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

[Terry W. Colvin]

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
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,
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....)

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
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?

Dr Jerry Goodenough
University of East Anglia
England


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"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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