I imagine that if you ran a cost-benefit analysis at the time, it would have found that a better investment would be to put money into incremental materials research.
Space is a particularly complicated area with respect to EV. I imagine that a whole lot of the benefit came from “marketing for science+tech”, and that could be quantified easily enough.
For the advancements they made in materials science and similar, I’m still not sure these were enough to justify the space program on their own. I’ve heard a lot of people make this argument to defend NASA, and I haven’t seen them refer to simple cost/benefit reports. Sure, useful tech was developed, but that doesn’t tell us that by spending the money on more direct measures, we couldn’t have had even useful tech.
SpaceX is an experiment that just burns private money if it fails to have a long-term payoff
It also takes the careers of thousands of really smart, hard-working, and fairly altruistic scientists and engineers. This is a high cost!
along with the general belief that large systems tend to err on the side of being conservative
VCs support very reckless projects. If they had their way, startups would often be more ambitious than the entrepreneurs desire. VCs are trying to optimize money, similar to how I recommend we try to optimize social impact. I think that prioritization can and should often result in us having more ambitious projects, not less.
Space is a particularly complicated area with respect to EV. I imagine that a whole lot of the benefit came from “marketing for science+tech”, and that could be quantified easily enough.
For the advancements they made in materials science and similar, I’m still not sure these were enough to justify the space program on their own. I’ve heard a lot of people make this argument to defend NASA, and I haven’t seen them refer to simple cost/benefit reports. Sure, useful tech was developed, but that doesn’t tell us that by spending the money on more direct measures, we couldn’t have had even useful tech.
It also takes the careers of thousands of really smart, hard-working, and fairly altruistic scientists and engineers. This is a high cost!
VCs support very reckless projects. If they had their way, startups would often be more ambitious than the entrepreneurs desire. VCs are trying to optimize money, similar to how I recommend we try to optimize social impact. I think that prioritization can and should often result in us having more ambitious projects, not less.