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

Samantha Atkins sjatkins at mac.com
Wed Jan 19 10:24:59 UTC 2005


On Jan 18, 2005, at 9:42 PM, 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
> 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....)
>

You have a point.  We will not get very far selling low orbit thrill 
rides.

> 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....)
>

Without knowledge we would have no place at all in space and no hope of 
ever going there or utilizing it.  Knowledge has manifold rewards other 
than hard currency.

There is a super-abundance of very pricey materials in space.  The 
point though is largely not to ship them back to earth except some of 
the pricier ones to purchase  things one can't yet manufacture off 
planet and to repay the investors many, many times over.   But most of 
the material should be used in space and various non-earth bodies to 
build a real space presence and society.    That ore it made no sense 
to ship back to earth is very nice to have available to build a large 
scale space-dock or super station.

Getting there from here is the immediate  trick.  Until there is 
substantial infrastructure in space there is not a good reason, even 
with much lower launch costs, to maintain a large number of humans in 
space.    The infrastructure is pricey to throw up from the ground or 
even the moon.  The moon also doesn't have as much variety of material 
as is needed.  We need a way to get our hands on space resources 
without thousands of humans in space.  Otherwise we are in a hopeless 
Catch-22.  Robots and telepresence devices might be workable for many 
tasks of building the needed infrastructure and gathering some tradable 
commodities.   Near earth asteroids would be a better target for 
diversity of materials and multiple usages than the moon perhaps.

> 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?

As opposed to leaving space to a bunch of battling politicians as we 
largely have for the last fifty years?   I think we have seen where 
that gets us.   If we can actually make money or even break even 
(essential for long term space viability) then we have a chance of 
having a large space presence.   Without it I see no real chance at all 
short of an attack by (of necessity inept) aliens giving us a 
sufficient kick in the butt.

- samantha




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