Paul Spudis says that NASA lost its way on the way to the moon.
It was clear that once the Griffinites came in, the lunar goal was being sabotaged by people who didn’t really believe in it (e.g., Doug Stanley). But I’m more sanguine than Paul is. There’s plenty of time to again make the case for moon first, and most of the things that we need to do (get commercial crew going, develop depot technologies) are independent of destination. That’s what Flexible Path is all about. As the time approaches at which it will be realistic to think about affordably going beyond LEO, we can decide how best to proceed. The most important thing in the near term, it seems to me, in that regard is to fund ISRU technologies and further prospector missions, and perhaps even robotic prototypes of processing facilities. That will provide a lot more ammunition for Paul and others who want to exploit the lunar resources and bootstrap the rest of the solar system with them.
But Thomas (and I’ll really not trying to be difficult about this) what lunar resource can we postulate might have net present value here on the ground?
Solar energy is one. However I kind of doubt the economics work unless you can fabricate the collectors using lunar materials somehow. Even if it never made sense to beam back the energy to Earth itself, you could use it to power the satellite network. Think wireless space Enernet.
Another could be manufacturing fuel for satellite reboost, or satellite maintenance. You know the things Shuttle was supposed to accomplish but never did (except for Hubble).
As we got more fuel production, and if the price for platinum group metals keeps increasing, we could do asteroid mining. Or whatever.
The applications probably will be things we cannot fathom right now. Remember Columbus was trying to find a route to the spice trade in the Indias, but the Spanish found themselves to be sending gold and silver back to the mainland for centuries instead.
I might as well go build a bonfire of hundred-dollar-bills in my front yard.
I’ll bring the marshmallows (and chocolate and graham crackers… those girls back in Idaho during the ’73 jamboree were on to something.)
But seriously… The justification just isn’t financial right now and I suspect it won’t be for a long time. That can change. That’s not the same as no justification at all and growth is a curve. Sometimes burning money at the beginning of that curve is the smart thing to do. Not your money? Understood. But you will benefit from others burning their money.
Once there is economic activity beyond orbit, smart guys (you among them) will find economic justification and start spending their money. That’s when things will start to move.
If we can’t justify the solar system how will we ever justify the stars?
I look forward to the sponsorship of world cup soccer on the Moon.
Imagine a zero g soundstage and a good script! Hell, I’d settle for a good script.
What if there is a catastrophe on it’s way and the only way we survive is to be far enough up the curve to do something about it? What if our efforts just needed to be slightly more than they are now but we don’t do it? Stupid humans. They died out because justification only came in one flavor.
What if there is a catastrophe on it’s way and the only way we survive is to be far enough up the curve to do something about it?
What if the struggle to get up the curve itself brings about catastrophe?
What if there is a catastrophe in the future that can only be dealt with by putting every effort into controlled fusion, nanotechnology, or (insert pet technology)? And that fooling around in space will leave us powerless to deal with it?
Anyone can dream up scenarios where the world has to do what they say to survive.
Ken, I made the admittedly bad assumption that you were talking about real people living in space, not fictions. So you are straightforwardly using sci-fi characters who call space “home” as an argument for why space colonization will be easier than ocean colonization or mine colonization?
BTW, the Seastead people are in the same boat, so to speak. They talk a big game but still actually live on terra firma. Even though what they are proposing is many orders of magnitude closer to economic reality than what you are proposing. I’d add that the Seastead movement is a very tiny one and consists almost entirely single or childless couples.
Kirk,
[[[If I was an investor and most of you walked in my office, I would throw you right out. Especially the guy telling me that lunar water “ought” to cost $2000/kg, and that our deliverable in the future will be lunar dirt and helium-3. Seriously, people, step back for just a minute and listen to how incredibly silly that sounds. I might as well go build a bonfire of hundred-dollar-bills in my front yard.]]]
That is what bankers basically did a 100 years ago with proposals to build the Panama Canal (actually the directors of the private company that tired it came close to going to jail…) and the Alaska Railroad, which is why government stepped up to the plate to make it happen. For that matter the same was true for the Transcontinental Railroad until the government sweeten the pot with generous low cost loans (basically 2 dollars for each dollar needed to actually construct it) and huge land grants.
That is why without a government owned Lunar Development Corporation to close the gap you won’t get anything more then science missions or a “gee whiz” stunt like the Google Lunar X Prize or a space tourist flight.
Some are seriously talking about one way trips now.
More than some people are seriously talking about ghosts, ETI visiting earth, “shadow people”, “remote viewing”, and many other wonders as well. If you are going to make a credible argument from authority you’re going to have to do much better than this.
All good questions Jim, let’s see…
What if the struggle to get up the curve itself brings about catastrophe?
I’ve read many possible world ending scenarios, but I’ve missed this one. Hmm? I suppose learning to refuel in space could blow us up? Eh, perhaps not.
What if there is a catastrophe in the future that can only be dealt with by putting every effort into controlled fusion, nanotechnology, or (insert pet technology)?
So a minor percent of everything we do as humans is the thing that pushes us over the edge?
And that fooling around in space will leave us powerless to deal with it?
Increasing our capabilities makes us less capable? Interesting assertion.
I made the admittedly bad assumption that you were talking about real people living in space
You never gave me that much credit to begin with. Yes, real people.
Here comes the strawman…
why space colonization will be easier than ocean colonization or mine colonization?
Huh?
What I said was that children will be a game changer providing economic incentive. Never did I say easy.
Yes, real people.
OK, I give up, who are these “real people” not on the ISS who call space “home”? Some psychotic people on earth who call some imaginary colony in space rather than they place they actually live “home”?
If you are going to make a credible argument from authority you’re going to have to do much better than this.
Authority is generally the weakest argument, but at least we agree that people are serious about colonization. Now some more people; right now are many that would jump at the chance to live and own property off Earth. They might be fools. They might die. But if we make it possible and some of them live we will be entering a new age of humanity. Like fire and the wheel. Agriculture. Stone. Copper. Bronze. Iron. Steel. That sort of thing.
OK, I give up, who are these “real people” not on the ISS who call space “home”?
Come on Googaw, you know we are talking about future prospects, not present realities. However, those advocating one way trips are real people. Those willing to go if it were made possible are real people. Those playing in Canada in mockups are real people. Biosphere II had real people. Lot’s of real people consider settlement a real prospect.
at least we agree that people are serious about colonization.
No, there are some fantasizers with no concept of economic reality who daydream about space colonization, just as there are people (many more people, actually) who imagine ghosts, UFOs, and so on.
Come on Googaw, you know we are talking about future prospects, not present realities.
In other words, the people you referred to who call space “home” are imagined future characters after all. Even though you just said above that they are “real people.” I’m afraid you have a serious problem distinguishing reality from fiction. And from this confusion between reality and the imagination we are supposed to conclude that space colonization is supposedly very different from sea colonization or mine colonization, because “real people” (i.e. hypothetical future people as you imagine them) call space but not the sea or mines “home”.
About the catastrophe justification for space colonization…
What catastrophe are you imagining? Remember, it has to leave the surface of the Earth less inhabitable than space already is.
Remember, it has to leave the surface of the Earth less inhabitable than space already is.
Actually, it has to leave it less inhabitable than space is at that time, not now.
Two examples, off the top of my head — a totalitarian world government, and gray goo.
I doubt totalitarian world goverment will work as a justification for government funding. “We need space to escape from you” is not a great sales pitch.
As for gray goo… this is way out on the fringe of science, just one cut above supernatural invasion by demons from hell. But nanotechnology can do anything if you wave your hands sufficiently vigorously, right?
I doubt totalitarian world goverment will work as a justification for government funding.
So do I. I was just positing a reason for people to prefer other locales than earth. And as for the gray goo, I wasn’t assessing it as a high-probability scenario, just one that met your criteria.
Gray goo is a good analogy for what this thread has devolved into. People saying “ignore economics and money, spend on putting people into space” will still be wondering when they’re old men why we aren’t putting people into space. Sheesh, you’d think I’d told them there’s no Santa or something.
Increasing our capabilities makes us less capable? Interesting assertion.
Curiously, it is your assertion, Ken.
There are an infinite number of ways we can “increase our abilities”, as you put it. You’re the one claiming that in every case except the one you favor we are less capable of dealing with catastrophe. I submit that your knowledge of the future is not superior to anyone else’s and that the optimal allocation of available resources is very much a matter of contention. That you can only see the possible benefits of propellant depots, etc and not the possible costs suggests a lack of imagination.
People saying “ignore economics and money, spend on putting people into space” will still be wondering when they’re old men why we aren’t putting people into space. Sheesh, you’d think I’d told them there’s no Santa or something.
Kirk,
The problem is that most space advocates assume that the moon, Mars, L4/L5, the asteroids, Kuiper belt, etc are habitable, and that thriving colonies can be placed there and that off earthers will eventually greatly outnumber terrestrials.
If one grants this assumption then it does logically follow that almost any up front investment is well worth it.
The difficulty is that the fact that this is just an assumption is lost track of. We just don’t know how the whole space thing will ultimately play out. We all have our hopes but hopes are not guarantees.
Hi All,
Of course this may also answer the Fermi Paradox.
Where are the ET’s if intelligent life is so common?
Still on their home worlds. Since human space exploration didn’t turn a profit for investors they just stayed home.
Tom
As a natural market, extremely unpromising within the next decade or two given that well over 99% of orbital HSF is funded by government space agencies.
Perhaps, though I’m not quite as as pessimistic as you are. I would expect to see a higher percentage of commercial customers soon. And in time, even without a technological breakthrough, prices can come down by enough to make this commercially viable. How long it will take is an open question. Whether government money can or should be used to accelerate this are two more questions. But Kirk was simply asking for an economic justification and I believe that in time tourism will be such a justification. It seems like the application with the best prospects, better than mining asteroids or the moon for resources to be used on Earth or even just in orbit.
If tourism is the justification for LEO or lunar human operations, then NASA certainly has NO business being involved with any of it, and it should DEFINITELY be passed off to commercial interests.
very different from sea colonization or mine colonization
Now you’re claiming that this analogy…
This hasn’t even happened at sea yet, despite centuries of human seafaring. Nor has it happened in the vast cavernous underground mines we have, which are far larger than any astronaut workspace will ever be in this century.
You were talking about colonization??? Good moving the goalposts there.
Beat ya to it Tom:
April 4th, 2010 at 6:51 am
What catastrophe are you imagining?
None at all. It’s never happened in the history of the world so it could never happen in the future./sarc
Watch the history or discovery channel some time. Or go here.
I hate to give you credit Jim, but…
You’re the one claiming that in every case except the one you favor we are less capable of dealing with catastrophe.
…is not a totally unfair comment. Not correct, but not totally unfair. You add the either/or that I never did.
As for predicting the future. Others have guaranteed we will face an extinction event… it’s just a matter of time. Even if we colonize the whole solar system it will eventually all be sterilized. It could happen toda…
In other galactic news… the centari, sol and other nearby systems were sterilize by a nova of magnitude 7.4…
Ken: even after an extinction event like the one at the KT boundary, the surface of the Earth would still be more inhabitable than any other place in the solar system.
So I ask again: what kind of catastrophe are you using to justify the space program? If you cannot point to an example, I’ll conclude you are just waving your hands.
the surface of the Earth would still be more inhabitable than any other place in the solar system.
Yes, if anyone were left alive to take advantage of that fact.
My rich uncle just spent one billion dollars buying the components of a spaceship. He’s contracted to put it into orbit and dock all the pieces together for another billion fully fueled (and I’m told private companies are prepared to refuel it as needed.) It has 2200 cubic meters of internal volume and a delta-V of about five miles per second. He was going to hand title over to me so I can start a company, but after reading the comments here has decided I’m not the man for the job, but others here are. So…
Could you operate this ship at a profit? (The $2b is already spent and not a consideration.)
Yes, if anyone were left alive to take advantage of that fact.
It would be quite easy to protect most people on Earth from the immediate effects of a K/T scale impact. It would be easy to feed them until the dust cleared, by simply storing food. All through this time, the Earth would have ample water, and pressure, and oxygen, and gravity.
After the dust cleared, the surface of the Earth would be far more habitable than anywhere else in the solar system, where there would be no naturally occuring air or liquid water, where radiation and gravity would be issues, where there would be no soil or biomass.
After the dust cleared, the surface of the Earth would be far more habitable than anywhere else in the solar system, where there would be no naturally occuring air or liquid water, where radiation and gravity would be issues, where there would be no soil or biomass.
How many people do you know who live in a naturally (in the sense of “not artificial”) occurring world? Who don’t live in a man-made house, who don’t eat processed foods which were originally grown by man, wear man-made clothes, who don’t use machines for transportation, etc.
Once the infrastructure is in place, it doesn’t matter if the air or water is procured by man, soil produced by man, and the radiation and gravity of natural space environments (which you don’t live in) is bad for you. The colonist need not live in those environments. Then there’s the possibility of adapting the colonist to the environment biologically rather than the other way around.
If tourism is the justification for LEO or lunar human operations, then NASA certainly has NO business being involved with any of it
NASA’s charter says otherwise — did you forgot the words “in my opinion,” Kirk?
Following your logic, the NACA had no business being involved in air transportation. As you say, people don’t HAVE to go anywhere.
Many people were happy that the NACA was involved in air transportation, though, especially have after Pearl Harbor.
People don’t “have to” do anything, but people can choose to invest in technologies that will make life better in the future.
Space travel is certainly a better investment than your bizarre scheme for building hundreds of submersible “Noah’s Arks.”
Following your logic, the NACA had no business being involved in air transportation.
Awful analogy. Airplanes were already of demonstrated military and real commercial importance when NACA research started being seriously funded. And real commercial transportation, people paying their own money to mail things or travel between places they already lived or worked doing productive things, was a thousands-year-old industry for which greater speed had long been known to be a great benefit.
By contrast, after fifty years of astronaut stunts, they are still just preposterously expensive entertainment. We have government space agencies flying astronauts for the sake of astronauts at ridiculously uneconomical expense and with orbital make-work as an increasingly lame excuse for the astronaut show. Meanwhile real space commerce, real space exploration, and the military use of space have all long been unmanned. And the demand for orbital tourism has turned out to be one tourist per year even charging prices based on the marginal costs of marginal costs of systems already paid for by government space agencies, all just to get to the easiest possible orbit.
Another gaping hole in your analogy is that NACA was about applied research, or as Rand puts it, technology development. It was not about the systems development or “infrastructure” that socialist space activism keeps lobbying NASA to fund, despite its long history of producing bridges to nowhere. The only thing HSF is good for getting fat NASA contracts. The only future HSF promotes is a future of crony socialism.
It would be quite easy to protect most people on Earth from the immediate effects of a K/T scale impact.
I believe you. Would we? Are we prepared for it now or would we know in time? Having a backup of humanity off world has the side effect of us not needed to know what catastrophe will suddenly hit us (within limits… solar wide we’d still need another plan) to be able to survive and recover.
NASA’s charter says otherwise — did you forgot the words “in my opinion,” Kirk?
Following your logic, the NACA had no business being involved in air transportation. As you say, people don’t HAVE to go anywhere.
I have to agree with Kirk here, but I would not single out tourism, I would extend it to most, perhaps all, economic justifications. Those who believe in a mixed economy will disagree with that. As far as I’m concerned governments should probably not be in the space business at all, or in any business. But then again I’m a libertarian leaning geek.
In theory I can think of possible economic justifications that would require government intervention, but I don’t consider those likely. Say if energy were to run out and Helium3 was the solution. Both seem unlikely and even if they were, true markets could probably take care of that more easily.
To me the strongest case for government spaceflight (both manned and unmanned) is exploration and even that is not a particularly strong one. I would consider “seeking and encouraging, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space” a necessary constraint, and even a more valuable outcome than exploration itself, but not a valid goal in and of itself.
Space travel is certainly a better investment than your bizarre scheme for building hundreds of submersible “Noah’s Arks.”
Ed, let me begin by saying, you’re an idiot.
I never suggested we build Noah’s Arks, it was merely a thought experiment to show how we could save millions more people from a putative asteroid impact on the Earth than we could by trying to move a few hundred to space.
And NASA’s charter says nothing about supporting space tourism. Space is not now nor ever will be a cost effective medium for point-to-point transportation like air travel, so your analogy breaks down between the air transport industry and space.
I have supported all along the rights of private individuals to travel into space on their own dime for whatever reason motivates them. But the funds of the government should not be expended to promote or support such schemes.
I fully support the idea of you heading off into deep space.
Ken,
[[[Beat ya to it Tom: April 4th, 2010 at 6:51 am]]]
I looked at your post and it doesn’t mention anything about the Fermi Paradox or ET. Also it doesn’t require the threat of a disaster to drive the ET’s into space as they could well have developed the ability to manage their world’s climate and deflect objects threatening impact using robotic spacecraft eliminating two potential drivers to evacuate.
So its possible that because of spaceflight economics the universe is filled with “lotus eaters” without any interest in space exploration beyond telescopes and a few robotic missions, and an occasional joy ride in orbit for those rich enough to afford it. That at least seems to be the future where New Space is taking us with the argument that spaceflight must meet the ROI returns of venture capitalists (100%+ in less then 3 years…) to be doable.
Tom