The value of manned space flight?

[The Firebird]

Yes. Mind you, that's total cost spread over more than a decade.

Amazon intends to spend that much on AI infrastrucure in a single year.

But, by all means, be down on Artemis for its spending.

Please let's not do an AI thread

So more science funding is a good thing, from my perspective. I think the 0.35% of the federal budget is too small.

The reason I brought up cost was to discuss the tradeoff between robotics and manned missions, which I think is relevant to the future of space travel. For example, recent missions include Dragonfly (flying robot to Titan, $1 billion) and Europa Clipper (flyby of a moon of Jupiter, $5 billion). The recently canceled Mars Sample Return mission was on the order of $10 billion, and deemed too expensive.

You can run over a dozen robotics missions for the cost of Artemis. There are a lot of ideas out there, with good proposals that took years to develop, but lacked funding.

Ideally, we would do both.

There's still an implicit personal opinion in there on how money "should" be spent that I don't accept as factually true.

It's a positive claim, not a normative one.

 

[Clint_L]

And some of us are pushing back against the futurist dream of colonizing space as a way to save humanity.

This is my main point. Well, that and that most crewed space exploration is super inefficient and mostly for vanity. But yeah, go space exploration! With robots!

Colonization is a pipe dream.