A very interesting list. The good news : the battle for convincing the public of the importance of climatology appears to have been won. The bad news : convincing them of the importance of manned space exploration is having mixed results. Although manned missions beyond LEO appear only at the bottom of the list, research on manned spaceflight on human health appears in the middle. So perhaps the public think it's not safe enough to attempt yet.
The survey also suggests that not much of the American public pays attention to space, with just 7 percent of Americans saying they've heard or read "a lot" about NASA and private spaceflight companies such as SpaceX over the last year.
Which is a useful way to pop my local filter bubble, which is crammed with SpaceX-y goodness. However :
For the first time, Pew also asked several questions about private companies, "such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic," that are developing space exploration capabilities. Strong majorities of respondents had a fair or great amount of confidence these companies would "build safe and reliable rockets and spacecraft" (80 percent), and "control costs for developing rockets and spacecraft" (65 percent).
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/nasas-priorities-appear-to-be-out-of-whack-with-what-the-public-wants/
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One of the benefits of private space flight is you don't need to actually convince a fickle public about anything. Since I'm currently in a country that scored a rather large own-goal a few years ago, plus having seen our Space Program having it's mission and goals being changed every 4-8 years, I'm at this point sold on the idea of funding Spaceflight through systems that don't have the same schizophrenic management structure that we've been relying on in the past.
ReplyDeleteMusk and Bezos both seem to be willing to say "This isn't going to pay off anytime soon, and that's going to be okay." Jeff also has a good track record of investing in long term bets. So, for now at least, the billionaires are showing to be less fickle than the aggregate american public.
Overall, I'd say "the public" (at least as represented by Pew) has its priorities almost exactly correct w.r.t. government funding. Manned spaceflight has relatively little place in that; its bang for the buck is atrocious (particularly that of returning to the Moon). Private companies can, will, and should be the ones to take the next steps in manned missions.
ReplyDeleteI eagerly look forward to SpaceX's progress on BFR, both for Earthly applications (transcontinental flights, whee!) and Mars. I suspect asteroids will also appear in their roadmap very soon, if indeed they aren't already there.