Either space is going to become economically viable within his lifetime and there will be private actors that can take him on, or we're going to shut down NASA as a waste of time, because that is what it will be. The part that takes astronauts, anyhow; a desultory automated probe launching system may be left in place so politicians can pretend to people like us that it hasn't been shut down (and keep the pork network in place), but it will be shut down. (Indeed... by this metric... observe that we are about halfway there today! This is less forward-looking projection than an extrapolation of existing trends... for all the sound and fury about NASA's reduced capacity since the space shuttles were retired, very little has been done about it. And you can't launch astronauts on words.)
Merely having the government writing checks does not mean you get to forget about cost/benefit analysis [1]. If space can not provide benefits proportional to the costs incurred, it's not right or effective regardless of who writes the checks. It will be crowded out by other programs that do provide benefits proportional to costs. (Probably social security or similar wealth transfers.)
(My judgment is firmly on the side that it can indeed provide such benefits. It all comes down to atoms and energy in the end, and space can provide us with plenty of atoms that are rare on Earth (platinum, etc) and is simply awash with energy.)
[1]: It's probably impossible to overstate how much better off we'd be as a civilization and culture right now if more people realized this. You can not escape from cost/benefit analysis; attempting to do so merely virtually guarantees that you'll make bad choices. And lo....
I'm very much with you on the cost-benefit of space. I think with every dollar, we have to ask, "Why not invest this in education?" and "Why not have the public fund this?"
For the former, I don't have great answers, and I struggle with it a lot. With the latter, there is an answer - neither public nor private equity markets have a long enough time horizon to sustain high risk investments for such a long time frame. (Especially if it's, "How do save the species in 200 years?" types of questions rather than space tourism) If it's important enough, we can't count on benevolent philanthropists.
Either space is going to become economically viable within his lifetime and there will be private actors that can take him on, or we're going to shut down NASA as a waste of time, because that is what it will be. The part that takes astronauts, anyhow; a desultory automated probe launching system may be left in place so politicians can pretend to people like us that it hasn't been shut down (and keep the pork network in place), but it will be shut down. (Indeed... by this metric... observe that we are about halfway there today! This is less forward-looking projection than an extrapolation of existing trends... for all the sound and fury about NASA's reduced capacity since the space shuttles were retired, very little has been done about it. And you can't launch astronauts on words.)
Merely having the government writing checks does not mean you get to forget about cost/benefit analysis [1]. If space can not provide benefits proportional to the costs incurred, it's not right or effective regardless of who writes the checks. It will be crowded out by other programs that do provide benefits proportional to costs. (Probably social security or similar wealth transfers.)
(My judgment is firmly on the side that it can indeed provide such benefits. It all comes down to atoms and energy in the end, and space can provide us with plenty of atoms that are rare on Earth (platinum, etc) and is simply awash with energy.)
[1]: It's probably impossible to overstate how much better off we'd be as a civilization and culture right now if more people realized this. You can not escape from cost/benefit analysis; attempting to do so merely virtually guarantees that you'll make bad choices. And lo....