Space Tourism?

Cave_Monster wonders: "With the successful return to earth by Gregory Olson, the US businessman who allegedly paid around £11m for his trip, what are people's thoughts on continuing with this trend? It is definately favourable towards generating extra funds for space programs, and with Mr. Olson preferring to be labeled as a 'flight participant' rather than a tourist, it definately begs the question as to how much input can these paying people have in space research? Experiments that he participated in included further investigation into how the human body deals with weightlessness and the possible causes to lower back pain and nausea, yet are these activities simply carried out so as to 'entertain' or is there real scientific purpose behind them? With the next 'tourist' expected to be Japanese businessman Daisuke Enomoto, should paying people have a real scientific background or is money simply enough?"

Comments

Definitely time to invest in a spell checker

[Tetravus]

I use SpellBound for Firefox. As for space tourists/flight participants, if they can positively contribute to experiments in a safe fashion they should be encouraged to help further defray the costs of their trip by working.

science is a fringe activity

[lawpoop]

Face it, most of what people want to do is socialize. Science or other knowledge-acquiring endeavours are fringe activities for the small geek subpopulation. That being said, when technology becomes mass produced and sold to people in order to socialize, that lowers the cost and makes the science much cheaper to pursue.

I say make space travel mostly a entertainment/travel industry for now. As the general public finances it, there will be investment and competition by private industry. The cost of space travel will become so cheap that it will be feasible to manufacture in space, and also to throw a few experiments up there.

Forget about the science-and-engineering oriented utopia promised us by science fiction. As a general rule, people want bread and circus. It would be much more effecient to throw a few experiments on the bread-and-circus rockets than the way it's currently being financed.

Re:Definately

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as we are being picky "it definately begs the question" doesn't beg the question.

      Fowler defines "begging the question" as the "fallacy of
founding a conclusion on a basis that as much needs to be proved as
the conclusion itself."

      "Question" here does not mean "a sentence in interrogative form".
Rather, it means "the point at issue, the thing that the person is
trying to prove". The phrase is elucidated by William Fulke in
"Heskins parleamant repealed" (1579): "O shameless beggar, that
craveth no less than the whole controversy to be given him!" The
OED's first citation for "to beg the question" is from 1581.

      Common varieties of begging the question are paraphrase of the
statement to be proved ("Telepathy cannot exist because direct
transfer of thought between individuals is impossible"), and
arguing in a circle ("The Bible must be true, because God wouldn't
lie to us; we know God is trustworthy, because it says so in the
Bible"). Fowler gives two example of non-circular question-begging:
"that fox-hunting is not cruel, since the fox enjoys the fun, and
that one must keep servants, since all respectable people do so".
Gowers notes that single words, such as "reactionary" and
"victimization", can be used in a question-begging way.

      The Latin term for the fallacy is _petitio principii_, a
translation of the Greek _to en archei aiteisthai_="at the
beginning to assume"; but _aiteisthai_ does literally mean "to beg".
The phrase can be traced back to Aristotle (4th century B.C.):
"Begging or assuming the point at issue consists (to take the
expression in its widest sense) in failing to demonstrate the
required proposition. But there are several other ways in which
this may happen; for example, if the argument has not taken
syllogistic form at all [...]. If, however, the relation of B to C
is such that they are identical, or that they are clearly
convertible, or that one applies to the other, then he is begging
the point at issue." (_Prior Analytics_ II xvi)

Re:Fly me to the Moon...

[DerekLyons]

A lot of the Russian money for the ISS has been siphoned out by Moscow bureaucrats, and the Russians are begging the US for extra funding.

Partially true. The extra funding they are currently asking for is because the 'free' Soyuz flights (carrying US personell) are coming to an end as per existing agreements.

I don't think the US is that behind in its commitments - the articles I have read suggest that the Russians are behind.

Hmm.. Where then is the CRV? (Essentially cancelled. Which keeps the crew size down because they are limited by Soyuz.) Where is the full fit of equipment for the LAB? (Sitting on the ground because the Shuttle is grounded.) The HAB? (Ditto. And it's because the HAB is grounded that they are having life support problems - because it's the backup to the Russian hardware.)

My guess is (based on plenty of direct experience of Russian industry and project management) that the Russian manufacturers have not seen any of the money allocated for the project, because it's been diverted to various consultancy companies and agencies.

Your guess would be pretty much wrong since all the critical path Russian equipment is on orbit - whereas almost none of the American hardware is.

So the Russians can't deliver, because they can't buy material and parts, and the money has disappeared, so they are looking for other funding sources.

A conclusions that only follows if you start from the premise that the Russians are to blame rather than bothering to actually be aware of the full facts.