Under the current administration not only will we not be going to Mars, but even If we did and a astronaut was left behind. No way no how would current political parties in Congress, ( much less our current president) spend the money it would take to save said astronaut.
My real wonder would be if the majority of Americans would okay the amount of money it would cost to save that one man? I know Maga wouldn’t. But the rest? Just made we wondered. Now with Project Hail Mary coming to theaters and the excellent novel. Its the same question.
Depends where the money is coming from. Military budget? Absolutely. Being taken from social services and whatnot? No. The amount of money that would cost could save so many more lives if it was used for things here. Choosing to spend it on saving an astronaut rather than on, for example, feeding homeless people and distributing medication and disaster relief is like a version of the trolley problem where the trolley is already heading for the 1 person, but you have the option of switching it to the other track to kill more people if you want to. I’d have a really hard time calling that moral by any metric.
Those are already arguments for why NASA and space programs shouldn’t exist in the first place.
I remember watching something about the space race, and there was a clip of public opinion during the time of the first mission to the moon, where a man complained that the money should’ve been used to improve the lives of poor Americans instead.
Regardless, for the scenario in The Martian, if money is already being spent and going to continue being spent on space missions in the future, I think you can rationalize it as using money for another or next space mission. They would still gain knowledge from what they had to do to pull off that rescue, so it’s not a complete waste of funds for a mission either.
On the morality point, I’d argue that we should spend the money to rescue any person if we have the money/means, and it can feasibly happen without excessive risk to other lives, otherwise we’re assigning monetary value to human lives. That includes both people in imminent danger, requiring expensive emergency services, and people suffering slower, persistent risks like hunger that require sustained support.
Resources are finite, though. If rescuing one person requires, say, 10 units of resources, but rescuing 10 others require only 1 unit of resources, isn’t choosing to rescue the 1 over the 10 already placing relative value on human lives, by declaring them to be 10x as valuable as the others? This is obviously operating on the assumption that we don’t have the resources to rescue everyone who needs rescuing.
In that scenario, I agree the pragmatic choice is to save the majority.
But many situations tend to be complex and aren’t as clear as a trolley problem, so I want to avoid falling into the trap of seeing a false dilemma when there’s possibly more than two options.