Here‘s kind of a typically dumb piece, which reeks of Apolloism:
I am a big fan of space exploration and I think that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is a visionary company that is trying to conduct meaningful space exploration. Yet, Congress might want to take a hard look at the ticket price for Musk’s latest endeavor before spending $10 billion to populate Mars.
First, SpaceX is not “trying to conduct meaningful space exploration.” It is trying to establish human settlements on Mars. And if it could really be done for as little as $10B, that would be an incredible bargain to the taxpayer, compared to (say) spending that same amount on SLS/Orion in the next three years, as NASA currently proposes.
I am a limited government conservative, yet I fully support government funded space travel. But it must be smart and it can’t fund risky adventures. The one concern I have about SpaceX’s plan to travel to Mars is that, on its face, the plan seems more like a for-profit enterprise than true space exploration. I would support pure exploration of Mars and a project that has a stated goal of forwarding humanity. Musk’s idea seems like he is more in it for profit than science.
#ProTip: “Limited-government conservatives” do not spurn profit. And even if making a profit on “science” was really a bad thing, settling Mars has nothing to do with “science.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, Musk has received about $4.9 billion already in government subsidies for his three companies. Now he comes to the federal government wanting more. And he has been the beneficiary of many contracts to put satellites into space that run in the billions.
#ProTip: Tesla and Solar City get subsidies. SpaceX gets contracts. One is nothing like the other two, other than federal dollars are involved.
This is a laudable idea and Elon Musk should be celebrated as one of the great innovators of our time, yet the taxpayers should not be funding for profit space exploration and may want to find another contractor who wants to go to space for purely scientific space exploration.
This is a perfect example of the mental confusion that occurs when (as many ignorantly did with Apollo) we conflate “exploration” with “science” with space development and settlement. Mr. Woodson needs to go read my recent screed.
[Update a couple minutes later]
As usual, the comments over there are idiotic, including a couple appearances of the ignorant “NASA’s Muslim outreach.”
From linked article:
“At first, these trips will take between 80 and 150 days, though eventually transport time could drop to 30 days.” Sounds great until you see that he is pitching a public-private partnership that will put taxpayers on the hook for $10 billion in initial cost.”
I have not read Musk plan, therefore I didn’t know the plan was to get there in 30 days. And that makes more sense in regard to the 100 passenger Mars transport, ie, a specialization of fast transport of people to Mars.
I have been suggesting for quite awhile that NASA goal in terms of Mars exploration should include a plan to transport crew to Mars in 3 months or less. Basically idea is small crew [say 3 seats] and be transporting most of mass needed with slower hohmann transfer and use non-hohmann mars trajectory with crew only.
To do such fast crew trips, requires a large amount of rocket fuel at high earth orbit- and is related to staging at say EML-1 rather than LEO.
From EML-1 the crewed ship approaching Earth at Low earth orbit distance, so it enters LEO at +10 km/sec, and adding rocket delta-v close to Earth’s gravity well and gaining benefit of oberth effect. wiki:
“In astronautics, a powered flyby, or Oberth maneuver, is a maneuver in which a rocket falls into a gravitational well, and then accelerates when its fall reaches maximum speed.The resulting maneuver is a more efficient way to gain kinetic energy than applying the same impulse outside of a gravitational well.”
Such added kinetic energy is used to change the vector of Earth orbital velocity around the sun. So with the hohmann one is adding velocity to Earth’s orbital velocity- increases the speed- and what doing instead is changing the vector and shortening the distance one needs to travel to Mars. Or one using a lot of delta-v but not arriving at Mars distance going at high velocity relative to Mars orbital velocity. Or instead of traveling 500 million km from Earth to Mars, one travels about 200 million km distance [or less] to reach Mars.
With hohmann Mars trajectories, to get to Mars in less than 8 months requires what called patched conic. With this non hohmann transfer
one also uses something similar to patched conic. Or it’s more similar to Venus to Mars hohmann transfer with it’s patched conic.
Anyways I think Mars needs to be explored before one can consider “doing Mars settlements”. As I also think one needs to explore the Moon before one can do commercial water mining [or do things like have lunar bases]. Actually I think one should explore the Moon more before having lunar base, than one needs to explore Mars before you make a Mars base. The reason being is one uses the first Mars base to further explore Mars in order to have needed exploration for additional future Mars bases. Or the first mars base focus is having human presence on Mars, other bases can focus on using Mars resources to lower cost of living and operating on Mars.
yet the taxpayers should not be funding for profit space exploration
Is the author under the delusion that government contractors don’t make a profit?
A ppp doesn’t mean that the government would pay all of the costs. And why wouldn’t we want commerce and government expanding our society as partners? The strength of our government is only as strong as the strength of the individuals and companies that enable government to exist.
It continues to be striking to me how unconservatively many conservatives can manage to talk about space policy.
Perhaps it’s the lingering residue of Apollosim and a resulting conception of the space program as some sort of “national greatness” project. Perhaps some of it is resentment of the tendency of NewSpace gurus like Musk (who was visibly pro-Hillary) to support Democrats politically and financially. And perhaps some of it is simple partisanship, since Commercial Space has been mainly identified as an Obama initiative (notwithstanding that the Bush Administration gave it its real start subsequent to the VSE).
And some of it may just be simple ignorance about space policy and architecture, which seems to be sadly on display in this Hill article.
It’s why I’m relieved that we do have voices like yours out there in conservative outlets, Rand.
Richard M.,
I think it’s all of those things you’re referencing. Small government conservatives, in their attempt to display fidelity to their principles, often dismiss space exploration as a big-government boondoggle which achieves nothing. Cutting space exploration is also a lot easier than cutting entitlements.
I believe a lot of the rest of is partisanship centered around dislike for people like Musk who are pushing for space exploration, since most of them are leftists.