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Billionaires Beating Governments to Space
Is this awesome or what? I get the feeling that the billionaires will get to Mars before the governments do.
Or maybe NASA is spending too much time on….
NASA Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity
Published in General
Knowing nothing more than what is in this video, I am convinced even more that government is more of an impediment to progress than I ever imagined.
It’s exciting. Someone should write a book about this stuff!
*cough cough*
NASA should be in the space launch business the same way that the FAA is in the airline business.
That is to say, not at all.
Private enterprise first, just as Robert Heinlein predicted!
I’ve used that exact example in the past, and it’s very valid. The government kick-started aviation in the 20’s, and then got out of the way.
50+ years after JFK challenged us to go to the moon, the government still is in the lead when it comes to getting us into space, and that needs to change.
It’s Awesome, Thrilling, Glorious.
Qutie the achievement, looks like they bought the parts at the Lowe’s plumbing isle.
Personally I’m skeptical that business will get there before governments. I just don’t see the financial benefits, at least it’s not evident, and the cost will be prohibitive. Why would shareholders continue to sink money into it without returns? But I could be wrong.
Begin with goals. No business would waste billions to focus on footprints, life signs and rock shapes on Mars.
It’s what’s in those rocks, how do you get it back to earth, and sustainability… of ongoing operations, for the next load.
And, opportunities for minorities… I kid.
There are no minerals on Mars that are so valuable that they could offset the cost of going there to get them and bringing them back down to Earth’s surface.
Maybe this, closer to home?
http://www.space.com/13247-moon-map-lunar-titanium.html
Awesome video. The scifi tales of my youth coming to life at last.
I wonder what Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton would make of Blue Origin being a byproduct of “income inequality?”
Yes, private enterprise is so much more promising.
But this was not exactly the same as achieving even a low earth orbit, which I believe requires orders of magnitude more fuel. I don’t know enough to know how realistic it is to scale this particular method to achieve orbit and interplanetary space flight, but I know it is much harder and more expensive.
Every discovery adds to the pool of reasons for farsighted entrepreneurs, especially the Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks, with track records and personal wealth to chip in, to gather investors, and payoffs can mount.
Or we can let politicians like Obama waste billions on emotionally satisfying fantasies.
As for going there, think of Earth as a town in a valley, and Earth’s gravity well as a really big hill you have to climb out of if you want to somewhere else, a hill that ends with a gentle sloping plain. Once you crest that hill, you can essentially coast to wherever you want to go, and the return trip is much easier as well.
To quote Robert A. Heinlein, once you’re out of Earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere.
If (and that’s a big if) He3 fusion proves to be the way to go, and if (another big if) there’s tons of the stuff on the Moon because of the solar wind, expect a lot more of this in the future.
Also, the amount of rare minerals in the asteroid belt is simply staggering: One decent-sized metallic asteroid might well have more platinum in it than all the ore that’s been mined on earth since the beginning of time.
There’s our business model. All we need to do now is go out and get it.
I could picture (probably several decades down the road) where asteroids would be mined. But would it be cost-effective to bring the raw ore back down to Earth? Or would we have refineries near the asteroid belt, and use those minerals for construction of space habitats, etc.? If we’re going to build stuff to be used in space, I wonder if it’s more plausible to take it from raw materials to finished products in space than to drop it to Earth, refine and forge it, then expend a bunch of energy to lift it back out again.
This reminds of a science fiction book I read many years ago, “The Voices of Heaven” by Frederik Pohl. A number of books have had spaceships powered by anti-matter, but they typically don’t say how the anti-matter is created. It’s going to take more energy to produce the anti-matter than you will get back out of it because no process is 100% efficient. So in this book a broad ribbon of photo-voltaic cells ran all the way around the moon and the electricity was used to power an anti-matter processing facility on the far side. Without an atmosphere in the way to diffuse the solar energy, they got a lot of juice. And they reasoned that if there were a cataclysmic containment failure and it went boom, it wouldn’t harm anything on Earth. Only long-range ships would have need for the anti-matter, so why not make it off-Earth?