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Should manned space flight be abandoned if only the rich benefit?

Now I hate the oppression of the poor as much as anyone...but..even if I were a terrorist, I would never strike at "Elysium," since humanity as a whole has to survive. Better them than no one. The moment they leave space infrastructure..that's another matter.

But "Elysium" gets it wrong. You see, it is the bored rich who want useless sub-orbital rides, and gov't that launched ISS.

Therefore if something like Elysium is ever built--it will be more TVA than MSN.

The problem are the space libertarians who want to raid SLS budgets to fund a bunch of sub-orbital or LEO only craft to their hearts content. They would hold BEO exploration hostage.

That having been said, I don't mind the sub-orbital folks, since there may face stiff regulation http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthr...Grasshopper-Sets-Record&p=2145116#post2145116

Engineers often get it from both sides of the political spectrum. If you want flood controls and levees for poor people in the Ninth Ward, the Greens hate you because they oppose levees and dredging, and the GOP doesn't want to spend money on Flood controls because of their stingy-ness. NASA often gets caught in between as well.

The worst of all possible worlds would be a Rand Paul vs Hillary Clinton 2016 election cycle.

NASA gets screwed by either of those abominations.
 
Mr. Laser Beam said:
Our destiny is in space. That cannot be denied. We can't stay locked away on Earth forever. We MUST expand.
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A curious statement.

How can the destiny of homo sapiens lie in space, when space is a deadly and absolutely unnatural habitat? Who defined that "undeniable" destiny?

And you feel "locked away" on Earth? Really? The ONLY place in the entire universe we currently know of where living beings can exist? That place makes you feel "locked away"?
 
The fact that our solar system is a very finite prospect, Earth's habitability being even more finite.
 
Of course we should explore and invest in space. We live on a planet with finite resources. Also, when did it become bad to be rich? In the good old days that is why you worked hard. Now days it seems people expect things to be given to them; like they are owed something. Newsflash: You are not owed anything!!! If you want something; work for it!
 
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sojourner said:
I've never owned a $100k Mercedes, but my current car has features that weren't even dreamed of in Mercedes from the 1990's.
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I suggest listening to the Johnny Cash tune "One Piece At A Time" just for grins. Here's a link to a Youtube video of this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWHniL8MyMM

Anyhow, even if you never actually go into space, you might be taking advantage of one of the spin-offs of space-related technology right this minute. That GPS on your golf widget that maps golf courses? Space program in the form of satellites. There's a rescue tool used by emergency responders that is a variation of explosive cutting devices that were used to separate devices from the Space Shuttle.

I don't really see space as becoming the playground for the very rich unless you count building very expensive "cruiseliner"-style spacecraft for rich space tourists. For as long as people go into space, there will be need for professionals who can steer the spacecraft to a distant world, repair the engines, and generally keep the rich people alive and help them reach their destinations as expediently as possible.
 
I reject the premise, and this false idea that everything that benefits the rich harms the poor and vice versa. The world does not have a finite amount of wealth that can either be distributed evenly or unevenly. Capital generates capital and it is easier to bring the poor up if you don't try to do it by dragging the rich down.

In the real world if there was an 'Elysium', there may be a paradise that only the rich can afford to live on, but those of us left down on Earth would sure benefit from building it, maintaining it, then trading with it, ending up richer than they were before. It's easy to blame the rich for being poor, until they invest their money in a company and that company gives you a job.

And I don't think man has a 'destiny' to expand, but we'd sure be a stronger race for expanding into space. You know, exploring the final frontier. To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go... It's not an entirely pragmatic argument and doesn't have to be. We should expand into space because it's there.
 
R. Star said:
Wow, people will blame the rich for anything these days.
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Certain types of people like to believe in a small, wealthy minority that they can claim is manipulating everything to keep them down in some sort of vast conspiracy. It keeps them from having to take responsibility for their own epic fails.

See also: "Der Juden."
 
Yminale said:
The movie "Elysium" has gotten me thinking, if spaceflight and colonization only benefits the rich, why should the rest of the 99% support and fund space.
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They shouldn't, and for the most part, they DON'T. The taxpayer's present contribution to space exploration is something like 2 cents out of every dollar collected in taxes; you probably loose more money than just sitting on your couch.

OTOH, the rest of the 99% stand to benefit substantially from space exploration if and when the resources of space become available for consumption to the people on Earth. This, too, is one of the major plot elements of Elysium.;)

The assumption has always been that private companies like SpaceX would make access to space affordable. Even with the most optimistic projection, the average person could only afford sub-orbital flight.
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The "average person" could NEVER afford a sub-orbital flight.

When people like Elon Musk mean by "affordable" is really on the order of "millions instead of billions." The kind of space missions that could be paid for by state or even city governments (on behalf of universities or science programs) or by medium/large corporations instead of global superpowers. Space won't be accessible to private citizens until there's a couple million people living there who have to provide services to one another, but that's a very different concept.

So are you comfortable with the 1% forming a breakaway society while the rest of us die on this rock?
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No, but neither would I be all that surprised if they tried it.
 
Crazy Eddie said:
The taxpayer's present contribution to space exploration is something like 2 cents out of every dollar collected in taxes;
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Actually, it's less than 0.5%, which is why the Penny4NASA campaign exists. They want to get federal funding for NASA up to at least 1% of the federal budget.
 
^ If it were up to me, we'd spend at least as much on space exploration as we do on the military. And that's not even to say the two are mutually exclusive; who needs aircraft carriers when you've got Rods from God?

Even without some innovative new technology, even without a revolutionary drive system that makes space travel cheap and easy, $500 billion would be enough money to brute-force our way to full blown lunar colonization in a very short timeframe. The real issue with space exploration is not that it's expensive or dangerous, it's that Americans stupid and crazy and won't tolerate spending tens of billions of dollars on things that don't explode.
 
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