Response to Michael Mandel’s “The Economic Failure of the Space Program”
“…The U.S. space program turned out to be one of the great economic and innovative failures of our time. For a decade it absorbed a big chunk of the country’s scientific and technical resources, while producing very few economically useful spinoffs.”
–Michael Mandel, Business Week’s chief economist
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/economicsunbound/archives/2009/07/the_economic_fa.html
Michael Mandel completely misses the point of scientific endeavor. If we assume the extreme: Space exploration is simply a financial black hole, what we gain is the knowledge about where and how to take the next step toward eventual success. Humans are neophytes in space.
Instead, he’s thinking like a Wall Street banker and expecting perfect predictability of economic success or failure. These are the Wall Street bankers who couldn’t even predict something as simple as the downside of leveraging their money. But he expects much better performance from scientists and engineers in something that is orders of magnitude more complicated than a relatively simple financial transaction scheme.
Hopefully the majority of folks recognize that “navel gazing” is not productive and not even a sport. We need to continue taking steps to exploration and learning. After all, we don’t know what we don’t know and our children’s children will thank us for taking the next steps.
Tags: apollo, business week, economy, libertiny, michael mandel, moon landing, space, space shuttle, stock market, us space program, wall street
