I have no doubt that SpaceX could send somebody on a circum-lunar flight essentially duplicating Apollo 8, and that they could relatively easily make a flight to Phobos or Deimos and return.
Landing on Mars, however, is a whole other problem and something which has proven to be harder to surmount than a solo climb of Mount Everest. Carmack's lander certainly can get to the Moon and back up to lunar orbit just fine (aka being able to perhaps duplicate Apollo 11 for a "weekend" trip to the Moon), but Mars is a much harder problem.
What makes Mars so nasty is that it has an atmosphere which has to be dealt with (heat shields are necessary, and aerobraking is useful to consider), but at the same time it is so thin that it can't be relied upon to really help you out at the most critical time of landing like it does here on the Earth or on Venus and Titan. Essentially it is very easy to either burn up or go smack onto the surface, and has an entirely different engineering realm in terms of being able to successfully land or take off from the surface of Mars. So far, nothing has ever been able to take off from the surface of Mars and return back to the Earth, shy of a very large meteor that dislodged whatever it is that made it to the Earth.
The other issue that doesn't seem to be as big of a deal to me due to experience on Mir, Skylab, and the ISS is long-term survival in space. NAUTLUS-X seems to be the way to go at least as a general design that is likely going to be duplicated for other spaceships doing interplanetary travel. Like I said, that gets you to Phobos which is tantalizingly close to the surface of Mars, but to actually go down and come back to Phobos is the real trick. Somebody will figure that out, but it will take some time. Phobos would certainly be an excellent waypoint and logistical center for trips to Mars (including perhaps even a fuel depot).
The one practical application for He3 that does not require nuclear fusion to be successful is to use the substance as a refrigerant. He3 happens to have the lowest boiling point for any liquid known in chemistry, and thus can cool stuff down when you really need to get to absolute zero. For superconductor research and other cryogenic applications, there is a huge need for the substance.... to the point that mining it on the Moon could provide a small but economically viable source of revenue.
Yes, it can be obtained from terrestrial sources too (and it is), but there is a market for the substance and obtaining it from the Moon is a practical alternative even if its use as a fusion fuel never happens.
Besides, I like Boron fusion systems better, and that can be obtained cheaply and easily from terrestrial sources. A box of Borax contains enough Boron to power a fusion reactor for a year... and many people simply flush that down the drain in a very literal fashion every week.
Elon Musk has burned through all of his PayPal stash, not to mention that his ex-wife grabbed what was left after the very public divorce. That he had a lot of money is true, but that money is gone. Still, for a multi-millionaire who burned through his cash reserves, he has a fair bit of stuff to show for all of that money unlike other wealthy people who have burned through a similar pile of money having nothing but sports cars an yachts to show for that effort.
Tesla Motors took up pretty much the tiny bit that was left when it was mis-managed and flowing red ink, where I think his ex-wife got a healthy chuck too. Elon Musk still controls 51% of Tesla, however, but he had to get a whole bunch of other investment capital including from Toyota. He has been doing similar deals to infuse SpaceX with cash.
SpaceX has launched the Falcon 9 though, together with a cluster of Merlin engines that are going to be flying with the F9-H. It has also successfully orbited the Dragon capsule and has successfully recovered that vehicle too. Those aren't small accomplishments, where launching the F9-H is going to be more of an incremental improvement rather than a radically new vehicle.
That there are engineering challenges, I will grant, and it still isn't all that certain SpaceX can maintain the production flow they are hoping for (about 10 or so F9's and F9-H launches per year). If they can pull that off, it will be quite impressive and getting to the Moon or Mars will certainly seem much closer.
The real game changer, however, will be the Merlin-2 engine.... if they ever get that thing built. That is the engine which will supposedly have better performance and higher thrust numbers than the F-1 engine used on the Saturn V and most certainly will make going to Mars doable. That must be the engine Elon Musk is thinking about when he made such a bold statement.
I certainly could see SpaceX being able to fly a manned mission to Mars using Falcon XX rockets.... assuming somebody will pay for it. As to who is going to pay for that rocket remains the question. I, too, am skeptical that commercial spaceflight is going to expand significantly such that a purely commercial venture to Mars will happen within the next decade or two. Here are some sources of commercial spaceflight revenue at the moment:
Communications - Already a very mature segment of spaceflight, telecommunications satellites of various flavors are perhaps the one sure business case for spaceflight. SpaceX already has the contract for the next generation of Iridium satellites, and other companies are currently in negotiations with them.
Reconnaissance - While it seems odd that such satellites are used for commercial purposes, it is something that is legitimately being used. The last Falcon 1 launch carried a survey satellite for Indonesia, and there are other commercial companies who sell survey images (like Google Earth) for various commercial activities. This is on top of military payloads from the National Reconnaissance Office or even weather satellites put up by NOAA.
Scientific Payloads - SpaceX and other commercial spaceflight companies are now getting cheap enough that more modest research proposals are affordable. More importantly, it is a pent-up demand for scientific research in space because getting space on the Shuttle has been almost impossible for so long. There are private research foundations who can and likely will be involved in purchasing space on various launches in the future. Iridium is taking advantage of this by offering space on their satellites for scientific payloads, as is SpaceX with their DragonLab vehicle that is scheduled to go up some time next year or in 2013. Rather than waiting a decade just to get a "slot" for a launch, researchers in space can finally get multiple opportunities to fly in the same year and do multiple iterations on the scientific research. This is going to be huge and may be the bulk of commercial spaceflight revenue for the next decade.
Tourism - This is the unpredictable wildcard for commercial spaceflight. Of all of the various applications that has a proven track record, it is tourism that will respond better with reduced launch costs. Virgin Galactic is but the first of many companies already taking deposits on spaceflight, and Space Adventures has been flying people in space for several years now. The market for space tourism is still quite small, but people like Robert Bigelow are betting a huge sum of money thinking it will become very big. Even for Bigelow, however, government customers are going to be the primary focus for at least a couple of decades... although Bigelow is marketing to countries other than the big space countries (US, China, Russia, and India).
I think NASA has been such a train wreck for so long that almost anything Obama did would have been an improvement. Even so, I don't think there has been any presidential administration put NASA on a lower priority in terms of general attention it gets than Obama. The appointment of Bolden as the administrator of NASA alone took longer than any of his predecessors (with members of his own party doing most of the hold-up keeping it from happening).
The advantage of shutting down the Constellation program is that it was horribly mis-managed with shifting design requirements and some hard technical problems that made it very easy to shut down. That it was inspired by people working in his predecessor's administration (of another political party) was only icing on the cake that made killing that program irresistible. I was never a fan for technical reasons, but the economic and political reasons for killing it was shooting fish in a barrel.
One thing that is interesting is that Bolden is no longer appearing in public so much or being a point man for Obama's policies. I wonder if that is coincidence or if Bolden is tired of carrying the water for Obama.
It is useful to note that SpaceX is hardly the only company working to reduce launch costs, and there are a number of other potential future competitors to SpaceX that are likely to bust the $1,000/kg to LEO down much further. Even for the Falcon 9-Heavy rocket, rocket fuel considerations are a very minor consideration.
With the upcoming STS-134 Shuttle launch, I would venture to guess that the catering budget for the press corps covering the event (not to mention the VIPs) is going to be costing more than the fuel costs to operate the Shuttle.
Considering that SpaceX is using kerosene for their rockets, it still will be a long time before the price of a barrel of crude oil starts to influence launch costs. When that happens, I might think launch costs are starting to hit practical engineering limits. It isn't even a negotiation issue right now when calculating launch costs.
Considering that the computing power of the Apollo Guidance Computer was roughly the same as a hotel room "card key entry" doorknob of today, and that the guys on the ground, during the missions, were still using slide rules for emergency burn calculations, I'd call that laughable tech. Werner Von Braun was a good plumber that made some huge engines work, but there have been a great many advances in spaceflight since that era.
Most of NASA is already driven by the commercial sector, known as "contractors". NASA doesn't even make anything anymore do they? It's all made by Boeing, Lockheed, Northrup et. al.
Perhaps true, but these contractors are largely government agencies anyway, and it sort of defeats the purpose for "commercial spaceflight" when all you are doing is replacing who writes the checks for these workers, while in the process perhaps putting a bit more instability for the individual workers who make the projects. The question here is the source of the funding, not necessarily the fact that an employee has a government civil service pay grade receiving a paycheck from the Treasury Department directly or more indirectly through a for-profit company.
It also matters what the nature of the contract involved is here, if it is a "cost-plus" contract where all of the minutiae of your job is decided by a government bureaucrat, or if the company is pretty much free to implement the design how it feels and only the final end-product is subject to a formal thumbs up/thumbs down acceptance. There is a difference here on a number of levels.
It also matters if the things that a company is doing can be also sold to other governments or private citizens without special legislation being passed by congress. Most of the products being developed for NASA by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrup-Grumman, or ATK can only be sold to government customers, as the exceptions are clearly exceptions. Even when the legal requirement isn't there, these companies aren't really selling to pure commercial ventures in space. Until very recently, it wasn't even a consideration for ULA to think Richard Branson might want to use an Atlas V or Delta IV for a spaceline carrying private passengers. Indeed, it was illegal for them to even consider such a pure commercial venture until recently.
These "commercial contractors" are not in control of the products, nor do they really design the vehicles except in terms of the most mundane issues. Key design considerations for all of these vehicles from the traditional spaceflight companies, and certainly the major decisions in terms of how large of a vehicle is going to be developed, what fuel it will use, where it will launch, what materials will be used in its construction, and other key decisions are all made by government bureaucrats. I don't really call that commercial spaceflight except in the most loose sense of the term.
There are commercial spaceflight companies who do make all of these decisions alone without any government input, except for an FAA official who gives the final air worthiness certificate once the vehicle has been built. The layers of government oversight are considerably less when it is purely private money on the line. This can and in fact is happening right now with a number of companies, including several who are now getting NASA funding for their products simply because they work.
Add to that the Plymouth & Massachusetts Bay colony was entirely funded by private efforts, as was the Virginia company. As a matter of fact, both of those colonies in America had to receive charters "purchased" from the crown of England before they even set sail.
When Antarctica was "discovered" (or at least recorded on official journals and publicly announced... discounting a "Terra Australius" mentioned anciently), the warships charting that discovery noted American whaling ships that had not only anchored nearby but were encamped on shore repairing equipment and hunting seals.
I could go on, but there have been many "voyages of discovery" that were either privately financed or funded as a philanthropic endeavor with mainly private funds. Yes, government financed expeditions can and did happen in the past too, but even then the prospects of opening trade routes was a major motivating force for those efforts.
Note that the Outer Space Treaty only requires that a signatory nation announce at least a year in advance that they are going to withdraw from the treaty. If the political will is there to have a country like the United States to claim extra-terrestrial real estate, it can easily happen and no other signatory nation can do a thing about it.... shy of going to war over the issue.
If the technology exists to be able to mine an extra-terrestrial body or do anything else in space, it can be done. Besides, commercial "exploitation" of space is already happening even with the Outer Space Treaty.
About the only thing it really impacts in terms of private citizens is activities below the Kármán line (if your spacecraft or satellite crashes into somebody's house, you have to pay damages, and you need aviation clearance to launch and/or enter the atmosphere). Spacecraft actually in space are governed by the laws of the country who launched the vehicle (giving some odd legal issues in the ISS if a felony happened up there). Ownership issue by private individuals is not covered by the treaty, but then again neither are the land allocation rules either.
While not really the intention of the treaty, the rule in space is that possession is 99.99% of the law, and if you have a bigger gun, you get to keep whatever it is that you possess. And yes, guns have already flown in space, and I'm not talking just a pistol or airguns either. The net effect of the Outer Space Treaty is that no nation claims territorial status to anything beyond the Earth, so it is a free-for-all as private citizens to work out governance principles in space for themselves. Somehow I don't think that situation will last when people who are not government employees are in space in large numbers.
Many of the top "new" aerospace companies are already siphoning off the cream of the crop from many of these companies, including operations in Houston. That talent isn't going to waste, and I'd have to agree that there is a deep talent pool which does need to pass on the lessons learned from one generation to another. That is indeed a huge issue, so I don't want to minimize that.
Still, those involved with the manned spaceflight program at NASA have a dismal record of getting anything accomplished, where the last new design to actually make it into space has been the Space Shuttle, started in the Johnson administration and approved during the Nixon administration in terms of real funding. If the experience of nearly a dozen failed launcher projects is lost, it could even be said to be a good thing after a fashion. Something is certainly missing from what needs to happen as the object of the whole exercise, getting people into space, seems to be lost completely anymore. If the same worker bees keep shifting around from one nameless company to another, perhaps the whole system needs to be rethought.
I'm also going to acknowledge that there ought to be a transition after a fashion, as radical moves can throw out the baby with the bathwater. The question is more in terms of how gradual, and what it really means in terms of a privatized spaceflight system in America. Merely becoming another contractor to NASA doing what was done by government employees isn't really privatization, as opposed to a company who sell spaceflight services to NASA as a customer but also sells those same services to many other people who are not even government agencies. More significantly, private companies don't have to "spread the wealth" by putting offices in key congressional districts, but rather make the decision in terms of where to locate facilities based upon hard economic decisions to remain profitable.
The U.S. federal government is hitting a brick wall in terms of finances, and the train wreck is going to do far more than take out NASA. For myself, I wish that America had the money and the political will among the politicians in DC to be able to continue to fund NASA as it has for decades, and perhaps even go up to the 1960's levels of funding. Unfortunately cold hard reality is such that NASA is going to be an easy target with a weak constituency ripe to be wiped out in a budgetary compromise.... especially when programs like Head Start, Medicaid, and Social Security are also going to be hammered hard. If T-bills lose the AAA bond rating quality, expect that to get much worse before it gets better.
I'm dumbfounded by what you wrote. How can you believe that? You're either so earnest, so profoundly convinced that only space can motivate people or you're plain old stupid. Seriously, you have google, USE IT.
I said nothing of the sort, I said that it can be a source of motivation, however. I also did not request that you help pay for this, either at gunpoint or through taxes. All I expect is that you and other critics simply do is get out of my way and out of the way of others who would go into space.
Essentially, quit being a jerk.
And in the long term, well, humans only have 10-20 years of useful life span. From birth to usefulness, let's say you have to be 20 years old to have learned enough and be mature enough to work. OK, by the time you're 40, you're bald, fat, stupid, and a demented vegetable that can't learn anything, has bad eyesight, farts, lost fertility, has all kinds of diseases. How far in space can you get in 20 years? How big is the universe?
I think this speaks volumes about the rest of your reply. I regard that after 40 you are just starting to hit your useful stride and barely beginning to contribute back to society. There is a very good reason the U.S. Constitution requires somebody over the age of 40 to be President, but I suspect your youthful ignorance doesn't see that. I promise that you will live to regret this statement alone.
Look, it's astonishingly simple. The 747 had its maiden flight in 1969. In that time, we have managed to get better at processing, storing and creating BITS, while the 747 still flies today, burning the same kerosene, in the same turbines, flying to the same place in the same time.
How little you even know about the 747 itself, much less the direction Boeing has gone. The 747 has had enough modifications and improvements since 1969 that versions produced today hardly resemble the vehicles originally built. Not only that, but Boeing alone (not to mention other aircraft designers) has introduced several new airplane designs since then which are substantially more fuel efficient and safer to fly, to the point that the 747 may even be discontinued from the Boeing product line. As an analogy, this particular one stinks and even backfires on you as well. Boeing's activities in spaceflight have also been rolled into their new product lines, of which one small part, GPS navigation systems, simply couldn't exist without spaceflight activities.
The rest of this post isn't even worth responding to as it demonstrates similar sorts of sheer ignorance on the topic.
It sounds like you are proving my point rather than providing ammunition against the idea. Which is more, $6 billion or $300 million? If we cut NASA completely but also eliminated taxes for commercial spaceflight, the federal government would still be money ahead.
BTW, the first private satellite (Telstar I) was launched on July 10, 1962 by AT&T. Commercial spaceflight certainly is happening now and is alive and well anyway. The purpose of cutting taxes is to increase that activity.... so why tax an activity which is being subsidized by the government in the first place right now, at much greater cost?
Rob Bishop is rated as "the most conservative representatives in the U.S. House" and is one who constantly calls for fiscal responsibility and decrying earmarks of other members of congress as being wasteful. I call that hypocrisy at the very least.
If Bishop was running on the platform of "bringing the bacon home to Utah" (as his fellow member in the Utah delegation, Orrin Hatch, did for his 2006 re-election campaign), it would be a bit more understandable. Sadly, he complains when others do that kind of thing but has no hesitation when doing it himself.
How do you think you can get to be 300 years old in the first place? Where are the ideas for getting that to happen going to come from?
In this case, it is a situation where you can have your cake and eat it too, but squelching efforts in one area are also going to stop development in other areas too. One of the reasons you may have even a couple more years on your life is precisely because of activities in space that have already happened, and people who have been inspired by spaceflight to make things and to discover things that have extended your life and the lives of your descendants (should you choose to have any).
I'm responding to somebody who wants to kill any effort for going to the Moon as a bad idea. You are responding to me suggesting it is a zero sum game, which it most certainly is not. Expanding humanity to other worlds is going to enable more economic activity and provide more raw materials to fuel the collective thoughts of mankind to make your life better including being able to live longer, if that is your choice.
Besides, if we can have millions of tons (metric or imperial, it doesn't matter for this) of raw materials obtained from sources in space, we can turn the Earth into a park and not have to damage fragile environments like coral reefs or arctic tundra. We can have the resources to "be green" and still live an advanced post-industrial lifestyle with all of the creature comforts you currently enjoy.
Why not completely turn it over to the commercial sector?
I have suggested the following plan to pay for a manned spaceflight program, that would have minimal impact upon the federal budget but end up producing a very robust and active manned spaceflight presence of Americans on not just the Moon, but on Mars and elsewhere:
Enact legislation that completely eliminates all federal taxes of any kind for industries or products that ultimately end up in space, and for all economic activities that happen in space. This moratorium on taxes should last at least 50 years from the passage of the legislation (to provide for a predictable economic environment for companies working in space). Yes, that would imply astronauts would not have to pay income tax for their work done in space, but that would be the tip of the iceberg.
Doing something that bold would not have to cost a whole lot of money, and certainly would be less in terms of even the current federal expenditures on NASA's human spaceflight effort of around $6-$8 billion per year... at least it would be less revenue lost than those current levels of expenditures. You would also see private capital pouring into spaceflight like you never saw before in your life, and a quest to make it profitable. I'm sure it would cause some distortion of American business practices (and some very unusual "space divisions" in some companies like Wal-Mart and McDonalds) but in the end it would be a way to finance spaceflight that wouldn't have to depend on a fickle change in presidential administrations every four to eight years.
Although it is futile to respond to a classical straw man argument, I do want to respond in this particular case:
Where is you sense of wonder, a desire to go someplace different or do something that nobody else has ever been before?
Where is it that we can go which will inspire humanity to do something new, something different, and to bring new ideas into nearly all discussions?
Going into space, and in particular sending people (not just robots) to visit other worlds and to find new places to explore is something which can benefit all of humanity merely because it is being done, regardless of cost or difficulty. Not only will it be beneficial, I don't think there has been a person on this planet, regardless of where they live, that hasn't been substantially impacted for good as a result of manned spaceflight activities. No, I'm not talking about Tang, Teflon, or Velcro either (none of which were developed for or as a result of spaceflight... at least initially). More food is available, diplomacy is easier to conduct, and general knowledge of other cultures is much better as a direct result of spaceflight.
This will only improve and become better if we can build a permanent settlement on the Moon or other worlds. Besides, I think it can also be done for a profit, but that is a completely separate issue entirely.
The largest employer in his district is the Weber County School District, but otherwise I'd have to agree with your position on Rob Bishop. The guy is a sell-out, and is partly responsible for a $3 billion earmark (nearly the only one in the current budget) for the "SLS" launch system (often dubbed the "Senate Launch System") to essentially restart under a new name the Ares V project.
It is useful to note that the ATK plant was in his Utah State House of Representatives district before he was elected to his current seat in Washington, thus has a rather cozy relationship with the people in that company as well as many neighbors who work for them as well.
One legitimate issue that needs to be addressed is in terms of how to keep domestic production going for the Ammonium Perchlorate, which is a vital chemical needed for general defense purposes. That is the primary chemical used in solid rocket boosters, and is used for most of the ICBMs in the arsenal of the United States (as well as the missiles in submarines). Right now, those missiles aren't being built, so there is a need for at least somebody, somewhere, to be using this chemical so that the factories making this rocket fuel can keep going for when the ICBM fleet needs to be refurbished for the next generation (the fuel is unstable and does need to be replaced periodically).
My personal solution to the problem: Rather than disguising a NASA program as something other than a make-work jobs program to keep the factory workers at these chemical plants employed, why not simply get into the business of making 4th of July fireworks and literally give these "missiles" to every city in America for their annual celebrations? $3-$4 billion would make a whole lot of fireworks, and it could at least be enjoyed for pure entertainment purposes by most Americans if they want to see their tax dollars literally burned up every year. You could even keep rocket developers busy, where they would be able to "test fly" their designs on a regular basis. That is much more to say that to have a bunch of rocket developers design a vehicle that will never fly due to an eventual shift in priorities, political parties, and mismanagement that usually accompanies most NASA rocket development projects.
In order to make "genuine" 3D movies, we would have to create a "tank" or "table" that would be a volumetric display. Such things do exist in various forms, but there needs to be some very hard work performed before these become practical. Dealing with "voxels" rather than "pixels" is a huge leap and fraught with all kinds of problems, not the least of which is the sheer bandwidth necessary to make it all work in the first place.
The problem isn't necessarily "unsolvable", but it is a very difficult problem to deal with. The trick is to find some medium where you could have a "voxel" on a display system that could have selective properties ranging from reflectivity and perhaps requiring the ability for illumination from that element too.
The ability to make such a "tank" is about where television was at in the 1920's and 1930's, by comparison. In theory it is possible, but really bright minds necessary to get it to work out haven't really pushed through the issues involved yet, nor really the techniques to pull it off have been created yet. It isn't science fiction, as it really can be created, it just is a hard problem. Philo Farnsworth had to plow a potato farm in Idaho, realizing that the furrows could be painted on a screen as phosphorescent pixels in order to get television to work. I would imagine it would have to be some similar kind of thinking to get true volumetric displays to work.
The first 3D stereoscope video game I ever saw was on an Apple ][e computer that was essentially a clone of Battlezone. I don't know of the exact year, but it had to be the early 1980's.
Considering the quality of the "hires graphics" on the early Apple computers, there wasn't a whole lot you could do, but then again it was impressive what games you could cram into 64k of RAM.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that somebody experimented with the concepts back in the 1960's, if you want to find what would arguably be the "first" 3D video game. Space War and some other very sophisticated games date back to that era.
3D movies have been around since the 1950's, and steroscopes dating back to the 19th Century. The principles for perceiving 3D images are certainly not new. Movies went to "3D" originally because that was something which wouldn't work very well on television and the movie studios felt very threatened at the time by "free" network television broadcasts.
What surprises me the most about the current "fad" for 3D movies in Hollywood this time (as opposed to previous efforts at 3D movies) is that this particular run seems to have legs, and more significantly there have been some hits where 3D movies have really made some money for a change. In previous situations, many directors were so caught up with the technology that they produced garbage thinking that the technology would sell the movie. After the novelty wore off, people stopped going and eventually being labeled a "3D movie" became a joke and the kiss of death for a film in the box office. Soundly, Hollywood directors dropped the effort then even though occasionally there were some who tried with different techniques from time to time.
While you may not like some of the current films that are 3D, one huge difference that has been happening is that some 1st rate directors and actors are involved in this new round of filmmaking, and more significantly they are telling real stories rather than merely showing off the technology as something cool for its own sake. If more directors concentrated on the story rather than the technology, it would make for better movies all around.
The one reason why being a "3D movie" is no longer the kiss of death is mainly because the people alive for when the series of awful 3D movies were around earlier are now either dead or at least senior citizens who typically don't go to movie theaters anyway. I argue that the issue is mainly generational ignorance, but also a change in attitude among directors who are making these films. I also predict that there will start to be some significant exploitation of the medium where some very horrible films will be made that rely upon the technology for a new generation to realize they are just milking the system.... like happened in the past. If you want to see how bad it can get, just read up on Jaws 3-D
I have been an OSM contributor myself, and I'm sorry if I implied that the OSM volunteers and organizers are seeking to make a profit off of their activities... at least following the Gracenote fiasco path.
I agree that legally speaking the OSM license is such that the data generated can't reshaped into a proprietary license. There were many contributors to the CDDB that thought the database being generated was open sourced and that was implied while it was being developed... at least until it was too late to make a big difference. Many in the open source community get wary about those who would try to do that kind of thing again.
I like your analogies to other on-line encyclopedias (Encarta, Britannica, and others) to Wikipedia. It is quite fitting, although the OSM projects is going to take a fair bit more time before that happens. I see something similarly happening with Google, although there the analogy is perhaps better compared to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy project where that although there are good intentions and an organization involved who is sympathetic to the community as a whole, divergent interests are present where eventually this volunteer effort will fall apart. It is Google's effort that you have to question here, even if they promote "competition" to the OSM effort after a fashion. I wouldn't trust Google, at least so far as always being so friendly to the open source mapping community, or even hosting the service in the long term.
The issue here is that there is a fairly substantial project that has been explicitly generating map data under an open-source license (until very recently, they have been using CC-by-SA). That differs substantially with YouTube and other commercial companies showing user generated content because you are and must be permitted to obtain the original source material and be able to remix, reuse, and re-edit the data.
If you mix the data from the OSM project, all of the data must also be available for reuse, including be available in its native format. That is the point, and the viral nature of the license. This is no different than the GPL and using GPL'd software in another software package. If you have some software using GPL'd subroutines (ignoring at the moment issues with LGPL), the entire software package must be GPL'd.
The argument about contributions is mainly which kind of project would you want to work for: A company who claims copyright on all of your contributions and doesn't care about your opinions and feelings on the matter... even if you have spent literally years of your life building the database, or would your rather be a part of a community of volunteers where you do have a say in the direction of the data reuse policies and that you can continue to access your own contributions at a future date and are free to use the contributions of other volunteers for your own purposes... whatever those may be.
For myself, I'd rather put the effort into an open source group that gives back to the world than working for free in a company that makes millions of dollars off of my volunteer efforts. Google can and likely will be sold to some multi-national conglomerate in the future (through a merger/acquisition, or some other pure business move) where the shareholders are only interested in one thing: How much money can you make for them. The purpose of those companies is to maximize profits and to increase shareholder equity. Why would you volunteer to help out an organization where that is their mission statement?
As an overlay, I don't think that would be a problem. The issue is mixing in the mapping data and combining with non-open source mapping data and prohibiting derivative works from the end result. I don't see how Google could get that accomplished.
Is there anything preventing Google from using the OSM data itself in Google Maps?
The OSM data license is an open-source license that would require Google to reciprocate and allow its map data to be used by the OSM project.... something that Google most definitely doesn't want to have happen. This is something where they can't have their cake and eat it too. If they displayed the OSM data as a "separate view" being a "community contribution view" that could in turn be put into the OSM database, sure.... they could do that.
The issue really is over how users can reuse the licensed data. Google holds all of their data as completely proprietary and has even gone on record as willing to prosecute those who blatantly copy data from Google. A common mapmaker technique is to deliberately introduce errors into their maps (such as misnaming a certain street or adding in small details such as a non-existent park) where copying that data can be used as evidence of copyright infringement. If the map was generated from actually being there or knowing the local geography, such details won't be copied as they don't exist. There are such errors in the OSM data too (mostly accidental and can be corrected, but they are there) so this can go both ways.
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I have no doubt that SpaceX could send somebody on a circum-lunar flight essentially duplicating Apollo 8, and that they could relatively easily make a flight to Phobos or Deimos and return.
Landing on Mars, however, is a whole other problem and something which has proven to be harder to surmount than a solo climb of Mount Everest. Carmack's lander certainly can get to the Moon and back up to lunar orbit just fine (aka being able to perhaps duplicate Apollo 11 for a "weekend" trip to the Moon), but Mars is a much harder problem.
What makes Mars so nasty is that it has an atmosphere which has to be dealt with (heat shields are necessary, and aerobraking is useful to consider), but at the same time it is so thin that it can't be relied upon to really help you out at the most critical time of landing like it does here on the Earth or on Venus and Titan. Essentially it is very easy to either burn up or go smack onto the surface, and has an entirely different engineering realm in terms of being able to successfully land or take off from the surface of Mars. So far, nothing has ever been able to take off from the surface of Mars and return back to the Earth, shy of a very large meteor that dislodged whatever it is that made it to the Earth.
The other issue that doesn't seem to be as big of a deal to me due to experience on Mir, Skylab, and the ISS is long-term survival in space. NAUTLUS-X seems to be the way to go at least as a general design that is likely going to be duplicated for other spaceships doing interplanetary travel. Like I said, that gets you to Phobos which is tantalizingly close to the surface of Mars, but to actually go down and come back to Phobos is the real trick. Somebody will figure that out, but it will take some time. Phobos would certainly be an excellent waypoint and logistical center for trips to Mars (including perhaps even a fuel depot).
The one practical application for He3 that does not require nuclear fusion to be successful is to use the substance as a refrigerant. He3 happens to have the lowest boiling point for any liquid known in chemistry, and thus can cool stuff down when you really need to get to absolute zero. For superconductor research and other cryogenic applications, there is a huge need for the substance.... to the point that mining it on the Moon could provide a small but economically viable source of revenue.
Yes, it can be obtained from terrestrial sources too (and it is), but there is a market for the substance and obtaining it from the Moon is a practical alternative even if its use as a fusion fuel never happens.
Besides, I like Boron fusion systems better, and that can be obtained cheaply and easily from terrestrial sources. A box of Borax contains enough Boron to power a fusion reactor for a year... and many people simply flush that down the drain in a very literal fashion every week.
Elon Musk has burned through all of his PayPal stash, not to mention that his ex-wife grabbed what was left after the very public divorce. That he had a lot of money is true, but that money is gone. Still, for a multi-millionaire who burned through his cash reserves, he has a fair bit of stuff to show for all of that money unlike other wealthy people who have burned through a similar pile of money having nothing but sports cars an yachts to show for that effort.
Tesla Motors took up pretty much the tiny bit that was left when it was mis-managed and flowing red ink, where I think his ex-wife got a healthy chuck too. Elon Musk still controls 51% of Tesla, however, but he had to get a whole bunch of other investment capital including from Toyota. He has been doing similar deals to infuse SpaceX with cash.
SpaceX has launched the Falcon 9 though, together with a cluster of Merlin engines that are going to be flying with the F9-H. It has also successfully orbited the Dragon capsule and has successfully recovered that vehicle too. Those aren't small accomplishments, where launching the F9-H is going to be more of an incremental improvement rather than a radically new vehicle.
That there are engineering challenges, I will grant, and it still isn't all that certain SpaceX can maintain the production flow they are hoping for (about 10 or so F9's and F9-H launches per year). If they can pull that off, it will be quite impressive and getting to the Moon or Mars will certainly seem much closer.
The real game changer, however, will be the Merlin-2 engine.... if they ever get that thing built. That is the engine which will supposedly have better performance and higher thrust numbers than the F-1 engine used on the Saturn V and most certainly will make going to Mars doable. That must be the engine Elon Musk is thinking about when he made such a bold statement.
I certainly could see SpaceX being able to fly a manned mission to Mars using Falcon XX rockets.... assuming somebody will pay for it. As to who is going to pay for that rocket remains the question. I, too, am skeptical that commercial spaceflight is going to expand significantly such that a purely commercial venture to Mars will happen within the next decade or two. Here are some sources of commercial spaceflight revenue at the moment:
There are other potential marke
I think NASA has been such a train wreck for so long that almost anything Obama did would have been an improvement. Even so, I don't think there has been any presidential administration put NASA on a lower priority in terms of general attention it gets than Obama. The appointment of Bolden as the administrator of NASA alone took longer than any of his predecessors (with members of his own party doing most of the hold-up keeping it from happening).
The advantage of shutting down the Constellation program is that it was horribly mis-managed with shifting design requirements and some hard technical problems that made it very easy to shut down. That it was inspired by people working in his predecessor's administration (of another political party) was only icing on the cake that made killing that program irresistible. I was never a fan for technical reasons, but the economic and political reasons for killing it was shooting fish in a barrel.
One thing that is interesting is that Bolden is no longer appearing in public so much or being a point man for Obama's policies. I wonder if that is coincidence or if Bolden is tired of carrying the water for Obama.
It is useful to note that SpaceX is hardly the only company working to reduce launch costs, and there are a number of other potential future competitors to SpaceX that are likely to bust the $1,000/kg to LEO down much further. Even for the Falcon 9-Heavy rocket, rocket fuel considerations are a very minor consideration.
With the upcoming STS-134 Shuttle launch, I would venture to guess that the catering budget for the press corps covering the event (not to mention the VIPs) is going to be costing more than the fuel costs to operate the Shuttle.
Considering that SpaceX is using kerosene for their rockets, it still will be a long time before the price of a barrel of crude oil starts to influence launch costs. When that happens, I might think launch costs are starting to hit practical engineering limits. It isn't even a negotiation issue right now when calculating launch costs.
After all, we made the moon with laughable tech.
damn, you're clueless aren't you ?
Considering that the computing power of the Apollo Guidance Computer was roughly the same as a hotel room "card key entry" doorknob of today, and that the guys on the ground, during the missions, were still using slide rules for emergency burn calculations, I'd call that laughable tech. Werner Von Braun was a good plumber that made some huge engines work, but there have been a great many advances in spaceflight since that era.
I think I know who the clueless one is.
Most of NASA is already driven by the commercial sector, known as "contractors". NASA doesn't even make anything anymore do they? It's all made by Boeing, Lockheed, Northrup et. al.
Perhaps true, but these contractors are largely government agencies anyway, and it sort of defeats the purpose for "commercial spaceflight" when all you are doing is replacing who writes the checks for these workers, while in the process perhaps putting a bit more instability for the individual workers who make the projects. The question here is the source of the funding, not necessarily the fact that an employee has a government civil service pay grade receiving a paycheck from the Treasury Department directly or more indirectly through a for-profit company.
It also matters what the nature of the contract involved is here, if it is a "cost-plus" contract where all of the minutiae of your job is decided by a government bureaucrat, or if the company is pretty much free to implement the design how it feels and only the final end-product is subject to a formal thumbs up/thumbs down acceptance. There is a difference here on a number of levels.
It also matters if the things that a company is doing can be also sold to other governments or private citizens without special legislation being passed by congress. Most of the products being developed for NASA by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrup-Grumman, or ATK can only be sold to government customers, as the exceptions are clearly exceptions. Even when the legal requirement isn't there, these companies aren't really selling to pure commercial ventures in space. Until very recently, it wasn't even a consideration for ULA to think Richard Branson might want to use an Atlas V or Delta IV for a spaceline carrying private passengers. Indeed, it was illegal for them to even consider such a pure commercial venture until recently.
These "commercial contractors" are not in control of the products, nor do they really design the vehicles except in terms of the most mundane issues. Key design considerations for all of these vehicles from the traditional spaceflight companies, and certainly the major decisions in terms of how large of a vehicle is going to be developed, what fuel it will use, where it will launch, what materials will be used in its construction, and other key decisions are all made by government bureaucrats. I don't really call that commercial spaceflight except in the most loose sense of the term.
There are commercial spaceflight companies who do make all of these decisions alone without any government input, except for an FAA official who gives the final air worthiness certificate once the vehicle has been built. The layers of government oversight are considerably less when it is purely private money on the line. This can and in fact is happening right now with a number of companies, including several who are now getting NASA funding for their products simply because they work.
Add to that the Plymouth & Massachusetts Bay colony was entirely funded by private efforts, as was the Virginia company. As a matter of fact, both of those colonies in America had to receive charters "purchased" from the crown of England before they even set sail.
When Antarctica was "discovered" (or at least recorded on official journals and publicly announced... discounting a "Terra Australius" mentioned anciently), the warships charting that discovery noted American whaling ships that had not only anchored nearby but were encamped on shore repairing equipment and hunting seals.
I could go on, but there have been many "voyages of discovery" that were either privately financed or funded as a philanthropic endeavor with mainly private funds. Yes, government financed expeditions can and did happen in the past too, but even then the prospects of opening trade routes was a major motivating force for those efforts.
Note that the Outer Space Treaty only requires that a signatory nation announce at least a year in advance that they are going to withdraw from the treaty. If the political will is there to have a country like the United States to claim extra-terrestrial real estate, it can easily happen and no other signatory nation can do a thing about it.... shy of going to war over the issue.
If the technology exists to be able to mine an extra-terrestrial body or do anything else in space, it can be done. Besides, commercial "exploitation" of space is already happening even with the Outer Space Treaty.
About the only thing it really impacts in terms of private citizens is activities below the Kármán line (if your spacecraft or satellite crashes into somebody's house, you have to pay damages, and you need aviation clearance to launch and/or enter the atmosphere). Spacecraft actually in space are governed by the laws of the country who launched the vehicle (giving some odd legal issues in the ISS if a felony happened up there). Ownership issue by private individuals is not covered by the treaty, but then again neither are the land allocation rules either.
While not really the intention of the treaty, the rule in space is that possession is 99.99% of the law, and if you have a bigger gun, you get to keep whatever it is that you possess. And yes, guns have already flown in space, and I'm not talking just a pistol or airguns either. The net effect of the Outer Space Treaty is that no nation claims territorial status to anything beyond the Earth, so it is a free-for-all as private citizens to work out governance principles in space for themselves. Somehow I don't think that situation will last when people who are not government employees are in space in large numbers.
Many of the top "new" aerospace companies are already siphoning off the cream of the crop from many of these companies, including operations in Houston. That talent isn't going to waste, and I'd have to agree that there is a deep talent pool which does need to pass on the lessons learned from one generation to another. That is indeed a huge issue, so I don't want to minimize that.
Still, those involved with the manned spaceflight program at NASA have a dismal record of getting anything accomplished, where the last new design to actually make it into space has been the Space Shuttle, started in the Johnson administration and approved during the Nixon administration in terms of real funding. If the experience of nearly a dozen failed launcher projects is lost, it could even be said to be a good thing after a fashion. Something is certainly missing from what needs to happen as the object of the whole exercise, getting people into space, seems to be lost completely anymore. If the same worker bees keep shifting around from one nameless company to another, perhaps the whole system needs to be rethought.
I'm also going to acknowledge that there ought to be a transition after a fashion, as radical moves can throw out the baby with the bathwater. The question is more in terms of how gradual, and what it really means in terms of a privatized spaceflight system in America. Merely becoming another contractor to NASA doing what was done by government employees isn't really privatization, as opposed to a company who sell spaceflight services to NASA as a customer but also sells those same services to many other people who are not even government agencies. More significantly, private companies don't have to "spread the wealth" by putting offices in key congressional districts, but rather make the decision in terms of where to locate facilities based upon hard economic decisions to remain profitable.
The U.S. federal government is hitting a brick wall in terms of finances, and the train wreck is going to do far more than take out NASA. For myself, I wish that America had the money and the political will among the politicians in DC to be able to continue to fund NASA as it has for decades, and perhaps even go up to the 1960's levels of funding. Unfortunately cold hard reality is such that NASA is going to be an easy target with a weak constituency ripe to be wiped out in a budgetary compromise.... especially when programs like Head Start, Medicaid, and Social Security are also going to be hammered hard. If T-bills lose the AAA bond rating quality, expect that to get much worse before it gets better.
I said nothing of the sort, I said that it can be a source of motivation, however. I also did not request that you help pay for this, either at gunpoint or through taxes. All I expect is that you and other critics simply do is get out of my way and out of the way of others who would go into space.
Essentially, quit being a jerk.
I think this speaks volumes about the rest of your reply. I regard that after 40 you are just starting to hit your useful stride and barely beginning to contribute back to society. There is a very good reason the U.S. Constitution requires somebody over the age of 40 to be President, but I suspect your youthful ignorance doesn't see that. I promise that you will live to regret this statement alone.
How little you even know about the 747 itself, much less the direction Boeing has gone. The 747 has had enough modifications and improvements since 1969 that versions produced today hardly resemble the vehicles originally built. Not only that, but Boeing alone (not to mention other aircraft designers) has introduced several new airplane designs since then which are substantially more fuel efficient and safer to fly, to the point that the 747 may even be discontinued from the Boeing product line. As an analogy, this particular one stinks and even backfires on you as well. Boeing's activities in spaceflight have also been rolled into their new product lines, of which one small part, GPS navigation systems, simply couldn't exist without spaceflight activities.
The rest of this post isn't even worth responding to as it demonstrates similar sorts of sheer ignorance on the topic.
It sounds like you are proving my point rather than providing ammunition against the idea. Which is more, $6 billion or $300 million? If we cut NASA completely but also eliminated taxes for commercial spaceflight, the federal government would still be money ahead.
BTW, the first private satellite (Telstar I) was launched on July 10, 1962 by AT&T. Commercial spaceflight certainly is happening now and is alive and well anyway. The purpose of cutting taxes is to increase that activity.... so why tax an activity which is being subsidized by the government in the first place right now, at much greater cost?
Rob Bishop is rated as "the most conservative representatives in the U.S. House" and is one who constantly calls for fiscal responsibility and decrying earmarks of other members of congress as being wasteful. I call that hypocrisy at the very least.
If Bishop was running on the platform of "bringing the bacon home to Utah" (as his fellow member in the Utah delegation, Orrin Hatch, did for his 2006 re-election campaign), it would be a bit more understandable. Sadly, he complains when others do that kind of thing but has no hesitation when doing it himself.
How do you think you can get to be 300 years old in the first place? Where are the ideas for getting that to happen going to come from?
In this case, it is a situation where you can have your cake and eat it too, but squelching efforts in one area are also going to stop development in other areas too. One of the reasons you may have even a couple more years on your life is precisely because of activities in space that have already happened, and people who have been inspired by spaceflight to make things and to discover things that have extended your life and the lives of your descendants (should you choose to have any).
I'm responding to somebody who wants to kill any effort for going to the Moon as a bad idea. You are responding to me suggesting it is a zero sum game, which it most certainly is not. Expanding humanity to other worlds is going to enable more economic activity and provide more raw materials to fuel the collective thoughts of mankind to make your life better including being able to live longer, if that is your choice.
Besides, if we can have millions of tons (metric or imperial, it doesn't matter for this) of raw materials obtained from sources in space, we can turn the Earth into a park and not have to damage fragile environments like coral reefs or arctic tundra. We can have the resources to "be green" and still live an advanced post-industrial lifestyle with all of the creature comforts you currently enjoy.
Why not completely turn it over to the commercial sector?
I have suggested the following plan to pay for a manned spaceflight program, that would have minimal impact upon the federal budget but end up producing a very robust and active manned spaceflight presence of Americans on not just the Moon, but on Mars and elsewhere:
Enact legislation that completely eliminates all federal taxes of any kind for industries or products that ultimately end up in space, and for all economic activities that happen in space. This moratorium on taxes should last at least 50 years from the passage of the legislation (to provide for a predictable economic environment for companies working in space). Yes, that would imply astronauts would not have to pay income tax for their work done in space, but that would be the tip of the iceberg.
Doing something that bold would not have to cost a whole lot of money, and certainly would be less in terms of even the current federal expenditures on NASA's human spaceflight effort of around $6-$8 billion per year... at least it would be less revenue lost than those current levels of expenditures. You would also see private capital pouring into spaceflight like you never saw before in your life, and a quest to make it profitable. I'm sure it would cause some distortion of American business practices (and some very unusual "space divisions" in some companies like Wal-Mart and McDonalds) but in the end it would be a way to finance spaceflight that wouldn't have to depend on a fickle change in presidential administrations every four to eight years.
Although it is futile to respond to a classical straw man argument, I do want to respond in this particular case:
Where is you sense of wonder, a desire to go someplace different or do something that nobody else has ever been before?
Where is it that we can go which will inspire humanity to do something new, something different, and to bring new ideas into nearly all discussions?
Going into space, and in particular sending people (not just robots) to visit other worlds and to find new places to explore is something which can benefit all of humanity merely because it is being done, regardless of cost or difficulty. Not only will it be beneficial, I don't think there has been a person on this planet, regardless of where they live, that hasn't been substantially impacted for good as a result of manned spaceflight activities. No, I'm not talking about Tang, Teflon, or Velcro either (none of which were developed for or as a result of spaceflight... at least initially). More food is available, diplomacy is easier to conduct, and general knowledge of other cultures is much better as a direct result of spaceflight.
This will only improve and become better if we can build a permanent settlement on the Moon or other worlds. Besides, I think it can also be done for a profit, but that is a completely separate issue entirely.
The largest employer in his district is the Weber County School District, but otherwise I'd have to agree with your position on Rob Bishop. The guy is a sell-out, and is partly responsible for a $3 billion earmark (nearly the only one in the current budget) for the "SLS" launch system (often dubbed the "Senate Launch System") to essentially restart under a new name the Ares V project.
It is useful to note that the ATK plant was in his Utah State House of Representatives district before he was elected to his current seat in Washington, thus has a rather cozy relationship with the people in that company as well as many neighbors who work for them as well.
One legitimate issue that needs to be addressed is in terms of how to keep domestic production going for the Ammonium Perchlorate, which is a vital chemical needed for general defense purposes. That is the primary chemical used in solid rocket boosters, and is used for most of the ICBMs in the arsenal of the United States (as well as the missiles in submarines). Right now, those missiles aren't being built, so there is a need for at least somebody, somewhere, to be using this chemical so that the factories making this rocket fuel can keep going for when the ICBM fleet needs to be refurbished for the next generation (the fuel is unstable and does need to be replaced periodically).
My personal solution to the problem: Rather than disguising a NASA program as something other than a make-work jobs program to keep the factory workers at these chemical plants employed, why not simply get into the business of making 4th of July fireworks and literally give these "missiles" to every city in America for their annual celebrations? $3-$4 billion would make a whole lot of fireworks, and it could at least be enjoyed for pure entertainment purposes by most Americans if they want to see their tax dollars literally burned up every year. You could even keep rocket developers busy, where they would be able to "test fly" their designs on a regular basis. That is much more to say that to have a bunch of rocket developers design a vehicle that will never fly due to an eventual shift in priorities, political parties, and mismanagement that usually accompanies most NASA rocket development projects.
In order to make "genuine" 3D movies, we would have to create a "tank" or "table" that would be a volumetric display. Such things do exist in various forms, but there needs to be some very hard work performed before these become practical. Dealing with "voxels" rather than "pixels" is a huge leap and fraught with all kinds of problems, not the least of which is the sheer bandwidth necessary to make it all work in the first place.
The problem isn't necessarily "unsolvable", but it is a very difficult problem to deal with. The trick is to find some medium where you could have a "voxel" on a display system that could have selective properties ranging from reflectivity and perhaps requiring the ability for illumination from that element too.
The ability to make such a "tank" is about where television was at in the 1920's and 1930's, by comparison. In theory it is possible, but really bright minds necessary to get it to work out haven't really pushed through the issues involved yet, nor really the techniques to pull it off have been created yet. It isn't science fiction, as it really can be created, it just is a hard problem. Philo Farnsworth had to plow a potato farm in Idaho, realizing that the furrows could be painted on a screen as phosphorescent pixels in order to get television to work. I would imagine it would have to be some similar kind of thinking to get true volumetric displays to work.
The first 3D stereoscope video game I ever saw was on an Apple ][e computer that was essentially a clone of Battlezone. I don't know of the exact year, but it had to be the early 1980's.
Considering the quality of the "hires graphics" on the early Apple computers, there wasn't a whole lot you could do, but then again it was impressive what games you could cram into 64k of RAM.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that somebody experimented with the concepts back in the 1960's, if you want to find what would arguably be the "first" 3D video game. Space War and some other very sophisticated games date back to that era.
3D movies have been around since the 1950's, and steroscopes dating back to the 19th Century. The principles for perceiving 3D images are certainly not new. Movies went to "3D" originally because that was something which wouldn't work very well on television and the movie studios felt very threatened at the time by "free" network television broadcasts.
What surprises me the most about the current "fad" for 3D movies in Hollywood this time (as opposed to previous efforts at 3D movies) is that this particular run seems to have legs, and more significantly there have been some hits where 3D movies have really made some money for a change. In previous situations, many directors were so caught up with the technology that they produced garbage thinking that the technology would sell the movie. After the novelty wore off, people stopped going and eventually being labeled a "3D movie" became a joke and the kiss of death for a film in the box office. Soundly, Hollywood directors dropped the effort then even though occasionally there were some who tried with different techniques from time to time.
While you may not like some of the current films that are 3D, one huge difference that has been happening is that some 1st rate directors and actors are involved in this new round of filmmaking, and more significantly they are telling real stories rather than merely showing off the technology as something cool for its own sake. If more directors concentrated on the story rather than the technology, it would make for better movies all around.
The one reason why being a "3D movie" is no longer the kiss of death is mainly because the people alive for when the series of awful 3D movies were around earlier are now either dead or at least senior citizens who typically don't go to movie theaters anyway. I argue that the issue is mainly generational ignorance, but also a change in attitude among directors who are making these films. I also predict that there will start to be some significant exploitation of the medium where some very horrible films will be made that rely upon the technology for a new generation to realize they are just milking the system.... like happened in the past. If you want to see how bad it can get, just read up on Jaws 3-D
I have been an OSM contributor myself, and I'm sorry if I implied that the OSM volunteers and organizers are seeking to make a profit off of their activities... at least following the Gracenote fiasco path.
I agree that legally speaking the OSM license is such that the data generated can't reshaped into a proprietary license. There were many contributors to the CDDB that thought the database being generated was open sourced and that was implied while it was being developed... at least until it was too late to make a big difference. Many in the open source community get wary about those who would try to do that kind of thing again.
I like your analogies to other on-line encyclopedias (Encarta, Britannica, and others) to Wikipedia. It is quite fitting, although the OSM projects is going to take a fair bit more time before that happens. I see something similarly happening with Google, although there the analogy is perhaps better compared to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy project where that although there are good intentions and an organization involved who is sympathetic to the community as a whole, divergent interests are present where eventually this volunteer effort will fall apart. It is Google's effort that you have to question here, even if they promote "competition" to the OSM effort after a fashion. I wouldn't trust Google, at least so far as always being so friendly to the open source mapping community, or even hosting the service in the long term.
The issue here is that there is a fairly substantial project that has been explicitly generating map data under an open-source license (until very recently, they have been using CC-by-SA). That differs substantially with YouTube and other commercial companies showing user generated content because you are and must be permitted to obtain the original source material and be able to remix, reuse, and re-edit the data.
If you mix the data from the OSM project, all of the data must also be available for reuse, including be available in its native format. That is the point, and the viral nature of the license. This is no different than the GPL and using GPL'd software in another software package. If you have some software using GPL'd subroutines (ignoring at the moment issues with LGPL), the entire software package must be GPL'd.
The argument about contributions is mainly which kind of project would you want to work for: A company who claims copyright on all of your contributions and doesn't care about your opinions and feelings on the matter... even if you have spent literally years of your life building the database, or would your rather be a part of a community of volunteers where you do have a say in the direction of the data reuse policies and that you can continue to access your own contributions at a future date and are free to use the contributions of other volunteers for your own purposes... whatever those may be.
For myself, I'd rather put the effort into an open source group that gives back to the world than working for free in a company that makes millions of dollars off of my volunteer efforts. Google can and likely will be sold to some multi-national conglomerate in the future (through a merger/acquisition, or some other pure business move) where the shareholders are only interested in one thing: How much money can you make for them. The purpose of those companies is to maximize profits and to increase shareholder equity. Why would you volunteer to help out an organization where that is their mission statement?
As an overlay, I don't think that would be a problem. The issue is mixing in the mapping data and combining with non-open source mapping data and prohibiting derivative works from the end result. I don't see how Google could get that accomplished.
Is there anything preventing Google from using the OSM data itself in Google Maps?
The OSM data license is an open-source license that would require Google to reciprocate and allow its map data to be used by the OSM project.... something that Google most definitely doesn't want to have happen. This is something where they can't have their cake and eat it too. If they displayed the OSM data as a "separate view" being a "community contribution view" that could in turn be put into the OSM database, sure.... they could do that.
The issue really is over how users can reuse the licensed data. Google holds all of their data as completely proprietary and has even gone on record as willing to prosecute those who blatantly copy data from Google. A common mapmaker technique is to deliberately introduce errors into their maps (such as misnaming a certain street or adding in small details such as a non-existent park) where copying that data can be used as evidence of copyright infringement. If the map was generated from actually being there or knowing the local geography, such details won't be copied as they don't exist. There are such errors in the OSM data too (mostly accidental and can be corrected, but they are there) so this can go both ways.