The Men on the Moon

This being the 52nd anniversary of human beings first landing on the moon, and also the day in which yet another billionaire used his money to finance a private flight beyond the edge of the atmosphere, there were of course complaints. These focused on the way that the government spending on the Apollo program was not spent on alleviating poverty and hunger, and that the billionaires spent their money to get themselves into space rather than fixing earthbound problems like poverty and hunger.

Some of these critiques throw figures around that decry the massive dollar amounts spent on space exploration and space travel, although the comparisons usually overlook the fact that the government has spent immensely more money on programs to eliminate poverty and hunger. Which, by the way, still remain. Articles around the internet will counter the comparisons by quoting figures; others will point out that the billionaires both a) spend quite a bit on programs helping folks in need and b) got their money when they created products and services that lots of people wanted to buy and use. In other words, if you don't want Jeff Bezos spending his money to fly into space, don't use Amazon and give your money to him. 

The thing that struck me this time was the idea that the money spent on the space program was somehow unavailable to alleviate poverty seems to treat these funds like they were stuffed into the Apollo 11 capsule and dumped out onto Mare Tranquillitatis. Money spent on the space program was, um, spent on the space program. Things were bought. Things were built. Things were designed. The people who bought things, built things and designed things were all paid for their work -- and as we have been reminded of in recent years, among those people were women from minority groups who played significant roles in the project. I may have it wrong, but I am willing to bet that the money space program employees were paid kept them from being hungry and kept them out of poverty -- and the money paid to those employees today does the same thing.

In fact, those joy-riding billionaires' rocket planes were also designed, bought and built and I'll go so far out on a limb as to say that the people paid for doing so were probably kept from being homeless as a direct result of the money they received. In fact, I think they're probably kept from being homeless right now.

This probably oversimplifies things but it really seems sometimes that the main gripe of people who level their accusations at governments and people who spend their money on traveling to space is that they didn't give any of it to the people griping. But other than in movie reviewing, griping never has paid much.