Space Is (Not) the Place, Says Professor

(from the original article)

But I?ll just point out that the idea that we are no longer able to accomplish feats we once could do (like travel to the Moon) clashes with the prevailing narrative that we march forever forward. Not only can?t we get to the Moon at present, but the U.S. no longer has a space shuttle program?originally envisioned to make space travel as routine as air travel. And for that matter, I no longer have the option to purchase a ticket to fly trans-Atlantic at supersonic speeds on the Concorde. Narratives can break. I?ll leave it at that.

I agree that the ability to move out into the solar system has been sidetracked. It has been a bit of a problem and mankind has pulled back from what we could be doing in terms of getting things done in space. The apparent retrenchment in the ability to travel into space isn't really accurate in the least and this guy really misses what is going on.

The Apollo missions were a highly focused goal that really pushed the limits of the technology available at the time, perhaps even pushing that technology to its breaking point as the Apollo 13 missions demonstrated very clearly. At best those could be compared to weekend camping trips. We learned a whole bunch about how to live and work in space on those trips that we also learned how tough it would be to go.

That said, the problem here is that we have been depending on "the government" to get us into space on Manhattan Project type "big science" expeditions, where those programs could be cut and abused because of political whims, graft, and corruption. All of that has happened and more with NASA. Had the NASA budget kept pace with the federal budget from the mid-1960's to today, there most certainly would be at least an outpost on the Moon or elsewhere in the Solar System like the Amundsen-Scott Base at the South Pole. One of the first missions of the "Apollo Applications Program" that was cut was a manned mission to Venus [wikipedia.org]. A mission to Mars has been talked about since the Nixon administration. Getting "out there" has been in the cards, but the funding to make it happen hasn't been there primarily because the political will that got the Apollo program going ran out of steam.

Private spaceflight efforts, in other words private citizens trying to get into space on their own dime without subsidies from a government entity, has taken a long time to get going. There are established markets for commercial enterprises in space today, primarily concentrated at the moment in the form of telecommunications (including "satellite" television, mobile telephones, and other long-distance communication), navigation (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, Compass, and others), remote sensing, cartography (Google Maps and others), and reconnaissance (both government and civilian). Add to that list is rapid point-to-point delivery and space tourism that is just beginning to open up. All of these are proven money-makers for those groups who wish to get involved with them and have also made life today much better because they exist as well.

Far from "we are never going to get into space", we are already there. We are just getting our toes out into the water, so to say, but the commercial development of space-based resources has steadily improved and now represents a multi-billion dollar industry. One of the hang-ups about getting more happening in space has been the cost of spaceflight. In other words, trying to find cheaper ways of getting stuff into space. When a 1 liter bottle of water costs $100,000 or more to send it into space, the economics of getting people into space for settlement simply don't work.

The fallacy in this article is the presumption that we simply can't get cheaper than $100,000/kg for putting stuff into space and that the cost of going into space is only going to go up. The reason that is currently the case is because the government, at least in America, has so screwed up the commercial market for launching vehicles that the price has been steadily going up faster than inflation over the past several decades. If you look at the major launch companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and ATK; they have all been gradually raising their prices over time in part because the government is willing to pay them those prices for the big government contracts.

What hasn't been said here is that commercial spaceflight projects and flights have all but stopped being purchased from American companies because they simply aren't even competitive with other countries, who are also largely running government-sponsored space programs of their own. Until recently, there hasn't been any sort of ability for a private individual to really enter the game. It isn't for a lack of people willing to try, but often the government doesn't want to give permission for private individuals to even make the attempt. Several who have posted here on Slashdot that I've argued with in the past have even supported such efforts and feel that no private individual should ever be permitted to leave this planet, even to the point of force of arms to prevent it from happening even if they could afford it on their own dime.

If you let private individuals who want to get the resources together on their own and would be willing to go into space, and if you let those people be able to exploit the resources which are in space to be able to keep those resources or be able to keep the profits from that kind of economic activity, I believe that mankind will be able to move off of this planet and they will be able to pay for this outward migration away from the Earth on their own dime without government resources being involved. For what governing of the "final frontier" is needed, it can be paid for from taxes and fees on this activity. Mankind will move on and go elsewhere, and get much, much further than 300 km above the surface of the Earth.

That said, and perhaps something that I will concede, there will never be more than a small fraction of the population of the Earth which will be able to leave this planet at once. There won't be a "mass exodus" of people traveling to Mars or Europa in hopes of being able to live somewhere else other than the Earth, but then again that isn't necessarily the point of colonization. We do need to be responsible stewards of our environment here on the Earth as the billions of people who will live on this planet in the future depend upon that. Then again, there are still millions of people living in Africa at what has been suggested is our ancestral home and they never left. When mankind left for Europe, and from Europe to the Americas, the vast majority of the people living in the original "homeland" remained. I don't see a move into space being any different, other than the rowdy and rebellious 1% of society who likes to live on the edge will be "out there" instead of here. Right now that 1% has a gun pointed to their heads and are being told they can't leave. That sounds like an exciting future I really want to live in.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/fQv93H5b7zk/space-is-not-the-place-says-professor

college football rankings dma americas got talent 2011 americas got talent 2011 absinthe ihop tiki barber