The Economic Benefits of Space

One of our regular readers on the Facebook side posed an interesting question, which I will quote:  Still, I’ve been waiting all these years for someone to make a really good argument for the value of the space program. I’d love to hear what you/others might have to say!  That’s a deep and important question that deserves a reasoned answer.

Here are some factoids:  2007 NASA Budget $16.3 billion.  US Pet Toy Industry in 2007:  $31 billion.  US Alcohol industry in 2007: $58 billion.

Computers:  In 1962, when the space race more or less started, a computer was the size of a small house and needed fourteen guys to run it to play a game of tic tac toe. 

By the time of the Apollo program, computers were the size of a shoebox and could be flown in space.  Apollo essentially flew and navigated on a Commodore VIC-20 by way of a comparison.  That progress took six years from a small house to a big shoebox and was driven entirely by NASA’s needs for a small, power-efficient, anvil-reliable computer.  

The computer you’re using right now has several million times the computing power of what went to the moon 40 years ago.  It could be argued that the entire computer industry was NASA-fuelled and there is some truth there. Some of their work was figuring out how to “network” Cape Canaveral/Kennedy and the Johnson Space Center in Houston together and do a hot swap 10 seconds into the launch, without so much as dropping a signal.  

Evans and Sutherland (ask an animator) one of the first ‘computer graphics and animation’ companies was a direct offspring of NASA.  It could be argued that animation would still be cel and ink based if it wasn’t for NASA needing real-time rendering engines for training simulators.  Yes, the early ones were low-rez polygon primitives, but they led to things like the opening credits on Monday Night Football, or the upcoming District-9, which is almost entirely rendered in an virtual environment.  “No film was exposed in the creation of this movie.  It’s all computer generated.”  Alright, it also created “Tron”, but we’ll forgive that.

Watching the BBC World Service.  If we didn’t have cheap, broadband digital satellite links, the BBC World Service would still be radio, over shortwave, if the ionosphere didn’t get in the way.  We would have to wait months for Top Gear or Corrie Street to ship tapes to North America for broadcast.

Speaking of tape, Time Code.  SMPTE Time Code was a direct result of NASA needing a way to identify video frames down to the 1/30th of a second, as well as edit it after the fact.  SMPTE Time Code is the international standard of frame coding and editing. 

Every TV frame you see has a time code and in editing that ghastly Shamwow commercial, the editor used the time code to electronically edit the segments together.  If you occasionally see a line of white dots across the top of the screen of your old tube TV, you’re actually ‘seeing’ the time code.  Seeing the time code that way means that old tube TV is badly misaligned and the frame masking is waaay off.  Time code is normally invisible to the viewer.

Optics:  Want to know if Vladimir Putin dresses left or dresses right?  Ask the US Department of Defence.  They have camera lenses that they admit to, that can read license plates in the Kremlin, from Low Earth Orbit.  That technology links directly to the Hubble and Cassini telescopes.

Do you have a GPS enabled phone, a Tom-Tom, or a Garmin GPS?  The Global Positioning System was a direct NASA offshoot hijacked by the US Military to provide non-inertial navigation for cruise missiles. Using that same NASA-originated technology, you can download the turn-by-turn directions from your place to Phil’s Original BBQ on College Street.

I think we both agree that the weather this summer sucks, at least in Toronto, and the reason is El Nino.  How do we know that?  Weather satellites thanks, taking readings of sea temperatures and heat flows in the Pacific.  Want to model global climate change?  Where do you think the technology came from to model the location of planets in the future?  The massive computing power needed to render long-range weather predictions comes right off NASA’s bat. That also includes the technology needed to model and decrypt the human genome, as well as sequence DNA.

If you bought a new house, odds are the water pipes are what is called PEX (cross-linked polyethylene), instead of copper tubing.  PEX is a space spinoff.  A hiker’s water purification system, like the MIOX, uses an electrified brine to treat untreated water.  A space spinoff, from Skylab, to treat non-potable water from the energy cells.

Now there have been things from space that truly suck.  Tang comes to mind.  Freeze-dried ice cream is just wrong.  So were Space Sticks, a simulacrum of the long-term shelf-stable goo that ‘the astronauts’ allegedly ate.  Imagine beef-flavoured toothpaste that doesn’t quite taste like either beef or toothpaste.

To put it in perspective, NASA has spent money, a lot of it and we’ve got our money back, several thousand times over.