<story><title>How Much Is an Astronaut&apos;s Life Worth?</title><url>http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astronauts-life-worth</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>drblast</author><text>What&apos;s the point?  It&apos;s not going to occur in a reasonable amount of time, and if you say, &quot;Well, eventually it will...&quot; then eventually everything that exists will cease to exist anyway.&lt;p&gt;Why not focus on things that are problems now?</text></item><item><author>arctangent</author><text>&amp;#62; Human space travel is a waste of money from a scientific standpoint.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s hard to weigh up the relative merits of spending money on human space travel now over spending (perhaps less) money a few tens or hundred years from now to achieve the same effect.&lt;p&gt;But if mankind doesn&apos;t eventually colonise other planets then we&apos;re almost certainly going to be wiped out by a big rock hitting our planet and killing every last one of us.&lt;p&gt;By the time we spot such a killer rock it would probably be far too late to start thinking about how we might go about travelling in space. We need the ability now, just in case.</text></item><item><author>VMG</author><text>It amazes me that on a tech site you are getting downvotes for this.&lt;p&gt;Human space travel &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a waste of money from a scientific standpoint. Why a libertarian magazine like reason.com supports &lt;i&gt;human&lt;/i&gt; space travel at all is a mystery to me.</text></item><item><author>jordanb</author><text>NASA &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a political organization, but that&apos;s why the manned space program exists. It long ago ceased to make sense from a cost/scientific-benefit perspective. Manned flight continues only on the argument that it excites the public and fuels interest in space.&lt;p&gt;Bearing that in mind, the entire thing is showboating on TV, and it&apos;s pretty silly to angst if over this, that, or the other bit of it is compromised by politics.</text></item><item><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>This is about 25 years too late, but good.&lt;p&gt;The problem here is that NASA is a political agency, not a scientific one. Each year, elected politicians sit down and decide how much they&apos;re going to get.&lt;p&gt;This means the number one rule is &lt;i&gt;don&apos;t make us look bad.&lt;/i&gt; You can&apos;t waste too much money, you can&apos;t go making a bunch of controversial statements, and good grief, whatever you do don&apos;t have astronauts getting exploded on TV.&lt;p&gt;The analogy with the mission-centric military was a good one. Unfortunately, as we involve the U.S. military in more and more missions that look highly political, we&apos;re going to end up with a badly broken military, for exactly the same reasons.&lt;p&gt;NASA should have but one mission: lower cost to orbit. If they can reach a 1000-fold reduction in cost to low-earth orbit, a lot of scientific research, exploration, and commercialization can take place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>verroq</author><text>Your argument can be further extended as &quot;what&apos;s the point of living when eventually everything will cease to exist anyway&quot;.&lt;p&gt;But ultimately, it&apos;s these small wins along the way that help push humanity forward. I&apos;m not going to open the &quot;what&apos;s the purpose of life&quot; can of worms but to dismiss scientific research because of how long it will take is a defeatist attitude. You can not predict what fruits will a particular scientific research will be bring just as you cannot predict the future.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Much Is an Astronaut&apos;s Life Worth?</title><url>http://reason.com/archives/2012/01/26/how-much-is-an-astronauts-life-worth</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>drblast</author><text>What&apos;s the point?  It&apos;s not going to occur in a reasonable amount of time, and if you say, &quot;Well, eventually it will...&quot; then eventually everything that exists will cease to exist anyway.&lt;p&gt;Why not focus on things that are problems now?</text></item><item><author>arctangent</author><text>&amp;#62; Human space travel is a waste of money from a scientific standpoint.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s hard to weigh up the relative merits of spending money on human space travel now over spending (perhaps less) money a few tens or hundred years from now to achieve the same effect.&lt;p&gt;But if mankind doesn&apos;t eventually colonise other planets then we&apos;re almost certainly going to be wiped out by a big rock hitting our planet and killing every last one of us.&lt;p&gt;By the time we spot such a killer rock it would probably be far too late to start thinking about how we might go about travelling in space. We need the ability now, just in case.</text></item><item><author>VMG</author><text>It amazes me that on a tech site you are getting downvotes for this.&lt;p&gt;Human space travel &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a waste of money from a scientific standpoint. Why a libertarian magazine like reason.com supports &lt;i&gt;human&lt;/i&gt; space travel at all is a mystery to me.</text></item><item><author>jordanb</author><text>NASA &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a political organization, but that&apos;s why the manned space program exists. It long ago ceased to make sense from a cost/scientific-benefit perspective. Manned flight continues only on the argument that it excites the public and fuels interest in space.&lt;p&gt;Bearing that in mind, the entire thing is showboating on TV, and it&apos;s pretty silly to angst if over this, that, or the other bit of it is compromised by politics.</text></item><item><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>This is about 25 years too late, but good.&lt;p&gt;The problem here is that NASA is a political agency, not a scientific one. Each year, elected politicians sit down and decide how much they&apos;re going to get.&lt;p&gt;This means the number one rule is &lt;i&gt;don&apos;t make us look bad.&lt;/i&gt; You can&apos;t waste too much money, you can&apos;t go making a bunch of controversial statements, and good grief, whatever you do don&apos;t have astronauts getting exploded on TV.&lt;p&gt;The analogy with the mission-centric military was a good one. Unfortunately, as we involve the U.S. military in more and more missions that look highly political, we&apos;re going to end up with a badly broken military, for exactly the same reasons.&lt;p&gt;NASA should have but one mission: lower cost to orbit. If they can reach a 1000-fold reduction in cost to low-earth orbit, a lot of scientific research, exploration, and commercialization can take place.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arctangent</author><text>The point is that we don&apos;t know exactly when an unpreventable extinction-level event will happen. It makes sense to plan for such an event as early as possible.</text></comment>