> Space is no longer pioneered by nations, it's pioneered by people making money.
Why is this bad? That space is a viable destination for private businesses shows just how far we've come.
Why is this bad? That space is a viable destination for private businesses shows just how far we've come.
X33, the last great "try some crazy shit" we pulled, was cancelled after $922m from NASA and $357m from Lockheed Martin. (Leave it to congress to kill the interesting/tricky/useful stuff! Revive this project!)
X33 was 1/10th the weight of the VentureStar craft it was a demonstrator for. It was to pioneer radical new high efficiency high-control thrust vectoring engines burning the most gravometrically dense element, innovative cryonics, sstol, lighweight composite construction techniques, lifting body aerodynamics, metallic thermal protection, and unmanned flight controls. Any one of these things could produce massive massive spinoff technologies in it's wake, and would be incredibly important technologies to be able to point to, and set a new bar for progress.
It's not that private industry is bad (oh, it is), it's that private industry is boring, safe, incremental, and the only massive innovations this world have ever seen have jumped up from the shadows and stolen existing big buisnesses lunch in the split second it took business to blink. Business is the living antithesis of what is most interesting and uniquely human: the radical.
No, we are not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United... http://www.alternet.org/fun-facts-about-rich-people-walmart-...