Why is going to the moon different from the Superconducting Super Collider

[Gman]

From the Cato Institute's Briefing Paper #16, May 26, 1992:

<snip>
Super Boondoggle Time To Pull The
Plug
On The Superconducting Super
Collider

by Kent Jeffreys

Kent Jeffreys is director of environmental studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

Executive Summary

Congress soon will be deciding the fate of the Superconducting Super Collider--the $11 billion Department of Energy atom smasher. After five years of skyrocketing cost estimates and increasing skepticism about the scientific merit of the SSC, there is now growing support on Capital Hill for pulling the plug on what would be one of the most expensive science projects ever undertaken by the federal government. The administration, however, has been lobbying furiously to spare the SSC from the budget knife and even proposes a 30 percent increase in the project's budget.

The SSC appears to be an ill-conceived project with weak economic justification but a tremendous amount of special interest support. With federal deficit spending rising to new heights, satisfying the curiosity of a small segment of the scientific community should not be considered a high national priority.

The full article is here: http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-016.html
</snip>

You will remember it became a para-religious crusade for the right wing to kill the Superconductor. But the issue for the GOP was not just the killing of a project fat with pork, but the also handing the Democrat controlled Congress a big fat defeat.

But now, Bush wants to go to the moon and that is a GOP project so they think its ok. There is no scientific value in going to the moon. None. We've been there to the point that people didn't even know or care we were back on the moon again. Federal deficits like what we are now experiencing were only an "it could never happen" nightmare in 1992. We're mired in a money sucking Viet Nam II and Bush even wants to spend over $1 billion on marriage thrown as red meat to the "christian" right wing.

But, let this Cato Institute article make the argument for us. Specifically and to paraphrase the article:

There are a number of reasons for not even starting on the Moon project.

1. Supporters of the project have never demonstrated that its scientific value outweighs that of other, competing scientific projects or the immense cost to taxpayers.

2. Cost estimates for the project continue are bound to escalate far above the original price tag--thus casting considerable doubt on the accuracy of current revised projections. The history of wildly optimistic cost estimates for the Moon Project is beginning to resemble that of the Pentagon's B-1 bomber. Furthermore, promised international contributions to the project have never materialized, so even greater costs will be imposed on U.S. taxpayers.(4)

3. The commercial applications of the Moon Project technologies may well be minimal. In any event, the Moon Project itself will not contribute to the future international competitiveness of American industry.

4. Recent experience with federally sponsored projects has yielded disappointing payoffs for the taxpayer. From the eventually discarded Department of Energy Synthetic Fuels Corporation of the late 1970s to the bedeviled U.S. space program--with the Challenger (and Columbia) explosion(s) and the Hubble telescope debacle--the government's "big" projects have been multibillion-dollar disasters.

5. The Moon Project promises to do little more than provide permanent employment for hundreds of high-energy aerospace contractors and transfer wealth to Texas.

100,000 kids in Texas just lost their medical coverage. Millions of retirees got screwed on Medicare and we want to go to the moon?

Gimme a break.

[SlavesandBulldozers]

1. does this guy just flip through a magazine

and pick out billion-dollar shit to get involved in or what?

[Dudley_DUright]

2. BTW

The cost of the SSC was more like 8 billion (although it would have been a lot more cost effective if we could have had an international collaboration to share the costs). The cost of going to Mars will be between 500 and 1000 billion. The SSC would have yielded world class science. A manned mission to Mars has virtually no scientific payoff at all. It is really an engineering project.

[girl gone mad]

3. Going to the moon is exciting and gamorous..

in a way that the SSC never could be to the masses. I think very few people ever understood the concept of a super collider, and they certainly didn't get the relevance.

I live pretty close to the SSC site, and I benefitted from that project because I was able study Physics at a small local university newly teeming with top caliber (and a few Nobel winning) physicists and mathematicians who had moved here with the hopes of getting to do research or be close to the action.

While I was very much for the SSC spending and was broken-hearted when funding was cut, I guess I am of the Carl Sagan school of thought when it comes to sending humans to space, and I don't trust this administrations motivations.

[David Zephyr]

4. Excellent Point You Make.

With the collider in Switzerland sort of needing "repair" and the Fermi lab doing the best they can, the cancellation by George H. Bush of the planned collider near Austin was simply sad.

That, and his son's shitty attitude about stem cell research and global warming is sickening.

Great post.

--David