Space Is Not a Void (slate.com)

An anonymous reader shares an article: When President Kennedy announced the Apollo Program, he famously argued that we should go to the moon because it is hard. Solving the technical challenges of space travel is a kind of civilizational achievement on its own, like resolving an interplanetary Rubik's Cube. The argument worked, perhaps all too well. As soon as we landed on the moon, humanity's expansion into the cosmos slowed and then stopped (not counting robots). If you were to draw a graph charting the farthest distance a human being has ever been from the surface of Earth, the peak was in 1970 with Apollo 13. With the successful moon landings, we solved all of the fundamental challenges involved in launching humans into orbit and bringing them back safely. The people watching those early feats of exploration imagined we would soon be sending astronauts to Mars and beyond, but something has held us back. Not know-how, or even money, but a certain lack of imagination. Getting to space isn't the hard part -- the hard part is figuring out why we're there. Sure, we can celebrate the human spirit and the first person to do this or that, but that kind of achievement never moves beyond the symbolic. It doesn't build industries, establish settlements and scientific research stations, or scale up solutions from expensive one-offs to mass production. Furthermore, as five decades of failing to go farther than our own moon have demonstrated, that kind of symbolism can't even sustain itself, much less energize new activity.

Comments

A lack of imagination?

[barakn]

Or is it that it's very expensive and extremely dangerous?

Re:A lack of imagination?

[rogoshen1]

I don't know, the fact that there is not a single sci-fi franchise based on space exploration absolutely implies a complete lack of imagination.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eye problems, muscle tissue problems, bone marrow problems, radiation, the list goes on. There are many reasons why long distance space travel is not possible at this time. Sound like some Millennial at Slate decided to write a blog post out of complete ignorance for any of the science involved. Humans already figured out that long distance travel is not worth the cost to the health of the travelers at this time and therefore have focused on robots and satellites to do the exploration. A far better investment of tax payer money if you ask me. Leave suicidal trips to private adventurers.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[Applehu Akbar]

These are all problems we have found in zero-G, which is what the ISS was designed to test. Now we can try simulating gravity to characterize how much gravitation is required to offset what medical effects.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[Rick Schumann]

Yes, it's about the most expensive thing that our species has ever done. Even putting satellites into orbit is supremely expensive, not even counting the payload itself. If it's not cost-effective, if there's no profit to be made from putting humans on, say, Mars, then you're not going to get funding to do it, or private industry interested in doing it. The only way that happens is if there's actual profit to be made (literally, above and beyond the costs associated). So far, no dice. That, plus it'll take generations to even build a viable colony and industry on even our own Moon; I defy you to try to get the general public to stay interested in something like that for that long.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[swb]

Until not that long ago it was extremely dangerous and expensive to travel more than 100 miles from home and in many places it still is. With that kind of logic, humans would never have left their village let alone their continent.

Yet to this very day there are people who take incredibly perilous journeys willingly even though they know that where they are going life will (at least initially) be very hard and the environment will be hostile, perhaps even fatal.

I think the biggest value of the manned space program isn't the space travel, really, but the sense of inspiration it provides, the notion that humanity is actually going somewhere and somehow progressing in the process.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[Sique]

It does not come from a lack of leadership. It really comes down to a big Why we should?

When people went to the Moon, we thought we would need people to set up experiments on other moons and planets. But since the mid-1970ies, automated space probes proved us wrong. They could get to Venus, Mercury and Mars at a fraction of the cost than having space ships going there. They could be smaller as they didn't need to house humans. They didn't need any life sustaining technology. They didn't need to come back. They could sustain accelerations in swing-by maneuvers no human would survive. And they had patience. They can fly three decades without going nuts. They could deliver the same measurements again and again with constant quality. And we could have them fly risky maneuvers because when they got lost, it was just damage to a machine.

There is not much scientific value in having humans flying to other space objects. And there is no business case yet. Thus we don't.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[SWPadnos]

I think your post was a perfect example of lack of imagination.

1) You don't imagine any reason other than profit for going into space.
2) You don't imagine anyone wanting to spend the generations (you claim it will take) to set up a colony on Mars.
3) You don't imagine the general public can be interested in space travel for long enough to matter.

This isn't meant as a personal attack, I'm just pointing out that the desire for short-term profit is an unimaginative reason to do anything.

According to the Wikipedia page on The Apollo Program ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), the total cost in 2016 dollars is about $219 B. This is roughly equivalent to the federal budget item for interest on the national debt in 2015 ($229 B, https://www.nationalpriorities... ). Just a little perspective on the "most expensive thing ..." comment.

Personally, I would love to go into space. I might chicken out at the last minute*, but for now I think I'd do it. I read Science Fiction and I want to make it Science Fact. I would like to harvest asteroids for materials, use micro-gravity manufacturing techniques, be able to see an eclipse any time I like, perform scientific experiments with better precision than Earth-bound instruments. I'd like to go *because it's there*. In the society we've given ourselves, that boils down to money, which is just depressing as hell.

* I'm thinking about it a bit like bungee jumping - sounds cool, but when you're standing up there wondering if the cord is the right length for your weight, maaaaybe this isn't such a good idea after all.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[angel'o'sphere]

They could sustain accelerations in swing-by maneuvers no human would survive.
The human inside of the space ship is accelerated with the exact same rate like the space ship around him: ergo he is in free fall and does not experience any acceleration at all, a no brainer.
And then again, a swing buy maneuver does not have such great effects anyway.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[bluefoxlucid]

1) You don't imagine any reason other than profit for going into space.

Well, yes.

Today, we work 40 hours per week. We get paid, and what do we do with the money? We buy things. We go into debt to buy, and then inflation makes our dollar-wages higher while not making our dollar-debt higher: it shrinks our debt back down. Corporations profit, banks profit, and we sort of fold some of the buying power back into worker hands.

When we improve technology, we make more for the hours we work. We still swap dollars at the exchange rate--I take home $20/hr, you cost payroll $10/hr, I work one hour to induce you to work two--and we get more for that time we put in getting those dollars.

Now imagine humans do a bunch of work and then burn the things they made.

We still work 40 hours, but a quarter of what we make gets tossed in the trash and incinerated for no purpose. Essentially, we work 40 hours and get paid for 30 hours. We're poorer.

That's what sending a bunch of crap into space for no reason does. That's what going to war does. That's what anything not really profitable does. Oh, sure, we can take a loss on paper doing drug research, and that might even be a loss for the world if the drug is useful for like 10 people a year but costs $3 billion to come up with; but we can also expend $100 million to, say, import a low-cost generic, research it, and FDA approve it, with no capacity to make a business profit. In both case, we as a society bear the cost; yet in the latter case, we get access to a low-cost drug like Bromantane, and can now treat depression (and maybe ADHD?) more-effectively with a $10/month prescription.

Profit isn't just a matter of a business surviving; it's a matter of society as a whole getting out more than it put in. Neither of these outcomes guarantees the other is also happening, and the latter one is the important one in long terms (thus why we have welfare).

Re:A lack of imagination?

[Applehu Akbar]

Not for testing. You could accomplish it with two small habitats connected by a long cable. The amount of gravity we find we need will have a major impact on teh design of a large habitat, so we need to find out the optimum amount before we design anything big.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[Arzaboa]

I'll add on to what you said, cuz I agree. It does come down to a basic lack of imagination.

When everyone is constrained by the thought's of a shorter life, uncomfortable, there is no profit, it seems to me like we will hardly do anything. It still boils down to the "save the children" argument, or "we must keep the heart moving as long as its physically possible for a machine to do", or pick one of those.

When it comes to exploration, its going to take us a while as humans to move on. Until we ship a propagating human population into the stars, we won't know. While we will run into all sorts of things that would make it difficult to come back to earth, and star children who can't step onto earth for a multitude of reasons, I for one don't see these as reasons we shouldn't go and do this.

If folks are sitting around saying that we should be living as long as we can on earth, we are already changing this environment.

Once people start going out into space, as long as we can live 20 or so years, that means we can reproduce enough generations to go forever. DNA will change, we'll adapt, and we'll figure it out. Sure, life spans will be different, but a short life span doesn't mean it is not an important life. For those that are religious, its not about longevity of life, its about a good life, yes? For those that believe in reincarnation, aren't they still alive through their families on ships traveling through space? For those that don't care about the end, then isn't it exploration for exploration sake? If it's about health, then these people shouldn't leave their homes, should have treadmills sent to their homes, air purified, and bubbles put around their homes, which in the end, they'll still die, and probably be boring anyhow.

As for the economy and profit, its not about that. If you get people into space, an economy is created. People come first before an economy and amazingly people tend to forget that.

As for profit, there are many reasons to travel and expand. Take bacteria as an example. They expand into everything. What lives, lives, what dies dies, what adapts adapts. It seems straight-forward, but I think many people get lost in this simple truism. To expand as a population, we can't all live to die hooked up to a machine, on morphine in a nursing home.

Imagination can be stifled by many things. Fear of everything is our biggest problem. My feeling is that if people want to go, lets put them in rockets and let them tell us whats happening. The science can then be done on them to figure out how to extend their lives from that point.

--
"If one day, my words are against science, choose science." Mustafa Kemal Atatürk - Elon Musk

Re: A lack of imagination?

[GameboyRMH]

This, as bad as it is for our sci-fi boners, it's pointless to send people at this time, sending robots just works better.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[randallman]

I'm a certified mechanical engineer and I think it is a good idea. Before reading your comment I already assumed you'd have redundant cables and propulsion systems capable or correcting or reestablishing rotation.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[Arzaboa]

I can't agree with your premise, that profit is why we live or do anything.

Even a business that doesn't make any profit for itself, is still a good endeavor if people can feed themselves and be happy. When I say happy, I mean that they feel good about themselves and what they are doing, and enrich their souls.

Sometimes as a species we must give a little bit to grow, and that is called investing, whether it be time, or energy. Not every investment returns an immediate profit. Some may never return a profit measured in dollars, as people may fail, but trying is what counts. We will have the knowledge forever, and that is profit.

Many societies on the planet never cared one bit about profitability. As long as the generations were alive and surviving, that was all they needed.

While you are right if a measure of being happy is looking through the lens of how much I have in the bank, and making the end of year statements not have parenthesis around them, but that isn't living and that isn't what makes most people happy.

Everyone does have different needs, but when we put profitability above all else, we are missing the entire point. I wasn't put on this planet to make a profit, that is a social construct. And to answer the question... I have nothing wrong with companies and people making profits, its just not the end all be all. I also certainly am not railing against any of our constructs, but I don't want our constructs to box us in so that we never do anything as a species.

On a final note, people come first, economies come later. If you put people in space, they will develop an economy among themselves. At that point, we can judge that and figure out how to optimize that. Until then, we are fear mongering as we go over all the reasons we can't do it.

--
"Throw all of the tea over!" -- Samuel Adams

Re: A lack of imagination?

[silverdirk]

Youre swinging the clue-bat the wrong direction. The difference between an F16 and a gravitational slingshot is that the F16 is being accelerated by air pressure from the outside, while the ocupant is accelerated by external contact as well. It requires the structure of the vehicle and occupant to withstand the forces. When gravity is performing the acceleration it accelerates all molecules of the entire body equally* so the bodies feel no external stresses at all.

*aside from tidal forces etc mentioned by the other posters.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[rogoshen1]

because one persons's delightful and witty sarcasm is another person's trolling attempt? :( for sadness.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[r1348]

Much longer space sojourns on the MIR and ISS have proven that they are indeed major problems. Apollo 11 lasted 8 days launch-to-splashdown, a mission to Mars will imply more than a year in space.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[ls671]

The radiation problem is not related to zero-G. No amount of gravity, simulated or otherwise, is going to solve that.

Are you sure about that? Gravity from a black hole will eat any radiation. So, problem solved! Just carry a black hole with the ship...

Re:A lack of imagination?

[Namarrgon]

So if you agree that pure research and long-shot investments can be worthwhile, despite no immediate prospect of profits, why do you feel that "sending a bunch of crap into space" is done for no reason?

Apart from the many ancillary benefits of space research (spinoff technologies, entertainment prospects etc), the science we learn in space and on other worlds is often clearly applicable to our own world, or at least could well be in the future.

And for human space travel, there's no denying the enormous inspirational boost that society gets when humans achieve something as epic as travelling to a different world. How many of today's terrestrial scientists and engineers, valuable and productive members of society, were inspired by their childhood memories of Apollo?

Then there's the prospect of vast resources in the asteroid belt, the longer-term objective of habitat redundancy for the species, general ongoing growth and expansion etc etc - all clearly beneficial to society, at least at longer time scales.

Re:A lack of imagination?

[OneAhead]

You're right about the spelling but wrong about the physics. There's no inherent need to burn large amounts of propellant during a gravity assist maneuver - just a little bit for "aiming", so that one comes out of it with exactly the right position and velocity. Almost all the acceleration is due to gravity, which you won't even notice if you're inside the spacecraft; see also parabolic flight, microgravity in orbit etc... So it's entirely correct to say that a spacecraft/vehicle/occupant does not experience any acceleration in its own frame [of reference] (in a relativistic sense).

Re:A lack of imagination?

[RonTheHurler]

And what was the profit for Faraday to do research into electromagnets in the 1840s, a time when the largest market for electrical gadgets was magicians doing parlor tricks? A far more profitable endeavor would have been better horse breeding techniques or faster looms.

Fast forward 150 years, and 90+% of our entire economy is based on the electrical foundations discovered by Faraday, distilled into equations by Maxwell (also without profit) and turned into countless products, most of which resulted in failed businesses and ended up in trash heaps. The minority of survivors changed everything.

Faraday wasn't the only one doing scientific research into useless things at the time. He just found the right paths.

That's the nature of progress. It's a trek into the unknown. We have no way to know which paths will be "profitable" and which ones will be dead ends. And if we don't explore them all, or at least as many as possible, we may miss the discoveries that build entire future economies. Without Faraday's and Maxwell's work, we'd still be living an 18th century lifestyle.

Who are the Faradays out there today? Will they be supported, or will we stifle them in favor of better horse breeding techniques and faster looms? Which one will give society as a whole the better future?

What is that hard?

[SuperKendall]

the hard part is figuring out why we're there.

Good grief, why is that even a hard question? The answer is because it's not well explored, we as a civilization have always explored, and in the end have always ended up benefitting by doing so.

Untold riches await the explorer - either of the mind, or literal material riches.

The hard question is not figuring out why we are there, it's figuring out what the hell the delay is!

Re:What is that hard?

[TheDarkMaster]

Businesses today are controlled by psychotic CEOs whose goal is solely to secure the golden parachute for the next victim, oops, next company. You need long-term CEOs for very long-term projects such as mining asteroids with billions and billions of dollars in metals and useful compounds (if you come up with a practical method of doing so).

Re:What is that hard?

[Jason Levine]

Has that ever held back people, especially when there was money to be made? Travelling to the "New World" was dangerous. You could drown as you boat sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, but people still went there. If you went, though, you could get in on the ground floor of some great new trading opportunities. Going west during the gold rush took months and wasn't a guaranteed journey. It was hard and dangerous, going through some unfriendly territory. But people did it because they might find gold and become rich.

In the asteroid belt alone, there's a ton of potentially valuable materials to mine. It wouldn't take much advancement from our current technology to send ships there to identify good targets, mine the asteroids, and then bring the materials back to Earth. Yes, it will be very dangerous, but the possibility of untold riches will drive people to risk their lives. (Yes, much of this could be done with robots, but a human on board would be valuable for making on the spot judgement calls.)

Re:What is that hard?

[higuita]

Stop funding weapons and wars and you will find that you have a lot more money available
Tax rich people, specially if they try to avoid taxes!! Close the tax heavens and financial loop holes.

Re:What is that hard?

[Rob Y.]

Of course, the New World was quite capable of sustaining life - and even had its own life forms to explore (and cultures to dominate).

What amazes me are the people that say we need to colonize other worlds for when we render this one uninhabitable. Well the worlds we could conceivably reach with our 'proven space travel technology' are far less inhabitable than this one will be - even after we're through with it. That doesn't mean we should stop looking for interesting targets and developing new technologies that may someday make practical space travel possible. But to argue that it's possible now - just because we know how to send a projectile with a short-term human-supportable environment to the moon - is absurd.

Re:What is that hard?

[jezwel]

America is rich beyond belief. The US government is not trying hard enough to get access to those funds. For some reason, spending vast sums on the MI complex propping up non-US territories for access to resources is seen as a better strategy than developing your own access to uncontested resources in space.

Re:What is that hard?

[Pfhorrest]

Thank you, I've been saying this for a while now. The technology required to enable permanent human settlement on any other known celestial body would also enable us to preserve Earth's habitability in the face of pretty much any disaster we're afraid might befall it. Climate change, nuclear winter, meteor impact? None of those will result in a world anywhere near as uninhabitable as Mars or Venus. If we could turn Mars or Venus into a habitable place, then we could much more easily restore Earth to habitability in the face of any such disaster. The entire world could be turned into the Sahara, or Antarctica, or entirely submerged under the ocean, and it would still be more habitable than any other planet we know of. So by the time we can settle other worlds, we won't need to. And until we're habitually settling the Sahara, Antarctica, or the seafloor, we clearly aren't ready to settle any of the even-less-hospitable places out there.

Why discount robots?

[grasshoppa]

The argument worked, perhaps all too well. As soon as we landed on the moon, humanity's expansion into the cosmos slowed and then stopped (not counting robots)

Why do our achievements with sending robots not count? We're still producing remarkable feats of science and engineering, aren't we? What's so important with sending flesh and blood?

Yes, other-world colonization is a very real goal, but it's not the only one. Scientific exploration is more efficient ( ie: get more done for less ) when you don't have to worry about maintaining a fragile human being as well.

We need to prepare now

[coldandcalculating]

I agree with the sentiment that we can't talk seriously about colonizing other worlds until we learn how to sustainably inhabit our own, but we need to develop the technology to move humans en masse alongside the capability to not ruin whatever place we land on. Not ruining planets is something we should be practicing on earth immediately, but as TFA points out, many people fail to recognize the economic benefits. Some day this world will be come uninhabitable (asteroid? zombies?) and it would be nice for the sake of our species to be able to move at least some of us to a new place and stay alive there. Why not work on this technology and prepare now? I think our descendants would thank us if they didn't have to attempt the long term survival of the human race in a hastily improvised tin can.

One of my favorite stories is Aesop's tale of the boar and the fox:

One day as he moved through the forest the fox came upon his friend the wild boar who was engaged vigorously sharpening his tusks against a large stone.

"My friend," started the fox, "Why do you exert yourself so, seeing there is no hunter about and no other danger from which to defend yourself on this day in the forest?"

To which the boar frankly replied, "The day will come when I have need of sharp tusks. I shall have no time to sharpen them then."

It's a lack of leadership

[cmaurand]

Not imagination. The moon program brought us solid state, microprocessors and miniaturization the went orders of magnitude better than anything previously produced, velcro, microwave ovens, fuel cells, ground reading radar, methods of inter-body navigation, Tang, Space docking procedures, standardized hatches on spacecraft, better alloys for building air and space craft, Meals Ready to Eat, air scrubbers, and more than anything else, confirmation of the math and physics involved. The space program generated all sorts of industries. In n1961, the technology for putting a person on the moon and returning them safely to the earth didn't exist. by 1969 it did. That took leadership. I haven't seen that kind of leadership since Kennedy. Lots of private contractors got very wealthy off the space program. However, NASA doesn't have the kind of lobbying money available to it that Goldman-Sachs has. What NASA does isn't sexy.

Re:It's a lack of leadership

[techno-vampire]

Just think about a WWI submarine ...

Submarines, then and now, are designed to keep pressure out; spacecraft are designed to keep it in. Completely different design problems requiring different classes of solutions.

More complex than that

[AlanObject]

The only reason that the U.S.A. went to the moon is because the reactionary/conservative votes in Congress and their constituency tolerated it. The reason: they were afraid that the USSR would get there first and establish military dominance from space.

Even so, if JFK had not been assassinated I have read that many historians agree that most of the NASA programs and particularly Apollo would have been de-funded. It was only through sentimental appeal to preserving the JFK legacy that they managed to preserve the 1-2% of the federal budget used for that purpose.

Today, the political dynamic is far different. As long as the right-wing has control of government it will never fund NASA space exploration again. The most you can get is big sub-contracts for private enterprise like SpaceX. But you will have to notice that Elon Musk is no longer hanging out with Trump. What do you think that is?

To the GOP, government scientists are the enemy, as are scientists employed by anyone that they do not have direct control over.

The issue is not motivation or imagination. It is the very peculiar politics of the U.S for the past several decades.

Re:More complex than that

[Khashishi]

Perhaps the issue is lack of competition. Would US have ever gone to the moon if there were no USSR?

What what?

[guruevi]

It doesn't build industries, establish settlements and scientific research stations, or scale up solutions from expensive one-offs to mass production.
NASA paid back at least 5:1 every investment ever made in it. Sure not so much today, but we wouldn't have the computer era without the space race, or memory foam mattresses or velcro or insulin pumps or LCD displays or photovoltaic cells.

Even if going to space is completely pointless (Beyond the information we get from doing basic research) it has encouraged the building of many industries. And even if it was just the information we gathered, it has helped endless amount of lives go from superstition based beliefs to actual scientific inquiry.

Re:What what?

[religionofpeas]

What kind of idiot is totally ignorant of the ginormous boost to tech that resulted from the space race???

To be fair, you'd have to compare it with the things you could do by allocating the same budget on something else. We could fund quantum computers, fusion reactors, batteries, solar panels, or a bunch of other things.

Re:What what?

[bluefoxlucid]

This argument always bothered me. It's a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, which is latin and thus means I am very smart and you should listen to me; also that a thing happened after another thing, therefor the first thing caused the second.

Fasteners evolved before space. The zipper was invented in 1901. Buttons are vastly-different from snaps. Velcro is similar to the hooks on various types of plants which attach to animal fur to carry seeds far away, but somehow is an invention only possible by NASA.

Foam rubber existed in 1929; we have similar latex beds today; but foam polyurethane somehow is an invention only conceivable because of NASA.

Plasma TVs gave us flat screens, and LCDs are based on the 1888 work of Friedreich Reinitzer and the 1927 work of Vsevolod Frederik's light valve; yet LCDs apparently were inconceivable without NASA.

The first photoelectric cell was built in 1888, but nobody would conceive of building terrestrial PVs to combat the climate change fears which began emerging in the 1970s and the long-standing concerns of air pollution if it weren't for putting the damned things in space.

Is this really the kind of argument we should use to justify NASA? That things are just impossible unless the Government space and war machines get out and push? Is that what you want to commit to as the entire reason NASA should exist? Because if so, somebody is going to reason that it shouldn't exist based on your argument being ridiculous.

We have research facilities in zero gravity which provide invaluable scientific data (okay, it's valued at billions or trillions of dollars) unobtainable via any other modern method.

Re:What what?

[HeckRuler]

That's a good argument for the believers. I like it. But it's not going to sway non-believers because it's taking too many liberties with history.

They're going to scoff at "NASA paid back at least 5:1 every investment ever made in it." and ask how that could possibly be true given NASA's ~$580 billion since it's inception. When you try and give NASA credit for:

computer era: They'll say that it would have happened with or without NASA, and I have to agree.

memory foam mattresses and velcro: Ok, but those are pretty minor things, and haven't paid out $2.5 Trillion.

insulin pumps: That's a more legit example.

LCD displays: I'd put that more at the feet of RCA. Just because the space shuttle had LCD displays doesn't mean they were exclusively developed for NASA.

photovoltaic cells: They'll point out that solar cells certainly existed prior to NASA. Of course NASA developed them further and has a practical application. The argument is that without that basic research to make them more viable, solar cells would not have been anywhere near commercially viable and private industry wouldn't have wanted to sink in the money to get it there.

NASA has a list of spinoff technologies. A lot of these aren't all that well known, but they're more concrete examples.

It's all about competition

[Parker Lewis]

The reason why USA planned a moon travel was not because "it's hard", it was because Russia sent a man to the space first. After the competition is over, all stopped. Maybe China sending man to the space/moon/Mars will make USA react again. Need or competition is the fuel for mankind.

Its about the money

[vux984]

. Not know-how, or even money, but a certain lack of imagination.

Getting to space isn't the hard part -- the hard part is figuring out why we're there. [...] It doesn't build industries, establish settlements and scientific research stations, or scale up solutions from expensive one-offs to mass production...[...]

You answered your own question. Despite your declaration to the contrary it is about the money. Nobody has figured out how to make money at being there. Industries go where the money is. Mass production happens when it is profitable.

Landing on the Moon Did NOT Kill the Space Program

[mschwanke97402]

Johnson simultaneously going all-in to Vietnam and creating the Great Society welfare and Medicare programs didn't leave much money for the Space Program. When we went to the moon NASA got as much as 5% of the national budget. That could not be sustained.

Interestingly ...

[fahrbot-bot]

When President Kennedy announced the Apollo Program, he famously argued that we should go to the moon because it is hard.

This is very close to the pick-up line JFK used on Marilyn Monroe.

Space Has Been Quietly Developing

[DanielRavenNest]

In 1972, there were less than 200 active satellites in space ( https://media.tumblr.com/tumbl... ). Today that number is about 1500, and those satellites are larger and more capable. But communications, weather, navigation, and definitely military satellites don't make headlines. Missions with people, and "firsts", like flying past Pluto, do. That gives the public a skewed idea about space. All the people getting satellite TV and radio, GPS, and weather reports are benefiting from space, even if they don't realize it.

Even human missions don't make the news once they are routine. Three astronauts just came back from the Space Station. Did that make the news? Probably not.

On DOGS (Design Of Great Settlements) vs CATS

[Paul Fernhout]

Yes, we really need to think a lot more about how to design space habitats and try out a variety of ideas in simulation and reality. Below is an excerpt from something I posted in 2003 to an Slashdot article on "Jeff Bezos' Shot At Space":
https://science.slashdot.org/c...

While it is excellent to see multiple billionaires pursuing cheap access to space (CATS), this seems like a problem that will be much easier to solve as new materials and processes come along (diamondoid jet nozzles, fusion, etc.) in the near future. Several of these entrepreneurs are of course already using newer materials and processes (composites, active dynamics, small ground crews augmented by fancy computers and software) relative to what NASA is stuck with in maintaining an aging Shuttle.

While I would never say such innovative effort is wasted, it would seem that launch technologies, while sexy, might really deserve somewhat lower priorities than the issue of what to do when we are in space. The fact is, we can launch people now, and relatively off-the-shelf technology (e.g. Ariane or Saturn V equivalent rockets) if manufactured in large quantities are probably Cheap-enough Access To Space for the next ten to twenty years (until nano-tech makes far better launch systems possible) especially if we are willing to accept 5% human casualties for launch (which is probably a far lower casualty rate than most human settlement travel activities historically).

There is also an issue of focus -- people focus on reusable vehicles, but the reality is that it is so costly to get things into space that there is not much point in returning either people or equipment after they have been launched. At best, Apollo era reentry capsules for people who want to come back to earth are good enough. For example, the space shuttle costs so much to launch relative to its production cost it should really be left in orbit as usable equipment (since anything in orbit is worth its weight in gold), and people returned in a small capsule if at all. Even if launch costs are greatly reduced, I think that a general outward trend of humanity will still reflect some of this economics (short of a space elevator). For example, in the USA, most people who went "West" during the 1800s probably never came back East.

So where is a key area of research that should be a priority among NASA and Billionaires, but is not heavily pursued? The issue is what to do in space once you have gotten there. Because if there is a reason to be in space, then people and collectives will work to get there. And the reality is, that right now, if we could get there, there is nothing to do there short of look around and come back. And if that were the case, Space would not deserve much more investment than say tourism to Mt. Everest. The reality is that we don't know how to support human life in space -- in large part because we have only spent a pittance on thinking about that issue systematically compared to the issues of CATS and Planetary Exploration. Frankly, while we support human life on earth, we have very little meta-knowledge formally about how to do even that. And, most of figuring out how to support human life in space at a nuts and bolts level requires non-sexy activities like sitting around and staring out the window, talking, sending emails, building databases, building software tools, building some small physical protypes on tabletops and outdoors, and just plain thinking (the hard stuff). This is all the preparation needed for the spiritual voyage into the (physical) heavens. Biosphere II was an excellent start in some ways, although the science mission was a bit dodgy at first and it seems Columbia (the recipient) seems about to abandon that effort for cost reasons --- and in any case, Biosphere II focuses on the wrong question -- we know biospheres can work and replicate (although scale is an issue) -- what we don't know is how to replicate the mechanical infrastructure (e.g. glas