I’ve actually got one of those.
A bit OT, but you might well be dismayed at how little Honey Boo Boo and her family are getting paid. It’s bad enough that they’ve volunteered a small child for national derision, but they didn’t even have the savvy to extract a fair share from the network.
Or maybe it’s the fact that outer space is an unbelieveably empty and hostile place, and that there’s nothing of rational value to be gleaned from going there on anything but the merest scale of data collection via robots and probes?
It’s hard to be enthusiastic about space travel when there’s no where worth going. Maybe we’ll set up a base on Mars, but to what point and purpose? Scientific research, akin to that done in Antarctica? And forget about going anywhere outside our solar system. Alpha Centauri is the closest star system and it’s literally centuries away, each way, even using hypothetical tech.
The “Space Age” concept was never about scientific endeavor. It was about “a brave new frontier”. It was going to be the new “Old West”, a place where anyone with the will to suceed could make a name for themselves. Except reality has finally sunk in, and we realize only the most elite of humanity will ever go into space - that the frontier isn’t a frontier, but a barrier, only to be crossed by a select few, and even then, they will find nothing of great value on the other side.
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Except for, you know, entirely untapped worlds of resources. Even if its hard to imagine how, the temptation is strong. But it is still work for robots.
Lots of tacit assumptions there. The program planning, economics, and to a large extent even the technology of moving on in the sense of “Next Big Step Outward” are very, very different from those of moving on in the sense of “making the bleeding-edge and costly into the routine and affordable.”
Achieving robust, much cheaper access to LEO – the Shuttle’s original goal – was (and remains) intrinsically a much harder, lengthier and costlier challenge than Apollo. But in 1970-1981 we attempted to do it all in one Apollo-like, “Babe Ruth points to the bleachers” step: STS 1.0 was going to be big, manned, and officially “operational” for all missions after 4(!) flights. Not surprisingly, “robust” and “much cheaper” evaporated along the way.
But STS 1.1, 1.3, 2.05, etc… would have been slow, and boring (just more circles in LEO, yawn), and still pretty damned expensive. So we “moved on”: a space station! back to the Moon to stay!! On to Mars!!!
Resources that cost exponentially more to harvest and transport than the ones we have on Earth, and which are by all indications no different than the ones we have on Earth.
Any of the rocky planets? They’re gonna have metals and minerals, but we consume those by the ton. I don’t want to think how we’d manage to retrieve tons of metals from Mars, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be cost effective.
As for the gas giants, which are further off, what do they have that might tempt us? Helium, maybe, since we’re running out of that? Can we possibly figure out a way to “mine” helium from anywhere as remote as Jupiter or as dangerous as the Sun, in a way that is at all economically practical?
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“This is the Space Age. Don’t worry. Others like you.”
(Anyone else think of this immediately on seeing that title?)
The naysayers are right. NASA is winding down and there aren’t a lot of great missions planned. Does anybody know when the next multibillion dollar flagship exploration probe is planned? Curiosity was the last. There is nothing else planned. Let me repeat: of these amazing multibillion dollar missions that take a decade or more to plan and build and which provided most of the pictures and data from the linked posting, none are funded. Think about this: you may not see another mission like Curiosity, Cassini, Galileo, New Horizons, Viking, or Voyager until 2025 assuming that it is funded soon. NASA is in a crisis. We need to recognize this.
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Did this change?
2010 NASA budget = $ 18.7 billion
2010 Military Budget = $1030.0 billion
No?
Sorry, we still live in the age of war, not the age of space.
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The same logic applies to getting materials from the New World. The secret isn’t sending big ships to go there and come back with material. It is to build self-sustaining colonies on the New World that can more easily send back the material. Don’t confuse the difficulty and expense of going into Earth orbit as meaning that it applies to everything in space. You could actually send material from the Moon to the Earth fairly cheaply with a big rail gun and heat shields on the goods. Or you could could put that material into Earth orbit where it is useful. There are a lot of options and we don’t have to continue to think small.
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I know this isn’t the point, but… why has no one alerted me that there are hot women in space? Is there a tumblr for this?
I thought every science fiction pulp advertised this fact?
ISRU is definitely the way to go wherever possible, but there’s been a lot of handwaving about how rapidly it could be (1) implemented and scaled up, let alone (2) start providing significant ROI – as distinct from saving the horrific cost of Earth-sourced material. People who envision a dozen astronauts, a few weeks, and voila! a regolith-sintering operation churning out cinder blocks for shelters (let alone higher-tech components for a rail gun) have never looked at what it takes to get a mining or materials-processing facility going, even in a shirtsleeves environment with non-mass-constrained tools.
So you’d prefer it were written like something on Gawker?
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I somewhat agree with you. At least a small bit. The problem is, is that wars create massive increases in technology and knowledge. Sure, we may have got there anyway but it’s kind of doubtful to me that we ever would have bothered yet. It took the cold war and the fact of the Russians launching Sputnik to get the United States off their asses and do anything at all. Without that, what would have been the incentive, outside of science fiction stories, to go to space? Not for we here but for our political masters? Even today, you’d find it pretty damn hard to convince anyone in the government about how much we could really make from space technology. There’s a huge segment of the population that still believe that the space program gave us absolutely nothing and just wasted money and resources and that’s a damn shame.
Totally agree with the article.
Part of what the article highlights is that “exploration of space” and “human presence in space” are two different things. Justifying the human presence in space by appealing to the “spirit of exploration” won’t work, because our unmanned probes are doing the job very well and are only going to get better. Hand-waving about “certain kinds of exploration that only humans can do” is just that — hand-waving. Until some circumstance actually arises that absolutely requires humans, “humans exploring space” will remain a very expensive solution looking for a problem.
The only really substantive reason to send humans into space is to live there permanently — to settle. That’s the only goal for a manned program that makes sense to me. As for “exploration” as such, probes win, hands down.
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no i’m mainly replying to a person who may or may not have a satellite phone.
Are you from the past?
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Well, aye. Aren’t you?
I’ve lived the majority of my life in what would now be called the past. At the time we were sure it was the present and the very latest. How it slipped away I will never understand.
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