The one I like most is Teflon, which was around before Kennedy was elected.
Here’s another interesting fact: a map of the exploration of the lunar surface done by the Apollo 11 crew. As you can see, it’s projected on to a baseball diamond to give it some scale. (Here’s a version using a football field for non-Americans.)
I think we still have some untapped potential for discovery out there.
We could, as a pointless political exercise. If Newt wanted to knock a couple of years off the space development timeline, he could guarantee some bookings in Bigelow’s space hotel. IMHO $0.1 billion now in incentives to private space ventures would do more to give us a foothold in space than any moonbase, If he wants to spend $20 billion on a prize, how about a round the moon trip in a vehicle assembled in LEO?
I also heard Mars ain’t no kind of place to raise your kids. Seriously, as cool as a moon base would be, and a fulfillment of my childhood’s imaginings, everything I’ve ever read about the difficulties of long-term life in space indicates 13,000 people living on the moon permanently is ludicrously stupid.
Something like the Antarctic research stations where personnel are rotated in and out is feasible. Let robots (rovers and the like) do the real exploration. The humans would be the maintenance staff. All you’d derive from this is scientific knowledge (a worthy end) so I can’t see a private company doing this.
But never in eight years, no matter who is the president or what the political will of the country. Maybe a crewed landing in that time.
If I could tell you that, that would be half the work done, wouldn’t it?
[hijack on the political side]
Plus there is the small detail that just any group of 13,000 people (where does he get that? The Northwest Ordinance?) is NOT entitled to receive statehood upon petition anyway. For one, Congress has absolute discretion to admit or not admit on a case-by-case basis regardless of how often and how much anyone votes for it; for another, a base garrison/faculty is not a community of citizens constituted in a body politic.
Besides all prior precedent involves that the land on which that body politic is constituted either be already claimed or annexed by the US as its territory, or that the body politic be sovereign over it (Texas). So the US would almost have to first unilaterally annex Mare Tranquilitatis as its sovereign territory in which case why bother with statehood?
There was quite some grumbling here on Friday, that during the debate they spoke about statehood for the moon while Blitzer didn’t even let the frontrunners say jack when the question of Puerto Rico statehood was raised.
[/political hijack]
Mr. Branson, here is our business plan for the moon colony:
- Spend $500 billion on the project
- Collect the $10 billion government prize
- Profit. (?)
He might as well throw in money for a tunnel to Pellucidar while he is at it. Just as likely to get done.
Let’s assume for a moment that you are correct and that it would cost an 5 times an order of magnitude more than the prize is worth to win it (despite the fact that it didn’t work out this way for the orbital X-Prize). That would mean that companies would either take up the challenge for reasons other than the prize or they wouldn’t take it up at all because it was too costly and expensive. Right? So…what’s the downside, again, for government? Am I missing something here?
-XT
While Jon Stewart showed n olfa clip of Gingrich calling D.C. (pop. 617,000) statehood a “crazy” idea. Stewart: “Yes, that’s too crazy an idea for anybody to take seriously . . . unless you move it to the Moon!”
While I would love to establish some permanent off-planet base, pretending we could do this by 2020 is idiotic. Heck, I’ll be surprised if we even achieve getting back to orbit regularly by then.
We just dismantled our entire launch functionality. No shuttles. No heavy lift boosters. Nothing.
No political will to move anything forward. Gingrich can’t do this by himself, and even assuming he wins, the GOP Congress doesn’t give a care for these kind of projects. It would never get the enormous funding needed to make this happen.
So, we get to watch as China or India or Russia gets to control space. This does not bode well for our long-term survival as ‘preeminent’ superpower. Remember why we went into space to begin with. The USSR put up Sputnik. That proved their ability to rain down nuclear destruction from orbit. The USA responded. There is no such prod to development now. It saddens me greatly, but this is not the ascent of the USA to space. It is our descent into partisan politics and a really horrible amount of plutocracy that could well ruin our republic.
But, maybe I am wrong. Perhaps some corporation will take the chance. I can only hope.
I suppose the downside for the government might be that the electorate may realise that $10 billion of their taxes has been diverted from NASA (with the consequent loss of jobs, closure of businesses, etc) for no good purpose.
The difference between the orbital X-Prize and Gingrich’s pipe-dream is that there are right-here, right-now cash customers for orbital launching facilities. A permanent moon base isn’t an opportunity to profit, it’s a dick-waving contest.
Saddens me, as well, Gag… but as long as those in the PTB remain, they’re going to hoard as much $$$ as they can, as fast as they can. And from what I can tell, the only reason Gingrich is able to do any politicking right now, is by the grace of ‘Citizens United’ and SCOTUS. And my feeling is the only reason they would have to fund such an ambitious project is if there $$$ in it for them, such as mineral right, etc etc.
However, couldn’t it be argued that the space program has saved mankind many billions of dollars by weather-watching satellites alone? I’m old enough to remember when hurricanes would hit Florida with very little warning; today, we generally know weeks in advance.
Add in the economics of communications satellites, and, well, hasn’t the space program repaid its own costs and more?
re the OP, I agree that each new generation has the right to forge its own destiny, and to alter the course of the ship of state. That’s simple democracy. They are a voting bloc, and, when united, are a vast power for change. I say yes, absolutely, young people should be active for what they believe in, and if it isn’t what I believe in, well, so it goes. I’ll vote my way, they vote their way, and the majority speaks with the voice of God.
I hope that today’s young people continue to support space and science. But if economic woes cause them to focus on home & hearth, well, who can blame them? It isn’t easy to focus on the high frontier when one is unemployed…
Who says teflon was a spinnoff? In that Wikipedia link, it specifically says:
,
And Teflon is listed as one of many “Mistakenly attributed spinoffs”
So where did that idea come from?
Why?
I’d like to see a 200 year plan for the establishment of a permanent and self-sustaining space colony. I’m not convinced that throwing up a base at this stage would be an efficient manner of pursuing that goal. If we’re going to undertake some grand plan, I’d like to have a number of basic questions addressed. What are the relative advantages of orbital, lunar and Martian approaches? What are the engineering and social requirements for such a colony? What is the proper ordering for resolving such challenges? What is the resource cost and how does it compare to feasible world GDP projections? What would our space friends do and how do those activities cost out? What are the prospects for contamination of fragile Martian ecology? And what’s wrong with partnering with other countries anyway?
“reasons other than the prize” could run well against the interests of society/the government. Handing over the space project to out of public control, purely for-profit enterprises doesn’t seem all that neat to me either.
For one thing, Richard Branson would soil his undies on a more or less continuous basis. Won’t you think of Mr. Branson’s maid ?!
Where is the money coming from? The school budget, healthcare?
Those the Newter would cut no matter what, so it’s a wash there.
As** xtisme** has pointed out what Gingrich claims to propose is to not spend money on an actual NASA back-to-moon program but instead offer a symbolic incentive to private business to take care of it if they feel like it.
As things stand, even under the more ambitious Bush proposal, spaceflight expenditures are small relative to other domestic programs.
Same way Tang got associated with the space program because the astronauts used it, I guess.