They can't. These companies are BANNED from creating interplanetary ventures. The law allows them to send-up satellites, but it's illegal for them to do any other space-based entrepreneurship. The government has assigned that market to NASA as a monopoly, just like the old East India Trading Company had been granted a monopoly by the crown.
Two things: 1) [citation needed]. I flat out don't believe this is true.
2) Re-read the part in the original post about buying some senators. If there was money to be made in space, and making the money was against the law... the law would be changed.
Drugs, genetic experiments, metallurgy, beamed power experiments, geriatric care, tourism...
Drugs and metallurgy: to my knowledge, this stuff is better done in microgravity than in low gravity.
beamed power experiments: what possible advantage does the moon offer? I don't even know why you'd need to leave the surface of the earth for this. If you needed a vacuum environment, earth orbit is a lot easier (and cheaper) to get to.
geriatric care, tourism: never going to happen. For one thing, your geriatric patients would have an awfully tough time with the g-forces involved in liftoff. Then you'd also have to figure out the economics - it's really, really expensive to get people into space. It's even more expensive to have them live there. No one is going to be able to afford to pay for the nursing home care on the moon. As far as tourism goes, you'd never get more than a couple tourists a year - no one could afford it. You can't even economically build a hotel on earth with that kind of occupancy rate, and hotels on the moon would be exponentially more expensive.
Lots of stuff we can do on the moon. Maybe better than in LEO.
The thing is, it's not good enough to be able to do it on the moon. It's not even enough that we could do it better than in LEO (which I doubt is true anyway, for most things). It's got to be more cost-effective to do it on the moon than somewhere else... and that just ain't happening any time soon.
Whether or not we're spending more than anyone else, we're not spending anywhere close to what it would cost actually do the missions we've set out to do. On the other hand, we are wasting an enormous amount of money in buying way more defense capability than we could possibly ever need. The GP is arguing (I think) that we ought to cut the defense budget and divert some of the money into space exploration.
... we'd be on our way to the libertarian paradise in space. Riiight. Dude, don't you understand how this works? The reason we're not doing "long-term settlement" on the moon is that there's absolutely, positively no way to make money at it. If there were, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and all the other usual suspects would just buy themselves some senators, get the government out of their way, and go do it. But the fact is that getting to the moon at all is astronomically (pun intended) expensive. Getting to the moon with all the equipment, people, and supplies you'd need to build a space colony is un-freakin' believably astronomically expensive. Not to mention all the enormously difficult, unsolved technological problems involved in long-term life in space.
And once you got there, what are you going to do to recoup your investment? There is absolutely nothing on the Moon that we can't get more cheaply and easily on earth. Much is made of the possibility of obtaining He3, but 1) we have no earthly use for it, and 2) there's really not that much of it on the Moon either. The Moon is almost entirely made of silicate minerals... so is the earth.
People who keep making this argument need to face the fact that there's a reason that private companies aren't going to the moon (or into space in general). It's not because the government is stopping them - if there was money to be made, big companies would route around the government. The problem is that there's no money in it.
... and I really wish I had saved the link, but I can't find it now. The upshot was that you had to be in a very, very, cold place for to financially break even by retaining incandescents vs. switching to CFLs. Further, unless you got most of your electricity from totally green sources, you still wouldn't break even in terms of CO2 emissions. One of the few regions in North America where retaining incandescents would make financial and environmental sense was certain parts of Quebec.
... between evolutionary psychology and "just-so" stories? Seriously, this is ridiculous. It's widely accepted in the pop pyschology crowd that men did the hunting while women did the gathering, but we don't even know if that's true! In fact, we know very little about the lifestyle of primitive man at all. This stuff isn't science - it's utterly untestable, for one thing. Any time someone starts explaining anything about human behavior in terms of what our cave man ancestors had to deal with, your internal BS alarm ought to start going off.
I think the "news factor" is this: we've known for quite a while that a) a huge carnivorous bird lived in NZ, and b) the Maoris told stories about huge man-eating birds. But previously, we also thought that c) the huge birds died out before the arrival of the Maoris, so their legends weren't connected to these birds. But now it turns out that the birds and Maoris did overlap for some quite significant period of time, with the birds only dying out fairly recently. So the connection, previously thought to be impossible, is now possible.
Yeah, in our system, we may pay a lot more money and get worse results than, you know, everyone else in the developed world... but hey, at least we don't have government bureaucrats* getting between us and our doctors! USA! USA!
* Instead, we have bureaucrats from the for-profit insurance companies, who make money by denying us care, and answer to no one but their stockholders.
I agree with this idea, but why call it socialism? Network connectivity is a UTILITY, and utilities have been provided by local governments (and heavily regulated private companies) from the dawn of time. We wouldn't exactly be in Red Scare territory if your city decided to provide wireless network connectivity.
So you're advocating the iPhone-style app store, with obscure fascist rules determining who is blessed and who is not?
Of course, "absolute free-for-all" and "Apple-style App Store" are not the only two choices. You sort of get it this later in the post, but of course the main concept left out here is the Linux repository concept. You can be reasonably sure that apps in the repository have been vetted for viruses, etc (at least you can with Debian)... and yet, if you really want to get software somewhere else, you can... but it's buyer beware.
Well, thinking about it you might actually be advocating that, in the misguided belief that the Linux Distributor model works well; it only does if you want OSS - not always a great option, alas -
It's not even true that Linux repositories are all OSS (Deb certainly has a "non-free" repository), and even if it were, the OSS-ness of the repository is certainly not an essential feature. Microsoft could certainly come up with a repository of software for Windows that was all closed-source, yet still vetted for malware.
Perhaps you'd better stick to talking about things you know something about, and my personal acquaintances aren't one of those things. No, I don't know any actual test pilots - there aren't really all that many to know. But I spent most of my adult life in the military and I'm quite well acquainted with fighter pilots (and others who take big risks). First of all, astronauts are not, in fact, generating risk assessments - they have neither the time nor ability to do so. Risk assessments are being done by NASA safety engineers, and the results of the cost/risk/benefit analysis are such that people have quite rationally decided not to accept them. Also, not understanding the risks involve != being lied to about the risks. Finally, your last sentence makes no sense at all.
Glory and adventure may not be a good reason for spending millions or billions of dollars, but thinking that the people dying are being lied to about the risks, when some of them generate the risk assessments, isn't.
Isn't what? A good reason to spend billions of dollars either? We need an actual positive reason to spend all this money, and so far, I'm not hearing it.
... but not sufficient to understand the risks. You also need to know about how to do failure analysis. Also, just having a degree in Aero Eng does not mean you're an expert in the field. I have a BS in physics and an MS in applied physics, but that doesn't mean I'm a qualified cosmologist. I guarantee you that most of these guys got their BS in Aero, then went on to military or civilian test pilot roles, and never actually did work in the field. And I'd bet the mortgage payment that none did any safety engineering.
A few years ago in WWI&II casualties were in the thousands and hundreds of thousands. Now they are in the dozens yet there is more protest over them than before.
Yes, but this is purely rational on the part of the public. In WWII, it was pretty clear that we were faced with an existential threat - it was defeat fascism or die. It can hardly be argued that the same urgency applied to conflicts like Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. People object to casualties accordingly.
It's a problem with objective reality. There really IS a much bigger payoff to solving our earthly problems than there is to colonize space. We've already gotten most of the payoff we're likely to get from investment in space travel. Your conclusion is correct: there needs to be a reason to do space travel such that people will understand the payoff. And I'm not seeing what it could possibly be - handwavy "glory and adventure" stuff ain't cutting it.
Really? Since 1980, there have been a hell of a lot of people killed in space shuttle accidents (between Challenger and Columbia, what, about 15?). I went to the Wikipedia page on NASCAR fatalities and counted about the same number of fatalities in NASCAR races and practices (excluding other sorts of races such as Indy car, etc) over the same time period. And there were a hell of a lot more NASCAR races (each with a hell of a lot more drivers) than there were space shuttle launches.
I'd say riding the space shuttle is WAY more dangerous than NASCAR.
The question of "what to do about sending people into space?" is pretty straightforward. There are costs and risks: how much does it cost to build the rocket? What are the potential mishaps, and how severe and how likely are they? And there are benefits: what are we going to get out of the proposed mission? The world has (correctly, in my view) done the math here: most stuff in space can be done just as well by robots, and blasting humans into space is 1) very risky, and 2) a lot more expensive then blasting robots into space. The glory and adventure factor alone has been judged as not worth getting very many people killed over.
I propose that the primary goal be to learn[1] about space colonization, and a perm moon-base is a good place to start. They would be space pioneers, and everyone knows pioneers risk arrows in their backs. This is a role Americans can relate to and would accept risk for because our ancestors faced the same situation. (Even "Native Americans" made a risky migration out of Asia. There are no true "Native Americans".)
[1] We are a long way off from self-sufficient colonies, but you have to start somewhere.
Your note [1] begs the question. Why do we "have to start somewhere"? You need to make the case that there's a compelling reason to do space colonization. "Because the earth will someday be destroyed" won't cut it - people can't/won't agree to spend an enormous amount of their hard-earned dollars today to solve a problem that's fantastically unlikely to occur during their own lifetime or that of their children. The fact is that there's no particular reason to do space colonization, because no one is willing to invest in something that for all practical purpose will never pay off.
"Advancement of science/technology/etc will ultimately pay it off" doesn't cut it either. Think back to the days when various regions of earth were being colonized. A lot of this was done privately - Hudson's Bay Company, the British East India Company, etc. So why, for example, aren't Boeing/Lockheed/Raytheon forming a joint venture to do a private space colony? It's the same answer - there's no reason to believe you'd ever make a profit in space. There's simply nothing out there that you couldn't get more cheaply on earth.
The slashdot crowd needs to get real about the economics of space. Sure, it would be cool to do a space colony. We'd probably learn a lot. But no one can afford it.
Slashdot Mirror
Two things: 1) [citation needed]. I flat out don't believe this is true. 2) Re-read the part in the original post about buying some senators. If there was money to be made in space, and making the money was against the law... the law would be changed.
The thing is, it's not good enough to be able to do it on the moon. It's not even enough that we could do it better than in LEO (which I doubt is true anyway, for most things). It's got to be more cost-effective to do it on the moon than somewhere else... and that just ain't happening any time soon.
Whether or not we're spending more than anyone else, we're not spending anywhere close to what it would cost actually do the missions we've set out to do. On the other hand, we are wasting an enormous amount of money in buying way more defense capability than we could possibly ever need. The GP is arguing (I think) that we ought to cut the defense budget and divert some of the money into space exploration.
... we'd be on our way to the libertarian paradise in space. Riiight. Dude, don't you understand how this works? The reason we're not doing "long-term settlement" on the moon is that there's absolutely, positively no way to make money at it. If there were, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and all the other usual suspects would just buy themselves some senators, get the government out of their way, and go do it. But the fact is that getting to the moon at all is astronomically (pun intended) expensive. Getting to the moon with all the equipment, people, and supplies you'd need to build a space colony is un-freakin' believably astronomically expensive. Not to mention all the enormously difficult, unsolved technological problems involved in long-term life in space.
And once you got there, what are you going to do to recoup your investment? There is absolutely nothing on the Moon that we can't get more cheaply and easily on earth. Much is made of the possibility of obtaining He3, but 1) we have no earthly use for it, and 2) there's really not that much of it on the Moon either. The Moon is almost entirely made of silicate minerals... so is the earth.
People who keep making this argument need to face the fact that there's a reason that private companies aren't going to the moon (or into space in general). It's not because the government is stopping them - if there was money to be made, big companies would route around the government. The problem is that there's no money in it.
... and I really wish I had saved the link, but I can't find it now. The upshot was that you had to be in a very, very, cold place for to financially break even by retaining incandescents vs. switching to CFLs. Further, unless you got most of your electricity from totally green sources, you still wouldn't break even in terms of CO2 emissions. One of the few regions in North America where retaining incandescents would make financial and environmental sense was certain parts of Quebec.
... between evolutionary psychology and "just-so" stories? Seriously, this is ridiculous. It's widely accepted in the pop pyschology crowd that men did the hunting while women did the gathering, but we don't even know if that's true! In fact, we know very little about the lifestyle of primitive man at all. This stuff isn't science - it's utterly untestable, for one thing. Any time someone starts explaining anything about human behavior in terms of what our cave man ancestors had to deal with, your internal BS alarm ought to start going off.
I think the "news factor" is this: we've known for quite a while that a) a huge carnivorous bird lived in NZ, and b) the Maoris told stories about huge man-eating birds. But previously, we also thought that c) the huge birds died out before the arrival of the Maoris, so their legends weren't connected to these birds. But now it turns out that the birds and Maoris did overlap for some quite significant period of time, with the birds only dying out fairly recently. So the connection, previously thought to be impossible, is now possible.
It's "flamebait" to ask someone for a citation for a fairly strong claim? Give me a break.
[citation needed]
We don't have sensible health care coverage here. Maybe soon, but not now.
Yeah, in our system, we may pay a lot more money and get worse results than, you know, everyone else in the developed world... but hey, at least we don't have government bureaucrats* getting between us and our doctors! USA! USA!
* Instead, we have bureaucrats from the for-profit insurance companies, who make money by denying us care, and answer to no one but their stockholders.
The hammer experience is much richer and warmer when you use a gold-plated one.
DDT is not now, nor has it ever been, illegal to use as a house spray to control malaria.
I agree with this idea, but why call it socialism? Network connectivity is a UTILITY, and utilities have been provided by local governments (and heavily regulated private companies) from the dawn of time. We wouldn't exactly be in Red Scare territory if your city decided to provide wireless network connectivity.
Of course, "absolute free-for-all" and "Apple-style App Store" are not the only two choices. You sort of get it this later in the post, but of course the main concept left out here is the Linux repository concept. You can be reasonably sure that apps in the repository have been vetted for viruses, etc (at least you can with Debian)... and yet, if you really want to get software somewhere else, you can... but it's buyer beware.
It's not even true that Linux repositories are all OSS (Deb certainly has a "non-free" repository), and even if it were, the OSS-ness of the repository is certainly not an essential feature. Microsoft could certainly come up with a repository of software for Windows that was all closed-source, yet still vetted for malware.
Perhaps you'd better stick to talking about things you know something about, and my personal acquaintances aren't one of those things. No, I don't know any actual test pilots - there aren't really all that many to know. But I spent most of my adult life in the military and I'm quite well acquainted with fighter pilots (and others who take big risks). First of all, astronauts are not, in fact, generating risk assessments - they have neither the time nor ability to do so. Risk assessments are being done by NASA safety engineers, and the results of the cost/risk/benefit analysis are such that people have quite rationally decided not to accept them. Also, not understanding the risks involve != being lied to about the risks. Finally, your last sentence makes no sense at all.
Isn't what? A good reason to spend billions of dollars either? We need an actual positive reason to spend all this money, and so far, I'm not hearing it.
Geez, no kidding. There needs to be an actual economic reason to go into space (with a payoff now or soon), or it's not going to happen.
... but not sufficient to understand the risks. You also need to know about how to do failure analysis. Also, just having a degree in Aero Eng does not mean you're an expert in the field. I have a BS in physics and an MS in applied physics, but that doesn't mean I'm a qualified cosmologist. I guarantee you that most of these guys got their BS in Aero, then went on to military or civilian test pilot roles, and never actually did work in the field. And I'd bet the mortgage payment that none did any safety engineering.
... led police to her body after he was convicted. The guy was guilty as sin.
Yes, but this is purely rational on the part of the public. In WWII, it was pretty clear that we were faced with an existential threat - it was defeat fascism or die. It can hardly be argued that the same urgency applied to conflicts like Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. People object to casualties accordingly.
It's a problem with objective reality. There really IS a much bigger payoff to solving our earthly problems than there is to colonize space. We've already gotten most of the payoff we're likely to get from investment in space travel. Your conclusion is correct: there needs to be a reason to do space travel such that people will understand the payoff. And I'm not seeing what it could possibly be - handwavy "glory and adventure" stuff ain't cutting it.
Really? Since 1980, there have been a hell of a lot of people killed in space shuttle accidents (between Challenger and Columbia, what, about 15?). I went to the Wikipedia page on NASCAR fatalities and counted about the same number of fatalities in NASCAR races and practices (excluding other sorts of races such as Indy car, etc) over the same time period. And there were a hell of a lot more NASCAR races (each with a hell of a lot more drivers) than there were space shuttle launches.
I'd say riding the space shuttle is WAY more dangerous than NASCAR.
Mod up accordingly.
The question of "what to do about sending people into space?" is pretty straightforward. There are costs and risks: how much does it cost to build the rocket? What are the potential mishaps, and how severe and how likely are they? And there are benefits: what are we going to get out of the proposed mission? The world has (correctly, in my view) done the math here: most stuff in space can be done just as well by robots, and blasting humans into space is 1) very risky, and 2) a lot more expensive then blasting robots into space. The glory and adventure factor alone has been judged as not worth getting very many people killed over.
You're sort of getting the idea, but...
Your note [1] begs the question. Why do we "have to start somewhere"? You need to make the case that there's a compelling reason to do space colonization. "Because the earth will someday be destroyed" won't cut it - people can't/won't agree to spend an enormous amount of their hard-earned dollars today to solve a problem that's fantastically unlikely to occur during their own lifetime or that of their children. The fact is that there's no particular reason to do space colonization, because no one is willing to invest in something that for all practical purpose will never pay off.
"Advancement of science/technology/etc will ultimately pay it off" doesn't cut it either. Think back to the days when various regions of earth were being colonized. A lot of this was done privately - Hudson's Bay Company, the British East India Company, etc. So why, for example, aren't Boeing/Lockheed/Raytheon forming a joint venture to do a private space colony? It's the same answer - there's no reason to believe you'd ever make a profit in space. There's simply nothing out there that you couldn't get more cheaply on earth.
The slashdot crowd needs to get real about the economics of space. Sure, it would be cool to do a space colony. We'd probably learn a lot. But no one can afford it.