I think you may have seen the news coverage that there are only four shuttle flights left. Many of you will be asking why is the very successful space programs being ended and why we are not planning on going on to Mars? Well, I have some opinions on the space program and what we should do next.
Apparently several thousands of people within NASA will be getting green slips. At this time and the state of our economy, we all have to feel sorry for these people and I do. If the claims are correct, these people are some of our most tallented. The fact that NASA and the space program has consumed so many of our best minds over the past 50 years can't be without some kind of impact on the economics of the total country. Remember that 99% of these jobs are "government" jobs. The total cost of the space program and the pay collected for 50 years by NASA workers has been taken from regular taxpayers. Before I get too far I know that many of you are going to say that, "if it were not for the space program, we would not have developed this or that". If that is the case, I would ask you to tell me one item within the top 10 or 20 items that have an impact on your life that came from the space program. I have gone thru the significant items that affect my life and only came up with GPS and satilite TV and cell phones. Notice that many countries around the world have communication satilites. Most people don't know that 90% of our rocket launches came out of Vandenburg air force base in California, not Florida. With the ICBM program, I feel we would have accomplished 100% of what most people feel came from the space program. How has landing on the Moon affected your life. Is it a "fuzzy feel good" thing or something really significant?
Now let's take the space program from a different angle. First, the USA does not have unlimited resources in money, energy or man power. We are finding that whenever you put resources in one area it is means that you took them from somewhere else. For too long we have not considered the affects of transfering resources from where they would have gone "naturally" to where the government wanted them to go. Isn't that what is pissing off all the Tea Partiers? They have figured out that realocation or transfering wealth results in less for everyone in the long run. Now are you starting to see where I am going? The space program was one of the biggest transfers of our wealth in the last 50 years.
The following is true by definition that the average IQ of the people of the USA is 100. If you don't agree with that, the following will not make sense to you. Now earlier we seemed to agree that the many of the smartest people (resources) in the USA were part of the space program for the past 50 years. That is a big deal. Now what do you think the impact on the rest of the real tax paying economy has been due to shifting many of our smartest people to the space program. How about a little math? If you take even a small percentage of the working and producing population out and put them into government jobs, what do you think the impact is on the IQ of the real producing segment? It goes down. That's right the average of the taxpayer base goes down. Example, if you take out 5% of the population who have an average IQ of 125 the IQ of the 95% that are left will be 98. It is just math. Now how do you think a population with an IQ of 98 will compete in the world? It will have a significant disadvantage. I don't want to hurt anyones feelings, but you have to agee that the smartest people have a much bigger impact on the economy disproportaionate to their numbers. In any population the top 10% will have about the same impact as the bottom 90%. It is my feeling and observation that anything that takes people from this top 10% and shifts them into a government job away from the real economy has a big impact "downward".
Combine this with the decline in our schools and you start to see the impact. During the past 50 years the USA was the benifactor of what was coined "the brain drain". This meant that many of the best minds from around the world were coming here. That had a double impact. It hurt the countries from where they came and helped the countries where they settled. If you have not noticed, the "brain drain" is over. We are getting a few, but losing more. Rather than the end of the space program being a bad thing, in my opinion it is a good thing. If these people are infact some of our smartest people then when they shift back into real economic jobs they should have a large positive impact. If these people have a hard time finding jobs, it will be because they were really not that smart after all. These people going back into the real work force should help the USA to become the "low cost producer" in more areas. I think it is a win!
PS, SAT scores hit their peak about 5 years after the Sputnik launch. The space program did infact motivate a lot of kids to go into technology. Was that a one time deal? What is going to movivate our kids to do a similar thing now?
