It's unlikely computing would have developed as quickly as it did without the Cold War. IBM's Sage and MIT's TX0 were both Cold War projects - one for a national early warning system, the other as an R&D platform for flight simulators.

Most US investment in associated tech - including the Internet - came through DARPA.

Not pointing this out because I support war, but to underline that the US doesn't have a culture of aggressive government investment in non-military R&D.

NASA and the NSF both get pocket money in budget terms. And at its height Apollo was a Cold War PR battle with the USSR that happened to funnel a lot of of money to defence contractors.

The original moon landings were not primarily motivated by science.

Why does it have to be government R&D?

It doesn't, but it was, because it was tied to administration and nuclear physics and then rocketry.

Private sector doesn't do much without obvious short-term gain, and it especially doesn't do basic research. It may be good at fitting more pixels in ever thinner phones, but it wouldn't get to that point if not the government that needed number-crunching machines for better modelling of nuclear fission some 80 years earlier.

As I said, IBM and Konrad Zuse were already on the cusp of general computing.

because companies are very not likely to pay for foundational research.

I believe you are making the same argument: the GP prefers space race over war for large technological development at less or no human suffering.

I have a hunch that space race is not for "peaceful technological progress of human race at large", or "let's see how this behaves in 0G, it might be useful for some global problems" anymore.

It is my understanding that it always was about „rockets are good for dropping bombs on people“.

Well, I highly doubt that the kind of rockets they are developing for Lunar and Mars missions will be mich better, if any better at all, than current ballistic missiles armies around the world already have. Those space rockets are huge and meant to more or less safely carry people over a long distance in space. Warheads are meant to carry explosives while also being hard to detect or stop. I'm no rocket scientist, but I believe that huge space rockets would defeat the purpose, as they would consume a lot of fuel for nothing, while also being much easier to spot and stopped by shooting something at them.

So I think the opposite: we are way past the point of space exploration being directly useful for weapons.

The point now isn’t having better rockets for (ballistic) missiles, since satellites became a thing the game has been infrastructure. Future (hypothetical) missions to the moon and mars might not be for military research purposes directly, but the infrastructure that both needs to be and now can be set up to support those missions will absolutely be co-opted for military purposes.

The race is now to bootstrap your nation’s permanent presence in space, because at the moment there is a first mover opportunity for what is slowly but surely becoming just another frontier for economics, geopolitics, etc. to play out over (granted this is already happening, I suppose I’m talking about a step change in scale).

Well, it never hurts to be prepared for the war against Europaeans (aliens from Europa, satellite of Jupiter).

LOL

Now do the opportunity cost of AI model virtue signalling to investors for several years

As long as they mostly spend VC money, who am I to judge? It's no worse than rich people buying yachts.

Just don't spend tax payer money.

But they dodge taxes, so they're effectively spending it anyway.

Are you talking about legal tax optimisation, or illegally not paying your taxes?

Firstly how is this related to opportunity costs. Secondly, no one said that to create digital computer you should start a war. It's just that war is already present, regardless of you invent digital computers or space travel.

What opportunity is being lost out on because of space exploration?

Whatever you can imagine they could spend the money on, including leaving it with the tax payer or taking on less debt.

(And, if you don't like the monetary framing: just look at the real resources spend instead.)

However I'm not nearly as harsh on unmanned space exploration.

That's not how resources work. Resources that are used for space exploration aren't magically available for anything else when you don't do space exploration. The economy is not a zero sum game and human capital is not fungible.

A rocket scientist/engineer/technician/etc at NASA is not going to work on the thing we "should" spend money on instead if tomorrow you shut down NASA's manned spaceflight programs. They'll probably go work on ads at Meta instead.

Who said anything about adjustments being instant?

> They'll probably go work on ads at Meta instead.

And provide value there, yes! That's how the economy works.

> That's not how resources work. Resources that are used for space exploration aren't magically available for anything else when you don't do space exploration. The economy is not a zero sum game and human capital is not fungible.

Your 'Meta' example was about fungible human capital, wasn't it? In any case, human capital is fairly fungible in the long run: people won't train on the skills necessary to hurl primates into space, if they know that there's no manned space programme in the first place.

And to make my position sharper:

NASA and the world would be better off shutting down their manned space programme tomorrow. A lot of the skills and human capital (but not all!) involved there can be funged into unmanned space exploration.

You are serious? Up until this point I thought you're writing in jest, because all the things you mention are actually good ideas - including especially funding manned space flight from entertainment budget, because:

1) It's better aligned with mission profile (inspirational, emotional, but not strictly necessary;

2) There's much more of it to go than NASA gets;

3) It would be a better use of that money than what it's currently used for.

I'm saying manned spaceflight is a waste of money and resources.

We'd get more and better science by spending it on unmanned space stuff. Or you could even just leave the money with the taxpayer.