A moon colony may be a reality sooner than we think
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
>I can still remember when President John F. Kennedy declared that America would put a man on the moon and when Neil Armstrong took that first step on the lunar landscape. Glued to televisions, Americans were filled with excitement and national pride during the Apollo missions.
> Last month I felt that same passion as I visited the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs with Vice President Mike Pence. “As we push human exploration deeper into space, we will unleash the boundless potential of America’s pioneering commercial space companies,” the vice president told the crowd.
It sounds like the space industry is growing and that's a good thing for space technology. As much as we laud American accomplishes in space exploration, it can be argued that the only investor and customer was the US, and the short term value extracted out of space was negligible.
Today, there's much more market opportunities in space than previously. 15000 satellites by 2024 is an explosive growth of 20x in 5 years. Tickets selling for low orbit tourism - that didn't exist in the past. Asteroid mining - that still seems like a pipe dream, but I'm no expert, it may be more plausible than I realize.
Regardless, it's a huge indicator of a healthier space industry if a substantial part of the investment into space is coming from private companies (SpaceX notably) rather than government grants.
Most of all, we’re far from colonies anywhere other than Earth, and barring a massive change of priorities as reflected in funding, that’s the future. Nothing about our ability to launch satellites a few hundred miles up translates to living on the Moon, or Mars.
If you're talking between NGOs, government, or the market, which one has the most well funded and successful ventures , the market wins every time. It scales better than top down funding and provides longevity and sustained results.
LEO is a great stepping stone and maturity there is a prerequisite IMO for further space exploration. The goal is not just landing on Mars - the goal is building up a space ecosystem, and this seems to be the right start.
Still, maybe you’re right, and reality is just waiting to catch up to your bold capitalist vision of market forces solving everything.
I'm surprised to see this here; I hope we are well beyond taking politicians' rhetoric at face value. It's political ad copy.
He was compelled to write it as part of the staged PR for the administration's policy launch, and the message was carefully written to advance the administration's broader platform (nationalism, the ultimate priority of business), to try to associate himself and the administration with people the public admires (JFK, Neil Armstrong), to promote administration members (Pence), and to manipulate readers into supporting the administration. It's advertising.
Those private companies receive substantial government benefits and support. Under this policy, the administration now has changed rules to suit what the big businesses want (as opposed to what benefits the public, the taxpayers, science, smaller businesses, other space users, etc.) and has setup a special office to help them. It remains to be seen if this benefits the public or is another giveaway of public interest and resources to big business.
That's incorrect. Russia hardly ever pushes new things in space lately. China has carefully launched several manned flights, and works hard in government space; but no commercial revolution in space of SpaceX scale anywhere on the horizon, for good reasons.
The biggest opponent of USA in space today is USA itself.
It is quite stunning how lightweight and meaningless this editorial is. The only real question is why NYT printed it. There is undoubtedly a reason somewhere in the bowels of the newsroom, but it is certainly not a reason to read it, much less to post a link to it.
I'm not for or against regulations; I think that you can only have a reasonable about particular regulations, and then the analysis is more complex than 'for or against' (tighten this, loosen that, fund this, accelerate this other thing, etc.). It would be great to hear an analysis of the costs and benefits of the specific changes; I'm afraid the only voices are on one side; this change as announced is all about one group's interests, big business; how will it affect others - public interest, taxpayers, science, military, small business, NASA research, astronauts, the use of space in other countries and among partners, etc.?
Here's some much better info than the parent link, though still basically only a detailed rehash of the announcement with no other points of view or analysis:
https://www.space.com/40692-president-trump-private-spacefli...
A lot of background from a few days ago, also all one-dimensional unfortunately:
https://www.complianceweek.com/news/news-article/spaceregula...
And a timely money quote:
"Right now, we don't let self driving cars go everywhere although we do allow it in a lot of places," Ketcham said. "Eventually, that technology will mature (to a point) that no one will notice. And the same is true in space flight."
I'd really like to see the other side(s) of this story. I don't trust op-eds at all, especially by politicians, especially by this U.S. administration, especially in regard to it helping its supporters (big business).
EDIT: And trying to hook people with moon colonies is transparent.
EDIT: added first paragraph, to get to the point promptly, and edited the second.
I'm not sure there's really an opposing view in this case. In broad terms, everyone seems to agree that some commercial space policies are no longer serving their intended purpose and are in need of updates. Whether or not this directive will improve matters is unclear, however.
I haven't heard from anyone but big business, who designed the policy, and who are generally the primary beneficiaries of this administration. Have you heard from science? Small business? Public interest groups? Anyone else?
Nothing has been done yet (only started), and what's been started isn't a new program, but some regulatory and administrative changes. Therefore if you don't trust the predictions of politicians (a wise choice) then there is no information.
There could be plenty of analysis from others.
Regulation is not holding back building a moon colony. It's insanely expensive and nobody wants to spend the money. Even Musk doesn't want to build a moon colony, and he could.
The Falcon Heavy is priced to lift cargo at less than $1,000 per pound, and can launch three times heavier payloads than the Shuttle. That would drop the nominal launch cost of the components for an ISS sized spacelab to under one billion dollars.
Space launch costs have already plummeted, and are poised to plummet even faster in the next decade. If the BFR is successful at full re-use (actually, it’s really if the BFS can be successfully reused often without costly refurbishing, as the BFR’s re-use is a straightforward repetition of the proven Falcon 9 approach), Elon’s crazy and bold claims of per-launch costs Of $5M are actually feasible.That would work out to something under $50 per pound, and the ISS components less than $50M to launch.
When full re-use occurs, it will be when launch costs start to converge near fuel costs, which are typically less than a half million dollars per flight.
if there's profit involved, then it will be feasible for other entities than gov'ts. For example, if a useful mineral that's hard to obtain is found on the moon (unlikely as it is...), mining and processing it into goods might be the impetus for such a change.
- Tourism - Minerals - Building a space observatory - Launchpad for further manned planetary missions.
I did read somewhere that, just as easy it is to get off the moons surface, it's equally or more difficult to get onto it.
So Moon can supply vast majority of material needed for operations in Moon-Earth space. You can maybe launch the materials using a mass driver (some demos here - http://ssi.org/mass-driver-demonstration-tapes/), but even more conventional technology will give you results.