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Neil deGrasse Tyson Touches Off Debate With Remarks On Commercial Space (theverge.com)
MarkWhittington writes: In an interview published in The Verge, celebrity astrophysicist and media personality Neil deGrasse Tyson touched off a firestorm when he suggested that commercial space was not going to lead the way to open up the high frontier. Tyson has started a live show that he calls "Delusions of Space Enthusiasts" in which he touched on, among other things, why the Apollo program did not lead to greater things in space exploration such as going to Mars. Tyson repeats conventional wisdom about Apollo and the Cold War. In any case, it is his remarks on commercial space that has caused the most irritation.
I've listened to NdGT talk about this topic a fair bit and I agree with his basic thesis that private companies will not lead the way to Mars or even the Moon. You simply cannot make a credible business case for a private company to do it. I'm an engineer but I'm also a certified accountant. I've pitched investors on projects and the problem is largely an economic one. Paraphrasing his arguments the risks are large and substantially unquantifiable, the ROI is unknown and will take many years if not decades and the amount of money required for large exploration projects is huge. The only institution which is in a position to spend large amounts of money on something with big risks, huge costs and completely uncertain payoffs are governments. Once some of the risks have been quantified and enough information becomes available to make a reasonable guess at an ROI and time frame for the investment, THEN private enterprise can jump in.
We largely admire companies like SpaceX but SpaceX isn't doing anything wildly outside what NASA has already done. They're not sending probes to Mars, they are just improving the economics and a bit of the technology for chemical rockets - a technology we've had for 60+ years. People talk about mining asteroids but no private body is funding the exploration to go find them much less developing the technology to actually do something economically useful. The cost is too big, the returns too uncertain and the risks are still largely unknown. It's why we still need NASA out there on the frontier. Leave the launches to SpaceX and others and get NASA out into the solar system doing the cutting edge research and exploration we so desperately need. We don't need NASA building rockets, we need them figuring out how to get us permanently more than 200 miles from the surface of the Earth.
any schmuck
Columbus was sponsored by a wealthy and powerful sovereign government. 15th century schmucks were not involved.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
During the age of Columbus, any schmuck with a ship could go out exploring.
Not the big voyages. Those required the resources and backing of governments. A large sailing vessel in those days was equivalent to a SpaceX rocket rocket today. Hugely expensive and state of the art technology. Columbus could only do his voyage because he was backed by the crown. It wasn't until centuries later that "any schmuck with a ship" could set sail for wherever. People didn't sail across the Atlantic until a government backed expedition (Columbus) proved that there was something out there worth going to see.
Private companies getting in the game are just a necessary natural evolution of the technology.
Private companies are NOT the ones doing the exploration. They are building the equipment used by those doing the exploration. SpaceX is building rockets not much different from those used 40 years ago. They aren't building a moon base or any of the equipment needed to go to Mars. They are building what amounts to the Model T of chemical rockets to get the cost down. NASA is the one sending probes to Pluto. NASA is the one doing experiments on the space station. Private companies only get involved when there is something they can see a way to profit from. It's a good thing but pure exploration of the frontier is simply something they cannot do because the risk/reward ratio is off the charts bad.
Sensitive much? There was nothing anti-business about what NDT said. He stated simply as fact, the exact same rational that pundits on the right-hand side of spectrum have used repeatedly when explaining why business-oriented individuals are better candidates to run the government: businesses are results oriented, and generally risk averse. If they are publicly traded and their principal business is not risk, then they are required to be by law.
Tyson wasn't making a qualitative statement about business competence or capability, he was talking about the fact that there is not even the teeniest tiniest business case that can be made for building a human spaceflight program to Mars. None. No CxO could present such a proposition to their board without running the very real risk of receiving a vote of no-confidence. This is fact, not the bias of a left-wing statist (though ad hominem is clearly the appropriate mechanism through which to debate your point and win people to your position).
Now, could a counter argument be made to NDT's point that perhaps a single, very rich, individual might be able to accomplish such a feat without having to worry about the ROI implications, perhaps even more nimbly and efficiently than governmental bureaucracy would allow? Sure, and I believe that Elon Musk is exactly that type of individual. Though I suspect that even he doesn't have the resources to pull it off alone, and will need outside investment. Which brings us back to challenges faced by business that Tyson identified.
Argue your position. Stop with the my team/your team red vs. blue bullshit and engage in an honest debate. If we don't find a way to do this as a society, to step away from demagoguery and ideological obstinence in order to find consensus, or at least rational, well-reasoned disagreement, then we have much, much bigger existential problems to address than the challenges presented by a manned mission to Mars.
In the 15th Century every early exploration of any note was government sponsored to some degree.
Although, it is important to note that at that time, there was a fuzzier line between the "government" and the people who had capital to send voyages. Queen Isabella provided money of her own for the voyage, as opposed to money raised directly in a tax and budgeted for the exploration.
However, as Queen, her jewels and her personal wealth were effectively derived from her position as a ruler.
Prince Henry the Navigator was in a similar position. He was rich, but mostly rich because he was a royal who had estates and money derived from his position related to the government.
There was no commercial interest, or any individual ship which was involved in the exploration of the Americas at that time.
You would likely have been better off discussing the Viking voyages, which is more of a scenario where voyages of relatively small ships fitted out for trade and raiding eventually got to North America.
And the Polynesian Islands were populated before Europe had boats. Your Eurocentric view is blocking you from seeing that explorers predate Columbus and made ocean crossings long before and without any backing from major wealth sources. We are talking BC thousands of years prior to Columbus' little voyage.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
As others have pointed out, the gravity well makes launch costs prohibitive. It also makes getting that load of ore from a captured meteor back down without another dinosaur extinction difficult.
Even with a few dozen engineering hurdles completely unsolved, a tethered station on a space elevator is really the only way to lift mass (you know, people and equipment) with any kind of reasonable energy-to-mass ratio.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Elon Musk's goal is to create a self-sustaining colony on Mars. In order for that to happen, he decided that he would have enough people volunteering to immigrate to Mars to make that happen if he can bring the cost of a ticket to Mars down to $500,000. And in order for that to happen, he needs to find a way to severely bring down the cost of launching rockets.
SpaceX's goal is not the usual corporate goal of making quarterly profits for the shareholders. He is keeping SpaceX private because he knows his goals would never be reached if he were to make it a publicly-owned company.
So while NdGT is probably correct, I think the only reason he will be correct in this case is that Elon Musk will die of old age before SpaceX gets far enough along to make a Mars colony a reality. But I'm really, really hoping that Musk can pull this off.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
You can't masturbate a person. A person masturbates themselves.