Why space programs and military research programs, btw, do tend to be important is that they simply are in fields where ordinary R & D wouldn't venture out to. Space is a quite extreme environment and you wouldn't start with those kinds of requirements at the first place on Earth. And during the Cold War, anything that even remotely might give an edge to Russia was deemed important to study by the military. Similar interest wouldn't happen if there wouldn't be a space program (or a Cold war arms race). This is why a space program is beneficial: it requires a lot of fields with a lot of high-tech.Montegriffo wrote:But you have to prove that none of these developments would have happened without manned space flight which is a whole different matter. Many of them were developed independently because there is a need for them here on Earth. Some of the best solar panels currently available come from Norway which as far as I know didn't have to put a man in space to achieve that. These lists on their own are not enough to convince me that a trip to Mars is going to benefit mankind enough that it is worth the expense.
What is provable basically is that serious spending in R & D works and is very important for future economic growth. Period. And if the government isn't involved, then the Private sector simply cannot pick it up. Private R & D cannot fill in the role as it has to pay itself up basically immediately: they cannot put money into something that might have economic benefits later which nobody can yet predict. The other thing here is basic research, not applied development for some product. The simply fact is that actually both NASA and the military in general (in the US) has supported a lot of basic research, which no universities could sponsor on their own. Only some large corporations like a Google etc. can even put money into basic research, but those are the exceptions.
I'll give an example from my country of what happens when R & D at the government level is cut.
Before the local National Institute for Health did a lot of medical research and basically had large laboratories where they could By themselves handle medical samples. Then someone had the bright idea that this was a useless waste of money, not what the institute should do, that the universities could do the research, the Private sector the laboratory stuff (checking samples etc). End result: as the universities didn't naturally get any increased spending, the medical research simply stopped. As there was no Private sector companies to do the laboratory stuff so well, now Finland is shipping it's health sample's to be checked in Poland. Basically the present NIH is a bureacracy that generates paper and recommendations and has no contact to medical research, where it was world class at least in some areas earlier.
Now naturally there is inefficiency in government run departments. And the politics, that everything has to be spread around to every place because of pork barrell politics (and not have everything concentrated in one place). Yet nothing is simply good or bad and especially shouldn't be looked from some ideological perspective.
