Do you watch sports, football, the Olympics? If not I'm sure you know someone who does. Same category as this. Each of the 32 NFL team is worth about the cost of 1-2 Artemis launches. The entire league could fund the whole Artemis program nearly twice. Hosting the Olympics is worth about 3-10 launches.

Like sports, the objective is ultimately useless except as a showcase of what humanity has to offer, and people like to see that.

This argument comes up a lot, about whether a space program is “worth it” in some sense. One problem I’ve found is that these discussions often treat this in the abstract. And then we get into the nature of human endeavor, the economic benefits of that R&D, etc.

Let’s talk about this in terms of practicalities. The NASA budget for 2026, per Wikipedia, is $24.4B. I often find it hard to really reason about the size of federal budgets, and the impact on tax payers, but I have a thought experiment that I think helps put it into perspective. Suppose we decided to pay for the NASA budget with a new tax, just for funding NASA. And we did that in the simplest (and most unfair) possible way: a flat rate. Every working adult in the US has to pay some fixed monthly rate (so excluding children and retirees). Again, per Wikipedia, that’s around 170M people. Take the NASA budget, divide by 170M, and you get … $11.96/month.

Obviously, there’s lots of flaws in this. That’s not we pay for NASA, we have income tax as a percentage with different tax brackets. But it is a helpful way to frame how much a country is spending, normalized by population. And I think it puts a lot of things in perspective. $11.96/month is comparable to a streaming service. And we talk a lot about whether NASAs budget is better used for other purposes, but we don’t do the same thing for a streaming service.

Hell, look at US consumer spending: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm (note that that spending is in dollars per “consumer unit,” which is I think is equivalent to an adult US worker, but there might be some caveats). Based on that, the average US consumer spends around $26.17/month on “tobacco products and smoking supplies”. I just feel it’s a little silly to worry about the NASA budget when the US consumer spends twice that on what is objectively a luxury good. At least NASA won’t give you cancer.

> Out of curiosity, why do you see this as a worthwhile endeavor?

to me it's inspiring and gives people something to cheer for. It also keeps a lot of people employed, productive, and at least has the possibility for new innovation. When looking at the mountains and mountains of wasted taxpayer dollars I dislike these the least.

The moonshot is a halo program that, when executed in a non-profit form, ends up benefiting society as a whole due to smart people being cornered and forced to solve hard problems that typically have applicability elsewhere on Earth.

Edit: remember the Kennedy speech — We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.

Because humans are destined to colonize space, and this is just an early step in a journey that will take hundreds or thousands of years.

More importantly, challenges like space exploration help drive knowledge and our economy; and are critical for national prestigue.

(And, most people don't focus on this, space exploration is a way for the US to demonstrate its military technology in a non-antagonistic way. There's a lot of overlap in space exploration technology and miliary technology.)

> My personal perspective is that the resources are better used for other purposes, but it's possible that I just haven't encountered some compelling reason yet.

Well, people are often obsessed with rationality, and seek reasons to do something, but there is one reason that works almost for anything: just because. If we want to go forward, we'd better try a lot of things, including those that do not look very promising. We don't know the future, the only way to uncover it is to try. Did you hear about gradient descent? It is an algo for finding local maxima and to do its work it needs to calculate partial derivatives to choose where to go next. In reality doing things and measuring things are sometimes indistinguishable. So society would better try to move in all directions at once.

A lot of people believe that to fly to the Moon is a good idea. Maybe they believe it due to emotional reasons, but it is good enough for me, because it allows to concentrate enough resources to do it.

> the resources are better used for other purposes

It is much better use for $$$ than the war with Iran. I believe that the war have eaten more then Artemis already, and... Voltaire said "perfect is an enemy of good". The Moon maybe not the perfect way to use resources, but it is good at least.

It is great to advance of what is humanly possible. Sending a robot? Great! Good data. If it dies, who cares, it does not live anyway. All abstract.

But sending a human? That feels more real. If we have the power to go alive to the moon, we also have the power to go even further. And we lost it, now we are reclaiming it.

And it doesn't matter to me what I think of the US government - this is progress for all of humanity. Also the comment section on the youtube stream is interesting - lot's of different flags are posted, sending good wishes from all around the world, low effort comments otherwise of course, but largely positive. (Very rare I think)

So, more rockets into space please and less on earth.

Go take a look at how much this costs compared to the rest of the federal budget. I think you'll be surprised by how little money NASA gets.

Now, the military...

I want humanity to continue to be explorers. The Moon is a good next thing, then asteroid mining, humans on Mars and Venus, and eventually colonizing the Milky Way.

Successful space travel is one of the few big news events where nobody has to be unhappy.

Most of the other big news events are ones where people get severely hurt, and political ones where one partly loses.

With this, we can look up at the moon, and say "Humanity did that."

It's a better thing to strive for than war.

Simply because Earth is too small a place for humanity to limit itself to.

Think of all that cheese.

It encourages kids to study science.

It unites Americans towards a cause.

The engineering advancements have commercial applications.

And at the most basic level, it's a jobs program. Look at how many Americans are working because of this.

You're right. The future of humanity is not in space, but in venture-backed smartphone apps.

Because inevitably the Earth will have yet another ELE. And it's a better use of tax dollars than warmongering, YMMV.

How many days of a war with Iran could be funded with the Artemis budget?

Because it is good for humans to have a thing to do. Not sure why this is not considered a valid reason. A lot of these 'it would be better to do X' assumes everyone has the same psychological profile as you. They don't. Many people are driven to explore and would go mad otherwise.

It's quite telling that all the replies you're getting are about "hope" and "jobs" with no actual scientific reason. I guess we're taxing people for vanity space missions and jobs programs. Makes sense.

I do much better with things to look forward to, or when I have a feeling that progress can be made. An interesting movie coming out, new music coming out. Or even better reminding me what humans are capable of above just grinding to get by or grinding to exploit others. Haven't been many moments of feeling progress lately.

Oh, don't worry, we did figure that out. What we haven't figured out yet is how to stop Congress from involving themselves in engineering decisions.

But they need to convince the people that it's worth the money, and the people are more excited when humans risk their lives, even if it is for nothing.