I think a lot of people miss that R&D is expensive and it is often takes those who can 'throw away money' to help fund it. This is on top of any subsidies that may exist for that R&D.
Look at cars, cell phones, computers and airplanes ("[1930's] Most people still rode trains or buses for intercity travel because flying was so expensive. A coast-to-coast round trip cost around $260, about half of the price of a new automobile. Only business executives and the wealthy could afford to fly.)"
I would love to travel to Space one time and I hope some day I can take a flight into space. Right now, space flight will literally be a "luxury vehicle that only serve as a novelty for the rich." There is no way I'll ever be able to afford it unless it is first affordable by the rich.
Commercial space flight leads to innovations and economies of scale that radically reduce the cost of accessing space, which means we can do a lot more space science for less money. Reusable rockets alone are incredible in this regard, and if Starship really flies then we will be able to put up space telescopes much larger than Hubble and JWST at significantly less cost.
Air travel was only for the rich and governments at first too, but if they hadn't funded it it would never have become cheaper.
I don't accept the "we have too many problems on Earth" argument about space, though I do understand where people are coming from. I think if we wait for major problems to be solved here, we'll never go. There will always be huge problems. That's life.
That and space is far less than 1% of global GDP. If we were spending loads of money on space people might have a point, but we spend more on porn than NASA. (Not really exaggerating... look it up...)
As for Elon being an "intolerable tech bro," I don't care. He's human. Lots of amazingly productive or innovative people also have huge personal flaws. Look at some of our favorite musicians.
It's sad that the biggest barrier to space travel remains the inability to mobilize large amounts of money to fund ambitious projects. We have no difficulty funding the most nugatory military operations at ten times the cost of a manned mission to Mars. But peaceful projects, whether on Earth or in space, run out of political support at a fraction of that price.
It's a lot more fun to focus on the technology because the technical obstacles to space flight are potentially tractable. The human obstacles seem to resist any solution.
I think if space travel were as common as air travel, sure - but right now, nobody with a net worth of under a million is going into orbit except as part of a national space agency.
The amount we spend on space flight is trivial in the grand scheme, and it involves the creation of very useful technologies for this world too.
The US government devotes 1/2 of 1% of its budget to NASA. And less than half of NASAs budget is for manned space exploration.
Out of that tiny budget they are building the SLS, which is a huge pork turkey that’s sucked up close to $20B in funding (including capsule) and is years away from launching anything.
Elon Musk is about to launch the first Falcon Heavy, which will cost less than $100M per flight, and carry basically the same amount of payload as the SLS ever will to orbit. He’s the good guy here, providing spaceflight with reusable launch vehicles that cost a fraction of any that came before.
A Falcon Heavy can put 30,000 lbs into Mars orbit. If VASIMR ever works, they could put an 140,000 lb VASIMR space vehicle in orbit and let it do the 90 day trips. All at a tiny fraction the cost of tye moon program.
I personally love space and aviation stuff. But, as economies become more efficient and global, it’s increasingly unlikely that it will be possible to finance such projects. See: people haven’t been on the Moon for 50 years, Concord haven’t
flown for 20. Both projects have been financed through relatively undemocratic, non-market means.
I didn't mean to make it code - space flight is a complete waste of money. As far as I'm concerned we've already proved our point with regard to space travel, and can now afford to spend those bajillions of dollars on planet earth instead of satisfying the curiosity of nerds.
This opinion was born and raised in an environment of government funding for space. There is no fundamental reason why it should cost dozens of billions of dollars to get to space. If private industry brings it down to a cost more related to the true, fundamental price, it goes flying out the window. Merely millions to put people in space is of a kind with oil exploration, building transport networks, and all sorts of other situations where private industry under solid government routinely invest by the millions or even billions. At that point the argument actually completely flips around; anywhere we can afford to put a human, it is more cost-effective to do so than send a robot.
The most hand wavy R&D propositions ever, a very common take on Reddit. I hate when people assume the specific ROI gained when developing rocketry, when it was still very novel in the 1950-60s, can be used as a general rule for spending money on NASA or related gov projects today.
Even if it was private space tourism, what's the problem? They'd be spending their massive wealth funding further development of space technology. This isn't a virgin galactic style technological dead end death trap.
As prices come down for access to space, there is obviously going to be a point between only being affordable by governments and being affordable by everyone, where only governments and particularly rich people can afford it.
I always wonder why people think that there's so much money you can take away from space exploration R&D when the whole sector is basically really tiny and funded on a comparable magnitude of public broadcasting in some countries (e.g. NASA's yearly budget of 16 billion EUR vs. Germany's public broadcasting budget of 8 billion EUR).
The discussions ensuing about the usefulness of space exploration are always passionate and of course argue the humanitarian point of using that money to better our planet before doing anything somewhere else.
How much combat ship, Nth generation fighter, railgun and hypersonic weapon R&D do you get for the same price?
You're correct, but that doesn't really change the point I was trying to make
Since you've edited your post, I'll respond to the rest.
> But they're also just carnival rides for Billionaires, and that's what gets on peoples nerves.
If Bezos or Branson had sent someone else up in their place, does that really change anything?
Sure, it's expensive and only the super wealthy can afford to go into space right now, but there are plenty of technologies in our past that only the wealthy could afford at first, but as time went on, they became more affordable.
There's also the issue that the cheaper something gets, the more potential it has for uses that simply didn't exist before. Take airflight. Imagine planes/flights were about 2 orders of magnitude more expensive than they are today. So many things we take for granted in society would simply no longer exist. Air shipping - gone, trans-Atlantic vacations - gone (or spend a month both ways on a ship), even military air forces would probably no longer exist - kind of weird when a new jet starts costing in the ballpark of an aircraft carrier.
Try to imagine society without affordable airflight. It'd be so different that it's literally difficult to even begin to imagine all of the implications. And the same thing will be true of affordable spaceflight, but to a far greater scale. One of the most simplistic and "boring" examples of this would be material scarcity - gone. There are asteroids idling around, in reachable distance, with metals and other elements amounting to trillions of dollars on value. Of course the first mega-load coming back will completely crash the market, but that's entirely the point. What we view as scarce no longer will be, thanks simply to lowering the cost of spaceflight. Get it low enough and you could even conceivably create a world where various highly polluting industries could simply be off-planeted, with the resultant products being shipped back.
And I'm actively avoiding anything remotely sci-fi. These are the boring, almost certain things, and they alone already are making the future look utterly alien, based on nothing but cheaper spaceflight.
Lower cost to transportation is key for pretty much any economic growth. People and companies have significantly more plans than just a couple probes every few years. Exploration, mining, tourism, scientific research, manufacturing are a couple things that come to mind. There are probably many more ideas than what i can think of and that’s the point. Make it cheaper for people with ideas to make them a reality. When only the largest of governments can afford to put something into space then we won’t see much innovation/economic growth.
The destination isn't the point. Yes, some rich folks go to go to almost space, and that's awesome for them. But what's awesome for the rest of us is the rich folks are subsidizing research into spaceplanes, and some day stepping into a spaceplanebto go to the Lunar colony will be just like stepping onto a 747 to go to London is today.
Look at cars, cell phones, computers and airplanes ("[1930's] Most people still rode trains or buses for intercity travel because flying was so expensive. A coast-to-coast round trip cost around $260, about half of the price of a new automobile. Only business executives and the wealthy could afford to fly.)"
I would love to travel to Space one time and I hope some day I can take a flight into space. Right now, space flight will literally be a "luxury vehicle that only serve as a novelty for the rich." There is no way I'll ever be able to afford it unless it is first affordable by the rich.
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