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Golden Spike Working On Private Moon Flights
medcalf writes "NBC reports that Alan Stern's Golden Spike Company is planning commercial trips to the Moon. From the article: 'A group of space veterans and big-name backers today took the wraps off the Golden Spike Company, a commercial space venture that aims to send paying passengers to the moon and back at an estimated price of $1.4 billion or more for two.
The venture would rely on private funding, and it's not clear when the first lunar flight would be launched — but the idea reportedly has clearance from NASA, which abandoned its own back-to-the-moon plan three and a half years ago.
Golden Spike's announcement came on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 17, the last manned moonshot. Backers of the plan, including former NASA executive Alan Stern and former Apollo flight director Gerry Griffin, were to discuss the company's strategy at a National Press Club briefing at 2 p.m. ET, but some of the details were laid out in a news release issued before the briefing.
"A key element that makes our business achievable and compelling is Golden Spike's team of nationally and internationally known experts in human and robotic spaceflight, planetary and lunar science, exploration, venture capital formation, and public outreach," Stern said in the news release.'"
If I were planning this, I'd like to first launch an automated habitat onto the Moon. If we weren't in a Cold War driven "space race", maybe we would have done that. We have some working knowledge now about long duration exposure to the space environment. We just need to work out landing something ISS-sized on a planet, or getting manufacturing capabilities there to build it in-situ. We also have better robots now. Build it, and then come.
I'm sure NASA would be going to the moon every month if they had all the funding they needed but sadly they no longer can. With that in mind I'm really glad that private companies are still pushing for space exploration and that governments aren't preventing them from doing so. I hope there are enough rich people interested in this to properly fund companies like this.
http://interserver.net/
I think the number of multi billionaires that would sign on is small but it's cheap for countries to get a seat on a Moon mission. Rather than spending tens of billions themselves they can for a fraction of that get one of their people a seat. It's one of the smallest clubs on the planet and so far they have all been US citizens. I can see Japan and as well as much of Europe being very excited about the prospect. For Russia it would be an afordable way to get there without committing to a massive program.
at an estimated price of $1.4 billion or more for two
According to Forbes there are only around 1000 people on Earth with that kind of money.
Eventually the moon will replace Florida as *the ultimate* retirement community. It's really only a matter of getting cheap propulsion systems, and then everything else falls into place. If a trip to the moon can be reduced to the cost of, say, 5x a roundtrip cross-country flight, then infrastructure will start to be built, communities set up, regular freight traffic (space truckers!) and then people by their thousands migrating there. Close enough to home but with 1/6 the gravity (and fewer falling injuries, bonus). It's the perfect place to retire to, once the infrastructure gets there.
I'm hoping this happens in the next 40ish years so I can spend my final days there.
The secret sauce is their "team of nationally and internationally known experts in human and robotic spaceflight, planetary and lunar science, exploration, venture capital formation, and public outreach", who of course go without introduction (i.e. we haven't found them yet).
I'm particularly fond of their saying that they have "clearance from NASA". What the hell does that mean? Are they cleared for launch of an unnamed rocket from an undisclosed location? Hell no. It means that they said, "Hey, NASA, do you mind if we make bogus claims about going to the moon" and NASA said "Sure, knock yourselves out."
Yes we should. There is no good reason whatsoever to ban commercial exploitation of the moon. If there are particular parts that make sense to keep pristine for future generations, then make lunar parks to preserve them. Preserving the moon in it's pristine form is only good if there are people their to appreciate it.
Commercializing the moon is another.
Should we allow such endeavor to proceed in the first place?
Of course we should. For two reasons.
1. Space exploration won't become more than the sideshow it is now until someone manages to monetize it. If we want real sustainable investment in space and space related technologies, we need someone to be making money off it somehow, otherwise various governments around the world will just continue to drop the ball. It could be from mining, or tourism, or something else, but industry needs to get involved.
2. I own all the real estate on moon (I bought it on eBay), so if anyone went there, they would have to lease the area they are using off my company - it's well past time for that investment to pay off for me.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Slow down Cowboy! We've barely managed to keep up a small station in Low Earth Orbit, much less figure out how to build and maintain habitable areas on the moon. It's lots more that just 'cheap propulsion systems'. It is an enormous expense of designing, building and maintaining things in a totally inhospitable environment.
Who is going to 'migrate' there? Where is the economic benefit? Don't go all Kim Stanley Robinson on us, there are incredible financial constraints that are quite real and won't go away. At the rate the economy is going, you're going to be lucky to spend your final days in something stronger than a cardboard box.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
it's not clear when the first lunar flight would be launched
Never. That clear enough for you?
And now... OooooooooOOOOOO
"Fly me to the moon
Let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like
On a, Jupiter and Mars
In other words, hold my hand
In other words, baby, kiss me"
If this is push through, that means, another history in the making!
Is anyone else struck by the fact that people who are allegedly intending to deliver an economically feasible private-sector ride to the moon would choose a name alluding to the completion ceremony for a massively government-sponsored(and deeply politicized and not a little corruption-plagued) infrastructure project?
Allow? We? Is this a socialist dictatorship or some shit? If WE aren't going to the moon, doing anything with it, exploring, mining or anything else with it, then how do WE have the right to stop an individual from doing all those things?
We allow commercial exploitation of the Earth and we live here...
I can't believe how much press this got, for being so without substance.
Here is their business plan: They are going to take people to the moon. They are going to do it by buying a spaceship.
That's it.
Bruce Perens.
Should we allow commercial exploitation of the moon?
Who is "we"? Unless you represent some group that owns the moon it's not your place to stop people from doing what they please there.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
...I was transported back to my air traffic control days. There was a high performance aircraft called a Mooney 20 that was favored by doctors and lawyers with way too much money on their hands. The Mooney was a tricky aircraft to fly, lots of airplane to handle for the uninitiated. Mooney pilots in crisis were the worst pilots to deal with due to their relative lack of inexperience. The running joke was that each Mooney came equipped with a "golden spike" mounted on the door, impaling unsuspecting pilots in the head and rendering them stupid.
Needless to say, a company called "Golden Spike" would not be a company I'd prefer to take me to the moon and back.
I've lived in Florida all my life, the retirees who actually live here are incredibly cheap, I simply can't imagine them paying even $100/kg for their food, water and air. (now, the people who buy expensive beachfront real-estate and never use it are another thing... they are our tax base.)
If, by infrastructure, you mean "farm domes," then think about how much area under dome is required to support each person and compare that to the size of your average McMansion.... I'm guessing you'd need dozens of McMansions worth of enclosed habitat to support each person, and before you get into "a glass roof is cheaper to maintain per sq.ft. than a home" think about replacement of lost gasses, meteor strike repairs, dust cleaning, etc.
At 1.4B/2 riders, I might hope that they'll do a couple of trips a year, but there just aren't presently enough billionaires on the planet to support more than that on a continuing basis.
Maybe getting the billionaires to spend their billions (on this, or anything, really) will stimulate the economy enough to empower more of us to be able to take the trip?
Should we allow commercial exploitation of the moon?
Sending astronauts there to discover new things, to take moon rock back to earth for research, to set up a moon-based telescope or something akin to that is one thing.
Commercializing the moon is another.
Should we allow such endeavor to proceed in the first place?
Why should we not be able to commercially exploit the resources of the Moon? That this question is even being asked sort of suggests that we aren't worthy of being a species worth saving. Yes, I'm serious.
Of any place in the Solar System that is worth gouging up and mining until it is unrecognizable, the Moon would be the place to do it and benefit not only mankind but the Earth itself as well. I would much rather have the face of the Moon become unrecognizable from its current view than to have mountain top mining and other incredibly disastrous terrestrial mining operations.
The Moon is huge anyway, so I highly doubt that we would be able to do more than a minor dent on the Moon. I say dig it up and pull everything of value off of the Moon and let people who want to go there have at it and do whatever they want! In time there will be a civilization on the Moon that can take care of itself and take stewardship of the Moon for those things that the people living on the Moon are concerned about. At the moment it is downright silly to sit on the Earth and hope that the Moon remains a sort of international peace park where people aren't really permitted to go except with special permission from some government agency.
For the money and effort it will take to go to the Moon, it will need to be something incredibly valuable for the venture to be worth the effort. Besides, anybody going to the Moon like Golden Spike Company is actually paving the way for us to go into the rest of the Solar System and to expand the reach of mankind in general through the universe. This is also an issue of raw freedom, as we as a species need an escape valve for people to go forward and try new ideas of culture, science, literature, and politics. Right now we are being strangulated as it were here on the Earth with what it turning into a monolithic culture and political system that eventually will collapse under its own weight.
We can't have mankind placing all of its eggs in one basket as it were, and going to the Moon to exploit it is a great way to make sure that doesn't happen. Mars or the asteroids may also be useful, but the Moon is a great part of that picture.
Start with billions of dollars, establish a private spaceflight company offering rides to bored rich people and shut it all down before you're bankrupt.
The reason why the "small space station" is a problem is precisely because it is in Low Earth Orbit. There are no "native resources" at that location to do anything useful. That particular orbit is really only useful as a way station to other places in the Solar System and for people and stuff going in both directions... to the Earth and from the Earth to elsewhere.
The problem with the ISS and why it is so hard to keep going is because it is incomplete. It was also done in the most expensive way possible and with the least sustainable way of keeping it going. I consider it a miracle that it was put up in the first place mainly because of the insane contracts and government bureaucracies involved in getting it built. If you built an international airport with eight runways, hundreds of hangers, thousands of rental cars, several hundred employees, and an interstate highway leading up to that airport but only had two Cessna airplanes fly into it each year.... it would be equally useless and a huge waste of resources. That is what we have with the ISS. It could be useful but it was built in the wrong way to be useful in the way you are suggesting.
You are also making the completely wrong notion that commercial spaceflight activity is not currently happening except for a few stupid extreme adventure people like Felix Baumgartner. It couldn't be further from the truth and in fact commercial spaceflight activity is already a multi-billion dollar industry. The Earth and its economy would simply shut down if it wasn't for existing infrastructure in space and for existing applications of commercial spaceflight. You use them all of the time without knowing it too. When you see astronauts running around, they are just the tip of the iceberg of the actual activity which is happening. Simply put, there is plenty to do in space and ways to make money just to support the existing infrastructure of what we are currently doing in space. That by itself would more than justify putting some people up there simply to take care of that equipment... particularly given the increasing complexity of much of that equipment which is being sent into space.
In other words, there are some space tourists and extreme adventure type people going into space, but they are so insignificant right now as to be ignorable on a statistical basis for the real stuff that is happening in space. Supporting that infrastructure from stuff you can get from space is already right now something which can close a business case for going up there right now. In fact, there are multiple businesses who are trying to do just that, and Golden Spike is just the latest of a long string of companies.
Should we allow such endeavor to proceed in the first place?
Who is this "we", kemo sabe? And what gives "us" the right to stop anyone from going to the moon?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Eventually the moon will replace Florida as *the ultimate* retirement community.
The reason everyone retires to Florida is because the weather doesn't get too cold in the winter. I'm not sure how the moon is going to compete there.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
If you want to know what would happen to the economy if alcohol was to disappear, all you need to do is look back to the prohibition era in the USA during the 1930's. As a social policy it was an utter disaster, but economically it wasn't nearly so bad and the Great Depression had nothing to do with the lack of alcohol production.... although a solid argument could be made that it may have been more than coincidence that the economy fell part when prohibition was passed and it recovered when it was repealed.
The interesting thing about the role of space-based assets is that the tendency is for increasing reliance upon them, not the other way around. Obviously the economy of the world did not depend upon anything in space in the 1950's as there was nothing in space at all. Even throughout most of the 1960's and 1970's, most of what was done in space could be done on the ground and indeed somewhat easier. Telecom satellites are one area where there was competition from cable laying ships... a decidedly 19th century technology somewhat updated to the 21st century through the use of fibre optic cables but still mostly recognizable to the trans-atlantic cables of a century earlier.
The interesting thing to note though, of everything that is critical infrastructure that really matters, absolutely none of it is being run by NASA with perhaps the exception of the Deep Space Network... and even that shows signs that will be replaced eventually by something not operated by NASA. Don't think that I'm trying to advocate for a level of increased funding for NASA, as I'm not. I think that agency has long outlived its usefulness in terms of being "the space agency". It really needs to turn back into what it once was and be a place to experiment with really cool technological ideas.... just as Jerry Pournelle was advocating in that article you linked. Projects like the Dawn mission to the asteroids are precisely what NASA should be doing, as an exploration agency that is also testing new technologies that may be used elsewhere afterward. The NACA did that earlier with aviation technologies, and NASA still has an aviation compoent (the first "A" in NASA).