Yeah, I have no illusion that military one-upping is going away any time soon. My point was only that while it's true it was military competition that opened access to space, we don't have to forever justify space exploration by military applications. Private industry around space, and NewSpace in particular, is a good step towards that.
Military competitions is what gave us microwave tech. Doesn't mean that if world peace suddenly happened, we would stop producing microwave ovens.
It's a mixture of both: Military competition is what drives a ton of research with an immense budget behind it. The problem I have with some nations (the US is not the only offender here) is that they deploy the poisoned fruit of that research.
> NASA has routinely faced similar criticism from some lawmakers and advocates of commercial space ventures, but seldom in a report released by the agency itself.
Lunar resources could have great value just by their location. The energy cost to lift them into space is much lower than from Earth. Doing anything ambitious in space would require a lot of material, which has limited our ambitions since the 1970s.
(Asteroids might serve better, though: a wider variety of stuff, comparable in energy cost but farther away.)
I wish the damn article would link to this new report, or at least give me the keywords to search for.
To send larger probes around the Sol system. To build larger orbital laboratories, LEO or otherwise. To build all supporting infrastructure for that. To manufacture things that benefit from microgravity conditions (like optical fibers, see [0]) to be used both on Earth and elsewhere. To enable large-scale Mars missions, including eventual habitation. To eventually access more raw resources than we've ever imagined.
If the benefit of manufacturing optical fibre cables in a low gravity environment was so great, would it be more economically viable to build a 'low gravity' factory on earth?
You want to put a delicate-cable factory on an airplane and figure out how to shape all materials from start to finish in 30-second bursts while also compensating for turbulence, additional Gs on ascend, flight adjustments, and proper stowing for takeoff and landing? ...
Oddly, that's the more practical of those suggestions, because forming a few kilometers of perfect glass by letting it cool while dropping would seem to require a tower impressive in its own right... More relevant, there are QA demands with fiber-optics that don't seem to jive with a "let it hit the ground and throw out the lumpy ones" approach, much less the handling while in full gravity (which is where the issues are).
Factories in Orbit, pretty much. There might not be many products today which will benefit from this ability, but a free fall environment brings many benefits to things such as crystallization of materials.
For example, the last resupply mission of Space X to the ISS included an experiment to product optical fibers onboard the space station, the goal is that these fibers will have a much lower number of defects in their crystalline structure then their earth produced counterparts, this means less refraction, which results in less signal loss over a longer distance which reduces the number of repeaters which reduces increases the overall signal speed.
Now, of course if you wanted to deploy these things on a world wide scale you'll need to set up a bigger shop then the ISS - which most likely will go out of service within the next decade anyway...
And while the moon does not provide a free fall environment such as LEO, the gravitational influence is still much lower than on earth itself and scaling up on a surface will most likely prove easier in the long term than doing so in orbit around the earth.
That's like going back to the 17th century and decrying the exploration of the New World because you're not certain just how much gold there may be and you can't predict what the New World economy might look like.
Barring drastic efficiency increases in launch technology (to a Star Wars style level of ease) a lunar base is essential to enabling a space economy not suffocated by heavy shipping and transaction costs incurred by the cost of fuel and launches. When the cost of shipping materials around in space isn't drastically more expensive than Amazon sending you a package, then you'll find out exactly what we want to build.
Except that back then they couldn't see what was in the new world. Now we can (on the moon), and know that there isn't much.
Also, it would take a lot more than just sending people there for them to be mostly be self sufficient like in the 17th century, because:
- there is no oxygen,
- there is no food,
- there is no water,
- there is no magnetosphere.
Appropriate radiation shielding is a matter of construction, which could occur on the moon itself using local materials ideally, or building underground enough to be shielded.
Moon habitation is something that makes little sense for its own benefit, but immense sense in an orbital supply chain for... I dunno... harvesting a few trillion dollars worth of minerals.
Space exploration will not be easy. Navigating accurately across thousands of miles of ocean on [a homemade raft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation) with only a coconut named Wilson and your hands isn't easy either :)
Show me the infinity He-3 and Mega-Billions in platinum I can make in an exclusive environment mankind is obligated to conquer on the timeline of a few short hundred years and I will show you some Multi-Billionaires willing to invest heavily as soon as the intersection of orbital access and autonomous robotics is potent enough to mine the crap our of that, and any other, 'Alaska'... Some imagine it will be many decades [never done those before!], until it's cost viable and some imagine 2020 or 2025 [0].
And I think my vision, and Elon Musks, has something more like autonomous driven lunar vehicles powered by machine learning and mesh networks for robust exploration. Like... 15 Teslas talking over wifi but with no traffic, no time limits, no pedestrians, no speed limits or laws against having jump rockets...
I totally agree we have to build PoCs, and test new equipment, and do science, and do engineering. But most of the "hard parts" WRT to survival have been done on earth [for a poor ROI on earth!], and the really hard parts WRT time differentials and manufacturing look very much like self driving cars and robots made for the moon or mars. Teslas and Foxconn, friend. Europa is just... what we do every day in Subsea exploration + what we do every day with our _amazing_ rover program.
I'm not saying we're there tomorrow. I'm saying that if our robots are there next week making oxygen generators and water pumps and harvesting and collecting, with steady resupplies of better robots and smarter factories, we could Kerbal ourselves f-ing far. H2O is rocket fuel - pure delta-v. Independent mining robots could extract the raw ore for our Expanse/BSG-ish space fleets over the next hundred years, and your grandkids could figure out how to spend an asteroids belt worth of mineral fortune :)
There are many Billions being spent on this pursuit today, in 2018. Cynicism aside, sometimes the VCs know a thing or two...
>That's like going back to the 17th century and decrying the exploration of the New World because you're not certain just how much gold there may be and you can't predict what the New World economy might look like.
No it isn't. Exploration of the new world offered obvious substantive benefits - the trees alone were priceless to a countries that had to manage forests very carefully, not to mention new and useful crops coupled with an abundance of land. In short, it was a no-brainer.
And it was extremely cheap compared to building space infrastructure, since food could be grown or purchased from the natives, there was air, sunburn was the only radiation problem.
In space we'll have none of that. There are unsettled regions on earth far more hospitable to human life than anything we'll find outside our gravity well. The idea we ought to sink trillions of dollars into and infrastructure to produce things that are already good enough is hard to justify.
A giant radio telescope on the 'dark side' of the moon to let us peer into the depths of time without interference from the noisy monkeys in unit 3a ;)
Ships, structures, and anything heavy that we could avoid pulling out of earths gravity well would be big cost savers if we're putting around the solar system or putting up shop anywhere.
There are also some high-energy applications that could get dicey on earth but wouldn't be too bad to setup on a neighboring geographic area with no atmosphere or food chain to worry about.
Oxygen generators, habitats, water refiners, nuclear reactors... Ideally from autonomous building robots, these would be the foundation of long term habitation.
I'm not sure what the delta-V is like to get materials from an asteroid vs the Moon, but I'd expect there is much more variety of resources on asteroids. I think an orbital station is also more attractive than the Moon from a delta-V standpoint.
> but I'd expect there is much more variety of resources on asteroids
As far as I understand, in terms of easy access, yes - in particular resources that on planemos tended to sink to the core as the object formed and cooled down.
> I think an orbital station is also more attractive than the Moon from a delta-V standpoint.
LEO? Not necessarily. You still need to burn your way up the pretty steep gravity well.
Both the Moon and the asteroids are vital components of expansion into the Solar System; they're interesting in different ways.
Interesting, I didn't realize Earth's gravity was still so strong at 500km up. Getting payloads to the station from space would still be cheaper because we could rely on aerobraking, but accelerating mass to Earth escape velocity from LEO would require an extra 1km/s of delta-V compared to the Moon. I think the Moon might make sense if we can mine significant materials from it, but I haven't read much about what's there.
See also this subway-style ?v map of our system (inspired by a similar map for Kerbal Space Program): http://i.imgur.com/AAGJvD1.png. I feel it would work great as a poster on a wall.
The map really brings home the point that "Low Earth Orbit is halfway to anywhere in the Solar System".
Neat pic (after I figured out I had to zoom in to see the destinations). It's just missing the route from the Moon to Earth Intercept(/Escape). I'd also love to see these maps include routes to the asteroid belt from the Earth/Moon/Mars.
I mean, we burn piles of money just for fun. May as well burn a pile of money to put someone on the moon again. Doing it just because we can is a fine reason.
"Still got it!"
One tweak, though. Rather than forcing them to find a reason to go, i.e. gathering moon rocks, they should just let the astronauts play around. That's the goal. Go there, then turn on a webcam and romp around for a few days.
That would get the world thinking. And that'd be pretty cool.
We already have good reasons though. Starters would be to prep a moon base and see how structures handle being constructed on the moon and how they fare.
I wish more people were inspired by Gene Roddenberry's vision of an ideal human society. I know it's a science fiction pipe dream because we're always held back by the lowest common denominator, but if mankind moved past the need for acquisition and power all that would be left is working together to achieve goals that make everyone's life more meaningful. We have to wait for meaningful goals to intersect with acquisition and power.
I for one am in full cognitive dissonance about that. On the one hand, I understand how much of a pipe dream Star Trek is, and on the other hand, I strongly believe it sets a standard worth aiming for.
> We have plenty of moon rock to run experiments on.
True for one side of the moon. The Far Side of the Moon (the part that never faces the Earth) is still mostly an enigma. It looks very difference from the Near Side and while we have mapped it, we don't have samples from it.
I would say a lunar mission is still called for, but for the Far Side.
That is what China's upcoming moon mission might be aiming for [1]: Chang'E 5 will conduct a sample return mission late in 2017, and Chang'E 4 will carry a rover to the far side of the Moon, the first mission ever to do so, about a year later.
That is just false. Did we take just one sample of our own earth and only work with that?
I'm a Mars first guy but going to the moon would require building up vital tech in launch and space habitation.
Also its false that 'we CLOULD, but why WOULD we' the fact is currently NASA simply can not do and all their efforts to work in that direction again have pretty much been failures.
The (single) Tesla Roadster is going on a transfer orbit to Mars.
(Actually, the Tesla is 'just' going into a heliocentric orbit with it's apogee around the Mars orbit. That is sufficient to prove that it can get to Mars because it's just a matter of timing, which is relatively trivial, but it doesn't crash into another Planet and upsets planetary protection officers - yes, that's a job)
What evidence leads you to believe that nasa is currently run as efficiently or as innovative as during say the first half of Apollo. Everything I’ve heard from people who worked there is that it’s generally become more and more of nightmare
No, it is exactly evidence. But, as you seem to be aware, each kind or instance of evidence should be weighed differently, i.e. stronger evidence should sway your beliefs more strongly.
People telling you things may not be particularly strong evidence, but you should still probably update your beliefs at least a little.
Ahh, I am glad you asked. I actually have been lucky enough to work at two small spacecraft companies. I am not an aerospace engineer but I talk to people who are and interact with tons of x-nasa people. Also, my weirdo comments aren't my own. Checkout the omega tau series, especially http://omegataupodcast.net/218-a-life-in-apollo/
Because capitalism, as religion while in its optimization frenzy- cripples the ability's of mankind? Reaching the moon already was only done to compete with a faction outside the reference system. Without commies to race and lean against, the western system decayed to just another nice decorated, well managed cotton plantation.
There is no price on the far future events, such as bollide strikes. If there where, suddenly the moon would have holiday resorts.
Though this is not caused by the religious aspects of modern capitalism, but by its core mechanism of work - people are forced to work on what earns them and protects their short-term profit (poor people to eat, rich people to not become poor people).
There seem to be only few people on the planet with simultaneously enough wealth and focused will to tell the market where to go, as opposed to being directed by the market - I'm thinking about people like Gates and Musk. Fortunately, one of them is hell-bent on getting to Mars; without that forcing function, we'd probably be talking about scrapping ISS by now.
(I don't feel like you can blame situation in NASA purely on capitalism though, at least not directly. They don't play the capitalism game. But they are controlled by politicians, and politicians play the capitalism game.)
This game involves people acting with self interest, and relates in some ways to access to/control of resources.
This is the case regardless of economic system.
"Capitalism is moloch, yes, but government is also moloch. Anarchy is also moloch."
That's why I wrote "indirectly". Politicians play the politics game, but the particulars of that game is in big way determined by the economic system of a country. In the US, politicians try to game the election process, and that involves allocating resources in a way that ensures their electability. The end result is things like turning NASA's space efforts into a giant jobs program. Politicians under a (hypothetical) different economic system would face different pressures, maybe even aligned with pursuing longer-term projects.
If there were a price on even medium-term future events, we would all be living in condo towers and taking public transit. We can’t even manage to shift the balance of ground transportation in response to a planetary crisis, there’s no way it would take us to space.
> Reaching the moon already was only done to compete with a faction outside the reference system.
Yes, going to the moon had to do with geopolitics but all this stuff about the 'reference system' is nonsense. Any geopolitical opponent could have led to the same result.
> Without commies to race and lean against, the western system decayed to just another nice decorated, well managed cotton plantation.
You are again trying to shoehorn your larged philiosophy about 'modern capitalism' into the argument. First of all it is absolutly clear to anybody with idioligical glasses on that NASA started to perfom less well long before it was clear to most people that the Soviet system was going to collapse.
NASA was young, flexible had lots of budget and thanks to a set of luck circumstances. The reality is that NASA has been burocratiesed and and largly been controlled by congress and presidents trying to use NASA for anything but space exploration.
Non of that has anything to do with the Soviet Union and some problem with 'capitalism'.
> There is no price on the far future events, such as bollide strikes. If there where, suddenly the moon would have holiday resorts.
Just like in democracy things only happen if large numbers of people can support it, neither capitalism nor democracy has done mutch to defend against meteors.
And nowdays it is actually capitalism that is driving the push towards people living of planet.
> Because the Apollo Program happened during Bretton Woods
We are still under the Bretton Woods system, more or less. Almost 2/3rds of foreign currency reserves held by central banks are held in U.S. dollars [1]. If anything, real interest rates are lower today than they were in the 1960s.
The germans could. When the anglo-british bureaucracy took over the german Huntsville engineering management and forced them to Houston/California and switch to solid rockets it started failing. This was the inside view.
The new type of management was called "destructive organizational culture".
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25611289 [of course the new management blamed it on the germans]
I really want to see asteroid mining prioritized, as well as a space station capable of permanent human habitation (either partial or full gravity). A space station is also preferable to another planet for our next big space endeavor IMO because it is easier to get materials to and from it (no extra gravity well to deal with). Also, I feel like a lot of people think "ah, everything has to be done differently because space is a zero-G environment", but I bet it would be easier to adapt a lot of traditional technologies, engineering processes, and biological elements in a rotating station. Once we have the ability to do fabrication and construction in space, everything becomes much cheaper. Lastly, if researchers need to experiment in zero-G, we could construct zero-G modules adjacent to the center of the ring for experimentation.
The primary blocker for a rotating station as far as I know has been the mass requirement. If you have a structure above a certain rotational speed with a radius that is too small, the occupants are likely to become nauseous. From the research I've seen, the minimum size for a viable rotating station would be about 600 tons[1]. Moving that amount of mass into orbit would have been extremely expensive, but Falcon Heavy could launch it for under $1.5B, and the BFR for even less.
It'll happen when there's a business model that reduces the operating margin for a company. My best guess is this will be when the price for lithium or trans-uranics goes up significantly, or some engineering process requires microgravity conditions.
My point is that just getting projects started in space has a high barrier of entry due to the expense of moving personnel and structures into space. If we had permanent residents there, and the ability to manufacture the structures in space, it would become cost effective to build those specialized zero-G factories. It's unlikely that any single company will pony up the cost for that space habitat/construction facility, since it will be the most expensive structure to build.
Depends on your design. The Saturn V was big enough to launch the entire lunar stack of vehicles in one shot. Anything less than that requires in orbit assembly.
IIRC: Saturn V could put 100k pounds in lunar injection. The first SLS will be around 50k, the Falcon Heavy around 40k.
Layer versions of the SLS, should we choose to spend more tens of billions developing them, will eventually have Saturn V capabilities.
The BFR (as planned) will be the largest capacity rocket ever made. Putting 300k+ in low earth orbit. It’s designed to be refueled in orbit, so essentially it’s lunar/mars injection orbit payload caisvity is 300k+.
It’s also designed to be fully reusable, unlike the Falcon series that only reuses main boosters. So it’s claimed to be far cheaper than them, and they are already the most affordable rockets ever made.
The SLS is designed to be crushed and melted like a beer can after every launch, which is why it will cost $2B+ per launch.
In inflation adjusted dollars? I would have still thought its 10X cheaper now because of all the learnings plus much lower cost computing and other engineering enhancements.
Back in 1973, the total cost of the Apollo program reported to Congress was $25.4 billion. By far the most expensive parts of the mission were the Apollo spacecraft (the Command Modules, the Lunar Modules) and the monstrous Saturn V launch vehicles. A single Saturn V launch cost up to $375 million in 1969 — or, in today’s money, a few billion dollars.
In 2009, NASA looked back at the cost of the Apollo program in its entirety, and arrived at a figure of $170 billion in 2005 dollars (or around $200 billion in today’s money). Compare these costs to modern day space travel, where companies like SpaceX charge just $133 million to launch a spacecraft to the International Space Station. The Falcon Heavy, which will be comparable to the Saturn IV, will be in the same price region.
Safety. Back then it was basically part of the Cold War. Today, what are you asking the people to risk their lives for? Making things civilian-safe is expensive.
Sure, so we might not stop an eccentric rich adventurer from self-funding an effort like this. But that doesn't necessarily mean the government would sponsor it, or allow people to be employed to do it.
Well if your justification for that is because people might die, I'm afraid you'll find that the government is more than happy to sponsor and employ people for projects with rather high fatality rates.
Wow, I had no idea the Shuttle was so crazy high. Wikipedia says it ranged from $16.5k - $50k, not sure on what basis. I guess the drastic cut in launch rate must have really tanked the efficiency of the program.
actually I was a little high. It’s cost per launch was $1.5B in 2011 dollars ($193B over 133 flights). It’s cargo capacity was only about 40,000 lbs, so around $37,000 per lb.
The truth was it’s stack had massive launch capacity, over 200,000 lbs. but it was almost all used up by lifting that space plane. A higher launch rate was never really possible. The solid boosters weren’t reusable without a huge amount of work, and the shuttles needed lots of maintainance between flights.
The BFR is designed with theses lessons in mind. It’s fully reusable and it’s seconf stage should be way more efficient. But we will have see how much maintenance it will require between flights.
Yeah, unfortunately there were a ton of compromises as NASA had to get funding support from other agencies, which resulted in a design that didn't meet their original goals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process is an interesting read.
I think the lag in certification partly came from NASA's risk assessment of some of SpaceX's plans. NASA increased focus on the risk of micormeteorite damage to the Dragon capsule while it is docked to the ISS, which has required additional shielding. Also NASA wants to see multiple Dragon flights with identical booster hardware before certifying the platform, and so far SpaceX has been iterating on Falcon a lot. Falcon 9 Block 5 is supposed to be the final iteration, so Dragon V2 certification has also been blocked on that.
It would be way cheaper to do it today. Apollo cost about $110 billion, adjusted for inflation. SpaceX projects that development of their Mars rocket (which could easily do the moon too) will cost $10 billion. Even if they're off by a factor of 2 or more (and their history suggest they aren't), that's still massively less expensive.
In my city (random Spanish mid-sized city, around 250K population) there is often debate about building a light rail or tram public transport line. But it is always dismissed by the administration for being too expensive, pharaonic, disproportionate for a city of this size, etc.
Doing some research on the history of the city, I discovered that not only there were several tram lines in the early 20th century, but there was even a tram line that went all the way to a nearby town of population around 15K, 22 km away. If anyone proposed a tram line like that today, I think they would be dismissed as being kidding for proposing such extravagant spending.
This, in a context where Spain is a much richer country than it was back then. I often wonder what went wrong.
Classic trams and modern light rail are different beasts.
Trams were popular worldwide back in the days where automobiles were far too expensive for most people and buses hadn't taken off yet, and since they were the only practical means of transport for medium distances, even small cities had massive ridership. They also ran right on the road, sharing space with cars, which was OK because there were a lot less cars and cars were not meaningful competition.
These days cars are affordable, and light rail has to be better than cars to be competitive, and do so well enough to entice a significant portion of the population out of their cars to be affordable. In practice this means dedicated right of way, which is far more expensive to purchase and fit out as a rail line than just laying some rails on an existing street. And of course modern safety, environmental and just plain bureaucratic regulations also inflate the prices of public works considerably compared to the good/bad old days, particularly in the US.
Yes, has all the disadvantages of a bus system with the added disadvantage that changing routes is tremendously expensive since you need to lay new track.
I'm aware of those factors, but I still think we took a wrong turn. Maybe not in the US due to the population sparsity and sprawl, but in Spain and many other European countries, if we could connect every town or city of more than 10K people by either rail, light rail or tram (instead of having spent billions on highways), that would cover 80% of the population. A large majority wouldn't need a car, and could instead use Uber-like services for the last mile. Pollution and emissions would be much less of a problem, and quality of life in cities much better.
But that's what happens with gradient descent, it can lead you to a local minimum...
If it can make you feel better, I know a lot of Italian cities are going back to trams in dedicated lanes. This is on the back of the clear advantages enjoyed by those cities (Rome, Milan) who didn't actually rip out all tracks after the last war.
There is an element of busywork too: local officials are always elected by promising change, they have to be seen doing something. So on odd years they put in something, and in even years they take it out...
In Europe? I doubt it. The car doesn't quite have the same cultural significance as a symbol of adulthood/independence here, at least not to the younger generation.
That's what they pretend. However, the reality is this:
* car sales do not drop, they oscillate depending on various governments subventions;
* vehicle fleet keeps rising (albeit slowly because the market is saturated);
* car owning per household has always been and is still on the rise (despite household size constantly decreasing);
* the distance travelled with cars keeps rising as well.
And visually, the amount of cars parked in the streets and along roadsides becomes insane. You already thought it was full 30 years ago, but now it is fuller.
Oh, and the cars become bigger every year. Not American-big, but still, on the way to it. For example, pickup trucks never took off in the French countryside in the last 50 years, not a single bit; but for a couple of years, it has started :-/
1) "suburbia" is now a thing in Europe too. Regular people cannot afford to live in city centres, they are the preserve of the wealthy. As population grows, more and more people are pushed further out, and they adopt suburbanization: big malls that cannot be reached if not by car, semi-detached houses in gated communities, etc etc. That's a lifestyle built for cars.
2) People will buy what manufacturers will sell. In a global market, car models are increasingly built with more than one country in mind. Inevitably, US tastes loom large.
3) The Hollywood influence cannot be underestimated.
Welcome to the Netherlands then. Most people ride trains between the cities. It does help, however, that most of the population lives in cities that are 30-40 minutes away on a train.
The Netherlands is approximately the same land area and population density as the NYC metropolitan area[1], so it is (as you say) a very different environment from the entire US or even Spain.
Well, since smitherfield used the CSA (combined statistical area) it's actually rather close. 34,493 km^2 for the New York CSA, while Netherlands is 41,543 km^2. So about 83% of the size of the Netherlands.
Not a big leap forward, being the vast majority of public transport users
People that need to move outside of going back and forth from a fixed place still would prefer a car
For obvious ease
You don't bring your girlfriend by the sea at night on a tram , you don't go to visit grandma with four kids on a tram, you don't walk 5 km from the station to the place you have to go by using a tram, unless you're forced to
BTW trams are really expensive to build, expensive to ride for more than short distances and maintenance is on the public, while car maintenance is on the owners.
We need better private transport, not better public ones
They're already ok, if you enjoy suffering rush hours congestion
> that would cover 80% of the population. A large majority wouldn't need a car, and could instead use Uber-like services for the last mile
I'm sensing a bit of a Catch-22 in this hypothetical: How would the success of Uber-like services been impacted if 80% of the population no longer needed cars?
Interesting take. Where I live (The Hague, Netherlands), trams are slowly turning into light rail systems. Where trams historically shared the roads with cars, they are now increasingly running on separate tracks (elevated or otherwise). This allows for different kinds of (more comfortable) trains, because they do not need to be built for collisions with cars.
I lived in a Swedish city of a similar size. They had a tram network that was dismantled bit by bit until it was completely shut down in 1973 because it was seen as unmodern. And now 40 years later they're all talking about building trams again since they're so modern...
Even in the US you see this. There was a light rail line[1] that ran west from Washington DC connecting several small farming communities in the early 1900s. It was dismantled and turned into a bike trail and now we are spending billions of dollars[2] to build a Metro expansion parallel to the old rail line.
What is interesting about the renaissance of light rail to me is that for many cities it's a restoration of how the city was originally designed.
Relatively modern cities, especially north american ones, would have grown along with the tram network, adding on "streetcar suburbs" as the city grew.
For example if a neighbourhood comprises of one major street lined with commercial with residential everywhere else, that was likely once a streetcar line.
At some point these cities threw out the trams and replaced them with buses and cars, but these cities weren't designed for that infrastructure.
Newer cities that are designed around cars are unwalkable stripmall deserts. It will be much more difficult to turn these into walkable transit oriented communities.
many places in the US are like this as well. trains used to criss-cross many cities and towns, but those lines have since been paved over for roads or just fallen out of use altogether.
This will go on until one day a large enough government admits that moon landings back in the 60s/70s were filmed, instead of real.
The large majority of people here are based in facts instead of religion and dogmas. As a fact-based society, we should be able to look from a distance and re-evaluate the facts with a colder perspective.
From what I observe, every year we are either 5 year away from settling on the moon (or Mars), every year there are nn reasons why it didn't happen (loop and repeat since the last 50 years).
Very few doubt the fact that selfies of astronauts smiling directly at the sun are possible (without injury).
Very few wonder why the first landing was a success, right on the first try even as other agencies (SpaceX) iteratively fail on the first runs.
Very few ask why the the original recordings don't exist any longer, only botched TV recordings.
The effect of radiation outside the earth shield is simply too strong. We have always sent animals during any space milestone before humans. Look up what happened to them, if you can find the records.
I'm an engineer. If possible, would like to see humans on the moon during my lifetime. Instead, we are taught that the sun orbits around the earth and burn apostates on the public square. We can do better.
They need driverless, conductorless subways/trams in enclosed tubular right of way with passengers entering from one side and exiting from the other, via offset doors.
Think of the days when you had elevators with operators who were paid for pushing the floor number for you - (a carry-over from the cable-pull hole in the wall days when operators were needed.)
These trams were killed by the wages of the operators, in much the same way that modern subways are ruined costwise by the wages of the drivers and conductors who each have hourly wage costs of $50 or more = large ticket costs and avoidance to car use. In effect opportunists grabbed all the $$
In the moon race, NASA is so burdened by legacy wages and other costs AND the fact that Congressional opportunists grab the money that NASA was prevented from that course.
The author answers the question in the first sentence. It is not that we can't, the problem is that it is not cost effective to do so. Or, as the cliche goes, "It's all about the Benjamins".
The inconvenient truth is that the US has a national debt of over $21T and a federal bureaucracy with a reputation of being unable to bring projects to completion on budget. Think of this in a more personal context: you need to plan to support yourself in your old age (retirement). Your lifestyle depends on a successful return on investment. What percentage of your savings would you invest in this? Where does this fit on your hierarchy of "needs" vs "wants"?
Your analogy makes no sense. America isn't a person, doesn't have a limited working life, and isn't going to "retire".
The solution to an inefficient federal bureaucracy and a large national debt isn't to cut economically irrelevant spending in those areas where the US enjoys an actual advantage over other countries. It's to improve the bureaucracy and balance spending in meaningful ways.
Unfortunately, any sane attempt at improvement is blocked by "small government" Republicans, who deliberately impede evolutionary improvements in government functioning in the hope that, by forestalling them, they can hasten some future libertarian revolution, wherein it becomes politically possible to eliminate all social programmes altogether.
In order to maintain their false image as being in favor of fiscal constraint, these same Republicans attack easy targets like NASA. At the same time, they protect insanely profligate projects like the F-35 fighter, which provide essentially socialist redistribution to defence contractors in their own districts. In your flawed comparison, it'd be like someone complaining about his children's spend on candy, while buying a dozen broken Ferraris every day.
> wherein it becomes politically possible to eliminate all social programmes altogether
.. but not, as you pointed out, the biggest expense of all in the military.
The way back to the moon is the same reason as America went to the moon in the first place: competition and colonialism. As soon as China or India look like they might go back to the moon, the space race will resume.
Social program spending is far higher than what is spent on the military. Unless you aren’t counting social security and medicare as “social programs” which would of course be silly.
Social security includes contributory pensions, though? In particular, if you're talking about US Federal debt, some of it is owed to the Social Security Trust Fund (mentioned upthread as "national debt of over $21T"), so either social security is part of government (and the internal debt should be deducted from that total) or it isn't (and doesn't count as government spending).
Calling this a republican problem is being willfully ignorant of the problems in our government structure. We didn’t get $21B in debt cause of republicans, or democrats, but because of congress.
Congress directed NASA to spend $20B to build the SLS, a super heavy launch system built by congresses favorite contractors. It won’t be reusable at all, ever launch rocket will be burned up in the atmosphere. Each launch will cost about $2B, and the first version will only put in orbit about the same amount of cargo a Falcon Heavy will for $90M.
The SLS won’t ever be canceled despite its awful economics because it’s diverting billions to favorite contractors like Boeing. That’s the problem. NASA could buy launch capacity for a fraction of the cost using commercial providers, but key congressional districts get no windfall from that.
The problems being discussed here happen at least 2 orders of magnitude larger than you are talking about. The little NASA journey to SLS has effectively no impact on the grander US government debt or the issues causing it.
The issues causing the debt are much much bigger problems that last centuries and are largely Republican-driven. They are things like overspending on War, keeping the poor population poor (war on drugs, cutting education spending, etc), that keep the population of the US unable to earn money and pay taxes, etc.
The problems are large and structural and they are not with NASA or their decision making. They are with Republicans.
Again, there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats. They both are responsible for the war on drugs because it’s politicalky popular. The few Opponents are either very liberal democrats or libertarian republicans.
Secondly, we are spending more on education than virtually any time on our history.
Thirdly, Obama was a democrat, at times had political majorities in congress, yet he never pulled us out of Iraq or Afghanistan, because it would be politically unpopular, and cost significant democratic party funders billions on contracting revenues.
Trump says he would cancel the F-35, but dame thing, same reasons.
Imperial congress has a turnover rate akin to the members of the communist party in the glory days of the USSR. They are all professional politicians who get re-elected by voting for what their financial backers want.
>war spending
There is no innocent party in terms of war making. This is documented historical fact. If anything, Democrats have taken the country to war more than republicans, but it is a largely irrelevant factoid. I am a bit confused at what you mean by "over spend" on war. I think the real issue is that these recent "wars" are actually just very large and powerful Police Actions. I am not making this distinction for political reasons, but rather to highlight the spending and tolerance of the nations that commit Police Actions. A War has existential effects on the participants. A police action tends to be very one sided. The US can, and indeed does, engage in conflicts in Africa, Central Asia, and South East Asia simultaneously, all while maintaining a robust, defensive army (it is more accurately in offensive army on a leash, but near as makes no difference). This is not War in a Clausewitsian interpretation of war. It is war in terms of its effects on the recipients of the Police Action; a war that cannot be won. Currently, the US war on terror is doing all the heavy lifting that the UN, by its founding document and principles, should be doing, but the US frames it as National Interest. This kind of codifies Exceptionalism (City on a Hill) and suddenly makes War a national line item expense. In any case, the debt is not caused by war, the current wars or the past wars. Our society in its composition and structure is unsustainable, and this incurs unreasonable amounts of debt. A simple g! search of US federal budget (both discretionary and mandatory) will show that the most expensive thing America does is exist.
>republicans aliens dude meme
We have gone 8 + 8 + 8 with 16 of those being Democrat president and ~10 of those being Left controlled congress. As you put it, the problems are large and structural, and the idea that the fault lies with one party, regardless of their actual hold on power, is preposterous in a deliciously propagandistic way. The War on Poverty, an abject failure, was started by a Democrat. The EPA was started by a Republican. The military industrial complex was basically instituted as well as exposed by the same guy, a Republican who came from a traditionally Democrat organization. Arguably the most ardent leftist president held power for more than 12 years, fundamentally changed the nature of commerce, raised a massive army, and freedom'd the shit out of half the globe. If you only see republicans as the problem, then you are going to generate a narrative that ignores many relevant factors. Just my .02
Economically, this 20 trillion of debt reflects the private sector's desire to save as much as it does the US government's desire to spend.
It is economically damaging to remove treasury instruments as a savings vehicle. We have already seen what happens when the interest rates on them are plunged to zero - asset bubbles popping up all over the place.
There is no theoretical reason why local currency denominated debt instruments cannot keep being issued indefinitely. Only cretinous goldbugs and other people who do not understand how money works try to argue that there's a solvency risk.
Actually, Republicans usually favor more NASA spending than Democrats do (e.g. Bush started funding manned Moon/Mars missions while Obama cut that program and the Space Shuttle), because most of it goes to red areas (Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, rural Florida, rural California). By contrast, Lockheed Martin made the F-35 program unkillable by selecting facilities and suppliers in all 50 states, plus several NATO allies and other prospective buyers.
Apollo cost around 2% of the US federal budget at its peak. In individual terms, if you earn the current US median income of ~$43,000/year, that's less than $1,000/year, or $20/week. How many people spend at least $20/week on "wants"?
The overall federal budget was much smaller then, too. If we take the peak cost of $3 billion/year, adjust it for inflation (about $23 billion/year), and divide it by the current federal budget, it would be 0.6%, or the equivalent of $5/week for someone earning the US median income. How many people spend that on "wants"?
And, it probably wouldn't cost nearly as much if you did it today. SpaceX projects that development of their Mars rocket would only cost $10 billion total, and it would easily be capable of lunar missions. SpaceX tends to miss their time-related goals but hit their cost-related goals, but even if they're off by a factor of 2, it's still way cheaper.
Obviously we don't want to spend even that much, collectively, on doing it, otherwise we'd be doing it. But IMO the "what percentage of your savings would you invest in this?" question just shows why we should. It's utterly insignificant on the scale of national expenditures, and the results would be far better than you'd get from another squadron of F-35s or whatever.
National debt is simply national savings. "Paying off" national debt means taking away one of the most popular, liquid, income producing asset from people and corporations.
But it isn't savings. It is, as you said, an income-producing asset. Its primary function is not as a store of value, but as a claim against promises of future production.
The national debt is mining resources needed for current operations from the future, rather than drawing down the stockpiles of those already mined from the past.
Claiming that debt is wealth is mistaken at best, and fraudulent at worst. Please reexamine your premises and analysis before repeating it.
Any fan of "modern monetary theory" should look at entities like the Soviet Union, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela. No government has an infinite capacity to print fiat money, and a theory based upon that as a premise is, in my opinion, complete bunkum.
I highly recommend exploring other macroeconomic theories. It is depressing how many of them amount to tricking productive firms and the labor workforce into believing a big lie of some sort, that allows some other more savvy entity to siphon value away from them.
Consumption is paid for by production. Imports are paid for by exports. Debt now is paid for by production later. Savings now is paid for by production earlier.
In theory, you can build an economy upon debts and repayment of prior obligations, but in practice, human beings are great at lying and making false promises.
Looks like you're not very familiar with it. Again, I highly recommend taking a close look and see if any of your questions are already answered/addressed.
It's your responsibility to support your own claim.
It won't do me any good to read more of your favored economic theory if I disagree with its fundamental premises. And I do disagree with them. Therefore, I will also disagree with all conclusions logically derived from them.
>The inconvenient truth is that the US has a national debt of over $21T
That isn't an inconvenient truth at all. The US is not dollar constrained.
If you think that the US is natural resource constrained - that's another matter. Are we in danger of running out of the resources required? Clearly no.
If you think the US is labor constrained - that wages are too high and we cannot afford to hire more people without causing spiraling inflation - that's another matter.
However, if you believe that, you also have to believe by necessity the idea that American labor is becoming less efficient and that automation isn't eliminating any jobs - let alone lots of jobs.
The question is why would we put a man on the moon?
I grew up with Moonbase Alpha (although I am not expecting to be thrown into space by a major explosion) and want this as much as anyone else but is there any reason (mining, strategic, know benefits to research) which justifies the price?
I would love that we are the point where we need a base on the moon, but I don't know what would justify it other than tourism and we aren't that rich and it isn't that easy and safe just yet.
I'd say the costs were projected to be unsustainable. There apparently was this whole episode with the Congress realizing that Wernher von Braun & crew are aiming for Mars, and deciding to cut the party short before it gets out of control[0].
> is there any reason [...] which justifies the price
THIS kind of thinking is our problem imho - we are living in rich times and we should start behaving as such! We have more of everything than we need. Yeah, there are children starving or dying of preventable diseases somewhere in the world, but guess what, even if we'd be 10x richer there will still be. Or we'll whip out a world war or some runaway next gen bioweapons instead to ramp up the killing that way. That's who we (Homo Sapiens) fking are!
A space race would be a pretty awesome way to encourage competition and progress on a scale similar to that encouraged by the last "world" war. But no, instead we'll go for the "mass-surveillance-technology supremacy race" or "best AIs for trading race" or the "let's pretend energy is scarce and price-war on in while talking about solving climate-change race"...
GROWTH and EXPANSION are our only reasons of being and our own authentic good motivations as human beings, and infecting as much of the cosmos as possible with ourselves, aka "space technology" development should be our core drive as a species!!!
As much as I want to agree with you I think it's a very naive way of thinking about this problem (which can sometimes be good so don't get me wrong).
I personally believe in what I call natural next steps. I.e steps that are naturally extending previous ones.
To me, the next step is making the space station much more robust.
And focusing on AI might actually be a much smarter move as it might allow us to build a secure and stable moonbase before we could do it using humans.
So it's a very complex discussion where priorities might sometimes look like they are ignoring something like a space station on the moon, but actually end up being a better choice because it will allow us to get there quicker.
This never works... People need to be forced into developing solution by creating more problems while solving existing one. Like "shit, the mars colony got wiped out by a diseases, no more humans to repair the stuff there, quick, figure out how to make robots that make more robots themselves, nothing else fits the budget". Or "shit, we underestimated the effects or magnitude of cosmic radiation on colonists, gotta accelerate work on those cures for cancer or we're fucked".
And "alternative priority" things like AI or, dunno, cancer-research, will never compete for the same money bucket as space exploration. They'll likely end up receiving significantly more money since space exploration will just increase their value by orders of magnitude. Economy is never a zero some game like "spend money on this vs. that" if you play it on a large enough scale since most stuff is either in excess of "creatable". Only real finite resource is "space you can practically reach to fast enough". Too bad some people have started to actually believe the made up rules of our "economy game".
Hmmm... now that I think about it, maybe our "economical game" is the problem: we've developed it so much, with manufactured needs and manufactured scarcities for the purpose of "hacking people into working the hardest they can", but now it's kind of turned against us. Maybe we need some serious rewrite of the code of global economy to start making the things that are technically possible actually possible...
Yeah, I know this kind of thinking... To many people have it. Hopefully I can try to "cure" at least a few from the "need for things to make sense" and to teach them to think more from the first principles of physics and the givens of biology. That's the only thing that needs to make sense.
> Yeah, there are children starving or dying of preventable diseases ~~somewhere in the world~~ in America
Fixed that for you.
I love space much as the next guy, but i dont see why the government has to spend considerable sums for it. The only purpose for space is science, either aplicable to science in general or to the military, but im sure its not cost-efficient for all the science there is to be made.
So if people love the space, they should pay for the things they want to be done out there. No reason for Nasa to not crowdfund or SpaceX to get private money to build something. The people that want to go to space or get space stuff get what they pay for, and the people that dont, dont.
I dont find it reasonable to think someone making very little money has to pay taxes that somehow fund Elon Musk's journey to Mars.
No, it's not. Fuck science, it's just a tool. The goal is GROWTH and MULTIPLICATION and CONQUEST! We should learn to be proud of our "viral" nature and start acting more like it. If we could do the same with "magic" or religion or whatever, then we'd do it using that...
Philosophically I agree 100% but they cost a fraction of what it would cost to create a base on the moon for instance.
Someone has to pick up that bill.
I am sure we will get a base on the moon with time but technologically we aren't there yet.
Let's focus on build a solid and habitable space station then we can use some of that knowledge to establish a base on the moon. (once we have solved the resource issues)
A moonbase is likely safer and more convenient in many ways than a space station, since you don't have to deal with microgravity. Certainly they have different problems with different solutions, so there's only a limited amount of knowledge that would transfer over.
I'm not opposed to an "ISS 2.0", but how much more would we expect to learn from it that we don't already know? I think it's already time to go to the Moon and/or Phobos.
It's cheaper and closer to home to get it up and running and I don't believe there is any base to claim it will only be limited amount of transfer over. And if that was the case then the purpose of a moon base would be put even more into question.
We have plenty to learn when it comes to building not just habitable space stations but also comfortable ones most of which will be easily transferable knowledge to a moon base when the cost of construction have come down signiticantly by the means of ex. space x or even a space elevator.
There are so many things we could be spending money on which would make a moonbase way more likely to happen than just skipping over a lot of intermediate steps to get there.
So much of engineering is very different in zero-G. I want humanity to spread among the stars, so I want us to be able to construct habitats on planemos and smaller bodies. I don't see space stations as important in the long run; even interstellar spaceships would likely operate under continuous acceleration so involve little zero-G engineering.
Space stations are not important in the long run, but the technologies developed to make them enjoyable and safe places are indeed very important but in the short and long run.
Planets will have different g's so first making things in zero-g work seems to be a much more solid approach to developing a long term space program.
If you want to spread you need to learn how to deal with being surrounded by space and a space station is the best way to do that short of sending people out in space arks.
> Planets will have different g's so first making things in zero-g work seems to be a much more solid approach to developing a long term space program.
I don't think that follows at all, because I think engineering at 2g or 0.5g or even 0.01g has a lot more in common with engineering at 1g or 0.15g than it does with engineering at 0g. Zero-g is qualitatively very different from non-zero g; stuff like room design, plumbing, HVAC, material constraints (the need to avoid things that can powder) are totally different.
> If you want to spread you need to learn how to deal with being surrounded by space and a space station is the best way to do that short of sending people out in space arks.
Within the solar system all journeys are relatively short and it's ok for spaceships to not be closed systems. For interstellar travel I think space arks will be necessary anyway. There's no really plausible way to get to another star in anything short of multiple decades.
"I don't think that follows at all, because I think engineering at 2g or 0.5g or even 0.01g has a lot more in common with engineering at 1g or 0.15g than it does with engineering at 0g. Zero-g is qualitatively very different from non-zero g; stuff like room design, plumbing, HVAC, material constraints (the need to avoid things that can powder) are totally different."
Those are mostly things that can be explored on earth, no need to build a moonbase to figure that out.
The opportunity with a space station is to figure out things that can't be explored realistically in other environments.
"Within the solar system all journeys are relatively short and it's ok for spaceships to not be closed systems. For interstellar travel I think space arks will be necessary anyway. There's no really plausible way to get to another star in anything short of multiple decades."
So it's much more useful what we learn on a space station than what we learn on a moon base. Being in space without access to any resources other than what you already have is a much more important thing to solve and solving that will allow us to reach other planets much easier, cheaper and safer.
I really don't see what advantage a moon base is giving us compared to a space station for now.
> Those are mostly things that can be explored on earth, no need to build a moonbase to figure that out.
> The opportunity with a space station is to figure out things that can't be explored realistically in other environments.
The best way to explore the things we're going to need to live on other planemos is to live on another planemo. A space station involves solving a bunch of engineering challenges that are different from Earth, some of which are relevant to living on other planemos and many of which are not. A moonbase gives us more of the challenges we care about and less of the ones we don't.
> So it's much more useful what we learn on a space station than what we learn on a moon base. Being in space without access to any resources other than what you already have is a much more important thing to solve and solving that will allow us to reach other planets much easier, cheaper and safer.
Again long-term life on a space station has a bunch of challenges that are just irrelevant. To spread to Mars we'll need a moonbase-like environment on Mars - one that has access to rock and some chemicals, not floating in empty space - and while people will need to go to and from there that's a matter of surviving in space for months rather than years, and frankly seems like something we could already handle. Similarly spreading to the Jovian system and so on.
No matter what planet you need to go to you need to spend a lot of time in space. Furthermore no matter what planet you would want to explore you would need a space station to explore from. It will also be the best way start the exploration as you can use your knowledge from the space station we have on earth.
So no matter how you look at it, in space in zero-g is going to be the majority of the endeavour.
Furthermore, we are simply not even close to be able to live realistically far from earth let alone able to afford it.
There are so many things that need to be established before it becomes realistically sustainable and safe.
> No matter what planet you need to go to you need to spend a lot of time in space.
Days for the moon, months rather than years for Mars, and we've already had people on space stations for that kind of duration. 3 years for the Jovian system which is a step up but not a huge one.
> Furthermore no matter what planet you would want to explore you would need a space station to explore from.
I don't see that at all. Unmanned satellites would make sense, but the surface (or possibly an aerostat for some planemos) is always going to be a much more human-friendly environment in terms of gravity and radiation shielding.
> It will also be the best way start the exploration as you can use your knowledge from the space station we have on earth.
This is circular reasoning.
> Furthermore, we are simply not even close to be able to live realistically far from earth let alone able to afford it.
Which is why the moon makes sense as a next step. It's challenging but doable.
Days to the moon at an extreme cost with little to no benefit vs hours for the satellite if something goes wrong.
Again we don't even have the technology to make mining the moon, if it had anything of value, profitable.
Two weeks a month on the dark side of the moon.
"I don't see that at all. Unmanned satellites would make sense, but the surface (or possibly an aerostat for some planemos) is always going to be a much more human-friendly environment in terms of gravity and radiation shielding."
You are missing the point. They don't have to be manned they are hubs between the planet and the surface and back home. They provide important information about the planet to those who live on it.
This is circular reasoning.
Has nothing to do with circular reasoning not sure you understand that word then.
The knowledge we have obtained on earth will help us when we put stations in orbit around the planets we want to explore.
The more solid we can make those stations the better for everything else.
Which is why the moon makes sense as a next step. It's challenging but doable.
No, it doesn't make sense as there is no benefit compared to the cost. We simply aren't there yet no matter how lovely it sounds.
> Days to the moon at an extreme cost with little to no benefit vs hours for the satellite if something goes wrong.
Days versus hours - exactly. A step up in risk, to be sure, but not a huge one - realistically there aren't so many problems that won't kill you in the hours it would take to get home from the ISS but will kill you in the days it would take you to get home from the moon.
> Again we don't even have the technology to make mining the moon, if it had anything of value, profitable.
Space stations aren't profitable either. It's not about profit, it's about humanity spreading through the cosmos.
> You are missing the point. They don't have to be manned they are hubs between the planet and the surface and back home. They provide important information about the planet to those who live on it.
So how does a manned space station help with that? We already have satellites orbiting Mars and acting as communications relays.
> Has nothing to do with circular reasoning not sure you understand that word then.
"Knowledge of space stations will be valuable because we will build space stations because that will let us reuse our knowledge of space stations" is textbook circular reasoning.
> No, it doesn't make sense as there is no benefit compared to the cost. We simply aren't there yet no matter how lovely it sounds.
So how do we get to there from here? I don't think we'll ever get to a point where going to other planemos makes sense from a corporate profit-and-loss perspective, not if we don't go there for non-economic reasons first.
Suppose the goal is Mars, or one of the Jovian moons, or Titan. How would an ISS 2.0 put us any closer to getting there than we are now? What is it that we can't do now that we would want to test out with an ISS 2.0?
We're going to need surface habitats on these places, and building a surface habitat on the moon would let us test out the technologies and engineering that needs, in a place that's - relatively speaking - much quicker to get to and from, so safer and easier to iterate on. While a space station tells us some things that are relevant to building surface habitats, most of the things it tells us are only relevant to space stations. I simply don't see the need for long-term-manned space stations, and medium-term-manned space stations we can do already.
Space stations are less expensive than moon bases so why do a moonbase? It teaches us nothing much more compared to a space station and cost a fraction.
They help by being a habitable space station which can be docked with. It might even be a place to escape and wait for rescue if something goes bad on the planet a much cheaper way to rescue than having everything based on the planet.
"I don't think we'll ever get to a point where going to other planemos makes sense from a corporate profit-and-loss perspective, not if we don't go there for non-economic reasons first."
It's not about corporate profit-and-loss it's a matter of making it unnecessarily expensive.
There are so many things to solve even when it comes to the space station. Just getting the price down substantially is hard but necessary before it make sense to putting a base on the moon without any point that isn't mostly already solved by the ISS.
> Space stations are less expensive than moon bases so why do a moonbase? It teaches us nothing much more compared to a space station and cost a fraction.
We need to learn how to build habitats off-Earth, out-of-atmosphere with all that entails (e.g. handling fine sharp-edged dust), and outside the van allen belts. And these things need to be closed systems that can be inhabited for decades at a minimum. At the same time, they'll be under nonzero gravity, and they will have access to bulk matter. That's a very different set of engineering challenges from a space station.
> There are so many things to solve even when it comes to the space station. Just getting the price down substantially is hard but necessary before it make sense to putting a base on the moon
But the cost-reduction techniques would be very different for planemo-surface bases than for space stations. E.g. a popular proposal for cheaper space stations is using inflatable modules to save having to ship up building materials, and that's a good idea for space stations. But on a surface under gravity, inflatables might not be structurally rigid enough, and building structures from the local soil might be a better option.
Might, maybe etc lots of unknowns where each mistake is costly and can threaten to bring down the project.
We have no idea so actually establishing a base on the moon isn't yet cheap enough that we can do it for the hell of it and we don't learn enough we aren't already learning with the space station.
Let's solve getting people and material cheap into space, lets solve better AI, lets have some optimal automated building processes on earth then we can talk about moving people and material up on a base on the moon just for the fun of it.
If ThomPete is talking about the analysis that I had a look at, then yeah the dividends from new technology developed was taken into account and it still doesn't work out economically. The problem is money spent on a moon base isn't being spent on economic developments on earth which also result in technological developments.
Yes, cause the most crucial ones are technologies about getting things into orbit and sustaining life in obit, creating habitable environments and so on.
Whether on a planet or in space those challenges aren't much different and whatever you gain as knowledge on a space station you can apply to a moon base later on.
Furthermore, the challenge of building a space station and not suddenly run into budgeting or construction issues is many many many many times higher when it comes to establishing something on the moon.
Each new learning that could be done on the space station will come as at a much higher cost doing something we don't have good enough technology to do with-in a realistic comfort zone.
If you like me believe that technology is the primary forcemultiplier for any realistic development into space the trick is to focus on developing within our comfort zone, until we it within our comfort zone to risk a next step. Then you will actually end up with a space station much faster (and a mars station and an out ring station and a space ark etc) because of the exponential force of technology.
If you're talking about some kind of self-sustaining station, then space wouldn't be where you'd go first anyway. You'd want to establish a self-sustaining colony in the antarctic, where conditions are significantly more favorable and yet still incredibly hostile.
And if you aren't... haven't we already done that with ISS?
There are already closed off habitats made to simulate living without outside assistance. It's the combination of a lot of things that are relevant here including zero-g not just any single one of them.
We haven't made space travel safe enough yet, we haven't made enough progress on habitats in space.
Plenty of things to figure out and a space station is by any means a much more effective way to do that both financially, when it comes to speed of iteration and ability to course correct and focus on improvements.
There's no Soviet Union boogeyman to compete with. Maybe if North Korea was competent and had the resources to start shooting for the moon, then I'm pretty sure we'd deem it worthwhile. I'm not sure we fear China enough to see them as that type of threat.
I think the real question is why we want to put a man on the moon. Imagine you climbed mount Everest with no climbing equipment and then 30 years later someone asked you why you haven't done it again.
The article answers itself: "NASA’s traditional manned programs for deep space exploration, costing well over $3 billion annually, continue to enjoy solid bipartisan backing among lawmakers and major agency contractors." That quote is speaking largely of the SLS. It's supposed to essentially be the Space Shuttle 2.0, but it's often just referred to as the Senate Launch System for good reason. We've spending billions of dollars on that program and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. This [1] is the Wiki entry from 2011 detailing the program's promises, which have been constantly 'reimagined.' In reality it's mostly a giant pork project.
Ultimately it's being driven by congressmen who only care about getting their kickbacks and it's being developed by ULA, an anticompetitive merger of Boeing and Lockheed, who only care about profit. And the companies themselves are also falling apart. This [2] is Lockheed Martin's CEO. One of the largest aerospace companies in the world is headed by a person who has absolutely no background whatsoever in aerospace or related technologies. Until 2015, this [3] was the head of Boeing - same story. Perhaps not coincidentally, since Boeing put an aerospace engineer in charge - they have sharply changed their direction and competitive outlook.
We have an increasingly corrupt government contracting work to companies who are driven only by money. Musk's success and the government's success in the 60s have something very simple in common. They were not driven by greed or short term self interest, but big picture ideology and aspirations. And it seems the whole notion of aspirations, beyond earning lots of money, is something that is somehow fading in society.
Why don't more people realize that infecting as much of the cosmos with ourselves should be one of the MAIN GOALS of Humanity?!
Ergo, space exploration technology should be a priority, even at massive costs, and even when those cost are measured in human lives and human pain and suffering. This, plus "defeating aging", plus "achieving superhuman general-purpose intelligence" (either by augmenting/improving human I or by developing AIs). Almost nothing else matters besides these. What fucked up global leadership did we end up with that they seem to have completely forgot this?
You might wanna justify those claims? Having a bunch of oppressed miserable humans rules by tyrannical AIs or whatever seems quite a bit worse then living happily on our single planet.
Better to have the seeds of humanity spread across many baskets, rather than in a single one that is perpetually endangered by an unlucky intersection with a rock.
Who knows if we'll ever be able to actually get outside our local system, but we're never going to figure out how to do it if we can't even setup shop in the cosmic equivalent of our front yard.
Despite your obvious irony, you're actually right - those should be primary goals of humanity. Beyond all this talk about life being a journey and not the destination, people sometimes forget that at some point, you're supposed to stop taking in the view and start doing something useful.
Edit 2
federal court set the value of the moon rocks at $50,800 per gram based on how much it cost the U.S. government to retrieve the samples between 1969 and 1972.
But we ARE talking about retrieving stuff from Mars: the BFS must be returned to Earth to be reused. It's also capable of bringing people back from Mars, and that's supposed to be included in the $200k/person ticket price. Assuming at least 200kg of human plus consumables per person for the trip back, that implies that anything worth at least $1000/kg would be worth sending back.
So I think Musk is actually wrong when he says that he can BOTH send people to Mars super cheap with return tickets AND that there could not possibly be something of enough value on Mars to return to Earth even if you had cocaine ($100,000/kg?) prepackaged on the surface (gold is $35,000/kg or something).
...not that I expect a vibrant Mars export economy or anything. Musk's basic point about not expecting Mars to fully and profitably pay for itself with physical exports is correct.
I can totally imagine a Chinese Prison facility that houses any nation's bad guys for a fee and churns out prepackaged organs. The tiny Albert Speer in my head can even see the benefit of such a system. And to be honest, China already does it to their prison populations. Putting the Organ Dispenser on the moon would just be a stylized recreation of the original concept of "international waters".
How about this: We legalize cocaine, but only cocaine manufactured on Mars. Investors (and engineers) will figure out the most economical way to get there, manufacture the cocaine, and get it back to Earth. The side effect will be that we will have figured out economical interplanetary space travel.
There's a lot of interesting things manufacturing-wise you can do in zero gravity which are now pretty impractical financially since it's so hard to get raw materials up the Earth's gravity well. It might be cheaper to get them from elsewhere where the gravity wells are shallower and the lack of air lets you use a mass driver rather than a rocket. Then it's a long slow trip to Earth orbit via ion driver but if it's just a hunk of metal it doesn't care.
I wonder about that idea. I mean, thinking about it there's almost nothing found outside of earth that's worth the cost of the infrastructure needed to bring it inside of Earth's gravity well.
Which is a bummer. The only thoughts I have contra that are that it's only expensive if you count the cost of the infrastructure - given that moving resources from outside of Earth to it isn't super unattractive.
Second it's possible that costs should be viewed not just Earth to outside of Earth but also outside of Earth to outside of Earth. That is to say mining water on the Moon doesn't make sense if the destination is Earth - it the destination on the other hand is another part of the Moon there might be some logic to it. You could in theory be cost competitive with the Earth as you don't have to get it out of Earth's gravity.
Simply put, we need a lander. If we had a lander, we could use existing rockets to get to Mars via Earth orbit rendezvous (see Gemini, also ISS is regularly refueled and boosted by visiting vehicles). But we spent all of our exploration money on an expensive rocket (and a capsule that is much heavier than it needs to be...).
Maybe we realize now going to the moon from a financial standpoint is purely political. If there was a efficient way and industrial need for plenty of resources from the moon maybe they'd make it possible. But right now grandiose measures of showing off your countries genitals kind of creates a narrative of wasted resources to me right now.
I've heard the argument that spending on stuff like this creates jobs and economy and I'm sure it does. But work a soup kitchen for a day and you'd realize we have economies of wealth built on the back of despair and hopelessness.
Our society needs to change to be a space faring one. Maybe I'm stupid and a traveling to space would initiate the change we need. I just can't see how.
(edited) Would these homeless people be sent to the moon mandatorily or voluntarily? If voluntarily, why only send homeless people? Why not send everyone who wanted to go?
In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the Moon was a penal colony. In that book, a form of harsh natural selection took place, and everyone who wasn't smart enough to survive in the demanding technical environment (and smart enough to foresee the disasters caused by those who weren't smart enough) quickly died gruesome deaths, leaving a population which was quite intelligent and valued learning.
I'd only suggest voluntarily, but I think that solving the housing problem and the question of colonization in one fell swoop seems like a nice solution.
Our economies of wealth are not built "on the back" of the people in the soup kitchens.
Those few people who are going to soup kitchens are typically so crippled by their own internal issues (e.g. mental illness, impulsive criminality, addiction, total inability to manage money) that their productivity is extremely low or negative. Nobody's taking anything from them because there's nothing to take.
In fact it's the opposite of what you said. It's the people in the soup kitchens who are living (e.g. eating soup) on the back of the healthy, productive people running the economy. Just ask: Which group would suffer more if the other group disappeared?
And before those full of moral rage jump in here, no, I'm not saying they deserve to suffer, etc. They don't. But nor is the underclass a productive group being forced to hold up the wealthy. It's not the medieval era any more; in a modern economy those with zero or negative human capital are nothing but a liability.
> in a modern economy those with zero or negative human capital are nothing but a liability
They're also, you know, human.
I blew several hundred dollars on air travel this weekend, for fun. People in soup kitchens are not living on my back. They're maybe living on my pinky nail.
Mental illness and addiction, btw, are illnesses. They're no more "crippling internal issues" than, say, diabetes.
I think he was using the term "liability" in a purely economic sense (liability v. asset) and in that sense he is absolutely correct. It is an ugly truth, but no less true for its ugliness.
>air travel for fun
i too enjoy living in an economy that has certain segments that are wildly productive.
>mental illness == diabetes
a comment like this must stem from a complete lack of contact with the homeless. i am not virtue shaming you at all. the homeless, as a crowd, can be very off putting. This does not negate their humanity, but it definitely dictates which segments of humanity they regularly interact with.
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my time amongst the homeless was a painful and informative experience. if you move around their world, you start to realize just how many of the street fam are where they are by choice. incompatibility with family or community, perplexing and unsettling addictions, habits, and proclivities (i thought people shooting up was going to be bad, but the eating of trash, hair, and feces was far more disturbing), and deep seeded mental trauma make many of the homeless community unreachable by the vast majority of society. the point is, there is no simple solution for outliers when we believe in the primacy of all human life. our society is an inevitable hierarchy, but our values preclude us from instituting a codified caste system.
The homeless i encountered, lived with, and eventually fled from see no place for themselves in society in a general sense. specifically, i had conversations with erudite winos and brilliant heroine addicts, their cognitive assets hampered by their chemical addictions. i also got assaulted and chased by 20somethings with wealthy and compassionate family members who would wire them money and beg them to return. then there is of course the individuals who cannot speak coherently, which is a surprisingly huge barrier to community interaction.
mental illness and addiction are illnesses, but MRSA and poison ivy rash are both "just" integument afflictions. Calamine lotion (handing out spare change, deifying the retched at snooty parties) will not help a staph infection.
Whats spent here is peanuts compared to whats spent on the military, the US (and the world) could easily sustain a moon/mars/ganymedes base and feed its poor if it prioritized its people instead of the defense complex.
This letter gets posted time to time. Definitely one of my favorites for explaining the rationale on spending money pushing boundaries when there are plenty of things that money can do to help people in need now.
Investing in space exploration is necessary and all I don't disagree. But saying it adds to the economy as much as investing in people who need investment I can't necessarily equate. There's millions of children's not getting an adequate education, and there's millions of people hungry and starved. In our current society; investment only happens when there's a vacuum of opportunity that could be filled. Only governments seem to invest in people right now. In a space faring society education is necessary. We don't have enough highly trained workers as is without space ships. We need investment and radical change in education.
> But right now grandiose measures of showing off your countries genitals kind of creates a narrative of wasted resources to me right now
Countries spend all kinds of money showing off their genitals in much worse ways. Think North Korea's nuclear weapons, or any of the Western nations' colonization follies.
How much has been spent on Olympic games in the last couple of decades? Would that be enough to get us to the moon?
North Korea nukes is more like showing venomous teeth than genitals.
The same way, launching the first Sputnik was a demonstration of military prowess: see, that thing flying over your head could be carrying a spy telescope, or a nuke.
Not a WSJ subscriber, so I can only see the first two paragraphs...
"NASA’s current plans for returning astronauts to the moon aren’t affordable and likely won’t produce sustainable, long-term economic benefits, according to an independent research study commissioned by the agency."
As an ex-NASA contractor (at the NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center, and yes, I think that name illustrates some of the problems of NASA), I completely agree. Management is extremely broken. Fifedoms are the major organizational component. Personalities are the driving principles. No one solves problems; they work around them. Going through the motions of the established procedures without understanding is expected to produce the optimal result.
On the other hand, all of this is a direct result of the funding model. Legislative and administrative priorities change every few years. Much of the priorities involve spreading contracts across important Congressional districts. It's not a surprise that the plans they come up with are PowerPoint schemes that sound good but have no real chance of success.
An example: the Constellation program was supposed to re-use the shuttle solid rocket boosters to save money. Sounds good, right? Until an aerospace engineer and solid rocket dude pointed out that they needed more thrust than the SSRBs provide. Proposed solution? Add another segment (of solid rocket motor) to the SRB. Unfortunately, that actually requires a complete redesign of the solid rocket motor. It would probably be more effective and cheaper to start from scratch. BTW, as far as I could determine, the current SLS program is the Constellation program with the names filled off.
(Said AE friend works for NASA building web apps because "they fly and that [pointing at the 1/5 scale model of Aries-1] doesn't.")
"Released last month without publicity, the report advocates using asteroids to produce fuel..."
But here we have an example of the same problem. Have one hard problem you apparently can't solve? Replace it with 10 harder problems that sound better. Pure public relations.
There's a lot of institutional inertia and forces opposing any change (and change itself is just churn).
The science side of things has a much better track record, but the interplanetary stuff is done by JPL, which isn't really NASA, and most of the rest is mostly a-political (modulo the Earth sensing stuff, which I'm continually surprised isn't cancelled for global warming reasons).
Then there's private enterprise, which seems to be doing better. But I'm not entirely comfortable with the "Guilded-Age" model of development.
So, I dunno.
Edit: when I wrote, "Until an aerospace engineer and solid rocket dude pointed out...", that should be "pointed out to me".
ProTip™?: Copy and paste the headline of the article into Google to get the full article. I really need to write a Chrome extension for this but haven't had the time. :(
Maybe because doin anything else that is slightly more complicated than a few experiments is gonna cost exponentially more and the budgets won’t get approved.
This is the one hope I have, with huge amounts of wealth concentrating in a few people's hands we may see pie in the sky stuff like Moon colonies and space tourism start up.
There are a lot of answers here about how expensive Apollo was, and about how those expenses haven't really gone away. Those answers are basically right: putting humans on the moon was, and would still be, enormously expensive.
But there's another factor at play which I haven't seen any mention of, which is that our risk tolerance as a culture has dropped considerably since then. We went from Mercury, to Gemini, to Apollo, in an INSANELY short period of time. We went from having never launched anybody into space, to Apollo 11, in ten years; we went from never having launched a Saturn V to putting three humans on top of one in thirteen months. We lost three astronauts due to multiple design flaws in the Command Capsule, then redesigned the capsule and launched it with astronauts in it in eighteen months.
None of that could happen now. And the reason can only partly be blamed on NASA losing its mojo. In truth, the entire spaceflight community has developed far a more comprehensive, reliable safety culture. But that culture is by necessity much slower than it was then. Nobody in the industry could move as quickly as NASA did in the mid 1960s. NASA of today can't - but neither can SpaceX, or Blue Origin, or Sierra Nevada, or anyone else I know of.
Even if we wanted to, we would have to re-educate our engineers. Engineers are taught how to do program management starting as undergraduates. We have an entire generation of aerospace engineers who have been taught to move at deliberate, conservative speed, to make sure nobody gets killed. The human inertia inherent in our current engineering culture just wouldn't allow us to go back to the speed of the 1960's.
A slower, more comprehensive safety culture costs even more money, but more importantly it requires financial support from Congress and the White House over a much longer period of time in order for a mission to make it from proposal to launch - support which is extremely hard to sustain across administrations.
And (personal opinion here) society as a whole is supportive of - indeed, has demanded and driven - these changes. We would not tolerate the US government spending 2% to 3% of the entire federal budget on a manned spaceflight program, and then losing an entire crew in a pre-launch accident, and then returning to launch in 18 months.
In order to efficiently place people into space we would need a robotics based economy. Robots would need to build the rockets and fly the rockets. Humans would design the rockets and tell them where to go. Mission control would be replaced with one flight director observing an AI which monitors everything.
An additional reason is that expertise died out with the end of funding. We had exactly one generation that tackled this problem - there has been no opportunity for them to hand down their experience. We're not starting from scratch, but we're certainly worse-off than we were at the end of the space race - scientists and engineers will have to learn from books and papers, rather than having an expert around to guide them.
Are most of the comments here based on the headline alone? This is a paywall and I am not seeing many comments discussing the article itself, just the headline (question).
WaitWaitWait... Nasa had its peak funding during those Moon landing years. We've let that equipment dryrot, switched to new versions, run those into the ground, slashed the budget repeatedly (and again over NASA's climate change research), privatized everything possible, let the best engineers retire, underpaid and underutilized their replacements until they left...
And somehow we have the gaul to wonder "why is going to the moon not working?"
Its almost like we're asking for something for nothing. Scientists and Engineers need to eat too. We need to buy new hardware. Train new people. If we wait too long, Musk will buy Cape Canaveral. We've already let Houston get turned into a museum rather than a launch pad.
I dont care how much you're gonna blame bureaucracy for this - this is poor leadership at the helm of our nation to gaslight folks this way.
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