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Neil deGrasse Tyson Says Private Business Will Not Open the Space Frontier
MarkWhittington writes "Neil deGrasse Tyson, the famous astrophysicist and media personality, offered something of a reality check on the potential of commercial enterprises to open the space frontier without the aid of government. Specifically referencing SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk's boast that he would establish a Mars colony, Tyson said on a recent video podcast, 'It's not possible. Space is dangerous. It's expensive. There are unquantified risks. Combine all of those under one umbrella; you cannot establish a free market capitalization of that enterprise.'"
But I hope he's wrong. Chances of anyone in government coming together for long enough to get something like this done again are slim, especially without a military reason.
It doesn't really matter, because private sector is our only option. Adjusted for inflation, we spent more in each year of our last dozen years of military actions than on NASA in 55 years. Doubling NASA's budget seems trivial. Hell, tripling or quadrupling it (especially in consideration for the kinds of returns we get, technologically and economically across all of society) seems insignificant.
But it isn't going to happen.
If we wait for a government and a citizenry that is more compelled by blowing up brown people overseas and pushing authoritarian and corporate agendas, it is never going to happen.
If we wait for a government and a citizenry that doesn't want to spend the money to cure cancer, cure aids, feed starving people -- all things that are entirely reasonable with fractions of the funding we spend on some of the most controversial and possibly unnecessary expenses in this country -- then what fucking hope have we of ever finding the progressive spirit for human advancement within our collective selves for funding space efforts?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson's_Bay_Company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Bay_Company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartered_company
http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/Weyland-Yutani
(ok, the last one not so much)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
SpaceX's launch manifest is right here: http://www.spacex.com/missions
Of the remaining four launches this year, only one is for NASA. Indeed, only one is for a US-based customer.
Of the twelve launches next year, three are for NASA and one is for the US Air Force. One is a launch demo so that obviously doesn't count, but that's still seven out of eleven launches going somewhere other than the US Government.
I don't really see SpaceX as being just a government contractor. It has plenty of customers, some of which are governments, and it actively seeks more by bringing launch costs down lower than any government agency has done in the past.
The real questions are:
1) Is there any profit to be made in colonizing space with human presence? If yes, then as someone else said, the hard part will be stopping them from doing so.
2) If there isn't, since Elon Musk is a bit of a space colonization nut, can he make enough profit off of his other business to finance a colony out of sspare change?
Exactly. Neil deGrasse Tyson is certainly an intelligent and articulate voice for science but we all have bias and he's not immune.
In this case, Tyson has been on the front lines of advocating increasing NASA's budget. When private industry begins talking about doing the things that have traditionally been done within NASA for cheaper, this becomes an argument against increasing government funding for space exploration.
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Forget Govt. subsidizing of space exploration or private industry.
We. Need. KERBALS!
In less than 10 years my Kerbals have colonized two worlds and visited countless moons. How? Because Kerbals take the risks!
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If by "developing its capabilities" you mean "analysing, understanding and applying NASA knowledge from the last 5 decades" to which they have full access then yes, they did that at some point and are still doing it. However, I'd be very surprised if their own research added even close to 1% to the heap. Just look at the outright silly disparity in amount, scale and scope of experiments, the size of the funding and R&D staff, etc. between the two.
They are basically a private extension of NASA with a significantly less risk averse decision making process, but also much less accountability. Not that I have anything against that, I think SpaceX is awesome, but I also do think that Tyson is mostly right.
And I suspect he should look up the definition of the word Entrepreneur sometime.
A USS Enterprise crew member?
Ezekiel 23:20
Very likely? I'll give you that it is possible that a "random slashdot poster" is more intelligent and insightful than "one of the brightest minds of our time", but you can't honestly think it is usually the case?
It seems most posters in this story haven't really bothered to watch TFV (go figure). Unlike the impression you can get from TFS, Tyson says he thinks there is too little private enterprise in the space industry, and that it's taken too long for them to get there.
The point he is making is that when it comes to pushing the frontiers, mapping planets and such, the business case is tricky. So he thinks there will continue to be a need for governments to fund this, if it is to continue, much like basic research.
I'd say that the presumption that private enterprises will always do everything better is the biased opinion, if anything.
What i'm saying is, you and your pal are entirely discounting EVERYTHING that NASA has done. Without everything THE GOVERNMENT has done since WWII in research and development towards aeronautics and space exploration, Elon Musk certainly would not have funded all of that on his own to get to where he is now. Lets not forget the bigger picture: had NASA not existed, with all that GOVERNMENT research and taxpayer money, Elon Musk might never have been who he is at all, given what the NASA programs contributed to solid state electronics, miniaturization, computers, communications, material science, and all sorts of other stuff.
This is a very common problem in the US... people are too egotistical to think that the reason they are where they are is that they've stood on the shoulders of this country to get there (to co-opt a compelling meme). We are who we are, our nation is what our nation is, BECAUSE previous generations have invested in the future to make this country better for the next generations (up until now.. now we have a bunch of asshats doing nothing but bleeding the country's future dry because they don't want to live up to the responsibility of investing in someone elses future).
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Theoretical scientist telling his own point of view on business and engineering problems to successful businessman and engineer? Surely Musk must repent and change his wrongful ways this instant.
I'm not saying he is wrong, or that his words mean nothing. I'm just saying that in this dialogue I'd listen to Musk and his arguments with much greater interest.
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
Musk is also a physicist. He actually dropped out of a PhD in physics to start PayPal.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
Funding for space goes up in Republican administrations because space exploration has traditionally been an outgrowth of the armaments industry. Put a capsule on a Titan II and it's a rocket. Put a warhead or several on it and it's an ICBM. Building and testing peaceful rockets helps national defense.