Heat is hardly a big deal at all. For crying out loud, the "atmosphere" of the Moon is essentially a vacuum, and that is one of the best insulative materials you can possible find. If anything, the problem you would find in any sort of Lunar habitat is trying to figure out how to get rid of the excess heat (i.e. provide "air conditioning"), even during the "lunar night". During the Lunar day it would be even more of an issue, although you could still build a temporary "heat sink" that could radiate that heat out during the "night".
Nearly any metabolism, even plant metabolism, is going to create heat just by simply existing and living. People produce an incredible amount of heat. To give a really good example for how much heat a human body can produce, take a look at the Mall of America which is located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. During the Minnesota winters, it can get to -40 (C or F... same thing at that temperature). Yet if you look at this Wikipedia entry, you will note that there isn't a single furnace in the entire building. All of the heat is provided by the metabolism of the shoppers themselves, the lighting fixtures, and from cooking surfaces from the many restaurants in the facility. That is it! It has air conditioners in the building, and surprisingly those even run during the winter.
If getting rid of heat is a problem even in Minneapolis during the winter, what do you think it will be like on the Moon?
That's microgravity, not low gravity. Different problem, and even if it was similar, we still don't have very much information.
That sounds like something that is screaming for some solid scientific research by itself that can have some incredibly powerful long-term knowledge gains. Just imagine the scientific breakthroughs just using this as one variable alone for various physiological experiments.
And you are using this as rationale for why we shouldn't go to the Moon?
Doing the same thing on a rotating platform (even if it is just 1 rpm) isn't going to give you nearly same sorts of controls that a solid "planetary" surface can give you.
And has been said elsewhere on this overall topic today, we know how to build things on the surface of a gravity well. Building on the moon, once some basic infrastructure is in place, will be trivial and the materials to make those facilities will be right at hand. Building at an L-point, GEO, or especially LEO is going to simply require shipping materials from some sort of gravity well. The ISS has proven how incredibly expensive it can be to ship nearly anything into orbit, but as the ISS is mainly a "make work" project for NASA anyway, it really doesn't matter... in that particular situation.
About the only thing that can't be manufactured in large quantities on the Moon is water, as hydrogen and nitrogen are two particular elements necessary for life that are not in large quantities there. However if you look at the ISS, that is a comparatively trivial in terms of its overall mass.
In order for these space stations to be constructed economically, it simply requires a substantial manufacturing infrastructure on the Moon in the first place. Or a near-Earth Asteroid, but that presents yet a whole different set of challenges that the Moon solves simply because it is in orbit already around the Earth.
While that may be solved, the equatorial ridge on Iapetus is just as confounding, perhaps even more so.
Crazy individuals like Richard Hogland are suggesting things like it is a large spacecraft aka Death Star due to this and other physical structures on this satellite of Saturn, but even from a pure geological/scientific viewpoint there are many more questions to be asked about this than have been answered.
It will be interesting to see if any follow-up mission to Saturn will ever happen after the Cassini mission ends within my lifetime, as there certainly have been some very amazing discoveries that deserve a strong follow-up investigation. It is amazing now that we have discovered such an amazing variety of worlds to explore even within our own Solar System, which is now beginning to help us to explain this hunk of rock that we live on right now as well.
Or more specifically, when you try to do a statistical comparison with a sample size of one, you tend to have all kinds of wild and crazy theories that get thrown around using that data point. Now that we have nearly 100 different worlds to compare the Earth to in terms of geological formation, structures, hydrology, and weather patterns; we certainly can start to make some much more informed guesses about what is happening right now here and what we can expect in the future.
I would have to agree with you on a general principle that A-life through biological means would mean using chemical processes like a biological laboratory or perhaps something akin to an oil refinery, and taking raw elements in the form of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and assembling those elements as a living thing that can self-replicate, given some basic nutrients.
I have heard of an eventual goal of creating a completely artificial eukaryote by some bio-researchers. The idea here is to try and figure out what the absolute minimum requirements would be necessary in terms of a genetic sequence that would still allow for self-replication. Sort of a biological equivalent of a RISC processor or perhaps even something of a biological equivalent of the Brainf*** programming language. Such an organism would have profound implications and even value in terms of biological research, where you could test different genetic sequences in a simple but known environment that wouldn't be fighting with billions of years of genetic evolution. In "the wild", such a simple organism would also face incredible competition and would likely be killed by nearly everything it would encounter, so mad monsters from a lab experiment would not likely cause many problems... at least with the basic A-life eukaroyte.
I agree that this is something that is decades away from being developed, but things such as writing a genetic sequence is certainly an important step to creating such living things.
One of the problems that the current RIAA approach is that they are ignoring the large scale publishers by going after these petty criminals. And this Minnesota woman mentioned in the articles is just that. She is accused of opening up to some friends a couple of CDs worth of MP3s.
I have seen some very large scale operations of blatant copyright violation in the past, including network sharing of copyrighted material. For crying out loud, I've had co-workers hand me nearly their entire CD collection compressed as MP3s on a couple of CDs.
This is also completely missing the Chinese CD copy pirates that even have complete CD pressing facilities, print up scanned jacket inserts, and sell the CDs as the real thing when in fact that isn't the case at all. And don't tell me these CDs don't end up in the USA, as I know for a fact that they do. This kind of activity is blatant copyright violations and involves criminal activities where not only is the "criminal" making money off of the duplication of the content, but it also does real damage that can be measured in a genuine sense where some individuals are buying this content thinking it is the real thing, completely unaware that it was made through an illegal process and the artist gets absolutely nothing in return.
I've also see websites... and they still do exists... that have hundreds or even thousands of CDs worth of data, and even hundreds of complete DVD movies available for download in blatant disregard for copyright laws. I know some of them have been shut down, but that just means they are avoiding to advertise on Google and other search engines, and you have to "go underground" to find these websites. If you search hard enough, you can still find them.
What this woman did was the equivalent of a shoplifter taking some candy or other low-value merchandise from a store. Certainly it is illegal and perhaps needs to be prosecuted. But it doesn't need to become a national news story, nor draw the attention of multi-national corporations to fly their lawyers across the country in order to prosecute individuals who are for the most part clueless to begin with. Certainly the $300,000 fine+ court costs is way over the top.
I would also like to ask this rather tough question to the RIAA: If any of this money is collected, will even a single penny of that money go into the hands of the artist you were representing?
This is tragedy compounding the situation, as copyright law is really there to protect the content creator. These organizations like the RIAA do very little to help the plight of the ordinary musician, nor does a prosecution like this ultimately help out a journeyman musician. I'm not talking the grand masters that are at the peak of popular culture and earn their deservedly millions of dollars. They can usually negotiate reasonable recording contracts and keep most of their money. I'm talking the more ordinary folks who are getting screwed over by the RIAA, where a prosecution like this will result in that same Minnesota woman simply declaring bankruptcy to get out of the debt, and the RIAA will then claim what little was paid toward the fine as legal costs. The only people who "won" in this case was the RIAA lawyers themselves, and not their "clients" for whom they were supposedly representing.
All that money represents is a medium of exchange, where you trade something you have (usually labor, but often other things too) to obtain the things you want.
The problem with digital cash and other sorts of record keeping systems that avoid the use of a physical artifact (aka a coin or a piece of paper) is that they can be and often are used by that "central authority" to perform other tasks with the information besides using it as an exchange. The most obvious is government "espionage" and surveillance. The issue of "identity theft" also occurs, strong crytographic techniques notwithstanding.
The downfall of physical cash is that it can burn, be stolen, or be lost through means other than being used to purchase something. Communication costs are also something of an issue, but I think that would involve other problems as well if you are depending on fiat currency (like the current U.S. Dollar, the Euro, or even the British Pound) as a medium of exchange. The issuing agency or government has the ability to inflate the value of that currency (actually reduce its value). Governments like the Wiemar Republic (1930's) in Germany and Brazil in the 1980's were legendary at doing this... where inflation for both countries were well above 1000% annually during this period of hyperinflation. Think about that carefully, and do you want to have something that may drop in value to 0.001% of its original value on a round-trip journey to Bernard's Star... or even Europa?
Currency "backed" by physical species (aka a gold coin of certified purity and weight) has the advantage of still retaining value even if the issuing agency or government no longer exists. In the case of gold, there are many uses for gold that have absolutely nothing to do with its value as a form of money, and those uses are still valuable. Similar physical substances used for money have included silver, salt, even grain and cattle. The inflationary pressure that can occur with these physical currencies is that a new source of the materials can be found to destroy its value. For instance, if an asteroid were discovered that was very nearly a solid chunk of gold, the value of gold in the rest of the Solar System would become nearly worthless. This happened BTW after the 1849 Gold Rush in California, where some very real inflation hit the USA, and certainly hit the exchange rate between silver and gold... of concern as the U.S. Dollar was originally a bi-metallic currency of both silver and gold.
There are two rather unusual examples of currency retaining value after the government which issued it no longer exists. The Confederate States of America issued a rather large amount of currency during the four years of its existance, and some of it can still be found from time to time. Both for political reasons as well as the fact that the country no longer exits, its value is actually worth more even in inflation-adjusted value than it was when it was originally issued. That wasn't the case immediately after the U.S. Civil War, but that is another situation still.
Even more bizzare is how the Iraqi Dinar was able to retain its value after the collapse of the Hussein government, and even appreciate against the U.S. Dollar. Economists and political scientists are still trying to figure this one out, but the main thing is that the Iraqi people continued to accept it for payment, and the supply of the money remained limited due to the fact that the Saddam Hussein government was no longer around to add more money into the overall monetary supply.
What kind of monetary unit is going to be used for interplanetary exchange is something that can be debated, but I would strongly suggest that national currencies like the Euro and the Dollar are likely to be used for the next couple of centuries, and there is no need to create any kind of new unit that doesn't already exist. The other "benefits" of this supposed currency system really don't seem to be that big of a deal either, and has a huge number of other problems, most n
Re:Beyond the Moon, Looking Toward Mars
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The New Moon Race
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· Score: 1
I strongly disagree that this is a zero sum game, and I think there can be resources found to do both Martian as well as Lunar exploration and development. As well as strong economic reasons to be found to follow both paths, and even to do exploration of Near-Earth Asteroids, and possibly main-belt asteroids like Ceres and Vesta. I'm talking manned exploration of these bodies, not just things like the New Dawn spacecraft.
Also I would like to point out that the sheer distance to Mars is going to prove to be problematic for a whole lot of reasons that I don't think have been properly explored. When similar settlements and outposts of humanity were at the same distance (measured in time for resupply and travel to get there), the results have been appallingly disasterous. Jamestown, Greenland, and even Los Angeles (note that LA completely died out once due to a lack of water to grow crops or even to drink). Greenland might be considered a marginal success story, but even that had some huge problems, and there is reason to believe that many of the "native" Viking Greenlanders simply merged with the Inuit in order to survive after the 14th Century, becoming culturally indistinguishable. We may understand the problems that Jamestown suffered from and avoid them today, but Mars is a whole different situation, where there are enough unknowns that I think the analogy is very apt, especially if we are deluding ourselves that we know the answers to all of the potential problems that may come up on a manned expedition to Mars, much less trying to establish any sort of permanent presence on that planet.
The Moon is only 3 days away from the Earth by using chemical rockets, and even closer if you have some sort of nuclear rocket or some other sort of device that can provide continuous thrust. Launch windows from LEO to the Lunar surface happen every couple of hours, not less than once a year as it is for Mars. Basically, it will be a whole lot easier to play around in our little backyard than it is going to be for getting to Mars, even if landing on Phobos takes marginally the same amount of delta-v as it does going to the Moon.
Experience gained from going to the Moon will also eventually translate for anything happening on Mars, if only because there will be people "up there" as well that will be hoping to go to Mars instead of being stuck on the Moon.
I also believe that if you try to seek congressional support for a $60 billion dollar program for going to Mars, it will never happen. Congressmen simply can't run on the platform "if elected, we will send people to Mars!" There is no compelling national interest in getting there unless it is getting there first in a Martian land rush.
My own opinion is that if some sort of Lunar infrastructure is established, with private individuals permitted to travel into space without NASA approval, it will be a privately financed group that will end up getting to Mars first.... perhaps even with CNN cameras (and camera operators) recording the landing of the first NASA astronauts arriving on Mars. This sort of infrastructure can be built for far less than $60 billion.
I would also add here that both the Columbia and the Challenger were supposed to be prototype spacecraft, rather than the "final product".
For those engineers who design for a niche market (aka not some mass-produced product made in the millions), how often do you have a non-engineer boss who sees the prototype and insists that you are done with R&D? Far more than most would admit.
The Challenger was actually an earlier prototype built prior to the Columbia, but refurbished and turned into a real spacecraft. The Endeavor was really the only shuttle that was purpose built using the knowledge gained from the shuttle program, and even that used spare parts intended for general maintenance of the rest of the shuttle fleet.
In other words, the current incarnation of the Shuttle should have been mothballed years ago. And at a current price tag of nearly $1.5 billion per flight, each flight could have been a new engineering iteration to work out the "bugs" and push the general model of the shuttle design. If I remember correctly, the original price for each shuttle was actually less than $1 billion (1980's dollars) when they were built brand new. And yes, I do understand why it costs so much to fly that machine. That was fine when the Columbia first flew and the few flights after that.
What is the true travesty is that NASA appears to be abandoning nearly all of the engineering knowledge gained from flying the shuttle, and at the same time having to re-learn everything they lost by throwing away Apollo in the 1970's. In 30 years, I'm sure there will be something like a Shuttle II program that will try to re-create the knowledge gained from the current shuttle, but by then all of the current shuttle engineers will be pushing up daisies, or very happily retired.
You are missing the goal here, which isn't to rush and try to get to the Moon at any cost (that was the goal of Apollo). In addition, it was just to "plant the flag", gather a few rocks that were close by just to see what is up there, and get back before the sun set on the controllers back on Earth.
The current goal is to set up something that can be used for a bit of a longer term mission. Perhaps even more important is to simply survive the Lunar night. Apollo never even tried to accomplish that task at all.
While I would agree with your post in the sense that it seems NASA is trying to re-create Apollo all over again, even down to nearly identical "Apollo II" capsules (try to Google that term, BTW... that was some program that never happened). How this is being sold to Congress is another plant the flag mission, but I think that would be a huge mistake. If that is all that NASA accomplishes, they truly do need to be considered as a relic of the past no longer worthy of their heritage and the agency disbanded.
What is needed is a genuine permanent human presence off of the Earth, and I believe that must include families and children, with the potential of human childbirth taking place somewhere off of the Earth. If this is to happen, the safety factors need to improve nearly a whole order of magnitude, and is something far more challenging. Even if all that happens is a Lunar equivalent of the South Pole Research Station, I would be incredibly impressed, but it can and should be more.
BTW, don't retread the argument about people not raising families in Antarctica. The reason that is the current situation is more political than technical... not even economic reasons are keeping families from Antarctica. Some parts of Antarctica are at least as habitable as the North Slope of Alaska, and there are some pretty big cities in that part of the world, and places in Siberia where conditions are even worse. If 100 years from now there aren't whole families waiting for the 3rd generation of lunatics (literally... people of the Moon) to be born, it will be also for purely terrestrial political reasons and not for any technical or even economic rational that will keep it from happening. Ditto more so for Mars.
Substitute Jobs for Wozniak and I think you have a real winner in terms of somebody who IMHO is the modern equivalent of Edison or Tesla... but with a former CEO that ignored his genius and dismissed the potential factory of new ideas that could have come out of that inventor/engineer.
In terms of Hawking, his "discovery" of Hawking radiation is a unique and seminal accomplishment that is at least on the order of the Photoelectric Effect, and may still yield something of a positive value to mankind in the future. The jury is still out on if that is a significant principle on a practical basis or not. In addition to Hawking radiation, he has also pushed the frontiers of Relativity in other areas as well, and has been instrumental in helping the next generation of physicists learn what the masters of the past understood.
As for Rutan, I think you are selling him short and premature on the fame side of the equation. It would be hard to compare Rutan to Goddard, as Goddard was also relatively unknown by people at the beginning of the 20th Century when he was doing most of his experiments. This is one of those "we'll see in 100 years if Rutan is famous or not". Goddard is famous only because of those who followed his work, in particular Werner Von Braun who copied Goddard's designs and pushed them well up to the next level on several subsequent designs that let ultimately to the Saturn V. Von Braun was just a kid when Goddard was doing his experiments, but hugely inspired by Goddard and other rocketry pioneers. If Rutan is successful with an orbital spacecraft, he will be remembered for much more than just Spaceship One.
If we are slowing down, it is because of bul*s*** regulations such as the Department of Homeland Security placing a ban on the sale of hydrogen peroxide or the DEA doing something similar with cough medicine.
Simply put, even from when I was a teenager until today (just a couple of decades ago) there were things you could get and purchase... without bureaucratic red tape.... that simply can't be done today in the name of "public safety". And it is getting worse rather than better.
Just another "for instance", as a teenager I used to go to the local pharmacy and purchase a 2 lb bottle of potassium nitrate (aka Salt Peter) and make my own home grown black powder and rocket fuel. It was sold at a pharmacy because it is also a heart medication to help out after a heart attack (drug companies now sell more expensive alternatives).
A more recent example was Armadillo Aerospace and their research into hydrogen peroxide rockets. A very legitimate and even open company that even law enforcement people could look into and check up on. They had some amazing rockets that used hydrogen peroxide as a mono propellant and achieved some incredible ISP numbers with them. But after they got beyond the casual hobbyist level of usage and tried to ramp up production on larger prototypes, John Carmack ran into a huge barrier put up by the Department of Homeland Security and kept them from being "certified" as a company who could use this chemical in large quantities. Those suppliers who could provide this chemical were afraid due to lawsuits and this red tape to provide sufficient quantities to continue the research. So Armadillo switched to another propellant scheme not because of scientific or engineering concerns, but for legal and poltical reasons alone.
There is also a huge clamping down on original research in many places, and kids are also not taught the scientific method in school much. This isn't to say they aren't taught about the scientific method, but that isn't the same thing. It is one thing to discuss the philosophical concepts of the scientific method, and another to actually do it and attempt to discover new truths about the universe.
People who did garage-level scientific research (a fair bit still happens) have always been considered a little bit odd, but were usually tolerated. I do believe that one-man small scale research can still happen in many areas of science that can be compared to Linnaeus, Goddard, or even Franklin. My kids have done science fair experiments that have produced, at least for me, unexpected results. Unfortunately it is the "big science" that usually is considered sexy and attracts the big money.
Forget about trying to figure out if you are voting for the opposition party or not.... what about intercepting those votes and getting them changed on the way to being counted?
Checksums can help to detect some interceptions and modifications.... but that is only a partial and imperfect solution. Other cryptographic techniques can be used for both preventing people from finding out what your ballot has been cast as, or to modify your vote. Even that has some strong limitations and would prove to be impossible to completely secure over a public network where the fate of the government hangs in balance.
Elections are the one activity that must be several orders of magnitude more reliable and secure than even military or even financial transactions.... not the other way around. Just because you can more or less reliably transmit a credit card securely doesn't mean the same system can be trusted for an election.
This issue doesn't even get into the fact that most coal-burning power plants release more *radioactive* material into the atmosphere and other waste repositories... primarily Uranium and other heavy metals mixed in with the Coal when it was sitting in the ground... than would ever be released if all a nuclear power plant did was send their nuclear waste to a typical city dump in ordinary unshielded dump trucks (not that I'm volunteering to drive such a vehicle).
The only reason why people are so paranoid about nuclear power plants is that they don't understand the basics of nuclear physics, and the big "N-word" carries so much baggage by anti-war activists.
Every form of energy production, including purely organic energy producers like a team of horses, have environmental waste issues that need to be dealt with. When you need to concentrate large amounts of energy in one place (aka Aluminum or Silicon chip foundries) that environmental damage will be more concentrated.
Per pound of waste and overall damage to the environment per kilowatt hour produced, I would dare say that nuclear power is perhaps the most efficient and cleanest energy source possible. Fusion is more efficient, but even fission reactors are not as bad as everybody would have you think.
This thought here regarding the conservation of energy is perhaps something that may lead to a more general understanding of the multiverse model.
Keep in mind that one of the primary "facts" that lead to the development of the Theory of Relativity was the idea that the speed of light, as measured with the best instruments at the end of the 19th Century, was identical in all directions within the range of experimental error. Nearly all of Relativity is a result of keeping the speed of light as a constant instead of a variable.
The Laws of Thermodynamics have proven themselves to not only be as fundamental as you can get in terms of scientific concepts, but have shown the general philosophy that nothing can be created nor destroyed on a fundamental level holds true as well... far beyond even the original thinking of those who proposed these laws in the first place. Conservation of information, mass-energy conversion, and other principles merely show that you need to dig deeper if you find a "leak" allowing these principles to be violated.
So you are on the right track here, but it would require taking the concept of a many-worlds multiverse and trying to decide how that would relate to these Laws of Thermodynamics. Perhaps over time, and averaged out over both time and space, these multiverses "collapse" to form identical universes?
From an Science Fiction viewpoint.... does squashing a bug accidentally if you time travel to pre-historic Earth mean that Nazi Germany will win WWII? Or that the earth is dominated by intelligent marsupials instead of intelligent primates? Does a multiverse model allow for time travel at all... aka John Titor type concepts requiring a multiverse in order to work?
I am suggesting here that one way to solve this "problem" is to demonstrate how the universe as we see it does conserve energy and that these "virtual" universes average out over time to be functionally identical to what we currently see. Or perhaps another way to think of this is that there is also a conservation of multiverses as well that is merely an extention of the Laws of Thermodynamics. As a universe is created, it requires another universe to be "destroyed". Whatever that really means... you can use your own imagination here for fun.
You are not "free" to use your property however you want... if you are affecting somebody else. And using rockets clearly have a huge impact upon property rights besides your own.
And in terms of property rights.... no, you don't have a "right to own property". This is not enumerated in the Bill of Rights nor anywhere else in the U.S. constitution, nor in any statutory law or for that matter even common law. It may be an "implied right", but you do not have the right to use any property you own however you wish. And there are many examples of how many governments in the USA regulate and control what you can and can't do with stuff you own.
I can't even dig a well for water in my backyard without applying for a permit first, or for that matter paying off a whole bunch of people for the right to turn on the pump because of "water rights" that I had no control of before I even bought my home. And I do hold title to the land that my home sits upon. Living in the western USA you will find that control over water resources can be a huge issue, where some politicians in California are claiming they can regulate the water that falls on my back yard... when I don't even live in California and river water nearby comes from Wyoming. I'm not kidding here either.
This does not require a constitutional amendment, and I think if you tried to push that opinion by trying to launch a rocket under the assumption that the FAA has no authority to act, you would land yourself in prison. If you are very lucky, you might find some federal judge in perhaps that shares your opinion, but he is likely to tell you that you are acting stupidly and not helping matters by trying to act in such a way.
Note here I'm not disagreeing that in many cases the government has exceeded its granted authority as described by the U.S. Constitution. And I do think the 445 people running the federal government (president+SCOTUS+congress) have missed some key issues perhaps even to the point that you are describing. But if all 445 people in authority here don't have an objection to the use of the FAA to govern spaceflight and general aviation, who is going to force the issue to be brought forth as an amendment as you seem to be demanding?
Perhaps if the Constitution Party comes to power (or some other similar political group) there might be such an attitude, but I think the Klingon Empire will establish an embassy in Washington D.C. first. Or at least some non-human sentient species.
Now you are going onto a religious constitutional issue here.
The federal government *IS* given authority to regulate interstate commerce... by which authority the FAA mostly operates under BTW. Again, I admit this is a much abused clause of the U.S. Constitution, but in this case it really is interstate commerce. Also, the U.S. Constitution does explicitly grant authority to Congress to regulate imports and exports to and from the union.
I would also dare you to suggest that a rocket from nearly any state in the USA... even Alaska... is likely to stay within the boundaries of that particular state, especially when you are talking about something capable of going into orbit. Even sub-orbital hops are going to be some sort of interstate travel, except something really bizzare like El Paso to Austin in Texas.
Or on a more practical level... what state court is going to go into this issue on grounds of constitutionality and try to duke it out with SCOTUS?
And getting back the the point I was making with "but the obligation in terms of protecting its citizens to regulate what kinds of stuff you are deciding to put into the air":
It is not just the federal government that can come into play here. State governments can also prosecute idiots who throw stuff into the air, and that is not something excluded by the U.S. Constituion. Most state courts, however, would also defer to the FAA in terms of what jurisdictional authority has control of the airspace over the state itself. It would be interesting to see what a legal interpretation of a state granting intrastate airspace authority to the FAA would finally end up becoming... especially if this became a huge issue.
And more to the point, since you seem to be a hardcore strict constitutional constructionist... who in the American form of government ought to have authority to control the airspace above houses and buildings but not in space itself? Do you really think it is productive to have 50 or 5000 different rules for governing flight and spaceflight? For many things (like drug or alcohol enforcement) I think this may be better left for individual states. But in this particular case I think the compelling interest is something that needs to be in the federal realm. If this did become an issue by having SCOTUS declare the FAA as unconstitutional, such as did happen with the Bank of the United States, a constitutional amendment permitting federal authority in this matter would sail through Congress and special sessions of state legislatures in a matter of weeks. Particularly if air traffic were seriously disrupted by such a ruling. And I highly doubt such a ruling would ever be made in the first place.
What "international law" are you talking about here? This is assertion of territorial sovereignty I'm talking about, and over the past century it has been gradually extended as resources have been discovered and the technological means to extract those resources have become available.
To give an example of an American claim of national sovereignty that is well more than the standard 12 miles look at Georges Bank:
There is historical interest in this particular part of the Atlantic, and issues of national sovereignty play an important role over who has the authority to "govern" that piece of real estate in the ocean.
Documenting what is happening in the Arctic is something you can look up, but my point is that you shouldn't assume that any piece of the ocean is free from a claim of national sovereignty, unless you are both very wealthy and have your own private warships capable of taking on major navies of the rest of the world.
Basically, this is a non-issue as if you had that kind of money you could find a country willing to take that money and allow you to launch a rocket. For those of us with far more limited means, seeking international waters is still a silly thing to even think about and largely irrelevant to discussing how you can get authority to get to the Moon.
If you are using 19th Century Alaska and California as an example, you have nearly proved my point here. Both of them (Alaska even in the 20th Century) were considered wilderness areas. Alaska had land titles granted and signed by President Nixon... and even one by President Ford under the Homestead Act.
In both states, particularly in the 19th Century, there were huge tracts of land available and nearly no government at all. California really didn't become a major player on the national level in the USA until after 1920, even though the gold reserves of California were important during the Civil War.
I do agree that government functions such as building roads, setting up "general security" in terms of wiping out organized mobs and bandits, and providing a legal framework where decisions can be "appealed" if there is an issue that is particularly sticky to deal with comes up. However, American attitudes about government (this is not a universal philosophy on the Earth) are that governments are self-organizing and come up from those whom are governed. If the U.S. Congress gets its act together on this issue, there will be governments set up among early colonists on extra-terrestrial bodies like the Moon which will not only claim territory, but will have laws which will reflect those people who are being governed. This is of course assuming that we are talking American citizens who go up to the Moon, but including other people who live in areas dominated by Americans.
But if both the U.S. Congress and the UN decide to bury their head and take the current diplomatic approach of declaring "the heavens" a nature preserve like Antarctica, preventing any terrestrial governments from claiming territory and being able to assert any governance over space.... I have no doubt that there will be people "up there" anyway creating new governments but without any formal recognition by terrestrial governments. And at that point you get some of the classic SF situations when those non-terrestrial governments become large enough to be significant to those on the Earth.
Which approach.... colonies bootstrapped by earth governments or mankind "bravely going where no man has gone before" is going to be used will be interesting to see. And I do believe that there will be people born on a world other than the Earth by the end of this current century. What government those individuals claim allegiance to will be interesting once it starts happening.
This isn't just "courts" that determine this.... it is also legislative bodies establishing laws and executive departments like the FAA to set into place procedures that allow you to build this stuff.... without having to go before a judge on each decision that you make.
An over-reliance on the judicial system is a scourge of America anyway, but it goes back to my original point of what I was trying to say: You need to have laws in place (even common law such as comes from a court) to provide a framework to keep activities such as launching rockets under control and "governed". Ultimately what the role of "government" ought to be about. Complain about the details if you wish, but the basic point of if there should be a set of laws in place is ignoring basic safety and can be incredibly dangerous.
Mind you, I was responding to your desire to launch any piece of junk into the air and the assertion that the government can't do anything to stop you. I am asserting that the government does have not only the authority at the end of a gun, but the obligation in terms of protecting its citizens to regulate what kinds of stuff you are deciding to put into the air... and stop you at even early design stages if that something you are making can't be controlled. Or tell you that launching an experimental rocket from Central Park in New York City is not a wise thing to do. Or the rooftop of a building you own on 5th Avenue for that matter (assuming you have that much money). Saying you need to buy a 10,000 acre ranch in Texas instead (aka Blue Origin) may be a good thing for all of your neighbors. Hence the need to seek "permission" from the government before you make any of these rockets and launch them. You are not an independent sovereign entity here in spite of your claims to the contrary.
That isn't exactly true. A warship does not have authority to board and inspect cargo unless it is in their territorial waters or it is a ship of their "flag". Aka on their national ship registry.
There are "war zones" and other kinds of details that can come into play, but for the most part warship don't have a "legal" right to board your ship except as an act of war. That is why a "flag of convenience" is often sought, because that means the various navies of the world can't really mess with you. And such ships are usually falling apart and on their last leg of even being seaworthy.
On the other hand, if you are on the national registry of a large nation (like the USA), you have the option of calling upon the Navy of that country for assistance against pirates and other would be idiots. That is why most ships going through the Persian Gulf and shipping to America have American registry. The U.S. Navy will protect them. That is something the Liberian Navy simply doesn't have the budget or manpower to help out in doing.
I have no doubt the situation will be very similar once large numbers of people get into space: A "space navy" will be available to help out against agressors but also do routine inspections on spacecraft of its national registry. And there will be "flag of convenience" for spacecraft running on well established routes.
More to the point, I highly doubt they would let somebody without even a conventional aviation license fly a spacecraft. So far, every single "spacecraft pilot", Chinese, Russian, and American (both NASA and private spaceflight) has held an aviation license prior to "going up there". In fact, every American astronaut... even if a passenger... has held one as well. That may change.
I have no doubt that if commercial manned spaceflight becomes something significant that you may end up having the conventional aeronautical license be waved similar to how the Morse Code requirements are no longer being used for Ham Radio licenses. But at the moment you you have to meet the minimum requirements for a general commercial aviation license if you ever want to fly a commercial spacecraft.
And what happens once you have large numbers of individuals "up there" in space that choose to live there permanently? That is a completely different question to what it takes for somebody from the Earth getting there in the first place.
Once private industries are established in space (even low-earth orbit) that extract local resources and have the capabilities of building other stuff in space, I don't see how any government is really going to be able to control what people are going to do once they "get up there".
Or as Douglas Adams wrote: "Space is Big. Really, Really Big." Governments of today are thinking (with reason) that no matter where you go or what you do, that an agent of that country... from its capital even... can travel and get to meet with you in less than a day or two. Or be able to contact you in less than 5 minutes. Those conditions simply won't apply to Mars. If what you are doing is someplace the government can't get to in less than two years (with a whole lot of effort), does the government really run your life anymore?
Does a spacecraft built and launched from the Moon have a terrestrial claim of sovereignty? Could it if those building the spacecraft don't want such a claim?
Even assuming a nearly pure libertarian viewpoint that you seem to be espousing here, you haven't answered a key question regarding rocketry:
What happens if your "property" goes and destroys somebody else's property?
We are talking huge amounts of energy that are released when a rocket is launched, where a major feature is to convert that energy into kinetic energy that can achieve orbital velocities.
Or to think about this in another point of view... the Space Shuttle, at the moment it is launched, contains more potential chemical energy than was released by the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Do the math and prove me wrong if you think I'm talking out of my behind here.
If you are talking about a manned spaceflight going to the Moon, you are going to need a similar order of magnitude amount of energy in one place capable of sending somebody up there. So how do you make sure that energy stays contained and doesn't kill your neighbor in the process?
Nearly all of the FAA paperwork regarding spaceflight is to document that you can contain that energy, releasing it in a controlled manner that isn't going to kill somebody else. And that if you launch something that goes up, that either you are insured to pay for any homes or businesses you might accidentally destroy, or that you are performing the launch in a place where nothing can be damaged. Ever wonder why launch sites are either in the desert or on a sea coast? It isn't the awesome views.
You can launch your rocket however you want. But the moment it lands on my backyard I can scream, complain, sue, and tear you apart. I don't think even the most ardent libertarian thinks you have the right to destroy my home and kill my family because your are being stupid with an experimental rocket design.
That there are abuses of authority by the FAA and Dept. of Homeland Security, I agree. But to leave it to total anarchy is something else entirely.
You are forgetting that the issue here is about what happens if the rocket leaves the territorial "airspace" of that country... or even might leave the country due to a malfunction.
For example, what if you launched an Estes rocket deliberately from South Korea to North Korea (Don't try this at home, kids!)? It wouldn't be pretty. Even launching close to the U.S./Canadian border still requires international warnings and filing flight plans for even a little 5 ounce Mosquito rocket.
This issue apples doubly so for spaceflight that goes past the "international" altitude of outer space, that is now treated like international waters. Keep in mind that this treaty was originally an agreement that countries are sending stuff into orbit, and that orbital trajectory is going to pass over nearly every country in the world. By signing the treaty, each of the countries are agreeing to clean up any mess that happens if one of their satellites goes down into another co-signing country. And fly-over permission is explicitly granted by the treaty without having to continually seek flight clearance when passing overhead.
If you are launching a sounding rocket that only goes up and then back down in the same country, and that rocket also does not reach an altitude that can interfere with satellites, you are correct.... you don't need an international treaty to launch.
But the question here is what does it take in terms of permission to go to the Moon. I highly doubt that you will be able to build a Moon rocket that is capable of staying completely with the "territorial" jurisdiction of a single country, assuming that such territory can be extended infinitely above the surface of that country. So you really do want to be launching from a signatory nation to that treaty.... otherwise you open up a whole can of legal worms that are better left alone.
One huge problem with this line of thinking is that increasingly it is difficult to find "sea outside of any territorial limits". Yes, I know it still exists, but the expansion of "Economic Zones" and even blatant territorial claims of many countries keep expanding to the point that in less than 100 years it seems likely that all of the oceans will have formal territorial claims of some sort or another. As evidenced by what is happening in the Arctic... particularly by Russia... there will be no international sea zones in the Arctic by the end of this decade.
I certainly wouldn't want to build a major business strategy based on the presumption that you will be able to find a reasonable piece of ocean without some sort of claim of national territorial sovereignty. Going for a much smaller country like Tonga or Liberia would be a much safer bet, if you couldn't cut through the red tape of the FAA-AST. The EU has absolutely no equivalent of the FAA-AST where you could even seek permission.
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Heat is hardly a big deal at all. For crying out loud, the "atmosphere" of the Moon is essentially a vacuum, and that is one of the best insulative materials you can possible find. If anything, the problem you would find in any sort of Lunar habitat is trying to figure out how to get rid of the excess heat (i.e. provide "air conditioning"), even during the "lunar night". During the Lunar day it would be even more of an issue, although you could still build a temporary "heat sink" that could radiate that heat out during the "night".
Nearly any metabolism, even plant metabolism, is going to create heat just by simply existing and living. People produce an incredible amount of heat. To give a really good example for how much heat a human body can produce, take a look at the Mall of America which is located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. During the Minnesota winters, it can get to -40 (C or F... same thing at that temperature). Yet if you look at this Wikipedia entry, you will note that there isn't a single furnace in the entire building. All of the heat is provided by the metabolism of the shoppers themselves, the lighting fixtures, and from cooking surfaces from the many restaurants in the facility. That is it! It has air conditioners in the building, and surprisingly those even run during the winter.
If getting rid of heat is a problem even in Minneapolis during the winter, what do you think it will be like on the Moon?
That sounds like something that is screaming for some solid scientific research by itself that can have some incredibly powerful long-term knowledge gains. Just imagine the scientific breakthroughs just using this as one variable alone for various physiological experiments.
And you are using this as rationale for why we shouldn't go to the Moon?
Doing the same thing on a rotating platform (even if it is just 1 rpm) isn't going to give you nearly same sorts of controls that a solid "planetary" surface can give you.
And has been said elsewhere on this overall topic today, we know how to build things on the surface of a gravity well. Building on the moon, once some basic infrastructure is in place, will be trivial and the materials to make those facilities will be right at hand. Building at an L-point, GEO, or especially LEO is going to simply require shipping materials from some sort of gravity well. The ISS has proven how incredibly expensive it can be to ship nearly anything into orbit, but as the ISS is mainly a "make work" project for NASA anyway, it really doesn't matter... in that particular situation.
About the only thing that can't be manufactured in large quantities on the Moon is water, as hydrogen and nitrogen are two particular elements necessary for life that are not in large quantities there. However if you look at the ISS, that is a comparatively trivial in terms of its overall mass.
In order for these space stations to be constructed economically, it simply requires a substantial manufacturing infrastructure on the Moon in the first place. Or a near-Earth Asteroid, but that presents yet a whole different set of challenges that the Moon solves simply because it is in orbit already around the Earth.
While that may be solved, the equatorial ridge on Iapetus is just as confounding, perhaps even more so.
Crazy individuals like Richard Hogland are suggesting things like it is a large spacecraft aka Death Star due to this and other physical structures on this satellite of Saturn, but even from a pure geological/scientific viewpoint there are many more questions to be asked about this than have been answered.
It will be interesting to see if any follow-up mission to Saturn will ever happen after the Cassini mission ends within my lifetime, as there certainly have been some very amazing discoveries that deserve a strong follow-up investigation. It is amazing now that we have discovered such an amazing variety of worlds to explore even within our own Solar System, which is now beginning to help us to explain this hunk of rock that we live on right now as well.
Or more specifically, when you try to do a statistical comparison with a sample size of one, you tend to have all kinds of wild and crazy theories that get thrown around using that data point. Now that we have nearly 100 different worlds to compare the Earth to in terms of geological formation, structures, hydrology, and weather patterns; we certainly can start to make some much more informed guesses about what is happening right now here and what we can expect in the future.
I would have to agree with you on a general principle that A-life through biological means would mean using chemical processes like a biological laboratory or perhaps something akin to an oil refinery, and taking raw elements in the form of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and assembling those elements as a living thing that can self-replicate, given some basic nutrients.
I have heard of an eventual goal of creating a completely artificial eukaryote by some bio-researchers. The idea here is to try and figure out what the absolute minimum requirements would be necessary in terms of a genetic sequence that would still allow for self-replication. Sort of a biological equivalent of a RISC processor or perhaps even something of a biological equivalent of the Brainf*** programming language. Such an organism would have profound implications and even value in terms of biological research, where you could test different genetic sequences in a simple but known environment that wouldn't be fighting with billions of years of genetic evolution. In "the wild", such a simple organism would also face incredible competition and would likely be killed by nearly everything it would encounter, so mad monsters from a lab experiment would not likely cause many problems... at least with the basic A-life eukaroyte.
I agree that this is something that is decades away from being developed, but things such as writing a genetic sequence is certainly an important step to creating such living things.
One of the problems that the current RIAA approach is that they are ignoring the large scale publishers by going after these petty criminals. And this Minnesota woman mentioned in the articles is just that. She is accused of opening up to some friends a couple of CDs worth of MP3s.
I have seen some very large scale operations of blatant copyright violation in the past, including network sharing of copyrighted material. For crying out loud, I've had co-workers hand me nearly their entire CD collection compressed as MP3s on a couple of CDs.
This is also completely missing the Chinese CD copy pirates that even have complete CD pressing facilities, print up scanned jacket inserts, and sell the CDs as the real thing when in fact that isn't the case at all. And don't tell me these CDs don't end up in the USA, as I know for a fact that they do. This kind of activity is blatant copyright violations and involves criminal activities where not only is the "criminal" making money off of the duplication of the content, but it also does real damage that can be measured in a genuine sense where some individuals are buying this content thinking it is the real thing, completely unaware that it was made through an illegal process and the artist gets absolutely nothing in return.
I've also see websites... and they still do exists... that have hundreds or even thousands of CDs worth of data, and even hundreds of complete DVD movies available for download in blatant disregard for copyright laws. I know some of them have been shut down, but that just means they are avoiding to advertise on Google and other search engines, and you have to "go underground" to find these websites. If you search hard enough, you can still find them.
What this woman did was the equivalent of a shoplifter taking some candy or other low-value merchandise from a store. Certainly it is illegal and perhaps needs to be prosecuted. But it doesn't need to become a national news story, nor draw the attention of multi-national corporations to fly their lawyers across the country in order to prosecute individuals who are for the most part clueless to begin with. Certainly the $300,000 fine+ court costs is way over the top.
I would also like to ask this rather tough question to the RIAA: If any of this money is collected, will even a single penny of that money go into the hands of the artist you were representing?
This is tragedy compounding the situation, as copyright law is really there to protect the content creator. These organizations like the RIAA do very little to help the plight of the ordinary musician, nor does a prosecution like this ultimately help out a journeyman musician. I'm not talking the grand masters that are at the peak of popular culture and earn their deservedly millions of dollars. They can usually negotiate reasonable recording contracts and keep most of their money. I'm talking the more ordinary folks who are getting screwed over by the RIAA, where a prosecution like this will result in that same Minnesota woman simply declaring bankruptcy to get out of the debt, and the RIAA will then claim what little was paid toward the fine as legal costs. The only people who "won" in this case was the RIAA lawyers themselves, and not their "clients" for whom they were supposedly representing.
All that money represents is a medium of exchange, where you trade something you have (usually labor, but often other things too) to obtain the things you want.
The problem with digital cash and other sorts of record keeping systems that avoid the use of a physical artifact (aka a coin or a piece of paper) is that they can be and often are used by that "central authority" to perform other tasks with the information besides using it as an exchange. The most obvious is government "espionage" and surveillance. The issue of "identity theft" also occurs, strong crytographic techniques notwithstanding.
The downfall of physical cash is that it can burn, be stolen, or be lost through means other than being used to purchase something. Communication costs are also something of an issue, but I think that would involve other problems as well if you are depending on fiat currency (like the current U.S. Dollar, the Euro, or even the British Pound) as a medium of exchange. The issuing agency or government has the ability to inflate the value of that currency (actually reduce its value). Governments like the Wiemar Republic (1930's) in Germany and Brazil in the 1980's were legendary at doing this... where inflation for both countries were well above 1000% annually during this period of hyperinflation. Think about that carefully, and do you want to have something that may drop in value to 0.001% of its original value on a round-trip journey to Bernard's Star... or even Europa?
Currency "backed" by physical species (aka a gold coin of certified purity and weight) has the advantage of still retaining value even if the issuing agency or government no longer exists. In the case of gold, there are many uses for gold that have absolutely nothing to do with its value as a form of money, and those uses are still valuable. Similar physical substances used for money have included silver, salt, even grain and cattle. The inflationary pressure that can occur with these physical currencies is that a new source of the materials can be found to destroy its value. For instance, if an asteroid were discovered that was very nearly a solid chunk of gold, the value of gold in the rest of the Solar System would become nearly worthless. This happened BTW after the 1849 Gold Rush in California, where some very real inflation hit the USA, and certainly hit the exchange rate between silver and gold... of concern as the U.S. Dollar was originally a bi-metallic currency of both silver and gold.
There are two rather unusual examples of currency retaining value after the government which issued it no longer exists. The Confederate States of America issued a rather large amount of currency during the four years of its existance, and some of it can still be found from time to time. Both for political reasons as well as the fact that the country no longer exits, its value is actually worth more even in inflation-adjusted value than it was when it was originally issued. That wasn't the case immediately after the U.S. Civil War, but that is another situation still.
Even more bizzare is how the Iraqi Dinar was able to retain its value after the collapse of the Hussein government, and even appreciate against the U.S. Dollar. Economists and political scientists are still trying to figure this one out, but the main thing is that the Iraqi people continued to accept it for payment, and the supply of the money remained limited due to the fact that the Saddam Hussein government was no longer around to add more money into the overall monetary supply.
What kind of monetary unit is going to be used for interplanetary exchange is something that can be debated, but I would strongly suggest that national currencies like the Euro and the Dollar are likely to be used for the next couple of centuries, and there is no need to create any kind of new unit that doesn't already exist. The other "benefits" of this supposed currency system really don't seem to be that big of a deal either, and has a huge number of other problems, most n
I strongly disagree that this is a zero sum game, and I think there can be resources found to do both Martian as well as Lunar exploration and development. As well as strong economic reasons to be found to follow both paths, and even to do exploration of Near-Earth Asteroids, and possibly main-belt asteroids like Ceres and Vesta. I'm talking manned exploration of these bodies, not just things like the New Dawn spacecraft.
Also I would like to point out that the sheer distance to Mars is going to prove to be problematic for a whole lot of reasons that I don't think have been properly explored. When similar settlements and outposts of humanity were at the same distance (measured in time for resupply and travel to get there), the results have been appallingly disasterous. Jamestown, Greenland, and even Los Angeles (note that LA completely died out once due to a lack of water to grow crops or even to drink). Greenland might be considered a marginal success story, but even that had some huge problems, and there is reason to believe that many of the "native" Viking Greenlanders simply merged with the Inuit in order to survive after the 14th Century, becoming culturally indistinguishable. We may understand the problems that Jamestown suffered from and avoid them today, but Mars is a whole different situation, where there are enough unknowns that I think the analogy is very apt, especially if we are deluding ourselves that we know the answers to all of the potential problems that may come up on a manned expedition to Mars, much less trying to establish any sort of permanent presence on that planet.
The Moon is only 3 days away from the Earth by using chemical rockets, and even closer if you have some sort of nuclear rocket or some other sort of device that can provide continuous thrust. Launch windows from LEO to the Lunar surface happen every couple of hours, not less than once a year as it is for Mars. Basically, it will be a whole lot easier to play around in our little backyard than it is going to be for getting to Mars, even if landing on Phobos takes marginally the same amount of delta-v as it does going to the Moon.
Experience gained from going to the Moon will also eventually translate for anything happening on Mars, if only because there will be people "up there" as well that will be hoping to go to Mars instead of being stuck on the Moon.
I also believe that if you try to seek congressional support for a $60 billion dollar program for going to Mars, it will never happen. Congressmen simply can't run on the platform "if elected, we will send people to Mars!" There is no compelling national interest in getting there unless it is getting there first in a Martian land rush.
My own opinion is that if some sort of Lunar infrastructure is established, with private individuals permitted to travel into space without NASA approval, it will be a privately financed group that will end up getting to Mars first.... perhaps even with CNN cameras (and camera operators) recording the landing of the first NASA astronauts arriving on Mars. This sort of infrastructure can be built for far less than $60 billion.
I would also add here that both the Columbia and the Challenger were supposed to be prototype spacecraft, rather than the "final product".
For those engineers who design for a niche market (aka not some mass-produced product made in the millions), how often do you have a non-engineer boss who sees the prototype and insists that you are done with R&D? Far more than most would admit.
The Challenger was actually an earlier prototype built prior to the Columbia, but refurbished and turned into a real spacecraft. The Endeavor was really the only shuttle that was purpose built using the knowledge gained from the shuttle program, and even that used spare parts intended for general maintenance of the rest of the shuttle fleet.
In other words, the current incarnation of the Shuttle should have been mothballed years ago. And at a current price tag of nearly $1.5 billion per flight, each flight could have been a new engineering iteration to work out the "bugs" and push the general model of the shuttle design. If I remember correctly, the original price for each shuttle was actually less than $1 billion (1980's dollars) when they were built brand new. And yes, I do understand why it costs so much to fly that machine. That was fine when the Columbia first flew and the few flights after that.
What is the true travesty is that NASA appears to be abandoning nearly all of the engineering knowledge gained from flying the shuttle, and at the same time having to re-learn everything they lost by throwing away Apollo in the 1970's. In 30 years, I'm sure there will be something like a Shuttle II program that will try to re-create the knowledge gained from the current shuttle, but by then all of the current shuttle engineers will be pushing up daisies, or very happily retired.
You are missing the goal here, which isn't to rush and try to get to the Moon at any cost (that was the goal of Apollo). In addition, it was just to "plant the flag", gather a few rocks that were close by just to see what is up there, and get back before the sun set on the controllers back on Earth.
The current goal is to set up something that can be used for a bit of a longer term mission. Perhaps even more important is to simply survive the Lunar night. Apollo never even tried to accomplish that task at all.
While I would agree with your post in the sense that it seems NASA is trying to re-create Apollo all over again, even down to nearly identical "Apollo II" capsules (try to Google that term, BTW... that was some program that never happened). How this is being sold to Congress is another plant the flag mission, but I think that would be a huge mistake. If that is all that NASA accomplishes, they truly do need to be considered as a relic of the past no longer worthy of their heritage and the agency disbanded.
What is needed is a genuine permanent human presence off of the Earth, and I believe that must include families and children, with the potential of human childbirth taking place somewhere off of the Earth. If this is to happen, the safety factors need to improve nearly a whole order of magnitude, and is something far more challenging. Even if all that happens is a Lunar equivalent of the South Pole Research Station, I would be incredibly impressed, but it can and should be more.
BTW, don't retread the argument about people not raising families in Antarctica. The reason that is the current situation is more political than technical... not even economic reasons are keeping families from Antarctica. Some parts of Antarctica are at least as habitable as the North Slope of Alaska, and there are some pretty big cities in that part of the world, and places in Siberia where conditions are even worse. If 100 years from now there aren't whole families waiting for the 3rd generation of lunatics (literally... people of the Moon) to be born, it will be also for purely terrestrial political reasons and not for any technical or even economic rational that will keep it from happening. Ditto more so for Mars.
Substitute Jobs for Wozniak and I think you have a real winner in terms of somebody who IMHO is the modern equivalent of Edison or Tesla... but with a former CEO that ignored his genius and dismissed the potential factory of new ideas that could have come out of that inventor/engineer.
In terms of Hawking, his "discovery" of Hawking radiation is a unique and seminal accomplishment that is at least on the order of the Photoelectric Effect, and may still yield something of a positive value to mankind in the future. The jury is still out on if that is a significant principle on a practical basis or not. In addition to Hawking radiation, he has also pushed the frontiers of Relativity in other areas as well, and has been instrumental in helping the next generation of physicists learn what the masters of the past understood.
As for Rutan, I think you are selling him short and premature on the fame side of the equation. It would be hard to compare Rutan to Goddard, as Goddard was also relatively unknown by people at the beginning of the 20th Century when he was doing most of his experiments. This is one of those "we'll see in 100 years if Rutan is famous or not". Goddard is famous only because of those who followed his work, in particular Werner Von Braun who copied Goddard's designs and pushed them well up to the next level on several subsequent designs that let ultimately to the Saturn V. Von Braun was just a kid when Goddard was doing his experiments, but hugely inspired by Goddard and other rocketry pioneers. If Rutan is successful with an orbital spacecraft, he will be remembered for much more than just Spaceship One.
If we are slowing down, it is because of bul*s*** regulations such as the Department of Homeland Security placing a ban on the sale of hydrogen peroxide or the DEA doing something similar with cough medicine.
Simply put, even from when I was a teenager until today (just a couple of decades ago) there were things you could get and purchase... without bureaucratic red tape.... that simply can't be done today in the name of "public safety". And it is getting worse rather than better.
Just another "for instance", as a teenager I used to go to the local pharmacy and purchase a 2 lb bottle of potassium nitrate (aka Salt Peter) and make my own home grown black powder and rocket fuel. It was sold at a pharmacy because it is also a heart medication to help out after a heart attack (drug companies now sell more expensive alternatives).
A more recent example was Armadillo Aerospace and their research into hydrogen peroxide rockets. A very legitimate and even open company that even law enforcement people could look into and check up on. They had some amazing rockets that used hydrogen peroxide as a mono propellant and achieved some incredible ISP numbers with them. But after they got beyond the casual hobbyist level of usage and tried to ramp up production on larger prototypes, John Carmack ran into a huge barrier put up by the Department of Homeland Security and kept them from being "certified" as a company who could use this chemical in large quantities. Those suppliers who could provide this chemical were afraid due to lawsuits and this red tape to provide sufficient quantities to continue the research. So Armadillo switched to another propellant scheme not because of scientific or engineering concerns, but for legal and poltical reasons alone.
There is also a huge clamping down on original research in many places, and kids are also not taught the scientific method in school much. This isn't to say they aren't taught about the scientific method, but that isn't the same thing. It is one thing to discuss the philosophical concepts of the scientific method, and another to actually do it and attempt to discover new truths about the universe.
People who did garage-level scientific research (a fair bit still happens) have always been considered a little bit odd, but were usually tolerated. I do believe that one-man small scale research can still happen in many areas of science that can be compared to Linnaeus, Goddard, or even Franklin. My kids have done science fair experiments that have produced, at least for me, unexpected results. Unfortunately it is the "big science" that usually is considered sexy and attracts the big money.
Forget about trying to figure out if you are voting for the opposition party or not.... what about intercepting those votes and getting them changed on the way to being counted?
Checksums can help to detect some interceptions and modifications.... but that is only a partial and imperfect solution. Other cryptographic techniques can be used for both preventing people from finding out what your ballot has been cast as, or to modify your vote. Even that has some strong limitations and would prove to be impossible to completely secure over a public network where the fate of the government hangs in balance.
Elections are the one activity that must be several orders of magnitude more reliable and secure than even military or even financial transactions.... not the other way around. Just because you can more or less reliably transmit a credit card securely doesn't mean the same system can be trusted for an election.
This issue doesn't even get into the fact that most coal-burning power plants release more *radioactive* material into the atmosphere and other waste repositories... primarily Uranium and other heavy metals mixed in with the Coal when it was sitting in the ground... than would ever be released if all a nuclear power plant did was send their nuclear waste to a typical city dump in ordinary unshielded dump trucks (not that I'm volunteering to drive such a vehicle).
The only reason why people are so paranoid about nuclear power plants is that they don't understand the basics of nuclear physics, and the big "N-word" carries so much baggage by anti-war activists.
Every form of energy production, including purely organic energy producers like a team of horses, have environmental waste issues that need to be dealt with. When you need to concentrate large amounts of energy in one place (aka Aluminum or Silicon chip foundries) that environmental damage will be more concentrated.
Per pound of waste and overall damage to the environment per kilowatt hour produced, I would dare say that nuclear power is perhaps the most efficient and cleanest energy source possible. Fusion is more efficient, but even fission reactors are not as bad as everybody would have you think.
This thought here regarding the conservation of energy is perhaps something that may lead to a more general understanding of the multiverse model.
Keep in mind that one of the primary "facts" that lead to the development of the Theory of Relativity was the idea that the speed of light, as measured with the best instruments at the end of the 19th Century, was identical in all directions within the range of experimental error. Nearly all of Relativity is a result of keeping the speed of light as a constant instead of a variable.
The Laws of Thermodynamics have proven themselves to not only be as fundamental as you can get in terms of scientific concepts, but have shown the general philosophy that nothing can be created nor destroyed on a fundamental level holds true as well... far beyond even the original thinking of those who proposed these laws in the first place. Conservation of information, mass-energy conversion, and other principles merely show that you need to dig deeper if you find a "leak" allowing these principles to be violated.
So you are on the right track here, but it would require taking the concept of a many-worlds multiverse and trying to decide how that would relate to these Laws of Thermodynamics. Perhaps over time, and averaged out over both time and space, these multiverses "collapse" to form identical universes?
From an Science Fiction viewpoint.... does squashing a bug accidentally if you time travel to pre-historic Earth mean that Nazi Germany will win WWII? Or that the earth is dominated by intelligent marsupials instead of intelligent primates? Does a multiverse model allow for time travel at all... aka John Titor type concepts requiring a multiverse in order to work?
I am suggesting here that one way to solve this "problem" is to demonstrate how the universe as we see it does conserve energy and that these "virtual" universes average out over time to be functionally identical to what we currently see. Or perhaps another way to think of this is that there is also a conservation of multiverses as well that is merely an extention of the Laws of Thermodynamics. As a universe is created, it requires another universe to be "destroyed". Whatever that really means... you can use your own imagination here for fun.
You are not "free" to use your property however you want... if you are affecting somebody else. And using rockets clearly have a huge impact upon property rights besides your own.
And in terms of property rights.... no, you don't have a "right to own property". This is not enumerated in the Bill of Rights nor anywhere else in the U.S. constitution, nor in any statutory law or for that matter even common law. It may be an "implied right", but you do not have the right to use any property you own however you wish. And there are many examples of how many governments in the USA regulate and control what you can and can't do with stuff you own.
I can't even dig a well for water in my backyard without applying for a permit first, or for that matter paying off a whole bunch of people for the right to turn on the pump because of "water rights" that I had no control of before I even bought my home. And I do hold title to the land that my home sits upon. Living in the western USA you will find that control over water resources can be a huge issue, where some politicians in California are claiming they can regulate the water that falls on my back yard... when I don't even live in California and river water nearby comes from Wyoming. I'm not kidding here either.
This does not require a constitutional amendment, and I think if you tried to push that opinion by trying to launch a rocket under the assumption that the FAA has no authority to act, you would land yourself in prison. If you are very lucky, you might find some federal judge in perhaps that shares your opinion, but he is likely to tell you that you are acting stupidly and not helping matters by trying to act in such a way.
Note here I'm not disagreeing that in many cases the government has exceeded its granted authority as described by the U.S. Constitution. And I do think the 445 people running the federal government (president+SCOTUS+congress) have missed some key issues perhaps even to the point that you are describing. But if all 445 people in authority here don't have an objection to the use of the FAA to govern spaceflight and general aviation, who is going to force the issue to be brought forth as an amendment as you seem to be demanding?
Perhaps if the Constitution Party comes to power (or some other similar political group) there might be such an attitude, but I think the Klingon Empire will establish an embassy in Washington D.C. first. Or at least some non-human sentient species.
Now you are going onto a religious constitutional issue here.
The federal government *IS* given authority to regulate interstate commerce... by which authority the FAA mostly operates under BTW. Again, I admit this is a much abused clause of the U.S. Constitution, but in this case it really is interstate commerce. Also, the U.S. Constitution does explicitly grant authority to Congress to regulate imports and exports to and from the union.
I would also dare you to suggest that a rocket from nearly any state in the USA... even Alaska... is likely to stay within the boundaries of that particular state, especially when you are talking about something capable of going into orbit. Even sub-orbital hops are going to be some sort of interstate travel, except something really bizzare like El Paso to Austin in Texas.
Or on a more practical level... what state court is going to go into this issue on grounds of constitutionality and try to duke it out with SCOTUS?
And getting back the the point I was making with "but the obligation in terms of protecting its citizens to regulate what kinds of stuff you are deciding to put into the air":
It is not just the federal government that can come into play here. State governments can also prosecute idiots who throw stuff into the air, and that is not something excluded by the U.S. Constituion. Most state courts, however, would also defer to the FAA in terms of what jurisdictional authority has control of the airspace over the state itself. It would be interesting to see what a legal interpretation of a state granting intrastate airspace authority to the FAA would finally end up becoming... especially if this became a huge issue.
And more to the point, since you seem to be a hardcore strict constitutional constructionist... who in the American form of government ought to have authority to control the airspace above houses and buildings but not in space itself? Do you really think it is productive to have 50 or 5000 different rules for governing flight and spaceflight? For many things (like drug or alcohol enforcement) I think this may be better left for individual states. But in this particular case I think the compelling interest is something that needs to be in the federal realm. If this did become an issue by having SCOTUS declare the FAA as unconstitutional, such as did happen with the Bank of the United States, a constitutional amendment permitting federal authority in this matter would sail through Congress and special sessions of state legislatures in a matter of weeks. Particularly if air traffic were seriously disrupted by such a ruling. And I highly doubt such a ruling would ever be made in the first place.
What "international law" are you talking about here? This is assertion of territorial sovereignty I'm talking about, and over the past century it has been gradually extended as resources have been discovered and the technological means to extract those resources have become available.
To give an example of an American claim of national sovereignty that is well more than the standard 12 miles look at Georges Bank:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Bank
There is historical interest in this particular part of the Atlantic, and issues of national sovereignty play an important role over who has the authority to "govern" that piece of real estate in the ocean.
Documenting what is happening in the Arctic is something you can look up, but my point is that you shouldn't assume that any piece of the ocean is free from a claim of national sovereignty, unless you are both very wealthy and have your own private warships capable of taking on major navies of the rest of the world.
Basically, this is a non-issue as if you had that kind of money you could find a country willing to take that money and allow you to launch a rocket. For those of us with far more limited means, seeking international waters is still a silly thing to even think about and largely irrelevant to discussing how you can get authority to get to the Moon.
If you are using 19th Century Alaska and California as an example, you have nearly proved my point here. Both of them (Alaska even in the 20th Century) were considered wilderness areas. Alaska had land titles granted and signed by President Nixon... and even one by President Ford under the Homestead Act.
In both states, particularly in the 19th Century, there were huge tracts of land available and nearly no government at all. California really didn't become a major player on the national level in the USA until after 1920, even though the gold reserves of California were important during the Civil War.
I do agree that government functions such as building roads, setting up "general security" in terms of wiping out organized mobs and bandits, and providing a legal framework where decisions can be "appealed" if there is an issue that is particularly sticky to deal with comes up. However, American attitudes about government (this is not a universal philosophy on the Earth) are that governments are self-organizing and come up from those whom are governed. If the U.S. Congress gets its act together on this issue, there will be governments set up among early colonists on extra-terrestrial bodies like the Moon which will not only claim territory, but will have laws which will reflect those people who are being governed. This is of course assuming that we are talking American citizens who go up to the Moon, but including other people who live in areas dominated by Americans.
But if both the U.S. Congress and the UN decide to bury their head and take the current diplomatic approach of declaring "the heavens" a nature preserve like Antarctica, preventing any terrestrial governments from claiming territory and being able to assert any governance over space.... I have no doubt that there will be people "up there" anyway creating new governments but without any formal recognition by terrestrial governments. And at that point you get some of the classic SF situations when those non-terrestrial governments become large enough to be significant to those on the Earth.
Which approach.... colonies bootstrapped by earth governments or mankind "bravely going where no man has gone before" is going to be used will be interesting to see. And I do believe that there will be people born on a world other than the Earth by the end of this current century. What government those individuals claim allegiance to will be interesting once it starts happening.
This isn't just "courts" that determine this.... it is also legislative bodies establishing laws and executive departments like the FAA to set into place procedures that allow you to build this stuff.... without having to go before a judge on each decision that you make.
An over-reliance on the judicial system is a scourge of America anyway, but it goes back to my original point of what I was trying to say: You need to have laws in place (even common law such as comes from a court) to provide a framework to keep activities such as launching rockets under control and "governed". Ultimately what the role of "government" ought to be about. Complain about the details if you wish, but the basic point of if there should be a set of laws in place is ignoring basic safety and can be incredibly dangerous.
Mind you, I was responding to your desire to launch any piece of junk into the air and the assertion that the government can't do anything to stop you. I am asserting that the government does have not only the authority at the end of a gun, but the obligation in terms of protecting its citizens to regulate what kinds of stuff you are deciding to put into the air... and stop you at even early design stages if that something you are making can't be controlled. Or tell you that launching an experimental rocket from Central Park in New York City is not a wise thing to do. Or the rooftop of a building you own on 5th Avenue for that matter (assuming you have that much money). Saying you need to buy a 10,000 acre ranch in Texas instead (aka Blue Origin) may be a good thing for all of your neighbors. Hence the need to seek "permission" from the government before you make any of these rockets and launch them. You are not an independent sovereign entity here in spite of your claims to the contrary.
That isn't exactly true. A warship does not have authority to board and inspect cargo unless it is in their territorial waters or it is a ship of their "flag". Aka on their national ship registry.
There are "war zones" and other kinds of details that can come into play, but for the most part warship don't have a "legal" right to board your ship except as an act of war. That is why a "flag of convenience" is often sought, because that means the various navies of the world can't really mess with you. And such ships are usually falling apart and on their last leg of even being seaworthy.
On the other hand, if you are on the national registry of a large nation (like the USA), you have the option of calling upon the Navy of that country for assistance against pirates and other would be idiots. That is why most ships going through the Persian Gulf and shipping to America have American registry. The U.S. Navy will protect them. That is something the Liberian Navy simply doesn't have the budget or manpower to help out in doing.
I have no doubt the situation will be very similar once large numbers of people get into space: A "space navy" will be available to help out against agressors but also do routine inspections on spacecraft of its national registry. And there will be "flag of convenience" for spacecraft running on well established routes.
Ask the FAA-AST. See http://ast.faa.gov/ for details.
More to the point, I highly doubt they would let somebody without even a conventional aviation license fly a spacecraft. So far, every single "spacecraft pilot", Chinese, Russian, and American (both NASA and private spaceflight) has held an aviation license prior to "going up there". In fact, every American astronaut... even if a passenger... has held one as well. That may change.
I have no doubt that if commercial manned spaceflight becomes something significant that you may end up having the conventional aeronautical license be waved similar to how the Morse Code requirements are no longer being used for Ham Radio licenses. But at the moment you you have to meet the minimum requirements for a general commercial aviation license if you ever want to fly a commercial spacecraft.
And what happens once you have large numbers of individuals "up there" in space that choose to live there permanently? That is a completely different question to what it takes for somebody from the Earth getting there in the first place.
Once private industries are established in space (even low-earth orbit) that extract local resources and have the capabilities of building other stuff in space, I don't see how any government is really going to be able to control what people are going to do once they "get up there".
Or as Douglas Adams wrote: "Space is Big. Really, Really Big." Governments of today are thinking (with reason) that no matter where you go or what you do, that an agent of that country... from its capital even... can travel and get to meet with you in less than a day or two. Or be able to contact you in less than 5 minutes. Those conditions simply won't apply to Mars. If what you are doing is someplace the government can't get to in less than two years (with a whole lot of effort), does the government really run your life anymore?
Does a spacecraft built and launched from the Moon have a terrestrial claim of sovereignty? Could it if those building the spacecraft don't want such a claim?
Even assuming a nearly pure libertarian viewpoint that you seem to be espousing here, you haven't answered a key question regarding rocketry:
What happens if your "property" goes and destroys somebody else's property?
We are talking huge amounts of energy that are released when a rocket is launched, where a major feature is to convert that energy into kinetic energy that can achieve orbital velocities.
Or to think about this in another point of view... the Space Shuttle, at the moment it is launched, contains more potential chemical energy than was released by the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Do the math and prove me wrong if you think I'm talking out of my behind here.
If you are talking about a manned spaceflight going to the Moon, you are going to need a similar order of magnitude amount of energy in one place capable of sending somebody up there. So how do you make sure that energy stays contained and doesn't kill your neighbor in the process?
Nearly all of the FAA paperwork regarding spaceflight is to document that you can contain that energy, releasing it in a controlled manner that isn't going to kill somebody else. And that if you launch something that goes up, that either you are insured to pay for any homes or businesses you might accidentally destroy, or that you are performing the launch in a place where nothing can be damaged. Ever wonder why launch sites are either in the desert or on a sea coast? It isn't the awesome views.
You can launch your rocket however you want. But the moment it lands on my backyard I can scream, complain, sue, and tear you apart. I don't think even the most ardent libertarian thinks you have the right to destroy my home and kill my family because your are being stupid with an experimental rocket design.
That there are abuses of authority by the FAA and Dept. of Homeland Security, I agree. But to leave it to total anarchy is something else entirely.
You are forgetting that the issue here is about what happens if the rocket leaves the territorial "airspace" of that country... or even might leave the country due to a malfunction.
For example, what if you launched an Estes rocket deliberately from South Korea to North Korea (Don't try this at home, kids!)? It wouldn't be pretty. Even launching close to the U.S./Canadian border still requires international warnings and filing flight plans for even a little 5 ounce Mosquito rocket.
This issue apples doubly so for spaceflight that goes past the "international" altitude of outer space, that is now treated like international waters. Keep in mind that this treaty was originally an agreement that countries are sending stuff into orbit, and that orbital trajectory is going to pass over nearly every country in the world. By signing the treaty, each of the countries are agreeing to clean up any mess that happens if one of their satellites goes down into another co-signing country. And fly-over permission is explicitly granted by the treaty without having to continually seek flight clearance when passing overhead.
If you are launching a sounding rocket that only goes up and then back down in the same country, and that rocket also does not reach an altitude that can interfere with satellites, you are correct.... you don't need an international treaty to launch.
But the question here is what does it take in terms of permission to go to the Moon. I highly doubt that you will be able to build a Moon rocket that is capable of staying completely with the "territorial" jurisdiction of a single country, assuming that such territory can be extended infinitely above the surface of that country. So you really do want to be launching from a signatory nation to that treaty.... otherwise you open up a whole can of legal worms that are better left alone.
One huge problem with this line of thinking is that increasingly it is difficult to find "sea outside of any territorial limits". Yes, I know it still exists, but the expansion of "Economic Zones" and even blatant territorial claims of many countries keep expanding to the point that in less than 100 years it seems likely that all of the oceans will have formal territorial claims of some sort or another. As evidenced by what is happening in the Arctic... particularly by Russia... there will be no international sea zones in the Arctic by the end of this decade.
I certainly wouldn't want to build a major business strategy based on the presumption that you will be able to find a reasonable piece of ocean without some sort of claim of national territorial sovereignty. Going for a much smaller country like Tonga or Liberia would be a much safer bet, if you couldn't cut through the red tape of the FAA-AST. The EU has absolutely no equivalent of the FAA-AST where you could even seek permission.