You are assuming that those growing the pot are sticking to just that kind of farm operation and not also setting up a meth lab or doing other kinds of illegal activities where they really don't care about the landlord or the consequences of damaging the house.
Furthermore, most homes aren't really set up to become greenhouses, where such an operation would also be incredibly messy and the water damage alone would seem to be sufficient to cause a total loss to the house. Having leaky "irrigation" pipes running through a house and running for a couple of months non-stop would be more than enough to start warping and damaging the floorboards and wall studs, not to mention the build-up of mold and other issues where you would have to peel back everything to the basic frame of the house.
Yes, I can see how it would be much easier to simply demolish the house and move it to a toxic landfill area (aka a "superfund" cleanup like cleaning up a chemical factory) rather than trying to do some "simple" repairs. If the "farm" is kept relatively low-key it wouldn't be a problem but rarely is that the case when being used in the manner described.
The purpose of setting up an indoor operation is to keep the supply close to the customers... and to avoid the hassle that comes with trying to ship the product past "security checkpoints" that can get it confiscated. Marijuana is a rather bulky product in terms of how much stuff you need in order to get a "high"... much more so than cocaine or heroin which can be highly concentrated for trans-shipment across larger distances.
Sadly, it is being grown in places with lots of sunshine too. One of the more interesting locations is to set up a pot growing operation in a national park or other wilderness area where even fairly sophisticated irrigation systems are set up to keep the plants healthy. Since it is an organized criminal activity, it becomes dangerous to even go camping or hiking near some of these "farms", where even park rangers try to avoid going except when heavily armed with DEA backup to shut down these operations. Because they are being set up in wilderness areas, they tend not to get noticed for awhile until somebody happens to wander by "accident".
I get your point here, but the issue is that it has become so profitable even with the potential for doing time in prison that there are many folks who are willing to make the effort to set up an operation like this.
Engine "governors" have been installed in some vehicles for some time when there was a concern that drivers might be exceeding the speed limit. On a basic level, it is sometimes merely a flywheel that cuts off the fuel flow when a certain speed is exceeded, although more sophisticated systems can be developed. There are even good reasons why you would want to put one of these devices on an engine deliberately, but I've heard of them being installed on mass-transit vehicles and even some farm equipment to deliberately design vehicles that can't be driven past some arbitrary speed limit.
The only point of using the GPS devices to monitor distance traveled is to start dealing with the corner cases so that you can "certify" that mileage driven happens in a certain taxation authority jurisdiction and excludes stuff that happens elsewhere (in another state or "off-road" usage, to give some examples). I'm sure that somebody somewhere is going to try and do something similar eventually for highway vs. residential road usage... and more than likely it will be a very incompetent engineer who will get the job to design the device too that will ignore the defensive programming concerns you have expressed here.
Just look at the computerized voting machines and the issues surrounding vote tabulation... something that ought to be incredibly simple for computers to perform and it still gets tampered with and even incompetently screwed up from time to time even to the point that major elections have already been thrown because of incompetence. When it comes to medical devices, I want to hurl when I am in a hospital and I see a major "life-saving" piece of medical equipment that used Microsoft Windows as its base operating system.
At least in America, there has been a "computer" installed in every licensed vehicle for decades that has been illegal to modify or disable:
The Odometer
Yes, as far as computers go it is an analog computer (usually now... there are some electronic ones in automobiles at the moment) based on very simple principles, but it still is there and certainly is illegal. The precedent is already there for automobiles, so all you are talking about is splitting hairs in terms of how much additional information is also going to be stored besides just the distance that vehicle has traveled since it was built.
"Black box"? There certainly has been some considerable effort to make odometers tamper-resistant, and it is something of a joke mentioned in several movies like Matilda and Ferris Bueller's Day Off that had significant plot situations where attempts to tamper with this particular computer were explicitly made by the major characters in those fictional stories.
This isn't a new issue, just the extent of the information being recorded is the issue instead.
"The" bitcoin person would be Satoshi. There are a couple of interesting things in the Bitcoin protocol that he alone can invoke. None of them impact the currency, but it can send out a broadcast message to the network warning of some sort of attack on the network or urge an upgrade of the software. Privately-built clients don't have to accept those messages nor do they even have to pass them on, but it is something in the protocol none the less. The messages have a public-key confirmation where the private key is only in the hands of Satoshi.
As to if Satoshi is a pseudonym for some other more famous/infamous person.... I can't do any more than speculate. But there is "a bitcoin person".
The view that minting new money (by whatever means) is the only source of inflation is one of those silly views that supporters of bitcoin stick to despite everything else saying otherwise. Look at the housing market, have houses suddenly become a dozen times more numerous? Has gold become so scarce that it's worth so much more than a decade ago? And so on.
Let's look at housing for a moment. One of the reasons why housing prices have dropped so dramatically is precisely because supply is outstripping demand by a huge margin. "Cheap" loans with little capital put forward to secure those loans and other loose lending practices sent a surge of construction activity which basically built houses that many people couldn't afford to keep. With the much tighter lending policies that are in place today, those who qualify to purchase a home now have many selections available where they can take their time to shop around for a real bargain.
As a matter of fact, relative to the number of people who can now buy homes, yes homes are indeed currently dozens of times more numerous or at least there certainly are many times more homes than buyers. It of course is very much dependent upon the location of the property, as some cities are much harder hit than others, but there are places where a home may be on the market for months or even years before it sells. It is also a relatively inelastic good in terms of the fact that when you need a home, you need it real bad and will pay through the nose to get it, but if you have one you don't (usually) need a second or third home. There is certainly a limit in terms of how many homes you own unless you want to get into the real estate management business.
In term of the U.S. Dollar from 1790 to about 1920 (when the Breton Woods system was put into place), the value of what you could buy for a dollar was remarkably stable. Yes, it went up and down in value as different things happened in America, but you could pretty much purchase a mule, a good work horse, a bushel of wheat, and a gallon of milk for nearly the same price throughout that period of time. There was local instability, but on the whole and in the long term view, it was a remarkably stable currency. Deflation pretty much matched inflation, and it worked out rather well for many people.
Also.... it should be pointed out that the U.S. Dollar was not gold-based, but rather "bi-metallic" based upon both gold and silver. It gets more complicated when you consider "greenbacks" and other currencies that were also introduced at the time including state-backed currencies that traded on a one-to-one exchange rate with the U.S. Dollar and some private bank notes. The value of a dollar was only marginally influenced by the national gold supply, although the gold rushes did have an impact when that bullion finally started to get passed around.
By far and away the largest problem that happened in terms of impacting the U.S. dollar prior to 1900 was the over inflation of the currency through fractional reserve banking, but that reserve banking usually happened on a more local level instead of a national level. The money supply would be expanded significantly, with that ending with a "bank panic" that would cause people to literally "run" to the bank and withdraw their money due to a bank failure when the loans were over-extended. The same thing is happening today, but instead of hundreds of banks that occasionally a few would go under, there is now just one monolithic "Federal Reserve Bank" that operates on a national scale controlling the currency. The over-inflation is still happening, but can be dealt with through "printing money" if they run short.
I'm worried that hyper inflation is going to be happening with the U.S. Dollar and other world currencies. Time will tell if that happens, but even a "central authority" may not be sufficient to put that genie back in the bottle once it gets out.
In terms of "kicking off the 2nd American Revolutionary War", I think folks at Waco, Texas and Ruby Ridge certainly did plenty to try and get that going earlier. Neither one worked out all that well for those who tried to fight the system through the force of arms.
I do hope that reason and sanity can prevail, and make sure that you use the four boxes of freedom in the order they were indended:
The four boxes of freedom: Soap, Ballot, Jury, and Ammo. Please use them in that order. I keep hoping that the Ballot box can still be effective for awhile longer in America.
I remember eating my first genuine Italian pizza when I went to visit New York City as a teenager. I was on a class trip to visit the tourist stuff there when a bunch of us got hungry in the evening and asked the hotel we were staying at for some pizza.... expecting something like from Godfather's Pizza or at least Pizza Hut or perhaps even a restaurant that served some classic "Chicago-style" pizza. Instead we got the real deal that was mostly some dough with a light covering of cheese and a few tomatoes as a topping.
Being teens, we didn't really appreciate what it was that we were eating and that the folks bringing us the food really wanted to serve us some genuine pizza... more like what real Italians make. Yeah, Americans have dramatically changed some of these food items to the point that they are beyond recognition from what they were like in the country of origin. Most of the time the food becomes much sweeter, uses fruit (aka the "Hawaiian Pizza"), and quite a bit more meat and fat as ingredients in its preparation... to perhaps overgeneralize the net effect but at least showing some of the trends toward the "Americanization" of some of these food items.
There is a genuine "Mexican" restaurant in the town I live in right now that is complete with staff that doesn't speak English, cockroaches in the kitchen, and children (10 year olds) running the cash register. The food is authentic to at least a region of northern Mexico and is also fairly reasonably priced. It certainly isn't Taco Bell.
I think you forget just how remote San Francisco was in the 1850's. It was quite literally on the frontier of European civilization and required expeditions that did indeed cost in today's dollars the equivalent of millions of dollars to travel to that destination from places like Germany or England. For some of the sailing ships, it was close to hundreds of millions of dollars in today's "inflation adjusted" money.
Not only that, but it took the better part of a year or more to get there, as they had to sail around the southern end of either South America or Africa to get there... a journey of tens of thousands of miles. If instead they took the overland route, they had to do that on foot and for the most part there weren't even roads which were built to get that done. It was also an incredibly hostile and alien environment where a great many people did die due to a lack of understanding how to survive the alkaline flats of the great basin.
Your list of implements needed for a successful trip is very short and if somebody actually had that list of equipment, they would most likely be dead. A successful overland wagon trip to California in the 1850's included a whole bunch of items ranging from materials to smith and machine items to several kinds of domesticated animals to make life much easier once you arrived. As a matter of fact, those stupid miners who brought nothing more than a pickaxe and a bowl for panning typically did die of starvation as they were "city slickers" who knew so little about what it takes to survive in the wilderness that they were usually destitute. Fortunately, most people during the era were accomplished farmers and knew a thing or two about how to live off of the land if they needed to do so. They were used to being self-sufficient.
If people do become successful in establishing a permanent presence in space, many of those skills or at least attitudes need to be rekindled and re-examined.in terms of how people did pioneering activities. Trash heaps tended to be comparatively small because almost everything was either repaired or reused, with complex items becoming heirlooms handed down from one generation to the next. Just that by itself, attempting to develop an advanced industrial society that has equipment which can be repaired by mere mortals because it is designed to be repaired by mere mortals, where you don't necessarily get the flavor of the month for some gee-whiz gadget.... that might have usefulness by itself. Throw-away land-fill in waiting stores like Wal-Mart or K-Mart simply won't exist in a true frontier area, and people will have to adapt with that fact of life.
The net effect of dealing with other countries is that you have to deal with those other countries. That seems a little counter-intuitive, but America really is ahead of the game in terms of setting up a regulatory environment that even recognizes commercial spaceflight activity. The counterpart of the FAA-AST office simply doesn't exist in most countries, or frankly in any other country that I'm familiar with. There certainly are counterparts to NASA in other countries, and perhaps some of those agencies would also take on the duties of regulating commercial spaceflight activities of its citizens including in a commercial capacity, but for the most part that isn't happening right now.
Also, by international treaty, if you are an American doing anything in space, you are subject to American laws and have to deal with American courts, even if you purchased a seat on a Soyuz spacecraft through a company based in Belgium. Each country is responsible through the Outer Space Treaty to make sure that the country itself indemnifies any other country adversely impacted by spaceflight activities. Somehow I doubt that Liberia is willing to make sure that if you wipe out the entire country of Palau by mistake with some hunk of space junk that they will help deal with the survivors. China, America, India, and Russia sort of have the resources to deal with that issue and to make sure that any company doing that will be forced by its laws to pay for that damage.
If you throw something like a subpoena into the trash, be prepared to simply stay out of that country for the rest of your life. Sometimes you can do that and get away with it. Doing that for all of these major countries doing stuff in space is likely going to be difficult unless you happen to like living in Tora Bora or some similar place that doesn't give a damn about laws of the major countries.
When the California Gold Rush happened in 1849, there were hoards of people who traveled to San Francisco (or overland) for the chance to "make it rich". Some fairly wealthy people spent the modern equivalent of a million dollars or more to make the trip too. Furthermore, in spite of being able to claim they were rich (and many did become quite wealthy), the price of gold did drop considerably compared to almost all currencies world-wide because that hoard of gold ended up flooding the world commodity markets at the time.
In other words, everything you are worrying about here has happened before, and indeed multiple times. Some people perhaps might be bit by the "gold bug" but if there is profit to be made, there are some folks who will take the chance to make that profit.
Also, there is no chicken-or-egg problem. If you have some ore that can be used to extract some sort of element that is particularly hard to obtain, it doesn't matter how you get it, the markets to buy the stuff already likely exist. Even Helium (He-3 and He-4) have existing markets for the stuff if only you can get it to the buyers. That is the problem, not trying to create the market in the first place.
The real issue is who is going to stick their necks out to make that initial investment, and what would be the most profitable initial enterprise to begin doing once you get there. For myself, I think ordinary water will be the material of choice in terms of its value in space for mining operations... but clearly that isn't really needed here on the Earth in terms of owning a bottle of lunar water. Its value is going to be how it is used in space for space applications.
When you mention launch costs, you are presuming that the price point includes sending fuel up on those rockets and shipping that fuel from the surface of the Earth to some asteroid and then trying to get a conventional rocket designed for flying off of the surface of the Earth to be able to return with that fuel barely making it back to the Earth.
That is a whole lot of assumptions that I think simply are false and misleading when being discussed about the economics of extracting minerals in space. Yes, a one liter bottle of water in LEO costs $10k for a cheap one and as much as $100k or more when you consider how it got there in the first place. But how much would it cost to extract water on the Moon or from an asteroid and be able to fill tanks for a return flight? That really changes the arithmetic. What about if you could build "Von Neuman" machines or at least a spacecraft factory on an asteroid so you didn't have to ship that metal there in the first place? It would cost an initial investment that might be huge, but the recurring costs might be considerably less.
I certainly haven't gone over the numbers, but it may be possible to cheaply refine some metals like Platinum, Gold, Silver, or other relatively rare metals on an asteroid and be able to cheaply send that back to the Earth (or elsewhere) for a price that is less than its value per ounce. You just have to make sure you aren't bringing the propellant from the Earth to do that.... which is where the logic fails when trying to point out how expensive it is to do stuff in space.
If you drove an automobile from New York to Los Angeles and back, how much more do you think it would cost if you needed a fuel tank towed in a trailer behind your car to make the entire trip without hitting a refueling station along the way? I don't even think such a vehicle would be legal without a DOT commercial license and hazardous materials handling endorsements. That is precisely the logic being used to explain why it is impossible to cost-effectively mine extra-terrestrial bodies.
What happens if you stay in orbit for a week? A month? A year? Are you sure that you can't do that again?
How many people do you think would like to be part of the first hundred folks who have gone past the Moon in a circum-lunar flight (re-creating Apollo 8)? How about being named the "first person in the 21st Century to orbit the Moon"? There certainly are some folks have egos that large, and even bank accounts to afford it.
It is far more than simply a joy-ride up into the sky, hanging around for a couple of minutes, and then coming back down. While the barnstorming level of playing around with sub-orbital flight certainly is more of how space tourism is currently being marketed, that is merely only the beginning. Folks have been into orbit through purely private efforts (non-subsidized by government agencies) and it will continue. It won't be just for the view.
So far, the only "space tourists" that have gone up past the Kármán line have all been customers of Space Adventures.... and they've all gone orbital. Every single last one of them, including docking at the International Space Station.
While I think there will be more sub-orbital tourists than the orbital variety, and that is where the talk is coming from, where the action is happening instead of the talk it is all orbital spaceflight.
That sort of blows your whole point away, and it will be several years to perhaps a decade before Virgin Galactic is able to post ticket sales that exceed the amount Space Adventures has procured from its orbital space tourism business. I wouldn't doubt that orbital space tourism might even stay ahead of the sub-orbital variety in terms of both absolute amount of money brought into commercial spaceflight as well as the amount of profit made from that activity. So far, Sir Richard Branson has yet to send anybody into space, so what exactly is the complaint about?
In addition to navigation, and telecommunications, reconnaissance is also a huge field (of which weather satellites are only a very small part). Google Earth is but another example of this kind of survey system that absolutely depends upon satellites to function, not to mention how businesses like farmers or mineral exploration companies use satellite information to map the surface of the Earth to find mineral composition and "mass concentrations" in the Earth that might yield profitable mining operations. Those are all very profitable.
The one new thing that has changed in the past decade is the opening up of commercial tourism to spaceflight, which is a genuinely new area of profitable enterprises that until now hasn't really seen its full potential. It is also very much price sensitive in terms of a price/demand curve that expands exponentially as you can drive down costs.... something these other areas of profitable business. For the most part, a telecom satellite costing a couple billion dollars to build can fly on a rocket that costs $20,000/kg to launch into orbit or more, so prices points really don't matter. Military and other government satellites or even the big fancy deep space probes are also in a similar position and don't require cheaper rockets. Pretty much the only current activity which will expand significantly if you can get spaceflight down to about $100/kg is tourism. At that point, it isn't billionaires flying but mere millionaires or even folks who won big at the racetrack. The range of people who can afford a ticket expands considerably. It would be much easier to justify spending $500k on a ticket to a Bigelow habitat if you can spend a week in space and in orbit, as opposed to a mere 4-10 minutes in something like SpaceShip Two flying with Virgin Galactic.
As for other ventures in space, mineral extraction and solar power farming seem like fairly good bets.... provided you can get launch costs down considerably. At the moment they aren't profitable and won't be with current costs, but if you can lower those costs to some reasonable threshold and be able to generate fuels in space from extra-terrestrial sources (like the south pole of the Moon), it may be possible to be able to send stuff to the Earth at a more reasonable price. That will take a whole lot of infrastructure development and will be extremely costly as well as labor intensive to put together before any of that can happen.
For solar power farms, one interesting application that may be profitable right now is for remote power sources for military operations. For example, bringing truck loads of diesel fuel into Afghanistan is a nightmare for many reasons (snipers along the route alone are a problem) and simply throwing that away for running electrical generators might be replaced by an antenna array that is much harder to interrupt by some insurgent group. Paying $100/kWh seems more reasonable when you look at it in that context, where even defensive arms can include things like rail guns or other electrically powered devices that are cheap in terms of the logistical re-supply of those materials in a combat zone. Some al-Queida folks getting to a crate of rail gun bullets would find them useless, for example. Such devices simply aren't even possible at the moment at an air base because of a lack of power, and this particular "military application" could provide at least the initial capital to get power satellites started. For civilian purposes, remote outposts like a mining operation in a wilderness area far from existing power grids might serve a similar role. Throwing an antenna grid on top of a deep off-shore oil drilling platform might be a practical and cost-effective way to supply energy to that platform, to give yet another example.
Some other potential operations could be to mix exotic metals that normally couldn't be made on the Earth... due to gravity normally getting in the way to separate those mixtures into their base metals. Some pharmaceutical processes have also been specul
Burt Rutan himself acknowledged the X-15 when he built SpaceShip One, and even went so far as to recognize not only the pioneering work of those experiments with the X-15, but that he even used some of the flight data from those experiments and efforts when he built this particular rocket. As a result, it could even be argued that SS1 and SS2 are the "descendants" or at least owe their heritage to the X-15.
It should also be noted that nobody else ever bothered to do a follow up effort to improve upon the X-15 until the original space X-Prize was created. It was precisely because this was a research area that was left unexplored that something else could have been created.... like SpaceShip One. SS2 is clearly the successor to that line of vehicles, where the X-15 certainly was not capable of carrying passengers. SS2 can carry 6, plus a crew consisting of a pilot and co-pilot.
The accident where there were injuries and deaths did happen four years ago. The problem now is mainly one of performance and getting the system to work. Since it doesn't bleed, it doesn't lead, so this has been mostly a non-issue in terms of press coverage.... noting that Virgin Galactic doesn't seem to be afraid of press coverage when thing seem to be going their way.
If things are going well, I guess even this is a non-issue. Still, it would be nice to know if the engine development is on-track and if it will be ready in time for the flight trials that supposedly will happen later on this year. It is sort of a critical component to be left for the last minute.
Scaled Composites is working on engine tests, no doubt. That should be expected, but I haven't heard of a full flight simulation test or some other huge milestone about the engines.... which is something worth bragging about if they were able to pull that off. Yes, the N2O is certainly fairly simple to work with and comparatively safe... which is one of the reasons why it is being used instead of Ammonium Perchlorate mixed with Aluminum.... which has some nasty by products and safety concerns (in spite of its use by NASA for manned spaceflight).
This particular engine system is nice in part because it can be aborted mid-flight if there are some problems that develop.... something typically not possible with a solid fuel core. It also doesn't require cryogenic systems to work like most liquid fueled rockets.
There may not be any sort of problem, and if so I am hoping for the best with SS2. It really is an amazing rocket concept and something that would prove to be genuinely ground breaking.... if they can pull if off. My question is the "If" that is happening.
No, this wasn't something from four years ago... it was something much more recent and some serious concerns that it was going to be a hiccup and that there were other issues popping up where the engines weren't working correctly. Mind you this is just pure speculation from some folks who also happen to be at Mojave and are just repeating stuff in the rumor mill... so it isn't anything official. The concern that was expressed was that this particular engine design might just be a dead end in terms of research. That happens when you are doing something different, and the SS2 design is nearly the very definition of something different. It is still in the R&D stage of development and isn't in production, so almost anything can happen.
Perhaps those concerns are a bit overblown, and if so I hope the best for Scaled and Virgin Galactic to be able to get everything going. I am excited to see this company get stuff into the air, and certainly this test flight is precisely the incremental design and testing routine typical for engineering but seldom applied to spaceflight. The reason it isn't used for spaceflight is that usually the cost for each flight is prohibitive unless you are using very small vehicles.... which really doesn't tell you much about scaling issues of the technologies. Different kinds of problems show up when you are working with big stuff that simply isn't a problem for small devices, and rocketry is certainly no exception.
Since SS1 is in the Smithsonian, I think the label "unique" still applies..... unless you can name another vehicle using this atmospheric re-entry method.
Getting the vehicle to "feather" is perhaps a useful step, but the real issue IMHO is if they are going to get the engine to work out.
In case anybody is unaware, there have been some gruesome accidents trying to get the motors to work including a couple unfortunate deaths at Scaled Composites. Apparently it is perhaps the one major show stopper to getting the vehicle to work out, as scaling the rocket motor from SpaceShip One to the much larger SpaceShip Two size has been a major hurdle.
When I mentioned this earlier on Slashdot (for a SS2 related post), I got a couple of private e-mails assuring me that all was OK, but that it still has been problematic. It still is an issue that might hold up the actual launch, and isn't getting much attention in the press. I just hope that it works out, as that seems to be the one major system that isn't really working right now.
What about deep sea exploration? It is happening anyway, and gets loads of funding, as does seasteading and other aspects to exploiting the other aspects of materials in the deep ocean. The whole disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last year is proof that billions are getting dumped into developing that environment.
Some marine researchers to get annoyed with the thought that perhaps if they had a submarine that cost the same as a typical Shuttle launch that perhaps they would get some kind of Nobel prize in Biology. Perhaps they would be correct, but getting people to any point in the ocean at any depth is not the same technical challenge that it is to get people to Mars or a probe to Pluto. There are some related principles, but the vehicles do exist now to get to almost any place on the Earth, on or under the ground or sea.
IMHO it is much easier to get a vehicle to the bottom of the Marianas Trench than it is to get a similar vehicle to the surface of the Moon. It is a fair bit cheaper too.
We can't even pay to keep a shuttle program going.
Cost is not the reason why the shuttle program is getting shut down. While it is costly, and costs are being mentioned, the U.S. federal budget has plenty of room to expand spaceflight activities if that is a priority.
Unfortunately, space is hardly a priority with the 537 people who are involved with setting national priorities in America. It took nearly a year for President Obama to nominate and get through the meat grinder of the congressional approval process for Charles Bolden to become the administrator at NASA. A great many other agency heads were already in place well before that happened, and arguably Bolden was one of the last top level agency heads appointed and the longest it took for any presidential administration to make such an appointment. I'm saying this mainly to point out that spaceflight simply isn't a priority at all for the Obama administration, not that it has been for any of his predecessors following LBJ.
Spaceflight has become a technical jobs subsidies program, which is part of what is making it risk adverse. Deaths get contracts canceled and programs terminated, and the rest is simply a jockeying for who gets the most in the pork trough. I'm hoping that the new momentum with commercial spaceflight is going to change that risk adverse attitude, as it doesn't really come from ordinary American people. Anybody willing to jump off the top of a mountain or a skyscraper with nothing but a paraglider or a parachute is certainly going to be willing to take a trip into space, and likely be willing to foot the bill themselves.
The problem comes from those who see spaceflight as a zero-sum game in terms of the robotics vs. manned (or "crewed") spaceflight. For those who are strong advocates of robotic missions (like Carl Sagan advocated instead of another Apollo-like lunar exploration mission), they think that somehow by eliminating the manned spaceflight program will increase their own budgets from a limited pool of government spending.
Historically speaking, it is the robotic missions that tend to get canned first or at least scaled back to being useless when launched. Robots tend not to have constituents, and there certainly isn't any public pull for those missions except for the pretty pictures they provide.
This isn't zero-sum, but that by getting people into space has its own motivations, goals, and needs.
What is going to be a major motivating factor in space, however, is a huge labor shortage that will exist for a very long time. Tele-operated robots are going to be used anyway and will be part of the technology for developing the infrastructure in space. It can't be eliminated and will be a part of the culture that develops "out there". On the other hand, I agree that those so short sighted enough to think a physical presence of humans in space can be eliminated is also forgetting that people are much more versatile and can adapt much easier than robots.
If, and this is IMHO a big IF that I personally doubt will ever happen, artificial intelligence research gets to the point that a robot like the Droids of Star Wars can be built which can improvise and make decisions on their own on a level about the same as a person, perhaps manned exploration and development of the universe can be abandoned as a species. On the other hand, I think something huge will be lost from the soul of humanity as a result and is not a future I would ever want my posterity to live in. People use machines, not the other way around. Machines merely amplify the effort of the people using them, they don't replace the people.
Another company to look at is Shackleton Energy Corporation which is attempting to get to the Moon.... primarily for extracting water rather than He-3. The "parent company" has built some impressive remote devices and has about the right amount of expertise and chutzpah to be able to pull off at least a preliminary mining trip to the Moon to at least see if it could be profitable.
I don't know if these guys are working with Harrison Schmidt or not, but in terms of a serious effort, these guys are at least a company worth looking at.
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You are assuming that those growing the pot are sticking to just that kind of farm operation and not also setting up a meth lab or doing other kinds of illegal activities where they really don't care about the landlord or the consequences of damaging the house.
Furthermore, most homes aren't really set up to become greenhouses, where such an operation would also be incredibly messy and the water damage alone would seem to be sufficient to cause a total loss to the house. Having leaky "irrigation" pipes running through a house and running for a couple of months non-stop would be more than enough to start warping and damaging the floorboards and wall studs, not to mention the build-up of mold and other issues where you would have to peel back everything to the basic frame of the house.
Yes, I can see how it would be much easier to simply demolish the house and move it to a toxic landfill area (aka a "superfund" cleanup like cleaning up a chemical factory) rather than trying to do some "simple" repairs. If the "farm" is kept relatively low-key it wouldn't be a problem but rarely is that the case when being used in the manner described.
The purpose of setting up an indoor operation is to keep the supply close to the customers... and to avoid the hassle that comes with trying to ship the product past "security checkpoints" that can get it confiscated. Marijuana is a rather bulky product in terms of how much stuff you need in order to get a "high"... much more so than cocaine or heroin which can be highly concentrated for trans-shipment across larger distances.
Sadly, it is being grown in places with lots of sunshine too. One of the more interesting locations is to set up a pot growing operation in a national park or other wilderness area where even fairly sophisticated irrigation systems are set up to keep the plants healthy. Since it is an organized criminal activity, it becomes dangerous to even go camping or hiking near some of these "farms", where even park rangers try to avoid going except when heavily armed with DEA backup to shut down these operations. Because they are being set up in wilderness areas, they tend not to get noticed for awhile until somebody happens to wander by "accident".
I get your point here, but the issue is that it has become so profitable even with the potential for doing time in prison that there are many folks who are willing to make the effort to set up an operation like this.
Engine "governors" have been installed in some vehicles for some time when there was a concern that drivers might be exceeding the speed limit. On a basic level, it is sometimes merely a flywheel that cuts off the fuel flow when a certain speed is exceeded, although more sophisticated systems can be developed. There are even good reasons why you would want to put one of these devices on an engine deliberately, but I've heard of them being installed on mass-transit vehicles and even some farm equipment to deliberately design vehicles that can't be driven past some arbitrary speed limit.
The only point of using the GPS devices to monitor distance traveled is to start dealing with the corner cases so that you can "certify" that mileage driven happens in a certain taxation authority jurisdiction and excludes stuff that happens elsewhere (in another state or "off-road" usage, to give some examples). I'm sure that somebody somewhere is going to try and do something similar eventually for highway vs. residential road usage... and more than likely it will be a very incompetent engineer who will get the job to design the device too that will ignore the defensive programming concerns you have expressed here.
Just look at the computerized voting machines and the issues surrounding vote tabulation... something that ought to be incredibly simple for computers to perform and it still gets tampered with and even incompetently screwed up from time to time even to the point that major elections have already been thrown because of incompetence. When it comes to medical devices, I want to hurl when I am in a hospital and I see a major "life-saving" piece of medical equipment that used Microsoft Windows as its base operating system.
At least in America, there has been a "computer" installed in every licensed vehicle for decades that has been illegal to modify or disable:
The Odometer
Yes, as far as computers go it is an analog computer (usually now... there are some electronic ones in automobiles at the moment) based on very simple principles, but it still is there and certainly is illegal. The precedent is already there for automobiles, so all you are talking about is splitting hairs in terms of how much additional information is also going to be stored besides just the distance that vehicle has traveled since it was built.
"Black box"? There certainly has been some considerable effort to make odometers tamper-resistant, and it is something of a joke mentioned in several movies like Matilda and Ferris Bueller's Day Off that had significant plot situations where attempts to tamper with this particular computer were explicitly made by the major characters in those fictional stories.
This isn't a new issue, just the extent of the information being recorded is the issue instead.
"The" bitcoin person would be Satoshi. There are a couple of interesting things in the Bitcoin protocol that he alone can invoke. None of them impact the currency, but it can send out a broadcast message to the network warning of some sort of attack on the network or urge an upgrade of the software. Privately-built clients don't have to accept those messages nor do they even have to pass them on, but it is something in the protocol none the less. The messages have a public-key confirmation where the private key is only in the hands of Satoshi.
As to if Satoshi is a pseudonym for some other more famous/infamous person.... I can't do any more than speculate. But there is "a bitcoin person".
The view that minting new money (by whatever means) is the only source of inflation is one of those silly views that supporters of bitcoin stick to despite everything else saying otherwise. Look at the housing market, have houses suddenly become a dozen times more numerous? Has gold become so scarce that it's worth so much more than a decade ago? And so on.
Let's look at housing for a moment. One of the reasons why housing prices have dropped so dramatically is precisely because supply is outstripping demand by a huge margin. "Cheap" loans with little capital put forward to secure those loans and other loose lending practices sent a surge of construction activity which basically built houses that many people couldn't afford to keep. With the much tighter lending policies that are in place today, those who qualify to purchase a home now have many selections available where they can take their time to shop around for a real bargain.
As a matter of fact, relative to the number of people who can now buy homes, yes homes are indeed currently dozens of times more numerous or at least there certainly are many times more homes than buyers. It of course is very much dependent upon the location of the property, as some cities are much harder hit than others, but there are places where a home may be on the market for months or even years before it sells. It is also a relatively inelastic good in terms of the fact that when you need a home, you need it real bad and will pay through the nose to get it, but if you have one you don't (usually) need a second or third home. There is certainly a limit in terms of how many homes you own unless you want to get into the real estate management business.
In term of the U.S. Dollar from 1790 to about 1920 (when the Breton Woods system was put into place), the value of what you could buy for a dollar was remarkably stable. Yes, it went up and down in value as different things happened in America, but you could pretty much purchase a mule, a good work horse, a bushel of wheat, and a gallon of milk for nearly the same price throughout that period of time. There was local instability, but on the whole and in the long term view, it was a remarkably stable currency. Deflation pretty much matched inflation, and it worked out rather well for many people.
Also.... it should be pointed out that the U.S. Dollar was not gold-based, but rather "bi-metallic" based upon both gold and silver. It gets more complicated when you consider "greenbacks" and other currencies that were also introduced at the time including state-backed currencies that traded on a one-to-one exchange rate with the U.S. Dollar and some private bank notes. The value of a dollar was only marginally influenced by the national gold supply, although the gold rushes did have an impact when that bullion finally started to get passed around.
By far and away the largest problem that happened in terms of impacting the U.S. dollar prior to 1900 was the over inflation of the currency through fractional reserve banking, but that reserve banking usually happened on a more local level instead of a national level. The money supply would be expanded significantly, with that ending with a "bank panic" that would cause people to literally "run" to the bank and withdraw their money due to a bank failure when the loans were over-extended. The same thing is happening today, but instead of hundreds of banks that occasionally a few would go under, there is now just one monolithic "Federal Reserve Bank" that operates on a national scale controlling the currency. The over-inflation is still happening, but can be dealt with through "printing money" if they run short.
I'm worried that hyper inflation is going to be happening with the U.S. Dollar and other world currencies. Time will tell if that happens, but even a "central authority" may not be sufficient to put that genie back in the bottle once it gets out.
In terms of "kicking off the 2nd American Revolutionary War", I think folks at Waco, Texas and Ruby Ridge certainly did plenty to try and get that going earlier. Neither one worked out all that well for those who tried to fight the system through the force of arms.
I do hope that reason and sanity can prevail, and make sure that you use the four boxes of freedom in the order they were indended:
The four boxes of freedom: Soap, Ballot, Jury, and Ammo. Please use them in that order. I keep hoping that the Ballot box can still be effective for awhile longer in America.
I remember eating my first genuine Italian pizza when I went to visit New York City as a teenager. I was on a class trip to visit the tourist stuff there when a bunch of us got hungry in the evening and asked the hotel we were staying at for some pizza.... expecting something like from Godfather's Pizza or at least Pizza Hut or perhaps even a restaurant that served some classic "Chicago-style" pizza. Instead we got the real deal that was mostly some dough with a light covering of cheese and a few tomatoes as a topping.
Being teens, we didn't really appreciate what it was that we were eating and that the folks bringing us the food really wanted to serve us some genuine pizza... more like what real Italians make. Yeah, Americans have dramatically changed some of these food items to the point that they are beyond recognition from what they were like in the country of origin. Most of the time the food becomes much sweeter, uses fruit (aka the "Hawaiian Pizza"), and quite a bit more meat and fat as ingredients in its preparation... to perhaps overgeneralize the net effect but at least showing some of the trends toward the "Americanization" of some of these food items.
There is a genuine "Mexican" restaurant in the town I live in right now that is complete with staff that doesn't speak English, cockroaches in the kitchen, and children (10 year olds) running the cash register. The food is authentic to at least a region of northern Mexico and is also fairly reasonably priced. It certainly isn't Taco Bell.
I think you forget just how remote San Francisco was in the 1850's. It was quite literally on the frontier of European civilization and required expeditions that did indeed cost in today's dollars the equivalent of millions of dollars to travel to that destination from places like Germany or England. For some of the sailing ships, it was close to hundreds of millions of dollars in today's "inflation adjusted" money.
Not only that, but it took the better part of a year or more to get there, as they had to sail around the southern end of either South America or Africa to get there... a journey of tens of thousands of miles. If instead they took the overland route, they had to do that on foot and for the most part there weren't even roads which were built to get that done. It was also an incredibly hostile and alien environment where a great many people did die due to a lack of understanding how to survive the alkaline flats of the great basin.
Your list of implements needed for a successful trip is very short and if somebody actually had that list of equipment, they would most likely be dead. A successful overland wagon trip to California in the 1850's included a whole bunch of items ranging from materials to smith and machine items to several kinds of domesticated animals to make life much easier once you arrived. As a matter of fact, those stupid miners who brought nothing more than a pickaxe and a bowl for panning typically did die of starvation as they were "city slickers" who knew so little about what it takes to survive in the wilderness that they were usually destitute. Fortunately, most people during the era were accomplished farmers and knew a thing or two about how to live off of the land if they needed to do so. They were used to being self-sufficient.
If people do become successful in establishing a permanent presence in space, many of those skills or at least attitudes need to be rekindled and re-examined.in terms of how people did pioneering activities. Trash heaps tended to be comparatively small because almost everything was either repaired or reused, with complex items becoming heirlooms handed down from one generation to the next. Just that by itself, attempting to develop an advanced industrial society that has equipment which can be repaired by mere mortals because it is designed to be repaired by mere mortals, where you don't necessarily get the flavor of the month for some gee-whiz gadget.... that might have usefulness by itself. Throw-away land-fill in waiting stores like Wal-Mart or K-Mart simply won't exist in a true frontier area, and people will have to adapt with that fact of life.
The net effect of dealing with other countries is that you have to deal with those other countries. That seems a little counter-intuitive, but America really is ahead of the game in terms of setting up a regulatory environment that even recognizes commercial spaceflight activity. The counterpart of the FAA-AST office simply doesn't exist in most countries, or frankly in any other country that I'm familiar with. There certainly are counterparts to NASA in other countries, and perhaps some of those agencies would also take on the duties of regulating commercial spaceflight activities of its citizens including in a commercial capacity, but for the most part that isn't happening right now.
Also, by international treaty, if you are an American doing anything in space, you are subject to American laws and have to deal with American courts, even if you purchased a seat on a Soyuz spacecraft through a company based in Belgium. Each country is responsible through the Outer Space Treaty to make sure that the country itself indemnifies any other country adversely impacted by spaceflight activities. Somehow I doubt that Liberia is willing to make sure that if you wipe out the entire country of Palau by mistake with some hunk of space junk that they will help deal with the survivors. China, America, India, and Russia sort of have the resources to deal with that issue and to make sure that any company doing that will be forced by its laws to pay for that damage.
If you throw something like a subpoena into the trash, be prepared to simply stay out of that country for the rest of your life. Sometimes you can do that and get away with it. Doing that for all of these major countries doing stuff in space is likely going to be difficult unless you happen to like living in Tora Bora or some similar place that doesn't give a damn about laws of the major countries.
When the California Gold Rush happened in 1849, there were hoards of people who traveled to San Francisco (or overland) for the chance to "make it rich". Some fairly wealthy people spent the modern equivalent of a million dollars or more to make the trip too. Furthermore, in spite of being able to claim they were rich (and many did become quite wealthy), the price of gold did drop considerably compared to almost all currencies world-wide because that hoard of gold ended up flooding the world commodity markets at the time.
In other words, everything you are worrying about here has happened before, and indeed multiple times. Some people perhaps might be bit by the "gold bug" but if there is profit to be made, there are some folks who will take the chance to make that profit.
Also, there is no chicken-or-egg problem. If you have some ore that can be used to extract some sort of element that is particularly hard to obtain, it doesn't matter how you get it, the markets to buy the stuff already likely exist. Even Helium (He-3 and He-4) have existing markets for the stuff if only you can get it to the buyers. That is the problem, not trying to create the market in the first place.
The real issue is who is going to stick their necks out to make that initial investment, and what would be the most profitable initial enterprise to begin doing once you get there. For myself, I think ordinary water will be the material of choice in terms of its value in space for mining operations... but clearly that isn't really needed here on the Earth in terms of owning a bottle of lunar water. Its value is going to be how it is used in space for space applications.
When you mention launch costs, you are presuming that the price point includes sending fuel up on those rockets and shipping that fuel from the surface of the Earth to some asteroid and then trying to get a conventional rocket designed for flying off of the surface of the Earth to be able to return with that fuel barely making it back to the Earth.
That is a whole lot of assumptions that I think simply are false and misleading when being discussed about the economics of extracting minerals in space. Yes, a one liter bottle of water in LEO costs $10k for a cheap one and as much as $100k or more when you consider how it got there in the first place. But how much would it cost to extract water on the Moon or from an asteroid and be able to fill tanks for a return flight? That really changes the arithmetic. What about if you could build "Von Neuman" machines or at least a spacecraft factory on an asteroid so you didn't have to ship that metal there in the first place? It would cost an initial investment that might be huge, but the recurring costs might be considerably less.
I certainly haven't gone over the numbers, but it may be possible to cheaply refine some metals like Platinum, Gold, Silver, or other relatively rare metals on an asteroid and be able to cheaply send that back to the Earth (or elsewhere) for a price that is less than its value per ounce. You just have to make sure you aren't bringing the propellant from the Earth to do that.... which is where the logic fails when trying to point out how expensive it is to do stuff in space.
If you drove an automobile from New York to Los Angeles and back, how much more do you think it would cost if you needed a fuel tank towed in a trailer behind your car to make the entire trip without hitting a refueling station along the way? I don't even think such a vehicle would be legal without a DOT commercial license and hazardous materials handling endorsements. That is precisely the logic being used to explain why it is impossible to cost-effectively mine extra-terrestrial bodies.
What happens if you stay in orbit for a week? A month? A year? Are you sure that you can't do that again?
How many people do you think would like to be part of the first hundred folks who have gone past the Moon in a circum-lunar flight (re-creating Apollo 8)? How about being named the "first person in the 21st Century to orbit the Moon"? There certainly are some folks have egos that large, and even bank accounts to afford it.
It is far more than simply a joy-ride up into the sky, hanging around for a couple of minutes, and then coming back down. While the barnstorming level of playing around with sub-orbital flight certainly is more of how space tourism is currently being marketed, that is merely only the beginning. Folks have been into orbit through purely private efforts (non-subsidized by government agencies) and it will continue. It won't be just for the view.
So far, the only "space tourists" that have gone up past the Kármán line have all been customers of Space Adventures.... and they've all gone orbital. Every single last one of them, including docking at the International Space Station.
While I think there will be more sub-orbital tourists than the orbital variety, and that is where the talk is coming from, where the action is happening instead of the talk it is all orbital spaceflight.
That sort of blows your whole point away, and it will be several years to perhaps a decade before Virgin Galactic is able to post ticket sales that exceed the amount Space Adventures has procured from its orbital space tourism business. I wouldn't doubt that orbital space tourism might even stay ahead of the sub-orbital variety in terms of both absolute amount of money brought into commercial spaceflight as well as the amount of profit made from that activity. So far, Sir Richard Branson has yet to send anybody into space, so what exactly is the complaint about?
In addition to navigation, and telecommunications, reconnaissance is also a huge field (of which weather satellites are only a very small part). Google Earth is but another example of this kind of survey system that absolutely depends upon satellites to function, not to mention how businesses like farmers or mineral exploration companies use satellite information to map the surface of the Earth to find mineral composition and "mass concentrations" in the Earth that might yield profitable mining operations. Those are all very profitable.
The one new thing that has changed in the past decade is the opening up of commercial tourism to spaceflight, which is a genuinely new area of profitable enterprises that until now hasn't really seen its full potential. It is also very much price sensitive in terms of a price/demand curve that expands exponentially as you can drive down costs.... something these other areas of profitable business. For the most part, a telecom satellite costing a couple billion dollars to build can fly on a rocket that costs $20,000/kg to launch into orbit or more, so prices points really don't matter. Military and other government satellites or even the big fancy deep space probes are also in a similar position and don't require cheaper rockets. Pretty much the only current activity which will expand significantly if you can get spaceflight down to about $100/kg is tourism. At that point, it isn't billionaires flying but mere millionaires or even folks who won big at the racetrack. The range of people who can afford a ticket expands considerably. It would be much easier to justify spending $500k on a ticket to a Bigelow habitat if you can spend a week in space and in orbit, as opposed to a mere 4-10 minutes in something like SpaceShip Two flying with Virgin Galactic.
As for other ventures in space, mineral extraction and solar power farming seem like fairly good bets.... provided you can get launch costs down considerably. At the moment they aren't profitable and won't be with current costs, but if you can lower those costs to some reasonable threshold and be able to generate fuels in space from extra-terrestrial sources (like the south pole of the Moon), it may be possible to be able to send stuff to the Earth at a more reasonable price. That will take a whole lot of infrastructure development and will be extremely costly as well as labor intensive to put together before any of that can happen.
For solar power farms, one interesting application that may be profitable right now is for remote power sources for military operations. For example, bringing truck loads of diesel fuel into Afghanistan is a nightmare for many reasons (snipers along the route alone are a problem) and simply throwing that away for running electrical generators might be replaced by an antenna array that is much harder to interrupt by some insurgent group. Paying $100/kWh seems more reasonable when you look at it in that context, where even defensive arms can include things like rail guns or other electrically powered devices that are cheap in terms of the logistical re-supply of those materials in a combat zone. Some al-Queida folks getting to a crate of rail gun bullets would find them useless, for example. Such devices simply aren't even possible at the moment at an air base because of a lack of power, and this particular "military application" could provide at least the initial capital to get power satellites started. For civilian purposes, remote outposts like a mining operation in a wilderness area far from existing power grids might serve a similar role. Throwing an antenna grid on top of a deep off-shore oil drilling platform might be a practical and cost-effective way to supply energy to that platform, to give yet another example.
Some other potential operations could be to mix exotic metals that normally couldn't be made on the Earth... due to gravity normally getting in the way to separate those mixtures into their base metals. Some pharmaceutical processes have also been specul
Burt Rutan himself acknowledged the X-15 when he built SpaceShip One, and even went so far as to recognize not only the pioneering work of those experiments with the X-15, but that he even used some of the flight data from those experiments and efforts when he built this particular rocket. As a result, it could even be argued that SS1 and SS2 are the "descendants" or at least owe their heritage to the X-15.
It should also be noted that nobody else ever bothered to do a follow up effort to improve upon the X-15 until the original space X-Prize was created. It was precisely because this was a research area that was left unexplored that something else could have been created.... like SpaceShip One. SS2 is clearly the successor to that line of vehicles, where the X-15 certainly was not capable of carrying passengers. SS2 can carry 6, plus a crew consisting of a pilot and co-pilot.
The accident where there were injuries and deaths did happen four years ago. The problem now is mainly one of performance and getting the system to work. Since it doesn't bleed, it doesn't lead, so this has been mostly a non-issue in terms of press coverage.... noting that Virgin Galactic doesn't seem to be afraid of press coverage when thing seem to be going their way.
If things are going well, I guess even this is a non-issue. Still, it would be nice to know if the engine development is on-track and if it will be ready in time for the flight trials that supposedly will happen later on this year. It is sort of a critical component to be left for the last minute.
Scaled Composites is working on engine tests, no doubt. That should be expected, but I haven't heard of a full flight simulation test or some other huge milestone about the engines.... which is something worth bragging about if they were able to pull that off. Yes, the N2O is certainly fairly simple to work with and comparatively safe... which is one of the reasons why it is being used instead of Ammonium Perchlorate mixed with Aluminum.... which has some nasty by products and safety concerns (in spite of its use by NASA for manned spaceflight).
This particular engine system is nice in part because it can be aborted mid-flight if there are some problems that develop.... something typically not possible with a solid fuel core. It also doesn't require cryogenic systems to work like most liquid fueled rockets.
There may not be any sort of problem, and if so I am hoping for the best with SS2. It really is an amazing rocket concept and something that would prove to be genuinely ground breaking.... if they can pull if off. My question is the "If" that is happening.
No, this wasn't something from four years ago... it was something much more recent and some serious concerns that it was going to be a hiccup and that there were other issues popping up where the engines weren't working correctly. Mind you this is just pure speculation from some folks who also happen to be at Mojave and are just repeating stuff in the rumor mill... so it isn't anything official. The concern that was expressed was that this particular engine design might just be a dead end in terms of research. That happens when you are doing something different, and the SS2 design is nearly the very definition of something different. It is still in the R&D stage of development and isn't in production, so almost anything can happen.
Perhaps those concerns are a bit overblown, and if so I hope the best for Scaled and Virgin Galactic to be able to get everything going. I am excited to see this company get stuff into the air, and certainly this test flight is precisely the incremental design and testing routine typical for engineering but seldom applied to spaceflight. The reason it isn't used for spaceflight is that usually the cost for each flight is prohibitive unless you are using very small vehicles.... which really doesn't tell you much about scaling issues of the technologies. Different kinds of problems show up when you are working with big stuff that simply isn't a problem for small devices, and rocketry is certainly no exception.
Since SS1 is in the Smithsonian, I think the label "unique" still applies..... unless you can name another vehicle using this atmospheric re-entry method.
Getting the vehicle to "feather" is perhaps a useful step, but the real issue IMHO is if they are going to get the engine to work out.
In case anybody is unaware, there have been some gruesome accidents trying to get the motors to work including a couple unfortunate deaths at Scaled Composites. Apparently it is perhaps the one major show stopper to getting the vehicle to work out, as scaling the rocket motor from SpaceShip One to the much larger SpaceShip Two size has been a major hurdle.
When I mentioned this earlier on Slashdot (for a SS2 related post), I got a couple of private e-mails assuring me that all was OK, but that it still has been problematic. It still is an issue that might hold up the actual launch, and isn't getting much attention in the press. I just hope that it works out, as that seems to be the one major system that isn't really working right now.
What about deep sea exploration? It is happening anyway, and gets loads of funding, as does seasteading and other aspects to exploiting the other aspects of materials in the deep ocean. The whole disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last year is proof that billions are getting dumped into developing that environment.
Some marine researchers to get annoyed with the thought that perhaps if they had a submarine that cost the same as a typical Shuttle launch that perhaps they would get some kind of Nobel prize in Biology. Perhaps they would be correct, but getting people to any point in the ocean at any depth is not the same technical challenge that it is to get people to Mars or a probe to Pluto. There are some related principles, but the vehicles do exist now to get to almost any place on the Earth, on or under the ground or sea.
IMHO it is much easier to get a vehicle to the bottom of the Marianas Trench than it is to get a similar vehicle to the surface of the Moon. It is a fair bit cheaper too.
We can't even pay to keep a shuttle program going.
Cost is not the reason why the shuttle program is getting shut down. While it is costly, and costs are being mentioned, the U.S. federal budget has plenty of room to expand spaceflight activities if that is a priority.
Unfortunately, space is hardly a priority with the 537 people who are involved with setting national priorities in America. It took nearly a year for President Obama to nominate and get through the meat grinder of the congressional approval process for Charles Bolden to become the administrator at NASA. A great many other agency heads were already in place well before that happened, and arguably Bolden was one of the last top level agency heads appointed and the longest it took for any presidential administration to make such an appointment. I'm saying this mainly to point out that spaceflight simply isn't a priority at all for the Obama administration, not that it has been for any of his predecessors following LBJ.
Spaceflight has become a technical jobs subsidies program, which is part of what is making it risk adverse. Deaths get contracts canceled and programs terminated, and the rest is simply a jockeying for who gets the most in the pork trough. I'm hoping that the new momentum with commercial spaceflight is going to change that risk adverse attitude, as it doesn't really come from ordinary American people. Anybody willing to jump off the top of a mountain or a skyscraper with nothing but a paraglider or a parachute is certainly going to be willing to take a trip into space, and likely be willing to foot the bill themselves.
The problem comes from those who see spaceflight as a zero-sum game in terms of the robotics vs. manned (or "crewed") spaceflight. For those who are strong advocates of robotic missions (like Carl Sagan advocated instead of another Apollo-like lunar exploration mission), they think that somehow by eliminating the manned spaceflight program will increase their own budgets from a limited pool of government spending.
Historically speaking, it is the robotic missions that tend to get canned first or at least scaled back to being useless when launched. Robots tend not to have constituents, and there certainly isn't any public pull for those missions except for the pretty pictures they provide.
This isn't zero-sum, but that by getting people into space has its own motivations, goals, and needs.
What is going to be a major motivating factor in space, however, is a huge labor shortage that will exist for a very long time. Tele-operated robots are going to be used anyway and will be part of the technology for developing the infrastructure in space. It can't be eliminated and will be a part of the culture that develops "out there". On the other hand, I agree that those so short sighted enough to think a physical presence of humans in space can be eliminated is also forgetting that people are much more versatile and can adapt much easier than robots.
If, and this is IMHO a big IF that I personally doubt will ever happen, artificial intelligence research gets to the point that a robot like the Droids of Star Wars can be built which can improvise and make decisions on their own on a level about the same as a person, perhaps manned exploration and development of the universe can be abandoned as a species. On the other hand, I think something huge will be lost from the soul of humanity as a result and is not a future I would ever want my posterity to live in. People use machines, not the other way around. Machines merely amplify the effort of the people using them, they don't replace the people.
Another company to look at is Shackleton Energy Corporation which is attempting to get to the Moon.... primarily for extracting water rather than He-3. The "parent company" has built some impressive remote devices and has about the right amount of expertise and chutzpah to be able to pull off at least a preliminary mining trip to the Moon to at least see if it could be profitable.
I don't know if these guys are working with Harrison Schmidt or not, but in terms of a serious effort, these guys are at least a company worth looking at.