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NASA's Cashflow Problem Puts Moon Trip In Doubt
krou writes "According to the Guardian, the Augustine panel is going to declare that there is simply no money to go back to the moon, and the next-generation Ares I rocket is likely to be scrapped unless there is more funding. The $81B Constellation Program's long-term goal of putting a human on Mars is almost certainly not going to be possible by the middle of the century. The options outlined by the panel for the future of NASA 'are to extend the working life of the aging space shuttle fleet beyond next year's scheduled retirement until 2015, while developing a cheaper transport to the moon; pressing ahead with Constellation as quickly as existing funding allows; or creating a new, larger rocket that would allow exploration of the solar system while bypassing the moon.' All of this means that NASA won't be back on the moon before the end of the next decade as hoped, 'or even leaving lower Earth orbit for at least another two decades.' Another result of the monetary black hole is that they don't have the '$300m to expand a network of telescopes and meet the government's target of identifying, by 2020, at least 90% of the giant space rocks that pose a threat to Earth.'"
... how much could it cost to rent a hollywood studio and some video equipment for a day?
We're in the middle of a recession that's one of the longest on record. They're projecting that the budget they have now will be the same fifty years from now, and everyone panics over this? Oh please. Just wait until the Chinese start firing rockets into space with people on them and design their own Apollo program. I bet legislators will look between the couch cushions then and find the spare cash they need to one-up them. I've never credited Congress with an abundance of brains, but pride? Oh, they got that in spades.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
There never seems to be enough money for something as fundamentally important and immensely valuable to the human race as space exploration. But apparently there's always a bottomless pit of wealth for bailouts, to help grow government bureaucracy and expand what in many ways are entitlement programs.
Keep all the little, boring projects that the public doesn't care about in the budget and then threaten that unless you get more money, then you won't be able to do the big, visible ones.
It's one of the oldest budgeting tricks in the book and somebody should be handing NASA's chief his ass for pulling such a stunt.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
No matter your political leanings, it is hard to argue that NASA does not provide a great return on investment. But with our myopic tendencies (Congress and Business) no one has the balls to invest what is needed to continue long-term success.
Conservative, mod down for violating
I'm going to have to disagree. NASA could survive, but only by doing something relatively radical that actually makes space exploration make sense. At a minimum that means setting up an orbital refueling system, with disposable heavy lifters to bring up fuel and other equipment, relaunchable shuttles to ferry people up and down, and ships that never re-enter the atmosphere but are refueled and stocked in orbit.
Alternatively, NASA could dust off the theoretical nuclear rockets (the closed cycle ones, not the ones that rely on detonating thousands of nuclear bombs) that they had started developing back in the 60's. Or they could start serious research on a non-rocket launch system. A space elevator is probably out of reach right now, but a hypersonic sky-hook, a launch loop, or a laser propulsion system is probably within our technology level (or soon will be).
Look around. Do you see private companies lining up to fund Moon travel?
Believe me, if Boeing or General Electric or United Airlines (those seem like the most obvious candidates off the top of my head; I'm sure there are many others) thought there was a profit in it, they'd be lobbying like mad for whatever regulatory changes would be necessary, and simultaneously developing well-publicized plans. Instead we have the absurdly misnamed "Virgin Galactic" planning suborbital hops at some point in the unspecified future -- and as much money as the Branson empire represents, the truth is that when it comes to projects of this scale, Virgin Everything is a bit player.
Yes, eventually the technology will improve to the point that corporate investors will see a short-term profit potential, and at that point the dollars will start flowing in. But it is going to take massive government investment to get us there. As long as the US is dragging its feet, we'd better hope that the EU or Russia or China can step up, because otherwise we are just not going to see people on the Moon again in our lifetimes.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Or the Chinese. They'll probably be there in less than 10.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Why exactly are we going to the moon again?
Uhhhh-- You're not from around here, are you? The non-geek answer is here. The geek-trying-to-not-be answer is here. And the real geek answer is... well, anything modded +5 on this thread that isn't "Funny".
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
In January, the Congressional Budget Office projected a deficit this year of $1.2 trillion before Obama took office, with no estimate for actions he might take. To a large extent, the CBO's estimate simply represented the $482 billion deficit projected by the Bush administration in last summer's budget review, plus the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, which George W. Bush rammed through Congress in September over strenuous conservative objections. Thus the vast bulk of this year's currently estimated $1.8 trillion deficit was determined by Bush's policies, not Obama's.
The GOP's Misplaced Rage by Bruce Bartlett
The agency needs about $300m to expand a network of telescopes and meet the government's target of identifying, by 2020, at least 90% of the giant space rocks that pose a threat to Earth. Congress has not come up with the money and is unlikely to, according to the National Academy of Science.
There is no advantage to detecting an incoming impactor if you do not have the means to prevent its impact. Having less time before large scale annihilation may serve the public better. But when it does hit (don't say if if you mean when), the loss of tax revenue will cause more damage to the budget than the space budget would have.
A microgram of prevention is worth a metric tonne of cure.
You don't need to stop a meteor. If you can spot it soon enough there are several techniques that could be used to change its trajectory so that it misses the Earth (such as putting a satellite near it that can tug it over time just using gravity, or by putting a coating on it that would alter the solar pressure on it and push it out of the way, etc).
Or you could leave everything to chance (or name your deity) but since we have the ability I definitely think we should give ourselves the chance to use it.
Not true. The US isn't the only country with space technology. I predict the Chinese will be the next to land men on the moon, and Mars, and everything after that. They'll probably work with the Russians, and maybe some US engineers will head over there too to help out after realizing everything here is going to pot.
While the USA is busy squandering its leading position in the world, China is working hard on becoming #1.
It's in Congress' collective pockets. And going towards fruitless things like corporate bailouts.
I propose a new tax. Hear me out please. Every time a white boy is raised in a loving home in suburbia and thinks he's a bad-ass, hard-ass street thug because he listens to top-40 rap on MTV and carefully rehearses his Ebonics until he speaks like someone who grew up in the Projects, tax half of his income. Put that money towards NASA. There's so many of these otherwise useless bastards that it should take about one year before we have a McDonalds on fucking Mars.
We can't stop the stupid thing.
That depends wildly on how much warning we have. If we spot it two months, or even two years before it gets here, you're probably right. Even then, small rocks are more common than big ones so it would be statistically likely that an evacuation could be done, possibly saving hundreds of thousands of lives.
If we spot a rock, even a big one, 30 or 40 years out, we have the technology already to make a difference. Enough nukes detonated all on one side will ablate material off the surface and produce thrust, changing the rocks orbit by a little bit. Luckily, even a minuscule change in direction will produce a significant change in position 30 years down the line.
The really interesting thing is if a rock is detected that will hit in 10-15 years. At that point, it is less likely for our current technology to be fully effective. We'd end up with a crash program that would make Apollo look like chump change. I could even imagine NASA dusting off the old Orion nuclear pulse propulsion ideas if the whole world were at stake; after all, what's a few hundred nukes being detonating in the atmosphere compared human extinction.
Our manned space program has been on a budget that amounts to just enough to keep limping along in LEO, but not enough to do anything useful for the last thirty years. And honestly, we don't care about what the Chinese do. We don't need an excuse to develop nuclear capability anymore. We aren't in a battle of ideologies where allowing the Russians to be better than us in anything would be a "win for communism". If the Chinese put a man on the moon we'll say good "job catching up", and then do nothing.
Congress doesn't have the decisiveness to kill the manned space program altogether nor the will to spend what is genuinely needed to kick start a colonization effort. So we continue with uninspired mediocrity. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this will change any time soon.
Just a tip - don't be partisan in your posts. Both parties spend spend spend, and have done so with reckless abandon since WWII. This is the check book republic.
Here, do this the next time your party is in charge: Take your income tax bill and write a check for double that. Because at our rate of spending, we only tax for half our expenditures. It doesn't matter who is in charge.
It us unfortunate that we have come full circle and now have taxation without representation. Our children and our kids have no representation in congress, yet they get to inherit our bills.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I'm sorry kids, I know I promised it to you, but we're not going to get to go to the moon anytime soon.
(Pause for "Awe but..." and whining)
You see, the thing is, we're on hard times here. The country's not what it used to be. We just don't have the money right now to spend going on trips to the moon and such.
So keep up those grades and -- if you're good -- maybe we'll go to the moon in ten years.
B.S. Corporations don't have the giant amount of capital needed to fund any serious space exploration, especially when the financial rewards are questionable and probably many decades away (asteroid mining, space-based solar power, etc.). Corporations have to get their capital from investors, who want to see a return quickly, not 50 years from now after they're all dead (since most investors are older and saving for retirement; young people are busy spending all their money at the mall or other disposable things).
The problem is that our government has mismanaged our tax dollars, and instead of investing it in space exploration to keep America at the forefront of technology (with all the spin-off technologies developed, in addition to the potential new industries named above), we've wasted our money on useless wars (Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq II, etc.), welfare for people who don't want to work, and more recently idiotic corporate bailouts for companies that were mismanaged and failing. If we had devoted 1/4 the Defense budget to NASA all these years, we would have had a Moon base by now, and probably a Mars one too.
Instead, what's going to happen is that a government with real vision for the future is going to take over as the #1 power on the planet, and they're going to push space exploration. That country is going to be China. And with that, Westerner's prior dreams of humanity being led by Western cultures, with their focus on individual freedoms, (as seen in shows like Star Trek) will be dead. Instead, to be realistic, we should start writing sci-fi stories where everyone speaks Mandarin, and everything big is done for the glory of the Party.
The "get off this rock" crowd is a magical-religious cult, not a serious proponent of realistic, feasible, affordable, desirable, or even specific projects.
Except that space advocates have been for decades proposing projects which are entirely realistic, feasible, and specific. Whether they're affordable is of course an open question, and whether they're desirable is a matter of opinion, but there is nothing like the ambiguity you claim.
Manned colonization of the cosmos is, at the present time and likely for centuries to come, no different from a belief in an afterlife filled with saints, virgins, and angelic personages.
By saying "cosmos," you're conflating science-fantasy ideas about warp drives and such with well-understood science and engineering problems involved in colonizing the Solar System. I suspect you're doing this deliberately to make it all look equally silly. In case you're really so ignorant that you don't understand the difference:
Cosmos -- not going to happen without fundamental changes in our understanding of physical laws. Too bad.
Solar System -- easily doable with technology that exists right now, using little more than a Newtonian understanding of the world.
It is not real.
Human footprints on the Moon are real. Many of the people who put them there are still alive. That's as real as it gets.
If you want inspiration, stick to anime.
How about being inspired by the actual record of what people did? Are you actually more inspired by fiction than by real life?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Please don't toss out "Iraq". That old throw away line was childish during Bush's years and just as tired now. Iraq had no bearing either.
Sometime between the time Clinton left office and Obama entered office the Federal budget surplus disappeared.
Now where did it go? Hrm?
Secondly, the national debt went from 6 trillion in 2001 to 10 trillion in 2008? (I'm rounding up)
Now where did that money go? It could have been useful to have when the economy collapsed in 2008?
Keep in mind the President had veto power and up until 2006 a majority in the house and senate so anything that got approved for spending crossed his desk.
I'm saying this as a person who support conservative government fiances in time of plenty and who donated to Ron Paul. As it is... 8 years is a long time to be in charge. Anything we have to deal with today was because of that.
And don't say Clinton is at fault either because he had 8 years to undo any problems he had caused if such is the reason.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
There is one objection to the space elevator that I've mentioned here before but never seen anyone seriously address.
The earth is built like a gigantic capacitor. The ionosphere has a relatively strong negative charge, while the ground has a relatively strong positive charge. An insulating layer of dielectric air is between them. It's a leaky self-adjusting capacitor because of lightning. A space elevator would bypass this insulating layer of air, making a direct physical connection between the negative and positive charges. Additionally, I believe that the carbon nanotubes proposed for its construction are electrically conductive, but even if they weren't there is probably more than enough current for electrical breakdown to take place considering that lightning does this to air molecules about three million times a day. What would keep the elevator from instantly vaporizing due to electrical arcing the moment it's installed?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
On the other hand, NASA's current budget could definitely pay for a TV studio and competent special effects people. I'm just sayin'...
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Because it certainly has not had any impact on the orgy of irresponsible spending of President Obama and his fellow Democrats.
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Face it, it isn't because we "DON'T" have the money its because NASA != votes.
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I/O:
Please don't toss out "Iraq". That old throw away line was childish during Bush's years and just as tired now. Iraq had no bearing either.
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It is no more difficult than that. There is no conspiracy.
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This not because of Iraq/Afghanistan. This is not because of a bloated defense budget.
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It simply is because NASA does not generate votes or control and as such does not qualify for a President or Congress not interested in science.
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Please don't confuse a President who TALKS about being for science, just understand the science politicians support is the science that polls well.
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#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The future of space belongs to a country willing to use nuclear propulsion. Chemical rockets are a dead end. They haven't improved much in forty years, and the limits of that technology have been nearly reached.
That's surprisingly insightful.
Add sterilization to the package and we will also have smart people flipping burgers on the martian McDonald's.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Better:
With a nuclear rocket you don't have to send fuel and oxidizer up - you only have to send propellant.
And, as soon as you establish a viable transport network, you can get your propellant on much lower-gravity bodies. One could land on a comet, get a lot of water out of it and use part of the collected water to get back to the fuel station.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Anyone who implies Dubya is a conservative is lying out their teeth.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
... which includes aiding, rather than usurping and suppressing, the development of PRIVATE spaceflight technology and business, the way they historically aided (somewhat) private air flight.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Yessure, but don't count on Coppola this time: he's living with E. Presley his golden retire.
My prediction is that there will not be a human outside of low Earth orbit for at least the next 50 years, with the possible (unlikely) exception of the Chinese attempting a lunar orbit or landing.
Perhaps in the 50-100 year timescale, we'll have figured out radically different approaches: Nuclear propulsion, a space elevator, a launch loop. Or we'll be able to upload our minds into hardware, and send people into space without sending bodies. E.g., your consciousness gets radioed into the probe once it's tunneled through the Europan ice.
I've been waiting for them to make Capricorn 2 for years. I mean they sort of implied it when they called the first one Capricorn 1. Of course, I hear O.J. Simpson won't be available for filming this time.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
The government has made it abundantly clear that it understands and cares little for scientific progress. It doesn't matter whether you lean left, right, or upside-down, the fact of the matter is that neither Congress, nor recent Presidents, have serious desires to see progress made in scientific realms for purely progressive reasons. As other slashdotters have pointed out numerous times, there is an enormous list of spin-off benefits that come from manned-exploration of space. Not only that, but direct benefits such as a progression of the human species beyond its own world are a payoff in and of themselves. Politicians don't care. If something won't result directly in votes, money, or power for politicians, then there is little chance that thing, be it a movement, a field, or an ideology, will get any serious backing from the legislative or executive branches.
This can also be seen in the Green movement, for example. Rather than fund or seriously investigate truly sustainable energy sources such as breeder reactors and fusion research, the government wants to hop on a trendy bandwagon (votes) that involves the more inefficient methods of solar and wind energy production and the costly subsidization of corn-based bio-fuels (money). We can, and should, therefore kiss off serious government spending towards goals like space exploration. True development and innovation will come in this field through privately funded space organizations and governments of other countries.
Companies like Bigelow Aerospace will work to make space accessible to the civilian population. Companies like Orbital and SpaceX will continue to try to reduce the cost/kg to LEO until space is affordable and accessible. Universities will continue to inspire engineering and science students to work on space-related projects just for the sake of doing 'something totally awesome' such as the Cubesat project. This will, in turn, provide a place of invention and learning. Other governments such as Japan, Russia, the UK, and the EU in general will lobby harder to have more say and dabbling in international space endeavors such as the ISS. Slowly, unfortunately, I think we will see NASA start to sputter and stagnate over the next few decades.
All I have to say to NASA is, "Thank you for all of the inspiration and hard work you put into paving the road to space for us." That organization put decades of hard work and research into opening up a whole new universe (literally) to us as a species. NASA, at its height, embodied the peak of the American 'can-do' spirit and gumption. It very much did make heroes of many dreamers and it should forever be remembered as an organization that truly inspired and captured the minds and dreams of thousands of people. The human race owes NASA a great debt for this and this alone. Sadly, however, I fear this organization is going to lose much of its former glory under the suffocating chokehold of egoistic and, frankly, stupid politicians.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Roombas in space! And they could clean up all the junk in orbit!
Putting the "anal" back into "analyst"...
It won't discharge very quickly because the ionosphere is a mighty poor conductor. A tower stuck into the ionosphere is only going to discharge the molecules it touches-- anything more than an inch away is effectively insulated.
nobody seriously objects because nobody seriously believes the space elevator could be built anyway
Why exactly are we going to the moon again? ... How about we use that other launch platform we have.. you know, earth
Because the moon is a very large bunch of ore in a MUCH shallower gravity well. For any construction for use in space that is of sufficient mass to make building and operating mines, some processing facilities, and a catapult on the moon cost-effective for a step in manufacturing its compaonents, it's the logical way to cut costs and/or boost profits.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It can be helpful to look at some actual data once in a while, calming, even. The problem is big, yes, but the historical record shows that the USA was able to reduce it's total national debt as a percentage of GDP, consistently since World War II, with the notable exceptions of the years of Reagan, Bush, and Son of Bush. This was done by growing the economy. It could be done again. One of the best ways to stimulate that kind of massive economic growth would be to use space exploration and alternate energy as a replacement for the military research and development, which drove much of this growth during the Cold War. USA National Debt as Percentage of GDP. If we choose not to do something like this, the debt will be crushing, yes.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I'm sorry, but any solution that kills Bruce Willis but allows Ben Affleck to live simply cannot be allowed to happen.
My prediction is that there will not be a human outside of low Earth orbit for at least the next 50 years, with the possible (unlikely) exception of the Chinese attempting a lunar orbit or landing.
The Russians have already offered flights around the Moon for $300,000,000. Maybe NASA could buy a few.
The cost of human spaceflight is going up.
$300,000,000 is a lot less than Apollo 8 cost, and non-government prices are only going down from here as private companies take over the manned spaceflight business.
Nobody has identified a compelling economic, scientific, political, or military rationale for sending people into space.
Yes they have; it's called tourism. Get the price of a week in orbit down to a couple of hundred thousand dollars and you'll have more customers than you can handle... that won't happen overnight, but it's quite feasible in a couple of decades.
My guess is that the first people to walk on Mars will be rich tourists, not government bureaucrats.
Please don't toss out "Iraq". That old throw away line was childish during Bush's years and just as tired now. Iraq had no bearing either.
A throw-away line for a throw-away war.
You know, once upon a time, we had a presidential candidate who is very gung-ho about science. He even won most of the votes. I suppose that invalidates your conclusion.
You need to recognize that there are very specific segments of the population who are actively hostile to science, and pandering to them using words they can understand is what gets their votes. Their weight in the polls dumbs down everything for all of us.
Whilst it is always fun to kick the beancounters (I do often enough) I don't think it is entirely their fault in this instance.
Space travel is not a field that allows much real experimentation. As a programmer now moving into space science, I can attest how different this makes things. A programmer can compile-debug-compile 50 times a day until something is just right. The NASA equivalent of compiling something costs $300 million each time.
This led in the 1950's and 60's to the development of complicated methods of systems management, which because they enabled Apollo to be a success have been copied and rigidly adhered to around the world ever since (Europe is a prime example; our native systems management experiments in ELDO were a dismal failure whilst Americans were walking on the moon. So we scrapped everything, simply copied NASA system management techniques, and now we have highly competitive heavy lift launchers)
Rigorous documentation, interface management, and change management do tend to drown space agencies in paper work but by the same token shit doesn't blow up quite so often anymore. Space systems management is conservative (in the literal, not political sense) because it would be extremely costly to explore any different ways of doing things.
The way things are done now may well represent a local maxima in our ability to build and fly rockets, but randomizing the function could easily cost trillions.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
For starters, it's a LOT cheaper to mine, refine, and launch material for space-based industry on the Moon than on the Earth.
You are missing a smiley here :-) It is definitely cheaper to launch stuff from the Moon if you have a cat-a-pult already. But where do you see metal ores on the Moon? Some refining processes require amazing quantities of energy, water, oxygen and other very specific ingredients that I'd be amazed if they just sit on the surface. And how do you "spiral out" a construction of a steel mill that weighs a few million tons and measures power in gigawatts? It can't be built without all the supporting industries being already in place.
Mining on Earth is already dangerous and difficult even though we don't need to do it in spacesuits. On the Moon the vacuum will be a major killer because an accident that on Earth leaves you with a minor wound will puncture your spacesuit and you'll be dead as a mummy before anyone can pull you to safety. There are all kinds of costs and dangers associated with Moon mining and refining, and it is absurd to suggest that they can be done there cheaper than on Earth (unless we terraform Moon or Earth.)
All the talk about cybernetic mining machines is just talk until I see a herd of them here, on Earth, mining something useful (like Uranium ore) completely autonomously and with minimum maintenance. If you need a spare part it will cost $50 million per delivery. Let's see how that helps to make Moon mining cheaper.
In my personal opinion, humankind will not get anywhere until a new propulsion method is discovered. Chemical rockets barely can lift a handful of people onto LEO. Nuclear rockets using something like water as reaction mass may be usable, but water is precious in space. Physics research does not go any faster if a Moon colony is set up (unless you expect to find some ET cache of knowledge.) NASA funding would be better spent on basic science, and whatever remains can be used to send cheap but resilient robots to neighboring planets. This is similar to space travel - a ship sent 100 years later will overtake the ship sent earlier earlier because it will move faster due to advances in propulsion methods.
But I don't believe you have the technology to prove said rock is going to hit the Earth in 30-40 years ; even small inaccuracies in orbital measurements and simulation could cause massive variation in the predicted position decades later.
We have demonstrated techniques for simulation of accurate orbits out to 50 Myr http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0004-637X/592/1/620/ so I think even a few hundred years we can do for accurate collision calculations.
The biggest issue then is the orbital determination of the impactor. We use radar for orbit determination and we are very good at it: http://impact.arc.nasa.go/news_detail.cfm?ID=132 The article gives an example of measuring Yarkovsky effect on a 1/2 km asteroid, which changed it's orbit by 15 km over 12 years of observation.
I can not give a site, but I would estimate that inside of 6 months we can plot an important orbit to a few centimeters, and if we expect impact inside of 30 years we can predict the time to within 1 minute, which would locate the impact on Earth to within a few tens of km.
What would keep the elevator from instantly vaporizing due to electrical arcing the moment it's installed?
you can't discharge the entire ionosphere by running a wire into it. It's not a big metal-foil plate, it's a very diffuse plasma.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Look around. Do you see private companies lining up to fund Moon travel?
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/02/22/65477.aspx
Even as Bigelow Aerospace gears up for launching its second prototype space station into orbit, the company has set its sights on something much, much bigger: a project to assemble full-blown space villages at a work site between Earth and the moon, then drop them to the lunar surface, ready for immediate move-in.
In an exclusive interview this week, Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow confirmed that his company has been talking about the concept with NASA â" and that the first earthly tests of the techniques involved would take place later this year. The scenario he sketched out would essentially make Bigelow a general contractor for the final frontier.
That role would be a good fit for Bigelow, who made his fortune in the real estate, hotel and construction business and is now focused on developing inflatable modules (or as he prefers to call them, "expandable systems") that can serve as the building blocks for orbital living complexes.
The first big step down that path came in July, when a Russian booster put Bigelow's Genesis 1 prototype module into orbit. Bigelow has said even he was surprised by the success of that mission, and he has committed himself to spending hundreds of millions of dollars to follow up on that first launch.
As long as the human race is confined to this rock it will eventually go the way of the dodo. From a species preservation point of view it is immanently logical that the human race needs to aquire a foothold on another planet. That is why such well known raving lunatics like Stephen Hawking are very much in favor of a Mars colony.
Sometimes I think Science Fiction is actually bad for real space exploration. We get people saying things like "Why is NASA dicking around with ISS and the Shuttle, they should get to Mars already". Well, you don't think we should practice being in space reliably for extended periods before setting out on a trip that takes years and any failure means the crew dies? But no, they skip over such details in SciFi so NASA should do the same.
nobody seriously objects because nobody seriously believes the space elevator could be built anyway
You're talking to a message board that sometimes has very earnest debates about the physics of Star Trek.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"It only looks that way with hindsight."
No, it doesn't.
"At the time it wasn't a dead cert that the 747 was going to be a success."
Looking at the number of transoceanic travelers and its tendence it was obvious that lowering the per-passenger costs and increasing capacity was a no-brainer.
"Some people probably thought there was obvious profit to be made from Concorde"
Which only makes my point stronger. See that I didn't say that 747 benefits were *certain* but that they were *obvious*. The same is true for Concorde: at least for those that put money in the project the positive prospects were obvious -time demonstrated they were not certain. On hindsight the "why" comes obvious and I already stated it: while the 747 directly answered to a certain tendence -lowering per passenger costs and increasing capactiy at current conditions (those of, say, the 707 or DC-8; but it even was protected against planned obsolescense: its double deck was in place to recover costs as a cargo plane in case supersonic airliners won the transoceanic battle and its wide cabin allowed it to survive as a militar cargo plane too), the Concorde project "abused" an unstated asumption that in the end resulted false: "those that currently cross the Atlantic in seven to nine hours will be mad about crossing it in four and a half"... specially if you can only take the advantage if flying from London or Paris but not from Madrid, Berlin, Roma, Bucarest, Bern, Helsinki, etc.
Let's not forget other ways of wasting money: each B2B bomber costs over $2 Billion. But hey, bombing people is more profitable than sending a man to Mars...
> I think that exploring space is really kind of pointless of boring compared to all
> the earth based science and engineering one could do with the same amount of money.
You're forgetting the #1 reason it's important: Terrestrial asteroid impact. Right now, if a Chixilub-like asteroid hits anywhere on earth, it's likely to instantly set back human civilization and technology by AT LEAST a hundred years -- if we're lucky, and most humans aren't actually killed, and some anti-technology religious zealots don't end up in charge during the aftermath.
We'll have the benefit of knowing that things like digital audio, magnetic levitation, and antiviral/antibiotic drugs are possible, but if every semiconductor on Earth were destroyed by the EMP from a large asteroid event, it would be YEARS -- probably a decade or more -- until someone like Intel had the ability to make a 500MHz Pentium III, let alone a 3GHz quadcore i7. And that's the best, most wildly-optimistic scenario imaginable. A really bad impact event *could* conceivably send the few humans left back to the technological sophistication of the ancient Romans. Or worse. Set back food production and medical treatment far enough to kill off just about everyone older than 40 or so who survives the initial event within 5-10 years (from things people routinely survive NOW... appendicitis, pneumonia, first heart attacks, breast & testicular cancer, diabetes, etc), and massively thin out the ranks of everyone alive, period, and the seeds of civilization's rebirth might not live long enough to reboot it after the worst of the aftermath is over 5-10 years down the road. To someone born After Impact, with 95% of the Pre-Impact adult population dead, a TV and DVD player literally WOULD be magic if he or she actually saw one in operation.
Ergo, our Lunar and/or Martian insurance policy. Assuming they were able to become self-sufficient enough to survive the loss of their terrestrial supply chain, our technology would survive, and eventually make it back to Earth. Knowing human nature, they'd probably wait a hundred years, go back to "stone-age level" Earth, tell the humans they found that they're gods (possibly wearing funny masks and outfits, just to drive home the point), and enslave them... er, well, let's not dwell on that. The important thing is that with a little luck, if a "bad, but not planet-killing bad" event happened, there would hopefully be enough semiconductors and backed-up digital libraries on the Moon &/| Mars to recover within a few years.