In the case of the OrbComm satellite, what was lost was a demonstration satellite where the intention was to test the technology in space, to turn on the computers and bounce a few signals off of the satellite. While it would have been incredibly useful to have the satellite go to a higher orbit and to be used for a longer period of time, there were considerable tests and engineering activities that were able to be proven over the few days that the satellite was able to stay in orbit.
In short, what was insured by OrbComm was the cost of the launch (which SpaceX may just give to OrbComm for free anyway as a good-will gesture in a future flight) plus a partial replacement of the vehicle. The design time is essentially meaningless as it is a part of a whole series of identical satellites that are going into serial production. The production line is still in place so there isn't even a need to retool... they just need to increase their orders from their suppliers and keep the production line going. The production line also won't take "a few years", as they are producing a satellite every couple of months at the moment. As I said, it is in serial production right now. The insurance underwriter refused to pay full price for the vehicle because it did make the trip into space and in fact engineering tests were able to be performed successfully even in the lousy orbit it was put into.
OrbComm has been considering other launch companies for their vehicles, but the fact is that the other companies can't beat SpaceX for price. The market that OrbComm is going into has extremely tight profit margins and competition from companies who don't even use vehicles in space. That price difference is what will likely make OrbComm profitable instead of a financial disaster like Iridium was once upon a time.
The fact that the primary payload on the CRS-1 flight was placed into the proper orbit in spite of a significant mechanical failure is something that the insurance company is looking at very favorably, and in that case a refund/reflight by SpaceX will further encourage any insurance company flying payloads with SpaceX. The only negative feature for future flights is that insurance for secondary payloads where NASA is the primary payload contractor will most certainly increase. Ultimately that justifies charging NASA more for future flights... above an beyond what other commercial customers wouldn't have to pay because their flight rules wouldn't be nearly as stringent as NASA's. I understand the concern that there was a 1% chance of the OrbComm satellite + Falcon 9 upper stage crashing into the ISS (the excuse for why the OrbComm satellite wasn't put into the proper orbit), but I expect future payloads and missions will take those issues into mind.
The government isn't spending a dime here. It is just not collecting federal excise taxes that otherwise would be collected if the person purchasing the automobile had purchased something else instead.
Besides, the federal government isn't exactly losing money either,as Tesla still is paying federal income tax on earnings as well as on salaries for its employees. Telsa is also paying property taxes for its factories and dozens of other taxes are being paid to state and local government authorities. You shouldn't be crying too hard about "government spending" here that isn't even happening in the first place. If nobody buys a Tesla Model S, the tax would never have been collected in the first place.
On top of that, the Model S has a starting price of about $50k, and Tesla is looking to eventually develop a high volume-low cost consumer vehicle once they get enough working capital from hopefully robust sales of their other products. The next generation vehicle is anticipated to cost about $30k... while still expensive is definitely something more affordable for a non-millionaire. That sounds like an excellent reason to even encourage this kind of business and marketing behavior to have the wealthy help finance the development of a low-cost consumer vehicle by offering luxury vehicles that also do something useful for the environment.
If you don't agree with those tax breaks, vote for people who will get them repealed. These tax breaks are not just for Tesla vehicles either, but for any electric automobile made by any company... including Toyota, General Motors, or Fisker. If you think it is such a good deal, why don't you dismantle a few golf carts and make your own electric automobile company?
I mean this in the nicest way possible, but SpaceX also doesn't suffer from obsolete union contracts and a bloated bureaucracy internal to the company which is preventing its expansion or even switch to other vehicles. SpaceX has never needed to retool to another vehicle, something which can sometimes cost more than simply building a new factory.
BTW, I agree with you on the Grasshopper and the eventual plans to make the Falcon 9 fully reusable (including oddly enough even the 2nd stage). Just partial reuseability will make some difference, and the rest is just gravy. If SpaceX can get the cost of spaceflight down to the point where fuel costs are significant (aka more than 10% of the cost of the launch and the price of petroleum in the Middle East impacts launch costs), they will start to really make a difference.
Remember, it was Elon Musk who suggested he could get the price of a round-trip ticket to Mars for an astronaut down to about $500k. He has his reasons for thinking that might be the cost, even though NASA put the figure at about $100 billion each instead.
They include companies from the Ariane industrial team and national space agencies
Yeah, that sounds like "private shareholders". Almost everything Arianespace gets involved with in terms of major decisions requires diplomats from various governments and frequently decisions are made for political and not fiscal reasons. While not unusual in the EU, you shouldn't confuse this with how SpaceX is financed, as the ownership of SpaceX is entirely from private entities (although it wouldn't surprise me if In-Q-Tel has a small stake in SpaceX already).
It should be pointed out that SpaceX has figured out how to reduce the cost of its launches to the point that the subsidy needed for Arianespace to compete would be embarrassing and noticeable to EU members and their constituents. Keep in mind SpaceX is making their rockets so cheap that even the Chinese don't think they can underbid SpaceX.
If the ESA was to expand slightly and include additional EU members (ESA and EU membership... while there is considerable overlap... isn't identical), they might be able to embark in an incredibly ambitious space program like a manned European Lunar or Martian program on a level comparable to NASA but with a much larger budget. Keep in mind though that would be a financial commitment of about $100 billion USD (or equivalent)... and I don't think it would be any cheaper simply because it is a European concept instead of being an American one. Just see if something like that would fly through the EU parliament, much less national parliaments in the EU in terms of funding.
The reason why top satellite manufacturers are in the EU is in part because Arianespace has been successful at competing on the international market, and because American legal regulations have been idiotic to put it mildly. ITAR regulations alone have driven out much of the commercial spaceflight market from America, which has gone almost exclusively to Europe and a few launches to Russia via RKK Energia/Roscosmos. China has tried to enter this market too, but they've had their own set of problems.
The satellites made in the EU are often being done on a contract basis, and if the EU wants to follow in the stupid path that the American Congress has done over the past couple of decades to drive out commercial spaceflight business.... EU companies would have the same problems that American launch providers have faced over the past couple of decades but without the American military or American military budgets to prop them up.
All that the EU can do to SpaceX is to impact his suppliers (which are few in number.... SpaceX makes most of their own components from raw bulk materials like sheets of aluminum, titanium, and steel) or his potential customers in the EU. Given that few of his customers are in the EU, it isn't all that big of a deal to them and increased regulations by the EU would impact all potential launchers.
It should be noted that until recently, it was the Ariane rockets that carried the bulk of commercial spaceflight vehicles. In other words, increased regulations on spaceflight (assuming they "play fair" and impose those regulations equally to all companies participating) would mainly kill European companies who are doing (and still doing currently) a very robust commercial business. Much of the reason why they have the launch rate that they do is because they have been very competitive on the world market and undercut American launch companies like Boeing (with the Delta rockets) and Lockheed-Martin (with the Atlas rockets). They worked their way to become compliant with American regulations like ITAR, but were also in a position to avoid ITAR if needed so they could launch vehicles from companies that American launch providers can't because of American regulations. There are some ESA payloads as well as satellites that have been launched by EU members.... but those will likely go to Arianespace anyway regardless of how cheap SpaceX makes their launch prices go and will never be on the table for SpaceX.
Arianespace can become an EU-only launch provider, but they will give up most of the market by doing so. Elon Musk's assertion here is that he can compete against Arianespace for contracts from countries like Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, and Qatar. None of those countries care or will even pay attention to EU regulations and will go to SpaceX if they can provide a launch for a quarter of the price that Arianespace can offer for the same payload. That should be a no-brainer, especially if SpaceX can deliver the same level of reliability that Arianespace is currently providing.
That really is the trick for SpaceX right now: to prove that their system is reliable enough that you can be 95%+ certain that the payload will make the trip into the intended orbit. A whole bunch of people are waiting to see if SpaceX can deliver on that promise, and that is the only real selling point at the moment for either Arianespace or RKK Energia for that matter. It has nothing to do with governments, but simply engineering that is well done and quality manufacturing processes.
Note that the 1st amendment also says that the government can't prohibit the free exercise of religion either, including its expression through speech and the press. There is a world of difference between a student or ordinary citizen expressing themselves in a voluntary manner (aka offering a prayer right before a test on their own or holding a prayer vigil on Christmas Eve in a public area... even on public property) as opposed to having the government mandate that you must pray to a certain god or have tithing extracted from your paycheck as a tax.
I don't have a problem with a student setting up a web page expressing their religious opinions using government funds... as long as you offer that same opportunity to all of the students on a reasonable basis to express whatever their opinion is including having no opinion or even being against organized religions in general. The problem is the censorship, and this attitude that religious expression is something that should be feared.
I think it would even be healthy to have a "debate corner" on a college campus where any student could express any political opinion they may have... including "hate speech" full of bigotry, sexism, and racism. If you think some sort of speech should be censored, you definitely don't understand the purpose or the philosophy behind the 1st amendment and why it was ratified in the first place. Suggesting that university websites, dorm doors, or even bulletin boards should be off limits to religious expression completely misses the mark... especially at a public school. Private schools have a little more latitude to ban some forms of speech as there is a contractual relationship to even attend. It definitely shouldn't be the other way around.
You are painting a rather wide brush here with libertarianism, and again confusing anarchists with people simply seeking liberty.
There is another philosophy here distinct from anarchism, which is the view that government is a necessary evil. Necessary explicitly because of the situations you describe, where there is a need to have a government to redress grievances. If you steal something that belongs to somebody else, or if you engage in a contract but choose not to follow the terms of that contract because it is inconvenient for you at the moment, there is a role for a government to step in.
This is the belief that a small government which can be controlled by the people it governs... essentially that a popular movement to abolish that government can happen simply because the government is so small that as a group the people it governs ultimately have the veto power on what happens. Individuals are held accountable for their individual actions but if you can get enough support for your viewpoint that a government might just back down for a while or for good.
This was the government advocated by Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. It is to be seen if their "experiment" in limited government was ultimately a failure, and it could arguably be said that perhaps it is because of the size and scope of the U.S. federal government that is their legacy. They were certainly not anarchists. Many of those who call themselves libertarians feel that perhaps a return to that general philosophy could be useful.
Distinct from libertarians are those who eschew government of any kind and are genuine anarchists. Some of them self-style as libertarians, and many of their viewpoints do coincide with many of the limited government "libertarians" advocating the elimination of several government agencies or promoting the legalization of marijuana, but they diverge from the viewpoint by thinking all government is evil and is the source of the problems. They even go so far as to suggested even limited government is bad because it sort of lets the camel's nose into the tent as it were and that granting any sort of authority to a government of any kind eventually grows until it can no longer be pruned down.
You are confusing a whole spectrum of philosophies here including many who have a philosophical viewpoint on governance which isn't really all that different from the major political parties of the world or even America.
The one major accomplishment of the Kepler observatory is that the understanding of the frequency of planets in other stellar systems and where they will likely be found has been nailed down very well. Back when we had a data set with a sample size of one (aka just our own solar system) it was very hard to try and determine just how many stars had planetary systems of their own. it was even hypothesized that multiple star systems (by far the more common type in the universe) simply didn't even have planets. That notion has now been thrown completely out the window as stellar systems with planets are now seen as extremely common.
The fun part has yet to happen though, as planets that may be found in the "habitable zone" are just barely starting to be identified. So far most of the planets that have been identified are planets that have very short orbital periods (some as short as just a few days). Instead, as Kepler can continue its mission it will be possible to identify planets that are much,much further away and their orbital periods are on the order of years instead of weeks.
When the time comes, I expect that probes to other stars (I think it will happen eventually... even if it is centuries away from happening) will be traveling to planets that will already be well identified in terms of basic characteristics... to have at least the degree of understanding of those planets like we do a great many asteroids at the moment.
Sure, if the CIA wants to fund a group going to the Moon with money derived outside of tax dollars (earned by investing based upon information obtained in intelligence operations... with the SEC looking the other way of course with "insider trading" laws) I suppose that is a "private investor".
That is one very interesting investor group though. It would be up to the X-Prize Foundation to make a final ruling on the matter.
The original X-Prize (before the Ansari family became involved I should note too... that didn't happen until nearly when the prize was awarded) was composed of donations from the space/geek community to help fund the prize. It was sort of a Kickstarter idea that happened before Kickstarter even existed, and over the first few years received a respectable amount of money into the donation pool, but not really the $10 million that was supposed to be awarded. There wasn't even any time limit on when you could win the award, with the assumption that the longer it took to win the prize that more people would donate and interest would compound the existing donations.
That worked for several years, but Peter Diamandis became aware of the "Hole-in-One" policies for events like golf tournaments (where the term originates... with defined rules where people in tournaments compete to see if they win a hole-in-one on a golf course and the insurance company pays up if somebody succeeds). It turned out that with the donations received to about the date that Mr. Diamandis looked into such policies, that he had enough to pay the premium and set a "reasonable" deadline for when the prize needed to be won. All of the active teams at the time supported the move, even though it meant that they needed to double down and really work to win the prize.
It should be noted that other than Scaled Composites, nobody else was really ready to win. ARCA (the Romanian team), Armadillo Aerospace, and a couple of other groups have subsequently fired actual hardware that might have won given a little more time, but they would have all likely missed the deadline and the insurance policy would have expired (Armadillo was a bit closer though). It certainly wasn't a guarantee that any team would have won.
The insurance company who underwrote the policy did offer to refund the money for the policy with a high interest rate if the X-Prize Foundation wanted to back out... especially after it looked like Scaled Composites was likely going to win. Obviously they didn't.
As for if an insurance company would offer a similar policy on a future space prize contest, I'm sure they will take into account the experience of the original X-Prize into consideration.
I don't think the idea is that the vehicle going to the moon will need a dedicated Falcon 9. Most teams intend to make their project a secondary payload... hopefully avoiding the problems that Orbcomm faced with the last CRS-1 flight (crew resupply service) to the ISS, where NASA said SpaceX couldn't use the booster to push the satellite into a higher orbit.
A secondary payload can be somewhat or even considerably less than $55 million.
Regardless, your point is still holding true to an extent. The team which gets to the Moon first gets the $15 - $20 million is mostly going to be covering basic expenses and essentially getting a subsidized trip to the Moon. On the other hand, Scaled Composites was able to leverage their "win" from the original X-Prize competition to turn into a merger with Northrop-Grumman for far more than the $25 million investment in SpaceShip One (on top of the prize money), and they also landed a contract with Virgin Galactic to make Spaceship Two for a price that also far exceeded the $25 million investment.
Any group of researchers who have figured out how to land a vehicle on another planet (you can split hairs about the Moon on this topic, given the context) for less than $100 million and return useful data has a bright future ahead of them in planetary science research. By comparison, Curiosity and the Mars Science Laboratory cost about $2.5 billion to get to Mars. It may be possible to build something a fair bit cheaper than that if it was a private development instead.
It should also be noted that the co-founders of Google are also major investors in Planetary Resources. It may be very possible that company will hire anybody who worked on successful mission to the Moon to help them with their endeavor to mine asteroids. Working hardware somewhere else in the Solar System is definitely a resume enhancement.
And while commercial interest is a way to get space exploration for "free" in a sense, something fundamentally has to change. Either we have to find something out there we don't know of now, or there has to be a sudden change in demand for something we do know is out there. As is, what we know is out there wouldn't be economical to collect without transportation costs dropping by several orders of magnitude from even optimistic projections of commercial space flight (as in, not compared to current government space flight costs). It is going to take more than a tax break to cross that gap.
I understand skepticism about commercial spaceflight opportunities, and cost is a huge factor for much of what can be happening in space. A sad reality is that the cost of going into space has been until the past couple of years (due to SpaceX and several other very disruptive companies entering the market) going up in price even faster than inflation.
There are some reasons for that, and it should be noted that commercial spaceflight opportunities have been fleeing from America to the point it was a non-existent industry in America as well. The ESA, it could be argued, has been paying for their spaceflight programs on the back of their commercial contracts. Russia has been subsidizing their spaceflight program with blatantly commercial projects and flying passengers into orbit.... now that they've discovered capitalism. But that isn't all.
Commercial spaceflight projects (mainly communications satellites, mapping satellites for things like Google Earth [plus other companies], and some remote sensing for other purposes) are currently a multi-billion dollar industry already. There are also a great many people who are providing commercial services to privately-funded research efforts (non-government efforts). My point is that there already is a huge commercial market, and suggesting that it may grow by 20% or 50% if some tax breaks and some legal changes could happen would easily add a billion or two more money per year into this industry. They aren't starting from zero here but from a rather large number to begin with. American companies mainly need to recapture even some of the commercial spaceflight market that once upon a time pretty much belonged to America originally. I don't think that kind of growth is unrealistic.
One interesting area of spaceflight that is also becoming much more like the kinds of rationale for sending people to Antarctica instead of robots is with sub-orbital launches. Virgin Galactic is but the first of several companies who are offering very cheap means of getting at least past the Kármán line, where it is now going to be far cheaper to send a healthy graduate student or even a university professor who is in pretty good shape into space with the experiment than it would be to hire a team of technicians to build the equipment necessary to make a robot to perform those experiments. In this case, I'm not even talking pie-in-the-sky estimates but rather hard figures based upon actual ticket prices that have already been sold. The sub-orbital spaceflight market has some incredibly fierce price competition as well where Virgin Galactic is offering what amounts to be luxury services and extremely good customer service on top of the price and will be seen as the high-end of the market. I don't know if sub-orbital spaceflight techniques can translate into orbital spaceflight equivalents, but it is a strong start.
It is a good point though that one of the reasons why grad students are sent to Antarctica is because it is cheaper to send a bunch of students than a multi-billion dollar robotic vehicle that would be slower and do less science.
Liability wavers? What do you think this is, offshore drilling?
No, drilling for petroleum offshore is wimpy stuff compared to mining Platinum out of an asteroid. We are talking real he-man, dangerous stuff here where frankly it isn't even known what dangers might be in store for those going into space doing this stuff.
The reason why state and national legislatures put in liability wavers on some activities is because it is seen as something important for national goals and interests, just like offshore petroleum extraction can be for many countries. Your analogy to such high risk places that are hostile to human habitation and requires advanced technology and large capital expenditures in order to make such projects effective is spot on, and the comparison works for people who are going to be doing stuff in space.
Thank you for bringing up the comparison. It works!
If a country really wants to have its citizens engaging in activities in space and expanding that country's reach into the rest of the solar system, such liability wavers are one approach that doesn't cost money but could encourage a huge amount of capital spent towards that end. With capitalism, you also don't need to be worrying about a change in presidential administration or even what one election might bring in terms of a change of leadership. Long-term plans for the future can be made by those willing to make such risks. Unlimited liability does the opposite and discourages companies from getting set up or investing into such endeavors in the first place.
While Robert Zurbin is an interesting person and I like some of the arguments that he makes in that "Case for Mars", I flat out disagree with his notion we should abandon the Moon as a source of resources or even for scientific exploration. It is an interesting place to hang out for a variety of reasons all to itself, and offers some interesting and even unique attributes that make it useful. For myself, I think development and even settlement of the Moon should be happening at the same time as similar developments on Mars, and it doesn't have to be an exclusive or situation. In fact, I think development of lunar resources together with development of Mars along with asteroids is a really good idea.
There is even a school of thought that large gravity wells like the Moon, Mars, and even places like Ceres or Vesta are places to avoid other than to be used as anchors for things like the Lagrangian points. Smaller asteroids can easily be mined and have minerals extracted, where you don't even need to worry about getting them out of a gravity well in the first place or it is trivially easy to get that to happen.
I'll also suggest that if Zurbin's plan hits a government bureaucracy (who Zurbin is hoping will pay for his dreams), that same bureaucracy will inflate the price of that plan several times simply because of the fiscal controls needed for government accounting alone. Since Robert Zurbin is insisting upon an international mission instead of one done by just one country, add another 5x multiplier to the cost on top of the additional multiplier due to being a government operation. International cooperation never keeps cost down and cost savings (especially for the primary country running the operation) would be had simply by telling other countries to try their own approach instead. This isn't to say that international cooperation is to be feared or dismissed, but rather that cost reasons should not be even remotely a consideration for that to happen. I'm not against international protocols being established for exchanging technical data or even for joint docking procedures (aka Apollo-Soyuz, Mir, and the ISS for joint Russian, American, and even European and Japanese docking on the same location),
In other words, if multiple countries are going to Mars, set up some standards for exchanging components and especially life-critical systems so an air scrubber or filter can be exchanged by crews on Mars to support each other if necessary. Such stuff happens in Antarctica between various national research stations, even though each station has its own objectives and research goals.
The ultimate driver for what happens in space will be determined by economics though. I would like to see the economic resources of space to be exploited and used in a manner that would be able to essentially have spaceflight (manned and unmanned) pay for itself rather than be an annual budget battle for how much needs to be spent for that purpose as if space is somehow only something for scientific curiosity and nothing more. With that in mind, I am a firm believer that CNN will cover the first landing of NASA astronauts on Mars live with a reporter on the spot ready to greet them with a party when they arrive. At the party will be some ale of some sort brewed at a local distillery made by previous settlers.
The issue with the Jame Webb Telescope is one of misappropriations of money and a lack of a plan. The management of the program has been absolutely horrible, If you go back into earlier threads here on Slashdot about this program, not to mention on other forums that talk about how it is being managed, it is really more of a domestic jobs program for research scientists than much of an actual program for going into space and doing something useful.
I say it is horribly mismanaged because the program lacks focus, basic design requirements keep changing, and in spite of the fact that it has been developed supposedly over the past decade to one degree or another they still are almost back to the original drawing board starting over yet again to get the thing built. It has been said that a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. The same thing over and over again is a huge money pit of problems and a space telescope that will never leave the ground.
Because so much money is being dumped into the JWST, they expect big things. At this point in time, a whole lot more science could have been done had a series of half-billion dollar telescopes (aka the original price of the vehicle I might add) been put into production and actually put into space. You learn far more by actually putting the vehicle in space too, I might add. Stick with a list of unchanging design requirements, and then engineers can actually have a design ready for you in a reasonable period of time and at a reasonable cost.
Humans will not go to Mars or any other location in our solar system for decades, possibly a century or two. They probably will rarely if ever go to the moon in our lifetimes. The money and justification are simply not there. We have a historic responsibility to play our role and leave the rest for future generations to each play the role that corresponds to them.
The reason why it will take decades or even centuries in order to put people on Mars or elsewhere in the Solar System has nothing to do with money, but simply the will and having governments permitting people to be able to go there in the first place. Money and justification is not an impediment.
One relatively cheap and easy way to encourage development of space economically is to simply say over the next century that any activity which takes place primarily in space is exempt from any form of taxation. Providing liability wavers would be something else that doesn't cost money but would make a huge difference for activities in space as costs could be a whole lot more predictable. The same could be said about simply making some sort of sane type of space law where things like ownership of resources obtained or manufactured in space could be made much more certain. There are people who are willing to go into space and to do things on their own dime, so it really doesn't need to cost anything from a government perspective, and if people can make money they will pay whatever it takes to get there.
Besides, I think the current approaches for getting into space are far too overpriced and other methods for getting into space can be done much more cheaply, even if ultimately it is exploding the equivalent amount of energy of a small nuclear bomb under your chair to put yourself or at least a metric ton of "stuff" into orbit. Cost is even less of an issue in terms of moving stuff around that is already in interplanetary space (aka extracting resources from asteroids). A couple of companies are currently in the process of setting up the infrastructure to do just that.
If you are asking if the USA or for that matter any other country in the world (or even group of countries) has the money to put together a government boondoggle that is a Manhattan Project-style "waste anything but time" mission that would put a bunch of people on Mars, I'd have to agree that such money simply doesn't exist. The Apollo missions were pretty much the most that could be done using such a fiscal model. That isn't exactly true, as the money dumped into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could have easily supported such a mission and have done it in under a decade. But it would be in the trillion dollar range none the less and it wouldn't be done in the name of science. If any science actually was accomplished, it would be an afterthought and not the purpose of the mission. I would dare say that spending that kind of money on a "stimulus" program instead of the junk that it was spent on non-military spending (appropriations above and beyond the normal budgetary process mind you as well) could have paid for such a mission as well.
I just simply reject the notion though that we must scale back our dreams. Some creativity in terms of how to finance these missions could happen, but I also am suggesting that even framing the debate in terms of manned vs. unmanned missions and that you can only have one or the other is simply the wrong approach to be taking at all. If it makes sense to send robots and to do something useful, send them. There are separate reasons though to get people into space as well, and if they are going to be on the frontier of human experience they might as well be doing some science too.
America as well as several other countries from around the world have scientific bases set up in Antarctica... at rather significant expense I might add too. If robotic missions were so wonderful, why do you think people are at those research locations instead of tele-operated robots? Note that there are teleoperated robots in Antarctica as well, so it isn't an either-or proposition. I'm just asking you to justify your logic in light of a similar situation that exists perhaps a little closer to home.
The role of a human on a science mission is to provide a way to rapidly react to situations at the location and to give very short instructions to perform complex tasks or for somebody 'on the spot' to make some sort of judgement call in terms of what to do next in a time critical situation. I wouldn't call that a lack of utility, but it is a narrow set of situations where early exploration science missions admittedly don't need to have those kind of parameters.
Right now there is still a whole lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of things that can be done with robotic spacecraft, so I would have to agree that some sort of increase in spending for robotic missions is warranted even at the expense of manned spaceflight. Then again you have projects like the James Webb Telescope that have been sucking up even the money that could be spent on other deserving robotic missions, so demonizing the manned spaceflight program really shouldn't be the only target here. More intelligent and fiscally responsible spending should be happening in this area.
None the less, when Harrison Schmitt was on the Moon, he was able to perform the kind of scientific analysis on the spot that simply couldn't have been done by a robotic probe. There really is a need to send up some geologists to the Moon to perform a really extensive survey of lunar materials and to follow up on previous scientific research that has been done there. The kinds of things that a robotic vehicle could do on the Moon would be significantly limited without having somebody on site able to really perform the kind of science that needs to be done there.
Carl Sagan performed a major disservice to America by making it a manned vs. unmanned mission argument anyway. The reasons and needs for either really have separate motivations and objectives, other than robotic missions are really good for doing the early preparatory work needed to make manned missions successful.
Travel to a Earth-Moon Lagrangian point is really no harder than going to the Moon. I don't know why there would be any special alignment or other issues related to travel to the Lagrangian points, other than perhaps there might be some sort of Aldrin cycler between the Earth and the Moon for a low-energy transfer system of bulk supplies. Note the link is in reference to such a "cycler" between the Earth and Mars, but a similar system could be put between the Earth and several Lagrangian points or even the Moon itself.
NASA's budget is going to be cut due to sequestration anyway, so the answer is ultimately no. Even cutting money wasting abominations like the James Webb Space Telescope (a good idea, just extremely lousy in terms of implementation) and the SLS ("Senate Launch System") program won't really pay for anything like this.
Then again the U.S. federal government is headed for a fiscal brick wall anyway. NASA may not survive the fallout from that when it ultimately hits.
None the less, it is good to be thinking about the future rather than the past. I give kudos to these guys for at least thinking about what the future could be, even if it may not happen for another fifty or hundred years.
Just because you think Mitt Romney is the devil incarnate and ready to harvest your soul taking America down a dangerous road doesn't mean that he may have a few redeeming qualities too. There were several Slashdot stories about Massachusetts under the Romney governorship and adopting the Open Document Format with some pretty sound reasons for doing that. If you are too new here to remember those stories or so closed minded to have skipped over them, I can't help your ignorance on this subject.
You don't need to do a google search to find this stuff and certainly if you are older you can remember significant things like that... as his move did set the standard which pushed Microsoft and some other companies to adopt the Open Document Format as at least an option with their word processors and even do a pretty decent job of supporting the format.
While I don't think Barack Obama is the messiah either and in fact I am hoping he doesn't get re-elected, he has several redeeming qualities about him too. In particular I like Obama's space policy as a massive improvement over what George W. Bush or for that matter anybody since Lyndon Johnson. I can certainly name a few other things that I admire about his service to America, so why is it that you must be such a jerk and fail to see any good qualities in another person who lives on this planet?
Every fiat currency in history has collapsed, gold has not.
I wonder how you explain Iraqi Dinars? That is an example of a currency that outlived the government which set it up in the first place, and was a fiat currency.
The advantage was that the printing presses which made the currency were destroyed by the invasion of the country, and stockpiles of money were also destroyed in the take-over of the government as well. Often as a way to subjugate the local population, invading armies brought along truck loads of the local currency as a way to debase that currency... so I'm not entirely sure why the U.S. Army didn't do that in Iraq. But this is a pretty clear counter example to the claim that all fiat currencies collapse.
Furthermore, if you have any Confederate dollars that can be authenticated, they are currently worth more than the U.S. Dollar. That says something, and it is another example of how some fiat currencies can maintain value over time or even increase in value.
Unless Bitcoins encounter a 10 billion times increase in value, the issue of liquidity is not even remotely a problem. Even then, there are options in the protocol to allow further subdivisions of the currency if needed. Your comparison to Bershire Hathaway A shares is completely unfounded, or it would be like those shares currently selling for a million shares for a penny.
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of the OrbComm satellite, what was lost was a demonstration satellite where the intention was to test the technology in space, to turn on the computers and bounce a few signals off of the satellite. While it would have been incredibly useful to have the satellite go to a higher orbit and to be used for a longer period of time, there were considerable tests and engineering activities that were able to be proven over the few days that the satellite was able to stay in orbit.
In short, what was insured by OrbComm was the cost of the launch (which SpaceX may just give to OrbComm for free anyway as a good-will gesture in a future flight) plus a partial replacement of the vehicle. The design time is essentially meaningless as it is a part of a whole series of identical satellites that are going into serial production. The production line is still in place so there isn't even a need to retool... they just need to increase their orders from their suppliers and keep the production line going. The production line also won't take "a few years", as they are producing a satellite every couple of months at the moment. As I said, it is in serial production right now. The insurance underwriter refused to pay full price for the vehicle because it did make the trip into space and in fact engineering tests were able to be performed successfully even in the lousy orbit it was put into.
OrbComm has been considering other launch companies for their vehicles, but the fact is that the other companies can't beat SpaceX for price. The market that OrbComm is going into has extremely tight profit margins and competition from companies who don't even use vehicles in space. That price difference is what will likely make OrbComm profitable instead of a financial disaster like Iridium was once upon a time.
The fact that the primary payload on the CRS-1 flight was placed into the proper orbit in spite of a significant mechanical failure is something that the insurance company is looking at very favorably, and in that case a refund/reflight by SpaceX will further encourage any insurance company flying payloads with SpaceX. The only negative feature for future flights is that insurance for secondary payloads where NASA is the primary payload contractor will most certainly increase. Ultimately that justifies charging NASA more for future flights... above an beyond what other commercial customers wouldn't have to pay because their flight rules wouldn't be nearly as stringent as NASA's. I understand the concern that there was a 1% chance of the OrbComm satellite + Falcon 9 upper stage crashing into the ISS (the excuse for why the OrbComm satellite wasn't put into the proper orbit), but I expect future payloads and missions will take those issues into mind.
The government isn't spending a dime here. It is just not collecting federal excise taxes that otherwise would be collected if the person purchasing the automobile had purchased something else instead.
Besides, the federal government isn't exactly losing money either,as Tesla still is paying federal income tax on earnings as well as on salaries for its employees. Telsa is also paying property taxes for its factories and dozens of other taxes are being paid to state and local government authorities. You shouldn't be crying too hard about "government spending" here that isn't even happening in the first place. If nobody buys a Tesla Model S, the tax would never have been collected in the first place.
On top of that, the Model S has a starting price of about $50k, and Tesla is looking to eventually develop a high volume-low cost consumer vehicle once they get enough working capital from hopefully robust sales of their other products. The next generation vehicle is anticipated to cost about $30k... while still expensive is definitely something more affordable for a non-millionaire. That sounds like an excellent reason to even encourage this kind of business and marketing behavior to have the wealthy help finance the development of a low-cost consumer vehicle by offering luxury vehicles that also do something useful for the environment.
If you don't agree with those tax breaks, vote for people who will get them repealed. These tax breaks are not just for Tesla vehicles either, but for any electric automobile made by any company... including Toyota, General Motors, or Fisker. If you think it is such a good deal, why don't you dismantle a few golf carts and make your own electric automobile company?
I mean this in the nicest way possible, but SpaceX also doesn't suffer from obsolete union contracts and a bloated bureaucracy internal to the company which is preventing its expansion or even switch to other vehicles. SpaceX has never needed to retool to another vehicle, something which can sometimes cost more than simply building a new factory.
BTW, I agree with you on the Grasshopper and the eventual plans to make the Falcon 9 fully reusable (including oddly enough even the 2nd stage). Just partial reuseability will make some difference, and the rest is just gravy. If SpaceX can get the cost of spaceflight down to the point where fuel costs are significant (aka more than 10% of the cost of the launch and the price of petroleum in the Middle East impacts launch costs), they will start to really make a difference.
Remember, it was Elon Musk who suggested he could get the price of a round-trip ticket to Mars for an astronaut down to about $500k. He has his reasons for thinking that might be the cost, even though NASA put the figure at about $100 billion each instead.
From the page you listed:
They include companies from the Ariane industrial team and national space agencies
Yeah, that sounds like "private shareholders". Almost everything Arianespace gets involved with in terms of major decisions requires diplomats from various governments and frequently decisions are made for political and not fiscal reasons. While not unusual in the EU, you shouldn't confuse this with how SpaceX is financed, as the ownership of SpaceX is entirely from private entities (although it wouldn't surprise me if In-Q-Tel has a small stake in SpaceX already).
It should be pointed out that SpaceX has figured out how to reduce the cost of its launches to the point that the subsidy needed for Arianespace to compete would be embarrassing and noticeable to EU members and their constituents. Keep in mind SpaceX is making their rockets so cheap that even the Chinese don't think they can underbid SpaceX.
If the ESA was to expand slightly and include additional EU members (ESA and EU membership... while there is considerable overlap... isn't identical), they might be able to embark in an incredibly ambitious space program like a manned European Lunar or Martian program on a level comparable to NASA but with a much larger budget. Keep in mind though that would be a financial commitment of about $100 billion USD (or equivalent)... and I don't think it would be any cheaper simply because it is a European concept instead of being an American one. Just see if something like that would fly through the EU parliament, much less national parliaments in the EU in terms of funding.
The reason why top satellite manufacturers are in the EU is in part because Arianespace has been successful at competing on the international market, and because American legal regulations have been idiotic to put it mildly. ITAR regulations alone have driven out much of the commercial spaceflight market from America, which has gone almost exclusively to Europe and a few launches to Russia via RKK Energia/Roscosmos. China has tried to enter this market too, but they've had their own set of problems.
The satellites made in the EU are often being done on a contract basis, and if the EU wants to follow in the stupid path that the American Congress has done over the past couple of decades to drive out commercial spaceflight business.... EU companies would have the same problems that American launch providers have faced over the past couple of decades but without the American military or American military budgets to prop them up.
All that the EU can do to SpaceX is to impact his suppliers (which are few in number.... SpaceX makes most of their own components from raw bulk materials like sheets of aluminum, titanium, and steel) or his potential customers in the EU. Given that few of his customers are in the EU, it isn't all that big of a deal to them and increased regulations by the EU would impact all potential launchers.
It should be noted that until recently, it was the Ariane rockets that carried the bulk of commercial spaceflight vehicles. In other words, increased regulations on spaceflight (assuming they "play fair" and impose those regulations equally to all companies participating) would mainly kill European companies who are doing (and still doing currently) a very robust commercial business. Much of the reason why they have the launch rate that they do is because they have been very competitive on the world market and undercut American launch companies like Boeing (with the Delta rockets) and Lockheed-Martin (with the Atlas rockets). They worked their way to become compliant with American regulations like ITAR, but were also in a position to avoid ITAR if needed so they could launch vehicles from companies that American launch providers can't because of American regulations. There are some ESA payloads as well as satellites that have been launched by EU members.... but those will likely go to Arianespace anyway regardless of how cheap SpaceX makes their launch prices go and will never be on the table for SpaceX.
Arianespace can become an EU-only launch provider, but they will give up most of the market by doing so. Elon Musk's assertion here is that he can compete against Arianespace for contracts from countries like Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, and Qatar. None of those countries care or will even pay attention to EU regulations and will go to SpaceX if they can provide a launch for a quarter of the price that Arianespace can offer for the same payload. That should be a no-brainer, especially if SpaceX can deliver the same level of reliability that Arianespace is currently providing.
That really is the trick for SpaceX right now: to prove that their system is reliable enough that you can be 95%+ certain that the payload will make the trip into the intended orbit. A whole bunch of people are waiting to see if SpaceX can deliver on that promise, and that is the only real selling point at the moment for either Arianespace or RKK Energia for that matter. It has nothing to do with governments, but simply engineering that is well done and quality manufacturing processes.
Note that the 1st amendment also says that the government can't prohibit the free exercise of religion either, including its expression through speech and the press. There is a world of difference between a student or ordinary citizen expressing themselves in a voluntary manner (aka offering a prayer right before a test on their own or holding a prayer vigil on Christmas Eve in a public area... even on public property) as opposed to having the government mandate that you must pray to a certain god or have tithing extracted from your paycheck as a tax.
I don't have a problem with a student setting up a web page expressing their religious opinions using government funds... as long as you offer that same opportunity to all of the students on a reasonable basis to express whatever their opinion is including having no opinion or even being against organized religions in general. The problem is the censorship, and this attitude that religious expression is something that should be feared.
I think it would even be healthy to have a "debate corner" on a college campus where any student could express any political opinion they may have... including "hate speech" full of bigotry, sexism, and racism. If you think some sort of speech should be censored, you definitely don't understand the purpose or the philosophy behind the 1st amendment and why it was ratified in the first place. Suggesting that university websites, dorm doors, or even bulletin boards should be off limits to religious expression completely misses the mark... especially at a public school. Private schools have a little more latitude to ban some forms of speech as there is a contractual relationship to even attend. It definitely shouldn't be the other way around.
You are painting a rather wide brush here with libertarianism, and again confusing anarchists with people simply seeking liberty.
There is another philosophy here distinct from anarchism, which is the view that government is a necessary evil. Necessary explicitly because of the situations you describe, where there is a need to have a government to redress grievances. If you steal something that belongs to somebody else, or if you engage in a contract but choose not to follow the terms of that contract because it is inconvenient for you at the moment, there is a role for a government to step in.
This is the belief that a small government which can be controlled by the people it governs... essentially that a popular movement to abolish that government can happen simply because the government is so small that as a group the people it governs ultimately have the veto power on what happens. Individuals are held accountable for their individual actions but if you can get enough support for your viewpoint that a government might just back down for a while or for good.
This was the government advocated by Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. It is to be seen if their "experiment" in limited government was ultimately a failure, and it could arguably be said that perhaps it is because of the size and scope of the U.S. federal government that is their legacy. They were certainly not anarchists. Many of those who call themselves libertarians feel that perhaps a return to that general philosophy could be useful.
Distinct from libertarians are those who eschew government of any kind and are genuine anarchists. Some of them self-style as libertarians, and many of their viewpoints do coincide with many of the limited government "libertarians" advocating the elimination of several government agencies or promoting the legalization of marijuana, but they diverge from the viewpoint by thinking all government is evil and is the source of the problems. They even go so far as to suggested even limited government is bad because it sort of lets the camel's nose into the tent as it were and that granting any sort of authority to a government of any kind eventually grows until it can no longer be pruned down.
You are confusing a whole spectrum of philosophies here including many who have a philosophical viewpoint on governance which isn't really all that different from the major political parties of the world or even America.
The one major accomplishment of the Kepler observatory is that the understanding of the frequency of planets in other stellar systems and where they will likely be found has been nailed down very well. Back when we had a data set with a sample size of one (aka just our own solar system) it was very hard to try and determine just how many stars had planetary systems of their own. it was even hypothesized that multiple star systems (by far the more common type in the universe) simply didn't even have planets. That notion has now been thrown completely out the window as stellar systems with planets are now seen as extremely common.
The fun part has yet to happen though, as planets that may be found in the "habitable zone" are just barely starting to be identified. So far most of the planets that have been identified are planets that have very short orbital periods (some as short as just a few days). Instead, as Kepler can continue its mission it will be possible to identify planets that are much,much further away and their orbital periods are on the order of years instead of weeks.
When the time comes, I expect that probes to other stars (I think it will happen eventually... even if it is centuries away from happening) will be traveling to planets that will already be well identified in terms of basic characteristics... to have at least the degree of understanding of those planets like we do a great many asteroids at the moment.
You don't need life support to survive on a sound stage in Burbank. :>)
Sure, if the CIA wants to fund a group going to the Moon with money derived outside of tax dollars (earned by investing based upon information obtained in intelligence operations... with the SEC looking the other way of course with "insider trading" laws) I suppose that is a "private investor".
That is one very interesting investor group though. It would be up to the X-Prize Foundation to make a final ruling on the matter.
The original X-Prize (before the Ansari family became involved I should note too... that didn't happen until nearly when the prize was awarded) was composed of donations from the space/geek community to help fund the prize. It was sort of a Kickstarter idea that happened before Kickstarter even existed, and over the first few years received a respectable amount of money into the donation pool, but not really the $10 million that was supposed to be awarded. There wasn't even any time limit on when you could win the award, with the assumption that the longer it took to win the prize that more people would donate and interest would compound the existing donations.
That worked for several years, but Peter Diamandis became aware of the "Hole-in-One" policies for events like golf tournaments (where the term originates... with defined rules where people in tournaments compete to see if they win a hole-in-one on a golf course and the insurance company pays up if somebody succeeds). It turned out that with the donations received to about the date that Mr. Diamandis looked into such policies, that he had enough to pay the premium and set a "reasonable" deadline for when the prize needed to be won. All of the active teams at the time supported the move, even though it meant that they needed to double down and really work to win the prize.
It should be noted that other than Scaled Composites, nobody else was really ready to win. ARCA (the Romanian team), Armadillo Aerospace, and a couple of other groups have subsequently fired actual hardware that might have won given a little more time, but they would have all likely missed the deadline and the insurance policy would have expired (Armadillo was a bit closer though). It certainly wasn't a guarantee that any team would have won.
The insurance company who underwrote the policy did offer to refund the money for the policy with a high interest rate if the X-Prize Foundation wanted to back out... especially after it looked like Scaled Composites was likely going to win. Obviously they didn't.
As for if an insurance company would offer a similar policy on a future space prize contest, I'm sure they will take into account the experience of the original X-Prize into consideration.
I don't think the idea is that the vehicle going to the moon will need a dedicated Falcon 9. Most teams intend to make their project a secondary payload... hopefully avoiding the problems that Orbcomm faced with the last CRS-1 flight (crew resupply service) to the ISS, where NASA said SpaceX couldn't use the booster to push the satellite into a higher orbit.
A secondary payload can be somewhat or even considerably less than $55 million.
Regardless, your point is still holding true to an extent. The team which gets to the Moon first gets the $15 - $20 million is mostly going to be covering basic expenses and essentially getting a subsidized trip to the Moon. On the other hand, Scaled Composites was able to leverage their "win" from the original X-Prize competition to turn into a merger with Northrop-Grumman for far more than the $25 million investment in SpaceShip One (on top of the prize money), and they also landed a contract with Virgin Galactic to make Spaceship Two for a price that also far exceeded the $25 million investment.
Any group of researchers who have figured out how to land a vehicle on another planet (you can split hairs about the Moon on this topic, given the context) for less than $100 million and return useful data has a bright future ahead of them in planetary science research. By comparison, Curiosity and the Mars Science Laboratory cost about $2.5 billion to get to Mars. It may be possible to build something a fair bit cheaper than that if it was a private development instead.
It should also be noted that the co-founders of Google are also major investors in Planetary Resources. It may be very possible that company will hire anybody who worked on successful mission to the Moon to help them with their endeavor to mine asteroids. Working hardware somewhere else in the Solar System is definitely a resume enhancement.
And while commercial interest is a way to get space exploration for "free" in a sense, something fundamentally has to change. Either we have to find something out there we don't know of now, or there has to be a sudden change in demand for something we do know is out there. As is, what we know is out there wouldn't be economical to collect without transportation costs dropping by several orders of magnitude from even optimistic projections of commercial space flight (as in, not compared to current government space flight costs). It is going to take more than a tax break to cross that gap.
I understand skepticism about commercial spaceflight opportunities, and cost is a huge factor for much of what can be happening in space. A sad reality is that the cost of going into space has been until the past couple of years (due to SpaceX and several other very disruptive companies entering the market) going up in price even faster than inflation.
There are some reasons for that, and it should be noted that commercial spaceflight opportunities have been fleeing from America to the point it was a non-existent industry in America as well. The ESA, it could be argued, has been paying for their spaceflight programs on the back of their commercial contracts. Russia has been subsidizing their spaceflight program with blatantly commercial projects and flying passengers into orbit.... now that they've discovered capitalism. But that isn't all.
Commercial spaceflight projects (mainly communications satellites, mapping satellites for things like Google Earth [plus other companies], and some remote sensing for other purposes) are currently a multi-billion dollar industry already. There are also a great many people who are providing commercial services to privately-funded research efforts (non-government efforts). My point is that there already is a huge commercial market, and suggesting that it may grow by 20% or 50% if some tax breaks and some legal changes could happen would easily add a billion or two more money per year into this industry. They aren't starting from zero here but from a rather large number to begin with. American companies mainly need to recapture even some of the commercial spaceflight market that once upon a time pretty much belonged to America originally. I don't think that kind of growth is unrealistic.
One interesting area of spaceflight that is also becoming much more like the kinds of rationale for sending people to Antarctica instead of robots is with sub-orbital launches. Virgin Galactic is but the first of several companies who are offering very cheap means of getting at least past the Kármán line, where it is now going to be far cheaper to send a healthy graduate student or even a university professor who is in pretty good shape into space with the experiment than it would be to hire a team of technicians to build the equipment necessary to make a robot to perform those experiments. In this case, I'm not even talking pie-in-the-sky estimates but rather hard figures based upon actual ticket prices that have already been sold. The sub-orbital spaceflight market has some incredibly fierce price competition as well where Virgin Galactic is offering what amounts to be luxury services and extremely good customer service on top of the price and will be seen as the high-end of the market. I don't know if sub-orbital spaceflight techniques can translate into orbital spaceflight equivalents, but it is a strong start.
It is a good point though that one of the reasons why grad students are sent to Antarctica is because it is cheaper to send a bunch of students than a multi-billion dollar robotic vehicle that would be slower and do less science.
Liability wavers? What do you think this is, offshore drilling?
No, drilling for petroleum offshore is wimpy stuff compared to mining Platinum out of an asteroid. We are talking real he-man, dangerous stuff here where frankly it isn't even known what dangers might be in store for those going into space doing this stuff.
The reason why state and national legislatures put in liability wavers on some activities is because it is seen as something important for national goals and interests, just like offshore petroleum extraction can be for many countries. Your analogy to such high risk places that are hostile to human habitation and requires advanced technology and large capital expenditures in order to make such projects effective is spot on, and the comparison works for people who are going to be doing stuff in space.
Thank you for bringing up the comparison. It works!
If a country really wants to have its citizens engaging in activities in space and expanding that country's reach into the rest of the solar system, such liability wavers are one approach that doesn't cost money but could encourage a huge amount of capital spent towards that end. With capitalism, you also don't need to be worrying about a change in presidential administration or even what one election might bring in terms of a change of leadership. Long-term plans for the future can be made by those willing to make such risks. Unlimited liability does the opposite and discourages companies from getting set up or investing into such endeavors in the first place.
While Robert Zurbin is an interesting person and I like some of the arguments that he makes in that "Case for Mars", I flat out disagree with his notion we should abandon the Moon as a source of resources or even for scientific exploration. It is an interesting place to hang out for a variety of reasons all to itself, and offers some interesting and even unique attributes that make it useful. For myself, I think development and even settlement of the Moon should be happening at the same time as similar developments on Mars, and it doesn't have to be an exclusive or situation. In fact, I think development of lunar resources together with development of Mars along with asteroids is a really good idea.
There is even a school of thought that large gravity wells like the Moon, Mars, and even places like Ceres or Vesta are places to avoid other than to be used as anchors for things like the Lagrangian points. Smaller asteroids can easily be mined and have minerals extracted, where you don't even need to worry about getting them out of a gravity well in the first place or it is trivially easy to get that to happen.
I'll also suggest that if Zurbin's plan hits a government bureaucracy (who Zurbin is hoping will pay for his dreams), that same bureaucracy will inflate the price of that plan several times simply because of the fiscal controls needed for government accounting alone. Since Robert Zurbin is insisting upon an international mission instead of one done by just one country, add another 5x multiplier to the cost on top of the additional multiplier due to being a government operation. International cooperation never keeps cost down and cost savings (especially for the primary country running the operation) would be had simply by telling other countries to try their own approach instead. This isn't to say that international cooperation is to be feared or dismissed, but rather that cost reasons should not be even remotely a consideration for that to happen. I'm not against international protocols being established for exchanging technical data or even for joint docking procedures (aka Apollo-Soyuz, Mir, and the ISS for joint Russian, American, and even European and Japanese docking on the same location),
In other words, if multiple countries are going to Mars, set up some standards for exchanging components and especially life-critical systems so an air scrubber or filter can be exchanged by crews on Mars to support each other if necessary. Such stuff happens in Antarctica between various national research stations, even though each station has its own objectives and research goals.
The ultimate driver for what happens in space will be determined by economics though. I would like to see the economic resources of space to be exploited and used in a manner that would be able to essentially have spaceflight (manned and unmanned) pay for itself rather than be an annual budget battle for how much needs to be spent for that purpose as if space is somehow only something for scientific curiosity and nothing more. With that in mind, I am a firm believer that CNN will cover the first landing of NASA astronauts on Mars live with a reporter on the spot ready to greet them with a party when they arrive. At the party will be some ale of some sort brewed at a local distillery made by previous settlers.
The issue with the Jame Webb Telescope is one of misappropriations of money and a lack of a plan. The management of the program has been absolutely horrible, If you go back into earlier threads here on Slashdot about this program, not to mention on other forums that talk about how it is being managed, it is really more of a domestic jobs program for research scientists than much of an actual program for going into space and doing something useful.
I say it is horribly mismanaged because the program lacks focus, basic design requirements keep changing, and in spite of the fact that it has been developed supposedly over the past decade to one degree or another they still are almost back to the original drawing board starting over yet again to get the thing built. It has been said that a definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. The same thing over and over again is a huge money pit of problems and a space telescope that will never leave the ground.
Because so much money is being dumped into the JWST, they expect big things. At this point in time, a whole lot more science could have been done had a series of half-billion dollar telescopes (aka the original price of the vehicle I might add) been put into production and actually put into space. You learn far more by actually putting the vehicle in space too, I might add. Stick with a list of unchanging design requirements, and then engineers can actually have a design ready for you in a reasonable period of time and at a reasonable cost.
Humans will not go to Mars or any other location in our solar system for decades, possibly a century or two. They probably will rarely if ever go to the moon in our lifetimes. The money and justification are simply not there. We have a historic responsibility to play our role and leave the rest for future generations to each play the role that corresponds to them.
The reason why it will take decades or even centuries in order to put people on Mars or elsewhere in the Solar System has nothing to do with money, but simply the will and having governments permitting people to be able to go there in the first place. Money and justification is not an impediment.
One relatively cheap and easy way to encourage development of space economically is to simply say over the next century that any activity which takes place primarily in space is exempt from any form of taxation. Providing liability wavers would be something else that doesn't cost money but would make a huge difference for activities in space as costs could be a whole lot more predictable. The same could be said about simply making some sort of sane type of space law where things like ownership of resources obtained or manufactured in space could be made much more certain. There are people who are willing to go into space and to do things on their own dime, so it really doesn't need to cost anything from a government perspective, and if people can make money they will pay whatever it takes to get there.
Besides, I think the current approaches for getting into space are far too overpriced and other methods for getting into space can be done much more cheaply, even if ultimately it is exploding the equivalent amount of energy of a small nuclear bomb under your chair to put yourself or at least a metric ton of "stuff" into orbit. Cost is even less of an issue in terms of moving stuff around that is already in interplanetary space (aka extracting resources from asteroids). A couple of companies are currently in the process of setting up the infrastructure to do just that.
If you are asking if the USA or for that matter any other country in the world (or even group of countries) has the money to put together a government boondoggle that is a Manhattan Project-style "waste anything but time" mission that would put a bunch of people on Mars, I'd have to agree that such money simply doesn't exist. The Apollo missions were pretty much the most that could be done using such a fiscal model. That isn't exactly true, as the money dumped into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could have easily supported such a mission and have done it in under a decade. But it would be in the trillion dollar range none the less and it wouldn't be done in the name of science. If any science actually was accomplished, it would be an afterthought and not the purpose of the mission. I would dare say that spending that kind of money on a "stimulus" program instead of the junk that it was spent on non-military spending (appropriations above and beyond the normal budgetary process mind you as well) could have paid for such a mission as well.
I just simply reject the notion though that we must scale back our dreams. Some creativity in terms of how to finance these missions could happen, but I also am suggesting that even framing the debate in terms of manned vs. unmanned missions and that you can only have one or the other is simply the wrong approach to be taking at all. If it makes sense to send robots and to do something useful, send them. There are separate reasons though to get people into space as well, and if they are going to be on the frontier of human experience they might as well be doing some science too.
America as well as several other countries from around the world have scientific bases set up in Antarctica... at rather significant expense I might add too. If robotic missions were so wonderful, why do you think people are at those research locations instead of tele-operated robots? Note that there are teleoperated robots in Antarctica as well, so it isn't an either-or proposition. I'm just asking you to justify your logic in light of a similar situation that exists perhaps a little closer to home.
The role of a human on a science mission is to provide a way to rapidly react to situations at the location and to give very short instructions to perform complex tasks or for somebody 'on the spot' to make some sort of judgement call in terms of what to do next in a time critical situation. I wouldn't call that a lack of utility, but it is a narrow set of situations where early exploration science missions admittedly don't need to have those kind of parameters.
Right now there is still a whole lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of things that can be done with robotic spacecraft, so I would have to agree that some sort of increase in spending for robotic missions is warranted even at the expense of manned spaceflight. Then again you have projects like the James Webb Telescope that have been sucking up even the money that could be spent on other deserving robotic missions, so demonizing the manned spaceflight program really shouldn't be the only target here. More intelligent and fiscally responsible spending should be happening in this area.
None the less, when Harrison Schmitt was on the Moon, he was able to perform the kind of scientific analysis on the spot that simply couldn't have been done by a robotic probe. There really is a need to send up some geologists to the Moon to perform a really extensive survey of lunar materials and to follow up on previous scientific research that has been done there. The kinds of things that a robotic vehicle could do on the Moon would be significantly limited without having somebody on site able to really perform the kind of science that needs to be done there.
Carl Sagan performed a major disservice to America by making it a manned vs. unmanned mission argument anyway. The reasons and needs for either really have separate motivations and objectives, other than robotic missions are really good for doing the early preparatory work needed to make manned missions successful.
Travel to a Earth-Moon Lagrangian point is really no harder than going to the Moon. I don't know why there would be any special alignment or other issues related to travel to the Lagrangian points, other than perhaps there might be some sort of Aldrin cycler between the Earth and the Moon for a low-energy transfer system of bulk supplies. Note the link is in reference to such a "cycler" between the Earth and Mars, but a similar system could be put between the Earth and several Lagrangian points or even the Moon itself.
NASA's budget is going to be cut due to sequestration anyway, so the answer is ultimately no. Even cutting money wasting abominations like the James Webb Space Telescope (a good idea, just extremely lousy in terms of implementation) and the SLS ("Senate Launch System") program won't really pay for anything like this.
Then again the U.S. federal government is headed for a fiscal brick wall anyway. NASA may not survive the fallout from that when it ultimately hits.
None the less, it is good to be thinking about the future rather than the past. I give kudos to these guys for at least thinking about what the future could be, even if it may not happen for another fifty or hundred years.
Just because you think Mitt Romney is the devil incarnate and ready to harvest your soul taking America down a dangerous road doesn't mean that he may have a few redeeming qualities too. There were several Slashdot stories about Massachusetts under the Romney governorship and adopting the Open Document Format with some pretty sound reasons for doing that. If you are too new here to remember those stories or so closed minded to have skipped over them, I can't help your ignorance on this subject.
You don't need to do a google search to find this stuff and certainly if you are older you can remember significant things like that... as his move did set the standard which pushed Microsoft and some other companies to adopt the Open Document Format as at least an option with their word processors and even do a pretty decent job of supporting the format.
While I don't think Barack Obama is the messiah either and in fact I am hoping he doesn't get re-elected, he has several redeeming qualities about him too. In particular I like Obama's space policy as a massive improvement over what George W. Bush or for that matter anybody since Lyndon Johnson. I can certainly name a few other things that I admire about his service to America, so why is it that you must be such a jerk and fail to see any good qualities in another person who lives on this planet?
Every fiat currency in history has collapsed, gold has not.
I wonder how you explain Iraqi Dinars? That is an example of a currency that outlived the government which set it up in the first place, and was a fiat currency.
The advantage was that the printing presses which made the currency were destroyed by the invasion of the country, and stockpiles of money were also destroyed in the take-over of the government as well. Often as a way to subjugate the local population, invading armies brought along truck loads of the local currency as a way to debase that currency... so I'm not entirely sure why the U.S. Army didn't do that in Iraq. But this is a pretty clear counter example to the claim that all fiat currencies collapse.
Furthermore, if you have any Confederate dollars that can be authenticated, they are currently worth more than the U.S. Dollar. That says something, and it is another example of how some fiat currencies can maintain value over time or even increase in value.
Unless Bitcoins encounter a 10 billion times increase in value, the issue of liquidity is not even remotely a problem. Even then, there are options in the protocol to allow further subdivisions of the currency if needed. Your comparison to Bershire Hathaway A shares is completely unfounded, or it would be like those shares currently selling for a million shares for a penny.