[extropy-chat] FWD [Skeptic] Re: defending the Vision for Space Exploration

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 10:42:26PM -0700, Terry W. Colvin wrote:
> Terry forwards:
> 
> > Their plan call for NASA to act as more of a customer for launch
> > services, with private enterprise taking more and more of a role over
> > time. Eventually private enterprises role would be large enough that
> > the market would be self-sustaining, allowing space endeavours to
> > truly blossom.
> 
> I don't see how this could happen, for how is one supposed to make money
> out of space travel? There is a small market for firing very rich

Maybe you've heard of space based communication? Intelligence gathering,
prospection. Tourism even, maybe. Or phased-array photovoltaics platforms,
with realtime beamforming (but launches have to get ridiculously cheap for
this to be cost-effective -- terrestrial launches, of course).

If you can bring a package to LEO, I can easily show you how to bring a
somewhat smaller package to Luna surface.

But the thing is it doesn't have to make money short-term, if you're a driven
person with deep pockets. A lot of dot com nouveau riches seem to fit that
profile.

And if that's the only thing to come out of dot bomb (magically transmuting 
fool's gold into worthwhile ventures), it's good in my books.

> people, celebrities and the like, into space for fun. (This market is
> likely to shrink considerably the first time a well-known celebrity
> re-enters the earth's atmosphere shuttle-like as a collection of glowing
> embers. Just imagine the interplanetary law-suits that will follow. And
> of course, in a perfect world some celebrities ought to be fired into
> space. One-way....)
> 
> One could imagine such people holidaying (uncomfortably) on a moon base,

I could imagine quite a few people doing quite a few interesting things with
several ~100 kg remote-control robotic packages on lunar surface a decade
downstream, but that's just me.

(Maybe we should use some intracranial hard vacuum in dem celebrities for
industrial processes down here?)

> where one could sell them souvenirs, postcards, air, etc. But there is
> no money to be gained - at least in the short to medium term - from the
> pursuit of knowledge which underlies the sending of unmanned missions to
> Saturn, Titan and so on. What else could we get from these places? Even
> if they turned out to have interesting minerals, it wouldn't be
> cost-effective to ship them in bulk back to earth. (There go all those
> SF films about miners in space....)

A person looking to Hollywood for technical inspiration must be...

Come on, this isn't hard. Hard vacuum, small escape velocity, teleoperation,
bootstrapping of autonomous industry, launch costs approach zero.
Exponentially self-amplifying industry in near Earth space. Clean energy,
free food, free habitats, computation effectively approaching infinity (I'd
call a cubic mile of personally owned buckytronics effectively infinite, some
people here would disagree).
 
> At the risk of drifting towards the political, the pursuit of pure
> knowledge is one of those things that the free market doesn't do very

The free market can make a number of people very, very well off. By
statistics alone a few of them with the right interests will do something
interesting. Bureaucracies are only very rarely doing something interesting,
and are usually dissipating metric tons of money to that purpose.

> well. (There are others, as anyone who has ridden on both Britain's
> privately-owned trains and France's state-owned trains can testify...)
> Handing over space to the private realm would lead to a concentration on
> those things that might make money - holidays in orbit etc - over those
> that clearly won't, e.g. can we land something on Pluto just to see if
> it has any atmosphere?

There are several people obsessed with Kuiper and Oort objects. Industrial
base on Luna will give you lighthours-lightdays within months of travel time
(packages, not people). As a side effect.
 
> Dr Jerry Goodenough
> University of East Anglia
> England

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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