“He’s [Gerstenmaier] shuttle era mamagement deadwood”

Apparently you are not aware that unless someone was hired at NASA during the past year, EVERYONE at NASA is Shuttle era.

Jeez, you can be dense.

“Mext stop for long term human habitation…”

Mexico? Certainly warmer, but you still won’t get any votes out of the Republicans in the Senate.

Instead of blathering incoherently maybe you should invest a small amount of time and learn how to type…

He’s shuttle era mamagement deadwood and trying to survive to retirement. He’ll be gone by the next administration.

Mext stop for long term human habitation, Luna. It’s logical. and it is inevitable.

“…they are a notorious drain on the system because of how our international collaborators do business and don’t lead to much.”

Do you have any examples you’d like to share?

And how does that affect ESA’s building the Service Module for the MPCV? Should NASA nix that too and just do without a Service Module?

“Except it’s not.”

Except it is.

If we’re going to go somewhere to live, then living on a “planet” and not a “Moon” is much better, especially since Mars has far more gravity, far more surface space, and has some semblance of an atmosphere.

As NASA’s Gerstenmaier stated at the hearing, and what is repeated by everyone, Mars is the goal.

“humna have not only been thre-”

No wonder you say “Except it’s not” so much – apparently that’s all you know how to spell…

As pure research sscientists rarely address those questions, the field is not well developed. They do what they do largely because they enjoy doing it, and for some reaason unknown to them society has estimated that as being useful.

In medicine, biology, and geology those questions are considered, as the results in those fields are fairly immediate and direct.

The first problem you have to tackle is Interpersonal Utility Mapping, overcoming the constrainsts of Arrow’s Possibility Theorem. Doing that allows you to use rough dollar amounts for your estimates. (The reasons those techniques are not well developed has a lot to do with politics.)

Next, you look at the knowledge in terms of technologies and resources. It is hard to quantify those. For example, the value of Mars’ resources depends on transportation costs, which depends upon engine technologies, which depends on fundamental engineering knowledge, which in turn, and so on and so on…

ISS research presents a good example of this kind of estimation problem. How much is improved knowledge of materials and processes worth? It is tough to go beyond the general statement that earlier research has always resulted in improvment in the standard of living, and increase in total utility.

Another problem is the conversion of knowledge into technologies. Often NASA has just left expensive data sets set, without extracting their full value, favoring instead the acquisition of new data sets.

Another way of trying to rank projects is by the questions they address, and the bearing of those on current problems facing mankind. And of course then there is research into identifying those problems that no one knew mankind had.

Given that most people will never leave the Earth, by Interpersonal Utility Mapping the most valuable space research is that improving our understanding of the Earth.
Whether those questions coneern weather, long term weather (climate), or geological processes (including impact), their return has to be pretty high.

Ahead of that you have improvements of the technnolgies of immediate production, such as communication and data processing systems, but the question of applied versus ure research can be eliominated for this analysis, except to note that applied research comes ahead of “pure” research, if there is such a thing. (By this analysis, dealing with the problem of space junk is pretty high on the list. As is satisfying defense needs.)

Well, as I noted at the start, most “pure” scientists rarely look at these questions. They run on their own joy juice which they produce by solving problems. And not having ever made that analysis, some of their own statements as to the value of their own work are pretty hilarious. As are the statements of many space “enthusiasts”.

If you want to get more technical, you can take the value of continents, regions, and areas, estimate the possiblility of their being destroyed, adjust for time (because without anything being done the possibility of their destruction is 1, its just a question of when) and then convert that to a present value. Plug in any sum for Investment you want.

The Bottom Line is that however you want to fiddle with those numbers, the ROIs are impressive. For that matter, the ROIs for improving those ROI estimates are impressive.

(Years ago I actually etimated the value of my time per minute, but the numbers have changed since then, with the ROI rising, but the number of minutes per day has been falling severely. So those estimates will not be updated here.)

Except it’s not. Luna is much more likely for the simple reason that humna have not only been thre- went their first and it is much closer to the Home Planet for resupply and hardware development. And gor a NewSpace, Reaganesque, pro-business sort like you, your metrics for attempting to justify ROI is pretty skewed. But then, you are still waiting for any minimal ROI to justify the $100-plus billion cost for ISS, arent you, Ron.