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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34500 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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With SpaceX's Starship having finished it's static fire tests they will soon be gearing up for the first orbital launch. So far, space travel and industry have avoided getting polarized (although Musk has gotten some frankly ridiculous hit pieces for the whole Ukraine Starlink fiasco), but I don't expect this to continue as it gets cheaper and easier to sent things to and from space.

If you look at the cost per metric ton for space travel right now, it's around $11.3 million/ton. That means that if you want to get a ton of material into space, you're shelling out quite a bit. This limits space endeavours to major governments or multinational corporations for the most part.

According to Musk, Starship will be able to lower the cost to only $20,000 per metric ton to get into space. This is multiple orders of magnitude in terms of cost reduction. Now I'm not super optimistic this number will be hit anytime soon, but if it is, it will enter us into a new era when it comes to space and technology.

My question is - how does this play into the Culture War? Musk has been increasingly right-coded, but it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left. On top of this, there's a strong nationalist angle if we can get and maintain an edge on Russia/China in space industry.

I'm curious if anyone else has more fleshed out ideas on this topic, in terms of how space industry will affect the Culture War. Or do most of y'all think this is a non-starter and nobody will care about space in 5-10 years?

If you look at the cost per metric ton for space travel right now, it's around $11.3

$11.3 million.

Also, the culture war will probably be kept out of space development due to how important it is. Space is the ultimate high ground and it is easy to command. You can't really block off thousands of kilometres of shoreline very easily, even with aircraft carriers. There's the horizon to worry about, land-based missiles, aircraft, ships can stay in protected harbors. (you really need satellites to watch for blockade-runners)

But with space, you can watch everything that happens. There is no stealth in space and almost no stealth from space. I suppose you could hide mobile missile launchers in warehouses or armored trains, play shell games like we do with ICBMs.

But you're certainly not going to be able to hide or defend your grounded spaceships. These things are huge, obvious and vulnerable. Even if you put in a lot of effort, someone will spot them hours before they launch, while they're all vulnerable on the launchpad or getting ready to launch. Then down comes a laser or kinetic shell and you've lost a billion dollar spaceship to $30 worth of electricity or a $50,000 chunk of processed moon-rock. Imagine if the Royal Navy could just charge into French ports during the Napoleonic War, or if both sides knew precisely where eachother's ships were? It would be a massive stomp for the British, for the stronger navy.

Control of space means control of nuclear weapons. Powerful lasers in space counter nuclear missiles flying on a high arc. Even if they fly low, they are still fairly visible from space and could be targeting by patrolling aircraft with less-powerful lasers, or ground based missiles. Controlling space means you could deny the enemy reconnaissance satellites, so they wouldn't have time to see your first-strike until it came across the horizon, weakening their ability to launch a second strike. Or you could launch rods from god style attacks, which are even faster than ICBMs.

It's much easier to build spaceships in low-gravity than in high-gravity conditions like Earth. Flying from Earth imposes immense design costs, you need a very sturdy ship with very high thrust-weight ratios capable of leaving our atmosphere. It's much more efficient to have low thrust engines that burn for a long time. Controlling space means controlling the best places to build spaceships, in the asteroid belt. There is a ludicrous amount of construction materials there.

Controlling space means total world domination.

Interesting points from a strategic perspective. How do you feel about the possibility of an international space treaty /non aggression clause going forward?

Why would the strongest states adhere to a treaty that limits their strength?

There's SALT, START and the test ban treaty as a tentative example. But most of that has broken down by now, along with the anti-ballistic missile treaty.

Another example would be the Washington Naval Treaty which set everyone's capital ship strength at a certain ratio to the British. The Japanese and Germans cheated and then WW2 happened, whereupon everyone left. It was a major failure. Similarly, the treaty on conventional forces in Europe has broken down.

My belief is that space is more like conventional military strength in that there's rough parity between attack and defence. The more warships you have, the better you are proportionately.

With nuclear weapons, it's easy to defend and hard to attack in strategic terms. Destroying the enemy's nuclear weapons in a first-strike is very difficult, they can hide them in various places. And the defending side's missiles can probably get through missile defense, that's still very cost-inefficient. So it's much harder to gain a decisive advantage such that you can really exploit your nuclear forces. Mutually Assured Destruction.

Arms control treaties make most sense for nuclear weapons, less sense for symmetrical weapons like capital ships or conventional forces that can attack and defend. Space is more like the latter. Nuclear treaties are already breaking down, so what chance is there for space?

There already technically is the Outer Space Treaty (ratified by countries that matter) and Moon Treaty (which hasn't), which probably tells you the strong limits on what can be done from a political sense. As does the various questions and problems related to anti-satellite weaponry development.

It lasts until someone sees use in putting a weapon in space, which won't be till we are beyond the moon

I’d imagine a weapon in LEO would be extremely devastating, why beyond the moon? Also what does beyond the moon mean in this context?

Yes, but any weapon in LEO can be based on the ground like an ICBM or modern ASAT weapons.

Maybe "beyond the moon" as in Side 3?

I have no strong opinions on the role of space in future warfare, but I would raise a note of caution that reading your post really reminds me of the early 20th century air power advocates and the apocalyptic visions they conjured of entire nations reduced to rubble and madness by bombardment from the air.

Control of space may prove to be decisive in future conflicts, or it may prove to be just another theatre in war. It's far too early to call it either way.

Well they were right, were they not? Nuclear weapons can raze large countries within an afternoon. The missile (with decoys) will always get through! There are wars fought without nuclear weapons but the whole global security system is founded on the basis of nuclear weapons, it's like the sea in which we fish swim. It's not the Russian army that deters NATO support for Ukraine and direct intervention, it's their nuclear arsenal.

The early 20th century air power advocates were directionally correct but were just one or two orders of magnitude off in their predictions. North Korea was reduced to rubble by conventional strategic bombing, for instance. Basically all urban centers were razed. If they were alone, they would've capitulated.

the apocalyptic visions they conjured of entire nations reduced to rubble and madness by bombardment from the air.

Well, yes? The "bomber will always get through" speech turned out to be grossly overstated once the bomber was put up against radar and better fighters and flak cannons, but the risk of being reduced to rubble and madness is one reason why nations with strategic bombing capabilities (much less nuclear bombing capabilities) have avoided anything more than proxy wars with each other ever since.

This is a good post, but if I'm not mistaken, are there not treaties/bans against space weapons for reasons like these? Or was that just for things like "storing nukes in orbit"?

Yes there are treaties against nuclear weapons in space generally and against conventional weapons on planetary bodies like the Moon.

But all this will change once it becomes more practical. The treaty doesn't even mention mining in space, there's no concept of property in the Outer Space Treaty aside from launched objects. You can't claim the Moon for instance.

No, treaties agreed to by spacefaring nations only ban WMD in space.

Treaties banning weapons only work when people either can't or don't want to build those weapons. We have treaties banning chemical weapons because no one wants to either use them or have them used on them. On the other hand, we had some treaties limiting the Russian and US nuclear arsenals because neither of us wanted to keep burning capital on the race.

Neither is the case here - the US is poised to gain a quantity advantage in space that no one outside of China will be able to match. (And China only if they can keep fast-following, since they're behind right now.) You can be sure the brass in the Space Force would love nothing more than to scale up Delta 9.

There is no stealth in space.

Just FYI, and also this. Obviously the programmes are super classified so we don't know how stealthy the satellites are, but hiding stuff in space isn't impossible.

Good point, I was referencing the old hard sci-fi idiom that there is no stealth in space. This really applies most towards things that move (especially if there are crew), satellites are a partial exception I suppose. Gigantic plumes of fire are pretty obvious.

But how do you launch something covertly? If there are rockets involved, there's huge plumes of fire. I suppose once it's up a satellite could be made out of radar-absorbent material - but our sensors are very very good. You can't really have your satellite be optimally radar-absorbent from all angles, some shapes have to be there to accomplish the purpose of the satellite, solar panels or whatever.

Heat or light signatures don't just disappear into the atmosphere like with aircraft. And spy satellites have to transmit information, which means they're sending a signal out. I suppose they could use some kind of point-to-point communication to hide. But there's going to be some heat created when you send a signal, heat that needs to radiate away. The background temperature of space is very low! They could also pretend to be civilian satellites I guess. But that would make it harder to put weapons on them.

I suspect that for the near future some combination of masquerading as or hiding on civilian launch vehicles, blinding enemy sensors via on-the-ground or on-the-web sabotage, or massed launches of decoys will enable some weak form of stealth or at least maskirovka when it comes to space warfare. There are also some crazier ideas out there involving active cooling with liquid hydrogen that I don't put too much stock in but would make for a good Tom Clancy novel.

Since Tom Clancy is dead, I already planned to add that as a plot point to my own hard scifi novel. Funny that I see the hydrogen steamer referenced here of all places!

I thought this place could do with a little good old fashioned space talk. ;)

but the satellite was seen and tracked later that year and in the mid-1990s by amateur observers.

Yeah, not sure how well that's working out for them.

The classic "no stealth in space" does refer to propelled craft, starting from torchships and working its way down. You can avoid most of the objections by a fully passive orbit without a crew demanding life support. But you're still left with an object that's warmer than the 2.7 Kelvin background, at least when it's on the sunny side of the planet. Or microburning to adjust orbit. Or maybe even powering up to communicate.

I went to find some polling evidence, and it seems that support for space exploration, at least in principle, is pretty strong across the board, and remarkably similar numbers of Dems, Reps and Independents in US support space spending.

At 20k it's still not very consumer facing, so it has low signalling potential and therefore low culture war potential. Maybe some rich people will do some tourism and we'll get a 'White Lotus' season on the moon so the educated class can sneer at the upper class while envying them. The blue tribe is anti-carbon emissions but they'll still fly to see family on the holidays. If there is a ubiquitous consumer use case like that people will use it, but I don't think there will be.

Whatever industrial and communications use case exists will be the most important one and that won't have big culture war implications.

Hundreds of millions of Americans routinely incur bills higher than that. $20k is cheaper per ton that many normal cars cost per ton.

IDK, that's like ten bucks a pound -- I can't get much shipped overseas for that rate.

(obviously there'd have to be somebody aggregating 'space stuff' into more transport friendly packages, who would probably take a big cut -- but if people want their ashes or science experiments sent into orbit, it could happen)

Yeah I guess the price is less why it's not consumer facing and just that most people won't have much reason to send things into space. Science experiments will be mostly institutional. Scattering grandpas ashes in space doesn't seem that different from say, flying to some natural spot to scatter ashes which doesn't have much culture war valence.

I mean, I weigh like 200 pounds, and routinely pay ~$2000 to go places less interesting than space?

This would not be so fun if I were stacked like cordwood in a container with a thousand other people, so I'm sure the price will be more -- but it's indicative that space tourism is moving away from "eccentric hundred-millionaire" towards "early career tech worker", which I think will have CW implications?

I have a feeling the cost to launch and the cost due to demand is going to come into play and push price up quite a bit. I don't think these things are going to be produced at anywhere near the scale that would allow for a $2000 trip up any time soon.

I don't agree. A considerable amount of effort was and very explicitly is being into designing the machine that builds the machines. The engines are being produced at a rate of nearly one a day and the general design and choice of construction methods and materials point to ease of fabrication being a primary design constraint. It is very plausible at this point that these will be constructed in quantities at least equal to that of widebody aircraft, and since they are ordinarily not expended, as with aircraft, that fleet does not rapidly deplete itself.

One problem is that all the current (human-rated) vehicles aren’t designed for affordable trips to space— they’re designed around constraints that will make them prohibitively expensive.

Dragon is for NASA (nuff said), New Shephard is boring (probably the closest to scaling into the vicinity of affordable though), and from my armchair virgin galactic seems like an expensive deathtrap (no in-flight abort? Manual controls?). Realistically, Starship won’t carry humans to orbit for many years (if ever) because of launch abort feasibility issues.

Maybe the next iteration of tourism vehicles will be more promising (for the less-wealthy among us). Something like a V2 of Dragon but built for tourism and cost from the beginning maybe. Flying humans reliably is wicked hard.

That's why I said "I'm sure the price will be more" -- but if it's 10x more, that is well within the reach of a whole bunch of people. Even if it's 100x, some dude working for Facebook probably has worse things he could blow his bonus on.

My question is - how does this play into the Culture War? Musk has been increasingly right-coded, but it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left. On top of this, there's a strong nationalist angle if we can get and maintain an edge on Russia/China in space industry.

I don't see how it will affect the culture wars much, for the main reason that progress is so gradual compared to other issues. If anything, things have been regressing: no more manned missions, but more probes. Musk providing coverage for Ukraine via Starlink scored him some points on the left .

Musk providing coverage for Ukraine via Starlink scored him some points on the left .

Did it? How many and for how long? Somewhere in between "but we can't subsidize it ourselves indefinitely" and "but we're trying to not let it be weaponized on drones", the backlash against them for not doing more seems to have greatly exceeded the original points, predictably.

I believe manufacturing is a far more relevant market than mining. There are a bunch of things that can be made better with zero/low gravity manufacturing.

https://varda.com/

Mining seems to become more interesting as a way to get materials that are already in space rather than for earth uses.

Finally, Gundanium/Endo-Steel will be real.

Space missions were always opposed by part of the left and supported by part of the right, see Ayn Rand on Apollo 11:

In The New York Times of July 21, 1969, there appeared two whole pages devoted to an assortment of reactions to the lunar landing, from all kinds of prominent and semi-prominent people who represent a cross-section of our culture.

It was astonishing to see how many ways people could find to utter variants of the same bromides. Under an overwhelming air of staleness, of pettiness, of musty meanness, the collection revealed the naked essence (and spiritual consequences) of the basic premises ruling today’s culture: irrationalism — altruism — collectivism.

The extent of the hatred for reason was somewhat startling. (And, psychologically, it gave the show away: one does not hate that which one honestly regards as ineffectual.) It was, however, expressed indirectly, in the form of denunciations of technology. (And since technology is the means of bringing the benefits of science to man’s life, judge for yourself the motive and the sincerity of the protestations of concern with human suffering.)

“But the chief reason for assessing the significance of the moon landing negatively, even while the paeans of triumph are sung, is that this tremendous technical achievement represents a defective sense of human values, and of a sense of priorities of our technical culture.” “We are betraying our moral weakness in our very triumphs in technology and economics.” “How can this nation swell and stagger with technological pride when it is so weak, so wicked, so blinded and misdirected in its priorities? While we can send men to the moon or deadly missiles to Moscow or toward Mao, we can’t get foodstuffs across town to starving folks in the teeming ghettos.” “Are things more important than people? I simply do not believe that a program comparable to the moon landing cannot be projected around poverty, the war, crime, and so on.” “If we show the same determination and willingness to commit our resources, we can master the problems of our cities just as we have mastered the challenge of space.” “In this regard, the contemporary triumphs of man’s mind — his ability to translate his dreams of grandeur into awesome accomplishments — are not to be equated with progress, as defined in terms of man’s primary concern with the welfare of the masses of fellow human beings . . . the power of human intelligence which was mobilized to accomplish this feat can also be mobilized to address itself to the ultimate acts of human compassion.” “But, the most wondrous event would be if man could relinquish all the stains and defilements of the untamed mind . . .”

Given how closely space tech has historically been tied to defense, I don't exactly see it as a progressive darling.

The current crop of utopian technologists derives more from reading Iain Banks than Marx. And the Gay part of his work, let alone the Communism, has always taken a backseat to the Fully Automated and especially Luxury elements.

We're probably overrepresented in tech-hub cities, and we're definitely overrepresented on the Internet. I suspect that alignment with progressive causes is downstream of those two associations.

Wow, love the quotes here. It definitely captures something I've always felt about those opposed to space travel, but haven't been able to quite articulate.

It is definitely easier to peddle a simplistic doom and gloom view of unstoppable apocalypse. I like to think the heroic vision is still popular enough to capture interest and catapult us to the stars. (Hence my tag)

I think, as others have pointed out, the case for manufacturing and research in space is still quite impressive. Creating exotic materials, and new medical formulae are only the tip of the iceberg.

Otherwise we're relying almost-solely on Elon Musk and that's too much hinging on one guy.

I do sometimes fear that if he dies all hope for space will disappear...

It is definitely discouraging that Tomorrowland, which was designed to remind us of the optimism and hope of our grandparents' time, died such an ignominious death at the box office.

Cheap space access creates unavoidable security implications.

Looking forward to rods from God becoming a reality. I believe it is merely a matter of launch cost holding back this obvious weapons system.

It's not as simple as you think.

Consider that looking out of the plasma of re-entry isn't easy, neither is beaming radio signals in. Maybe some sort of powerful laser or microwave link could work. If not.. precisely computing where an object falling through differentially dense layers of atmosphere is going to end up isn't easy at all.

And I doubt any major government would let someone test this extensively.

Most of the plasma interference is to the front and sides of a reentry vehicle, isn't it? Signals relayed through whichever part of a LEO constellation is currently behind the vehicle might be an option. They wouldn't have to be continuous, just frequent enough to cap inertial navigation drift.

I think finding a good use case is an even harder question. These would be perfect aircraft carrier killers, but the country with Starship is also the one with all the aircraft carriers. For easier targets there are already cheaper options at much higher TRL.

In some ways Brilliant Pebbles is even more exciting. In principle, space-based BMD is actually viable even for mass launches of ICBMs. In fact, because (i) MIRVs are only deployed on re-entry, (ii) objects moving in a vacuum are relatively predictable, and (iii) any kind of collision in space is likely to be terminal due to the insane velocities involved, the economics and physics might even favour the defender: 10,000 or so baseball-sized micro-missiles could take out huge numbers of ICBMs reliably (again, in principle - so much of this stuff is untested).

it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left.

I'm not sure this is the case anymore. They've been pulling the "There are starving trans people of color being hunted by Republicans while the ocean is rising, and you want to spend money on SPACE that could have gone to my non-profit for hunted trans POCs?" card for a while, and demonizing space travel as a way for rich (white) people to escape earth. I don't hear much futurism from them anymore.

Buuuut, I was surrounded by particularly-inconsistent leftists for way too long.

I’ve seen enough leftists ranting about how the ISS is literally settler colonialism or whatever to doubt space being coded progressive. I mean obviously they’re not expressing the majority opinion, because their opinion is ridiculous, but it does point to a tendency towards discomfort with space travel.

Wait, did they really get so mixed up that they think what's bad about colonialism is the "going somewhere else and building a home there" part, and not the "muscle out and exploit whoever's currently living there" part?

Yes, I see this all the time in commentary around certain boardgames, for example. A lot of the time it's acknowledged that it's worse with the second part, but a lot of people seem to object to the first as well, at least if the word "colony" is explicitly used. This is far from universal even among the hard-core progs I encounter, but it's definitely noticeable.

I mean obviously they’re not expressing the majority opinion, because their opinion is ridiculous

Sorry, walk me through the logic here?

They've been pulling the "There are starving trans people of color being hunted by Republicans while the ocean is rising, and you want to spend money on SPACE that could have gone to my non-profit for hunted trans POCs?"

It was happening back then as well, space exploration has always been coded right-wing and nationalist. I'm not sure why OP thinks it was ever coded as left wing.

It has forever been coded as right-wing in a large body of scifi literature and filmmaking, and it was also right-wing and nationalist in the most literal sense- Nazi scientists were hugely important to the US space program. That is one of those historical anecdotes that progressives cite as a low-key own goal. "Look how bad our government was- it recruited Nazis to the space program!" Yeah, it did, because they were the best and they greatly contributed to those accomplishments.

The dialectic between civil rights and NASA is going to endure in similar form in the modern culture war vis-a-vis progressivism/Effective Altruism versus space adventurism.

The right wing of today should take the side of space adventurism as well, as a competing vision to EA. The two are not really reconcilable.

I don't see how you CAN be a progressive leftist under the current popular definition of the term and openly support rapid industrialization of outer space.

On the practical side, advancement of space industries is a tacit admission that we're not on the verge or running out of space, resources, or energy for the planet, requiring everyone to cut back drastically on consumption or risk ultimate ruin.

That is, even if "Capitalism depends on unsustainable growth!" is technically true, we have a shitton of room to grow if we can get space colonies operational.

O'Neill cylinders could (theoretically) grow all the food we would need on the planet in a sustainable way (i.e. almost zero net impact on earth's biosphere). Orbital solar collectors solve climate/energy woes almost by themselves. If we get asteroid mining, all bets are off. Hell, if we put factories in space we could run them off the dirtiest energy sources imaginable without harming anyone.

Can't have "late stage capitalism" if Capitalism is even now staging for off-planet industry.

Private companies are driving space exploration forward WAY faster than government, with an overall better track record too I'd allege. Hard to make the claim that space travel is the purview of Government when government can't even launch rockets, currently. People are going to become billionaires or maybe even trillionaires if this industry matures, this promises massively increased inequality.

Money spent on development of this tech directs it away from special interest groups or captured institutions.

And perhaps the bigger downstream effect, it gets us on the path towards new frontiers which can be used to escape their social games and restrictions.

There's nothing to excite a progressive about space travel if their worldview requires believing that the world is in such terrible shape and beyond technological salvation that only socialism can solve it.

If it's successful I think the left is most likely to just ignore it. Excellence in American industry doesn't serve their purposes. What the right will do is hard to say, populism and suspicion of elites make interesting bedfellows with the likes of Musk but the right does contain factions that will be absolutely enthralled to see him succeed and because of his more recent mask off plays at the expense of the left he will probably find a home on the right.

How it all shakes out will probably depend on which industries actually have most immediate use for cheap(er) launches. Besides the obvious satalite uses and space tourism the immediate impact is harder for me to grasp. This isn't to say it won't be huge and disruptive, I just won't even hazard a guess at how it will be.

Mining seems to be one obvious game changer if there are very valuable materials we don’t have a lot of but could use a lot of.

Yes, that's the ultimate jackpot. However that still seems decades off, even with my fairly bullish stance on space.

As with so many things in space, I think the timeline is driven by one binary variable: does SpaceX's vision of a rapidly reusable Starship come to fruition?

If it does, asteroid mining goes from a pipe dream to a reality in the blink of an eye. So many things that work in principle work in reality once you can toss a hundred tons to orbit every day of the week.

doing complicated construction in space and getting autonomous miners where they need to be, then maneuvering the mined material back to earth and getting it back down is the kind of thing that has hundreds of steps just as hard as being able to reuse the rockets. Hell, if you asked someone smart who didn't already know how hard of a problem it was having reusable launch crafts probably wouldn't even come up on their list of hard problems.

Oh, certainly, I'm not saying the only thing holding us back from von Neumann probes and a Dyson sphere is mass to orbit! But if you skip autonomy, on orbit mining, and on-orbit manufacturing, you can still make a business case for the simplest asteroid mining possible:

  1. Identify asteroid with 100 tons of platinum

  2. Launch intercept/dock mission a la Hayabusa

  3. Slow burn for intercept course with Earth using ion propulsion a la Dawn (not to mention Starlink and a million Soviet spacecraft)

  4. Crash it in the desert and recover contents

100 tons of platinum is only a couple billion dollars, so this only works once launch prices for the monstrous probe necessary for something like this are reasonable and you can cut costs on the probe by removing the anal mass optimization currently necessary.

This is obviously far less revolutionary than true asteroid mining with on-orbit processing and manufacturing, which is what will kickstart the off-Earth economy, if we ever get there. Still, it's a start.

Has space and moon shots always been left coded? Maybe I'm not old enough for that.

I see no reason the derangement that has devoured every other unalloyed good in our society won't devour cheaper space launches. And I don't even think it takes novel rhetorical arguments to derange it. There are plenty of rhetorical weapons already created to alienate the left from space industry, and turn low information voters in blue dominated areas into an activated political enemy to SpaceX.

  • Why invest billions into space when minority patron group still suffered inequity?

  • Space industry is just a reflection of toxic masculinity and it's need to conquer and master

  • "Ecological" arguments about how it's immortal to "pollute space"

  • SpaceX has a "toxic" work culture, and/or discriminatory "merit based" recruitment.

  • Just regular old sneering and "Elon Man Bad".

And I'm sure you'll be able to follow the money right back to ULA, same as you could follow the unfounded attacks on mandate and lockdown skeptics right back to Pfizer.

Why invest billions into space when minority patron group still suffered inequity?

Whitey on the Moon, a 1970 (!) spoken word poem which featured in the 2018 movie "First Man", shows that such ideas were already present and don't need to be extrapolated from first principles.

At least according to this article, there was at least some opposition to the original moon program from the civil rights movement. The most famous congressional NASA/space program opponent, William Proxmire, seems to have been a somewhat libertarian-ish Democrat, from his Wikipedia description. OTOH Murray Rothbard also bashed the space program, such as in here.

I don't think that pro-space-program/anti-space-program is something that is immediately returnable to left-right scale. It appeals to a certain variety of nationalism-tinged technophiliac small-p progressive thinking that has adherents both on the left and the right, though with different areas of emphasis.

It's impossible to know for sure, but I think if President Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, the US would not have put men on the moon in the 1960s. Or 1970s. Perhaps not ever (so far).

Kennedy's martyrdom made the Apollo program a political third rail, so pretty much anybody with the potential power to cut its funding kept their mouth shut until the first successful landing. But nobody spends hundreds of billions of federal tax dollars without a lot of people wanting that money to be spent on something else that they think is more important.

US would probably have still felt it necessary to not let the Soviets get all the space-related achievements for only themselves tbh.

...it also seems like space and 'moonshots' have long been a darling of the left.

Have they? I think there's an I Fucking Love Science branch of the broadly construed American left, but I tend to think of the left-wing view of space projects being encapsulated by the absolutely amazing Billions for Space Pennies for the Hungry photograph. Of course, there's more than a little bit of racial politics to play into that as well and my perception is that this has only grown stronger with time. In more modern media, I see people blaming Jeff Bezos for going to space rather than just personally ending world hunger.

Money (as in "a countable medium of economic exchange") is great and pretty foundational to human civilization, but it does tend to distort people's thinking once the scale of the numbers, and thus the corresponding impact on the real world allocation and distribution of scarce resources, gets several orders of magnitude beyond what they're used to thinking about in their daily lives.

Like, it's clear that if a man is spending $1000 a month on booze and gambling while his kids are starving, he is being evil. He could very easily spend $1000/mo on food for his kids instead of on his own enjoyment. $1000 of food per month is a tiny fraction of your local food economy.

It's less clear to me that Bezos could end world hunger overnight by putting his billions of dollars towards that goal instead of building rockets. What real-world resources are the two different projects competing over? Food production is mostly about arable land and physical labor; rockets use very little of the former and relatively modest amounts of the latter. The main resource that space project money goes towards is smart and skilled people's time and creativity. Whether you think world hunger could be solved by Bezos would seem to hinge on whether or not you think that if all those smart rocket scientists were put to work figuring out how to grow more food (or, realistically, how to distribute it better - I've never heard anybody gainsay the conventional wisdom that the world grows enough food to feed everybody, it just doesn't get it into everybody's hands efficiently enough before it spoils) it would make a sustainable impact.

There's also a separate issue of the difference between a one-time investment in developing a technology that you expect to eventually turn a profit (as far as I know, SpaceX, Blue Origin and all the other private space companies definitely expect to get their money back down the line once their rockets are developed) versus sustaining a charitable non-profit (if "solving world hunger" simply means "give money to everybody who can't afford to feed themselves, from now until eternity if necessary") which has no financial upside (except perhaps in a macro sense, i.e. people who aren't starving will be more productive and the economy as a whole benefits, but that's the government's job, not Bezos's). Leftists would still claim it's the right thing to do with that money, but approximately none of them have built billion-dollar businesses by spending their money on things that will eventually make more money, etc., so they really have no clue what it takes to get those resources in the first place.

And let's not forget just how effective poor people are at ruining the best-laid plans to help them.

World hunger as an issue isn't dominated by the literal cost of paying to send people food. Live Aid found that out. Famine in the modern world is rarely caused by too little food and often caused by someone using deprivation of food to serve a political motive. The best way to estimate the cost to end world hunger is to start with the cost of invading and occupying North Korea as the minimum estimate.

I guess this was just a perception, on a quick google it looks like space isnt' very politicized yet.

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