That sounds like an excuse, not a cause. You can use anything for an excuse, including what your mother look like this morning when she woke up today (or if she did at all).
The problem isn't COBOL by itself. The problem is that COBOL is seen by some as the last and greatest language that has ever been invented and that nothing else could improve upon it other than minor refinements of the language. That is what gives us crazy junk like object-oriented COBOL.
Rethinking computer programming language design has given us a multitude of languages and conceptual models that we can apply to software design and substantially improve the quality of the software being produced. I would be really curious about what Grace Hopper would think of some even higher abstraction levels like Scratch. No single programming language is best for everything, but some are better at accomplishing key tasks over others.
One huge difference.... Hopper actually wrote COBOL and put the concepts into practice by doing it.
Sure, you could read the notes of some of the early theoreticians who played with the idea of computing theory line Von Neumann and Turing, but I give more cred to those who actually did the work.
Ada Lovelace did precede the work by Konrad Zuse by nearly a century. Noting against Zuse, as he certainly did a whole lot to advance computing in the 20th century as well. Sometimes you need to go in baby steps until something actually happens, which is simply how scientific progress is made at all. If you've done something useful in this world with your life, it is that you've been able to explore the frontiers of human knowledge and perhaps contribute a little bit more knowledge to go just a little bit further.
Russia took the conquest of Kosovo by the US and the EUSSR as a precedent: "If you can legitimize an invasion and a land grab simply by proclaming the regions you want to grab as independent first, so can we." And they did. And they will again if they feel like it, because no international law exists any more to stop them.
Russia did nothing of the sort. If you really want to understand why Russia went into Georgia, I would suggest reading this book or you can simply read the Cliff Notes.
It was simply in the national interest to do what Russia did, as was also the case with Kosovo. In the case of the USA, it was even more about the personal ambition and the need to establish a "lasting legacy" on the part of Bill Clinton.... and ditto for Putin in regards to Georgia. Russia wanted a strong leader, so that is what they got.
While not nearly as useful as Geosynchronous orbits or other near equatorial orbits, Molniya orbits and related Tundra orbits are incredibly useful, especially for countries like Russia that has most of its territory in high latitude locations. The kind of vehicles that you would put into those orbits don't need to be launched from Florida and in fact are better launched from places in Russia as well.
My point is that there are things besides polar orbits or geosynchronous orbits to consider when building a spaceport or trying to identify why that location might be useful.
Right.... Georgia recognized their sovereignty after Russia held a gun to the collective heads of nearly everybody in Georgia?
Don't even get me started with Kosovo. That is a political quagmire that has nearly 2000 years of bullshit strewn around the rest of the world and is responsible for the deaths of literally millions of people including folks in my hometown. In spite of all of those millennia of turmoil and death, little seems to be solved.
If you think SpaceX is a black hole, what do you think of ATK and Boeing in regards to the SLS that is spending several billion dollars each year and hasn't even been able to get that rocket system into the air... and won't for another 10 years?
At least SpaceX is delivering cargo, which is a damn sight better than what the other tar pits that I see NASA dumping money into.
The JWST isn't going to fly. Of course neither will the Orion space capsule, especially on the SLS system, but who is counting?
The only thing those programs do is provide "make work" jobs for engineers and technicians. The SLS is being built explicitly to keep the Ammonium Perchlorate plants running for the next decade until the next major buy of ICBMs happen. For what expense and if there might be more productive ways to get that accomplished is certainly something to be asking, but it has nothing to do with accomplishing anything in space and especially nothing at all to do with science.
Having NASA kill people didn't really end up being that much of a test of the organization. Oh, they had engineering reviews and all sorts of finger pointing, but in the end nothing really changed and in fact the things that caused the deaths were more or less repeated with only cosmetic changes. Concerns about the tiles and how fragile the shuttle surfaces were looked at from STS-1, yet it seemed to have been a surprise to some people at NASA when the Columbia was lost.
Yes, it will be a test if SpaceX kills people as a result of an engineering flaw or other mishap. As for destroying payloads, they've done that in spades. Do you see anybody complaining? If anything, SpaceX keeps getting new customers in spite of lost payloads in the past.
The N1 would have been an amazing rocket... if it would have ever flown. There were several attempts to fire the thing though, and the second launch of the N1 is supposedly the largest artificial non-nuclear explosion in the history of mankind. That still doesn't take the cake to what happened in China where over 500 people were killed when a rocket went off course and landed in a nearby village.
Building rockets is hard, and you are dealing with incredible energies just to get stuff up. Complaining about SpaceX and their record is so minor and insignificant that it is hardly worth even mentioning. The first launch of the Falcon 1 was something stupid on the part of SpaceX, but that company does seem to learn a bit from their mistakes.
The delta-v needed to send something to the Sun is even harder than shipping it to the Moon. Nice try, but even that won't work.
The only reason why somebody would put some nuclear waste into space is because that "waste" would be considered valuable in and of itself. Sort of like why Pu-238 is being used extensively on spacecraft at the moment. It is worthless as something to be used in fission reactors (hence considered "waste") but incredibly useful for other tasks. There may be other things in nuclear waste worth recovering too, assuming new techniques for extraction may be found.
As a place to dump spent reactor fuel, the Sun and the Moon are pretty damn lousy.
I would hope that over time a place like the Moon would become a place that would be full of life, and have some unique aspects that would making living on the Moon seem better to the local residents than what we have living here on the Earth. At the very least it would be different.
The early pioneers going to the Moon would face some incredible hardships, and it would indeed be a sterile and dead place for them. One of the challenges for those going to the Moon to live and raise families (as opposed to weekend camping trips like is being proposed by Golden Spike) is to figure out how to start an entirely new biosphere web. The things you take for granted now such as the wet grass, the cool breeze, all of the greenery, the worms in the soil, the microbes, the cockroaches, ants, mosquitos, everything... it will all need to be taken eventually to where we as a species are going. We are dependent upon all of the rest of these forms of life so I'd have to agree that they are necessary to our very survival anywhere even away from the Earth.
I would expect that parks would be a popular hang out for people even on the Moon. That is the kind of thing that needs to be planned when designing a space colony, although it won't be easy to built and won't come cheap. On the positive side, once you get some kind of animal or plant from the Earth up to the Moon, those things can make copies of themselves.
Once such structures actually do get built, once there are real cities on the Moon with generations of children who were born and have lived their lives on the Moon, it will be a very different place than the sterile conditions that the early settlers will encounter. I completely agree that the kind of people who will want to be in that kind of environment and face incredible dangers simply because they don't know what some dangers may even be is going to be a huge challenge. Our ancestors did that before though, and I expect that our children and descendents will figure out how to do that again in other places like the Moon and Mars.
First, the price is for two people, the price per seat is half that.
Next time the cab driver tells you the fare is $20, give him $5 and tell him that's the per seat price.
I've been a cab driver, and if four people were riding in a cab where the fare was $20, I'd be glad to take that $5 from each person separately and even give change.
It really isn't a problem. If you are stupid enough to ride in a cab by yourself, you need to pay full fare, just as it would be in this situation with Golden Spike as well.
Meh. I personally would not care to retire to a place like the moon (or Mars for that matter). Just the very thought of it is depressing, knowing that outside the little habitat that is sustaining you, there is nothing else alive.
Just don't move to a climate where the temperature falls below freezing for a couple months of the year... or to a place where the temperatures stay above 100 for the whole day. Not all of us can live in Malibu where the temperatures year-round are pleasant with a gentle breeze and little in the way of nasty storms that cause other problems.
Mankind has dealt with living in less than ideal locations for millennia and has created technologies to be able to cope with living in those harsh climates. People live year-round on the South Pole in a place that if you went outside that little habitat which is sustaining them for more than a brief trip that they will most certainly die. Arguably the same thing could be said about people who live in Minneapolis. You certainly don't want your care to run out of gasoline in January while traveling through rural Minnesota and you also want to make sure your care is in good repair if making such a trip.
I also like to point out that the original village of Los Angeles in California had every last man, woman, and child die due to a lack of water and food. It was a pretty miserable place to live until some advanced technology in the form of roads, ships, and irrigation canals (including culinary water sources) were able to be brought into the Los Angeles basin. Now it is a city of several million people... very few of which even bother paying attention to the complex technology which is keeping them alive.
I'll agree that living on the Moon is a step a bit harder in terms of worrying about finding air to breathe, but it isn't too hard. Furthermore, all you need to do in order to get more oxygen is to simply sinter some regolith.... the oxygen certainly doesn't need to come from the Earth. It just takes some people willing to make the effort and to put together the technology needed to get it to happen. If you have a few thousand or even a million people up there with you, there will certainly be plenty of places to go and you don't need to have cabin fever. The problem is trying to see who might be first to start such a place, but those are called pioneers for a very good reason. It sounds like you don't want to be a pioneer, so leave that job to somebody else.
If you want to know what would happen to the economy if alcohol was to disappear, all you need to do is look back to the prohibition era in the USA during the 1930's. As a social policy it was an utter disaster, but economically it wasn't nearly so bad and the Great Depression had nothing to do with the lack of alcohol production.... although a solid argument could be made that it may have been more than coincidence that the economy fell part when prohibition was passed and it recovered when it was repealed.
The interesting thing about the role of space-based assets is that the tendency is for increasing reliance upon them, not the other way around. Obviously the economy of the world did not depend upon anything in space in the 1950's as there was nothing in space at all. Even throughout most of the 1960's and 1970's, most of what was done in space could be done on the ground and indeed somewhat easier. Telecom satellites are one area where there was competition from cable laying ships... a decidedly 19th century technology somewhat updated to the 21st century through the use of fibre optic cables but still mostly recognizable to the trans-atlantic cables of a century earlier.
The interesting thing to note though, of everything that is critical infrastructure that really matters, absolutely none of it is being run by NASA with perhaps the exception of the Deep Space Network... and even that shows signs that will be replaced eventually by something not operated by NASA. Don't think that I'm trying to advocate for a level of increased funding for NASA, as I'm not. I think that agency has long outlived its usefulness in terms of being "the space agency". It really needs to turn back into what it once was and be a place to experiment with really cool technological ideas.... just as Jerry Pournelle was advocating in that article you linked. Projects like the Dawn mission to the asteroids are precisely what NASA should be doing, as an exploration agency that is also testing new technologies that may be used elsewhere afterward. The NACA did that earlier with aviation technologies, and NASA still has an aviation compoent (the first "A" in NASA).
I can't believe how much press this got, for being so without substance.
Here is their business plan: They are going to take people to the moon. They are going to do it by buying a spaceship.
That's it.
It is a fair criticism here. I find it sad that they don't have any customers to show off, and that the hardware they are claiming that they are working on is all on power point presentations rather than something they can pull out and present at the press conference. At least Planetary Resources (the last company to make a big splash like this) had some Arkyd 100 satellites to show off to prospective customers on the day of their big public debut. They have just photoshopped Apollo 17 images.
The big thing they need to work on is coming up with a lunar lander. Supposedly they will be manufacturing some of the equipment "in conjunction with some partners", but I don't see anything concrete in regards to who is actually building that hardware.
I also noticed three huge names that were not "business partners" with Golden Spike:
* SpaceX * Bigelow Aerospace * Scaled Composites
Scaled was purchased by Northrop-Grumman, who is involved with United Launch Alliance, so there still might be some very loose connection there and ULA is one of Golden Spike's "business partners" on their official media kit. The reason I suggested these three companies though is that they have been the poster children of "new space" in terms of getting stuff into orbit or at least into space in an economical fashion. If these companies are not involved, I would really like to know who might be?
You'd better learn Mandarin. China is the only country properly investing enough money for the infrastructure to expand and explore space. I believe their plans might be more mature than Golden Spike Company.
{{Citation needed}}
Seriously. While China was saying they might be able to get to the Moon by the year 2030, they are going very slowly and not very well for that matter. The Chinese space program does not have the operational tempo needed to have a sustained presence on the Moon or anywhere else for that matter. They are doing some interesting things, no doubt, but the Chinese are hardly the nation to fear in terms of what is happening in space.
By far and away I'd call this plan to be far more detailed by people who actually have a clue about sending people to the Moon (some of them by having sent people to the Moon 40 years ago) than anything I've seen from the Chinese. Good luck with that, they'll need it.
What is stopping people from launching nuclear waste and sending it to the Moon or to the Sun is simply that it would never be economical to do something that stupid. Honestly, sending nuclear waste to the Moon would be a very good thing to do, and nobody either here on the Earth or on the Moon would care. The waste stream from a terrestrial nuclear power plant could easily be thrown into a crater without any covering and nobody even near that crater would even care. There is no environment to destroy, there are no animals to worry about, and radiation from the Sun and from the rest of the Universe is enough to make that nuclear waste seem like a useful radiation shield rather than something to worry about from itself.
Seriously, this is about as stupid of a thing to worry about as concerning yourself about the radioactive fallout from coal-burning power plants (that actually put out more radioactive waste in a best-case situation than the worst-case situation of most nuclear power plants).
By saying this would ultimately be an economic issue, the costs associated with shipping radioactive waste to the Moon would be so expensive that nobody would try either. People are going to be building nuclear power plants on the Moon from Uranium found on the Moon well before anything is shipped from the Earth to the Moon is going to take place. It is far more likely that the Earth will be receiving the radioactive waste from these lunar fission reactors instead of the other way around.
The reason why the "small space station" is a problem is precisely because it is in Low Earth Orbit. There are no "native resources" at that location to do anything useful. That particular orbit is really only useful as a way station to other places in the Solar System and for people and stuff going in both directions... to the Earth and from the Earth to elsewhere.
The problem with the ISS and why it is so hard to keep going is because it is incomplete. It was also done in the most expensive way possible and with the least sustainable way of keeping it going. I consider it a miracle that it was put up in the first place mainly because of the insane contracts and government bureaucracies involved in getting it built. If you built an international airport with eight runways, hundreds of hangers, thousands of rental cars, several hundred employees, and an interstate highway leading up to that airport but only had two Cessna airplanes fly into it each year.... it would be equally useless and a huge waste of resources. That is what we have with the ISS. It could be useful but it was built in the wrong way to be useful in the way you are suggesting.
You are also making the completely wrong notion that commercial spaceflight activity is not currently happening except for a few stupid extreme adventure people like Felix Baumgartner. It couldn't be further from the truth and in fact commercial spaceflight activity is already a multi-billion dollar industry. The Earth and its economy would simply shut down if it wasn't for existing infrastructure in space and for existing applications of commercial spaceflight. You use them all of the time without knowing it too. When you see astronauts running around, they are just the tip of the iceberg of the actual activity which is happening. Simply put, there is plenty to do in space and ways to make money just to support the existing infrastructure of what we are currently doing in space. That by itself would more than justify putting some people up there simply to take care of that equipment... particularly given the increasing complexity of much of that equipment which is being sent into space.
In other words, there are some space tourists and extreme adventure type people going into space, but they are so insignificant right now as to be ignorable on a statistical basis for the real stuff that is happening in space. Supporting that infrastructure from stuff you can get from space is already right now something which can close a business case for going up there right now. In fact, there are multiple businesses who are trying to do just that, and Golden Spike is just the latest of a long string of companies.
Should we allow commercial exploitation of the moon?
Sending astronauts there to discover new things, to take moon rock back to earth for research, to set up a moon-based telescope or something akin to that is one thing.
Commercializing the moon is another.
Should we allow such endeavor to proceed in the first place?
Why should we not be able to commercially exploit the resources of the Moon? That this question is even being asked sort of suggests that we aren't worthy of being a species worth saving. Yes, I'm serious.
Of any place in the Solar System that is worth gouging up and mining until it is unrecognizable, the Moon would be the place to do it and benefit not only mankind but the Earth itself as well. I would much rather have the face of the Moon become unrecognizable from its current view than to have mountain top mining and other incredibly disastrous terrestrial mining operations.
The Moon is huge anyway, so I highly doubt that we would be able to do more than a minor dent on the Moon. I say dig it up and pull everything of value off of the Moon and let people who want to go there have at it and do whatever they want! In time there will be a civilization on the Moon that can take care of itself and take stewardship of the Moon for those things that the people living on the Moon are concerned about. At the moment it is downright silly to sit on the Earth and hope that the Moon remains a sort of international peace park where people aren't really permitted to go except with special permission from some government agency.
For the money and effort it will take to go to the Moon, it will need to be something incredibly valuable for the venture to be worth the effort. Besides, anybody going to the Moon like Golden Spike Company is actually paving the way for us to go into the rest of the Solar System and to expand the reach of mankind in general through the universe. This is also an issue of raw freedom, as we as a species need an escape valve for people to go forward and try new ideas of culture, science, literature, and politics. Right now we are being strangulated as it were here on the Earth with what it turning into a monolithic culture and political system that eventually will collapse under its own weight.
We can't have mankind placing all of its eggs in one basket as it were, and going to the Moon to exploit it is a great way to make sure that doesn't happen. Mars or the asteroids may also be useful, but the Moon is a great part of that picture.
The problem with a Fusor is that the energy requirements necessary to get it to produce that neutron flux is quite high. Not only does the Fusor not really produce a net energy gain to sustain fusion on its own, but using those neutrons on Uranium would also be prohibitively expensive in terms of shoveling coal into a boiler to produce the electricity necessary to power the Fusor in order to manufacture the Plutonium. Yes, it could be done, but there are much easier ways to get the job done at far less cost.
Mainly I'm saying this is an economic rationale where building such a device for making RTGs is sort of lame and expensive. If you were a desperate country like North Korea and didn't otherwise give a damn about power requirements in your quest for making a bomb, I suppose that would be one way to enrich Uranium to manufacture Plutonium. But if you have access to large quantities of Uranium and can write your own regulatory rules, why are you bothering with such silly methods of nuclear alchemy?
A Fusor is a fun tool to play with in a chemical laboratory if you don't mind just playing with a few atoms of some exotic material, and it has been built commercially for such applications. This isn't a completely cracked up idea, so it does deserve at least thinking about the idea for a bit and understanding what your application might be for generating Plutonium.
This organization, the Tax Policy Center, is making the assumption that those people who will be taxed will actually have that money available to be put into the treasury instead of working to find other ways to avoid paying those taxes... including simply not working at all or cutting back on their pay in lieu of other forms of payment.
It is a nice fiction here, but I think reality would bite this off by quite a bit. It would take some time for people to adjust to the new tax rules, so for the first few years of such a plan there is no doubt that people would pay the tax rather than do the "alternative payments" in various ways (off shore accounts, perks of various kinds, stock instead of wages, and other ways to get around even the new rules.
This is playing whack-a-mole in terms of trying to close loopholes, not to mention huge payments that would be made to political campaigns to poke holes in any such plan that would be rendered useless anyway. As a practical matter, it wouldn't happen regardless of popular support, and if it was actually enacted there would still be ways around this sort of cap.
In the long run, especially with closed loopholes, most millionaires would simply stop working and stop investing. They would take their pile of money they earned previously and just kick back and bide their time encouraging their kids and grandchildren to simply leave America altogether with as much of their money as they can take across the border to elsewhere.
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That sounds like an excuse, not a cause. You can use anything for an excuse, including what your mother look like this morning when she woke up today (or if she did at all).
The problem isn't COBOL by itself. The problem is that COBOL is seen by some as the last and greatest language that has ever been invented and that nothing else could improve upon it other than minor refinements of the language. That is what gives us crazy junk like object-oriented COBOL.
Rethinking computer programming language design has given us a multitude of languages and conceptual models that we can apply to software design and substantially improve the quality of the software being produced. I would be really curious about what Grace Hopper would think of some even higher abstraction levels like Scratch. No single programming language is best for everything, but some are better at accomplishing key tasks over others.
One huge difference.... Hopper actually wrote COBOL and put the concepts into practice by doing it.
Sure, you could read the notes of some of the early theoreticians who played with the idea of computing theory line Von Neumann and Turing, but I give more cred to those who actually did the work.
Ada Lovelace did precede the work by Konrad Zuse by nearly a century. Noting against Zuse, as he certainly did a whole lot to advance computing in the 20th century as well. Sometimes you need to go in baby steps until something actually happens, which is simply how scientific progress is made at all. If you've done something useful in this world with your life, it is that you've been able to explore the frontiers of human knowledge and perhaps contribute a little bit more knowledge to go just a little bit further.
Russia took the conquest of Kosovo by the US and the EUSSR as a precedent: "If you can legitimize an invasion and a land grab simply by proclaming the regions you want to grab as independent first, so can we." And they did. And they will again if they feel like it, because no international law exists any more to stop them.
Russia did nothing of the sort. If you really want to understand why Russia went into Georgia, I would suggest reading this book or you can simply read the Cliff Notes.
It was simply in the national interest to do what Russia did, as was also the case with Kosovo. In the case of the USA, it was even more about the personal ambition and the need to establish a "lasting legacy" on the part of Bill Clinton.... and ditto for Putin in regards to Georgia. Russia wanted a strong leader, so that is what they got.
While not nearly as useful as Geosynchronous orbits or other near equatorial orbits, Molniya orbits and related Tundra orbits are incredibly useful, especially for countries like Russia that has most of its territory in high latitude locations. The kind of vehicles that you would put into those orbits don't need to be launched from Florida and in fact are better launched from places in Russia as well.
My point is that there are things besides polar orbits or geosynchronous orbits to consider when building a spaceport or trying to identify why that location might be useful.
Right.... Georgia recognized their sovereignty after Russia held a gun to the collective heads of nearly everybody in Georgia?
Don't even get me started with Kosovo. That is a political quagmire that has nearly 2000 years of bullshit strewn around the rest of the world and is responsible for the deaths of literally millions of people including folks in my hometown. In spite of all of those millennia of turmoil and death, little seems to be solved.
If you think SpaceX is a black hole, what do you think of ATK and Boeing in regards to the SLS that is spending several billion dollars each year and hasn't even been able to get that rocket system into the air... and won't for another 10 years?
At least SpaceX is delivering cargo, which is a damn sight better than what the other tar pits that I see NASA dumping money into.
The JWST isn't going to fly. Of course neither will the Orion space capsule, especially on the SLS system, but who is counting?
The only thing those programs do is provide "make work" jobs for engineers and technicians. The SLS is being built explicitly to keep the Ammonium Perchlorate plants running for the next decade until the next major buy of ICBMs happen. For what expense and if there might be more productive ways to get that accomplished is certainly something to be asking, but it has nothing to do with accomplishing anything in space and especially nothing at all to do with science.
Right.... because a 6000km x 12,000km from the center of the Earth would be a sub-orbital flight.
Having NASA kill people didn't really end up being that much of a test of the organization. Oh, they had engineering reviews and all sorts of finger pointing, but in the end nothing really changed and in fact the things that caused the deaths were more or less repeated with only cosmetic changes. Concerns about the tiles and how fragile the shuttle surfaces were looked at from STS-1, yet it seemed to have been a surprise to some people at NASA when the Columbia was lost.
Yes, it will be a test if SpaceX kills people as a result of an engineering flaw or other mishap. As for destroying payloads, they've done that in spades. Do you see anybody complaining? If anything, SpaceX keeps getting new customers in spite of lost payloads in the past.
The N1 would have been an amazing rocket... if it would have ever flown. There were several attempts to fire the thing though, and the second launch of the N1 is supposedly the largest artificial non-nuclear explosion in the history of mankind. That still doesn't take the cake to what happened in China where over 500 people were killed when a rocket went off course and landed in a nearby village.
Building rockets is hard, and you are dealing with incredible energies just to get stuff up. Complaining about SpaceX and their record is so minor and insignificant that it is hardly worth even mentioning. The first launch of the Falcon 1 was something stupid on the part of SpaceX, but that company does seem to learn a bit from their mistakes.
The delta-v needed to send something to the Sun is even harder than shipping it to the Moon. Nice try, but even that won't work.
The only reason why somebody would put some nuclear waste into space is because that "waste" would be considered valuable in and of itself. Sort of like why Pu-238 is being used extensively on spacecraft at the moment. It is worthless as something to be used in fission reactors (hence considered "waste") but incredibly useful for other tasks. There may be other things in nuclear waste worth recovering too, assuming new techniques for extraction may be found.
As a place to dump spent reactor fuel, the Sun and the Moon are pretty damn lousy.
I would hope that over time a place like the Moon would become a place that would be full of life, and have some unique aspects that would making living on the Moon seem better to the local residents than what we have living here on the Earth. At the very least it would be different.
The early pioneers going to the Moon would face some incredible hardships, and it would indeed be a sterile and dead place for them. One of the challenges for those going to the Moon to live and raise families (as opposed to weekend camping trips like is being proposed by Golden Spike) is to figure out how to start an entirely new biosphere web. The things you take for granted now such as the wet grass, the cool breeze, all of the greenery, the worms in the soil, the microbes, the cockroaches, ants, mosquitos, everything... it will all need to be taken eventually to where we as a species are going. We are dependent upon all of the rest of these forms of life so I'd have to agree that they are necessary to our very survival anywhere even away from the Earth.
I would expect that parks would be a popular hang out for people even on the Moon. That is the kind of thing that needs to be planned when designing a space colony, although it won't be easy to built and won't come cheap. On the positive side, once you get some kind of animal or plant from the Earth up to the Moon, those things can make copies of themselves.
Once such structures actually do get built, once there are real cities on the Moon with generations of children who were born and have lived their lives on the Moon, it will be a very different place than the sterile conditions that the early settlers will encounter. I completely agree that the kind of people who will want to be in that kind of environment and face incredible dangers simply because they don't know what some dangers may even be is going to be a huge challenge. Our ancestors did that before though, and I expect that our children and descendents will figure out how to do that again in other places like the Moon and Mars.
First, the price is for two people, the price per seat is half that.
Next time the cab driver tells you the fare is $20, give him $5 and tell him that's the per seat price.
I've been a cab driver, and if four people were riding in a cab where the fare was $20, I'd be glad to take that $5 from each person separately and even give change.
It really isn't a problem. If you are stupid enough to ride in a cab by yourself, you need to pay full fare, just as it would be in this situation with Golden Spike as well.
Meh. I personally would not care to retire to a place like the moon (or Mars for that matter). Just the very thought of it is depressing, knowing that outside the little habitat that is sustaining you, there is nothing else alive.
Just don't move to a climate where the temperature falls below freezing for a couple months of the year... or to a place where the temperatures stay above 100 for the whole day. Not all of us can live in Malibu where the temperatures year-round are pleasant with a gentle breeze and little in the way of nasty storms that cause other problems.
Mankind has dealt with living in less than ideal locations for millennia and has created technologies to be able to cope with living in those harsh climates. People live year-round on the South Pole in a place that if you went outside that little habitat which is sustaining them for more than a brief trip that they will most certainly die. Arguably the same thing could be said about people who live in Minneapolis. You certainly don't want your care to run out of gasoline in January while traveling through rural Minnesota and you also want to make sure your care is in good repair if making such a trip.
I also like to point out that the original village of Los Angeles in California had every last man, woman, and child die due to a lack of water and food. It was a pretty miserable place to live until some advanced technology in the form of roads, ships, and irrigation canals (including culinary water sources) were able to be brought into the Los Angeles basin. Now it is a city of several million people... very few of which even bother paying attention to the complex technology which is keeping them alive.
I'll agree that living on the Moon is a step a bit harder in terms of worrying about finding air to breathe, but it isn't too hard. Furthermore, all you need to do in order to get more oxygen is to simply sinter some regolith.... the oxygen certainly doesn't need to come from the Earth. It just takes some people willing to make the effort and to put together the technology needed to get it to happen. If you have a few thousand or even a million people up there with you, there will certainly be plenty of places to go and you don't need to have cabin fever. The problem is trying to see who might be first to start such a place, but those are called pioneers for a very good reason. It sounds like you don't want to be a pioneer, so leave that job to somebody else.
If you want to know what would happen to the economy if alcohol was to disappear, all you need to do is look back to the prohibition era in the USA during the 1930's. As a social policy it was an utter disaster, but economically it wasn't nearly so bad and the Great Depression had nothing to do with the lack of alcohol production.... although a solid argument could be made that it may have been more than coincidence that the economy fell part when prohibition was passed and it recovered when it was repealed.
The interesting thing about the role of space-based assets is that the tendency is for increasing reliance upon them, not the other way around. Obviously the economy of the world did not depend upon anything in space in the 1950's as there was nothing in space at all. Even throughout most of the 1960's and 1970's, most of what was done in space could be done on the ground and indeed somewhat easier. Telecom satellites are one area where there was competition from cable laying ships... a decidedly 19th century technology somewhat updated to the 21st century through the use of fibre optic cables but still mostly recognizable to the trans-atlantic cables of a century earlier.
The interesting thing to note though, of everything that is critical infrastructure that really matters, absolutely none of it is being run by NASA with perhaps the exception of the Deep Space Network... and even that shows signs that will be replaced eventually by something not operated by NASA. Don't think that I'm trying to advocate for a level of increased funding for NASA, as I'm not. I think that agency has long outlived its usefulness in terms of being "the space agency". It really needs to turn back into what it once was and be a place to experiment with really cool technological ideas.... just as Jerry Pournelle was advocating in that article you linked. Projects like the Dawn mission to the asteroids are precisely what NASA should be doing, as an exploration agency that is also testing new technologies that may be used elsewhere afterward. The NACA did that earlier with aviation technologies, and NASA still has an aviation compoent (the first "A" in NASA).
I can't believe how much press this got, for being so without substance.
Here is their business plan: They are going to take people to the moon. They are going to do it by buying a spaceship.
That's it.
It is a fair criticism here. I find it sad that they don't have any customers to show off, and that the hardware they are claiming that they are working on is all on power point presentations rather than something they can pull out and present at the press conference. At least Planetary Resources (the last company to make a big splash like this) had some Arkyd 100 satellites to show off to prospective customers on the day of their big public debut. They have just photoshopped Apollo 17 images.
The big thing they need to work on is coming up with a lunar lander. Supposedly they will be manufacturing some of the equipment "in conjunction with some partners", but I don't see anything concrete in regards to who is actually building that hardware.
I also noticed three huge names that were not "business partners" with Golden Spike:
* SpaceX
* Bigelow Aerospace
* Scaled Composites
Scaled was purchased by Northrop-Grumman, who is involved with United Launch Alliance, so there still might be some very loose connection there and ULA is one of Golden Spike's "business partners" on their official media kit. The reason I suggested these three companies though is that they have been the poster children of "new space" in terms of getting stuff into orbit or at least into space in an economical fashion. If these companies are not involved, I would really like to know who might be?
... or have ex-wives they'd like to leave behind.
You'd better learn Mandarin. China is the only country properly investing enough money for the infrastructure to expand and explore space. I believe their plans might be more mature than Golden Spike Company.
{{Citation needed}}
Seriously. While China was saying they might be able to get to the Moon by the year 2030, they are going very slowly and not very well for that matter. The Chinese space program does not have the operational tempo needed to have a sustained presence on the Moon or anywhere else for that matter. They are doing some interesting things, no doubt, but the Chinese are hardly the nation to fear in terms of what is happening in space.
By far and away I'd call this plan to be far more detailed by people who actually have a clue about sending people to the Moon (some of them by having sent people to the Moon 40 years ago) than anything I've seen from the Chinese. Good luck with that, they'll need it.
What is stopping people from launching nuclear waste and sending it to the Moon or to the Sun is simply that it would never be economical to do something that stupid. Honestly, sending nuclear waste to the Moon would be a very good thing to do, and nobody either here on the Earth or on the Moon would care. The waste stream from a terrestrial nuclear power plant could easily be thrown into a crater without any covering and nobody even near that crater would even care. There is no environment to destroy, there are no animals to worry about, and radiation from the Sun and from the rest of the Universe is enough to make that nuclear waste seem like a useful radiation shield rather than something to worry about from itself.
Seriously, this is about as stupid of a thing to worry about as concerning yourself about the radioactive fallout from coal-burning power plants (that actually put out more radioactive waste in a best-case situation than the worst-case situation of most nuclear power plants).
By saying this would ultimately be an economic issue, the costs associated with shipping radioactive waste to the Moon would be so expensive that nobody would try either. People are going to be building nuclear power plants on the Moon from Uranium found on the Moon well before anything is shipped from the Earth to the Moon is going to take place. It is far more likely that the Earth will be receiving the radioactive waste from these lunar fission reactors instead of the other way around.
The reason why the "small space station" is a problem is precisely because it is in Low Earth Orbit. There are no "native resources" at that location to do anything useful. That particular orbit is really only useful as a way station to other places in the Solar System and for people and stuff going in both directions... to the Earth and from the Earth to elsewhere.
The problem with the ISS and why it is so hard to keep going is because it is incomplete. It was also done in the most expensive way possible and with the least sustainable way of keeping it going. I consider it a miracle that it was put up in the first place mainly because of the insane contracts and government bureaucracies involved in getting it built. If you built an international airport with eight runways, hundreds of hangers, thousands of rental cars, several hundred employees, and an interstate highway leading up to that airport but only had two Cessna airplanes fly into it each year.... it would be equally useless and a huge waste of resources. That is what we have with the ISS. It could be useful but it was built in the wrong way to be useful in the way you are suggesting.
You are also making the completely wrong notion that commercial spaceflight activity is not currently happening except for a few stupid extreme adventure people like Felix Baumgartner. It couldn't be further from the truth and in fact commercial spaceflight activity is already a multi-billion dollar industry. The Earth and its economy would simply shut down if it wasn't for existing infrastructure in space and for existing applications of commercial spaceflight. You use them all of the time without knowing it too. When you see astronauts running around, they are just the tip of the iceberg of the actual activity which is happening. Simply put, there is plenty to do in space and ways to make money just to support the existing infrastructure of what we are currently doing in space. That by itself would more than justify putting some people up there simply to take care of that equipment... particularly given the increasing complexity of much of that equipment which is being sent into space.
In other words, there are some space tourists and extreme adventure type people going into space, but they are so insignificant right now as to be ignorable on a statistical basis for the real stuff that is happening in space. Supporting that infrastructure from stuff you can get from space is already right now something which can close a business case for going up there right now. In fact, there are multiple businesses who are trying to do just that, and Golden Spike is just the latest of a long string of companies.
Should we allow commercial exploitation of the moon?
Sending astronauts there to discover new things, to take moon rock back to earth for research, to set up a moon-based telescope or something akin to that is one thing.
Commercializing the moon is another.
Should we allow such endeavor to proceed in the first place?
Why should we not be able to commercially exploit the resources of the Moon? That this question is even being asked sort of suggests that we aren't worthy of being a species worth saving. Yes, I'm serious.
Of any place in the Solar System that is worth gouging up and mining until it is unrecognizable, the Moon would be the place to do it and benefit not only mankind but the Earth itself as well. I would much rather have the face of the Moon become unrecognizable from its current view than to have mountain top mining and other incredibly disastrous terrestrial mining operations.
The Moon is huge anyway, so I highly doubt that we would be able to do more than a minor dent on the Moon. I say dig it up and pull everything of value off of the Moon and let people who want to go there have at it and do whatever they want! In time there will be a civilization on the Moon that can take care of itself and take stewardship of the Moon for those things that the people living on the Moon are concerned about. At the moment it is downright silly to sit on the Earth and hope that the Moon remains a sort of international peace park where people aren't really permitted to go except with special permission from some government agency.
For the money and effort it will take to go to the Moon, it will need to be something incredibly valuable for the venture to be worth the effort. Besides, anybody going to the Moon like Golden Spike Company is actually paving the way for us to go into the rest of the Solar System and to expand the reach of mankind in general through the universe. This is also an issue of raw freedom, as we as a species need an escape valve for people to go forward and try new ideas of culture, science, literature, and politics. Right now we are being strangulated as it were here on the Earth with what it turning into a monolithic culture and political system that eventually will collapse under its own weight.
We can't have mankind placing all of its eggs in one basket as it were, and going to the Moon to exploit it is a great way to make sure that doesn't happen. Mars or the asteroids may also be useful, but the Moon is a great part of that picture.
The problem with a Fusor is that the energy requirements necessary to get it to produce that neutron flux is quite high. Not only does the Fusor not really produce a net energy gain to sustain fusion on its own, but using those neutrons on Uranium would also be prohibitively expensive in terms of shoveling coal into a boiler to produce the electricity necessary to power the Fusor in order to manufacture the Plutonium. Yes, it could be done, but there are much easier ways to get the job done at far less cost.
Mainly I'm saying this is an economic rationale where building such a device for making RTGs is sort of lame and expensive. If you were a desperate country like North Korea and didn't otherwise give a damn about power requirements in your quest for making a bomb, I suppose that would be one way to enrich Uranium to manufacture Plutonium. But if you have access to large quantities of Uranium and can write your own regulatory rules, why are you bothering with such silly methods of nuclear alchemy?
A Fusor is a fun tool to play with in a chemical laboratory if you don't mind just playing with a few atoms of some exotic material, and it has been built commercially for such applications. This isn't a completely cracked up idea, so it does deserve at least thinking about the idea for a bit and understanding what your application might be for generating Plutonium.
And you want to know what led to the collapse of the Roman Empire?
Christianity.
As an utterly simplistic answer, you may be somewhat right. But what of Christianity led to the collapse of the Roman Empire?
This organization, the Tax Policy Center, is making the assumption that those people who will be taxed will actually have that money available to be put into the treasury instead of working to find other ways to avoid paying those taxes... including simply not working at all or cutting back on their pay in lieu of other forms of payment.
It is a nice fiction here, but I think reality would bite this off by quite a bit. It would take some time for people to adjust to the new tax rules, so for the first few years of such a plan there is no doubt that people would pay the tax rather than do the "alternative payments" in various ways (off shore accounts, perks of various kinds, stock instead of wages, and other ways to get around even the new rules.
This is playing whack-a-mole in terms of trying to close loopholes, not to mention huge payments that would be made to political campaigns to poke holes in any such plan that would be rendered useless anyway. As a practical matter, it wouldn't happen regardless of popular support, and if it was actually enacted there would still be ways around this sort of cap.
In the long run, especially with closed loopholes, most millionaires would simply stop working and stop investing. They would take their pile of money they earned previously and just kick back and bide their time encouraging their kids and grandchildren to simply leave America altogether with as much of their money as they can take across the border to elsewhere.