Do you think that beyond LEO human spaceflight would be worth the investment? Why or why not?
I mean, who knows? Probably not any short term economic benefit, but it’d be cool as hell.
Frankly I think mankind needs more petty, not-necessarily-economically-wise megaprojects because they’d have possible unforseen benefits associated with them
considering what even going to the Moon the first time did for us; it brought the computer age upon us at least several decades early by jumpstarting the semiconductor and digital computing field.
at the beginning of the race to the moon, the calculations for the space missions were being done by hand by a group of women 'calculators' (see: Hidden Figures). By the end of it, we had computers small enough to jam into the Lunar Module so it could do this shit itself, and in doing so we pushed computers and similar technology way further way faster.
i mean, talk to any space person and they'll go on and on about the spin-offs™. Stuff like the algorithms developed to help the Shuttle rendezvous with derelict, tumbling satellites finding their way into LASIK machines, turbopumps being miniaturized into artificial heart, and even just.
The practical stuff. The water filtration advances that were required to get a space station to be able to recycle as much of its water as possible, because you can only get a little bit more water every few months, stuff like that.
The fact that satellites on orbit allow us to use our world better, to have a better idea of land use and crop usage, and if a field needs more/less water than it's getting from a satellite view updated daily.
Going to Mars, or even just To The Moon To Stay With A Science Outpost, is going to present us with challenges we can't even imagine now. And who knows what other questions we'll answer in the process?
Bear in mind, we're doing this with less than half a penny on the tax dollar, before anyone says that doing this kind of aspirational spaceflight is "wasteful" or "frivolous"
And with that half a penny, we're getting like a 15:1 return on investment in associated economic benefit, as things developed for spaceflight find their way back to earth.
