Apollo technical spin-offs

[PeterB]

"In 1971, NASA commissioned a study that claimed the Apollo program generated a $7 USD return for every dollar spent. The impartiality of such a study was suspect, since NASA used it to justify their funding requests, and the Congressional General Accounting Office (GAO), never much of a friend to the agency, was highly critical."

From www.vectorsite.net/tamrc_24.html

I know Jay has quoted the $7 per $1 figure, as have I. But according to this article, the cite is unreliable. Is there any other material around which discusses this issue?

[PeterB]

Anyone?

[gwiz]

Well, there's all the infrastructure at Kennedy Space Center, much of which was re-used for the Shuttle. Probably similar re-use of facilities at other NASA and industry sites. Even though there was little re-use of flight hardware beyond Skylab and ASTP, there's always thousands of subcontractors who come away from such a programme with better facilities and methods for use in future business.

This site has a list of NASA spin-off products, though it's not clear which are specifically from Apollo.

Not technical, but one big benefit was supposed to be the development of management techniques for large projects.

[Retrograde]

The referenced link includes a statement about the study, but no link or other cite of the study itself.

Perhaps I will not make myself very popular here, but to me, saying that the study finding $7 benefit to the economy for every $1 spent might not be reliable is rather like saying claims that there is a giant planet hovering motionless between the sun and the earth hidden in a giant cloud of invisible dust, might not be reliable. Had I been asked to prepare a shameless propaganda piece showing how civilization would collapse and humanity would return to caves if the space budget were cut, and had I no qualms about the murderous assault on economic science about to take place, I would take one of two approaches:

a) Apply a multiplier effect to spending on space exploration (i.e., each dollar spent is then respent by NASA employees/contractors, and the recipients of those dollars respend them, etc), and completely ignore the fact that money spent on space exploration is not available to spend on other uses, which ought to benefit from the same multiplier

b) Assume all technological progress would have stopped without space exploration, count up the number of people employed working with technologies with any remote connection to the space program, and claim that the money spent on the products produced by these people would be instead be put in a big pile and burnt, and that these people would instead be living in caves

If anyone can actually find the study, I'll be glad to have a look; without seeing it, I can't say if it took one (or both) of these approaches, or did something different. But, the bottom line on things like this is, space exploration is beneficial if it produces benefits exceeding its costs, and naturally there is some subjectivity about the valuation of the benefits. But purported benefits like job creation are things to cite when you can't think of any real benefits (and I note that space enthusiasts are by no means the only ones to wave the job creation flag). Spending an equivalent amount of money on creating giant ceramic figurines of obscure 17th century Portugese poets and towing them out to the ocean and sinking them would also create jobs, if we don't count the jobs destroyed by the taxation to support this program; it might even lead to improvements in materials science, manufacturing techniques, and navigation science.

This being a website for space enthusiasts (and, having a mild case myself, that's why I come here), I think there is a tendency to accept any argument favorable to space exploration without dissecting it too critically. But I suspect you'll have a hard time finding any trained economist able to make the $7 for every $1 claim with a straight face...

[PeterB]

kos said:

Spending an equivalent amount of money on creating giant ceramic figurines of obscure 17th century Portugese poets and towing them out to the ocean and sinking them would also create jobs, if we don't count the jobs destroyed by the taxation to support this program; it might even lead to improvements in materials science, manufacturing techniques, and navigation science.

That's the point made in the article I linked: "The US interstate highway program, another huge Federal project, also boosted the economy through government contracts, but the end result of the interstate highway system was an "infrastructure" that provided absolutely clear long-term economic benefits and was directly useful to vast majority of American citizens." You can't say the same about the remains of a Saturn-IC stage sitting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

This being a website for space enthusiasts (and, having a mild case myself, that's why I come here), I think there is a tendency to accept any argument favorable to space exploration without dissecting it too critically. But I suspect you'll have a hard time finding any trained economist able to make the $7 for every $1 claim with a straight face...

Well, I'm as much a space enthusiast as anyone on this board, but I like to have the facts to hand in case anyone chooses to raise this sort of argument.

The problem is, at the moment, our technology is such that the means we have to leave the planet is *very* expensive. In other forums, I've compared space travel to setting up a trans-Atlantic airline in the 1910s. Had the American government in 1910 embarked on an Apollo-style program to create a trans-Atlantic aircraft, the program may well have succeeded by 1918, even with World War One raging. But would it have led to world airline travel in the numbers we see now, or even saw in the 1960s? Almost certainly not. Historically that didn't start until technology brought the costs down. And that technological development occurred without massive government intervention.

Hmmm. I'm wondering whether I've given myself a short story idea...

[Retrograde]

Hi Peterb,

I don't think we disagree

My speculation would be that the $7 for $1 study does one of the two things mentioned, counts the effect of spending but not the effect of taxation, or attributes full value of all products influenced even slightly by space programs. But without seeing it, it remains just my speculation. Certainly, I find varying material on the internet with both of these features, but those are not the NASA study (although they may have been influenced by the NASA study)...

Nick