BIG SPACE.(The Talk of the Town)(space policy)

Last week, when President Bush unveiled his plan to establish a moon base and send a manned expedition to Mars, his stated reasons were, for the most part, high-flown. The plan, he argued, would revolutionize our understanding of the universe, allow us to go to worlds far beyond our own, and "lift our national spirit." But, in deference to reality, the President spent a few moments discussing the economic benefits, citing the usual list of innovations that we owe to nasa and promising that his plan would lead to a new generation of "technological breakthroughs." Our investment in space, he said, would be "repaid many times over."

The economic case for space exploration has always been important, because of the vast costs and the indeterminate benefits. And so for forty years we've heard about the ways in which the space program has helped invigorate the economy and solidify America's technological dominance. Really, though, there is no economic case for space exploration. If the goal is to increase employment or spur technological innovation, then the dollars invested in nasa would be better spent elsewhere, no matter how thrilling and magnificent the recent Mars landing and the rest of our achievements in space may be.

In the fifties and sixties, military and space research did help make the United States a technological powerhouse, in large part because of the demand that was created for products (like semiconductors) that would otherwise have taken longer to develop. But this effect--which economists call "technological acceleration"--was already diminishing when the Apollo program got under way. By the mid-sixties, civilian demand was driving the development of high-technology products.

What about those legendary spinoffs and spillovers? Many of the innovations we credit to the space program--such as Teflon and Velcro--were actually invented outside it. Others originated in space research, but the return the government got on its R. & D. investment was fairly slim. To invent something like the cat scanner, to use one of Bush's examples of nasa innovations, it would be a lot cheaper and wiser simply to invest in medical research, rather than in moon shots. nasa claims, for example, that the lunar expeditions gave us the cordless drill; what a lot of trouble to go through to improve upon the handyman special.

A major increase in space spending may actually have the unfortunate effect of crowding out more terrestrially oriented research and development. The supply of American scientists and engineers is (in the short term, at least) relatively fixed, so, if nasa starts spending billions more, scientists and engineers will merely be lured away from other jobs, mostly in private companies. as ...