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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.
used to be they were only for governments and large corporations. now the military is buying the same tech as everyone else because it's better than their custom made stuff. same thing with commercial space. there will be a lot of investment which will drop the costs of launches and it will get ahead of NASA
If anything, it seems like deGrasse came closer to giving team Space!!! what they wanted to hear than I would have expected, in that he left open the implication that nation states might develop serious interest in colonizing nearby rocks and would then very likely find themselves in need of contractors for various purposes; and enable some more fully private side activities.
The ROI of getting things into earth orbit is well established; and it has a correspondingly robust market, with more outfits clamoring to enter it. Satellites are all sorts of useful and need more or less continual replacement, repair, and so on. Nobody doubts that.
The technical feasibility of snagging asteroids and chopping them up is still in the more speculative stages; but that also has an obvious possible ROI if the technical challenges can be overcome.
The case for the moon or mars, though, isn't just a matter of corporate shortsightedness, it's a matter of "Please, tell me about the ROI, within, say, the next 250 years...". Planetary colonization would undoubtedly be cool; and might be something that a nation state would get interested in as part of a prestige contest(like, say, the last time we were at all serious about the moon); but nobody ever seems to have any plans, aside from vague references to Helium 3, for what would make lunar or martian living more cost effective than some sort of aggressive colonization of underutilized desert regions or something similarly unsexy. The bounteous iron mines of mars? The endless plains of razor-sharp, static-clinging, vitrified silicates of the moon?
We seem to have gotten away from this in recent years but space exploration is a perfect example of what government SHOULD be doing. These kinds of exploration programs are not economically viable for commercial enterprises. Government needs to pave the way first. This is something at JFK understood all too well.
Bringing a giant asteroid made of gold to earth would make gold worthless. Basically the same reason DeBeers locks up half of all diamonds ever mined.
I've tried but I cannot respect this guy. Seems that everything he does drips of condescension.
Columbus was sponsored by a wealthy and powerful sovereign government.
He was indeed. But many follow on missions were privately funded. Governments funded the development of better compasses, sextants, chronometers, and better ships, as well as the initial voyages. But within a few decades, the spice trade, slave trade, and sugar/rum trade had made oceanic voyages profitable enough for the private sector to dominate.
however, we don't know the reasons the Polynesians expanded. It is highly doubtful a lone couple of polynesians set sail on the high seas to find new islands. The amount of provisioning and boat building required would indicate at least local levels of cooperation and contribution that would most likely be analogous to modern government sponsorship of exploration and colonization. These aren't the brave, rugged capitalist individualists you are looking for, either.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai