even to have a permanent presence in space (as in, you don't rotate people out every few months), much less a self-sustaining one.
We haven't done large-scale agriculture in space. We haven't developed methods of processing extra-terrestrial resources. We haven't seen what different gravity conditions does to children or pregnant women. We don't have solutions for the conditions people develop in zero-g, and we don't know if 1/3g or 1/6g causes those same conditions. We can't completely recycle our waste into food, water, and air without a steady supply of consumables from Earth. We don't know how to effectively deal with lunar regolith and we haven't done the engineering to keep the poisons in Martian soil out of the habitat. We haven't even developed the habitat!
The book speaks to me because I work for an engineering company and I know how much time and money it takes for even simple projects when there are lives on the line. The book doesn't say we can't colonize space, only that we have a lot of work ahead of us before we can successfully pull it off.
You're jumping from the start to the end. For instance you do not start with large scale agriculture on Mars - that will be a decades long project that will start with simple greenhouses. The first missions will be bringing 200% of the food they need with themselves, and then working to establish and ensure (as there will be unmanned deployments ahead of time) domestic life support systems. And the first habs will be exactly what we land in - the rockets themselves.
I think an important thing to consider is that in contemporary times most institutions are 100% risk averse outside of war. With Mars that will always be an impossible initial threshold. Because not only are there known unknowns, but also a practically infinite number of unknown unknowns. When we landed on the Moon internal estimates at NASA gave us about a 50% chance of success, which is why the public obituary for the astronauts was written before they'd even left Earth. Early on in the Apollo program NASA even ended up scrapping mathematical risk modeling because the numbers were always coming back so grim that they found it impossible to move forward with them.
Of course that doesn't been they were just suicidally YOLOing it. There was (and will be) extensive planning and preparation, but you have to strike a balance between achieving things and working to create an acceptable perceived risk factor. So for a practical example - the long-term effects of low g, as opposed to 0 g, can be relatively safely ignored. There's every reason to think that low g will be much closer to 'normal' gravity than 0g in terms of effects, and predictable bone/muscle deterioration can be mitigated with exercise or even weight suits much more easily than on the ISS.
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An even more general issue is that the best place to test things with relation to Mars is Mars itself, because Mars is far closer to the Earth in just about every way than it is to the Moon, let alone the ISS. So we have things like the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, or AMADEE-18 that was carried out in Oman. But at the end of the day it's Earth - we know the conclusion of these simulations, and there's limitations on what we can simulate.
We might have issues with bone loss in low-g environments, we might not. The point is that we don't know. These are human beings we'll be sending. Taking a chance on "it'll probably be all right" just isn't acceptable.
And that's just one single issue out of thousands that needs to be resolved before we can start having people live off-Earth. Most of it is stuff we just don't know how to do. You're trying to build a rail network with iron-age know-how. We can't even get to the moon right now, much less build a Mars outpost.
And while it's true that testing stuff on Mars would be ideal, Mars is too far away. You can't respond to emergencies. You can't quickly iterate designs for systems. You can't easily commercialize tourism. If we build bases on the moon first, we can be much better prepared to take that larger step to Mars. Sure, send a couple Apollo-style "plant a flag, take pictures, hit a golf ball, go home" missions using professional astronauts, then maybe a few missions where you have a lab on the ground and you stay for a month. But if you're sending people to stay, you need to be very sure they aren't going to die on you. Dead astronauts are heroes. Dead colonists are a tragedy, and an excuse that will be used to justify never going there again. If we can keep a permanent settlement alive on the moon, Mars will be that much easier.
Either way, there's still a lot that needs figured out first. The book outlines just a small fraction of what needs to be done. A good chunk of that will happen here on Earth. Some will happen in orbit. Some will happen on the moon. And eventually, some will happen on Mars. And it'll be fucking cool! Seriously, space stuff is fun to geek out on. Lots of interesting problems to solve. If it was easy, it'd be boring.
Hitting on the most general issue first - you could spend the next million years trying to simulate every possible contingency and issue with Mars, but at the end of the day you're still going to have many things with a high level of uncertainty, let alone the unknown unknowns. This means that going with an acceptably high risk is simply a prerequisite - period. It worked during Apollo and it will work for Mars, simply because there is no other option. So yes, "it'll probably be alright" is absolutely going to be a norm.
And the Moon is a complete hell hole that shares essentially nothing in common with Mars. You're looking at 2 week long day/night cycles that oscillate between absurd extremes of temperature of something like -300f at night to +200f during the day. And there's also no atmosphere which is why the Moon's surface looks like a teen with chronic acne. Even the smallest pebble will pound into the surface and often at quite a high level of energy. Similarly this is a big part of the reason that Moon dust is some seriously nasty stuff. Mars has a similar issue, but orders of magnitude less severe owing to the nature of where its dust came from, which is more similar to terrestrial dust sans composition.
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As for the specific issue you mentioned - bone/muscle loss is not some unsolved mystery as the book implies. Your bones/muscles strengthen in accordance to the stresses they're under. In space there are 0 stresses so they deteriorate. The normal solution to this is weights, but in 0g that obviously doesn't work so astronauts are left doing largely ineffective and awkward elastic based exercises, which they have to spend 2+ hours a day doing. None of these are issues in low g where weights do work, and the bone/muscle loss will already be far less. These sort of arguments are like saying "Ok, we know this ship floats in 20 ft deep water, but how do we know it'll float in 50 ft deep?" Technically you don't, and you won't until you try it in 50ft of water, but ultimately there's no reason to think it won't.
Well, you have to quantify "waste" to make that claim.
There are many arguments that the space shuttle program's side effects helped win the cold war, foster modern communications, inspire generations to study science, ...
Those are good things, without stating its known direct accomplishments.
People debate whether the Human Brain Project was a failure, despite the fact that it generated a lot of new research.
In 2025 dollars, the cost for the Human Brain Project is just under $2 billion. In 2025 dollars, the Space Shuttle total cost is $311 billion. NASA spends about $3 billion every year on the ISS - more than the entire Human Brain Project.
The problem is that people are able to look at the Human Brain Project, and say that despite important research coming out of it, it might not have been a good idea (again, this gets debated). But people act as if some research coming out of NASA's endeavors entirely justifies them. When people refuse to look at things critically, resources almost invariably end up misallocated.
I am not saying that because good things happened that there was no waste. However, to say that nothing good came from (or can come from) something and it was a waste is stating something else entirely.
Not sure whats your problem, why can't we have both?
Those are definitely not money wasted - for waste look at things in ballpark of trillions like meaningless wars for made up reasons that destabilized whole parts of world and killed millions of civilians, look at various ways ultra rich and their companies avoid paying even bare minimum taxes and contributing back to societies form which they siphoned those vast amounts of cash.
These are peanuts which keep giving back to whole mankind and our future, instead of destroying it.
> Not sure whats your problem, why can't we have both?
Because resources are limited? Any money going to, say, SLS is money that can't go to another project. This would be true even if NASA's budget were 10x bigger.
I'm not sure what it is about NASA that leads people to pretending that we have infinite budgets. In just about any other area, we can have a discussion about whether or not this is a good allocation of resources (for instance, the Human Brain Project I mentioned before). But when NASA comes up, this goes out the window and we're supposed to believe projects like the SLS are tantamount to being free, and that they aren't diverting resources from other potential NASA projects.
> Idk, absolutely does fucking not at all look wasteful
It does if you actually look into at the facts instead of just taking a PR listicle at face value.
For instance, the very first thing mentioned on that list is Alzheimer's. Go ahead and look into what the ISS actually did with regards to Alzheimer's, and you see a lot of "this has the potential to teach us more about the disease," without any evidence that anything was ever learned. There's a reason why you don't hear researcher's working on these diseases go "well, we expect a huge breakthrough once this ISS experiment is done!"
This is the problem every time this gets discussed. People just run a Gish Gallop of copying and pasting a big list of vague claims from the NASA PR department, without bothering to look at the actual claims to see if they're accurate. When you do, they're invariably far less than they're made out to be.
So many of the things we use today on a daily basis came from having a manned space program.
It used to be that in the 1960s we were spending about 4.4% of the total federal budget on the space program.
Since the 1970s, it's gone down to around 0.71%.
Since the 2010s, it's gone down even further to 0.3% - 0.4%.
We've also not pushed much for talent in the federal government by way of salary and perks.
Despite these challenges, there are a whole host of technologies, medical treatments, navigational advancements, etc. we would not have without simply being in space. Even accounting for inflation adjusted dollars, the amount total spent in the history of NASA, across all programs, is absolutely miniscule to the technological and economic advancements that have come from it.
There are around 1,600 published papers with data from the ISS, and those have been collectively cited over 14,000 times by other papers.
That is a significant impact and can only be done by having people there.
> So many of the things we use today on a daily basis came from having a manned space program.
What are these? If you say "integrated circuits" I'll point out that's largely a lie, unless by "space program" you mean "Minuteman II ICBMs".
"Comes from NASA" ends up meaning "NASA was tagentially involved early on". And really, how could it ever be concluded NASA was essential? You'd need to argue the counterfactual that a technology would not have been developed otherwise, and how can one do that?
