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

Terry W. Colvin fortean1 at mindspring.com
Wed Jan 26 00:54:53 UTC 2005


Terry forwards:
> 
> 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).

Jerry belatedly replies:

This all sounds very nice, but hellishly expensive. The capital outlay
of establishing and maintaining regular contact with an industrial base
on the moon would be huge. Given that a body as wealthy as the US
government cheese-pares on a project as simple (and comparatively cheap
- comparatively as in "still hellishly expensive") as the space shuttle,
what are the chances of private enterprise coming up with that kind of
ginormous capital outlay with no expectation of any kind of return for
years/decades to come? 

I don't disagree that these things might work, merely that profit-making
bodies could afford the years of expenditure (and risk) to get things to
the stage where they DO work. (They are, after all, beholden to
shareholders in a way that government aerospace and defence
organisations are not.) And I would be happy to be proved wrong. But
private space flight - as someone on the list pointed out - hasn't
reached the Alan Shepherd level of achievement yet, so I may have a long
time to wait.

(Of course, if those nice aliens in Area 51 would lend us some of their
advanced space technology.....)

Dr Jerry Goodenough
University of East Anglia
England


-- 
"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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