Even though SpaceX does the launches, it is government agencies that deal with launching missions, and government budgets are influenced by public opinion.
E.g. it would serve the latter better if we would explore Venus, Europa, Titan, etc. than trying to live underground on a dead poisonous planet.
What we learn there can be helpful for understanding the history of the solar system as well as planetary dynamics (remember that in terms of well-studied planets, we’re currently at sample size = 1).
We don’t live in the 1950s or the 1890s any more. We are not willing to sacrifice the lives of our explorers like we did when we went to the moon or Antarctica in the 1960s and 1900s respectively. We are not engaging in juvenile races to “get there first” which is both expensive and dangerous.
The space exploration of today is more collaborative and careful then the explorations of the past. So we don’t risk the lives of our explorers nor the unnecessary expenses of getting things done 20 years when we can do it in 50 for far less money and with infinity more safety.
So it’s not about trying to race and and get there first, but rather making sure that the opportunity doesn’t pass us by.
As far as cost goes… these sorts of missions are expensive relative to the amounts of money most of us work with in a regular basis, but compared to the vast sums that get put toward far more questionable and frivolous uses it’s a drop in the bucket. If saving money or rerouting funds to more deserving causes is a goal, there’s several tens of bushels of lower hanging fruit elsewhere that should be looked at first — anything with scientific purpose should be trimmed last.
This is all just to say. A non-voting F-150 owner who talks shit about rich people going to space is actually not doing any damage while filling up his truck, next to that rich conservative voter that emits more greenhouse gas than the F-150 ever can ever hope in a singe space visit for his own amusement.
>rich conservative voter that emits more greenhouse gas than the F-150 ever can ever hope
Wow
None of the space tourists so far have been particularly known for their conservative politics. Nor do I find space tourism to be some lauded thing in conservative circles.
So to answer your question: “How rich”: Rich enough to own significant stock in polluting corporations.
The rich would spoil Earth and defile it and then move off to the ultimate gated community of Mars, leaving us to deal with the consequences of their actions.
Mars is the spoiled planet, and will be until some point technology is a lot further along. The rich are not going to run away to some wonderland. Earth is the garden, and nothing else is like it in space.
Otherwise you've gotta start stacking disasters to get close, and even then it's pretty difficult. Mars is really bad.
Also, it is not like you couldn't vastly more cheaply and easily build Mars bunker on Earth. As we are centuries away from planet scale geo-engineering.
If we did, it would still work better to just use it here on some isolated land.
Such a ridiculous idea puts the rest of the article in a very questionable light for me.
The earth-sized radio telescope made out of Starlink transceivers is an obvious winner. Total coverage ground radar using the transceiver antenna is another.
I am all for exploring space. I just loathe the fact that we have billionaires with no technical training calling the shots.
(Well, maybe not "exploring". There isn't much to see! I'm very much for using space.)
Planets are big, like absolutely massive. You can easily catch up, specially if you get intel on inevitable failures of first movers.
It's always been true ;)
If you put it to a vote, majority of americans will allocate public funds towards terrestrial concerns over a new space lab. Even though provable, tech transfer in aerospace innovation proves most abundant. In today's dollars, what was nasa's highest yearly budget: maybe $30B? Let's see what 5% of US GDP devoted to Space R&D and Peaceful Expansion by mid century looks like!
This makes sense if you think about it - flying humans around the solar system just doesn’t make much sense until we have actual orbital industry at some point in the future to bring the costs down to a reasonable level. And I personally have to agree with the camp opposed to Mars colonization, but for different reasons than most. Mars is kind of a crappy place to try and live by most metrics. It seems like colonization efforts would be better allocated to large asteroids or water-rich moons.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2018/06/06/majority-of-a...
[2] https://morningconsult.com/2021/02/25/space-force-travel-exp...
When someone (usually NASA or NASA fanboys) does a Gish gallop and drops of huge list of things supposedly created by NASA, it's worth picking a couple to take a deep dive into. When you look at the details, the amount of tech transfer is often not anywhere close to the amount claimed.
Still, there is good science and technology that comes out of NASA. But it's likely we'd have a lot better results if a large chunk of the NASA budget wasn't spent throwing people up into space for no reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies
Bowflex ;)
Honestly though several really nice space exploration projects have been well founded by several governments (including India, China, Europe and North America). Some really silly projects have also been privately funded (e.g. space tourism for the rich). People are rightly questioning how people get so insanely rich that they can afford this. They ask if they are paying their fair share of taxes, if they pay their workers fairly, and which contracts the government have offered them.
If you separate those two classes of space projects I bet you would find way more support for the former (or at least some indifference) while you would find that people vehemently oppose the latter.
It'd be interesting to follow this thread and see if this sentiment can be heard here.
As a comparison, Opportunity rover covered 45.16 km in 15 years. The Apollo 17 crew covered 35.74 kilometers in 3 days.
It is just that we are not found of sending people and letting them die there, so a human mission implies a return mission, and if there is a return mission, of course you want to bring back souvenirs.
In fact, a sample return mission can be seen as a step towards a manned mission. First you try to bring back a pile of rocks, then you consider bringing back humans.
And yes, humans are far more efficient than robots at space exploration today, but robots keep improving, and I think it will take many years before we put people on Mars, so by the time we are ready for a manned Mars mission, we will probably have much better robots. Not as good as humans, but digging lots of rocks and moving faster than a snail will probably be well within their abilities.
Clue?
Perhaps an answer is that one of the contingencies being covered by the Perseverance sample-collecting is against future contamination? Maybe the NASA missions have been extraordinarily careful about not contaminating Mars with earth microbes, but they're worried that future commercial crewed missions won't be able to be so careful. Then when the humans get there, they'll have some unspoiled sample containers to experiment on and compare to the post-human samples.
Making a successful return trip would be an important milestone, we never did anything close to that before. Yes, moon landings, but the moon is 100-1000 times closer and 10 times less massive than mars, with half its surface gravity.
If it ever happens, the "get back samples" mission is likely to focus on that technical aspect more than anything else, it may not even have a way to explore and collect samples. So let Perseverance do the collection because it is what it is designed for and put them in a neat pile so that the other mission can focus on getting them back.
Further missions should be able to do both collection and return, maybe even take people, but starting small may be a good idea, especially if human lives are at stake.