But we want kids to be inspired by a lot of other stuff. Because they will get inspired by other stuff, because everyone is different and things are going to stick with or bounce off them in different ways. Yeah, kids want to be cosmonauts, but that’s not the only way for them to dream and be inspired, and not the dominant way either.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have people get into it all and be inspired by it. But it’s just one facet. Yes, it might seem that it’s the ultimate thing to someone driven passionately by space exploration, but it probably isn’t.

It’s almost certainly awesome though. Just like the many other awesome awesome things.

The situation now is not an indictment of humanity or whatever, just the folly of the time and something that could and should be changed.

When they’re instead spending billions on drone technology so that they can kill people by remote control from the safety of a trailer park in Nevada, it kind of is.

That’s the snide answer. The long answer is that we’re also spending lots of money on things like CERN, but I dare you to try and explain why the Higgs Boson is important to a layman. (You will have noticed nearly every single news article that reported on it bending over backwards to try and avoid explaining what it was in anything but the most vague terms possible.) That’s not to say manned space flight is a glorified PR program either, but in so far as a scientific achievement that actually means something to people goes you’d be pretty hard pressed to beat that photo of Buzz Aldrin on the Moon. It’s a really effective way of saying “Yes, this is what we can do now. Just think of where we can go in the future. Just think of where you might be able to take us.”

My point here isn’t that spending money on manned space exploration somehow makes a society inherently better, but that the abandonment of space speaks to a more general malaise and stagnation in society as a whole. Very few things are done these days unless they have a near-immediate economic payoff thanks to rampant capitalism, and even CERN regularly gets asked what exactly it is doing to benefit society. The answer is: lots of stuff, but since it doesn’t have a direct dollar value attached to it it is perceived by society to be something of a waste of money that’s only funded because we have to maintain our credentials as a Western technocracy *somehow*.

Here is a little story for you about how smaller scale university funding works. At my university there were three research groups: Materials, Optics and Astrophysics. Materials and Astrophysics each got half a floor of a building plus some sundry labs. Optics got an entire *building* to itself, as well as the lion’s share of the grant money. Why was this? It was because Optics was researching things that had direct commercial applications (optical coherence tomography amongst other things), whereas Materials and Astrophysics were engaged in research that was a little more blue-sky in its thinking.

So that’s the ballgame. Unless your research will lead to big bucks further down the line, you get a bare minimum of funding — just enough so that you can be waved around as a prestige item. That’s not an attitude that will take us anywhere useful, and neither is not exploring space because it’s too hard and the moon isn’t literally made of cash money.

(Note: not characterising China as “hostile” here.)

(I think I’m missing your point. What exactly are you saying with that comment?)