gov't or private industry of Space Exploration.

Great Debates
21

arl said:

Actually interstellar travel we don’t really have to worry about for a very long time. If you haven’t already read them, some of Michio Kaku’s ideas about Type 0, 1, 2 and 3 societies may be interesting to you.

mbh, that’s not the way I understood the original US/Soviet treaties, but they may very well have evolved since then.

Cal, yeah, but the He[sub]3[/sub] on the moon is a lot closer than the gas giants. And fusion without waste? How can ya beat that? :slight_smile:

Mekhazzio, you’re right, of course. Right now it’s more of a “pander to seniors vs. food/exploration” thing.

22

aynrandlover innocently asked what benefits have come from the space program, thereby falling squarely into my carefully laid trap. Sorry, my friend. I baited you.

Here are some recent benefits. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Inventions and improvements resulting from the space program include:

Cordless power tools, water filters, digital image processing used in MRIs and CAT scans, lightweight oxygen systems for firefighters, improved laser precision, aircraft collision avoidance, and VR mapping. (blatantly stolen from this site)

Microcomputers, i.e. the one you’re likely reading this post on, were first implemented by NASA. Miniaturization in general won huge strides during the design phase of the moon shot.

And then there is materials science. When the Apollo project first started, it was designed with the presumption that materials not yet invented would be used in a large proportion of the vehicle. Mylar, early carbon fiber, Velcro, Kevlar antecedents, and hundreds of other materials were either specifically invented for the space program or first mass-produced for the space program and were implemented elsewhere afterward. Once the production facility is up to supply NASA, companies seem to find other buyers as well.

Almost all of the above was contracted out by NASA. Those contractors were then free to use whatever they created for NASA in the free market. But NASA created the market first, covering the R & D efforts of contractors. Black and Decker alone sells $400 million dollars worth of cordless power tools a year, but the research and development was a result of, and partially offset by, NASA’s need for such devices.

If you consider all the different taxes levied upon a product, including its retailer, its producer, the producer’s payroll, and sales tax, Black and Decker alone may have generated a trillion constant dollars in tax revenue since the 1960s just on power tools. That’s a helluva payoff, in my opinion.

23

Okay, forget my last statement above. That’s just plain stupid. But I still stand by my contention that the United States took in far more revenue from the products resulting from the space program than it ever spent. I also still think a trillion, all told, is reasonable.

24

Sofa King: Look at Bush’s budget again. While NASA overall only gets a small increase, the area we are all talking about (developing cheaper ways into space) gets a whopping 64% increase. Mars exploration funding also got a significant increase.

NASA does a lot of things it probably shouldn’t. By giving the agency overall a small increase, while giving the space R&D functions a huge increase, Bush is sending a message - go back to doing what you do well.

Bush’s budget also gives some pretty healthy R&D tax credits to private businesses who engage in their own research.

Necros: I brought this up in the other thread, but I’ll repeat - there is absolutely no evidence that private industry is unwilling to take on huge risks. Boeing bet the entire company on the success of the 747 - a program on the scale of a small space program, yet with no established market, a radically new vehicle, and the awareness that for it to be a success huge changes would be required in the way people fly. Yet they took that gamble. More recently, Airbus Industrie did the same thing with their super jumbo program. And bear in mind that these were both programs that were not expected to turn a profit for over 20 years, long after the current management is retired.

Arianespace is a consortium of private corporations and governments that is spending hundreds of billions on space lift. And there are over a dozen private launch companies now. They are undertaking high-risk projects, like the sea-launch platform that recently put a satellite into orbit, or Burt Rutan’s involvement in ‘X’ prize.

There is far more evidence that it is government which tends to look no further than the next election. The U.S. government has a history of deferring problems for the next administration or ignoring them completely if they don’t translate into immediate votes. Which of course is WHY we have no space presence to speak of - put your trust in government, and you’ll soon find that government is untrustworthy.

25

Sam Stone said:

No, see, they’re not. They may be undertaking projects that seem to be high-risk compared with other companies’ risks, but in the grand sceme of things, they’re not.

Arianespace has never been at the forefront of space exploration. The French didn’t send men to the moon. They aren’t sending scientific instruments to Mars. They did not build the Voyager probes. All they do is send cargo into space, usually satellites.

Launching stuff into space is not “high-risk.” It’s a reasonably predictable, proven endeavor. It’s profitable. Everyone does it. When Arianespace decides that they want to do some truly pioneering work, you know, the kind that costs hundreds of billions of dollars and has no forseeable reward besides advancing human knowledge or prestige, let me know. I suspect you’ll be waiting a long time.

26

You mean like the billions of dollars Bell Labs has spent studying such quickly-paying commercial concepts as black holes, the Big Bang, and Quantum Mechanics?

Of course companies are in the business of making profit. This does not mean they have to be short-sighted, or that they don’t understand the need to do basic research, which almost always pays off many times over in the long run.

I agree that private industry won’t do things like short-term, high cost research programs like Martian landers. That’s what NASA should do, and it does it well. But private industry is VERY interested in lowering the cost to get things into orbit, and that will have the effect of making everything else much cheaper. NASA should get out of that business.

But you know, it isn’t even clear that private businesses wouldn’t send space probes to other planets - there are plenty of reasons why they might do so - public approval, brand recognition, research into techniques in robotics and communications that WILL pay off one day, etc.

Private corporations give billions of dollars in endowments and scholarships, and that’s about as basic as you can get - investing in the education of a person who may not even work for you.

Anyway, I don’t have any evidence that governments are any more willing to engage in very long-term projects. Remember the Superconducting Supercollider? Billions of dollars spent, and scrapped because politicians voted to kill it in favor of some vote-buying pork barrel programs.

NASA’s space research budget is a pittance, and it will stay that way. NASA’s entire space research budget wouldn’t fund HEW for a week. Most of NASA’s budget goes to two big ticket items - an old, expensive heavy lifter (the space shuttle), and the International Space Station, which has far more to do with international politics than real science.

27

This is true. Unfortunately though there has been quite a major shift away from such basic research in the more cut-throat, short-sighted business climate of today. Bell Labs and IBM’s Research Labs are but a shadow of their former selves as far as basic research is concerned.

I agree with you to a certain extent, but there are various pressures that tend to cause them to underfund basic research. Maybe companies don’t have to be short-sighted about this, but speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that they often are!

On that point, I agree with you wholeheartedly! NASA’s unmanned probes provide an amazing example of how much can be done with so little; the manned space program, at least over the last quarter century, provides an amazing example of how so little can be done with so much.

28

Yes, stupid NASA. After all, they’ve just been brimming over for funding on a shuttle replacement and our very own space station…

Note that two such advanced lifter projects were just canceled in the wake of Bush’s budget “rearrangement”, and I’m sure you’ve heard what’s happened to plans for the ISS by now.

It’s like griping about repair costs for your beat up old junker of a car, but not spending the bus fare or down payment to get a replacement. Are we waiting for a new shuttle design to just materialize out of thin air? Sit and pray for one of your mythical generous businesses to wave its hands and present a shiny, robust, high-tech marvel of engineering at a magically low price?

I’ve never been one for religion…

29

There are lots of ways NASA could encourage and be involved in development of a heavy lifter without getting into the business of strapping commercial payloads aboard and flying them.

First, they can contract it out. Let private companies bid for their heavy-lift payloads. Take the design competition they used for the next generation shuttle one step further - contract out the entire launch. Let corporations compete with each other to lower the cost of space access.

I’d love to see the day when NASA has a 15 billion dollar budget, and doesn’t have to spend a nickel on the shuttle program. Then you could read in the paper about how NASA’s new robotic lander is headed for a return mission to Mars, after being lifted into orbit by a Boeing rocket.

30

…and this looks to be one of my busiest threads…
I think Sam Stone got it right… a mix of gov’t/business is what will pave the way. To take his analogy further, you ride in your Boing moon-earth ferry craft to the gov’t co-sponsered Lunar Station, a subdivision of Lunatic Ventures, with about 30% of it’s space leased cheaply to the Gov’t and the other 70% going to private industry… everything from Hilton Luna to JPL and other science industries.

Hmmmm… no of course it’s a matter of which stocks to pick, and if Lunar Disney will have the same start up problems that Euro-Disney had…
Decisions, decisions…

31

Wen we were engaging in the space race against the Russians to get to the moon, we weren’t intrested in scientific exploration or possible economic benefits.
We went to BEAT THEM TO IT!
All advancement through competition stemms from Us vs Them.
The Soviet Union broke up, and with it, the impetus for real competition.
Only a Nation-State has the resources to fund such a venture, such as a round trip to Mars.
UNLESS…
Imagine a spacecraft funded with corporate grants, expecting a return on investment.
Think of the corporate-sponsored race car, with all the corporate logos plastered on the side.
Corporations supplying hardware, software, engineering,
communications, mabe staking a claim on some Martian real estate.
I figure…General Motors, General Electric, DuPont, IBM,
Microsoft, AT&T, maybe some Defense/Aerospace corporations.
Have them all scrape together about $3 trillion, and convince them a &5 trillion return on investment, and whach the mission get off the ground within five years.

32

Actually, free enterprise in space will begin shortly. Dennis Tito, a California investment banker, paid $20 million to the Russians to spend a week on Mir. However, with Mir’s imminent demise, the Russians have transferred Tito onto a flight to the International Space Station. Needless to say, NASA isn’t too thrilled with the idea of private citizens on the ISS, but there’s not much that they can do. The Russians are shopping for more people to take the trip (after all, they have a huge bill to foot for their contribution to the space station), so anyone on the board who has 20 million dollars can take a trip into space ;).

To answer the OP, private exploration of space is coming!

33

So, going off of what enolancooper says, we may be looking at the next great space race in a matter of a few years…

It looks like the Chinese are working hard towards their own program, and are planning on doing it all themselves.

What impact will that have on the space industry?

34

Probably none, for quite a while. They have to prove they can do it reliably, first, and that will take a while just to meet parity, assuming they don’t outright clone a US or Russian design.

They’re not the only non-US spacelift capability, either. I believe…France?..is still launching satellites too.

35

I wonder if any company could get away with conducting this sort of large scale research into something that couldn’t turn a profit for 20 or 30 years down the road. It isn’t just a question of management values. This is the sort of thing that could invite a hostile takeover.

36

Jeez, someone tell Airbus Industrie. Or Boeing. Boeing is still working on a spaceplane design that no one believes will fly until at least 2020. Boeing has been working on a spaceplane since 1975.

Then you could ask just about any drug company. Almost every product they make will not break even for at least 20 years. Hell, it takes over 10-15 years just to get a drug through FDA approval. Most large drug companies are working on things that no one believes will be profitable or even possible for decades. The average drug costs over 100 million dollars just for FDA approval. The whole cost of a new drug R&D program is in the hundreds of millions, with no possibility of a nickel’s worth of revenue for at least 10-15 years, and breakeven for years after that. And then the patent expires and profitability drops through the floor. So there is also huge risk involved.

A private company beat the publically funded Human Genome project in completely mapping the human genome.

There are several hotel companies that are investing millions into R&D for orbital hotels, even though no one expects those to make a profit for decades, and maybe even longer.

Almost every large company has a large R&D program, with some percentage going to fairly basic science. Lucent, HP, GE, Microsoft, DOW Chemical, Xerox… The list goes on.

Most large energy companies have R&D projects working on alternative fuels, as do most auto companies. Many of the technologies they are working on will not turn a profit for decades, if ever.

Companies give billions of dollars in scholarships, bursaries, and R&D grants. I made it through college partially on a scholarship from Xerox.

There is plenty of evidence that private companies undertake basic research and long-term commercial R&D. Governments, on the other hand, tend to fail to look beyond the next election. The budget for the NSF is a pittance. NASA’s budget is mainly tied up in very visible, short-term efforts like the space shuttle and the ISS (NASA just cancelled the X-33, their main long-term research program).
I should point out that NASA started by taking all the funding from the X plane program, a well-crafted, long-term program designed to have a very cheap re-usable space plane by the end of the 1960’s, and used the money in a crash program to get results immediately, largely by designing rockets and capsules that were only of use for the specific programs. How much cheaper would space access be today if the X-20 DynaSoar program would have been allowed to continue?

I already mentioned the Superconducting Supercollider, which used to be the darling of the “Government must do research” crowd. It was used as an example of something so expensive and so basic that only government could do it. Well, it turned out that government COULDN’T do it, because short-sighted politicians killed it. As soon as they realized that it wouldn’t be finished and producing results before their re-election campaigns, it went on the chopping block.

Yeah, governments sure do look far ahead.

37

Well, yes, but that’s pretty much an inevitable feature of an adversarial political system. With no real daylight between major parties in terms of policies, a lot comes down to “what have you done for me and how much better/worse off am I since the last election?”. It’s not really surprising that governments (I’m talking mostly about the US and UK here, but I’m sure it’s true elsewhere) focus on spending to survive in the short-term. Why let your ‘competitor’ reap the benefits of your investments?

38

Fascinating subject, I really enjoy the diverse reading that this board sends me towards.

It does seem that market analysts value long term R&D somewhat higher than I might have thought but there still have to be limits. I would be fascinated to discuss the subject with an analyst specializing in aerospace or pharmaceuticals.

A couple notes on your points.

Not sure the genome case has much application as it isn’t clear that profits are that far down the road. The company is already generating significant revenues (though not profits) in my understanding. Its also an odd example given the various complaints about its business plan.

It would be interesting to look at a breakdown of R&D at Boeing. They did spend a billion on it last year but also spent a billion propping up their share price.

Some sources say basic science research has declined through the 90s. Undirected scientific research of the type discussed above has certainly gone down.

I would question the sanity of a hotel chain that spent millions on reseach like that. A quick search suggests your thinking of studies by shimzu corporation which are said to have cost 3 million dollars but are really about general lunar construction techniques. Still pretty far sighted but also a very small amount of money for that particular company.

I am not sure what your point is with the supercollider. Are you suggesting that private companies would do the job if government wasn’t in competition with them? That governments act screwy doesn’t imply that business will do the job either.

Overall you did rip a pretty big hole in my argument though.

39

But is this being done as a purely private venture, or is it something Boeing is doing in cooperation with the government? The Highly Reusable Space Transportation study is being done for NASA; Boeing’s Future-X program is being carried out in cooperation with NASA and the Department of Defense. The Sea Launch program does show that companies–especially aerospace companies–are willing to make large investments on risky ventures for long-term profits. And clearly launching satellites into Earth orbit is now pretty much just another business. But that wasn’t true in 1957, and I doubt that private enterprise will lead the way in the exploration of the outer planets or the first manned mission to Mars (although there will be lots of for-profit companies acting as contractors and sub-contractors on the first manned mission to Mars). Private companies aren’t going to do something like land people on another planet or send probes to Jupiter and Saturn unless they’re being paid–almost certainly by a national government or governments–to do so.

I don’t know how much we’re really arguing here. After all, you you said yourself that “private industry won’t do things like short-term, high cost research programs like Martian landers. That’s what NASA should do, and it does it well”. Both Big Government and Big Business are capable of mounting grand, visionary projects when appropriately motivated, and both are capable of being short-sighted and focusing only on the here-and-now also.

40

It sounds like we’re not disagreeing much. I just wanted to make the point that far more basic research is done by private corporations than most people think. Typically, when having a conversation with people about government and research, you hear something like, “But government must fund science, because if they don’t, no one else will.”

But the Straight Dope crowd is clearly more well informed than average, so we’re pretty much in agreement. There is a role for government to fund science, and a role for business. But let’s keep government out of the day-to-day operations of operational programs. Business does it much better. And that’s exactly what NASA is doing with their new Space Launch Initiative. Kudos.

What intrigues me are the new business models that are being created that involve basic research. For example, if you can get the cost of space launch down by an order of magnitude or so, you start to make it feasible to launch commercial probes to Mars just to do things like shoot footage for big-screen movies, or drop robots that can be licensed to research facilities. Or even just as spectacles. Think back to how many hits NASA got on its pathfinder web page, then think about how a company could make a profit on a suitably inexpensive Mars launch that could return IMAX films, offer pay-per-view showings of the actual descent and touchdown, etc.

Ron Howard used the KC-135 ‘vomit comit’ to film all zero-G footage for “Apollo 13”. How much cheaper does space access have to get before Universal or Paramount might be sending regular missions into space to shoot footage?

I brought this up before, but given a cheap moon lander and a cheap way to get it into space, you could send 1000 small robots to the moon, and allow them to be tele-operated through web pages. Then make up an education package and sell the program to schools to teach astronomy. Or just sell time on a robot over the web. I’d pay $100 to be able to explore the moon from my office for half an hour. How many more would? How about if the robot has some pre-defined programs that will do things like draw out your name in the lunar dust, there to remain for thousands of years? I can see it now - the Hallmark lunar robot will draw your wife’s name on the moon for the low, low cost of just $149. Give the gift that lasts millenia!

And once these rockets are headed out to these locations, it will be much cheaper for scientists to ‘piggy-back’ their own missions onto them, much like they do with the shuttle now, only an order of magnitude or more cheaper. Down to the price where a local astronomy club could raise funds to pay for their own small payloads.

The X-33 was going to get payloads to orbit for $1000/lb. A number of private rocket programs could cut that cost perhaps in half. At $500/lb, a small science package is even within the reach of individuals. HAM radio operators have migrated into amateur radio astronomy and web stuff. I can imagine new Amateur rocket clubs that are actually launching payloads aboard private rockets.

When space is opened up to anyone with an idea, you’ll see a rapid advance in technology. People will start making standard ‘environment’ packages that consist of casings, power supplies, interfaces to rocket systems, etc. You’ll be able to buy one for a couple of thousand bucks and breadboard your own experiment into it. Perhaps rocket amateurs, instead of launching from the ground will design and build rockets that will be carried about a commercial vehicle and then be launched to other planets.

These things tend to snowball. Given enough people who want to do this stuff, companies like TI or Intel will start making dedicated IC’s that handle things like telemetry, communications, etc., making it much, much easier for an individual to design his own space experiments, and making it far cheaper in the process.

Perhaps a ‘holding company’ model will form, in which some business acts as a clearinghouse for space payloads. Give them the dimensions and weight of your package (plus other requirements like insertion orbit, whether it needs to be rotated when deployed in space, etc), and they’ll find you a launch carrier. They’ll buy space in bulk and make a profit re-selling it.

The prospects are very exciting, and we’re not that far away from it.