QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Sep 30, 2015 -> 07:57 PM)
In the 1960s, we went to the moon for s***s and Giggles - it was basically to beat the Russians there.
Out of that effort, the amount of benefit this nation got was huge. Pull out your phone. Do you have the ability to access a GPS instrument? Those satellites grew out of the development of satellite launch and engineering facilities developed in the effort to go to the moon.
Early next week I'm likely to be hit by a tropical storm. We know that in part because we are able to launch satellites into high, stationary orbits around the Earth and they're capable of multi-spectral imaging at high resolutions - so you can see water vapor contents through the atmosphere. Those satellites last for years, one of them even survived an impact with a bit of space rock a few years ago & we managed to recover from it. Meanwhile, I'm watching television that was broadcast to me via satellites.
If you tried to predict any of that after the Moon landing, you'd never have come close to guessing where it would go.
Today, the main company that launches satellites from the US is the United Launch Alliance, a combination between Boeing and Lockheed. They aren't exactly companies that get into business in order to contribute to charity. They're now being competed with by other companies, including SpaceX and soon to be Jeff Bezos's company, because this is to them an obvious growth industry - spurred by original development from NASA.
You want some crazy ones? Have you or a family member ever had an MRI or an ultrasound? The imaging software that today allows us to do those was originally software developed 25 years ago when the Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror was misground. The amount of economic benefit developed from this work long-term is extraordinary. I'm an asthmatic - i have vacuums and air filters built using NASA filtration technology. It makes my life better.
That's the thing with basic research - if you try to predict where it's going to go, you'll be wrong. In the 1970s, geoscientists and biologists studied "extreme" organisms that live above 50 degrees C. Why on Earth would anyone care about a bacterium that lives in a hot spring pool in Yellowstone? In the late 1980s, a research group realized that one of these bacteria had an enzyme that survived high temperatures and could be used to process DNA at higher temperatures than anyone else could. They extracted that enzyme and published their work - leading to the development of a technique called Polymerase Chain Reaction - PCR - for rapid DNA sequencing. The cost of sequencing DNA went down by a factor of several thousand and the time taken went down from years to days.
Because people investigated bacteria in a pool in Yellowstone in the 1970s, today we're talking about the fact that a rape kit came back showing Patrick Kane's DNA was not present within a few days after it is collected. That skill can save people's lives - we can sequence parts of genomes rapidly and determine "hey this person is at risk of breast cancer and should take aggressive action". Because of a bacterium living in a hot spring.
I can't tell you where a Mars program could lead. Heavy lift rockets like those needed to get to Mars could also reach the asteroid belt which has objects loaded with the elements we pay large amounts of money for today - gold, rare earth elements, silver, etc. Materials developed for those missions could be better building materials. We built an ion thruster engine to visit an asteroid. We developed imaging technology for Mars that can be adapted to Earth and weather forecasting. We might develop a type of fusion and realize we need a way to bring back lots of helium-3 and the Moon's surface is a good resource. But really, if I try to guess I'm going to fail. If you found a martian organism, it could be like that bacterium in a hot spring - who knows what it is adapted to.
But beyond that still, I would argue there is a point just to the search. Quite simply "is there other life in this universe" remains a fundamental question. That's one of those things that shapes the way we look at ourselves - how unique are we? If life evolved 5 times in our solar system, how do we view ourselves? It's even possible life evolved once on a place like Mars and then fed other sites in the solar system through meteorites - we could actually even be martians.
But even beyond that, there's one other level - NASA is quite simply the single most well respected brand the United States has in the world. People who have barely ever had internet access know about NASA. They imaged Pluto this year. They dropped a nuclear powered laser firing robot onto the surface of another planet (using thruster and parachute technology now being licensed elsewhere btw). They landed on the moon. They practically own social media - I got 500,000+ readers earlier this year for a story I wrote using one of their Pluto images. I've pointed out the ISS traveling overhead to about a dozen different students this year including a couple below 10. This very weekend a story about NASA is going to open as the likely number 1 movie in the world.
The people who built many of the companies we see today grew up watching humans walk on the moon. I can picture the Sojourner rover accidentally kicking up one of its wheels on a rock in 1996 - its just locked in my head. The people who built the internet grew up watching shuttle launches. We can put a price on how much money is earned from NASA developed technologies and its generally huge. We can't put a price on the best brand the country has. We can't put a price on a 10 year old dreaming about being an astronaut and what they do with their life. And that's what we're really losing when we don't explore.
Definitely for more than s***s and giggles LOL
I really wasn't thinking of it quite like that.
