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In a perfect world I would a be an "I f*ing love science!" guy. I grew up watching Mr. Wizard and later Bill Nye, winning the science fair, and getting graduate degrees. I even get to do something that sometimes slightly resembles "research" in the corporate world doing data experiments at a big company. I do f'ing love science.
But I'm not convinced that government funded science can be anything but a patronage program with our present politics. What institutions put their neck on the line for Jay Bhattacharya during covid? What institutions pushed the government to back off from childhood covid vaccinations? What institutions stood strongly against strong-arming covid survivors into vaccinating.
This is a simple, but salient example. There is not a strong enough scientific apparatus to stand up against anti-scientific viewpoints from within the government. It's an entirely controlled program. I don't want to fund it anymore. Elon started Space X with $100M. I hope someone can peel off a few notes for you, but if they take it out of my pocket, we've got a problem.
I honestly don't think SpaceX even exists however without the NASA effect. Want proof? How well are non-American private orbital launch companies doing? Exactly, they are doing terrible, and are few in number. US government funded science set the stage for SpaceX to be successful. Saying "well look at SpaceX we don't need government funding" has it complete backwards.
I mean space launches are extremely expensive and thus probably not in the perview of any company without a billion dollars in capitalization. Angola’s GDP doesn’t actually support that kind of activity.
Going to the broader point, how much waste, fraud, and vanity projects are the taxpayers to fund in an agency to get one semi-interesting project spun off to the private sector? We had a shuttle program for 30 years. We did fuck-all with it. We studied zero gravity’s effects on some plants and animals, we took cool pictures of space. But when it’s all said and done, what the public got was a shuttle program that didn’t even improve the space suits, let alone the shuttle or the launch rockets. We bolted a shuttle that, other than heat shielding was basically a commercial airplane to an ICBM without a warhead. For 30 years. It took Musk maybe ten to create a system in which all parts were recycled for the next launch and capable of landing vertically. He redesigned the 1960s era space suits to meet the needs of people who would spend more than a few hours in them, and had all of this safe enough that celebrities were willing to pay for a ride. If we’d stuck with NASA and the shuttles, we’d still be going down the produce aisle to find new plants to test in zero gravity. I’m sure rutabagas in zero gravity behave very much like every other root vegetable in zero gravity, so I don’t want to spend ten thousand dollars to launch them into space to find out.
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The space station that I always called a boondoggle ended up funding SpaceX, and it's made me reconsider a lot of beliefs about wasteful spending... Maybe there really is a positive multiplier to a lot of this stuff, if you commit to setting enough money on fire for long enough.
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