The asteroids are calling us, but we're not going?

Great Debates
21

I felt the same way when David Brinkley started hawking Archer Daniels Midland, but there ya go.

At least there’s a long history for this. The earliest such thing I can remember is the Vikings choosing the name GREENLAND. NASA is trying to be the Chamber of Commerce for the Greater Solar System Metropolitan Area. Which makes it ironic, and stupid (from their official point of view), that they opposed the Tourist in Space thing the Russians are trying out.

I used to be in total agreement with you, and still would be if government put enough of its own resources into space. There’s never been a frontier before where at least some people couldn’t just load up a wagon or take a boat trip or walk to get there, so it all has to be centrally carried out due to enormous costs.

22

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Tuckerfan *
**

Why do you think that our old retired Navy ships are sitting in dry dock? Why are the retired Air Force planes sitting out in the desert? Because if you threw even a small portion of that metal on the market we would go into a depression. Most of the scrap metal that comes from such a market is from trains and that is probably in an effort to subsidize them.

To go to the asteroids for metal we need a big project. Issac Asimov suggested building a shield around the sun. That would confine the energy from the sun and allow us to do more large projects. It’s in one of his books, which means it is like finding a needle in a haystack.

23

This is an absolutely ridiculous assertion. Compared to how much scrap metal there is in the U.S., the hulls of the various ships and aircraft in mothballs are a drop in the bucket. And if a new source of cheap steel was dropped on the market, it would IMPROVE the economy.

Most of the ships that are in mothballs are there because there is a finite chance that they will be useful again, or because sister ships are still in service so the mothballed ones become sources of spare parts. That goes for the aircraft too, which actually don’t have that much metal in them in terms of weight.

The other reason these things are sitting in mothballs is the same reason that auto yards are full of wrecked cars - because the metal value in them is not worth the cost of recycling them.

One of the major assumptions of science fiction writers in the 50’s to 80’s was that we were going to run out of metal, and the population would continue growing at a rate that would put severe population pressure on us. But in fact, the cost of most raw materials has been dropping throughout this century, and continues to drop, for the simple reason that advances in exploration and ore extraction have outstripped demand. If steel were ten times the price it is today, my guess is that there WOULD be people thinking about mining asteroids. But as long as there is plenty of steel available on Earth at reasonable prices, it simply makes no economic sense to go all the way out to the asteroid belt to get it. That will change one day, but it could be decades or centuries from now.

As for the OP, I don’t buy for a minute the notion that NASA and the government is stopping space exploration because they are worried about terrorists dropping rocks on us from the moon. This is a government that couldn’t figure out that a terrorist might fly a jet into a building. You give them WAY too much credit. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained through sheer stupidity. That goes triple for the government.

The real problem is that NASA has a monopoly on heavy lift, and there isn’t enough demand for heavy lift to warrant the development of new vehicles. There is plenty of demand for rockets to launch smaller payloads, and as a result there are lots of private companies doing just that. The Pegasus air-launched rocket, for example. And doesn’t Boeing have a floating sea platform for private satellite launch? And didn’t Alaska just open its new spaceport for polar satellite launches?

24

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Sam Stone *
**

Those two counterdict each other. If it will improve our economy then we should have the government subsidize the dumping of all that metal on the market.

I was given the facts I cited by someone working for the largest brokerage company of metal in the country. In looking it up in Google I was wrong in saying dry dock which is where they work on ships.

25

Sounds like Mr Smith got upset that the nasty USA didn’t keep on going into space like Bobby Heinlein promised. Does Smith look at the economics of it?

26

Let’s assume that the decision-makers have never read SF. Nor have they ever heard of Heinlein or any of his books. But it would be hard not to have heard about the dinosaur-killer theory. Might not that alone be enough to cause alarm bells to go off in their heads? As in, “Once people get into space, Earth will be helpless against them throwing big rocks at us – we’d better see to it that no one ever gets into space.”

At the same time, isn’t it likely that some government officials are just uncomfortable with the idea of people getting out from under? They don’t want people to have anywhere else to go, because if they did, many would.

27

I haven’t finished reading through the thread yet, but this line hit my jitter trigger.

Sam, in view of the restrictions on private development and the tendency of many to see NASA as a burden on the national budget (!), this is not surprising.

It reminds me strongly of the NY State Dept. of Transportation engineers who, when asked to review a suggestion for a new highway that would alleviate heavy traffic on two roads by building a new one across open land parallel to them, said in essence “but there’s no demand there now – nobody drives that route.” Right, dildohead – it’s open fields now!

I have never invested in fusion power – not because I don’t see it as the ideal solution to the question of future energy sources – but because it seems destined to be ignored and rejected by every decision-maker who cannot see beyond the next election.

“The markets for space” seem to be in the same boat.

What we need is another Heinlein.

28

Don’t get me wrong, guys. I am the biggest proponent of space exploration you’re likely to find, and I grew up reading every word Robert Heinlein wrote at least 10 times over. He is by FAR my favorite author, and I dearly wish we could have a spacefaring civilization such as he described. I also think that in the long run nothing is more important for mankind than to get off the Earth. As Heinlein himself said, the Earth is way too fragile a basket for mankind to keep all its eggs in.

But I’m also a realist. I understand that as long as NASA runs the show, we are unlikely to ever get anything but a horribly expensive, bloated space transport that is way too expensive for most space projects. We need a healthy competitive marketplace for space transport before we’ll see the kind of intense innovation that has made so many other expensive technologies drop in price and become available to all.

But the problem is that there just aren’t many markets for space at this time. For a while it looked like there was going to be a huge boom in satellite launch needs, but that market largely collapsed.

Asteroid mining? Please. The scope of such an endeavour is fantastic. It cost 30 billion dollars just to put a lousy 3-person space station in orbit. What’s it going to cost to build a factory employing hundreds in the asteroid belt? Or even just a manned ship to go out and prospect?

And sure, if you could get a metal-rich asteroid back to Earth you’d have a lot of metal, but you’d also collapse the price if that much became available.

If you want access to space, you need incrementalism. Space tourism is a real possibility, and once a market for that develops, THEN you’ll see aerospace companies working like mad to develop low-cost launch vehicles. Then when the price of launch comes down, you’ll see new markets for other space projects. That will stimulate more demand, and cause more launch development. In the meantime, we’ll learn how to live and work in space, and that may open up new possibilities for further exploration.

But this is a long, slow process. Maybe a decads to get the first profitable tourist business launched. Then decades of development before we can take the next step. I don’t believe any of us will see a real, large-scale existence in space for mankind in our lifetimes. Certainly not in the next 30 years.

We might get a chance to take a vacation in space in 20 years, and there might be suborbital flights that are as common as, say, the Concorde is. And we might see a manned program to Mars within 20 years.

But things will get exciting anyway. Within 10-15 years we will have interferometry telescope arrays in space that will let us image surface details on planets around other stars. That’s phenomenal. And Cassini will be at Saturn soon. And people like Burt Rutan will be building exciting new rockets that will have the promise of cheap launch.

Hazel: This is a government that ‘couldn’t imagine’ a scenario where a terrorist might crash an airplane in to a building, and I’m supposed to believe that they are thinking about terrorists building mass drivers on the moon? Not a chance. It’s also not a threat. ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ is a great book, but Heinlein got the details wrong. You could never hide the construction of something like that on the moon. Hell, we could detect the heat from such construction today, and our sensing technologies 50 years from now will be amazing. And if we ever get to the point where there is so much development on the moon that someone could hide the construction of something as huge as a mass driver launching railroad-car sized rocks we’ll also have technology to prevent such an attack. But really, no one’s thinking about that, and no one cares.

They DO care about the legal status of the moon, and there are treaties and such that have attempted to forbid any private development in space, but they are ‘justified’ on other grounds (usually just the typical socialist hatred of anything private companies might want to do, and a feeling that ‘important’ things should only be within the realm of government.)

29

Kniz Said:

Uh, no. I said that IF the steel were suddenly dropped on the market, it would improve the economy. Those battleships and old airplanes and cars and such can be looked at as metal mines that haven’t been exploited yet. Has the discovery of a rich vein of minerals anywhere ever destroyed an economy?

The problem is that it costs more to extract and recycle those metals than the metal itself is worth. That’s the real reason why those old ships and hulks of cars and planes are lying around. If metal were suddenly 10 times more expensive, you’d see an active effort to go around and recycle all the stuff we aren’t using now. But as long as recycling costs more than simply digging up new ore, there will be no incentive to do it.

30

Ah, but do govt officials have enough science/tech knowledge to realize that the “dropping rocks” scenario isn’t a threat? From the moon, anyway. Also, suppose the rock thowers are in the asteriods? At a time when there are people doing things at many asteroid locations? Finding out what sort of project any given heat source represented might too difficult, if there are thousands. It may not only be the IRS that can’t find us in the asteriods, but also the CIA, FBI, DEA, & BATF!

I agree that the attitude you describe exists. Absolutely. But I do think there is also a controlling mindset that fears any situation in which people are not under close observation and strict control. People with this mindset do not want even a small number of people to get out from under. More might follow. And the existance of a place with more freedom might cause unrest here at home: the curse of a good example.

31

Hazel I’d have to disagree that there is some sort of government conspiracy keeping us out of space. There are far too many economic factors to explain why we haven’t explored space more aggresively. I can certainly see the goverment becoming concerned if there were the potential for mass emigration. However, that’s so far from what’s currently economically feasible that there is no reason for the government to worry about it.

Having said that, It would be nice if private industry were to get involved in the human exploration of space. You may recall that, a few years ago, strong evidence of water ice turned up on the moon. At the time, there was an estimate that, if there were a source of water on the moon, a moon base could be established for “only” about 15 billion dollars. Wouldn’t it have been something if Bill Gates had said, “OK, I’ve got the cash,let’s go! Moonbase Microsoft, here we come!” Yes, there’s no immediate practical value of such a base but what a way to get into the history books!

BTW One of the biggest problems with the way space exploration is perceived is NASA. The have the astounding ability to take some of the greatest achievements of mankind and make them boring.

I remember when the first pictures of Io were due to come back. Big deal, right? First close-up images of Jupiter’s moons, very exciting. The press were all gathered at the big news conference waiting for the the first pictures to arrive, very tense, very thrilling. The first picture pops up on the screen and there is dead silence for at least 10 seconds while everyone stares at this marvel. The official NASA spokesmen finally breaks the silence and says, “It looks like a pepperoni pizza.” Not exactly, “Where no man has gone before”, is it?

32

Just as a note; since I brought up the value of a pure metal asteroid in Earth orbit, I’ll touch on it again. Perhaps the value of it is not in dollars based on the ground, but the fact that if you tow one (or otherwise safely place it) into Earth orbit, you now have mega or gigatons of metal redy to be used in any way you want, and you don’t have to launch it into orbit. It’s already there. Doing this will make it easier to build ships to other asteroids, or moons, or anywhere. Getting into orbit is half the problem (literally, as far as energy budget goes), so starting out there is a big boost.

33

My first impression on reading the article to which the OP linked is “what a fucking wackjob.”

The author thinks that corporations are an extension of the government. I don’t even know what that means.

Then, to support his thesis that NASA exists to control, rather than advance, space exploration, he claims that gun control laws led directly to the attack on the World Trade Center.

If the Libertarian party wants to be taken seriously, they better muzzle this guy.

[/quote]

Occam’s Razor needs to be applied here. The economics of space exploration mitigate against it. More specifically, the perceived economics of space exploration mitigate against serious research and development. That in itself is sufficient reason to explain the lackluster state of the space industry.

I agree with Sam: incremental development of space activities will prevail until the right set of circumstances occur for an explosion of development. Probably something like the dot-com bubble will need to happen, and in the fallout when the bubble bursts, there’ll be enough expertise, knowledge, and equipment lying around to make it viable, much like the Iridium satellite service was a total financial boondoggle until bankruptcy erased the 25 billion dollar development and implementation costs.

I’m sceptical that space tourism will take off, because I don’t think that there are enough Dennis Titos around. My bet for the first significant economic venture in space: snake oil. Take any vaguely disreputable medical treatment on which the rich can waste money, stick “zero gee” in front of the name, and a whole generation of hucksters will ride again. As an incidental benefit, the mechanics of profitable space business will be worked out, much in the same way that the porn industry did most of the hard work developing viable business models and payment methods for the Internet.

34

I don’t think space tourism will happen soon in the sense of giant space hotels or anything. But specialty use by private citizens will grow, including pleasure rides.

Think about the market just for Hollywood. James Cameron is already negotiating to try and make a movie in space - this is guy that spent 300 million making Titanic, and who’s company actually did a lot of significant marine engineering for The Abyss. Hollywood alone could spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year in space in the relatively near future.

Then there are companies like CNN or even space.com that might be interested in unique space enterprises. I remember doing the math on the number of hits of the ‘Pathfinder’ web site and realizing that if they could have found a way to charge even $1.00 from everyone who viewed that page they could have paid for the entire mission.

How about telepresence? Land a fleet of micro robots on the moon, and allow people to control them for a few minutes from a web page for a fee. A venture like that would need to orbit a satellite around the moon to relay the low-power signals from small robots, and could help finance itself by selling bandwidth to other lunar ventures.

There are applications out there that will help develop space, but they aren’t grand ideas like moving asteroids into Earth orbit - they are small projects that, in the process of being developed and flown will improve our technology and lower the cost of access, which will make even more projects profitable. Eventually, we’ll have real presence in space, but I don’t expect it soon.

35

For the life of me, I can’t imagine the benefit of filming in space. Space footage is more easily simulated with computer-generated graphics (and much more cheaply, too); same with weightlessness effects, which is done by taking an empty 747 and having it fly in a sine wave (which is how the astronauts were trained).

36

hansel, don’t you think people might be interested in seeing movies actually shot in space? Rather then something computer-generated? No matter how well done the computer-generated footage is, it’s not real. It’s sort of like seeing an animation rather then live action.

Re snake oil, would it need to be phoney? How about a retirement community on the moon? Gravity 1/6 that of Earth’s – a good environment for a frail elderly person. Or how about a spinning orbital habitat with a variety of gravitation levels, from zero gee at the center to, say, 1/2 gee at the edge?

Re L. Neil Smith, from what I gather, he and the official Libertarian Party have no use for each other. And re guns, like it or not, suppose going armed were commonplace in the US, including on airplanes. The Sept. 11th terrorist actions would not have been possible. The terrorists would have had to come up with some other plan.

37

Hansel: Some things are just not that easily done, and even with today’s CGI graphics there is still no substitute for the real thing. And Cameron is a believer in doing things for real. He didn’t *have to take a real submersible down to Titanic and shoot hundreds of reels of film, but it wouldn’t have been the same movie if he had. When they made The Abyss they designed their own working diving gear, and built the entire set underwater rather than rely on models and special effects.

So yeah, if filmmakers can get into space with enough of a crew and actors to shoot a movie there, for say a hundred million dollars or so, they’ll do it. If for no other reason than that a lot of big-time actors and directors are huge fans of space, and would do it just for an excuse to get up there. Tom Hanks would be there in a second.

38

I can think of a lot of space film and TV (later Star Trek series most prominently) that have already presented views of space that don’t seem animated, and against which any real footage would probably look bland.

“This is real space” would be a short-lived gimmick. And almost certainly, filmmakers would alter their footage for purposes of the film. Could Cameron better film 2001: A Space Odyssey in earth orbit?

This is an excellent idea, but I can’t picture it as a first generation space venture, since the people who live in retirement homes typically aren’t multi-millionaires. More like third-generation.

The reason I say “snake oil” is that I suspect the first successful commercial ventures would be ones that cater to eccentric rich people who would normally pay to fly to Switzerland to have the stem cells of stillborn calves injected into their eye pouches. Like Dennis Tito paying 20 million for a short trip to space, the initial customers will be people with more money than sense, since the costs will be ridiculous on any normal human scale.

There have been other threads discussing this, so I won’t take it up here. I will observe, though, that tying together gun control and space exploration in a short essay is not a winning strategy for either position.

39

I should have credited Heinlein for the “old age homes on the moon” idea. It was in an article he wrote cira 1950 discussing what the next 50 years might bring.

40

The point to me in all quasi-debates on space is that both sides fail to do a full cost-benefit analysis. Yes, it is absolutely certain that we will learn things that we cannot otherwise if we pursue a thoroughgoing space program. Yes, there are resources out there that are either scarce or easily depletable on Earth’s surface. How much will it cost (either economically or in resource diversion terms) to get to them and to develop them? Is it worth it to Joe Taxpayer? If it is in the long run, to what extent does this justify the expenditure in the short run? These are valid (if subjective) questions that space advocates should try to answer to the best of their ability. And the “proofs” that space is a boondoggle give absolutely no shrift to the results to date, and tend to compare the results ridiculously. ("$1,000,000 a pound to ship moon rocks back to earth?" Right, and it cost several hundred million to build the transmission antenna on top of the World Trade Center – if you assume the sole purpose of building the WTC complex was to hold up the broadcast tower!!)