I often see this “argument,” and it doesn’t become any more logical from repetition (it is repeated ad infinitum by “Gary Church” over at Space Politics). This one is from “orionContractor” over at NASA Watch:
This continual argument over the huge waste of government spending that NASA does confuses me, only someone with NO understanding of how our government works and the enormous sums of money which are blown daily on worthless projects that add no value to anything other than pet spending plans could make that statement with a straight face.
There is no relationship between government waste in other programs, even if it’s much greater, and government waste at NASA. Even if the Pentagon really does waste hundreds of billions of dollars (and note that in this context, the accuser generally simply means “spending money on defense items that I don’t personally think we need”), that doesn’t make it all right for NASA to waste tens of billions on Ares.
Classic Tu Quoque fallacy:
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/tuquoque.html
“”While I wish SpaceX and all the commercial space people the best, you are all kidding yourself if you think their business model has “scalability” to the level which would be needed to bring in this new age of space most of you seem to be touting as around the corner.””
This is the next sentence after the section you quoted and I find it equally ironic. If the commercial people make money, their activity level will increase as long as profits do also. Who would have predicted the current auto industry in 1900.
I agree with Rand, simply noting that other gov’t programs have wildly high costs compared to value isn’t a good argument for NASA to have high costs.
While it is not a good argument, it MAY be reality that any gov’t program will necessarily descend into byzantine, bloated, labor-heavy morass that is ultimately high cost regardless of the goods or services in question. I suspect that is the point here.
This argument seems to have started with Wernher von Braun, who liked to say, “We should take all the money that’s wasted on war and make them spend it on space instead.”
Leaving aside the irony of someone who built missiles for Hitler (and later the US Army) saying that, it does not stand up to scrutiny.
The “conquest of space” has cost as much as a small war. The cost of the Apollo program alone was equivalent to about one year of combat operations in the European theater during World War II. Did Apollo produce anything that had comparable value to overturning the Third Reich?
Ed, don’t say stuff like that! You’re just inviting the Apollo Cargo Cult back into the room.
Given the +300 billion dollars into the NASA monolith in the last 30 years it is ironic that the Aerospace leaders for the next decade are not products of the NASA ecosystem: Burt Rutan and Elon Musk.
Things are looking up.