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As a huge fan of space I agree we need progress, but we can achieve that by no longer 'visiting' space and instead 'moving' there.

I was talking with a JPL engineer about SpaceX and he said something which really knocked me for a loop. He said "We don't live in space, we camp there." And by example he suggested what if there was no food, fuel, or running water in Barstow California. Everyone would have to carry what they expected to use from Los Angeles, stay for a while and then go back to Los Angeles to reload with supplies. Now imagine there is a toll gate on I15 outside San Bernadino that charges you $100M to use the road between LA and Barstow. Now what kind of town would Barstow be? A ghost town.

Space, and low earth orbit in particular, is the same way. We don't have any infrastructure up there. Just a single campsite. Every time we launched the shuttle we took perfectly good fuel and burned it up in the atmosphere because we had no way to take the left overs from the external tank and store them in orbit. If you consider just that one problem, keeping fuel around. You see how far we are from living in space vs just visiting.

At $54M/pop SpaceX will make somethings a lot more accessible in space. Putting some infrastructure in space like a gas station and a space tug, will go a lot further.

Back in 1988, a Canadian scientist was commissioned by a 2nd world power to build a system that could be used for orbital launch 4 orders of magnitude cheaper per pound to orbit than what SpaceX can do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon

It would have involved firing payloads out of a very large cannon, then firing a rocket onboard to circularize the orbit, so this is not for manned launch, but we should be able to ship bulk items like fuel, oxygen, and water this way.

Every time we launched the shuttle we took perfectly good fuel and burned it up in the atmosphere because we had no way to take the left overs from the external tank and store them in orbit.

We also burned up a perfectly good contamination free vacuum-proof hull the size of a 747 fuselage that was already 99% of the way in orbit. (External tank.)

Great post, but '2nd world' is not the right description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_world

Actually, I know this and this wikipedia entry. It's hard to for me to classify Iraq. For awhile they were another totalitarian state with ties to the Soviet Union. For awhile they were more in the US orbit. I guess that would put them in the 3rd world, though economically they have been in a different class than the poorest 3rd world nations.

I was thinking of terming them a "second rate power."

Yeah - Sorry I know its a bit nitpicky, because "second world" is pretty commonly understood in this way (to mean "secondary power"/"partially developed economy" etc.) but although common it is really a bit of a misuse of a word that has a very specific original meaning and I thought its probably worth pointing out to people (not just you) where the differences lie.

I remember LOVING the "Doomsday Gun" movie when I was a kid. It was one of those that was on TV late at night and I watched it secretly long after I was supposed to be in bed.

Though you don't even need to look at what he did for Iraq, right? His first project launched projectiles into space for the DoD iirc.

Thanks for reminding me of that 'gun'. I was recently noodlingly around with the question "Can the Navy's rail gun launch projectiles into orbit?" [1] The production gun is expected to us 64 Megajoules. The challenge is that you have to impart all the energy you can before the projectile leaves the gun (because you then lose your source of acceleration) and drag (or air resistance) is proportional to the cube of the velocity. So the faster you try to make something go, the harder the air resists it moving.

Using the math from "Rocket Propulsion Elements" [2] it seems like for anything other than a needle shaped projectile it would not be practical.

[1] http://www.navytimes.com/news/2008/01/navy_railgun_test_0801...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Propulsion-Elements-George-Sutt... Pretty much everything there is to know about rockets that isn't classified.

> A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s

So the solution is to build a ship based on a design from 1965?

No. And that's why I think a lot of the criticism of the project is valid. The solution is to build something that captures the imagination. Something that LOOKS like a ship from the future. It doesn't have to be the Enterprise.

If you want to capture the imagination, you don't need a ship that looks snazzy. You need a ship that can safely and reliably take people to Earth orbit and back at a price normal people can afford. As long as space travel is the province of billionaires and test pilots only, nobody will care about it.

What you need is a space DC-3.

> You need a ship that can safely and reliably take people to Earth orbit and back at a price normal people can afford.

That's what needs to be actually built, but it's not how human imagination works. To capture imagination, you make people watch this:

http://youtu.be/_yijcWsLda8?hd=1&t=9s

or this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7DEw70LVWs

You need to touch the heart, connect with people's desires, emotions and dreams they already have. And be it or not, Star Trek, et al. is something that is closer to general audience than another rocket. I'm not saying "let's build the Enterprise", but we shouldn't ignore the popular culture vision of space, because it's mostly Hollywood, not NASA, who drive the dreams. Let's find a way to connect to that.

BTW., to remind everyone, the very first Space Shuttle was named "Enterprise" for a reason.

What captures peoples' imaginations isn't the vehicle. It is the journey. Or, more importantly, the destination. The vehicle is just the can they sit in to get there.

People (the vast majority, anyway) don't travel because they like to travel. They travel because they want to get somewhere. What excites their imagination is the thought of being at that place, not how they got there.

Part of the reason people aren't excited about space travel today is because there's nowhere to go. There's no orbiting low-gravity resort to vacation on, no Mars colony where Cousin Phil lives with his family to go to for Thanksgiving. And a big part of why those things don't exist is because getting people into space is a damn expensive and risky business, even today. If the only way to get to Disneyworld was to spend $20,000,000 and ride a thirty-year-old Russian relic, Disneyworld wouldn't exist either.

A cheap, safe and ugly ship would do a lot more to solve that problem than an expensive and beautiful one would.

You havw to remember that in the imagination, the vehicle is a large part of the journey. Having a nice one definitely helps, or car styling wouldn't matter so much. Beautiful vehicles will definitely help.

So you're left with the question of which helps more: a beautiful/sexy vehicle, or safety and cheapness, the answer is basically one of detailed analysis. I suspect you're right about where the balance leans, but I also suspect it's possible to have both.

I agree, what we really need is to equip a Mars rover with a digital IMAX3D camera.

I personally didn't like the intros of Enterprise.

Partially because its tone didn't feel like a Star Trek intro, but mainly because it completely ignored the incredible achievements of the Soviet space program. You would at least expect a shot of Yuri Gagarin.

> Partially because its tone didn't feel like a Star Trek intro

I felt something quite the opposite; I think that Enterprise intro actually best captured the spirit of whole Star Trek - the dream of exploration, advancement and excellence.

Fair point about the Russians though; they deserve more credit that they usually get nowdays.

The other ship on the front page of the enterprise web site the `skylon`, looks awesome, almost like it was designed by Apple compared to the current crop of 'beige box' rockets. Its design spec seems to put it in the class of space DC3 too.

> A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s. The ships look the same, the suits look the same, the propulsion technologies look the same,

And the ideal of manned spaceflight should remain in the 60's - at least for the foreseeable future. We are magnificently evolved to inhabit this planet. The remainder of the solar system is insanely hostile to our form of life. It's far more sensible to engineer machines that can act as our eyes & ears and extend our narrowly evolved senses to far-out and lethal environments.

We're not all that great at swimming either, and yet building oceangoing boats and ships has turned out to be an important part of our technological development. Likewise air travel; we're only evolutionarily optimized for walking about on land, but have used technology to travel and transport goods over large distances on water and in the air.

Those are all fair points. But they don't really address my assertion:

1. I am not arguing that our evolutionary past should dictate where we explore. Rather, I'm arguing it must inform how we explore. Space travel is so lethal for our species that we are better off engineering machines, robots or beings that are specialized to operate in space.

2. The energy expenditure, economic cost and sheer distance of space exploration is many orders of magnitude beyond the costs of land, sea or air travel. Comparing terrestrial forms of travel to space exploration is disingenuous.

3. No endpoint. When the great explorers were trailblazing across the oceans there was a reasonable expectation of finding a suitable endpoint with fresh water, edible plants & animals, other people (!) and exploitable resources. With space exploration none of these things are present. We have to carry a suitable endpoint with us during the journey and plant it where ever we happen to land.

Expanding on that last point - imagine a specialized mars robotic explorer that goes on a one-way mission, taps in a sub-surface source of water, erects a basic greenhouse structure, goes into sleep mode for a few months, wakes up, plants some seeds, sleeps a while longer, etc. - it bootstraps a suitable endpoint for human explorers to inhabit years, decades or centuries later.

I agree with you on all these things, but subject to qualification. I think we need to be developing human spaceflight in parallel with robotic exploration, for the same reason that we don't do all our exploration on earth with telescopes. Air travel is orders of magnitude more difficult than sea travel, which is orders of magnitude more difficult than wandering about on land. I think there is no substitute for getting out there and attempting a wide variety of technological workarounds, notwithstanding the fact that many of these will be futile or fatal. The key plus for me of private or even semi-private space exploration is that failure or fatality won't mean a loss of political capital, compared to publicly-owned and managed space endeavors. Bluntly, we're more likely to discover better technologies if people are allowed to blow themselves up in the pursuit of same. On the last point, planetary colonization is one (remote) endpoint, if we can bootstrap it, but I think asteroid mining and the like also offers the potential of non-planetary habitation, which I find far more interesting. I remain optimistic about the possibility of other propulsive or spatial traversal methods, notwithstanding the limitations from our current theories of physics, though this is a statement about faith in technological progress rather than a specific hypothesis.

So long as we don't blow said planet up, which so far we have come disturbingly close to doing several dozen times.

The same could be said for climbing mountains or racing cars at high speeds. The point isn't just to gain knowledge though, the point is to go, to do, to live.

The public was not that excited about space in the 60s either.

http://si.academia.edu/RogerLaunius/Papers/93299/_Public_Opi...

Perhaps not in the USA but in the UK everyone I knew was glued to the TV to watch the Apollo launches. Of course there was a big layer of Cold War propaganda added, but it was an exciting time.

I know it sounds silly to people in the space business, but the public could really use some futuristic looking space ships and more exciting missions to get excited again.

Who cares what the public "could use"?

This is a self-defeating argument because you're starting with the premise that the govnermnet ought to be in the business of making people excited/happy, and then argue that therefore, we should build awesome space ships. Once that premise is accepted by society, it'll be all about wealth redistribution, healthcare, and regulation (and ultimately economic stagnation), and building space ships will be the last thing on anyone's mind.

This post also really bothers me because it's not like the public is a bunch of 4 year olds going "oooh, shiny." And if they are, we need to be finding ways to improve that problem, not playing to it. If society is that messed up, society is headed for the gutter anyway.

Getting people excited about space travel isn't the goal, it's a means to an end. The end goal is investment in new research, technologies, and education, which will help the economy and improve the wellbeing of society. Getting people excited about space travel can create the political will to accomplish those things.

I'm not saying we should spend billions on pointless feel good projects, but if painting the space shuttle silver or making a robotic probe slightly anthropomorphic would convince hundreds of thousands of grade schoolers to stay in school and do lots of math, I think it's worth it.

So, no, we don't need to build the Enterprise, but we DO need to take this as a marketing lesson about why the public seems to yawn when they hear anything about space and Nasa these days.

The lesson is: "Sell them what they want, but deliver them what they need."

> simply because the different companies will have to start competing on something other than "look, we're in space!"

Price, safety, quality of the trip? It seems a long way out before space travel is a commodity such that a large percent of those wanting to travel can afford to do so. The majority of air travel now doesn't compete on style of the vessel, does it?

How. Incredibly. Disappointing.