Alternately: UK? Spain? Portugal? Netherlands? Got rich on above said idiots.
Maybe you live in the western USA?
Maybe you have Polynesian Ancestry? Or Scandinavian?
Have you ever taken a trans-atlantic flight? Ordered anything from overseas? Made a long-distance phone call? Used GPS?
You know what, let's have a few idiots who go exploring in every generation.
You might also want to think about how to keep critical machinery running on the end of a six month - best case - supply chain.
"Take three of everything" might work practically, but will raise some eyebrows economically.
Those are the hard problems. Compared to them, getting there is trivially easy.
What a miserly way to look at the world when you yourself live in it benefiting from centuries of similarly flexible-minded people working towards similarly extreme ideas for their time.
There's nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. It's just a hard thing to do for the time being, like so much else was that's now not only accepted but so routine as to be a fundamental part of daily civilization.
That is a subject of disagreement. Kim Stanley Robinson depicted a coming clash between proponents of Mars colonization and keep-it-untouched environmentalists in his Mars trilogy. (And from his later novel Aurora, one wonders if KSR has actually gone over to the anti-human-expansion side.) Thirty years ago, that might have seemed fanciful, but not today when environmentalism has made wider inroads, especially among younger generations. It is easy to find rhetoric now about the future of humanity where the writer talks about the need for degrowth, humanity as a virus, etc.
A radio telescope on the far side of the Moon would be nice. But there are no slaves or spices, and no gold or other metals at prices that make the economics even remotely sane.
We'd be going for the sake of going - a good enough reason mythologically, but a very tough sell economically.
IMO we'd be better off clawing back the physics PhDs who work in finance and applying them to a blue sky search for new physics. With current tech there's a serious risk of a(nother) Space Winter when the initial wave either fails or doesn't generate any rewards.
I think Mars is a bad choice for a first attempt at a permanent village in space, let alone colony, because things will go wrong and the distance is so large help from earth can't[0] arrive in less than several months. Moon? Few days. Could fix "our food cargo storage exploded/was infected with deadly mould and now we don't have any" if it's on the moon, everyone dies if that happens on Mars.
Mars does have one advantage for saving the earth, though: even if we never actually go, developing the tech to make a self-sustaining colony on Mars necessary solves the biggest environmental challenges on earth.
[0] with current rockets; in principle faster ones can be made, but nuclear propulsion is frowned on for various reasons depending on exactly which one is under discussion
I can't get off this authoritarian nightmare rock soon enough.
Think "company town" but so, so much worse.
The desolate environment, required infrastructure, and costs make me see exploitation in that future... not freedom.
This nightmare rock has abundance and greed. We've struggled with "easy mode"!
Space doesn't exactly improve that; hellish rocks with nothing but our greed. Whoever delivers has the authority!
Even with a more optimistic take, I don't like it.
Posit that we have a nice overlord. They provide and expect nothing back.
Given the environment, they'll determine that surveillance is paramount to safety of The Dome.
We can't have someone spacing everybody.
Which is is fact pretty much exactly what happened with NASA and the ISS.
> There is something noteworthy a rocket can do that the shuttle cannot. A rocket can be permitted to fail. What if a billion dollar spaceship wipes out on a "routine" mission "commuting" to space with some puny little satellite? Cooper fears it might drive a stake through the heart of the manned space program.
Nailed this one too.
> But to require six shuttle launches a year, there would have to be 18 satellites. "Barring some extraordinary breakthrough in technology," says an informed communications industry source, "that's inconceivable."
This prediction, though, didn't work out so well. (SpaceX alone has more than 5,500 satellites, and is launching thousands yearly.)
>This prediction, though, didn't work out so well. (SpaceX alone has more than 5,500 satellites, and is launching thousands yearly.)
Easterbrook was writing specifically about the shuttle. As he explains in the rest of the article, the financials of the shuttle as designed just didn't work without a very high launch cadence. Had each shuttle been capable of landing on its own back at the launch site and be reused 18 times and counting over three years as SpaceX has done with Falcon 9, Easterbrook's conclusions would have been different.
Overall, the article is flabbergastingly predictive of every single thing that happened to the shuttle program over its 30-year operational history. In addition to what you mentioned, Easterbrook also predicted
* The lack of survivability of the crew if an SRB failed (Challenger)
* The fragility of the heat-shield tiles (Columbia, and STS-27)
* The danger to the entire US space program—military, commercial, scientific—if the shuttle, intended to be the sole national launch system, was grounded
Other than a bit more insight on the impacts on human healthy from long term spaceflight.. What are the major scientific insights or developments made thanks to the ISS?
With Apollo there are quite a few, but with the ISS I can't think of anything
But the ISS should be considered a manned instrument bus. Consider OCO-3, a gimballed observer on the exterior of the ISS. It has revolutionized our understanding of global carbon cycles, and local carbon sink/sources.
There are numerous such missions that benefit from a common, well supported platform to operate from.
The next one should be robotic though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory_...
> ”You've probably heard, for instance, that the space shuttle will retrieve damaged satellites and return them to earth for repair. Not so. It can't. Simply and flatly, can't.”
Interesting article, but the Washington Monthly’s sources were wrong here. The space shuttles could, and did, retrieve satellites from orbit and return them to earth several times during their operating life:
STS-41-C (launch) / STS-32R (retrieve): LDEF
STS-41-B (launch) / STS-51-A (retrieve): Palapa B-2 and Westar 6
STS-46 (launch) / STS-57 (retrieve): EURECA
STS-72 (retrieve): Space Flyer Unit (SFU)
The shuttle program launched 135 missions at a cost of $209 billion (2010 dollars).
Assuming you already have a Space Shuttle, then the answer was apparantely yes. Lloyd's of London, as insurers, paid NASA for the recovery of Westar 6 and Palapa B2. The cost of the recovery was said to be $10m, vs. the $180m insurance value of the satellites (both in 1980s dollars). [1]
I suppose many of today's satellites are relatively cheap and considered more expendable, but back in the 1980s these things were very valuable pieces of kit.
Besides, most of the retrieval missions performed by the Space Shuttles were not "failed" satellites but rather long-life science platforms that were designed to spend time in space and then be returned to earth for analysis. Now days, many of those sorts of missions can be performed on the ISS, but back then the shuttle was the only option.
[1] https://www.lloyds.com/about-lloyds/our-market/what-we-insur...
The orbiters were built by Rockwell International, the external fuel tanks by Martin Marietta/Lockheed Martin, the SRBs by Thiokol/ATK United Space Boosters Inc./Pratt & Whitney.
I didn't realize this was the reason for the thermal insulation. It's ironic how in the end the insulation popped off and crashed into the tiles during launch, causing the very disaster it was intended to prevent.
If not, then "caused" isn't the right word, it's just an incomplete mitigation and not ironic.
Launching once per week, a single StarShip will carry 10,000 tons to orbit. Fully 50% of all mass launched to orbit since Sputnik 1. Given the hopes for even more frequent launches with a fleet of StarShips makes me wonder who is going to pay for it all and why?
I do understand it's supposed to be much cheaper. But someone still has to pay. And that person still has to be sure that SpaceX - as a single, critical, supplier - won't eat their business model any time SpaceX chooses.
So I do hope there's a secret cunning plan I'm not aware of.
Amazingly prescient article, but I don't think the author expected the answers to these heartbreaking questions to be "yes."
Twelve-year-old me stayed up all night to watch Columbia launch in '81, and I watched the last flight of Atlantis in 2011; I still can't watch the Challenger footage to this day.
Episode 1: Why do Blake and Craig think the Space Shuttle was stupid? https://youtu.be/KRlD8SdFmaE
Episode 18: Challenger https://youtu.be/H98IGl7pSfQ
