The high cost to the human race’s colonisation of space is caused by the complexity and danger of reaching and leaving escape velocity within the earth’s atmosphere.

The Space Shuttle turned out to be an expensive and dangerous white elephant, the reason the Shuttle was so expensive is, because of its complexity with millions of different manufactured parts, and the need to cover it with bathroom tiles.

There is another route, we can reach the edge of space no problem Burt Rutan proved this with Space Ship one, when he won the ‘X’ prize by reaching over 100 km twice in one week.

Yes the Shuttle was ‘reusable’ but in name only. They could not have turned that around in a week.

What NASA should be doing is creating rocket fuel on the moon, there is lots of water on the moon, use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which when combined make very good rocket fuel.

Use the rocket fuel to fuel a space tug, use the space tug to accelerate and decelerate Space Ship one, to and from escape velocity in the safety of a vacuum.

No atmosphere = no friction = no heat = no bathroom tiles and no foam shielding on the external fuel tank.

Once we can accelerate and decelerate space craft with rocket fuel that is obtained from out of the earth’s gravity well, space travel becomes cheaper by many orders of magnitude, ok the capital cost would be very high, but once the systems are in place, the number of human beings, living in space increases exponentially.

A good example for the way very high capital cost projects work, is the Panama canal.

Not going to the Moon at all, in any form, however is quite stupid. The Moon is the stepping stone for space exploration and commerce. If you could manage to build spacecraft there, you can get them out of the Moons gravity well for a tiny fraction of the cost then you need when you try to get something out of Earths gravity well.

Going to the moon right now, and starting to build a factory for gadgets there, would be an extremely lucrative business. If you can do that trick and produce telescopes, satellites, spacecraft, space stations etc. on the Moon, you can turn *huge* profits from the price difference between earth based space flight and moon based space flight.

Back in the days of Apollo11 there was no space industry. Now there *is* a space industry. This space industry wants gadgets in earth orbit and elsewhere. They will pay you gigabucks of $ to get the gadgets where they should be.

Under Earth based space flight conditions, Earths economy may afford one or two stunt/tourist visits to Mars, and that’s it, like we visited the Moon. If you aim for sustained expansion, commerce and colonization, you need to be able to lift many millions of tons of material up into the Lagrange points. If you do that from the moon, the cost of getting material to Lagrange points is a really tiny fraction as compared to earth based launches. Heck if you’re just shipping raw materials to your shiny space dock, you can stick it on a rail gun/linear accelerator and shoot it there, costs you nothing but the energy you accumulated by way of solar cells, and the sun shines 50% of the time on the moon.

Here’s my idea, which btw I’d finance by cutting defense to 1/3, using 1/3 on the economy, 1/3 on space. I’d also flirt openly with “Wealth Caps” if the “Parasite elite do not invest in humanity’s future, and take note they will be blamed if any act of terrorism occurs…but also having a carrot to go with the stick of that if they cooperate humanity will be far richer in the future and their heirs will be credited with helping to bring it about…”

1. Space elevator. 10 years of multi-billion dollar research and space cannons would bring it up. There even might be a “Second moon” a 20K ton rock of debris that floats just about where a good counterweight would be.

2. Mars. Use the space elevator to construct in space a very, VERY large “O-Neil” type space habitat with either a nuclear ram or a “Space Sail Kite” probably both. Have that, with centripetal gravity carry people to and from Mars. Mars would also need a “Space elevator” like in the novels, though I’d argue to tow one of it’s moons into the proper orbit for a counterweight. I’d personally call this thing “Relayer” from the Yes album name, but also because of what it does.

3. Ceres: Back to “Planet” status.

On the way back and forth from Mars and Earth the relayer could drop off stuff at Ceres, once labeled a planet and soon to be again along with Pluto. Ceres, unlike the moon, has lots of water and other chemicals. IMO, it was a near earth sized planet that broke up billions of years ago. IMO again there will be found fossils and complex chemicals. In any event, it makes the moon look like a pail of water compared to a swimming pool with a lot of extras.

So the low gravity well would make it easy to get on/off the thing, and the resources could be easily mined for more rocket fuel using mirror arrays and constant sunlight for energy.

Ceres would become a huge city and it would also become a hub for a new “Belter” community of “Space Steads”. Mars would become terraformed and mankind would probably then work out both terraforming Venus and some deep space and interstellar missions.

But I do think the Moon is a necessary destination in any long-term space development scheme and a viable destination for a different approach toward that; an Open Source approach. For the past year I have been trying to promote a concept called the International Open Space Initiative; an open world space program whose objective is the telerobotic pre-settlement of the Moon and Mars as community projects developed using the Linux model of open development. I like to refer to this as the Best Model Train Layout Ever -the kind you might one day move into.

The key problem for space programs today is their declining mass cultural relevance. We now have more current astronauts than ever in history, but most people can’t name more than one or two of them. There are a number of causes for this. There’s a general trend of dystopianism in contemporary culture that makes talking about the future in any positive context seem quaint, naive, and silly. We are a broken people raised in a Cold War cultural climate mired in apocalyptic fantasy. Even Science Fiction has generally given up on any plausible visions of the future. Space agencies have been very poor in their ‘visioneering’, linking space development to practical solutions to terrestrial problems and so they’re always trumped by starving children in Africa , Global Warming, economic crisis, and our endless wars. Hinging it all on Space Solar Power doesn’t cut it and the rest of the technology transfer argument is like a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It’s also no longer sufficient in our culture for people to be a fan club watching from outside the space center fence. If we can’t be personally involved, it’s not relevant. It was good enough for our parents/grandparents to think they were vicariously contributing to the space program by contributing generally to the productivity of the nation. Well, no one is buying that idea anymore.

The IOSI concept makes space very directly culturally relevant by opening it up to mass global participation and making the fruits of that participation directly relevant to real issues on Earth. And the key to that is the concept of telerobotic pre-settlement and the nature of the technologies that is based on. John Q. Public knows he has very poor odds of ever becoming an astronaut and going to or participating in space via the space programs, space tourism, or as a space entrepreneur. Manned space activity is out of our reach. Rockets are big and expensive. They need big and expensive facilities to develop. But robots are something anyone with a little technical knowledge can fool around with and produce innovations for and today even kids hobby clubs in Japan are at about the same level of sophistication in technology as NASA’s robotics labs. And even if you’re not that up on the robotics, many other aspects of telerobotic pre-settlement are similarly accessible. Like habitat design. The logical method of habitat development by telerobotics is based on modular component systems and excavated structures -since excavation is the simplest form of In-Situ Resource Utilization. Well, again, you don’t need a zillion dollar space center to experiment with that kind of technology. It’s on the level of people building Modernist sheds in their back yards -and a lot of people now do that. So there’s this vast spectrum of stuff for tinkerers, Makers, architects, and industrial designers to get into. There is potential in all this for even the impoverished kid in a developing country with a good idea to see his brainchild get to space!

Of course, one still needs rockets to get robots to space but you don’t need the grade or scale of hardware that manned space flight demands. You can use modest sized low-reliability launch systems with an acceptable 1/3rd loss where most of the costs are in the development, not the duplication of hardware. So the scale of costs are low -especially when the development overhead is being crowdsourced across a global community. We may ultimately still need the government space programs or space entrepreneurs with their deep pockets and rockets, but we don’t need Space Shuttles to do this. And we don’t need to go to space to prove concept. Everything in the telerobotic lunar or Mars settlement ‘package’ can be field tested on Earth in places like the Atacama desert, Iceland, and so on. For robots, the environmental differences between space and the ambient outdoors on Earth are not all that great. In many ways space is a _less_ harsh environment. Satellite engineers sometimes think of orbit as a haven.

Now, the really powerful thing about all this is that, essentially, telerobotic pre-settlement of the Moon or Mars means figuring out how to go from dirt and rocks to a sustainable high western standard of living using renewable energy and hardware that’s more-or-less on the scale of home appliances. Think about that. No, really, THINK about that. What would that capability mean here on Earth? And what if it was all Open Source? Just about everything telerobotic pre-settlement deals with has direct re-application on Earth and its all profoundly disruptive technology. It has the power to change the essential logistics underlying the entire terrestrial civilization, demassifying production, economics, resource distribution, energy, you name it. Starvation, poverty, Global Warming, energy crisis, pollution, social and economic justice, it all relates because, to a large extent, all that relates to our antiquated massified Industrial Age production and energy architectures and the economic and political architectures they’ve cultivated around themselves. So here we have a whole-world space program that really changes the picture of life on Earth for the better while opening the doors to life in space. That’s what the space programs originally promised us, and failed to deliver. Now we have the possibility of rolling up our sleeves and doing it ourselves.

But, alas, no matter how I try to describe this, so far, very few people seem to get it. I can’t reduce this to a ‘tweet’, I can’t afford lots of pretty CGI illustrations, I can’t afford to get the ball rolling all by myself, and people today are just too caught up in their crisis-hopping apocalyptic head-trips and fantasy/nostalgia onanism to care.

“you’re a coward, and a liar and a BOOM”

Just watched it again. HAHAHA

We have a geyser of toxic crude turning an entire ocean into a giant toilet; hemorrhaging cash and human blood in Afghanistan and Iraq; remnants of a global depression with another double dip down looking increasingly likely; and an expert prognostication that we are well on our way to making earth uninhabitable by 2300.

The moon adventure is frivolous, akin to affluent geriatrics getting hoisted up Everest for Facebook fodder, and can and ought to wait until we straighten our shit up down here. Now, some say that the ongoing dismantling of our ecosystem on this planet only adds impetus for an expansion into off-world colonization. To which I reply, bullshit.

If we can’t maintain a sane and reasonable presence on this world, our species ought to perish here and do the rest of the universe a favor, lest we export our incompetence to other worlds.

Often by completely ignoring the consequences in terms of human lives, health, environmental concerns, or fiscal responsibility. We all get to live in the depleted remnants of the planet after their balls-to-the-wall adventuring and excess.

I live in Southern California and off the coast of San Pedro is a vast toxic unattended, ignored Superfund site that has been languishing for decades, one of many scattered all over Southern California. Much of it gifted to us by the aerospace industry. The site has been designated for clean-up for decades, but no money allocated and the company still dodging responsibility, deliberately dragging the case on eternally in court.

For every mighty adventure, exploit like walking on the moon, somewhere there is a massive debt passed on to the grandchildren of Buzz Aldrin. Somewhere there is a hidden place receiving the waste and pollution that made that photo op possible.

People walking on the moon? Not worth the price.

We’ve put far too much debt on our national credit card. Party is over. Time to settle up. Let the adults handle this, granddad.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/15/AR2009071502940.html

Words used in his closing paragraph: vision, exploration, future, historic, journey, future, challenge, boldly, vision, bold, bold, achieve, leadership, bold.

All of that hyperbole carries a quantifiable price, Buzz.

Now I feel like there’s some big problems that we have no adequate solution for, like say, nuclear wars, a human killer virus, global killer asteroids, super volcanoes and the like. And while these events seem to be relatively rare (the jury is out on some of them), they do still mean they wipe us, every last of us, out.

For whatever reason, migration is wired into our monkey brains, and we’ve been doing this game a fair bit. It’s probably got something to do with some reptilian hindbrain survival instinct. On any account, man has gone just about anywhere he can. And if we don’t get our arses off this wildlife preserve the universe handed to us on a silver platter, we’re not going to appreciate the fact that we have only one spaceship Earth, and it’s dying, and then we won’t have any place to call home.

In space: Every oz of material is expensive, therefor recycling is super important. And that is especially true of what is typically deemed waste. I high emphasis on research in this area helps in space and for better living here on earth.

In space: Food, air and water are not to be taken for granted. The more efficient food production without wasteful use of other supplies is huge. Hauling a hamburger to orbit can cost hundreds of dollars and take the place of other supplies.

In space: Air is even more important. Pollution of any kind can be a death sentence so the ability to monitor and replenish the air, again with the least impact on other supplies, is important.

In space: Water is so necessary for almost everything we do and in orbit it’s even more useful. But it’s heavy and correspondingly expensive to haul into orbit. We need to keep it clean and reusable.

In space: We also have an environment that is controllable an separate from our ecosystem on earth. That ability to quarantine hazardous research is again a huge benefit.

In short: Space and space research is and will be the greenest science going with literally boundless benefits to earth and our ecosystems.

Last but not least, all this green will spawn it’s own green (as in money) dividends.

How about instead of creating new technology to house someone on a celestial, non-earth near-void, just for giggles — we spend those trillions on figuring out how to house people earthside? The space industry is an absolute money pit and should be reserved for when resources are in abundant, excessive surplus to go scampering around the cosmos for nonsense that matters approximately jack.

If we had a chance at some real engineering and industry on the moon, I’d be all for it. But all people are willing to put up the money for is a few days of tourism. That’s not helpful.

It is “good” when one is thirsty, and one has a cup of it to quench one’s thirst, but if one is immersed in it for a time exceeding one’s capacity to hold one’s breath, one is dog-ass D-E-A-D.

And that’s bad.

The nature of debt is key. And our nation is not carrying the good kind. I am very familiar with Krugman and my perspective is entirely in line with his opinions on the subject.

Rly?

As for returning to the moon, I understand wanting to go further, to near-earth asteroids, Mars, etc. Wouldn’t the moon be a good test bed for long term equipment?

As for Neil Armstrong, et. al. I think they’re concerned about the manned space program self-destructing under the new goals and guidelines.

I have some concerns along those lines myself. I like Obama, and he has some good goals for manned space travel, but it will be years before hardware is even in the testing phase. Add all the problems that come about when producing new hardware, it’s possible that the new hardware could get bogged down in cost overruns and delays. And what of the goals of the next administration?

NASA has been bogged down for decades now by bureaucratic infighting and no clear goals or executive branch support. I think those issues need to be addressed in addition to turning responsibility for a human presence in space over to the private sector.

Either we go on to bigger and better things, or we stop sending men into space.

Reality check: ALL the science the Apollo missions accomplished could have been accomplished with the robotics of that time.

Imagine what today’s robotics could do!
We need to re-think this whole manned space flight business, and if we are going to continue to send men into space, we need to get to work developing propulsion systems that will make travel within the solar system, at least accessible in a survivable period of time!

Sure, the initial escape of the Earth’s pull is a larger hurdle – but if you’re planning on sending a ton of stuff to the moon it just becomes more and more expensive for little benefit. We just need to forget about that rock and keep moving.