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Comment by Merrill | Hacker News Reader

Over the last 6 years, 29 people have gone into space or about 5 per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_travelers_by_nam...

Globally, babies are born at the rate of about 145 million per year. So at the current rate of space travel a baby's chance of going into space would be about 1 in 30,000,000.

Even if space travel were increased by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude, only an insignificant percentage of people would ever travel in space. The energy requirements and expense make it a pastime for only the stupendously rich.

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Reminds me of this quote.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."

Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

Ironically perhaps, we seem to be heading that way with cloud computing and single source ecosystems.

Given the price/performance characteristics of electromechanical relay computers, he was probably about right. The introduction of vacuum tube electronic logic, subsequently replaced by discrete transistors, and the integrated circuit logic changed the price/performance ratio by several orders of magnitude. There's the old joke about how your 1940s car would now go a million miles an hour and several million miles on a tank of gas if it had improved like computers. But we know it is a joke because physics sets bounds on the energy need to move a 1.5 ton mass, while the bounds on the energy to operate a logic gate are much lower. The same is true for spaceflight, where the formulas for rocket propelled vehicles are well understood.

The point I was trying to make is that we are only at the dawn of commercial space flight. Compare the first commercial airplane flights, technology and cost, to today's 20 euro Ryanair flights. The same will happen with space.

>The same is true for spaceflight, where the formulas for rocket propelled vehicles are well understood.

You are assuming there never will be a replacement for rocket technology. I think you're wrong.

It took about 11 years to go from Kitty Hawk to the first scheduled passenger flights in 1914. On the other hand, about 40 years elapsed between Gargarin in '61 until Dennis Tito's paid flight aboard a Soyuz in 2001.

The interval from Gargarin to now is 58 years. 58 years from 1914 puts us to 1972. By '72 we had turbofan jet airliners of all the current layouts including 4 under the wings, 2 under the wings, 2 in the tail, and different layouts of 3 in the tail. There had been the ill-fated Comet with 4 in the tail. The Concorde SST had done its first flight already in '69. There has been no comparable advance in space flight technology in the last 58 years.

Since '72 there has been cost reduction and refinement of the jet airliner, but prices also have come down due to higher volumes, more passengers per flight, and a reduction in service.

What is this new propulsion technology that you anticipate?

>There has been no comparable advance in space flight technology in the last 58 years.

Because there was no incentive. Space was something governments did and after the USA won the space race, interest waned. SpaceX proved there is a commercial market. Now we are witnessing the start of a commercial space boom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_co... Look at the number of launchers in development. Competition = innovation. And once space mining has been proven as a concept, then the real boom will begin. I'm optimistic and expect all of this to happen in the next 20 years.

>What is this new propulsion technology that you anticipate?

Ion drives?, scramjets?, something that hasn't been discovered yet?, ... I honestly don't know but I doubt we will still be stuck with chemical rockets a 100 years from now.

Every time I see this analogy, I wonder why people choose Kitty Hawk as the start date. Perhaps instead, they should treat Gagarin's flight as analogous to the flight of the Montgolfier brothers in 1783. The interval from the first manned balloon flight to the first airplane flight was 131 years, with decades of little apparent progress during that long time.

You’re calling it a pastime? I think there’s a little more than that going on.

It's a pastime in the same sense as having a 414 foot yacht. It provides personal amusement, and it is a great status signal. https://www.forbes.com/sites/billspringer/2019/09/04/microso...

Wait, wtf. Do you honestly think only rich people are going to space? You know we have highly accomplished people called astronauts and cosmonauts doing scientific research, right?

Scientific research is not the objective of higher volume space tourism as planned by Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and others. Virgin apparently sold over 700 tickets at $200K or more each for suborbital flights. Tourism to ISS is temporarily suspended due to Soyuz being the only spacecraft able to transport the astronauts and cosmonauts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism

The words "tourism" and "tourist" do not even occur in the article.

This assumes that the only way to benefit from space travel is to physically go there yourself. Communications and navigational infrastructure adds considerable quality of life to everyone.

If you want to add all the benefits, a fair consideration requires looking at all the costs, which you neglected. Pollution is but one.

I don't know enough to say where the cost-benefit analysis ends up, but I'm inclined to believe some rockets overall benefit humanity, like launching satellites to help solve our environmental challenges, but many don't, like space tourism.

What fraction of launches do you think are space tourism? There was less than 1 tourist a year in the aughts, but it's all research staff these days.

post curiosity edit: Heck, your own thesis hinged on observations that necessarily had to be done in space.

I don't have a fixed view on rockets. I helped build an x-ray observational satellite in orbit, but I don't agree with a view common on HN that space travel an unqualified good or necessary today.

The early communications satellites were launched with Thor-Delta and Delta rockets. In general, communications satellites reached low earth orbit before manned spacecraft, and satellites where put into geosynchronous orbit before manned spacecraft passed that altitude on the way to the moon. Manned spacecraft have never operated in geosynchronous orbit, since it is beyond the Van Allen belts and exposed to cosmic radiation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_(rocket_family)

I fully support the continued development and operation of all kinds of satellites for communications, earth monitoring, astronomy, etc., as well as the development and operation of spacecraft for lunar and planetary exploration. However, people are not suited for space travel since they are fragile and weigh too much, especially when all the life support overhead is factored in.

And the number of people who could be addressed at once was once limited to an auditorium.

Rockets to Earth orbit are the bootstrap stage, like electro-mechanical relays are to transistors. We will have orders-of-magnitude more efficient methods, and they will bring humanity to space and its treasures to us, without dumping chemicals into the air.

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