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"What NASA should be doing is what no private enterprise can do: highly unprofitable risky space pioneering that inspires the human race."

http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1112392431/spacex-sets-it...

I do not know if SpaceX will make it; I'd personally bet against that timeframe, though I wouldn't bet against the goal in general. But I will guarantee this: Barring a major political turnaround in the US, SpaceX will make a manned mission to Mars happen before NASA possibly could at this point. They don't have to make sure at least one part is sourced from each Congressional district, they aren't beholden to a Congress that on space exploration time scales blunders about like a drunken sailor, and they aren't a 53-year-old sclerotic bureaucracy.

Unprofitable they can do (and I mean that in both the good (research) and bad (blatant waste of funds) ways); they can not do risky. Unless you mean "risky because politics compromised the engineering process", which they can also still do. (Reading an honest history of the Space Shuttle is an eyeopener. Feynman and the glass of ice water was only the flashy tip of the iceberg. Google "Senate Launch System" for the latest.) It isn't in their genes anymore. You could put it back, but in the time that process would take, SpaceX will be there already.

There is no NASA apart from politicians. They are a wholly-owned subsidiary of Congress. That's not even a political statement, it's simply descriptive. If you can't trust politicians to drive our space policy, then you can't trust NASA to do it.

Agreed. If there's a place where I can place a cash bet that SpaceX will be the first entity to put a man on Mars, I'd do it tonight. They have the people, the vision, leadership, philosophy, and just enough of a successful track record so far to put meat into it, and de-risk it. They have momentum.

http://longbets.org/

ok. you get your man on Mars .. then what? do you see anyone clamoring to live on Antarctica? Mars is even more un-hospitable. Just to look around? that's an expensive sight-seeing tour.

nobody will want to actually live there. if there is money to be made by mining Mars' resources, fine - but don't steal my money (via tax dollars).

First off, I didn't say anything about someone living on Mars, as in, moving there permanently. That may or may not happen -- in the long run, probable. I just bet that SpaceX is probably the lead contender for who's going to put the first human footprint on Mars. It will likely be their tech, anyway.

Secondly, I'm pretty sure there are people who would love to live on Mars. At least give it a shot. Yes, in purely practical terms, it has a lot of downsides. But so does Antarctica, and many people have travelled there and some people actually live there at least some duration.

Third, there's good reason to believe, based on past experience with similar efforts, that the net economic effect for folks back on Earth is going to be positive, due to the side effects and fallout from R&D breakthroughs and engineering optimizations. That's what happened with the US-Soviet space race and the Apollo program. Also, since we're talking about SpaceX, which is a private company, it's possible that some, though almost certainly not all, of their funding comes from non-government sources, including non-US sources. It will probably be a mix. Mr. Musk personally put in a lot of his own money, which he made privately, to bootstrap it.

Fifth, one argument for establishing a permanent human presence on Mars is so that humanity has at least one outpost off Earth. So that if some disaster happens with Earth, not all of our eggs were in one basket. Paying even $100m to buy that seems like a pretty cheap form of insurance. Much much greater sums get spent on say NFL football merchandise, or pop music albums, each year. And certainly a couple orders of magnitude more have been spent on US military operations in the last decade, most of which could be argued were unnecessary.

Ninthly, because I cannot count: there are likely many economic benefits to you, the US and the planet to both setting foot on Mars and creating a sustained outpost there, in terms of the follow-on effects of inspiration and imagination and ambition, especially in children and upcoming generations. Surely if we could tip even 1m more children world-wide over into eventually becoming engineers, scientists and inventors, rather than lawyers, accountants, brokers or rap stars, the whole of humanity would be better off, on the net.

Eleventhly, I have no eleventhly. :)

it's certainly possible that private money funds this, but highly doubtful. why? because it's mostly a money-pit operation. investors have an almost zero chance of getting a return on their money in their own lifetime. spaceX is mainly competing for gov't money either in the form of seed money for R&D or as their main customer for LEO trips.

don't get me wrong, I love SpaceX (and Elon), but most of this is folly.

Even terraforming Mars isn't realistic, it's a mostly dead planet whose core has cooled and now doesn't have any protective electromagnetic belts.

I think part of the point is that NASA was pretty much flailing even just in the "send shit into Low Earth Orbit" department.

Well, at least we have Braid, that's a step forward in the gaming department. ;) (Or maybe this comment is lost on the wrong J. Blow)

But "send s* into LEO" was always stupid. IAMNA-NasaHistorian, but wasn't the Shuttle was built because NASA and its contractors had a massive infrastructure that none wanted to shrink? "We have to stay in space" had political plausibility, and the absence of a compelling science agenda wasn't noticeable to the Congressmen who _wanted_ a compelling agenda to justify maintenance of infrastructure in their districts.

I think Stephenson's dead right about the effects of risk aversion, but I don't understand sentences like "In a world where decision-makers are so close to being omniscient, it’s easy to see risk as a quaint artifact of a primitive and dangerous past." The Lehman Crisis is only the latest evidence of Omniscient Collapse. The safety record of the Shuttle is another.

My current guess is that part of the problem is excess compartmentalization and excess complexity. These seem related to large-scale corporate organization. Believing that risk is a real if weird economic cost, I have to wonder if these enormous corporations really deliver their promised bargains of scale economy. It's certainly plausible to imagine their capital has to include a government backstop, and that maybe our institutions would be somewhat less enormous and stupid if we would just let their risks come to the fore.

But that would lead to more chaos that our corporate leaders and politicians would like. We've got a leadership class more interested in managing than accomplishing, and it's showing up in all sorts of places.

Let's take away money from boring and put it into interesting! How can anybody be against this?

How about we take it away from "boring" and give it back to the taxpayers from whom it was taken via coercion.