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Majority of Americans Believe It Is Essential That the US Remain a Global Leader in Space (pewinternet.org)
Pew Research: Sixty years after the founding of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), most Americans believe the United States should be at the forefront of global leadership in space exploration. Majorities say the International Space Station has been a good investment for the country and that, on balance, NASA is still vital to the future of U.S. space exploration even as private space companies emerge as increasingly important players. Roughly seven-in-ten Americans (72%) say it is essential for the U.S. to continue to be a world leader in space exploration, and eight-in-ten (80%) say the space station has been a good investment for the country, according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted March 27-April 9, 2018. These survey results come at a time when NASA finds itself in a much different world from the one that existed when the Apollo astronauts first set foot on the moon nearly half a century ago. The Cold War space race has receded into history, but other countries (including China, Japan and India) have emerged as significant international players in space exploration. Another finding in the report: Most Americans would like NASA to focus on Earth, instead of Mars.
Moon colonization shout be the goal along with asteroid mining. That is the best way to build a sustaining space travel infrastructure. Mars can wait.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Considering 1 in 3 Households in the US rank as âoeThe Working Poorâ, Americaâ(TM)s fastest growing demographic and the fact that the majority of US Households cannot afford to send their children to a college in the US, how exactly shall the US remain relevant at all. Itâ(TM)s a well known fact on Wall Street that the days of US economic supremacy are over. Itâ(TM)s all about the cash heist now. By 2035 China and the BRICS will rule and the US will become a 3rd world shithole renowned for it Prison Society and corporate backed military authoritarianism against its population of impoverished ignorant bible banging fuckwads
I'd bet $10 that the stated reason is Trump is destroying Earth's environment so we need to go to space.
72% think it is essential that the US be at the forefront of space EXPLORATION, but 18% think we should do any exploring. People as a whole are completely, utterly useless at directing policy. If you ever want to do anything important or interesting ignore what people think about it.
fixed it for you
Eliminating poverty within your borders is a far more noble pursuit than exploring space. Let's cure problems down here first and then worry about up there.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Theres my .02
... because American voters also want a Wall.
They want to be isolationist and nationalistic.
They do not want to invest in the education needed to produce rocket scientists.
They want coal plants to stay open for jobs despite the owners' assertion that "we don't use manual labour like we used to."
They want nuclear power but they have no indigenous people who can build a plant.
They are anti-science.
Judge Orders EPA To Produce Science Behind Pruitt's Climate Claims
America will never dominate in any regard going forward.
They want to be great again by going backwards.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Why?
I get a kick out of space stuff, but what's the return on investment? Could we realize a better return per dollar by spending it on other areas?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
... because American voters also want a Wall.
They want to be isolationist and nationalistic.
They do not want to invest in the education needed to produce rocket scientists.
They want coal plants to stay open for jobs despite the owners' assertion that "we don't use manual labour like we used to."
They want nuclear power but they have no indigenous people who can build a plant.
They are anti-science.
America will never dominate in any regard going forward.
They want to be great again by going backwards.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
we cut all this "wasteful" government spending. Every dollar spent being wasteful if it's not spent in their district...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Another finding in the report: Most Americans would like NASA to focus on Earth, instead of Mars.
Read TFA yourself of course, but note the following:
The questions shown about what should NASA have as its priority included:
"Monitor key parts of the earth's climate system"
"Monitor asteroids/objects that could hit Earth"
and
"Send astronauts to Mars"
Whether you believe man is changing the climate or not, it still is an obvious priority preference to monitor climate unless you are really fringe and don't think it changes at all.
Additionally, even that fringe is going to consider not getting whapped by rocks..from..spaaace.. higher priority than having someone take a joyride out to one.
--- Mercutio was right.
A country $20T in debt can't be be a leader an anything.
When was USA ever the global leader in space?
The Russians did most everything first: first artificial satellite, first man in space, first woman in space, first in-flight rocket restart, first landing on another planet, first object in solar orbit, first animals and plants in space, first planetary flyby, first communication between crafts in space, first multi-person crewed craft, first soft landing on the moon, first in-space docking, first crew exchange in space, first sample return mission from the moon, first remote rover on another planet, first in-space observatory, first soft landing on mars, first signal from surface of Mars received on earth, first flyby of Venus, first soft landing on Venus, longest time spent in space... on and on it goes.
Also they are one of only two countries who can send people to space today, the other is China. US lost this ability.
Maybe US should work on becoming a leader, first, before trying to "remain" a leader.
I think that NASA should focus on the gas giants, maybe Mars, and on things further out. The closer in stuff is either within the scope and interest of private corporations, let Musk and Bezos and peers spend their dollars on near-Earth, the Moon, and Mars.
Venus is closer to us yet NASA is always making us look towards Mars, talk about Mars, focus on Mars. My question is why and what is going on with Venus that we are coaxed into always focusing on another planet that is further away.
Almost like something is there that shouldn't be focused on or talked about. Any thoughts?
Real men wouldn't consider anything less than galactic leadership.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I didn't see anywhere where it says how many people participated in this poll. I sincerely doubt that all 300,000,000 citizens responded.
That's the problem with these 'polls': limited number of participants, how do you expect anyone to believe this truly represents the majority?
Who the fuck cares what a majority of Americans believe? There are Americans who believe Canada is responsible for burning down the White House, so why exactly should we pay any attention to them? A better approach would be to confiscate all their guns, give them free cable TV and then we'd never have to worry about them again.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/06...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Since they voted in trump and think he is wonderful.
And nothing else they may do will ever be able to fix this.
NASA's annual budget is $18 bn. So, those 72% of Americans can accomplish their goal by paying $80 each every year, voluntarily.
Of course, what many of those people are really saying is that they like US space leadership and that others should be taxed to pay for it.
"Define essential"
https://youtu.be/TXs2UfPv39s?t...
This week major European news (on euronews) news was successful landing of Soyuz and subsequent successful launch of Soyuz (with people on board in both cases)
Have you heard anything about in American media, the media of imbecile two-bit backwood degenerate parvenu country?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Remain? ESA is sciencing rings around NASA in space, China and India have essentially caught up to nearly equal capability, American astronauts need to hitch a ride on a Russian Soyuz to get to the International Space Station and the one American company that still has some (impressive) launch capability is actually founded and led by a South African.
Methinks the US as an entity have some catching up to do when it comes to "Space Leadership". It's more of a committee of nations now.
Majority of Americans stopped reading after "essential remain world leader" and jumped up and down chanting '"Murica! 'Murica!"
You probably could have asked if it is essential to remain the world leader in obesity, people in jail or environmental pollution and people would have argued that it can't be bad to be the leader in anything - as long as you are leading.
bickerdyke
nuttin
They are not currently THE global leader. Haven't been since their retired the Shuttle instead of replacing it. Some of the robots they have been sending out have been interesting though. China, Russia and Europe are the big leaders at the moment.
What people are talking about is building a self-sustaining (as far as possible) moon base as a demonstration humans can survive long-term without deliveries from earth.
Quite so. The real challenge in doing so is finding an economic reason to build such a moon base in the first place. It won't get done without a darn good reason. Either we need to discover something really valuable that can only be exploited on the moon or there would need to be some national/global defense reason to do it. Literally every really large expenditure (talking MUCH bigger than stuff like the ISS or LHC) made for exploration is made for one of those two reasons.
My personal guess is this will take at least 100 years to accomplish.
Unless it was declared to be a massive national/global priority I think your time estimate is short by several hundred years. Such an endeavor would be massively expensive and requires large amounts of technology we are in no danger of developing in the near future. I could see it happening at some point but a real moon based like you are proposing is going to take a really long time to come to fruition if it ever does. The biggest obstacle to it is economics. There just is no obvious direct economic benefit to building such a thing.
Moon colonization shout be the goal along with asteroid mining.
Asteroid mining is a ludicrous proposition. Either it requires returning a dangerously large amount of material back to earth (dropping a large rock on Earth from space tends to make a rather large boom - de facto a WMD) or it requires processing in space for which we have not the technology, the infrastructure, nor any demand. To make asteroid mining and processing in space we would have to build a huge amount of space based infrastructure, supply chains, and economy for which there is no obvious ROI. People who suggest processing in space tend to rather glibly gloss over the details about how manufacturing supply chains actually work in the real world because they don't understand manufacturing. We take for granted a lot of things that are FAR more difficult to achieve in space. You have to replicate not just processing equipment but entire supply chains and then automate them which we cannot even do here on Earth.
Moon colonization? Fun idea but what's the motivation for doing it? What's the economic or defense reason that would justify and pay for such an enormous outlay of cash? Just because it's cool (and it is) isn't sufficient. Scientific research isn't enough either though that's closer. I'm all for colonizing the moon but I just can't see a roadmap to making doing it possible on a time scale shorter than hundreds of years. We would need a LOT of massive advances in technology to really make it practical and economic to do and even then we still would need an economic reason to be there for any length of time.
That is the best way to build a sustaining space travel infrastructure.
That's debatable and there are plenty of people more informed on the subject than either of us that have different opinions.
Most great achievements of civilization are not "profitable".
That's just not true in the long run. The biggest exploration expenditures are generally made for one of two reasons. 1) Defense of nation states and 2) Economic benefit. If something doesn't have a profit eventually then it won't be done or won't be done for long. The payoff doesn't have to be immediate but there does have to be a payoff eventually.
Accountants are notoriously myopic.
Yeah it's annoying having someone point out reality all the time. Much better to live in an echo chamber where the laws of economics are suspended for your benefit.
Trump as president is just a symptom. Removing him will do nothing about the actual problem.
Quite so but it would definitely be a good start to solving the actual problem.
Eliminating poverty within your borders is a far more noble pursuit than exploring space.
First off you cannot eliminate poverty completely. To pretend otherwise is a delusion. Second, I reject your attempt to frame the argument that somehow exploring space is a less noble endeavor. Third, exploring space has proven economic benefits that are hugely useful towards fighting poverty. Every penny we've invested in NASA has been repaid in economic benefits from technology spinoffs alone somewhere between 3X and 8X ROI even under the most conservative analysis. You want to reduce poverty? Spend MORE on a well executed space program. That will do more to reduce poverty than almost anything else you could possibly imagine.
Let's cure problems down here first and then worry about up there.
That meme is tired and false. It isn't either/or. Exploring space can do far more to solve terrestrial economic problems than keeping our feet on the ground.
One thing though: the Chinese have yet to do anything really serious in space outside of launching satellites. Note the relatively slow pace of the Shenzhou manned spaceflight program, compared to the several times a year the Russians do with flights to the ISS.
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...
From a paper I co-write in 2001: "A Review of Licensing and Collaborative Development with Special Attention to Design of Self-Replicating Space Habitat Systems"
https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com...
"The continued exponential growth of technological capacity since the 1970s has removed most technical limits to group collaborations on space settlement issues. To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act. The most successful space related collaborations in the future will be ones that make these principles part of their daily operations. One result of such collaborations will be a distributed library of simulations and knowledge including specific detailed designs for self-replicating space habitat systems."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
To remove social limits, groups must be explicit about the licensing terms of individual contributions and the collected work, for example putting their contributions in the public domain, or under a license like the BSD license or GPL as a conscious act.
Basically you are arguing that some version of open source style licensing will get us there. I think you're going to run into the same problems as we do with open source style licenses on hardware. It works well in software because there are limited capital expenditures required to build production ready software. You're basically just asking people to donate their time and knowledge and you can get working products of high quality. But hardware is different because you have to spend hard cash to make it. Even prototypes and proof of concepts of anything non-trivial can be wildly expensive. It's not enough to design something - you have to build it and test it in the real world. Furthermore software is protected by copyright by default without even having to take any actions. This prevents free riders without extra expense. Hardware has no such protection in our legal system. You have to apply for a very expensive patent which limits how easy it is to protect inventions and keep the available. Anything useful that isn't patent protected will be patented by a more motivated party with deeper pockets effectively taking it out of the public domain for a substantial number of years.
I'm certainly all in favor of what you propose in principle but I think the economic realities of it are that it won't really get us there. I think you are thinking about it like a software guy who doesn't fully appreciate the economic realities of building physical objects under our current legal framework.
If you look at History and the various technologies that have come along, you notice that there is one kind of technology that enables most others...transportation.
Whether it's inventing a wheel, canoe, ship, automobiles, etc. enabling someone to get from A to B quickly and easily is the key to creating the huge, glorious stuff once you are there.
So too with space. Don't try to be the first to Mars. Be the first to make getting to Mars cheap, quick, and easy. Don't be the first to put up a giant space station, be the first to make putting space stations up quick and easy. Don't be the first to establish a Moon colony. Be the first to make regular or on demand supply runs to that colony.
So focus on launch capabilities and, once in space, the ability to go from A to B without years of planning and relying on being shot across space on chemical rockets.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I've got one:space based solar power.
Ok, devil's advocate here. Where is the economic benefit over terrestrial generation that would justify the immense expense of developing the technology (presuming it's possible) and deploying it to space? Terrestrial solar in principle can already cleanly provide more power than the global need multifold without even taking up arable land nor requiring any new technology to be developed. It's also not clear how you plan to transmit this energy safely to Earth... For space based energy generation to become a thing it needs to provide an economic advantage over the existing options. (and it needs to be technologically feasible)
It should come as no huge shock that China is the technology leader in this space.
??? Nobody is a leader in this space because it doesn't exist outside of a few academic research projects with no immediate chance of application. There is precisely zero power being transmitted from space based solar generation to Earth nor any reasonable prospect of it happening any time soon.
The only motivation for moon colonization that I can see is the same motivation for colonizing Antarctica.
There are several potential motivations I can think of. The first and most alarming and most likely is as a military base. Kind of the ultimate high ground if you will. The second is that if we are going to mine something is space, the moon seems to be a far more practical candidate than asteroids. It's composition isn't wildly different from Earth and we already have/had technology that can reach it even with humans if necessary. I still think space mining is something of a fools errand until we get substantially more robust space travel capabilities than we have now. The third is as you mention scientific research. Obvious potential utility there. The fourth is as a sort of waystation for deep space travel. It seems like the resources exist to make rocket fuel on the moon and there is(oxygen in reasonable abundance and the gravity well is considerably shallower than the one on Earth.
Are any of these sufficient to justify a moon colony? Honestly I have no idea though I admit I'm dubious. I think the military base is by far the most likely. Mining and manufacturing requires substantial advances in technology that will take a long time to develop unless we have a crash government program. I'm sure there will be efforts at scientific research but a manned outpost seems unlikely unless it is developed for other reasons. And a deep space support station seems pointless unless part of a bigger project.
But the original implication was that basing our space plans on mining will be less expensive than alternatives such as Mars colonies because of the value of the ore.
It's still far cheaper to get precious metals from Earth mines than space, and it doesn't look like that economic reality will change any time soon. Digging and sifting many tons of dirt on Earth is still much less expensive than sifting less dirt on asteroids because big machines are still far easy to build and maintain on the ground than having smaller mining machines on asteroids; plus the huuuuge expense of fuel needed to move stuff into and out of Earth's gravity well.
A permanent Mars colony would be a far more glorious "human" achievement than an asteroid mining operation. Perhaps the original poster believes that asteroid mining will gradually get more efficient if we simply get actual practice, and therefore should put our resources into space mining.
However, I suspect it will take breakthroughs in other technologies, such as AI and/or space elevators, before space mining becomes practical. It may not be worth waiting around for grand inventions such that we should perhaps focus on a Mars colony instead.
Table-ized A.I.
Name one fiscal statement that an accountant created, that has a timespan of more than one fiscal year. The profession and business priorities may require it but accountants do indeed have a short time horizon. This makes their vision limited.
All long-term, visionary exploration & development is done by dreamers, idea people, and mad kings/queens. They frequently fail. It's a high risk, high reward field and that just isn't the comfort zone for bean counters.
Therefore your attempt to align "accountants", "long-term", and "reality" fails. It makes a good sound bite but it doesn't correlate to the real world which you claim to defend.
ROI is a short-term metric designed by accountants. It's the wrong metric by the wrong group of people.
Look at the exploration and founding of nation states in North America. What was the ROI on that? Most of the earliest explorers and settlers were lucky to survive. Eventually some people started to earn a living and a few even got rich, but that took decades or centuries.
Eventually the New World broke away from the Old World. How do you calculate an ROI on that? The simplistic explanation is that the Old World lost it's proverbial shirt. England, France, Holland, Spain, Portugal, they lost everything. That's how an accountant would calculate an ROI on exploration: Even if you are 100% successful, you eventually lose everything, so the ROI is 0% or worse. Therefore exploration is a losing proposition from an ROI point of view. If you win you lose, and if you lose you lose.
The biggest strategic bets are too important to leave to short-term thinking and thinkers. If you use limited and limiting metrics like ROI then you'll never achieve the really big wins.
Accountants are not explorers and it is both wrong and destructive to give them that role.
The US originally led the space race cause they couldn't handle the idea of the commies beating them to anything. Ever since the cold war ended, there has been zero political interest to keep going, unless it involved distributing pork to politicians favorite companies.
The only way US will ever become serious about space again, is if there's a military reason to do so, and that won't happen until and unless some new existential threat his the US.
The tax break left a gigantic hole in the U.S.'s budget. The only way to fill that hole -- outside of raising taxes again -- is to reduce spending.
Cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. will cover most of the shortfall. However, it also means that no other programs -- other than the military -- will see any increase in spending. If anything, I expect agencies like NASA are going to have to work VERY hard to justify even their current budgets.
The Republicans want to take us back to an eighteenth century economy, one where the robber barons rule and peasants know their place.
Guess What. Moon Rocks are Pure Poison.
But at least we might develop Combustible Lemons.
That may all be true but one aspect of the idea is that simulations will improve (as they have) and a lot of hardware can be designed and tested virtually (e.g. Besiege or Kerbal Space Program).
Kerbal Space Program is not a simulation. It is a game. Do not confuse the two. It has about as much to do with how real space travel is designed as Mario Kart does with driving your car to work. Any similarities are superficial.
My first job out of college for a number of years was doing simulations of both hardware and production systems. My company had a large department for finite element analysis, vehicle dynamics simulations, etc. We also did a lot of monte-carlo analysis and robot modeling. These were useful for optimizing designs or for doing early evaluation of design ideas. But they were only supplemental in all cases. We also had a large materials testing lab, a rapid prototyping lab, and a large department for product testing because ALL models have limits to what they can tell you. A simulation model that hasn't been validated to a real world system is nothing more than a theory. It's no different than doing physics on a blackboard while never actually doing any experiments. That's not to say simulation is useless (far from it) but do not be tempted into thinking it is something more than it actually is.
Is only simulated testing ideal? No. But it is next-to-free and so can move us forward.
"Next to free"? Not even remotely. Not even if someone donates their time. Simulations can help reduce opportunity costs in some cases but they do not eliminate the costs of actually building, prototyping, and testing for hardware. Simulation is actually quite expensive to perform because you have to be able to validate the model against a real world system. That means you have to actually build a physical object or system to check against and that is never free or even close to free.
Simulation models of any meaningful complexity are actually quite expensive to develop and deploy. For the stuff I was working on I wouldn't roll out of bed for a problem that cost less than a few million dollars because the savings wouldn't justify the cost of the analysis otherwise. It would be cheaper to just build whatever we planned to model and iterate. And at the end of the day, we still had to go and build whatever we designed and we still had to go test it in the real world. Simulation can reduce costs but when you are talking about hardware design it is NEVER free or even close to free.
Eventually, sure, we need to build and test real hardware. But that can come later after we have a lot of social momentum going from the simulations.
Building hardware is not an "eventually" thing. If you want to design hardware that you know works, you have to actually build it. There is no way around this. You can simulate all day long but simulations are models and models NEVER give you the whole picture. Models are a theory and you have to actually test the theory. Nobody sane is going to step onto a rocket that has never been tested in the real world. There is an old saying in the simulation community All models are wrong. Some models are useful.. Simulation is ALWAYS a model of reality and all simulations incorporate numerous assumptions and parameter limitations which the real world is under no obligation to respect. Your simulation is going to be wrong, the only question is by how much. The only way to know that answer is to build what you are simulating.
It requires orders of magnitude decreases in cost, but that's theoretically possible with sufficient research investment.
There are lots of things that are theoretically possible in the sense that they haven't been conclusively determined to be impossible. That is not the same thing as saying they are plausible or likely.
Rectenna arrays take up less space than solar panels.
That's only an issue if space is somehow a constraint.
The panels will be in the sunlight all the time.
Again, that's only an issue if there is a constraint in play. If a solar panel + battery system gets the job done and is cheaper then the argument is over before it begins. To be honest I have a hard time imagining any sort of space based power generation transmitted to Earth being cheaper than terrestrial generation. It also seems improbable that such vast amounts of energy could be transmitted through the atmosphere without any dangerous side effects. It's a cool idea but it has a strong whiff of science fiction about it unfortunately.
Obligatory XKCD on Kerbal Space Program: https://xkcd.com/1356/
Again, I agree with what you are saying overall -- but I feel you are missing my main point about social momentum and proof-of-concept.
There is a *huge* difference socially between having essentially nothing but an idea (what we have now, e.g. James P. Hogan's Two Faces of Tomorrow novel, Gerry O'Neill's non-fiction writings, or some paper idea studies like NASA's 1980 Advanced Automation for Space Missions http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/... ) versus having a detailed collaboratively-developed simulation model based on the best science you have which brings together thousands of knowledgeable engineers and scientists (like Linux brought together thousands of knowledgeable programmers). We're going to need a lot of design thinking for something extremely complex like self-replicating space habitat that can duplicate itself from sunlight and asteroidal/lunar/martian ore which includes all the chemical pathways and mechanical designs.
Think of it this way -- if you were a multi-billionaire, who would you give some funding to for people to go further for a space habitat (like by building prototype hardware)? Some group with a hand-wavy idea? Or some group with detailed (but maybe inaccurate for the reasons you outlined) simulation models that have been worked on for knowledgeable engineers for a decade in their spare time as a labor of love to get as close as they can without having the money for hardware tests which they know are important?
Or if you hired your own people to build space habitats, who would you be more likely to hire (at least for part of the design team)? Engineers who had no knowledge of such simulations or the core engineers who had developed such systems or used aspects of them to design and build other smaller projects?
Also, don't get too hung up on the mechanical/physical limits of current simulations. There is also a lot of design work to do related to operations research, logistics, and chemical pathways related to knowing what materials and tools you need to make other materials and tools.
Consider the issue of how to make an airlock seal. There can be a lot of work done today on logistics like all the prerequisites of how for materials to make a flexible deal for an airlock door -- even if some of the mechanical design is still questionable (like whether that specific seal actually works as well as you hoped for a specific work pod's door). NASA already has made airlocks that work OK -- so presumably there is a way to find out what materials they used and then work backwards from there -- perhaps documenting a range of possible seals and then figuring out what each needs as prerequisites (and so on, recursively).
Sure, "Space Engineers" may not be realistic -- especially as it tries to be a game and not a CAD/CAM program. But something like it could be a lot more realistic. And that is a step forward -- even if it is not the final product.
We also can look forward twenty years to what might be possible for testing any detailed designs we make by then. 3D printing is bringing down the cost of testing mechanical prototypes -- and in twenty years is likely to be even better. Also, simulations continue to get better as hardware becomes cheaper and more available. How good might general simulations be in twenty year for testing designs? For example, maybe someday we will actually be able to simulate water molecules and solutions much better than we can now and so atomic-level chemistry simulations for completely new chemical processes may be much more useful. But until then, there are handbooks for chemical engineering with many cookbook recipes if you are willing to work withing the limits of what we know well (even if space may pose extra challenges for earth-derived recipes)
Another aspect is that commercial designs (like you mention developing) tend to be optimized and push the envelope of what
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.