A Stitch in Haste

What better time to announce a $104 billion "back to the future" moonshot boondoggle than in these post-Katrina days of "how are we going to pay for this" and "there's no fat left in the budget"?

The target date for the new moon landings is 2018, just about when the fraud of the Social Security "trust fund" will begin to be finally and irrefutably exposed. I wonder what kind of mood for mammoth "warm fuzzy feeling" federal programs we'll be in then.

There is no compelling geopolitical need (i.e. the Cold War), none whatsoever, for a new moonshot program, or even for any kind of deep space program at all.

It's not even clear that there would be any scientific value to a new moonshot program. Science needs a zero-gravity environment (i.e., the space station) for the current fields of inquiry far more than a low-gravity environment.

Even space travel itself won't really be advanced by the proposed "back to moon" program. Indeed, NASA is boasting that it will merely be cannibalizing parts from the space shuttles and "updating" basic multi-stage rocket design. "Think of it as Apollo on steroids," says NASA administrator Michael Griffin

No, I prefer to think of it as the deficit on steroids. $104 billion worth of steroids.

Carl Sagan summed it up best (I'm paraphrasing from a post-lecture Q&A I attended as a graduate student at Cornell): "We've been to the Moon. The Moon is boring."

It's also far too expensive, even for today's tax-and-spend Republicans.

More thoughts from Downtown Lad, California Yankee.

Washington is again wrangling over the NASA budget, including President Bush's call for the U.S. to return to the Moon and commence planning for a manned mission to Mars:

President Bush's plan to send man to Mars in coming decades received a green light Thursday as the House passed a bill funding the annual budgets of NASA and the departments of Commerce, Justice and State.
...
On Bush's plan to eventually send man to Mars, the House on Wednesday rejected by a 259-163 vote a move by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., to stop early stage preparatory work to send U.S. astronauts to Mars as the House debated a $59.8 billion measure funding.
...
The underlying bill gives Bush's moon and Mars plan full funding, while grants to state and local law enforcement agencies would be cut for the sixth consecutive year.

The Twentieth Century space program was a perfectly reasonable government expenditure for a very simple reason: the Cold War. In a post-Soviet, "sole superpower" era, there is no rational basis for the Moon-Mars mission that the President endorses. Our fiscal difficulties generally, and our other military priorities specifically, make the program particularly irresponsible.

I blogged about this issue over a year ago, in a post entitled, "Space — The Final Appropriation."

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What sort of a world is it at all? Men on the moon, and men spinning around the earth, and there's not no attention paid to earthly law and order no more.
--A Clockwork Orange

One of the stickier wickets for some libertarians is the issue of government-funded space exploration.

Is "space exploration" a public good? Does it generate positive externalities? Does it help preserve our competitive advantage globally? Is it the high-tech version of global paternalism (i.e., we have to get there first so the Soviets Europeans Japanese Chinese don't muck it all up)?

Or is it a political diversion (i.e., the Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling)? A boondoggle to favored industries (i.e., the Politics of Pull)? The Broken Window Fallacy (sure, the space race gave us Tang and Teflon and neat-o ceramic technologies, but what else might we have gotten instead with the money and man-hours that were committed to it)? Does it stifle private ventures in the area?

Looks like we might have to start asking those questions all over again:

NASA's new administrator and Texas Republican Rep. Tom DeLay said Tuesday the space agency will have the necessary funding to implement President Bush's vision to send astronauts back to the moon and to Mars.

"We have the money to do good things," said Michael Griffin, who has visited at least seven of NASA's centers since he was appointed in April.
...
DeLay said NASA is a priority — even in a time of war and tightening budgets. "We will provide the funding necessary to get us where we want to go," the House majority leader said. "And hopefully we can do it in an expedited manner."

If I may remain an earth-bound (i.e., real-world) libertarian for a moment, I find the assertion that "we have the money to do good things" utterly preposterous in the current fiscal environment. And as for DeLay's statement: Who exactly is "we"? Was space exploration a major issue in the election? I must have missed that exit poll.

Even if you can persuade me that the government should be worried at all about returning to the Moon or going to Mars, you still have to convince me that the opportunity cost is not too great. And, unless Osama bin Laden is located on a cave in Olympus Mons, I can see no scenario where you could so convince me.

There's just too much "earthly law and order" that needs attention right now.

Meanwhile, here's a space-based program that clearly qualifies as a public good: asteroid detection. And for those interested here's a Space Politics Blog. I like their logo: "Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway..." Very true.

Suggested Reading:


Suggested Viewing:

I have absolutely nothing to say about NASA's plan to build a base on the Moon by 2024 that I haven't already said more than once — namely that the "space race" was, arguably, a legitimate public good during the Cold War (i.e., part of our national defense), but unless we have reason to believe that Osama bin Laden is hiding on Olympus Mons, there is no legitimate reason for us to be going back to the Moon fueled by taxpayer dollars. Note also that "patriotism" and "our sense of wonder" are not legitimate reasons; neither are nebulous claims of "pure science" — which is often a euphemism for "zero-value science." If there is a tangible, cognizable value to going to the Moon, then private parties will seek to do so — no NASA budget required.

More thoughts from Distributed Intelligence (times two), PoliBlog, Unrepentant Individual, Dilbert Blog.

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So having said that, and having Netflixed both full seasons recently, let's turn this into an open thread about "Space: 1999."

Some hasty stitches:

--I preferred Season One's Victor, a sort of Mr. Spock proxy, over Season Two's Maya, "the Wonder Woman of Space" (good grief). Why did she, an alien, always choose to morph into Earth animals? Questions like that can drive an overly skeptical 8-year old crazy.

--The door-opener/communication device that they used on Moonbase Alpha, with the little B&W TV-screen, was cute but is now embarrassing given today's cell phones and video iPods. The hand weapons were intriguing too.

--Eagles were cool; "Computer" wasn't.

--The more things change...


...the more they stay the same.


--Now you know where "BSG" got the idea of having a musical montage of teaser clips in the opening credits. Although I seem to recall that the original "Mission: Impossible" television series did the same thing.

--Speaking of "Space: 1999" and "Mission: Impossible," did you know that Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, co-stars on both series, were married in real life? I'm sure that helped their on-screen chemistry. (They divorced in 1993.)

--Will any sci-fi show or movie ever explain exactly how they produce artificial gravity? ("2001" and "Star Trek VI" don't count).

--Best.Monsters.Ever.


Any other thoughts?

I'm not sure what the back story is to a report that the latest omnibus appropriations bill includes language expressly forbidding NASA from spending any taxpayer money to research, develop or advocate a manned mission to Mars. But I know I like it.

As I explained in a comment to this blog:

I'd rather see NASA's greatest minds redeployed in the private sector than squandering their talents on warm-fuzzy-feeling boondoggles.

The simple truth is that most (perhaps not all, but certainly most) of NASA's operations have become unnecessary and wasteful since the end of the Cold War. NASA is, with only a few exceptions, a legitimate public good only to the extent that it pursues military objectives.

We went to the Moon not because it was neat-o, but because we had to. There is simply no analogue to going to Mars -- there is no "space race" any longer.

When China's Communists become an interplanetary threat to the free peoples of Earth -- which they likely will -- then we can revisit legitimate (i.e., military) NASA funding. In the meantime, let's keep NASA on a short leash and limit it to atmospheric studies, researching global warming, etc., where at least a remotely plausible "legitimate public good" argument for spending taxpayer money can be made.

NASA has launched (pun intended) a new tool to ensure that people are properly propagandized into thinking that the space agency is both a legitimate public good and just plain neat-o:

NASA has released a clever around-the-house and around-the-city Flash site that details a whole host of common materials that do in fact owe their existence to the space program.

The animations, reminiscent of the Teletubbies' gaudy overcolored domain (and, for those is in the know, the Comet Empire), are obviously geared to children and other gullible types. They identify various everyday items supposedly resulting directly from NASA expenditures.

For example, NASA apparently "invented":

--the guitar ("special vibration analysis equipment")
--the Dustbuster ("self-contained drill")
--baby formula ("algae as a recycling agent")
--cosmetics ("digital image processing analyzer")

Of course, what you won't find anywhere on NASA's website is a list of all the products that were never invented or improved because the R&D money needed to produce or enhance them was diverted to taxes in order to fund NASA and all the other "just plain neat-o" things the government has somehow convinced itself — and others — that it should be doing with taxpayer money. Perhaps they're still exploring outer space looking for them.

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Explanation of post title here.