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FAA Setting Up Commercial Spaceflight Center
coondoggie writes "The FAA this week took a step closer to setting up a central hub for the development of key commercial space transportation technologies such as space launch and traffic management applications and setting orbital safety standards. The hub, known as the Center of Excellence for Commercial Space Transportation, would have a $1 million yearly budget and tie together universities, industry players, and the government for cost-sharing research and development. The FAA expects the center to be up and running this year."
Center of Excellence for Commercial Space Transportation = CECST = SEXED
Do you know how far 1 million dollars goes in a government project? They won't even have a building for 30 years at that rate.
Floating sky cities, New York to Beijing in minutes, Earth to Mars in hours. That's the future of energy and transportation. Soon we'll have vehicles that can travel at tremendous speeds, negotiate right angle turns without slowing down and without incurring any damage due to inertial effects. A new analysis of the causality of motion reveals that Aristotle was right to insist that motion is caused. As a result, we are immersed in an immense lattice of energetic particles. Lots and lots of clean energy. Read Physics: The Problem with Motion if you're interested in the future of travel and energy production. Welcome to the 21st century.
$1 Million dollar budget? It's a nice gesture, but it seems pretty small for the responsibilities they're claiming this center to have. Seems more like a 'token' gesture made to *look* like they're doing something than taking real action to make things happen. That said, I'd rather see them save that money and get out of the way altogether...
Won't that be pronounced "Sext"?
One million dollars! *Pinky to mouth*
I understood it as using 1M to gather up groups (unis and such) to gather together and use the joint gathered funding to build the place and get it running.
So yeah, 1M to gather groups together to work on it MIGHT maybe. Get 2 Big Unis with some clout. Or 4 or 5 smaller Unis together to help. But still 1M in comparison to the Ivy League Schools that might actually have some powers to make it happens to mean little to nothing.
...Not with a bang
but a whimper.
Yep, gotta handle all that space traffic. Yessiree Bob! No more waiting in line, no more congestion in the TSA security line, no more risk of getting bumped off your spaceflight. Yeah, times have changed, what with all the commercial space flight going on.
Honestly, and I'm certainly no libertarian, I don't want the FAA to have anything to do with space or commercial space travel AT ALL. OK, they do manage to keep the air travel in the US somewhat stable, but really they move so slowly and are so co-opted by they airlines they are supposed to regulate. Just ask anyone involved with trying to get the FAA to implement Direct and other flight path changes to improve on-time performance and fuel usage. Or anyone who has ever worked on any project to upgrade air traffic control computer systems.
Sounds like someone's nephew needed a job that didn't require him to actually do much other than pick up his paycheck.
$1 million will about cover office space & equipment and salaries for someone's nephew, his secretary, and the office manager for the two of them....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There is nothing in space. Where would you go? In other words, once the novelty-seekers got their thrills, what's the motivation?
Precious metals and other mineral resources, for one.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
They're just being efficient. One million dollars pays for exactly one CEO with nothing left over, but we all know that a CEO is a superhuman worker who can do hundreds of times what a normal worker can do, why else would they be paid so much? So this is really a cheap way of having an office staffed with hundreds without the hundreds.
Where not understanding energy means you can spout off whatever you like about it! Where philosophical aesthetics trumps empirical observation! It's a wonderland where any thing is possible, as long as it remains but a possibility!
I can tell it's going to suck because it's a "center of excellence". Sounds like something from Office Space.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
So go get them Do it. Now. Show me, don't tell me.
1) We have all the metals and minerals we need right here on Earth. Short of atomic blasts, it didn't disappear. It is cheaper to recycle and reclaim right here on Earth instead of shipping up specially-built space-mining equipment at 12000$/pound.
2) The volume of space is enormous. The average density is about 1 atom per cubic centimeter. I repeat, there is nothing in space. The volume of the Earth is enormous. Everything you need is right under your feet, supplied with free gravity (so your body can keep working), air, water, and food. Which aren't free, but a hell of a sight cheaper than what you need in space.
So dig in the planet, my friend, it's all there. I know, a shovel is not as sexy as a rocket.
But since you seem to have all the answers, riddle me this
"ON this planet we can barely keep commercial AIRLINES going profitably. What is the profit motivator for space flight? Who's gonna go, with what money?"
I'll wait right here. On Earth.
1) There is nothing in space.
This is probably the stupidest argument against exploring space I've ever seen, and it keeps being repeated like it's a valid statement. Guess what? There was nothing on Antarctica prior to 1905 either. That's when the first research station was built there. Private industry has been sending cruises with tourists for the last 60 years.
There are hundreds of thousands of destinations out there, just in our system alone. Only a tiny fraction has been explored and as far as anyone can tell, it's all raw resources up for grabs. The big expense in space expeditions is the cost of sending everything up there. What we need is a place where we can start to manufacture things from the resources available, and that's not all that far off.
Things like 3-D printers and Fab-Labs are just the beginning when it comes to what we'll be able to do with manufacturing in the near-future. Sure, anything we build up there will still need regular supplies, but I would assume that a corporate sponsored space station or colony's "second order of business" would be to become as self sufficient as possible in order to cut expenses. Once we have the capability to manufacture things like station modules and space craft in space the costs will drop dramatically, just like they have for every industry before.
So yeah, there's not a lot of nearby cheap destinations right now, but they're coming and they'll continue to grow in number as long as there's a market for it.
$1 million is probably enough to handle 6 or so people working in an office. If they are there to facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas, writing and maintaining a couple hundred page piece of FAA regulations, and another document to explain how to manage the airspace involved, that's probably the right amount of money to get started.
Can you breathe aluminium? Or eat pure gold?
The scale of 'precious and valuable' changes a bit in space.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
what's the motivation...Who's gonna go, with what money...what makes you think we'll do space travel
Answer
Zero-G sex/ porn movies/ any deviant endeavor relating to the baser needs of humanity. There's money out there, lots of money. Whether the powers that be allow anyone (other than themselves) to go as well as remain is still questionable.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
If you follow O'bama's thinking that there is no reason to return to the moon since we were already been there, it's like saying to Columbus there in no reason to return to the new world since we were already there. How lame can you get?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
The big expense in space expeditions is the cost of sending everything up there. What we need is a place where we can start to manufacture things from the resources available, and that's not all that far off.
And who are you going to sell them to, in large enough numbers (or high enough per-unit prices) to pay back the trillions of dollars of up-front infrastructure investment?
Are you going to be able to get them down to Earth's surface for less than their weight in gold? If not, why would your customers on Earth buy goods they'll never use? More to the point, why should they buy expensive space-built stuff when they can get cheaper Earth-built stuff?
It won't be because Earth becomes uninhabitable, because (hereby declared Cull's First Law of Space Colonisation) any technology capable of making space habitable is also capable of making Earth more habitable, for cheaper.
About the only thing you can get in space that you can't on Earth is sheer mind-bogglingly huge amounts of raw gas and rock. But if it's too big to ship down, you'll have to sell it to people already up there, which means they have to find something else to sell to the people downstairs who are selling them oxygen and water and food.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
A web page with a form. One poor nerd to sit in a dimly lit cubicle feebly attempting to respond to the 35,000 submitted forms per day, the IT infrastructure to support him (an exchange cluster, an AD + file&print server and bandwidth, a leased pair of IIS servers backed by a two-node MS-SQL Server server cluster). A filing cabinet he steals office supplies from every day.
A "consultant" in Bangalore that sets up said single web page ready to exploit with various viruses.
It does not even begin to pay for serving the inevitable FOIA requests submitted the nerds who thought their submitted forms might actually reach someone useful and irate they've received no response.
All that, and some mentions in the press for "trying" to preserve US manned spaceflight when we all know it's over. What a deal.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Well, hell, if you're going to go there... Entire moons made of hydrocarbons. 1E68 times the solar energy that falls on the Earth each day. More water, oxygen and all of the other basic essentials of life than exist on the surface of the Earth, times a billion. Diamonds the size of eggs. Eggs the size of diamonds. More real estate than all the world. And perhaps, Life.
Once you leave Earth orbit, you've spent half of the energy necessary to reach the next star - Proxima Centauri is closer than a round trip to Cleveland.
We should want to go out there, not because of the stuff, but because it's new and we haven't been there yet. But if greed is what it takes: who owns the Asteroids owns the Earth.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Everything you need is right under your feet...
No joke.. We've dug...how deep? 5 miles? I'll be generous, 10 miles.. Cool we got 3,990 more to go.. approximately? Please, all you chicken littles... What are we gonna run out of next? Air? Oopsy daisy, you might have a point there. Meh, can't get that from space either... But there's plenty of that underground too actually..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
which means they have to find something else to sell to the people downstairs who are selling them oxygen and water and food.
Well that's why we need to get the materials to build the huge orbiting solar array(s) from the asteroid belt for. Then using beamed energy power plants, all electricity will eventually be very cheap and non-polluting. (Let's say even cheap enough to be un-metered, so the only utility cost is a fixed service and maintenance fee.) Then you don't have to worry about coal and nuclear or the real estate for wind farms etc. when powering cities and their electric cars.
For other science value, you could build some rather huge automated observatories. Instead of just looking at the spectra of a single pixel by some star, something built in space at a mega-project scale might even be able to resolve the planet and see things like clouds or continents. Might even help address some issues relating to life formation and SETI. Other projects may be comparable to the supercollider - perhaps they'll find something interesting like the effect of gravity on the results when compared to their Earth based counterparts.
These things take a couple steps and may not seem that obvious, but it's not like the applications aren't there. Also there's a nice side benefit. Once you figure out how to apply that level of technical knowhow, it's also easier to deal with potentially dangerous space rocks on a trajectory landing them where you don't want them to. And you could argue that history shows that the odds are fairly small. Yet I still think that it would be nice luxury to afford that the dinosaurs didn't have.
That idea is laughable. When we mine things on earth, we mostly use machines to do so - even though the conditions here are just about ideal for humans. Therefore, it is patently absurd to suggest that we would send humans into space to mine asteroids - asteroids without an atmosphere, exposed to vast quantities of radiation and most tellingingly of all, virtually no gravity. Why would we send a human to do a machines job?
Exactly how is it "commercial" if the government forces everyone to jump through their hoops and use their services? And you wonder why everyone is moving to China.
...but then I realized that, while there were the predictable rants to the effect that government having anything to do with "commercial space flight" was a bad thing somehow, there were no observations on the irony of "commercial space flight" being reliant upon existing and massive taxpayer-funded infrastructure and the continued maintenance and improvement of same.
How "private" is a venture that depends upon the preexistence of a trillion dollar taxpayer investment to ensure that they don't get a free colonoscopy from a bolt or other bit of space debris that is traveling at 22,000 MPH??
I am still waiting for the "commercial space flight venture" that starts out in a truly "private" manner by building ground communications and tracking stations around the planet - to include a facility equivalent to the Air Force Space Command's tracking site at NORAD.
"Commercial space flight" is not so much a "venture" as it is a new and fascinating form of wealth transfer. Pat yourself on the back: If you have paid any Federal taxes in the last 50 years, you're helping somebody else explore the possibility of getting extremely wealthy through the use of the facilities you built.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Let's see... it looks like they will use an existing structure, probably part of either NASA's donation or a universities. Researchers will probably be from universities and NASA working on some kind of team with someone from the FAA either overseeing the whole operation or having significant input.
Here is one part I just wonder about -
3.3 CRITERION 3: THE ABILITY OF THE APPLICANT TO PROVIDE
LEADERSHIP IN MAKING NATIONAL AND REGIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO
THE SOLUTION OF LONG-RANGE AND IMMEDIATE AIR TRANSPORTATION
PROBLEMS.
The applicant must demonstrate the following:
Significant experience with industry and/or government agencies related to
commercial space transportation. A proposed plan might include the establishment of
an advisory board comprised of leaders in the field and written commitments from
their organizations to be actively engaged in the COE.
High standing within the national and international arena of commercial space
transportation research as evidenced by presentations at national and international
conferences, publications in popular and peer-reviewed periodicals, etc.
Evidence of ability to obtain matching funds and potential sources, i.e. letters of
commitment.
If the applicant proposes as a member of a team of universities, it must provide a
comprehensive strategic management plan. This plan should articulate proposed
management and oversight of fiscal and technical activities, and detail how the
universities will coordinate research efforts, how research teams will be selected and
evaluated, and how the costs of administering the Center will be apportioned and
funded.
Do they plan on having Virgin-whatever help them out?
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." General James Mattis
That idea is laughable.
And you laughed, I gather. Still doesn't make it an unrealistic. Humans after all do the control and repair on those machines on Earth.
Therefore, it is patently absurd to suggest that we would send humans into space to mine asteroids - asteroids without an atmosphere
Speaking of laughable, humans can't breath dirt either. But somehow, they manage to mine stuff underground. What's missing from your argument is the observation that humans can modify their environment extensively. So there's no need to try to breath vacuum when you can breath air in an environment you either made or brought with you.
The real obstacle is that any attempt to extract resources currently costs a large number of orders of magnitude more than the value of the resource mined. That has to go down a lot before it makes sense. It probably won't do so in the near future, but there is no inherent obstacle that keeps the price up.
Why would we send a human to do a machines job?
When the machine can't do the job. My view is that a few humans are a force multiplier for machines. If you're going to build a huge amount of infrastructure in space, then humans are a natural accompaniment.
You had me, then you lost me right there.
Okay, fine, no, I can't do those things, but that wasn't my point. My point was that the quantities of those things up there might make it commercially viable to invest the resources necessary to get personnel to near-Earth asteroids, or to orbit for processing.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
But since you seem to have all the answers, riddle me this
So you think I'm wrong about this throwaway comment I made about why people might have reason to go into space. Fair enough, and maybe you're right; I'm a layman in the hard sciences, definitely not a rocket scientist or a geologist. But why the hostility? Why can't the goal of the conversation be progress rather than victory?
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Thing is, Columbus went to the Earth, where there was land, gravity, air, water and food.
Imagine Columbus went to a place where (supposing he survived) he notes there is no
air
food
water
gravity
and lots of radiation
and everybody died in about 3 seconds
Would you go back? Wouldn't you also say "we've been there" and continue living where you are now?
That idea is laughable.
And you laughed, I gather. Still doesn't make it an unrealistic.
Most people would understand that the word laughable carries the same meaning as farcical, comical, ridiculous, any number of descriptors which indicate that not only is the idea unrealistic, it is piteously so. Like believing that animals talk and have human emotions because Disney says so. If a kid believes that animals talk, it's cute and we think they are funny. If an adult believes it, we think they are to be pitied.
Humans after all do the control and repair on those machines on Earth.
Sure, and 100 years ago, humans dug up coal with a pick and a pony cart. But now, they use gigantic draglines and longline face machines to dig out the coal in an essentially automated fashion. Sure, humans occasionally interact with those machines to repair them - but not because it is infeasible to have a machine do the repairs, but because it doesn't (currently) make the most economic sense. Entire cars can be produced on an assembly line with no human intervention. So if it made economic sense we would certainly do the same for mining equipment. In the asteroid example if a machine broke down, we would send another to take it's place, or send another machine to fix it. We would never send a human - because for one that would be a crap job, a return to to the type of working conditions we haven't seen in the west since the industrial age, for two, humans are crap at undertaking tasks in space, our bodies aren't designed for it, and for three, the killer reason, it doesn't make economic sense.
Speaking of laughable, humans can't breath dirt either. But somehow, they manage to mine stuff underground. What's missing from your argument is the observation that humans can modify their environment extensively. So there's no need to try to breath vacuum when you can breath air in an environment you either made or brought with you.
But again, why would we send a human to do such a crappy, unrewarding job, when it can be done more easily, more cheaply, and more safely by a machine? We wouldn't, anymore that we would return to mining by pick and shovel.
The real obstacle is that any attempt to extract resources currently costs a large number of orders of magnitude more than the value of the resource mined. That has to go down a lot before it makes sense. It probably won't do so in the near future, but there is no inherent obstacle that keeps the price up.
Which is basically you admitting we would never do it anyway. Because we don't have a shortage of resources, owing to the fact that we really aren't using any, with the notable exception of fossil fuels. All the metals we use go back into the environment, which means we could simply recycle - if it made economic sense to do so.
Why would we send a human to do a machines job?
When the machine can't do the job.
A circumstance which demonstrably does not apply in the case of mining. This isn't the 1960's. We no longer envision the future of space exploration to be ships filled with humans doing 1960's jobs BUT IN SPACE. Human beings recognise the limitations of our own bodies, and devise tools (machines) to cater for those limitations. This trait is one of our greatest strengths, and foundation of all our achievements in the last 300 years. We aren't going to throw that away because a small group of people is romantically attached to the way we THOUGHT the future would look like in the blinkered past.
"Guess what? There was nothing on Antarctica prior to 1905 either. That's when the first research station was built there. Private industry has been sending cruises with tourists for the last 60 years."
Really? There was no gravity, air and water in Antartica? And there were fish and penguins there, hardly "nothing". You people seem to have a hard time grasping the concept of "nothing". Compared to space, every corner of the Earth is raining with resources.
So please, think your comment through before posting. You really show off your ignorance and naivete.
Because no progress is possible in space. It is a dead end with our technology. Nothing more than dream fodder for overgrown children who ate a steady diet of sci-fi while growing up.
This Space Nuttery sucks up valuable brain power on Earth that could be used to bring real progress to the 7 billion or so people who live in reality-land.
Have you ever come across the fact that one small asteroid has more iron in it than all the iron mined in the history of mankind? That the nickel mine in Sudbury is mining the remains of a meteorite? Another fact that slipped your mind is that it will be a lot cheaper to build something in space from materials already out of the earths gravity well than it would be to boost the same thing into orbit from earth! Though you are perfectly correct, if all we plan to do is sit here and wait for the next, Megavolcano, comet, asteroid strike or some other mega natural disaster to wipe us out!
I don't think that the AC poster really has thought through his comment very well. Nice comment there about the role meteors have played in terms of mining.... which offers some excellent thoughts on the topic.
One of the problems with heavy metals is that most of them have sunk into the center of the Earth over time, and that it is only rare exceptions.... usually due to volcanism or meteor landfalls mentioned above.... that you find deposits of the heavier elements in even modest quantities. Going to an asteroid you don't have to worry about trying to dig down a couple of miles or more to get at the ore.... because going a couple of miles you have already shot past the center and are coming out the other side.
Also not mentioned..... there is a reason most mines only go at most a couple miles down: There is this pesky thing called "gravity" that we constantly have to fight here on the Earth. Trying to push up a couple miles of pure rock at 9.8 m/s^2 constant acceleration is an incredibly difficult task if you are trying to squeeze under that rock to get at a vein or ore body that happens to lay underneath that rock. The engineering requirements for keeping that rock suspended for at least the duration you are extracting the minerals is an incredible accomplishment that has spawned its own engineering discipline: mining engineering. If you have ever heard of some of the famous "A&M" schools around the country, notable a school like Texas A&M, the "M" comes from the mining engineering school that was the very purpose for the establishment of the university (with biology programs related to agriculture being the other). I can point to a couple dozen universities across the USA that were established explicitly for this purpose. It isn't easy, and even today there are dozens of people in 1st world countries that die from mining accidents each year.... many more in developing countries like China where they die not by the dozens but by the hundreds or even thousands each year.
Another issue is that mining is an incredibly destructive process that causes incredible environmental damage, wiping out whole habitats and even ecological niches. One mine that is close to my house grew to the point it took out a whole city and even an entire mountain in the quest to dig ever deeper down to obtain the ore. In this case, to avoid problems with the overburden of the rocks, the mine has simply moved the entire mountain down the road in an attempt to get at the minerals in the mine. Why not move this environmental damage to a place that has no "environment" to damage? Mining asteroids sounds pretty good to me on this issue too, where streams aren't filled with toxic metals or even entire climate zones are left alone. Heck, once a good asteroid has been hollowed out, it might just make a new environment that we could put stuff into to develop new environmental niches that until now have simply not existed.
Recycling is also never 100% effective as much as some people would have you think otherwise. You always need to have at least some input from raw sources to maintain any sort of supply of an element no matter how effective you have become at reusing the material.
Getting back to the AC poster above:
No, it isn't all there, at least as easy as those would have you think. Easy spots to dig and extract ore from has pretty much disappeared from the Earth. On a rare occasion you might hear about another gold rush due to a mineral deposit in a generally previously unexplored area, but where exactly are the new frontiers for humanity right now? Oh, that is right, in space! As I tried to explain above, getting down to deeper and deeper pockets of minerals is an incredibly difficult task. Modern mines that operate on the scale of current productio
"Easy spots to dig and extract ore from has pretty much disappeared from the Earth."
Not really. Dig deeper. And if yu think we can't do that, what makes you think we'll do it in space, where I repeat, there is nothing?
"I'll ignore the airline comment for now, as the guy who made that comment was genuinely ignorant of capitalism and how people make profits."
Right. So where is the commercial supersonic passenger transport on Earth? We can't even do that. What makes you think we'll do it in space?
*Regular* airlines are constantly going broke.
Oh, and gravity also keeps you and your tools where you put them... I really, honestly believe you Space Nutters are genuinely deluded, clinically.
You had me, then you lost me right there.
This is somebody who clearly doesn't get it. What is being said is that from a pure energy standpoint, sending a kilo of "stuff" into space; in other words like leaving the gravity of the Earth and in a position to go somewhere else like the Moon, Mars, or one of the asteroids; and then ploping it back onto the ground where you got that "stuff" in the first place is actually cheaper to ship it to another star like Proxima Centauri than it is to ship it back to the Earth.
In other words, Proxima Centauri is closer than a round trip to Cleveland. This is a true statement if you study celestial mechanics and understand the energies needed to get around and being able to do anything. It may take a century or two for whatever you are sending that way, but eventually it will get there and the energy requirements aren't all that great compared to simply getting away from the Earth in the first place.
This is also why "in-situ" resource development is so important for the development of space, as you get the materials where they are much more accessable rather than trying to bring things from a generally inaccessable place, like the Earth.
I would love to see this supposed assembly line with my own eyes. I don't think it can be done, at least not without some humans working to maintain those machines which are making the cars. And who came up with these "machines" you are talking about? Is this some other machine?
I think not. Creative energies have to be expended, and these things are not happening on the Earth contrary to what other fantasies of watching Terminator or The Matrix that you have been watching lately.
Even when it is possible to fully automate a process, often there are people involved either because it takes time to automate a process, the automation equipment is only going to be used occasionally so is not purchased, or because people happen to like hand-crafted products. There is a certain quality to hand crafted items that can't be made by a machine no matter how hard you try.
I'm not saying there is no place for an automated factory, but please, give a good example next time and try to explain why people no longer are needed in this universe in some fashion that makes sense before you spout off this drivel.
I agree that when people start getting out into space there will be a high degree of automation for nearly everything that happens there. Labor shortages alone are going to require automated equipment, but I don't see an argument here that makes sense in terms of a complete prohibition of sending people into space, or that there will be zero need for having somebody on the ground on Phobos to take care of some machinery that can be repaired or dealt with easier there rather than having to have a team of several dozen try to come up with the programming necessary for the remote manipulator that is also broken down to repair that machine. Saying there is no need for people in space is just as nutty as saying everything will be done by hand and that we can walk to the Moon.
I don't get this one at all. Where in the solar system are you going that you live for a total of three seconds once you get there, and how do you get there in the first place? And you are saying that all places in the solar system other than on the Earth are this inhospitable? If most astronauts died three seconds after launch, there wouldn't be many folks who would be willing to make the trip in the first place. For many, they wouldn't have even cleared the launch tower if that was the case.
BTW, so far as I've seen, the Earth does not have a monopoly on Gravity, and it is there in rather abundant quantities if you really need to have it. What possible use do you have with gravity anyways, and why is it strictly necessary to your line of thinking?
Food: There is this amazing thing you might want to look at. They are called "plants" and take things from something called "soil" and turns it into "food". BTW, soil can be produced from the end products of the growing process and can be made into a closed cycle. All that is needed is energy..... which can be harvested from all that radiation you are complaining about. Plants do that directly from the radiation BTW, in the form of "sunlight". Maybe that is something you've never heard about either. I also wasn't aware that when you went to the dark side of the Moon that everything stayed in perpetual darkness there either.
Water: This is "out there" in massive quantities. Water is one thing that is certainly not lacking elsewhere in the Solar System, although it may be in lesser quantities than can be found in the middle of the ocean. The two elements that make up water, both oxygen and hydrogen, are the two of the most common elements in the universe and are found literally everywhere. Again, using all of this "dangerous radiation" to make a solar-powered furnace releases quite a bit of oxygen and hydrogen. Finding ways to combine those elements back together again isn't really all that hard of a problem, and the energy resulting from that recombination also has considerable uses. I should also note that on both the Space Shuttle and with the Apollo flights, water was a by-product from the fuel cells used to generate electricity. Most of the time astronauts are busy spending their time trying to get rid of the stuff rather than trying to find water in the first place. Shortages of water are certainly not a problem.
Air: I mentioned refining ore to release oxygen. Oxygen is incredibly abundant elsewhere in space and can be obtained through multiple means. In fact on the Earth one of the problems with most metal refinement is that the metal manufacturers want to get rid of the oxygen, where the oxygen in the atmosphere keeps interfering with the refinement process. Oxygen reduction is basic to most mineral extraction methods. So why not keep that oxygen instead if you need it to breathe? Seriously, I don't think this is a problem in space either. As for the other elements in the air, why are they needed? I'll admit that plants need nitrates in order to grow, so some nitrogen might be useful as well, and over time those of us made out of meat also end up producing carbon dioxide that can over time end up becoming poisonous. Oh, did I mention plants before? They do a pretty good job of removing CO2, and produce some useful stuff called food with it too.
The problem here isn't that these items can't be found or made when you get "there" elsewhere off the Earth, but that you have to be more creatives about how you get them when you arrive.
This comment makes as much sense as somebody living in Africa about 100,000 years ago and complaining that you can't find zebras or lions to eat if you travel elsewhere. That sure didn't stop people from trying to get to other continents.
I'll be the first to admit that the cost of getting into orbit needs to drop substantially. That is really one of the major limiting factors for getting into space, where shipping up a 1-liter bottle of water costs $100k when it is delivered to one of the astronauts on board the ISS.
Unfortunately that is not something NASA has been actively trying to resolve either, except to drive that cost up. The folks appropriating money for this are more interested in the jobs for their states/congressional districts rather than trying to make access to space more affordable for the rest of us, and they'd rather keep the cost of spaceflight high to justify the billions being spent on those space industry jobs. The more people it takes to get somebody into space simply means more people have jobs that can get those congressmen re-elected. This also explains why the "replacement" vehicle to the Shuttle ends up costing nearly twice as much to fly with 1% of the cargo capacity and half of the astronauts. Yeah, that sounds like something improving the economics for getting into space, but perfect for "make work" projects that are just people running in circles not really doing anything but wasting government money.
As far as bringing something down from space, I would love to see how you determine those costs. While I know of some rocket developers who are making vertacle take-off and landing rockets, but I don't know of anybody who is seriously considering having a powered rocket that brings something from Earth orbit and landing it on the surface. You certainly don't see the Space Shuttle getting outfitted with a new refueled external tank just to land back on Earth.
Again, where is the cost for bringing stuff from orbit to the surface on the Earth? You may have to be creative in terms of how you get it down, but I would argue that it doesn't cost nearly as much as you think it does to take something already in orbit and to bring it down. The expense is getting it up there in the first place, not trying to figure out how to bring it back. I would dare to say that it may be possible to find a way to deliver cargo cheaper from low-earth orbit to a major space port cheaper than you can send a package from Los Angeles to New York. Please explain this if you think I'm wrong here, and I'm not talking the expense of getting something into orbit in the first place, which is a completely different issue. The engineering requirements is quite different for the two kinds of tasks.
As for the trillions of dollars worth of investment necessary to get the infrastructure set up in space, I'd say that sort of money will come when the trillions of dollars worth of income from that investment can happen. Again, it takes some creativity here, and it will take getting cheaper access to low earth orbit too so that it will bring down the initial capital requirements in the first place.
BTW, I'm with you in terms of what it is that is the "killer app" that can justify going into space in the first place. Space tourism certainly seems like at least one reason to put some people up there in the first place, and it has been proven that there are millionaires willing to part with a substantial fraction of their wealth to have the chance to spend some time in space and to literally "go where nobody has gone before". That at least provides a source of some income to sell stuff to somebody already up there as it puts somebody up there in the first place, but other sorts of projects in space do seem to be mostly uneconomical at the moment or the product of dreamers not grounded in reality. Space-based solar power sats are not economical at all with current launcher prices, and we certainly don't have the infrastructure necessary to drive that price down with materials mined from the Moon or asteroids. Helium-3 extraction sounds wonderful until you realize that fusion research is still decades to centuries away from a practical reactor that can use the stuff once you get it. I just don't see a sound reason other tha
Dig deeper? Did you really read my post here? It is becoming increasingly more expensive and much more damaging to the environment to get much deeper. There certainly will reach a threshold that extracting minerals from space will be no just sort of cheaper but an order of magnitude cheaper than going down further. It sure isn't cheap to extract a pound of ore from a couple of kilometers underground, and takes a tremendous amount of capital to get that to happen. I've even heard that most mines expect it to take decades to recover the often billions of dollars that are spent on opening a mind before they finally break even from a fiscal standpoint.
Again, there is not "nothing" in space. I stand in my back yard and see a universe filled with stuff, of which I am standing in just one minor little corner.
Regular airlines are going broke because there is massive competition going on between them. They dare not raise fares because by doing so a competitor will undercut them. That still doesn't stop others, perhaps foolishly, from trying to start a new airline and trying to make a profit from this industry that the other airlines are going broke in.
Frankly, this isn't even a good argument at all, and certainly it can be shown that the commercial airlines are working with billions of dollars in revenue. Yes, I know that revenue is not the same as profits, but those airlines that figure out how to improve efficiency and are willing to offer customers those services which are requested at a reasonable price that those same customers are willing to pay for those services will make a profit... or they will go bankrupt like happens in any capitalistic society.
This is how capitalism works. The "too big to fail" argument simply falls flat for me and is something stupid as well, and a foolish place to throw government money to buy out those companies who fall flat on their face. I say let them fail, and let those who are smart to pick up the pieces afterward! It might be nice for a couple of major airlines to go bankrupt, as it might inspire a new round of entrepreneurial activity instead.
As for why there isn't supersonic passenger transport, there are a whole bunch of problems including how the government really screwed up the development of supersonic travel. Too much money was thrown at the problem back in the 1960's where it drove out private capital from even researching the problems involved in making that practical. It relied upon a monolithic solution that would work for everybody in exactly the same way.... just as all socialistic projects with government money end up. Rather than an incremental solution where minor problems could be tweaked and solutions found, the whole thing had to be built all at once and work correctly the first time it was tried. That is not a way to develop a technology, that is a way to kill off a technology.
BTW, I can name nearly a dozen different companies who have various levels of sub-orbital spaceflight projects capable of carrying passengers. Most of these are being built with private capital and are following an incremental approach to vehicles which will travel higher, faster, and carry more cargo or passengers safely. If you are really interested in supersonic transport, it is a sub-orbital vehicle that really is the solution, where you don't have to plow through all of that air to get to your destination. Hopefully the time will be quite soon when FedEx will start to promise that they can deliver a package to a spot yesterday with a 12 hour guaranteed delivery (for a premium price). I think that day is sooner than you think.
I would love to see this supposed assembly line with my own eyes.
Well, google is you friend - if you are still not satisfied it would probably mean a plane ticket.
I don't think it can be done, at least not without some humans working to maintain those machines which are making the cars. And who came up with these "machines" you are talking about? Is this some other machine?
I think not. Creative energies have to be expended, and these things are not happening on the Earth contrary to what other fantasies of watching Terminator or The Matrix that you have been watching lately.
Even when it is possible to fully automate a process, often there are people involved either because it takes time to automate a process, the automation equipment is only going to be used occasionally so is not purchased, or because people happen to like hand-crafted products. There is a certain quality to hand crafted items that can't be made by a machine no matter how hard you try.
I'm not saying there is no place for an automated factory, but please, give a good example next time and try to explain why people no longer are needed in this universe in some fashion that makes sense before you spout off this drivel.
Good luck with that strawman. Try more kerosene, that usually helps.
I agree that when people start getting out into space there will be a high degree of automation for nearly everything that happens there. Labor shortages alone are going to require automated equipment, but I don't see an argument here that makes sense in terms of a complete prohibition of sending people into space, or that there will be zero need for having somebody on the ground on Phobos to take care of some machinery that can be repaired or dealt with easier there rather than having to have a team of several dozen try to come up with the programming necessary for the remote manipulator that is also broken down to repair that machine. Saying there is no need for people in space is just as nutty as saying everything will be done by hand and that we can walk to the Moon.
See previous post for the debunking of the 'humans are needed to repair the machines' myth.
Not sure, but that's probably enough to pay for business cards, a pallet of letterhead, and the salaries for the G-20 and the three G-14s that are gonna run the operation. In government that's enough.
I am struck in your post about how much you harp to the point of obsession on the limitations of the human body. If you can have self-repairing robots (or it is cost effective to send massive mining infrastructure when the old infrastructure breaks), then that's probably a technological environment in which you can engineer human bodies that can withstand the rigors of space. In other words, when we're doing mining and other things in space, we'll probably have the technology in place to obsolete that entire argument. I don't believe we'll need to go that far to prove you wrong however. A human is not just a collection of weaknesses, but it is also a collection of strengths, most of which will apply in space as they do on Earth. Contrary to your assertion, the human body is well suited to doing things in space as has been demonstrated already in Earth orbit and on the Moon. We can move and manipulate things quite readily in the microgravity environment of the ISS. Current spacesuits limit our mobility in space, but we still can work well with the current designs. Future spacesuits will fix many of these problems.
Sure we'll have to figure out how to counter or mitigate the effects of adverse conditions like zero or low gravity, radiation, etc. But these are engineering problems with which we already have some success. If in addition, we simply fix the human body so that the concerns are no longer valid, then that merely makes my side of the argument easier and more inevitable.
Moving on, as I said before, the return on possible mining projects is currently orders of magnitude less than the cost. That says little about the future. My view is that we'll eventually get the costs down to the point where space-based mining is feasible. Extrapolating from today's technology and costs (especially given your very liberal technological assumptions about the capability of future machines) makes no sense.
Finally, I really think you need to look at what people actually do in the high technology societies. We still have crappy, but rewarding jobs. It makes no sense to ignore that when you make your arguments.
See previous post for the debunking of the 'humans are needed to repair the machines' myth.
You haven't done that yet. Here's what you wrote:
Sure, and 100 years ago, humans dug up coal with a pick and a pony cart. But now, they use gigantic draglines and longline face machines to dig out the coal in an essentially automated fashion. Sure, humans occasionally interact with those machines to repair them - but not because it is infeasible to have a machine do the repairs, but because it doesn't (currently) make the most economic sense. Entire cars can be produced on an assembly line with no human intervention. So if it made economic sense we would certainly do the same for mining equipment. In the asteroid example if a machine broke down, we would send another to take it's place, or send another machine to fix it. We would never send a human - because for one that would be a crap job, a return to to the type of working conditions we haven't seen in the west since the industrial age, for two, humans are crap at undertaking tasks in space, our bodies aren't designed for it, and for three, the killer reason, it doesn't make economic sense.
This is your "debunking". Saying without even a shred of proof, that machine repair is "not infeasible". Second, there are no assembly lines that operate with no human intervention. Humans still maintain those assembly lines and hence, are "human intervention". Humans still have command authority over what that assembly line does, again more "human intervention".
1) Build vertically and increase the density of our living space, but it doesn't address increased food & water consumption or increased heat generation (if you haven't read Ringworld, you need to) as the population continues to grow,
2) Build on the ocean floor or floating cities; same problems as #1,
3) Wars fought over increasingly scarce resources, which will ultimately reduce the population, but is a rather drastic and ugly way to achieve it,
4) Allow part of the population to migrate off this planet, freeing up resources and reducing consumption of resources on the planet.
Now, #4 is hard and we're nowhere near ready for it. But if we don't work towards it, if it is not a serious goal, we will never get there. We also don't know what cool technologies will spin off and benefit everyone. You benefit handsomely from all the tech that has grown out of the first 50 years or so of "Space Nuttery".
I didn't warn you there would be math.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This is your "debunking". Saying without even a shred of proof, that machine repair is "not infeasible". Second, there are no assembly lines that operate with no human intervention. Humans still maintain those assembly lines and hence, are "human intervention". Humans still have command authority over what that assembly line does, again more "human intervention".
You missed the point of the illustration, which is not that car assembly lines run unattended but that cars are built entirely by robots, without human intervention. The degree of automation is bound by economics, not technology. If robots can build a car then they can certainly repair a piece of mining equipment.
Look at it another way. We know from the get go that asteroid mining will struggle to be economically viable, mostly because any material which requires that much energy investment to transport to earth will be amongst the most expensive material available. Consequently mining an asteroid will have to be done in the most efficient way possible. That rules out using humans right there. Having to feed and house humans, plus give them atmosphere at the right pressure, plus, you know, the monetary compensation as a consequence of having one of the worst jobs ever and seriously affecting you health by living bathed in dangerous radiation 24x7 PLUS no gravity, and having no contact and no possibility of contact with your loved ones. The addition of humans will MAKE the plan financially un-viable. So if we needed to do it (and quite frankly there is no sign of that happening, but that is a separate conversation), we would use robots, we would use techniques that minimise the chance of breakdown, if breakdowns happen we would simply send a replacement machine or use another machine to do the repair. We are already automating every mechanised, repeatable process as soon as the economies of scale mean that the capital investment in robotics can be justified. For asteroid mining, capital investment in creating a human suitable environment would be several times greater that the capital investment needed to design and build a machine that presses the buttons that humans would otherwise be needed to press. No mining company would ever send humans: too much investment, too much ongoing cost, too many ethical issues.
You missed the point of the illustration, which is not that car assembly lines run unattended but that cars are built entirely by robots, without human intervention. The degree of automation is bound by economics, not technology. If robots can build a car then they can certainly repair a piece of mining equipment.
The paragraph is incorrect since these lines operate with human intervention as I pointed out. Also building something is not comparable to repairing something. The key difference is that the production line has an extraordinary degree of control over the inputs. The materials and components are of exacting specifications. A repair job starts with a piece of broken equipment, possibly with past kludges or other inexact repairs and changes. You don't have control over what you get to repair or how it breaks. It is a vastly uncertain situation incomparable to the rigorous environment of the automobile manufacture line.
Look at it another way. We know from the get go that asteroid mining will struggle to be economically viable, mostly because any material which requires that much energy investment to transport to earth will be amongst the most expensive material available.
It doesn't require that much energy investment. As I pointed out, to get from Earth to orbit is roughly $10 per kg in electricity energy. Similar amounts of energy would be required to get payloads from asteroids to grazing Earth's atmosphere (where aerobraking takes the payload eventually to Earth's surface). If you set up manufacture of local energy production, then you might be able to do this for a lot less.
The key is that money currently measures the involvement of Earth based resources. Everything else in the Solar System has essentially no value to us. So it doesn't matter, if it takes extraordinary energy or other space-side resources to bring something to Earth. What currently matters is how much Earth-side resources it takes. In the future, these space resources will start to have value to a space economy. That means however, that you would then have lower energy destinations available to you than Earth.
For example, suppose I create a mini-factory for the lunar environment that can rapidly make copies of itself. It costs a billion dollars to build and launch. In addition, suppose it costs a few tens of millions per year to build the infrastructure to manage millions of these factories and the stuff, like a Earth-return launch infrastructure and vast mining infrastructure. What is the cost of this infrastructure? It is the billion dollars plus the annual maintenance. Even mining lunar iron or aluminum can be profitable in this situation (including the amortization cost of the mini-factory). Here, iron would be less valuable than the energy, priced on Earth, that it would take to retrieve it. The thing is though that lunar energy is free. It costs us nothing on Earth to use lunar energy and we had no other valuable use for that lunar energy (opportunity cost is zero in other words). This would be a situation however where there is zero to little human involvement since the factories would have capability to replace machines (even if repair turned out impossible). And it would be easy to control the systems from Earth which has a small communication delay (rough trip delay is roughly 2.5 seconds). But humans would only cost what you need in Earth-side resources, just like everything else. You would need to pay them in Earth money, but most, if not all, of their overhead could be supplied locally by lunar infrastructure (even rare elements can be common enough with large enough mining infrastructure).
I think even here that a lunar side human presence would help things, but it's less of an opportunity cost than you'd get elsewhere. Things get more complicated when your infrastructure is much further away. Control is far more difficult with communication round trip delays of minutes or hours.