144 thoughts on “They’ve Thrown A Bone”

1. Paul Spudis said it well:

   The fundamental fecklessness of the new direction is exposed in this new OSTP document; we will build a Crew Return Vehicle for ISS that is not needed (if we can get there on the Soyuz, we can certainly return on it) and we will conduct “research” on heavy lift technologies that are already well understood.

   Smoke and mirrors, just like everything else from the Obama admin. The Orion lifeboat / HLV study is just more money down the drain that will lead to neither a lifeboat nor an HLV.

   Obama doesn’t intend for any American to leave LEO in the next 20+ years, I’m not even certain that he wants Americans in LEO, much less beyond.

2. Mike, funding SpaceX to do an engine based on RS-84, which they supposedly licensed, would be one way of getting the kerolox. Like I said, I would prefer something with more thrust but it is a reasonable solution. SpaceX has experience on kerolox design even if it is not staged combustion. If you want to reduce R&D costs further you could probably convince the French to play along. They have been working at this sort of technology for several years now with the Russians. Still I think this work is better off as a public/private US effort without international participation.

   I also think an engine with better thrust than RL-10, like two times bigger, using modern construction techniques would prove useful for doing ACES and other applications. Rocketdyne are the people with LOX/LH2 experience. To reduce R&D costs a partnership could be done with the Japanese, or the French.

3. Why not just finish the RL-60? Supposedly it is nearly a plug n’ play replacement for the RL-10 that can fit the same space.

4. I personally favor the “opening a new frontier for commerce and settlement” argument as a reason for expanding into space, but whatever floats your boat. We do some things in space right now that are very worthwhile and do pay for themselves including communications, GPS, weather & natural resource observation, reconnaissance. I can’t claim that human spaceflight is currently worth what it costs, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t an investment worth making.

   A real market for human transport to LEO exists right now for getting astronauts and a few tourists to ISS. Currently this market is heavily dependent on government support, but it looks like it is on the cusp of real growth due to tourism and increased use of ISS. In another 4 years there may begin to be private destinations such as hotels in orbit. I think that government investment into human transport to orbit may be almost as useful as the building of the first national road through the Cumberland Gap was in the early US. It’s taking a long time to become profitable, but once it does I believe it will have been worth it.

5. “We (the taxpayers) are paying a lot more than we need to to an American aerospace contractor.”
   Hell, we the taxpayers are paying a lot more than we need, period. You are arguing that we should have the Russians do a useless thing for us because they charge less to do it. The only reason I see for the ISS in the first place is to keep our edge in manned spaceflight. Take that away, and what’s the point, anyway?

6. The manufacturing capability will no longer exist, either the physical plant or the people. Those will disappear forever in less than a year.

   Yes, the physical plant will be thrown back into the fiery chasm from whence it was forged, and the people will be lost forever as the earth itself will open up its depths and swallow them whole, a la the final big battle scene in Return of the King.

   Or! Or maybe whichever highly trained engineers and technicians lose their jobs as a result of NASA restructuring already have sufficient training and experience to work at private companies like SpaceX and Armadillo and others. The private companies would in fact be eager to hire the best of those that NASA loses, along with their expertise. As for those that aren’t NASA’s best, plumbing is a lucrative related career.

7. Yeah, I dunno about SpaceX or Armadillo hiring NASA employees.. startups don’t tend to look to the public sector for recruits. The, umm, stamina often isn’t there.

8. This is a strong point for space colonization. While Earth may remain a nicer environment than space (at least the parts of space that don’t have comfortable colonies established), it can still suffer destructive setbacks.

   This is a strong point for colonization only if it can be shown that it is possible for human civilization can thrive off earth. This is still very much an open question. Arguments that assume it, instead of show it, are just begging the question.

9. So Kirk, Jim, everyone else who thinks there should be a serious national need for the space program. How about an international need? Asteroid avoidance? Do we have to wait for a serious rock to hit us before the world takes it seriously? Kirk is probably going to say this is not a problem that is well solved by human spaceflight.. but as much as I dislike people jumping on anything as a HSF justification, I also dislike the unrealistic-expectation-of-capabilities robotics crowd.

   Arguably the Japanese make the best robotics in the world, and their Hayabusa probe had a whole lot of problems. That doesn’t justify a human tended mission. It more suggests that we need more robotic missions to perfect the technologies we’re most likely to need for a serious asteroid avoidance mission. That said, if we identified a planet killer with high certainty right now, a crash program to divert it would most likely be human tended, so putting at least a little research effort into developing the human spaceflight capability needed for such a mission seems prudent.

   It’s a shame the world community is so in denial over planetary threats that even another robotic mission is too much to think about.. at least human tended missions are consider, if only as justification.

10. I agree we need a serious program to characterize and potentially divert threatening asteroids. As you’ve already figured out, there’s no role for astronauts in that program, despite the movies Hollywood makes on the subject. A high-velocity, out-of-the-ecliptic-plane intercept made possible by a Jupiter gravity assist is not a mission for squishy-pink humans.

11. The important consideration for cosmic impact prevention is that you first want to find and catalog the objects. Only in the event you find one that will “soon” hit do you go hog wild and invest heavily in countermeasures.

    That first step doesn’t require people in space. It does require telescopes (perhaps in space) and possibly rendevous of small tracking probes with candidate objects to reduce uncertainties in their orbits.

12. So Kirk, Jim, everyone else who thinks there should be a serious national need for the space program. How about an international need? Asteroid avoidance? Do we have to wait for a serious rock to hit us before the world takes it seriously? Kirk is probably going to say this is not a problem that is well solved by human spaceflight.. but as much as I dislike people jumping on anything as a HSF justification, I also dislike the unrealistic-expectation-of-capabilities robotics crowd.

    I think the times of flight of any realistic asteroid or comet deflection mission would be far too long for manned craft to be even considered for the job. Barring the development of fusion drive we’re totally dependent on robotic craft for this mission. If the robotics aren’t up to the task…well, we’re screwed.

    Curiously, the first instinct of the space advocate is not to save earth but to abandon it. Potential catastrophes are used all the time to justify things like space colonization but I’ve yet to hear anyone advocate serious funding for robotics development because an asteroid deflection mission might need it.

13. You just made the best argument I have heard so far for shutting NASA down. If it has lost sight of the vision, a vision shared from Verne, to Sagan to Young, of why go into space then there is little hope the POR, Obama’s new Policy or any other will move us forward.

    Wow, Thomas Matula. In the heights of hubris I think you’ve hit a new high-water mark. So if people at NASA don’t subscribe to your grand vision, well, then they don’t deserve to exist. Shut down this offending agency that can’t see the grandeur of your dreams, or force the workers to concede that no human spaceflight program is tantamount to arguing for human extinction.

    JPL, be gone, you robot-loving scum. How dare you explore without humans? Your reconnaissance missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have no value. No humans will ever follow you there.

    APL, recall your worthless probes from Pluto and Mercury. Do we really want to add more chapters to the book of knowledge that we will be forced to read from the ground?

    Thomas Matula, you are truly a piece of work.

14. > Kirk Sorensen Says:
    >
    > April 15th, 2010 at 5:47 am

    >== So if people at NASA don’t subscribe to your grand vision,
    > well, then they don’t deserve to exist. Shut down this
    > offending agency ==

    > JPL, be gone, you robot-loving scum. How dare you
    > explore without humans?

    Just a nit, but JPL isn’t part of NASA, its part of the university of california. NASA contracts with them to do unmaned space exploration – but several agency’s contract with them for various thnigs, adn other agencies cuold contract with them for that.

    So if you really only think you need robotic space exploration – you don’t need NASA at all.

15. Jim, you wrote:

    This is a strong point for colonization only if it can be shown that it is possible for human civilization can thrive off earth. This is still very much an open question. Arguments that assume it, instead of show it, are just begging the question.

    What needs to be shown? Human civilization thrives in a lot of adverse environments now. Space colonization would be more difficult, but it’s a variation of a trick we already know humans can do.

16. I’ve yet to hear anyone advocate serious funding for robotics development because an asteroid deflection mission might need it.

    Probably because robots are no where near as flexible as people. You plan for one emergency, you get another. We need assets in place, ready to react to what might be a very sudden situation. How many times have we had a near miss with little or no warning?

    It’s not about abandoning the Earth, it’s about expansion beyond Earth. Once we have growing colonies, people that said it would never happen are going to look as stupid as those that said we could never fly. If economics is the only reason for going, we’d better get started because out there is where the wealth is. Wealth that will increase our wealth here on Earth, not because of some import, but because of assets in place, in space and other worlds.

    Anybody that says the environment is too harsh have not been paying attention to how we adapt to harsh environments are right here on Earth. Adaption is what we do.

17. Come back and talk to me about how successful and cost-effective space colonization will be when we have huge multi-million-people cities in Antarctica, on the Greenland ice sheet, in the Gobi or the Sahara. Because any one of those places is infinitely easier and cheaper to colonize than space, and there’s essentially no one there.

    You all take it as a given that space colonization is going to be economically advantageous and successful, whereas I see absolutely no reason to believe that.

18. Come back and talk to me about how successful and cost-effective space colonization will be when we have huge multi-million-people cities in Antarctica, on the Greenland ice sheet, in the Gobi or the Sahara. Because any one of those places is infinitely easier and cheaper to colonize than space, and there’s essentially no one there.

    There are government restrictions in all those places. Except for space.

19. What needs to be shown?

    That you can even ask such a question speaks volumes.

    Human civilization thrives in a lot of adverse environments now.

    Humanity lives, with negligible exceptions, exactly where it has lived since the stone age.

    Ask yourself, if civilization thrives in a lot of adverse environments, why Canada has only a tenth the population of the US.

    Space colonization would be more difficult, but it’s a variation of a trick we already know humans can do.

    Utter nonsense. Space colonization advocates will never be taken seriously until they’re willing to confront the issues instead of ignoring them.

20. Bob-1,

    [[[Thomas, science textbooks aren’t stamp collections — they are useful! I’m sure you agree that technological advancement makes life better. Do I really need to make an argument for why and how scientific knowledge enables technological advancement?]]]

    And this spin-off argument relates how to robotic missions to planets that humans will never visit or add to the human econsphere?

    One of the key arguments for science spending since War World II is based on the assumption that all scientific knowledge is equally valuable. But is it?

    A textbook on solar weather is very useful because space based communication and navigation systems. But just what would the economic value of a textbook be on the geomorphology of Titan?

    Now I for one would probably buy, but then I have enjoyed astronomy since I was a kid. I have been a subscriber to Sky & Telescope since I was 10 and I have a 8″ Springfield telescope that was built by Russell Porter. But those are my personal interests.

    But if spending on space science doesn’t contribute economic competitiveness in the near-term, and human survival in the long-term why should any government spend on it?

    That is why HSF is key, because it provides the promise of incorporating the solar system into the Earth’s economic sphere. Without why should any money

21. There are government restrictions in all those places. Except for space.

    That’s not why they’re uninhabited. They’re uninhabited because survival is difficult and expensive there. But with a tiny fraction of the technology ASSUMED for space colonization any of those places could be as homey and cozy as any shopping-mall interior of an O’Neill-style colony.

    Yet they remain empty. Probably because the NEED to colonize isn’t very strong. The only places “colonized” in the US in the last fifty years have been the circumferential rings of former farmland surrounding our major cities.

22. Thomas Matula, is this you?

    http://spaceinvestmentsummit.com/lcr2_bios.html#matula

    Are you a professor of business? Because if you are I have a whole new dimension of questions for you.

23. That’s not why they’re uninhabited. They’re uninhabited because survival is difficult and expensive there.

    It’s a combination of the two. Space has only the latter problem. And it has a much better resource base, especially in terms of energy.

24. Kirk,

    Yes, that is me, Although I am in San Diego now teaching at California International Business University while do consulting in the are of strategic management and innovation strategy.

    Yes, I would be glad to answer any questions. That email is outdated but you may reach me at tommatula3@hotmail.com

    Tom

25. Thomas Matula, is this you?

    Oh boy. Great find Kirk!

26. Thomas Matula, my main question is, aren’t you troubled by the lack of business case for the activities you propose? I can only imagine the grade a student would get in one of your classes for proposing such an economically unpromising activity.

27. Rand, it’s your site, but the Earth still has a better story for energy. Utilizing nuclear energy is much easier down here than up there because of the existence of large and inexpensive heat sinks (water, air). I’ve spent a lot of time looking at space nuclear reactor design and butting up against the limitations posed by a radiator and temperature to the fourth power.

28. To nip an argument in the bud.

    Population of Sahara: 2.5 million
    Population of Antartica: 1100 in winter, 4400-5000 in summer.
    Population of Greenland: 57,600

    I couldn’t find figures for the number of people living on the surface of the oceans, underwater, or in deep caves, but I imagine it’s on the order of millions for the first and thousands for the second two.

    These places are all inhabited. Sure they don’t have a high population density, but no one has explained why a high population density in one of the harder to inhabit Earth climates is a necessary prerequisite for colonization of space.

29. Kirk,

    [[[But with a tiny fraction of the technology ASSUMED for space colonization any of those places could be as homey and cozy as any shopping-mall interior of an O’Neill-style colony.]]]

    Actually that would be one of the spin-offs of a space settlement focus for NASA, besides capturing the public’s imagination it would also advance a number of technologies that would reduce the dependence of humans on the local environment. Plus probably increase the number of robotic missions by linking them to economic competitiveness.

    As a historical note, the 1850’s were a watershed in the scientific investigation of the American west because of the survey expeditions sponsored by the government to determine the best route for a transcontinental railroad. By the same token the building of the Panama Canal simulated a major increase in research in tropical biology as a spin-off of going research to battle the diseases that stopped the commercial effort by France to build the canal. And the completion of both projects made their respective areas so accessible to science that an explosion of research followed generating a great expansion of scientific knowledge.

    Which brings us back to HSF. HSF must have a function that integrates into the national purpose or it will languish as it has for been doing for years now. The new HSF goals are just flags and footsteps unless they are integrated into a larger vision, one that excites the public. The American west was seen as a worthless desert by many in the east two years ago. If I recall Jefferson felt it would take 600 years to explore and settle the lands he bought in the Louisiana Purchase which made up only half the of American West. What change? The emergence of the vision of a national destiny, the manifest destiny, a “noble mission” to settle the land for “sea to shining sea’. That vision became the framework to measure both government policy and programs against in terms of effectiveness.

    Yes, I know it was already inhabited by native Americas and Manifest Destiny destroyed their civilization. But that is no the key point. The key point is a unifying vision transformed the United States from a medium size country on the eastern seaboard to the world’s largest economy in less then a century.

    BTW one of the great things about the Solar System is by all appearances there are no civilizations or intelligence species beyond Earth. Its all ours if we want it 🙂

    The key point I am making is that one of the major problems with space policy is the lack of a similar unifying national framework. That is why it has become the play thing of Presidential administrations. Don’t like the current policy? Wait until the next administration, it will change again. The same launch pads being destroyed now will be rebuild for Shuttle II or whatever problem is that administration’s center piece… Only to be destroyed again by the next one.

    As the same time, without such a unifying vision any policy created will be processed through the NASA cultural filter to produce what we have had for the last couple of decades, extensive paper studies, false starts on bending metal that is then tossed away and technology demonstrator that are never completed. I expect the same will be the outcome of the current policy.

    That is really the line of thought I am guess I am look for folks to consider think about in terms of the new policy, to ask some basic questions. Why HSF if no space settlement? Why robots if humans will never follow? What is the value of NASA to the nation if its not to sail on the boldly on the New Ocean that President Kennedy referred to space as in Rice University speech? What does NASA do that couldn’t be out sourced other agencies?

30. The only places “colonized” in the US in the last fifty years have been the circumferential rings of former farmland surrounding our major cities.

    That’s incorrect. There’s a lot of settlement of areas with natural beauty (for example, private land in western Montana) or areas with a pleasant climate (for example, Phoenix, Arizona, western North Carolina). Note that just because an area has a pleasant climate, it still can be adverse to human habitation. The two areas I mention have extremely dry climate and rugged topography respectively.

31. Kirk

    [[[Thomas Matula, my main question is, aren’t you troubled by the lack of business case for the activities you propose?]]]

    Yep, which is why I switched from mining engineering to economics and business in my studies.

    The key is the “business case” as you refer to it, although that term is used more outside of business then in it. But the key to the business case for human settlement of space will be space resources and for space resources there are three problems that need to be addressed to get to the point where you are even able to start work on a business case.

    First is an understanding of the resource. Just what are the resources of the Moon and NEOs. Not in general, but more specific. What does a lunar ore deposit look like? How do you refine it?

    Second is the technology. For example how do you drill on an asteroid? The deep drilling techniques used in the industry all depend on a high gravity environment, plus an atmosphere for cycling the drilling mud. Neither will be on a NEO or even the Moon. Explosives are an everyday tool in mining. But how do they work on the Moon? What are the rock mechanics of different types of geological structures on the Moon? And how do you explosives on the Moon without creating a massive dust problem? Underground it would be controllable, but what about the surface? And on NEOs?

    The key is like most industries the mining and energy industries firms in the mining and energy industry tend to be followers not pioneers. That is a requirement when you have fiduciary responsibility to stockholders, who, unlike taxpayers, will sue if you get too far out of line.

    That is why you need a government entity to lead the way into space resource development. To close the gap. To provide the technical data base and demonstration needed to get industry involved. Just as was the case in alternative energy like Wind, Solar, etc. That is the best way short term to get to the point where you are even able to start on a business case. And that has been a traditional role for the government and one government has funded in the past, from Wilken’s south pacific expedition to the government railroad surveys of the American west in the 1850’s. And its a role government needs to step up to the plate to do again.

    As to why space settlement. Human survival is the simple answer which is the argument provided by Sagan and Hawkings. But from the economic perspective the reason is much more complex. Basically its about continuing the 500 year long expansion of economic activity to continue increasing the level of wealth for all humanity. Not just in terms of “hard” resources, but in also terms of advancing technology as well. There are two books I encourage anyone involved in space policy to read as they really provide the background for understanding why humans must expand into space, although neither is a book on space policy.

    The Birth of Plenty : How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created by William J. Bernstein, McGraw-Hill, 2004 ISBN-13: 978-0071421928

    It summarizes quite of bit of research on how humanity broke through the cycles of boom and bust that Malthus documented, the Malthusian barrier, and created today’s prosperity.

    The second book below also provides an answer on why Europe and not China went on to dominate the world even though both were about evenly matched economically in the 15th Century which also has reference to the space policy debate, although like the first both it never touches on space. And no, the recall of the Chinese fleet is not covered in detail as its a symptom not a trigger. The key factor was the impact of a new world on intellectual and economic activity that created a burst of creativity that provided the basis for moving forward.

    The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. by Kenneth Pomeranz, Princeton University Press, 2001 ISBN-13: 978-0691090108

32. They’re uninhabited because survival is difficult and expensive there.

    People settle difficult and expensive places all the time even when less expensive and less difficult alternatives exist. You could say the rate of growth is slowed because of difficulty and expense, but that’s all. You can’t say it is the reason for no settlement. There is no one reason. People do things for their own reasons. Growth depends on industry. There is no industry in space. Once there is, you will have growth. With enough industry that growth could be significantly more than a less difficult, less expensive alternative. It’s not anywhere near as one dimensional as you paint it Kirk.

33. One might make the case that human spaceflight will help in asteroid deflection, but it would be indirectly. HSF is likely to involve developing the technology to transfer and store cryogenic liquids in space for extended periods. This technology could be adapted to storing liquid deuterium. With large enough amounts of liquid deuterium, one can build very mass-efficient thermonuclear explosives (if they are large enough, they need no compression in their final stage, so they’re basically a LD2 tank plus a very powerful igniter.)

    At up to 100 MT/ton of D2, one could imagine multi-gigaton-scale devices being assembled in orbit, with on-orbit transfer both of the liquid fusion fuel and the propellant needed to accelerate it out of LEO.

34. Kirk, try reading about the Antartic Treaty. Specifically the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty. The fact is there have been many proposals for petroleum extraction, among other things, in Antartica and it has been persistently banned. I remember reading there are also large coal reserves under the ice, since Antartica was not always as cold as it is now. It used to be home to luxurious forests in pre-historic times.

    Antartica is not economically developed for political reasons.

    Algeria gets natural gas from the Sahara. They are the major supplier for Italy and Spain. France also gets more than a little. Libya extracts petroleum from the desert. Far from economically useless.

    In Greenland there is no land ownership.

    As for a moon nuclear reactor you could probably use the excess heat to melt ice at the poles.

    If you are not at the poles you can probably use solar power anyway. The solar panels, or mirrors themselves can radiate excess heat. At the time most nuclear reactor on the moon proposals were made, solar cell technology was a lot cruder. IMO nuclear makes the most sense for propulsion (nuclear-thermal or nuclear-pulse).

35. Godzilla,

    [[[In Greenland there is no land ownership.]]]

    Actually Greenland belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark and the mineral rights belong to the Queen of Denmark. You just need to make a deal with her ministers to mine, which some firms have done.

    Here is a link to one such firm, Greenland Minerals and Energy, Ltd., that plans to open a REE mine in Greenland that could supply 20% of the world’s demand.

    http://www.ggg.gl/

36. There is far too much science fictioneering and far too little economic literacy among astronaut fans. In particular I recommend Adam Smith. High technology is based on an elaborate division of labor among at least hundreds of millions of people on earth. Even the primitive proto-industrial technology of Smith’s time involved sophisticated divisions of labor among the tens of millions of people of Western Europe, as Smith well describes. If we were just a few thousand people living on a tropical island we would be living like primitive tribes, regardless of whether we had modern scientific knowledge, because we couldn’t achieve anything like the extreme division of labor that makes modern technology possible. Since space colonies unlike tropical islands require high technology, they will not be anything close to self-sufficient until the very distant day when technology has been radically transformed in ways that would make no sense to do in our highly populated global economy.

    Space colonization is a very distant goal and launching astronauts today will not bring about the “backup” of earth — the dawn of self-sufficient space colonies — a nanosecond sooner. It is a task for our grandchildren, or their grandchildren.

    Popular apocalyptic fever aside, this task is nowhere close to being urgent on the timeframe of our mayfly generations. An asteroid strike that could possibly wipe out humans only happens once every several hundred million years, and we already know how to divert asteroids with robots so the odds of being wiped out by an asteroid have become practically zero. We have about a billion years before our sun gets too hot. Any human-made threat would sooner or later threaten any space colonies as well. As Kirk points out Earth is for almost all cosmic threats the safest place in the solar system for us anyway. So the idea that we need to build space colonies in this century to save our species is apocalyptic nonsense.

    Despite it being a task for our grandchildren, or their grandchildren, I consider earth backup to be a very important long-range goal. Are there in fact things we can do at this very early date to nudge it along? I suspect there are, but they have nothing to do with the sympathetic magic of launching astronauts and hoping they will miraculously transmogrify into space colonists. Accelerating the advances in our industries on earth, from agriculture to mining to chemical engineering, are the most important things we can be do to bring about space colonization sooner. ISRU is an important technology we will be able to develop within the next few decades that will eventually lead to the precursor industries of the radically transformed industries we will need to make space colonization possible. So primitive ISRU, which can’t be done economically until it can be done in a fully automated way and on much smaller than human scales, will be an important stepping stone to space colonization that we and our children can bring about.

37. Thomas identifies two (what happened to number three?) keys to long-term space development: (1) understanding the resources, and (2) developing the technology, especially mining technology.

    I have no strong disagreement so far, but observe that (1) is orders of magnitude cheaper and far more effectively done by robots operated from earth and producing results analyzed down here, just as with space science. Machine have been all over the solar system whereas astronauts have never been beyond the moon (and have mostly not even gone beyond LEO), despite far more money having been spent on the astronauts than on the automated spacecraft. A specific example of the relative effectiveness of automated machines and astronauts for exploring for ISRU resources: twelve astronauts walked and roved around the moon at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars but never got a clue that there is water ice at the lunar poles, or even that there is a tiny bit of hydration in the regolith they romped around in and collected. It took methodical machines orbiting the moon, and full-time scientists carefully analyzing the data they produced, but costing only hundreds of millions of dollars (three orders of magnitude less expensive), to discover these potential resources.

    For (2) the mining technology, full automation is more speculative as neither robots nor astronaut-tended machines have progressed beyond sampling to mining. We do however already mine the deep seas for oil and probably soon other minerals using teleoperated robots, even though human divers are orders of magnitude cheaper than astronauts. If we look at real space markets just doing the R&D to get to the point where we can launch a single astronaut on the moon costs far more many than the real markets for lunar-derived propellants will amortize. So until lunar mining can be done in a fully automated way, and probably in a very small-scale way, it won’t be done at all, except as extravagant government make-work pseudo-infrastructure that leads to nothing except abandoned demonstration mines and bankrupt governments.

    OTOH, the appropriate government research bodies (probably not NASA, since they are a cultural of aerospace engineers, not mining engineers or chemical plant engineers) could do important technology research to help make ISRU effective and affordable sooner.

38. Space colonization is a very distant goal and launching astronauts today will not bring about the “backup” of earth — the dawn of self-sufficient space colonies — a nanosecond sooner.

    I agree. It might bring colonies about decades sooner, but definitely not nanoseconds. I find this technological/economic pessimism just as unproductive and unrealistic as the sci fi scenarios.

    While I’ve disagree with Thomas Matula a lot in this thread, I think he’s got a coherent rebuttal.

    My view is that there are a bunch of significant obstacles to various desires for ambitious things like profitable space businesses or colonies in space. But there’s no reason to expect these obstacles to remain unchanged even over the span of a few decades. A lot of stuff becomes viable merely by lower costs or by just doing something for the first time (risk retirement).

    It may be as googaw implies that even most serious manned activity in space simple is counterproductive at present (the money being better spent elsewhere for a faster eventual development of space). But how would he know? We aren’t really investigating it.

39. We are researching many technologies that may accelerate the dawn of industrially self-sufficient space colonization, and we could research them more aggressively. One can think of Drexler’s self-replicating nanobots as the ideal but unachievable target technology for space industrialization. In Drexler’s economic fantasy we just launch one small rocket full of tiny self-replicating robots which can make anything, and presto, we have a self-sufficient economy.

    For various reasons (some economic as explained above, some having to do with quantum mechanics, Google [Smalley nanotechnology fingers]) the odds of Drexler’s vision ever coming true are small. But there are some more promising technological pathways that may eventually approach most of the functions of that ideal:

    + Genetic and metabolic engineering to figure out how to turn biological plants into flexible and self-replicating chemical plants.

    + Chemical microprocesses, e.g. microreactors. In other words chemical plants on a chip. This technology works and has already started to be useful on earth. Eventually, a complicated chemical plant with hundreds of reactions and separation processes might be crammed into a few kilograms of payload.

    + 3D printers, CDC milling, and similar flexible manufacturing technologies.

    + Automated mining, currently being developed for deep sea mining.

    Research into such things could be helpful to earth industry and real space development alike in the coming decades as well as accelerating the dawn of industrially self-sufficient colonies in space centuries from now. Whereas the causal connection between launching an astronaut today and developing the technology that will be needed by a real space colonist to support himself two hundred years from now is essentially nil (thus my “nanosecond” comment): such thinking is just sympathetic magical thinking, intuitively appealing but quite wrote.

40. Kirk Sorensen Says: :”But in space, the job is better fulfilled by a machine that doesn’t care about vacuum, doesn’t need to be rescued at a moment’s notice, doesn’t have feelings, and can “eat” ambient electromagnetic radiation via a solar panel.”

    We currently have one of those robots stuck in a sand trap on Mars. It cost several Billion dollars to send it there. Someone could salvage the mission by walking over and giving it a good hard shove with his boot. He could dust off the solar panels while he’s at it, too.

41. Yup, we could fix that billion-dollar robot, if only we could have a trillion-dollar human there. Yup, that trillion-dollar human would fix that billion-dollar robot real good.

42. Even if Kirk vast overestimated the cost of putting a repairman on site (he hasn’t in this case since you can’t do it for any amount of money), it remains that Spirit is severely degraded in performance. It’s grinding tool is worn down, two of the three wheels (each has its own motor) on the right side don’t work, and it’s not likely to survive more than a few winters anyway even with clean solar panels (due to degraded solar panels and the decay of the radioactive heating elements in the vehicle). The cost would probably have to be under $10 million to justify the effort.

    Whereas the causal connection between launching an astronaut today and developing the technology that will be needed by a real space colonist to support himself two hundred years from now is essentially nil

    A lot can happen between now and the era of magical tech. First, if that technology comes around in the near future, rather than two centuries from now, then the people who have been doing stuff in space will be well placed to take advantage of it. If the magical tech doesn’t come around shortly, then there will be an extended period of time when current technology will be the only show in town. And we already have profitable opportunities in space, even if none of them are manned. Finally, there is the reasonable possibility that the people who are doing things in space also happen to be the people who develop the magical tech, simply because they work in a wider variety of demanding environments.

43. we already have profitable opportunities in space, even if none of them are manned.

    This is hardly a justification for astronaut projects that are orders of magnitude too large and too costly for these opportunities.

44. Hey, Rand –

    When you mentioned your New Atlantis essay again, I went back & re-read it. (Great piece, btw … even after a second look.)

    Reading it reminded me, though, of a potential advantage I haven’t seen suggested regarding an in-space refueling infrastructure (depots).

    What about the ability to vastly simplify or nearly eliminate the TPS issue for re-entry of RLVs? One of my small peeves is that so few people ever discuss the fact that if you can afford the extra energy expenditure to “slow down”, that re-entry becomes a much easier problem to solve.

    In theory, if there is plenty of “cheap fuel” available on-orbit, and you have the right engines/thrusters for the job, then you should be able to eliminate the need for high-performance TPS, which (it could be argued) barely exists today, anyway.

    Thoughts?

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