Eric Anderson says that it’s a good time to kick off a national discussion.

Two points. Can we please, please, stop using the word “exploration”? Because every time we do, we provide ammunition to the robot lovers, because one does not need to send humans into space to “explore.” Toward the end, he finally talks about settlement, but we need to make the point over and over that exploration is just a means to an end, not the goal.

The other point is that the argument that it’s good to spend money on space because “it’s spent right here on earth” is both economically spurious and weak. As I wrote years ago:

Sadly, it’s a fallacy to which space enthusiasts (and particularly NASA enthusiasts) are prone as well. Often, when touting some proposed space project, they talk about how many “jobs” will be created in Houston or Huntsville or Florida, or in the district of some California contractor. And when someone says that “money is wasted by sending it into space,” they assume that the critic is stupid, or confused, and respond, “Not a single dime is sent into space. We don’t fill up the rockets with bushels of money and send it off to Mars. Every dollar is spent right here, on good old Mother Earth.” And even more amazingly, they say it as though it’s an effective rejoinder.

But of course, they’re attacking a strawman argument, because no serious critic of the space program literally believes that we are shipping currency to the heavens.

Yes, of course paying NASA astronauts, managers, engineers and support people, and their counterparts at the contractors creates jobs for them, just as it would if we took the same amount of money and employed people to dig holes. The issue, of course, is not whether they have “jobs” and receive taxpayer dollars, and recirculate it in the economy–it’s what they create, or don’t, and whether or not their creation is as valuable as some other use of the money that it took to create it.

What were the opportunity costs of building the current International Space Station? Could that money have been spent in some way that would have made us a wealthier nation? Indeed, could it have been spent in a way that would have advanced us much further in space? Well, at least, we have a space station, finally. But could those many billions of taxpayer dollars and almost two decades (yes, time has opportunity costs as well) have provided more than a crippled facility, barely capable of supporting a half dozen people at continuing costs of billions per year?

There’s no way to know. It is, in Bastiat’s words, one of the things that “are not seen.”

If we want the taxpayers’ money, we have to make the case for how spending it in that way, rather than some other, will actually improve their lives. Simply saying that it will be spent here doesn’t cut it, any more than did the arguments for the failed “stimulus.” We simply have to hone our arguments better, and stop indulging in fallacies.

[Update a few minutes later]

Jay Barbree indulges in the same old tired, ineffective arguments and fallacies:

The late, great TV news anchor Walter Cronkite used to say, “There’s not a single McDonald’s on the moon or on Mars. Every space dollar stays in the pockets of those needing to eat on Earth.”

We see the benefits of the space program all around us in lives saved, in early detection of cancers, in NASA’s discovery of the dangers of cholesterol coupled with stress, in early detection of most diseases, in improved surgery techniques needed for repairing failing hearts, in making a child’s small body whole, and in filling our stomachs with safe foods.

We see spaceflight dollars when weather satellites warn of hurricanes, when radar systems tell us that tornadoes are approaching, when satellites log critical environmental changes, when an ATM hands us our cash, when we pay our bills and communicate through satellites. Most importantly, we see space dollars at work when doctors perform surgery robotically through eyes in space, when firefighters walk into flames breathing safely through equipment developed for NASA, when … Well, there’s simply no end to the benefits gained by science.

A repeat of the broken windows fallacy (and citing its use by Cronkite makes it no less fallacious), and very few of those benefits resulted from human spaceflight.

Sigh…