Comments on: Ben Bova’s faulty economics http://www.spacepolitics.com/2004/02/29/ben-bovas-faulty-economics/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ben-bovas-faulty-economics Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway... Wed, 17 Sep 2014 13:35:41 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.0.38 By: Arthur Smith http://www.spacepolitics.com/2004/02/29/ben-bovas-faulty-economics/#comment-173 Mon, 01 Mar 2004 18:57:06 +0000 http://www.districtofbaseball.com/spacepolitics/?p=87#comment-173 $12-13 billion is actually not that far off when you remember NASA is the National AERONAUTICS and Space Administration – Bova may also be relying on numbers that remove the “Earth Science” and Education budget figures from the total, since they’re not exactly “spending on space”.

There’s probably some arguably legitimate way to calculate $200 billion for the total too; in any case that’s not really far enough from the $360 billion (minus aeronautics etc.) total you find to matter that much to a general audience – it’s still less than a single year’s defense or medicare+medicaid spending.

On the economic benefits of the space program – there’s probably some way to calculate a couple of trillion dollars in economic benefits directly or indirectly stimulated by space spending; again I find it hard to imagine how anybody could get accurate numbers for such a calculation. At least from the 1994 CBO statement (was that pre-Gingrich?) the economic returns are no worse than for other spending. I.e. Bova may not be that far off; I just wonder what exactly his sources were.

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