Going to the Moon

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon 43 years ago this year.   Three years later, we packed it in and switched over to providing bus service to low earth orbit.   The vision provided by one of the great movies of the time, 2001: A Space Odyssey, suggested that 11 years ago, we'd have space stations that were big enough to require bus service and populated enough to justify artificial gravity by rotating them, and at least two permanent bases on the moon.  The cold war was still going full force.

Last week, Newt Gingrich proposed a permanently manned base on the moon by "the end of his second term", which in his delusional grandeur would occur in 2021.   Newt doesn't understand this, but this is a very Keynesian idea, and could well be the most sane thing he has said during his entire campaign.  The space program used to be a great impetus for innovation and new technologies.  The computer, microelectronics in general, networking, numerous material, chemical, and other new industries were created by the space program.  Most of these things would likely have happened eventually anyway, but the confidence that there would be a lucrative business providing these things accelerated all these industries by many years.  It cost $23.9B (about $170B today) over about 15 years, and created over 350,000 direct jobs.  Most of these didn't last the full life of the program, but lets say it was about half--that's $50 or $60K per job in current dollars.  And that's only direct jobs.  It doesn't count the new industries it created or expanded.   A business is much more inclined to open a new production line if it knows that (say) half its production will be bought by the government.  Then there are also the people providing lunch and housing for the workers. How many job/years did Apollo create indirectly? tens of millions? compare this to the piddly 12000 job/years created by the $7B Keystone XL (about $500K/job).

Space exploration is best done by robots.  They're much more tolerant of radiation, they don't have health problems related to low gravity and boredom, they allow larger teams to participate over dramatically longer time periods.  Unfortunately, they do have long time delays, so it really helps to have a human close up.  For this reason, we really do need to have colonies over the long term.  There are lots of potentially useful things we can "harvest" from space.  Pure exploration is the most obvious and probably the most valuable over the long term, but there are lots of shorter-term wins.  For example, there are a bunch of production processes that can only be done in a vacuum or zero gravity.  This is difficult or impossible to achieve on earth.  There are minerals in the asteroid belt that can be enormously valuable here on earth. They may be even more valuable in space--if we learn to mine them, we don't need to lift them off the earth, which will make the colonies cheaper.   Radio takes an hour or more to get to the asteroids, so we need to send a few humans with our mining robots.  This will be way cheaper if they live in a space station or on the moon.

The real point of space exploration is the creation of new things, things we could have never imagined had we not tried to do it.   Would the iPhone have happened without the space program?  Maybe, but probably not for another 10 years or so.