Because it has also been Bush’s “target”. All along the VSE has carried a pretense of human spaceflight to Mars, even though, as Dwayne Day has huffily argued, the actual plans don’t take Mars very seriously. For example, the President’s commission was called “Moon, Mars, and Beyond”.

Barney Frank was simply responding to the propagandistic description of the VSE rather than to NASA’s actual work. This is just how politicians operate. It can be interpreted as just clearing the air, which would be a good thing. Or it can be interpreted as trying to embarrass Bush with his own propaganda. That would also be a good thing, because that’s what propagandists deserve. Or maybe Frank doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the distinction between NASA’s actual plans and the propaganda surrounding them. That would be a bad thing.

Now perhaps Frank did, in fact, consider chopping off the Mars leg as a backhanded way to destabilize the whole human space flight effort, but his offering more than implicit support to lunar travel makes that unlikely.

I don’t want to overanalyze what is probably just his reflexive opposition to this stuff, but it does seem a bit funny.

In fact, Mars travel is now regarded as such a distant proposition at NASA that his amendment could have been seen by the agency as just clearing the air.

— Donald

They were not in a position to wait for Runge-Kutta methods, or not to wait for them. On the other hand, if they had developed mathematics that far, they would have understood the universe vastly better than they actually did. They also might have defeated the Romans, I suppose.

It is no more “useless” than your mathematics to anyone who cares to actually look at the experiments that are being done there.

First, you said that it wasn’t personal, but you keep attaching “your” to “mathematics”. You are having trouble keeping your word on that point. This is not about my mathematics, it’s about mathematics in general. And my point is: you can have mathematics without space travel, but you can’t have space travel without mathematics. If you don’t realize that mathematics is as much yours as it is mine, then that’s exactly the ignorance that I criticized.

Second, your statement that the space station science doesn’t seem useless to anyone who cares to look at it is simply not true. You would at least be on safer ground to argue directly that it is useful, than to claim that every informed person thinks it is.

— Donald

The apparently smallness of a budget is not a measure of its value. Thus, just because we “only” spend $400 million on something does not mean that it has lessor, greater, or equal value to something we spend $100 billion on. If its wasted, it is still wasted, no matter how small or big it is.

Secondly, in spite of what I may sound like, I never consider knowledge about anything a waste. Thus, I in no way oppose spending money on mathematics, pure, applied, practical, lemon-colored, or otherwise.

What I do argue is that there is immense value in spending people to the planets — not least the long-term survival of our species and (especially if the rest of the Solar System proves to be sterile) spreading life in general — and some of that value is scientific. I maintain that you are dead wrong when you argue that it is “impractical” or not worth the relatively small amounts of money we spend on it. Just because, like mathematics, that value is not readily apparent to a lay person (in this case, you) or immediately available does not mean it does not exist. For example, mining the asteroids is likely to prove of immense value to humanity — at least as valuable, in a different way, as the practical applications of your mathematics — but we are not likely to see much of it in the next couple of decades or longer.

It is worth noting that mathematics is a human endeavor that has spanned thousands of years, and that decades and even centuries of work have gone into creating the practical applications of mathematics. Yet, in planetary exploration, anything that does not produce instant results you consider a waste of money.

Just like mathematics, the human expansion into the Solar System will take centuries, at best, and more likely thousands of years. The Greeks did not wait for your Runge-Kutta methods to start figuring out how the universe worked. Likewise, we should not wait until human spaceflight is “practical” (as you put it) to start figuring out how to do some of the things we will need to do to send human beings to the planets.

You say the Space Station is useless. Read the article in the May Spaceflight about learning to successfully grow planets to maturity in space. The project was started by a country that no longer exists, extending from early experiments on the Salyuts, until full success was achieved in cooperation with a different country in early Space Station experiments. Growing multiple generations of planets in space is a clear prerequisit to people living there, it proved to be much harder to do than anyone really expected, but we did learn how to do it — albeit over decades and at great expense.

This is an example of what the Space Station is giving us. (I don’t debate that the Space Station was badly managed and that it cost many times what it should have and that we should not have used the Space Shuttle to build it — but that is not at all the same as saying that it is useless or “impractical.”) It is no more “useless” than your mathematics to anyone who cares to actually look at the experiments that are being done there.

— Donald

I can certainly accept that it’s not a personal attack. I’m also not going to argue that mathematics funding is sacred or demand any increase in funding, because frankly I don’t like the idea of ever begging for public money.

On the other hand, even if your argument isn’t personal, it certainly is ignorant, and therefore unserious for a different reason. The sum total of mathematics funding across all government agencies, both pure and applied mathematics, is just shy of $400 million in the FY 2007 request. Applied mathematics certainly isn’t long-term or purely theoretical. It is crucial for all of science and engineering, including your pet holy grail of human spaceflight. For example, no computer can predict any trajectory, in spaceflight or any other kind of flight, without Runge-Kutta methods. What cannot be predicted cannot be controlled. No rocket would ever have reached any orbit without this particular applied mathematics.

As for pure mathematics, which I might estimate gets about 1/4 of federal funding, or maybe $100 million a year, I can quote Louis Pasteur: “No, a thousand times no, there does not exist a category of science to which one can give the name applied science. There are science and the applications of science, bound together as the fruit to the tree that bears it.” In other words, in order to apply mathematics, you have to have mathematics to apply. You never know what mathematics might turn out to be useful, not only in your lifetime, but within the next year.

For example, the mathematician G.H. Hardy explained in his apologia, A mathematician’s apology, that he was outright glad that his area of research, related to prime numbers, wasn’t useful. Boy did he turn out to be wrong. Number theory is now just as important for communication security — for the everyday exercise of sending a credit card number to a web site — as Runge-Kutta methods are to launching rockets.

Again, I’m not saying this to beg for money. I don’t whether mathematics research is underfunded. What I do know is that $400 million per year for all mathematics research together is a drop in the bucket compared to the $100 billion or so that goes to all of the engineering and science agencies. It is so small that even if you wanted to eliminate it, you wouldn’t succeed, because funding would diffuse into mathematics from other research. In fact, half of the $400 million is already other-agency funding that comes into mathematics by diffusion; only half comes directly from the NSF.

Beyond that, federal funding is only part of public support for pure mathematics in the United States. The freedom to do pure research is also an enticement for teaching mathematics. It is one of the ways that mathematicians want to be paid for their teaching. An ignorant Congress would have to outright ban research in pure mathematics in order to stop its implicit public funding. In fact Congress is extremely ignorant on these points; too ignorant, thankfully, to be hostile.

First, I agree with pretty much everything you state above — except, of course, the last paragraph. And, there’s the rub. In my opinion, if we are going to cut government spending in the sciences (broadly defined), “ivory tower” academic mathematics would be near the top of my list. Rightly or wrongly, I see them as far less practical, useful, and of long-term promise, than, say, exploring Earth’s moon and Mars with astronauts.

I would in fact oppose cutting “ivory tower” science — but any benefits are just as theoretical and far into the future as the projects you choose to oppose.

— Donald