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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.
Right now, the barrier to increasing use of space is the cost of launch. It's indeed true that, with launch costs at their current levels, utilization of space resources isn't likely to be commercially viable (at least, not for applications other than the ones already being done, such as observation and communication.)
The critical question is, can the cost of getting to space be reduced? And if so, by how much?
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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
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.
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?
In the very long run, probably. But I think there's probably a route to increasing space exploration and utilization by explicitly avoiding the cost of Earth-to-orbit transport costs. The plan I've seen that has some promise goes as follows:
1. Find some metal-rich and volatiles-rich asteroids and comets (not exactly rare in the Asteroid Belt). Tow these asteroids into a near-Earth orbit and begin extraction and smelting. ....
2. Set up manufacturing facilities in Earth orbit to build spacecraft and satellites.
2a. We could even "grow" plastics with bacteria or genetically-engineered plants.
3
4. Profit!
In all seriousness, if you created a parallel space-based economy whose sole purpose is to make transporting anything but humans into space, then the whole question of how to make Earth-to-orbit transport cheaper ceases to be an issue. Obviously the startup costs and R&D for such a project are monumental, but in the long run, the rewards would be huge. The whole point of commercial spaceflight is to find a way to make it economically feasible, and this is about actually creating a space-based economy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Plutocrat-Wins-Darwin-Award-In-Space-Day? I'll dig it.
Deserves two days if it's Trump. Three if his hair jams the airlock.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Quick fix. Sorry it was Leif Erikson, his son that made it to Canada.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
No they could not unless they had the backing of someone wealthy to pay for the ships
Yes they could. People cross the ocean in small boats all of the time. And just look at the Pacific? All of those islands were colonized by people with Stone Age level tech. It's not a great analogy to space, but surely you don't need a billion dollar rocket to get into orbit. Surely it can be made more affordable, and that's what they're trying to do.
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.
Not true, asteroids could be brought near earth by incredibly cheap process that merely would be time consuming. A little nudge in the right place at the right time
Bringing asteroids "near" Earth (that is in an Earth crossing orbit, nearly intersecting the Earth) can be accomplished with a little nudge for some small set of asteroids - but this will NOT bring the asteroid "to Earth" (as the OP said) unless you are planning on causing a cosmic bombardment that will vaporize the asteroid in a spectacular explosion (good luck getting the people of Earth to buy into that plan).
Asteroid mining requires bringing the asteroid into an Earth orbit, which involved a very large change in velocity, not a "little nudge" and won't be cheap no matter how it is arranged.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
He gave an example of a type of diamond that is really rare. I concur that diamonds shouldn't be used as an example of inherent value, though.
Platinum and gold are around 30 dollars a gram.
Rhodium peaked at around 28,000 dollars a gram.
His example was exceptional because it used something that would trivially devalue if it came to Earth in large quantities as well. His point is that there's no known substance that could possibly justify 281,000 dollars per gram of transportation costs- the few you could point to or hypothesize are only so valuable because they are rare, such as unique quality gems, extremely short lived radioactive materials, etc. It's too expensive period- at the moment.
And the Polynesian Islands were populated before Europe had boats.
No, they weren't.
"Polynesian ancestors settled in Samoa around 800 BC, colonized the central Society Islands between AD 1025 and 1120 and dispersed to New Zealand, Hawaii and Rapa Nui and other locations between AD 1190 and 1290."
http://pvs.kcc.hawaii.edu/ike/...
Your Eurocentric view is blocking you from seeing that explorers predate Columbus and made ocean crossings long before
Yes, that part is right.
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