It would seem to me that the space frontier, if and when, would be the opposite of individualism and libertarianism. The mentality that creates school shooters and terrorists could end up killing an entire city if allowed to evolve in a fragile environment. behaviours that can be tolerated in wide open earth settings cannot be tolerated in a tin can. People will have to be far more rigidly controlled and monitored in a space setting than anything Google and Amazon combined with the Chinese government can dream up. It’s bad enough when drunks try to open the door of an aircraft at 35,000 feet.
The only difference between rock and ore is whether there is a profit once it is processed. There are obviously locations where the concentration is such that rare earths become ores - South Africa, China…
Wait… You think libertarianism is the mentality that causes school shooters and terrorism? Wow.
Mental illness and bullying creates school shooters. Terrorists have many different motivations. I don’t think Osama Bin Laden was a libertarian.
Those crazy libertarians, always wanting to leave people alone. They must be the most dangerous people ever. Get enough of them together, and you might get a mass ignoring of your demands.
Physics is not political. And engineering is physics, and economics is engineering. See how easy it is to make useless bumper-sticker statements?
Apollo failed as a sustainable program because it was primarily political. Sustainable programs cannot be arbitrarily expensive, but purely political programs have an incentive structure designed to increase costs. These divergent factors mean that purely political programs must collapse.
SpaceX was not created by any particular political beliefs. Simply the observation that if you look at the materials and work involved in going to space, it’s way more expensive than it should be. Why is a Falcon 9 on the order of 1/10 the cost per kg to LEO than the Shuttle? Because the Shuttle was a political program. The development model was political, the reusability aspect was political, even the fact that it’s a cool spaceplane instead of some boring other thing was effectively political. The physical and engineering merits, let alone the economic ones, took a backseat. In fact we know from the Challenger investigation that even the operations were political instead of engineering-based.
We are making better progress today because NASA is taking a more hands-off approach. Not completely, but they are allowing far greater freedom of design in their suppliers than they ever were. Look at the diversity in HLS designs if you want evidence of that, or the COTS and CRS programs.
Of course politics has some influence over everything. But it is a matter of degree, and the degree to which we can isolate it and prevent it from infecting the design is the degree to which the design has a chance at long-term success.
There is no political will for a trillion-dollar Mars program, let alone $10T or whatever higher number might be needed for something beyond flags-and-footprints. Thus, any possible national Mars mission must cost less than that. Whether it is possible to do for less than that is, again, a question of physics, engineering, and economics. If prices come down to a point where it can be done for billions, not trillions, the political will will manifest–not before. That has already happened for a return to the Moon. It remains to be seen for Mars, but will take some time regardless.
You appear to think that physics exists apart from humans.
We can trade bon mots back and forth all day, but I am reminded of something that a very wise man once said.
YOU CAN’T TAKE THE POLITICAL OUT OF SPACE AND CONSIDER ENGINEERING ON ITS OWN.
I believe that is how loud is done on the internet.
Let’s digress. A very silly thread is also going on right at this moment, about building a structure to take water across the country to California. I abandoned it because all anyone wanted to do was throw engineering schemes at one another without a single one asking the fundamental political question. Why should we continue the century-long environmental destruction that mostly benefits white people?
Now there are ways to answer that question, but the loaded nature of its wording is deliberate. (I know some people consider pushing the political into their faces to be anathema, but it’s also true that some people think that leaving the political put of issues is anathema and is the precise cause of most problems today, so live with it.) The issue is only very secondarily one of engineering. First and foremost, the political ramifications must be addressed before even minor projects are let loose upon the world. That’s why the U.S. has all those reviews that engineers hate and that cause people (i.e. conservatives) to rant and rave, cursing the left as the reason why America can’t get anything done and China can. China, however, is seeing the throes of the giant environmental crisis it let loose on itself and will be suffering for decades, one reason why I am somewhat sanguine that China is not automatically going to take over the world.
Lefty as I am, I have stated that I’m all for low-earth space missions and science missions farther out. Here’s the big BUT! Humans seeing the rest of the universe as merely another frontier to conquer is as political as all get out. First and foremost, address why anybody should encourage that before telling us that it is our future, a future we’ll all wind up paying for. And if you don’t believe that’s true, I would suggest taking a few years off engineering for prolonged immersion in reading history. History is incredibly useful and instructive. Also, see China, above.
It does. Or do you think the Moon disappears when you aren’t looking at it?
No amount of political will can create a faster-than-light starship. Nor can it even put a kerolox-powered, single-stage rocket into Earth orbit with a 10x mass ratio. Physics–in the sense of what’s really out there–sets a hard bound on what is possible.
Engineering sets another bound; one that is variable over time. We know very well the properties of a cubic meter of diamond, and it is certainly physically possible. But if your design requires that, I’m afraid we’ll have to put that in the category of impractical–for the time being.
On this list of the possible, politics is far down. It can’t be ignored completely. But the politically possible is a subset of what is actually possible. It is unwise to consider politics first, because it has the side effect of poisoning everything that comes after.
Design the system based on the best known physics, engineering, and economic knowledge. Only then should we consider if it is in addition politically feasible. If it’s not, keep working on the engineering and ask again in 10 years.
Only if your political lens is that space colonization = Earth colonization. They have little in common beyond the name.
I don’t know if it’s possible to drag this thread back into Factual Questions territory at this point, but this is the inference that seems most problematic to me.
Your historical example of “shipping stuff across oceans” was indeed an incremental process, beginning with migration and trade that kept inching and footing (in every sense of the term) from one habitable locale to a nearby one. Even oceanic voyages were highly incremental in their evolution, beginning with the Austronesian expansion from one island to another, coastal trading, relatively short ocean crossings, and eventually longer crossings. All of these involved taking humans from one human-habitable environment to another, with plenty of resources available for support when they reached their destination.
None of this applies to the development of off-planet travel. There’s nowhere humans can go beyond the surface of the Earth that doesn’t require really massive amounts of centralized planning and support for very definite objectives and destinations. There are no waystations or caravanserais between the Earth and the Moon, and there’s no space-travel parallel to coastal trading that will make it immediately profitable to incrementally develop vessels for short-hop purposes that can then be tweaked and pushed to achieve longer jumps.
Matter isn’t the same thing as physics. Of course matter exists, and behaves in ways that are consistent with the conceptual models that we call “the laws of physics”, independently of humans. But those conceptual models are human creations.
There is a long history of philosophical discussion over whether math exists independently and humans merely find examples of it or whether math is a purely human construct.
They are models of the behavior of matter. The models are not so important–none of them are true anyhow, and sometimes you can have multiple, contradictory models that yet give good answers–but the behavior is the same, and thus the limits on what is possible.
It is not just that the Moon is still there when I am not looking. It’s that the gravitational well is still there. It is still made of atoms, which are made from subatomic particles, which are made from even smaller particles, and so on. They are bound together by electromagnetic and other forces. All of these things are really happening, and would continue happening if every person on Earth was wiped out.
The laws of physics aren’t the models. Maybe we sometimes fuzz the ideas together in common discourse, but the universe doesn’t follow the laws of General Relativity. The universe is, and GR is one of our best descriptions of it. It’s backwards to think physics starts with our human understanding of the universe.
Then the term “laws of physics” doesn’t really mean anything, for human purposes. We humans have zero access to rational understanding of the behavior of matter except through our human-created models whose nature and accuracy are constrained by the contingencies and limitations of our being human.
There’s not much point in claiming that we should use the term “physics” to mean some idealized perfect entity that exists in some pure form independent of humans, when the only form of physics that humans have any access to is our own imperfect models.
It would not be so remarkable if physics was merely described well by math. But what is remarkable is that the flow is ever in the other direction–that discoveries in physics are feeding back into pure mathematics. And yet that is the case. One talk on the subject, for example.
I’m not so sure of that. The problem with both Saturn/Apollo and the Shuttle was that they were both products of the military/aerospace contractor paradigm, where a technical goal is defined and money is thrown at the project until the hardware appears. The government can do lots of things well but doing them economically is not one of them. For all the exoticness of spaceflight, in the end launching stuff into orbit is cargo delivery; and the US went about it like if aircraft carriers were used to transport cargo containers, or supersonic bombers to deliver airfreight.
It could have been different; the US government could have simply told the aerospace companies that it would contract for the most economical delivery to orbit they could provide and let them work out the best way to do it. But a sustainable and economically rational approach to spaceflight became impossible once the Soviet Union used it’s clunky but powerful R-7 rocket to beat the USA in several highly visible firsts. Initially having nothing but converted military (=expensive) expendable missiles at its disposal, the USA abandoned all incremental approaches in favor of a crash program to achieve an ad hoc result. The US government went about spaceflight like the Soviet Union went about industrialization: simply ordering things built by fiat, whether they made long-term sense or not.
Of course there is. Physics as a practice could not exist if we didn’t, at some level, believe that all of these models are somehow describing the same underlying physics. Without that, it’s just the same “well, it’s true for you but not for me” that is pervasive in other social endeavors.
A reminder that we are in Factual Questions. There is factual content to this question. The philosophy of science, or the politics of technological advancement, isn’t it.
But again, that throws you right back to framing the subject in terms of what humans believe and what humans do. There’s really no other way to meaningfully talk about physics.
(Note that I’m not trying to argue that because it doesn’t really make sense to claim that “physics exists apart from humans”, therefore we must adopt a radically relativist stance about its findings being “true for me and not for you”.)
ETA: Okay, mod blew the whistle so I guess we did not adequately succeed in getting this discussion back in FQ territory. I will shut up about the nature of physics (although if it’s sufficiently factual, I’d still like to know how “incrementalism” in space travel development could plausibly parallel that in maritime voyaging development).
The answer to the OP depends on the cost of a trip to those bodies. Based on the raw physics, even raw commodities like aluminum could be worth returning. But we are very far from that point.
It’s often said that if there was a pile of gold on the Moon, it would not be worth picking up and returning. That was true given Apollo costs. But we are probably close to it not being true with the next generation of reusable rockets. If reusable rockets can put mass into orbit for 10x the propellant costs, we can return mass from the moon for less than the cost of gold.
Of course there is no pile of gold on the Moon. And I am not confident about the usual example, Helium-3. Whether there are other realistic possibilities depends on what we find with future exploration.
If you eliminate the “return to Earth” requirement, the possibilities expand. For instance, the aforementioned aluminum is not very valuable on Earth, but is valuable in Earth or Lunar orbit. On orbit manufacturing drives the value up.
Whether there is any value in on-orbit manufacturing is not strictly an economic question. A manned mission to the outer planets does not have to be profitable, but nevertheless could drive profitable industries elsewhere in space. If NASA needs 10,000 tons of water in orbit, it could be cheaper to launch from the Moon than from Earth (though probably not in the near future).
Let me give you an example then. And let me stress that this isn’t a prediction, but simply an example of how incrementalism in this inatance could work.
Axiom Aerospace puts up a space hotel. It’s a big hit. With Starship flying, people can be sent to the hotel for maybe $50,000. That puts it within the realm of other expensive vacations for the well off. So Axiom expands the hotel, and maybe a competitor or two joins in. Soon there are hundreds of people staying in space hotels. Maybe thousands. The volume of transport brings more competitors and innovation into the space launch business, and they begin to shave prices and improve reliability nd safety. Soon you can get to LEO for not much more than a ticket on the Concorde used to cost.
Now, the sheer amount of water being consumed in orbit makes it profitable to mine on the Moon. So a company builds a station at the South pole and starts mining water. In the process they discover ways to lower the costs, and space suits and engineering techniques on the Moon get better. Another company builds a transfer vehicle between the Moon and Earth that uses aluminum and ice for a fuel, to lower costs even further. That company builds aluminum extraction facilities on the Moon. Byproducts include iron and titanium - resources that can be sold to others.
In the meantime, the declining cost and increased safety of getting to the moon attracts scientists, astronomers, geologists, artists and universities. A company comes along and builds a hub-and-spoke moon base with the hub being shared and the spokes leased out to various businesses, governments and institutions.
Now you can get to the moon and have a pre-made place to stay. Tourism to the Moon starts, and research institutions can afford to send teams to the Moon for specific reasons.
At some point you have hundreds to maybe thousands of people on the Moon. This creates markets for goods and services to be provided. Companies innovate and compete to find cheaper ways to move material. Prices fall further, and a local economy develops.
Prices and capabilities get to the point where companies start sending rovers to explore for minerals and things of scientific interest. But rovers are heavy and expensive to ship. Soma new design comes along where all metal parts are sourced from lunar 3d printed aluminum and titanium, and only the complex parts like electronics, hoses, wiring and such are sent to the Moon, and the heavy stuff is made there and the Rover assembled. Now there are rover construction teams and engineers on the Moon.
Over time we get better and better at working on the Moon. Prices continue to drop, and services available on the Moon grow. A company puts up a lunar internet constellation. Movies are now shot on the Moon, just as Tom Cruise is planning to shoot one on the ISS now.
Disney shows up, and spends billions creating a special park in a Lava tube, with smaller domes pressurized so you can fly in them, take low-g amusement rides, whatever. This is enabled by the availability of lunar steel and titanium. Guided tours are available to take you through the amazing vistas of a lunar lava tube. Thousand foot cliffs, stalactites the size of skyscrapers, open spaces so large you can barely see the walls in the distance. It’s declared one of the natural wonders, and everyone wants to see it.
In the meantime, material blasted off earth billions of years ago is discovered in pristine condition in a lava tube, and scientists start coming to the Moon to discover more. Gas pockets of argon and oxygen are discovered, and used to further pressurize living spaces. This starts a ‘gold rush’ to find more gas pockets, water, etc.
A mission to a large crater’s central peak is undertaken, and discovers rich veins of asteroid material. Gold, silver, platinum, carbon, whatever. By now transport to Earth is cheap enough that it makes sense to mine it. Another gold rush starts with companies prospecting other craters with central peaks.
Once there are thousands of people on the Moon, secondary markets grow for entertainment, goods and services. Adventure seekers and explorers show up looking to make fortunes prospecting, and go bust. But people make fortunes selling them stuff. The economy grows. New projects like giant telescopes, radio telescopes on the far side, research centers that take advantage of vacuum, low gravity and isolation show up.
In the meantime, there is increasing pressure to source food locally. So a small passage in a Lava Tube is pressurized, nuclear power is built on the surface and the tube is lighted and heated. A giant greenhouse is created, and it’s a beautiful space. Tourists show up to see it, and a Saudi billionaire decides he’ll be the one with the best mansion ever, and spends billions to build out another tube passage as a residence.
I could go on. I have no idea what a lunar economy might look like, and no one else does either. But we have seen the process play out many times - inhospitable or hard to access regions are explored, more people show up, prices come down, new things are invented that no one could foresee, prices come down more enabling other profitable activities, access expands even more, and eventually you have a thriving community in a place where no one thought anyone could live.
It also might never happen. Maybe the Moon is just so difficult that after we go and explore for ice we’ll say ‘screw this’ and the Moon will never have more than a dozen people on it at a time. After all, we used to talk about underwater cities, and they never happened. We built some underwater hotels, and almost no one cared enough to go. The future is unpredictable. But what is predictable is that it will never happen if we don’t try because it’s ‘stupid’.
But the first explorers to California starved to death. Florida used to be a swamp where no one wanted to live. There are remote Pacific islands that have massive tourism infrastructures on them now. We spend billions on giant platforms in the North Sea. Dubai was an uninhabitable desert. Sending a ship across the ocean took the resources of governments and often ended in death for the crew.
All of the things that caused that stuff to blossom were wholly unpredictable at the time. But once we found value in those places, we figured out a way.
Projectile Remnants in Central Peaks of Lunar Craters
Projectile hits the moon and makes a big splash. The rebound creates the central peak, lifting and embedding the remains of the impactor within it.
It may turn out that the best place for mining asteroids is the Moon. And we may even find enough carbon compunds, nitrogen and other necessary-bit-scarce materials to make lunar colonization even more viable. And if the impactor was a type M asteroid, even a pot of gold.
To Charlie Stross’s one good point, it’s unlikely that we will ever have a self sustaining colony on the Moon or Mars any time in the forseeable future. It would indeed take millions of people. But that’s not necessary so long as we find enough of value there to keep resupplying critical goods and materials from Earth.