Murdoc's Journal: Can we go to the moon?

Ah, so finally I get around to it. :P

From http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192999&cid=15841006:

"Many of the comments above point out an "attitude" of NASA people. This may in fact be true; however, I believe that my "attitude" is one of understanding the difficulties involved. Perhpas I came across too negatively, though: I believe that we can and will go to the Moon...it's just a problem of expense driving us to a long period of time to design and build the spacecraft and develop the technologies needed.

It's important to understand the challenge that NASA is up against: During Apollo, NASA had approximately 2.5% of the national budget. Today, NASA has less than 1%, and they've been asked to do the same job while having to cover the expense of the International Space Station ($4B per year) and the Shuttle (~$2B per year, perhaps more--it depends on whose numbers you believe). That leaves (very approximately) 1/5 the spending power as what was available in Apollo."

Despite the technical problems that this author goes into later, it is here we see the essential reason for not doing better in the US space program: lack of money. The Apollo program had a huge amount of money invested in it thanks to the cold war. Today, we don't really have that, and the War On Terror is unlikely to provide benefits to it. So why not just move more money into it from the military budget? That would be nice, but not going to happen.

First of all, it has to be established that money is scarce. Regardless of whether any particular thing that money is supposed to represent the value of is actually scarce or not, money itself is scarce; it needs to be in order to have value. Given that, there is only so much of it to go around, and everyone (in this case, every hand that's out for government money) is going to want/need more of it. The reason why so much money is going into the military at the moment instead of the space program (or social programs, or whatever), has to do with the decline of the US economy, but that's another topic.

Right now I want to address the question in the subject: Can we go to the moon? I do not have an accurate answer for that, but what I can say is that there are a great many things that we have, or could have, in abundance, meaning "more than we need". This has been so since the 1920s, as Technocracy has shown, and may still be the case today, provided our current system (called the Price System) hasn't destroyed enough of our resources and infrastructure yet to change that. Given that we live in a state (or at least, potential state) of technological abundance, making a space program would be a piece of cake. Remove the constraints of scarcity that hold us back (i.e. politics and money), replace it with something that works (Technocracy), and think of the possibilities! No more "budgets" to worry about; the best and most well educated minds working on the project (and more all the time with superior education); no need to worry about whether things like social programs or defence are "doing without" because of your decisions, etc. That's abundance for you.

So just take a look at what is stopping us whenever there is some problem with society, such as lack of police, lack of teachers or doctors, lack of research in medicine, terrible space program... and ask yourself what the problem really boils down to. Almost every time it will come out to: not enough money. So then, why not get rid of the stuff?

(BTW, it should be taken as a standard disclaimer for probably every post I make here that I am not setting out to prove that Technocracy could indeed solve these problems, because that's impossible. There is simply too much to go into to put in any kind of post like this (textbooks full). All I'm doing is showing how (superficially) Technocracy can help with these things, and thus hope to spark interest in learning more. Basically I'm trying to answer the question: Why should I care? or What's so good about it? After that, actually proving it takes time, but time well spent, I assure you.)