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Comment by TkTech | Hacker News Reader

The space race was a one-time oddity. During it's peek NASA used nearly 4.5% of the federal budget[1]. The Soviets poured so much into it, it practically bankrupt them. The military wanted better ICBMs, the government wanted to win the race. No one ever dreamed of making it profitable.

SpaceX for comparison only relieved about 100m a year[2], or 0.0026% of the federal budget. Boeing and other groups have similar funding for their space programs. They also, as a commercial company, must be profitable (or try) which isn't as easy as it sounds.

Rocket development is slower even with better modern tooling because we just don't put any money into it anymore.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA [2] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-budget-of-SpaceX

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As someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s, I still yearn wistfully for the space race's unity and determination of purpose.

It's hardly appropriate for HN, but I wonder how differently the world would look if NASA had received a much larger budget. Probably taken from the US Military's allocation, how much would the loss of half of the US Navy have affected world politics and conflicts? Or what would the USA look like without the Iraq war of 2003 onward?

(I'm trying to be as neutral as possible in my language here, I don't want to start a flamewar about US and geopolitics!)

I doubt we'd have gotten further into space as some of us would like, but I do think we'd have already proven that asteroid mining can work, and some people would be living multi-year tenures on the Moon. Whether we'd have bootstrapped our way to mining and using nuclear materials in space is doubtful, but certainly possible. (in other words, building nuclear rockets that have never been close to Earth's biosphere, which would open up large parts of the Solar System for human exploration)

Check out this amazing plan from Rockwell produced in the 80s to see what that might have looked like [1]. I have a print out of it I like to look at once in a while to remind me what could have been possible if we had different priorities.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/ntBHE.png

WOW

That's an astonishing presentation of data/intent.

I will have to see if I can find that as a vector and/or get a large format print. That's beautiful!

EDIT: Here's a vector! https://cdn.makezine.com/uploads/2013/07/integratedspaceplan... (Found via Google, searching using "The Rockwell International Integrated Space Plan")

I'm so depressed that humans won't ever achieve this. We'll fight and continue to hedonistically chase profit until we destroy ourselves.

You've got that exactly backwards.

The pursuit of profit, which is the pursuit of greater productivity, is what makes it possible to pay ever increasing amounts of taxes, which provides for a radical improvement in the welfare of people on the planet.

Just ask China. They went from being an anti-profit, anti-market country of near absolute poverty, to a heavily for-profit economy, lifting nearly a billion people out of poverty, and providing for an extraordinary base of increasing savings derived from profit (income beyond expenses). So much for destroying us, humanity has never been better off on average than it is today.

Profit is a store of prior productive action that enables you to make future investments. To curse that is absurdity defined. It's the only reason we're all alive, it's a base requirement of all civilization (unless you like the odds of survival when you're living moment to moment, betting on never falling off the highwire).

So... how's the planet doing with all that?

>They went from being an anti-profit, anti-market country of near absolute poverty

There's a lot more history to China than 1980-now. What I see every day on HN (and elsewhere) are new startups which are simply rent-seeking enterprises, and I don't see how that helps us.

Thanks for posting this! Looks very cool never seen it before. I will follow your print out. It will make a nice poster! :)

That's remarkable. Looking at some of the marker points (e.g. a self-sustaining martian colony by 2035), it feels like Elon Musk is attempting to singlehandedly bring us back on track.

In retrospect, the amazing part wasn’t the science so much as americans working for something other than profit. Naturally, it was a proxy war instead. If only we could get our current batch of war hawks to push for research instead of bombings maybe we’d actually get something as a country out of our massive defense budget....

americans working for something other than profit

What do you think all those corporations were working for other than lucrative government contracts? What do you think all the employees were working for if not their paychecks? While I'm sure that many of them truly loved the work, their primary reason for working was that they got paid for it. Just like everyone else. Profit make the world go around.

Profit on an individual level, maybe, but not an industrial level. Taxpayers funded it.

The economics of asteroid mining is terrible. Look at the % of world GDP spent on non organic non earth specific mining aka no coal, marble, etc and it’s really cheap.

Now figure final prices would need to be cheaper for space mining to take off. Even recycling electronics filled with high value atoms is difficult to profit from.

Gold’s price collapsing when a meaningfully rich asteroid source can be mined seems likely.

Gold isn't a hugely valuable material as a target for asteroid mining. Platinum is a much better option.

This would be a good thing. It's a wonderful metal, just useless when it's worth so much. Silver would be awesome to crash too, since it's more conductive than copper.

There's one place it could really shine and that's manufacturing space habitats if we could successfully put manufacturing in space for those it might tip the scales since it'd remove the launch cost from a large portion of the structure.

That’s a real chicken and egg problem. Why put that many people into space in the first place?

Tourism seems like an option, but if you can drop launch costs enough that it’s ‘cheap’ then sending stuff up is also ‘cheap’.

IMO, the trick to getting space mining to take off is not robots it’s the need for billions of tons worth of low complexity stuff in orbit.

Off world cryptocurrency mining and AI computations. A few hundred years from now this may not sound absurd.

Two hundred years from now, GPU's will still be scarce and expensive thanks to all the solar powered crypto mining satellites in orbit.

I suppose the exception could be rare earth metals, asteroids which contain them in sufficient quantities might be worth going after.

'Rare earth' metals are not actually rare. The cost (both capital costs and environmental costs) to refine them are high, but there is plenty of ore available if you have the refining capacity. There are some elements that are actually rare (e.g. tantalum) but there is no reason to believe they will be any easier to find in asteroids and the cost to refine will be even greater.

When we have robots and automated tech to send a small factory mining robot and convert volatiles on the asteroid into fuel to move it to near the earth, then it will become much cheaper. The cost to send a small surveyor to an asteroid today is only a billion or so. Eventually it will be a bit less, and then it will be a matter of time between landing on one and moving it slowly into an orbit we want.

how much would the loss of half of the US Navy have affected world politics and conflicts?

Probably quite a lot; the 600-ship Navy was half of Reagan’s strategy to bankrupt the Soviets, the other half was Star Wars (SDI).

The money that would have gone to NASA while everyone was still pumped from the moon landing went on the Vietnam War instead. By the time Star Wars came about, the momentum was lost.

This is when the government had a vision and the nation had a collective aspiration. Now we can't even imagine such a thing. Politicians have no vision and there is no collective aspiration or national goal. Politicians get elected so that they can be the ones who benefit from influence peddling and not somebody else. I can only imagine what we could accomplish today if there was a vision for doing so given todays technology.

>This is when the government had a vision and the nation had a collective aspiration.

The moon program was always controversial and it came close to cancelation several times.

That's why as stupid as it is, this rivalry between the US and China might actually trigger something. It's sad that close-mindedness prevents meaningful collaboration, but if an Us vs Them mentality is what it takes to make leaps then it might be worth it.

That makes sense. I guess with enough money we could develop a rocket much faster.

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