who pays the bill for NASA? most of it comes from the american taxpayer. and that is just not right. why? because the american taxpayer pays for research which becomes available to the scientific community as a whole. sure, they do get some return on their investment, but this doesn’t seem right.
let me say why.
scientific knowledge is for the benefit of us all. take the ability to cure diseases (well, the ones that we can cure.) this knowledge is available to everyone who can get their hands on it, and those who can’t can’t for two reasons, 1. they can’t understand it (and this is a large amount of scientific information, as few people would, i would wager, be able to explain what a Higgs boson is and why it is so important) and the second reason is that it is not financially accessible. this latter point needs no explanation. people in poverty all over the world would be able to be freed from large amounts of suffering through disease if medicine and doctors were free. but they are not. that is the way things are. but how does this relate to space funding?
like this.
we are genetically selfish automatons at the lowest level (think about it, there are few people out there who aren’t bonking away, and reproduction is the effect of bonking away. it’s good for our children to survive. and to survive, we must get off this rock, as an asteroid is coming, and there will be one big enough to destroy life on the planet, if not the whole bloody thing. it can’t be stopped. but what we can do is get off the planet and settle in numerous places. despite the fact that this would lead to the very bad days i talked of in another post, it seems that this is the right way to go. (if one argues that continued human existence is a good thing. i’m not sure about this. Stephen Hawking had something very wise to say along these lines “it says a lot that the only thing we have created that comes close to life is the computer virus, and this is incredibly destructive.” however, a computer as a virus itself (ie the computer is the virus) is a notion i may ponder over later.) anyway, we need to get off the planet.
to get off the planet and get to other habitable places (we need to get out of the solar system, as the sun will swell up and swallow the inner rocky planets and then go out and leave a big patch of darkness (well, it may be a bit red, but it still won’t be anywhere near as bright as it is now when it’s finished doing its thing) and that will make survival a lot more difficult. so we need to be on multiple planets, preferably, in multiple solar systems and even better, multiple galaxies.
how to achieve this? the ISS is one of the first steps. we need to know how to survive long term in space (it takes the rather speedy photon in a beam of light 8 years to get to the closest star, and lot longer to get to the next galaxy. NZ doesn’t have a space program. very few countries do. Japan, US, Russia, China have their own programs, and the ESA is Europe’s collective effort. should these countries foot the bill alone? no. if we all want to share in the benefit of intergalactic colonisation, we should all pay our dues, and yes, that means tax. this tax should go towards some sort of global fund. that seems fair. but what about the gate keepers? so far, only Russia, the USA and China have put people into space in their own programs (ESA dudes mostly use the US program to get up there and some others use the Russian method, to the best of my knowledge, and the Chinese have only put one guy up there.
getting into space needs to get to the same stage as getting in the car and going to the mall (not that anyone goes to the mall with high gas prices, the wonderful state of the economy and the internet.) and it seems to have taken the first step. but this step doesn’t seem to be very well liked.
i wasn’t alive back in the late 50s and early 60s when going into space was a way-out concept. i grew up in the 90s when the shuttle would go up numerous times a year and the russians would go up when they could afford to fill up the gas tanks. it all seemed to be like clockwork. then came Challenger and years later Columbia. but neither of these tragedies made gave space-flight its edge back. they reminded us that going into space was dangerous, but they didn’t give it the excitement there once was. i have to make this judgment from what i see in the media, history books etc, but Armstrong and Aldrin may well be one of the greatest days in human history. Gagarin’s flight goes along with it. remember the ticker-tape parade for Al Shepherd when he got back from his massive slingshot ride? everyone was ecstatic. same for John Glenn’s flight. (I call Shepherd’s flight a slingshot as that’s what it was, he didn’t orbit, like Gagarin and Glenn did, he was shot straight up and landed a few hundred miles away. it was an attempt for the struggling American space program to save face and needs to be seen as such. not to belittle the man or the accomplishment. it was very impressive, but the Soviets had already been to the party, had too much vodka, woken up the next afternoon, worked out what the hell had happened and started working on sending Ghermain Titov into space, who orbited before Glenn did, to set the score 2-0 to the soviets.) the point is that the space-flight was the highlight of the year/one of the biggest stories of the year. everyone knew who went and the name of the ship. anyone know which shuttles have been up so far this year? there was a Simpsons episode on this phenomena, space-flight had become boring. and going on a car trip is boring. it certainly doesn’t make world headlines. lack of publicity for the space program for this reason is a justifiable problem, but it also has this benefit- we have come to see it as part of our advancement. we now need to see it as part of our everyday lives. and spaceship one, for example, is another step in that direction.
there can’t be a gatekeeper, as there is at the moment. there have been a couple of space tourists, who paid the russians to fill up the tanks and light the match, but spaceflight won’t be part of everyday life until everyone has done it so much that it’s just another trip in the car. and more funding for space-happenings, research and other spacey things (nothing to do with Kevin) will help this along. the X-prize that SpaceShipOne won was another first step. but it needs to be followed up with another advancement. and a fund for research, development and implementation would do that. the X-prize was a million dollars, which comes nowhere near paying the costs or bringing in the publicit. and as No. 2 said, a million dollars isn’t a lot of money. if this fund put up a prize of a BILLION dollars, it would attract a lot of attention, and lots of people working towards a goal of getting space-flight turned into a mall trip.a billion dollars is a colossal amount of money. no one person would be willing to put up a billion of his own for something (well, it would be a way for Gates to be charitable, and it would also give him something to do now that the Gates/Seinfeld ad campaign for Windows has fallen flat on its arse.) and that money can’t come from Americans who foot the bill for NASA. it can’t come from the Russians, who pay the bill for the Russian Space Program. it can’t come from the people of Europe who pay for the ESA. it needs to come from everyone, for we will all benefit from it. the billion dollars would be around 16 cents per person on the planet. many many persons cannot afford 16 cents extra on their taxes, but these can be balanced out be the wealthier persons. i for one would pay my 16 cents (or even a dollar) if i knew it was going towards space research, rather than paying some bums to sit around their state houses and cook up p, and cause the house to need to be demolished and rebuilt at the taxpayers expense.
would you pay your 16 cents?
I would.
