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The Financial Future of Space Travel
gurps_npc writes " This CNNMoney story discusses the financial future of space travel. In particular it gives some nice names and numbers, such as Bezos, Musk and 3554 Amun. 3554 Amun is an small metalic asteroid that crosses Earth's pass (not on collission course) and contains over 20 trillion US dollars worth of precious metal. It is a great fact to know when trying to explain to flat-earth types that don't understand why we waste money on space travel."
hey, maybe these people have a point. perhaps someday mars will be a vacation spot, and not just in "total recall". and hey, i sure wouldnt mind getting my hand on all that precious metal floating out there, except that it would COMPLETELY drop the value of world currency. Especially if we found more of it. And a sudden drop in the value of the worlds currency would not be good for average joe. the person, not the tv show (what do u people take me for?)
Great, so the rich get richer because not every company can afford to goto space (talk about your barriers to entry, or should I say orbit).
I bet there are more than $100 quadrillion dollars of precious metals in the earth ... the problem is that most of this stuff is too expensive and difficult to get at. Same deal here, at least until we get a space elevator going. We need damn cheap travel to make it worth going to space to get IRON of all things ... for now, it's what, $20,000 per pound going up, and mining equipment / transports back down are heavy.
scheme. The government will front the money, and we'll have privatization of risk, but when the money starts to get made, we'll hear about how we need to keep government out. Kind of like today, where companies rail against government interference on the Internet and the utilities, which wouldn't exist without government action.
Seriously, without government action, the south would have no electric power, the Internet would not be here, and people in the boondocks would never have mail service, because the Free Market wouldnt support it.
On that note, remember, Free Market economics is like Marxist economics, a few designed system with strengths and weaknesses, not some divine proscription.
3554 Amun is an small metalic asteroid that crosses Earth's pass (not on collission course) and contains over 20 trillion US dollars worth of precious metal. It is a great fact to know when trying to explain to flat-earth types that don't understand why we waste money on space travel. We should continue exploration not only for the monetary return on investment (ROI), but rather BECAUSE IT'S THERE!
FTFA: whoever owns Amun could become 450 times as wealthy as Bill Gates . And exactly does one come to own an asteroid? Is planing a flag good enough? If so, I'm gonna start launching "ME" flags at all the nearest celestial bodies.
The discouraging thing is that we probably could, today, build automated spacecraft that could reach the asteroid and set off nuclear bombs to change the orbit. It would be profitable to nudge the thing into earth orbit. And if somebody screws up, we lose the planet.
We might actually be able to pay off the national debt!!!
No Sigs!
Depending on how valuble each amount of metal is (are we talking 5 tons of pure silver, or 5 pounds of platinum?), this sounds like the kind of stuff that could destabilize economies.....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Well, yes, if everybody means the same Europeans that it helped. Latin America is still paying for the exploitation.
And in slightly more related grounds, the wealth also destroyed Spain in the end, leading to an economy of bankers and people living the rich life on nothing but credit. There is a reason Spain isn't exactly on the forefront of the world economy anymore. In a very real way, the only people to benefit from all that gold in more than the short term were the British. They used the wealth they got to develop their own economy and make the big steps in technology that made them a world power.
I hate to say this and support the righties on the issue, but the east india company and others in the early ages of european exploration and establishment of global trade routes faced the same issues. This is how stock came to be, because the risks involved in mounting expeditions to god knows what "savage land" was considered just as risky then as space is now.
The prevelance of pirates and relative lawlessness of foreign lands meant there was a good chance of your ship never returning, and ships were a big deal back then, much more expensive in real currency to build than they are now. (this is supposedly the origin of the phrase "my ship came in")
Anyway, they will push into space the same way companies launched in earlier days which involved huge risk, by spreading it among many investors in the form of stocks.
On the other hand, should we colonize mars they would quickly outstrip earth in ability to harvest asteriods as the lower gravity there would make the playing field truly unequal.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Expense and difficult problems pave the way for high tech research and funding.
Just like war: the people who benefit most are in the high tech fields.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
contains over 20 trillion US dollars worth of precious metal
MA, PA, GIT THA TRUCK! Der's gold in 'em 'ere asteroids!
And the heavy metals include fissionables, so electrical power for manufacturing and consumer use also gets cheaper.
It was actually more like: the gold Spain brought back from the new world created a major glut that significantly devalued the price of gold, and the resulting inflation ended up devastating Spain's economy.
Since gold had little if any actual intrinsic value in those times (today at least we can plate electrical connectors with it), acquiring more of it had just the same effect as printing more paper money today: it created inflation, not any new real wealth.
Oh! I thought you were talking about the Olympics.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Get our eggs out of this nest at the bottom of a gravity well.
here's one
gandhi owned a loincloth and a pair of glasses when he kicked off
how about tesla? living-starving-in a cold water flat at the end when the feds ripped off his notes
gw carver? turned down 100gs a year in the 1800s to keep working on his ag patents for the good of the planet?
Let's turn it around, how many incredibly rich guys actually got there without being total jerks or without being born into it, ie, big nothings?
Oo..
>>he wealth also destroyed Spain in the end, leading to an economy of bankers and people living the rich life on nothing but credit.
this accurately describes the US. Frightening but not unexpected.
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you realise its the poor that do all the actual work?
the rich just cream off the profits from & take the credit for the labour of the poor.
Web Design
Just like the Martians, living in their reservations deep underneath Mars' crust after trading all of their land away for a single bead.
Seastead this.
Since gold had little if any actual intrinsic value in those times (today at least we can plate electrical connectors with it), acquiring more of it had just the same effect as printing more paper money today: it created inflation, not any new real wealth.
Sadly, most people can't comprehend that.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Ooh, I wanna be a space pirate!
Can I name my ship "Serenity"?
You've obviously never studied economy (though admitedly, I haven't either), so I think it only fair to point out the obvious:
Millions of people would lose their jobs.
It's going to be a sad day for humanity when exploration and progress are hindered because some sweatshop in India can't keep up. Companies weren't born rich, they became rich because they didn't sit on their arses all day, complaining "Why do the rich keep getting richer? Life suck. Boo hoo hoo". It's the rich that send rockets into space - they should be the ones to claim the profits - the last thing society needs is a generation dependent on welfare hand-outs, simply because the rich have too much money and the poor needs to catch up before any work is done.
The day astronomers discover an asteroid with oil reserves is the day the US diverts half its military budget to the 'peaceful exploration of space'.
Kevin Fox
The Pres I Dent Just forgot about EARTH
the sun is god
A number of private spaceflight firms mentioned in the article are looking for people to hire. These companies are looking for folks with expertise in a variety of areas, from web design, to aerospace/mechanical engineering, to programming. Here's a few links (courtesy of RLV News, listed roughly in order of available resources), with descriptions of what the company does:
* Bigelow Aerospace: Inflatable space station modules for orbital research and tourism. Despite being inflatable, their modules are better at withstanding space debris than the ISS, as they're made of a material twice as strong as kevlar. Out of all the private spaceflight firms, they probably have the most resources.
* SpaceX: Orbital rockets which are drastically cheaper than the competition, with plans for building manned orbital rockets. They should be launching their first rocket next month.
* Scaled Composites: Burt Rutan's company and winner of the X Prize. They're currently working on building SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic.
* SpaceDev: They build microsatellites and propulsion systems.
* Blue Origin: Suborbital vehicle company started by Amazon.com's CEO, Jeff Bezos. Author Neal Stephenson also works for them, hoping for the "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a minor character in a Robert Heinlein novel."
* Rocketplane Limited: Suborbital spaceplanes
* Masten Space Systems: Suborbital launch vehicles.
* TGV Rockets: Suborbital launch
i think you miss my point.
if this asteroid gets mined, who'll be doing the actual mining?
who'll be going up into space, risking their life?
who'll be building the equipment, spacecraft, etc?
it wont be the fat cat boss that gets the majority of the cash from it.
Web Design
Because Jupiter and Saturn have heaps of methane (many times the mass of the Earth) and Neptune and Uranus are practically made of the stuff.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If you suddenly flood the market with all these extra resources, it will be entirely a buyers' market, and other sellers and the countries who rely on them heavily will start collapsing.
I know this has been mentioned before, but exactly what sort of speeds are those space elevators expected to maintain?
100 mph? Well, just under two years transit on freight wouldn't be too bad, I guess.
10 mph?
That would take real long-term planning to do much with.
Maybe I should go hit google before I get all cynical.
Maybe 3554 Amun could be the counterweight. Oh, wait, somebody's thought of that one before. Sorry.
One thing to worry about is what would happen if it snapped? Would it wrap around the earth like yarn? Would the counterweight be launched in some unpredictable path (away from the earth, at any rate)?
Sounds like a toy my son would like to play with.
It's a conspiracy by the people selling diet foods, I tell you! No one ever suspects them!
I see your point, but OTOH, in a "free" labor market, nobody is forced to do that work are they? If that person doing the mining didn't want to risk their life in space they could find a job elsewhere, in theory.
The price for such labor will no doubt be set by the laws of supply and demand; they'll find the price point at which somebody skilled enough will be willing to do it. The price probably won't be all that high.
In theory, sure. In practice, I like to eat.
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
The GP does have a point though, in theory. Finding a more efficient way to produce something or obtain raw materials generates overall more wealth (or rather, wealth potential) within society. Economics is not a zero-sum game (for the rich to get richer the poor don't need to get poorer, since we can all make new "stuff"). In theory those jobs lost could be put to work creating something else, which could make other products cheaper in turn (increased labor supply in other markets), or making something new like a cure for cancer or cheap TV shows or furniture. Of course reality doesn't always allow this for individuals, particularly those who have spent their entire life in a now-obsolete industry.
One other 'angle' here though is that a single entity owning a supply of precious metals that outstrips the rest of the planet's supply would allow that entity to control prices. Traditional mining is expensive. They could surely set the price point at just below the level necessary to keep mines profitable, leaving little benefit for society at large but still putting millions out of work. (This doesn't even assume price fixing, yet even in, say, the oil industry with in theory many suppliers we still have artificially controlled pricing.)
Yup, hence all my qualifiers, like "in theory" and putting "free" in quotes :) (I'm sure the garbagemen who collect my garbage for a low wage are also "free" "in theory" to find better work :/)
is that a lot of the mineral reserves in our planet are under rainforests or other ecologically significant portion of land on earth and/or in areas where conflict fuels and is fueled by the pursuit of mineral reserves. In Brazil at least, disputes over land in the Amazon for control of areas with potential for gold and iron is intense for years, if you look at Africa, you got a similar situation with regards for gold and diamonds. Finding an economically viable way of tapping into space minerals would provide a way of pushing down prices so that these earth-based conflicts become meaningless, and would take out most of the reasons why some people insist on destroying ever scarcer forests. I might be saying complete rubbish, but it seems to me that once we find a cheaper way of sending the machinery out in space and of negotiating space-scale distances a bit faster. We could do most or all of the processes of refining and even manufacture outside the earth's atmosphere, and getting stuff back down is less of a problem once you got the materials processed in space. And I bet that moving tonnelades of raw minerals across space would be much cheaper than doing this on the surface of the earth. That does not seem to be such a blue sky dream to me at least. This last bit might be somewhat of paranoid of me, but it is indeed unfortunate that the US is the only remaining super-power, because they don't have anything but corporation lobby to foster them and innovate on many technological fronts. So if we got companies that are doing just fine in the current model, the US is unlikely to invest significant amounts of money for breakthroughs in these technologies. Now why am I talking about the US, because they are probably the only ones who got a big enough budget and a level of political unity to try and do a coherent project of this magnitude. The EU push into space technologies has been too meek if you ask me, and the russians, who have the knowledge, don't have the money. China perhaps would do this, they are communists, but they know how to go after the big bucks. (If you read up to here, I congratulate you, you got a lot of patience!)
www.meneguzzi.eu/felipe
I tried to get some information about this asteroid, bu as soon as i read the word "Au" small $ signs appeared in my eyes and I was unable to read further.
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
No, but it does contain e
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Have != try to sell. Check the diamonds, we do have far too many diamonds, but De Beers managed to market them very nicely and keep the price high for more than a century. If the De Beers cartel wasn't monopoly, the price of diamonds wouldn't be a tenth of what it currently is.
In fact, had De Beers not existed, no one would give a flying fuck about diamonds.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
I read a lot of negative comments on NASA on this board. It's now fashionable to complain that this agency has become a huge inefficient cesspit of wasted opportunities and money. Since the last shuttle disaster NASA is not looking very good for sure.
People assume that things will fare better if profit-driven private enterprise runs the space exploring show.
To a great degree I think it's not as simple as it looks. First the obvious cheap routes to profit from space are already taken : putting satellites in LEO and geosynchronous orbit. There is already a lot of competition on that market between the US, Europe, Japan, India and China. Unless someone comes up with a space elevator that works or similar disruptive technology, this is not likely to change much.
Essentially private space exploring enterprises is now at the level NASA was at in 1950 or so. It took a huge financial effort and a large dedicated team of incredible people to go to the Moon in 1970 or so (and bring back small samples of rock). While not all of this is lost, and I believe it is possible to repeat the feat, I can't see much profit in that particular endeavour. Colour me doubtful with respect with space tourism. It will be a while before this is safe enough for companies to ship people for small leaps above the atmosphere without getting sued out of existence at the first accident.
Getting to the Moon and the asteroids and mining them has been a mainstay of science fiction since it has existed. Everyone knows many asteroids are metal-rich and could turn a nice buck if they could be exploited. Everyone knows the Moon is littered with He3, and theoretically achieving sustained nuclear fusion might be easiser there. However various governments have known this as well, for decades. In contrast to starry eyed reporters and somewhat naive slashdot users, they have run the numbers and found that with current technology their exploitation is simply not economically feasible. Again we need disruptive technology and it's not there yet.
While I'm not a particular big fan of governements either, and not particularly the US's, I'd like to remind everyone here that so far, in spite of their failings, it is them who have driven investments, research, exploration and exploitation. They are so far ahead of any and all private space exploration outfits that it's not funny.
Even with the help of billions and indeed, trillions of dollars of private funds it will take a very long time for private enterprise to catch up, let alone leap ahead. I don't doubt that if Bill Gates and Warren Buffet combined their wealth they'd be able to build a Saturn V equivalent in a small number of years, but I can't see anyone succeeding in convincing them it would be a good and sound business proposition.
It may happen, but I wouldn't hold my breath. While private enterprise is busy gathering investors with nice sounding business plans and pooh poohing all that we learned in the last 50 years or so of actual space exploration because, you know, gov't did it and that's not relevant, NASA and the others are still exploring the solar system, last I checked. Apparently there's a plan to go to Mars, or so I heard.
Really all that NASA and others require is a sound plan, a clear worthy goal that has some chance of succeeding. What many people seem to be missing here is that in spite of searching and thinking hard that plan was never found. The rest followed.
Unless they face something, what is Doom 3 games is based on! :)
"The Apollo era was heroic, but beating the Soviets to the moon never provided a compelling economic reason to return. (We didn't even get Teflon or Tang as spinoffs--both were invented before 1960.)"
I may be nitpicking here, but the premiss is plain WRONG.
America's leadership in the semiconductor industry in general and the CPU industry in perticular is direct result of the space race and the arms race. I prefare the former rather then the latter. The challange of making apollos on-board computer directly influenced the development of ICs, and later the CPU. intel would'nt have been if it were not for apollo (or at least would have come much later).
If you're so interested in creating jobs, why not start banning labor-saving technology?
English is easier said than done.
Whoever is sitting on the near-earth passing asteroid is in fact in command of weapon similar to clean nuke. And having transportation to earth orbit is equivalent to having long range ballistic missile. So space property will probaly be supervised by some international body, like International Atomic Energy Agency. It would be logical if the same agency take care of registration and distribution of space property rights.
Now, let's get Gyro Gearloose on this thing! We don't want the Beagle Boys getting to it first!
Jeeze, they're going to need at least 20 Bruce Willises to mine that puppy. What a time for Bush to outlaw cloning.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
That's 20 trillion US dollars worth of precious metal at current prices
You can guarantee that if you manage to mine this rock, prices would go down. Supply and demand.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
DeBeers buys most of the uncut diamonds which are produced. They put them in a big vault somewhere and trickle out stones at a rate which guarantees an artificially high scarcity and therefore an artificially high price.
Just because you have something doesn't mean you have to sell it, especially when it's not in your interest to do so.
Deleted
As long as it only lands on the "bad" countries it wouldn't be a problem. :)
Of a space elevator please? People keep saying it'll be cheaper than flying rockets but they also keep failing to explain how it'll be cheaper.
Deleted
There's a lot missing in this equation as presented.
The asteroid, small as it is on the scale of things, weighs a lot. A real lot.
This means that changing the delta-V to get the metals to Earth will require a lot of energy. We may well be able to do that with the Sun one day. However, there is also the gravitational field energy to be considered. Merging the gravity wells will release an awful lot of energy, which will then need to be soaked up somehow, or we'll make carbon emission worries look like wondering vaguely if you left the gas on.
In short we'd better build that space elevator and a portable solar sail before we even think about mining asteroids on a grand scale.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
ok so you now have a "cable" travelling at thousands of km/h in contact with what? wheels, rollers on a lifting platform/pod. Maglev? More than that, it's more than likely a carbon based cable so it'd better not get too hot, the carbon will change state, sublimate etc. and we're talking lots of power and lots of energy, therefore lots of heat.
The truth is a space elevator will have to travel at tens of miles per hour and then the huge distances we're talking about become a big problem, it'd take days to get into orbit. That's not a problem? ah well, except that we have tens, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of space elevator to pay for, maintain and operate. It has to be able to handle lots of lifts to pay for itself.
Space elevators sound like a great idea until you realise the scale of infrastructure you'd have to build to operate one economically.
Deleted
To mine 50billion worth, takes $30billion of effort, ie people, mechanics, geoogists, transports, refiners, etc...
To print $50b in TBILL/BONDS, takes 2 seconds on a FED RESERVE table offer monthly, all it does is TRUELY devalue the present
currency. Spending REAL $$$ to min $50billion (one years worth btw) takes effort and real people benefit, unlike
T-BILLS.
Go read financialsense.com
Fake wealth = monetory inflation at 10% with credit interest rates at 4.5% = 5.5% spread gains, out of 10trillion, thats 550billion out of thin air each year without it effecting inflation, for now....
Go check the current M1/M2/M3 money supply charts at the FED charted over 20 years, vs stock market prices... inflation finds a home, today its the stock market + oil prices and not wages/consumer goods.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The fact that you think gold is only good for shiny oranments is ignorance on your part.
Precious metals like gold and platinum have many applications in electronics, medicine and science in general.
And you know what, i really do think that there are better things to do for humanity than spending the money to feed some poor people in a country you've never been to.
And by the way, it's metals, not rocks.
554 Amun may well have billions of precious metals inside, it'll be easier to reach than the moon BUT it's also moving at a fair old whack and actually parking it in orbit is going to be a whole different problem. Somehting 2km in diameter is going to take a lot of stopping. The only way to do it with anything approaching today's technology would be to dump a series of engines, possibly ion drives or even a solar sail, on the rock and slow it down so you could pick it up on the next circuit. Looks like we'll all have to wait a while longer to knock Bill Gates off the rich list.
And that's how you make money... Restrict the market. You're making the assumption that there's a free market for diamonds, there isn't. You might have a million tonnes of gold in your back garden (or in space) but if you sell it by the ounce it won't have an affect on the world market.
e.g.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/198202/diamond
Deleted
3554 Amun is an small metalic asteroid that crosses Earth's pass (not on collission course) and contains over 20 trillion US dollars worth of precious metal
But the knowledge gained from exploring Space and the Solar System is priceless.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
There is EVERY reason to be in space, now. It just happens that we aren't pursuing the correct reasons at the moment, leaving them neglected in favor of pursuing silly reasons.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I can't completely agree with your point about the poor doing all the work. Or even all the 'real' work as you said. Most of the much better off people i know, very well paid executives and managers and such, spend far more time at work than anyone else i know. They have a LOT of responsibility and a lot to do. On the other hand, the factory workers i know, from what i see, do LESS work than most people. Most likely due to the fact that they're union and unions dont' believe in actual work but rather lots and lots of breaks all day and then stopping a half hour before the end of the day to line up by the timeclock so they can sprint out the door as soon as the clock hits 2:30.
In Mercury by Ben Bova it was broken at geosynchronous orbit. It wrapped from Equador across the acific and ended in the Atlantic. I think he's wrong.
In part it depends on what it's made of but it has to be designed of materials good under tension, I guess lose the tension and it behaves like string. The downward force on the middle would be greater than at the top so there would be tension at the top end.
Consrevation of angular momentum suggests to me the top would move east as it fell but the tension would pull against this.
Then there are wind effects. Does the anchoring at the base hold?
The simplest case should be solvable, no air resistance, ground anchor holds, uniform mass distrubution with height, infinitly flexible, infinite tensile strength, non elastic etc. Any applied mathematicians out there?
It's such prudent thinking like that kept your ancestors in Britain.
It's not 1950, and the knowledge required to design and build a space vehicle is no longer in the realm of research, but of engineering. For one thing, my Palm Pilot has many times more computing power than the computers onboard those spacecraft. And a single PC today has more computing power than NASA had for the Apollo missions.
Tourists can be told to sign a waiver:
By the way -- if you don't like our government, you're welcome not to move here. Leave the criticism to those who do.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Now, something that has always been a point of mine to make about mining space, is that if we continue to do this, our planet will eventually get bigger. If we want to maintain the size we have (For some weird reason) we would have to put some matter equally as much back into space. This soil or whatever it is, will cost a lot of put up there, and will be thoroughly infested with microbes and insects. The insects may die out, but the microbes will hybernate in that soil until it strikes some planet or moon or whatever. Bacteria has been known to survive in space. Astronauts found a piece of foam on the moon, and it had bascteria on it, from when a technician sneezed back on Earth. They discovered this 5 years after the mission that placed the foam there went up. Our planets gravity would increase, the magnetic field might get stronger, who knows what might happen! I predict that the Earth would also warm up, because of the excess matter/surface area.
Fortunately, "labor-saving technology" rarely saves any actual labor. Look at computers, fantastic potential to allow one person to do the job of hundreds. What really happened? /.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
The asteroid should be used for space use. Getting a refining factory up there would be MUCH cheaper than taking all the metal down unrefined. And once you have refined metal in space, why should you have to bring it down? That would be the perfect place to build craft that don't ever have to land on a planet. Sure, you'd still bring the electronics and plastics up, but there is no reason to ferry the bulk of a ship up there. Same goes for habitats.
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
We may have a period of space colonization that generates a lot of entertainment and literature, just like the American West of the late 1800's
Except that a lot of that literature has already been generated in anticipation.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
The rich get richer because they have habits that grow wealth.
The poor stay poor because they have habits that continue to keep them poor.
There is nothing evil in being rich.
The evil is when someone takes a liberty or property through force from someone else.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
The rich may do a lot of work, but what do they actually produce? Food is grown by farmers, cars are constructed by factory workers, houses are built by construction workers. The managers may enable their work, make the labourers work more efficiently or sell their work for more profit, but even if they do that (which not all actually do), they still don't do the actual work itself.
And then there's the entire financial industry (and especially the stockmarket) that spends long hours just shifting money around for the profit of the owner of that money, without ever producing anything new.
Without workers, you have nothing. Without managers, perhaps the work will be a bit harder or less efficient. Or maybe not.
Without managers those workers would have nothing to do. They need direction and enablers. Organization and structure. Without the managers, there would be chaos. Nothing would get done. The workers merely build the product. They don't plan the product lineup, they don't organize the sale of product to the vendor, they don't take care of health and safety issues, they don't do the massive amount of engineering that goes into the production of a product. Farmers may be a bit more self managing but they are a special case. A smaller entity. Construction workers have foremen to direct them. The foremen, if they are part of a larger construction agency, have bosses over them which direct them where to go based on the sales made by salesmen. There is a LOT that goes into supporting these workers and that's where you NEED to have managers. I work in IT support for a factory. Believe me they need managers.
"Millions of people would lose their jobs."
Granted, just like millions lost their jobs when we developed new mining methods or invented the steam engine.
But history indicates that in total many times more jobs are created than lost, and the standard of living increases.
e.g. an off the peg shirt costs me about 1 hour of my labour. 100 years ago a shirt would have cost me about a week's labour.
As a further example my dad lost his job as a machine tool maker. Now has a higher paid, less strenuous job in the education sector. Loosing jobs isn't a bad thing - it is often a sign of progress that people no longer have to work in mines or the mill like my grandparents did.
i.e. my grandad is welcome to his job as a blacksmith in the mines - I'll stay as an IC designer than you very much! BTW I have been made redundant at one point in my career and it was the best thing to happen to me.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
The tidal force is CHANGE in the force of gravitation with distance, not the force of gravity per se. Newton recognized this in order to explain the second, anitpodal tide each day.
The tide force formula then is the cube of distance. That explains why the moon, a 26 million times less massive than the sun, but 1/400th the distance have comparable tides.
and if you can't eat you won't do that job. If no-one can eat from what it pays, no-one will do the job. If no-one is willing to do the job, but the profit is there, then the wage of the job will increase until it's either not profitable, or someone is willing to do it.
This will start off as a small sector and grow.
An equilibrium will be found.
If you don't believe this will work, look at the countries that have a large percentage of the population starving, and those that have a high standard of living - correlate this to their adherence to a free market economy. Not a 100% match I'll grant you, but getting there...
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Ever heard of gold plated connectors?
Gold-on-gold contacts are very corrosion resistant. (Gold-on-other-metal contacts will cause the "other metal" to corrode faster though. So if you want gold plated electronic connectors, make sure BOTH sides of the connection are gold plated.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Why was this modded as flamebait? Which part isn't true or overstated?
I've heard that one of the best uses for non-flawless artificial diamonds are in the cutting department. My father, a former owner of an excavating company, would by diamond blades just for cutting things like pavement or concrete. The blade would last a long time if you treated it with respect and it would produce beautiful cuts. The diamonds in the blade were dark, but they were still diamonds. Unfortunately, artificial diamonds are still expensive, but I would expect that to change as it becomes easier to produce them.
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Diamonds, they're not just for jewelry anymore.
Just because it passes by our planet doesn't mean we own it, on that basis i'd own every frickin' car that passes by my house.
"If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low
Space property rights are a very murky and ambiguous area, but one which should get resolved if we want to have any hope of expanding out there permanently.
Space property is also a very political idea. It is not a coincidence that NASA is building fully domestic exploration and landing infraststructure at a time when competing space programs in Russia, Europe, India, and China are in their ascendancy. The US may not make territorial claims of celestial bodies like the moon unilaterally, but it will influence international property rights agreements from a position of strength.
an ill wind that blows no good
In other words, when you have plenty of precious metal, well it's not precious anymore.
D'uh !
Thomas-
What I noticed missing was the Gold group, with Copper, Silver, and Gold. These are the metals that we need for their electrical properties. In particular, copper is slowly getting more and more expensive, and a good source of that would certainly be nice. (Not that the Platinum group metals aren't nice to have for their catalytic properties.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Without managers those workers would have nothing to do. They need direction and enablers.
No they don't. Workers have taken care of themselves for millennia. The managers just make the workers work more efficiently, reaping big profits for themselves and their superiors. It's only because the rich monopolised the means of production that workers now need them.
Construction workers have foremen to direct them. The foremen, if they are part of a larger construction agency, have bosses over them which direct them where to go based on the sales made by salesmen.
And yet houses have been built for 8000 years or more.
Yes, managers certainly add value (most of the time, anyway), but it's still the workers that do the actual work, and they have done that long before there even were managers. Managers make themselves necessary, but they really need workers more than the workers need them.
We all realized the errors of our ways and made Ned Ludd Day a national holiday?
English is easier said than done.
The budget part is true. The implication that we just wander the earth "invading small countries" is nonsense. Afghanistan involved the removal of the toxic Taliban, and Iraq wouldn't have been an issue if Saddam hadn't invaded Kuwait. Were you thinking of Japan, maybe? Or Germany? Do you have any sense of history about where the western democracies have "invaded" and where they have not?
If the US thought nothing of invading small countries, we'd have long since turned Cuba into an annexed vacation spot, turned Hugu Chavez into valet parking attendant, paved over North Korea, etc. But we have not. Much, no doubt, to your rhetorical disappointment.
Never mind, of course, the considerable overlap in raw research dollars, logistical support, and technology applications that NASA enjoys with the military.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I'm no Luddite; I love technology. I just don't pretend that it saves me time (especially not while I'm posting on /.)
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
The shuttle and the international space station continued this record of dismal return on investment.
The article starts with a misleading statement. The premise is no return comes out of the space technology and practices. Wrong. Communications, GPS and weather forecasting all have satellites in common. I'm sure there's many more industries than what I come up with.
You bet someone's making a bunch of money off that.
Now I know who's blowing themselves up halfway around the globe. Great. So I got that going for me.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
So you're saying Diamonds are going to have a DRM broadcast flag? Diamond Restrictions Managment?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
We should send a space probe up there to steer the asteroid toward Earth. If we can manage to steer it to land in my back yard, I'd be a trillionaire. It might literally kill two birds with one "stone" by knocking down my house, which needs a lot of work. ;-)
The evil is when someone takes a liberty or property through force from someone else.
That's only your limited view. The reality is that property is theft.
Your body is composed of particles of star-stuff billions of years old. Do you really believe you can claim "ownership" of that, or anything else, for that matter? Even if your consciousness manages to "improve" the work of millions of related physical and biological processes, the net result is the material of you and everything else was here before you and will be here long after you. The same goes for the products of your labors.
Ownership is a shared delusion, like society and government. If you're looking for evil, try looking at Man's attempt to spread his deranged monkey-mind beyond the ravaged confines of his unfortunate birth-planet.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
Those astroids could fix economic stability if we are careful with how to extract it. Currently the US dollar is not based on anything but confidence. If we pulled just enough gold to make out dollar worth gold. That would help tremendously. Additionally, No one in their right mind would "flood" the market with that much gold or any metal over night. However, over a time-elapsed period, you could begin to see the economy expand to the point, where we would have as many trillionares as we currently have billionares.
1) You are thinking that the owner of the metal will sell it all at once, and the price drop is a bad thing. No. We are talking about decades to mine out of the asteroid. It is not 20 trillion instantly hitting the market, destroying it. Instead it is spread out over many decades (if not centuries), and during that time we avoid starting newer mines in less profitable loads, because it would not be worth it. I doubt the value of the metal, if we could mine it, would drop more than 10%. But that is a POSITIVE effect for most of the world. It means that manufacturing costs go down, for greater profits for everyone - except the owners of earthly mines that don't get a piece of the action.
2) You are also assuming we have to ship the stuff down to earth. Forget that foolishness. We use the metals to start a manufacturing plant in orbit, that begins to build earth satelites and space ships to explore the rest of the solarsystem.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
LOL. They already do. Diamonds, from reputable sources, are laser inscribed with a serial number. All they have to do to these diamonds is add an additional letter at the start/end....N for natural, M for manufactured - or whatever else they want to designate. And I think in this case it is perfectly fine. How uncool would it be if last year you spent $30,000 on a diamond, only to have it valued at $5 because someone can manufacture diamonds at an insane speed.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Also, the value probably doesn't take into account the cost of mining the metals and bring them to Earth. (Unless you plan to sell them to people to use in space, which presents a very different market and therefore I'd argue that the cost of the metal is currently not known.) Bringing things up to orbit or back down again is very expensive, which is bound to reduce the profit there by quite a lot. Perhaps even erase it.
The experiment in unbacked currency has only been going on for about thirty years. There is no historical example of it working over a long time frame for any government, ever. It's simply human nature to screw it up eventually. And see my sig.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
The author fails to note that the automobile, commercial air travel, the PC, and the cell phone were all profitable within a few years of their introduction, even if they had no where near the level of refinement and volume of use that they have today. Space travel is now decades old but still only Earth orbiting, unmanned satellites have any economic justification.
It costs hundreds of dollars per pound to get things into space, and the costs of doing anything once you're there are enormous. Planet Earth has hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of nickel, iron, platinum, gold, etc., but just as for that asteroid most of it costs more to mine than it's worth. Of course, talking about a trillion dollars worth of platinum is silly -- if you actually had such a large quantity it's price would plumment.
I'd like to see a horde of wayward day laborers built a passenger jet. They may be able to do it, but eventually, they'll organize themselves so that some people manage other people. It's called leadership, and it's not a pox on humanity.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Of course it saves us time. If we didn't have computers, someone would have to work these Navier-Stokes equations by hand, and that would take a lot longer (or would take a lot more money) than having a computer do it.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
And when it's not precious anymore, maybe we can actually do something cool with it. Humanity benefits.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
I'd like to see a horde of wayward day laborers built a passenger jet.
I'd like to see a horde of managers build a passenger jet.
The gas planets consist of a mixture of gases; there is no actual surface one could walk on.
How will it be possible to deploy some sort of a mining construction in such an environment? [not to mention its hostility: the temperatures, enormous gravity (ex: on Jupiter)
The saddest poem
Not only does the cost go down, but by driving the costs down for metals like this from off-world sources it will make terrestrial mines for similar materials to be forced out of business.
For the most part this will be a good thing, as most of the current mines are located in what is today largely wilderness... for exactly the same reasons why people go there to search for these metals: They don't have to deal with purchasing property at huge prices (like downtown Manhattan or Tokyo) in order to extract the minerals. Fights over mineral rights and appropriate methods for extracting those minerals lose one of their main justifications: If we don't to it here, where else are we going to get it?
Mines like the Kennecot Copper Mine in Utah is an example of something that will be a relic of the past. If you ever fly into or out of Salt Lake City International from the south end of the airport, you will fly right over this mine and be rather low to the ground as well. You would miss it only if you didn't pay any attention to it at all. The residents of Salt Lake City realize the large number of jobs this mine represents, and it has been there for more than a century, so they don't really mind too much that the mine is there. Still, it has had a devistating impact on the wilderness of Bingham Canyon, not to mention that the canyon nor the mountains that were next to it even exist anymore. The tailings hill left from mining these mountains is a permanent feature to Salt Lake Valley that has also had a major impact on the local environment that is not to be ignored either.
All of this damage, and under control of U.S. mining regulations that are hard to deal with, yet the mine is still profitable. This is a mine that would definitely be shut down due to extra-terrestrial mining efforts, and no similar mine would ever be started either. Oh, some limited mining would still occur because of national priorities, welfare service projects (keeping people employed through government subsidies... although it might be cheaper to simply pay the miners directly and close the mine anyway), or simply because of the need for a specific mineral that is required for a certain industry from a very reliable source. That and it will take centuries for extra-terrestrial mining efforts to really be developed, so something needs to keep businesses operating in the meantime.
Tell that to DeBeers. They seem to have figured out how to do it. Stockpiles and market cornering. Then just trickle them out as needed.
""I don't see an obvious biosynthetic pathway from allicin (CH2=CHCH2SS(=O)CH2CH=CH2)to isothiocyanates (R-N=C=S) ""
Did you intend that as political commentary, or was it just a humorous misspelling of 'federal'?
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
Bringing things down is only slightly expensive. We do it all the time with things like comet dust. Yes, those things are light, but the principle still applies. Down costs far less then up.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If I own the mineral rights to my property, and a space rock lands in my backyard, hopefully a small one that doesn't kill everything in a 10 mile radius. Let say its a chunk of gold, do I get to keep it, or do some gov't spooks take it away and I get nothing?
If you look at such things, the average joe is the person least hit by currency devaluations - essentially currency devaluations remove all the value of money from those that are holding it, and the average Joe just doesn't have much money. That's why it is so appealing to Socialist to cause huge inflation - it is a great way to steal from the rich to give to the poor. The only problem with currency devaluations / inflation is that it destroys the economy, because no one is willing to work anymore.
That said, as others have pointed out, currency is not linked to metals of any type - and the economy would be improved, not hurt, by cheap metals. There are two ways to make Joe happier - one is to pay Joe more, and the other is to make Joe's life less expensive without taking away anything. This would be the second option.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Ok, I'll respond to the troll. Ignoring all arguments about ethics, buisness and whatnot, even if we spend all our resources/money on projects here on earth the world cannot support 6.6bln people at a first world level.
Take copper for instance, an average first world person consumes over 300KG of copper per year. WE ARE GOING TO RUN OUT! Silver is another precious metal that is used in everything from electronics to photograph to medicine. 1 troy ounce of silver costs near $9.50US. This is up from $7US about a year ago. The cost is going up BECAUSE WE ARE RUNNING OUT. If you truly want to bring the whole world up to first world levels we need new sources for things like metals, ALL of them. The Earth is getting tired, we have used all the easy resources and there aren't enough deposits projected to begin to bring everyone up to the standard of living that we enjoy. We need to get to the resources in space before we no longer have the resources to go anywhere.
Now, a side note. If we can move our heavy industry to orbit and use materials that are already in space (asteroids) we can quit makeing such a d@mn mess of our planet. Do you know the environmental impact of mining metals? Between the giant holes in the ground, the massive amount of energy expended in processes such as smelting and the chemicals necissary to tease metal out of lower and lower grade ore? It's truly horrifying. In space we have all the free, uninterruptable solar energy we could need. Smelting would just requre a big mirror to focus sunlight on an asteroid. Sending down finished products is essentially free. Many asteroids are free metal that do not need to be chemically reduced. The benefits are amazing when you sit down and research them a little.
Actually, you'd be rather surprised. My wife did a report in college on the whole garbage/waste disposal system, and as far as city workers go, garbage men are among the highest paid of the non-skilled workers, mainly because so few people are willing to do the work.
For starters mining mars and comets and stuff is never gonna happen with fossil fuels. And if it even looked possible with any of the alternatives then there would be more going on that just some solar sail. nano space ladders? whatever. . . . and does anyone still even believe we went to the moon?
thousands of years ago, the great pyramids were built. And guess what, there were foreman who directed the project, (though at the time they were called "taskmasters" or "slave-drivers") There were architects who designed it, there were mining supervisors to tell the workers where to get the rocks, and there was a guy who financed the whole thing (he was usually called "King")
Not much of that has changed. workers aren't slaves anymore and have lots more rights, but they still need to be told what to do.
Also, having had a house built recently (about 8 years ago) I was certainly glad that there was a boss I could deal with to make sure it got built the way I like it, because the workers certainly kept screwing things up on their own.
Ira
In what way would the opening of a new mine cause the loss of millions of jobs?
Well if we did ever make it to the moon and if we ever can build space ships, maybe they can find another habitable planet out there to transport some people too so they can quit killing people for population control here on Earth. Maybe they can transport all those people from those foreign nations we keep sending food too but they never gain any weight. They can start over on a new planet and farm for their own food.
=*^.^*=
Please mail me your computer, your iPod, and any other "possessions" of yours that I may mistakenly believe have "worth". Or are you still living with mommy and daddy?
Feel free to go back to living on the savannah. You'll be hyena turds within 24 hours.
The only problems with modern society is it subverts natural selection and gives morons way too much free time.
This may be true in the US, where the unemployment rate is very low, but my point of reference is my own country (South Africa) where AFAIK it's a pretty low-paying job, due to the high unemployment rate and abundant supply of unskilled labour. I could be wrong though - haven't actually checked.
Perhaps instead of bringing all of it back some (or most even) might end up being used to further develop our off planet infrastructure? It seems to me that if one of the big impediments to space exploration and development is the cost of getting out of the gravity well, then being able to get the resources outside of the gravity well would go a long way toward alleviating the problem.
Politicians are like diapers - they should be changed frequently and for the same reasons.
Incorrect.
To live, one must use stuff. Using stuff is excercising the important part of property ownership -- disposing of an item as you see fit.
Since it's impossible to live without using stuff, i.e. without exercising property ownwership rights, it's impossible to live without de facto property rights.
Anybody claiming you don't have property rights has no other meaning than that they wish to be able to take what you have and use it as they see fit. I.e. they claim property rights over it.
That someone owned (properly) the atoms before you, and someone else will after, does not affect this concept. Indeed, it just strengthens it by impressing on the living aspect as core to what ownership means.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
And congratulations to them, too! They convinced billions of people to pay a ton of money for rocks they literally have warehouses full of. Good quality 1 carat diamonds should, according to supply and demand, be about $10.00 each.
This is not their evil ways, but your slobbering consumer ways. It's a free society, don't buy the stuff.
The only thing evil De Beers did was, according to PBS, making (via their buddies in government) all South Africans at the turn of the (1900) century have to pay a head tax; hence the bushmen minding their own business were suddenly forced to get jobs (for low pay) for De Beers so they could pay their tax, thus providing De Beers with a work force.
Oh, and the PBS show also hinted behind-the-scenes strongarm tactics on some of the other mining operations around the world to bring them into the monopoly as partners.
And I'm a goof who paid about $5990.00 too much for a VF 1.06 carat diamond and about another k to get it made into a nice gold ring.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
And, of course, people being the thieves they are, for every pound of gold brought in from space, about 300 pounds of gold rings and nuggets tagged "gold from space!" will be sold.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
> Unfortunately, artificial diamonds are still expensive, but I would
> expect that to change as it becomes easier to produce them.
Didn't you watch the De Beers PBS Frontline special? Artificial (and natural) have been cheap for decades. They're rippin' ya off, man! Wake up!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The US gov't absolutely needs to get that chunk of $$$. It should be NASA's primary focus. 20 Trillion would give our children a future.
m@t
No, sorry. I don't see the connection between space travel and mining nearby asteroids. I mean, it's not as if having decided to mine the asteroid we would need humans in space to make it happen. Siting and plunking some form of engine(s) on the asteroid doesn't require a human to be there. Slowing it into orbit around the earth doesn't require direct human intervention. Mining the ore, refining it, launching it into the earths gravity well certainly doesn't either. Why is this justification for "Space Travel"?
That's what I meant when I said that it might be sold in orbit. But as I noted, you don't know what the economics of that will be. Depending on the supply and demand, the prices of those metals will be different from the prices down here. So fixing a value to the asteroid right now is silly if that's your plan, isn't it?
We've brought down comet dust once in what was a pretty expensive mission. The other time we (NASA) tried that same trick, the probe buried itself halfway into the Nevada desert. That pretty much illustrates the problem.
Controlled, soft re-entry is not easy. If you're shipping down tons of material at a time, it'll be very expensive. Remember, all of that energy you need to lift material into orbit has to be shed to bring it back down. Parachutes would probably be unweildy (at best) for a really large shipment. Retrorockets would use just about as much fuel to break the descent as you use going up. And so forth.
grow your own damn food then. I hear Canada is really sparsly populated. I doubt anyone would mind if you carved yourself some piece of the wilderness and started subsidence farming (which btw is sooo much more fun than being "exploited" within a capitalistic economy. make your own hours, yeah!)
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No power in the 'verse can stop me
Haven't you gotten the memo? Smart people nowadays think decreasing efficiency and spending as much time as is humanly possible on one task puts the fun back in economics. Don't write yourself off, embrace your inner smartness!
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No power in the 'verse can stop me
I love technology. I just don't pretend that it saves me time
Hand cook all your own meals, do you? (Or buy them at restaurants that use no technology - hmm, get food poisoning much?) Hand wash your own (handmade) clothes? Walk everywhere -- barefoot?
Just because you choose to spend the time you saved using one technology on using a different technology, doesn't mean that it hasn't saved you time.
-- Alastair
while this idea is fun to entertain when you are like 16, sitting at your parents dinner table it raises some ugly issues. Realworld objects can very often only be used to one end at a time. Take a car, for example. You got one car and for guys with Rage-against-the-machine t-shirts screaming "property is theft, war is peace, black is white". Nevermind that four 16 year olds with walnuts for brains wouldn't even get to the point where there might be a car available at all. But anyways. All four of them have the equally important need to go somewhere. Unfortunatly, each in an other direction (north, east etc). Even worse, they all have to absolutly go now.
How would you resolve this issue? Obviously, only one of them is going to be on time, where he wants to go. Whoever takes the car is, by your values, a thief. By your morals, no one would be able to go anywhere. Which so happens to be a nice analogy to what "property is theft" and related ideology will do to a mans life.
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No power in the 'verse can stop me
I don't know what you have been smoking, but please, lay off of it for your own good. Now try to follow along with this:
Project: Build an automobile that you can drive from New York City to Miami, Florida.
Assets: 10,000 workers.
Begin. Let me know whe you are done.
Workers generally are able to make one or two types of things with any skill. (Think about woodworking or blacksmithing. The same few types of things are made over and over by the same people.) To create a more complex item usually requires a several disparate skill sets. Getting these to come together (especially if you use more than, say 3 or 4 people) requires some form of leadership (e.g. a manager.)
As another example, try to build a computer. From scratch. Start with mining the metals you need to build the wiring. You will probably want to start with aluminum. Oh, and go build a smelter for that too.
Workers are all find and good. Every project needs workers. But the people who organize (and manage) above the low-level worker are vital to producing anything also.
Since you gave the house example, good luck making the wiring for your house. Or rolling the pipes for your plumbing. If you want to live in a house that is even 4000 year old technology, you better learn how to quary stone and shape it.
I assume you don't want to go buy any of this stuff because that would contribute to the monopoly of the rich.
I am not a resource! I am a free man!
You mean every pound of gold brought from space will be mixed with 100 lbs of terran gold and sold as "containing real gold from OUTER SPACE".
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
There are signs that bringing things up will become considerably less expensive in the (relatively) near term. That will cause some fairly profound alterations in the economics of all this, should it come to pass (and personally, I have almost no doubt it will.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you ask me, using "in legal pragmatics", would have been better than "in theory", because it's more than just theory. The idea is that nobody is holding a gun to your face or striking a law that we must do such 'n such. There are bad situations, but those don't count for the point that I'm trying to make.
Don't get me wrong, though, I agree with your main point.
testing out my trending skills
On top of that, the workers tend to not have people skills. People skills are more important than any other type of skill out there, because it enables more people to find work, and helps coordinate us in ways that computers and lower level workers can't.
testing out my trending skills
"(Business 2.0)"
So has anyone worked out a quantitative business plan for this project?
Seems to me it would produce very expensive iron and way more cobalt and platinum than we have a use for.
maglev has been considered, apparently.
Given that the expected speeds have to be in the thousands of miles per hour along most of the distance, I'd prefer non-contact.
And days to orbit? Not at tens of mph.
I guess, even if it were a year to geosynchronous, if you had enough climbers running at once, it might be worthwhile. Mostly for structural materials, I'd suppose.
At least, that's what the wikipedia entry said some people expect. It's a monofilament of carbon, remember?
Still, the length of the thing, and the strength of the cable, even if it doesn't crush what it falls on, I would not want to be trying to get out from under it.
I don't see any more force being applied now than in the 30's.
I really appreciate your thoughtful reply. My response to your original post was a trifle insulting, for lack of a better word, and I want to thank you for the rare grace with which you responded.
I actually think you are correct in your assessment of the current state of private space flight. I also think you underestimate either the power of the profit motive in general or the perceived profit potential in space travel. It's not about tourism, but resources. The initial ventures may be touted for tourism, but I think that's a sideshow. The real money will come later, when Some Bright Lad figures out how to get something valuable from extraterrestial locations, e.g., the moon or Mars.
And I wish I'd had the decency to say it that way.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.