Indeed. I recall coming across the Sky Car in (IIRC) the late 1980s, when it was the next great idea, and just about to become operational. Not much seems to be different today.
Well 30 years ago I used to dream about what it would be like to have a huge, room-sized personal super-computer at my disposal. What a silly dream.
Oh, wait.
No, lev, the American political culture is biased towards private-sector action as the default position, whereas government action is what you always have to make a case for. That’s tradition. That the private sector often (by no means always) is more economically efficient than the public is incidental.
Strictly speaking, all of the ISS modules were built by private contractors, albeit with funds from the public coffers. NASA builds virtually no spaceflight hardware of their own. Ditto for the ESA, and the Russian Space Agency is essentially a clearinghouse for private contractors who actually run the operational aspects of their space program as well as built the hardware. In any case, Scaled Composites’ suborbital flights scarcely qualify as space tourism on the scale that compares in any way to a permanent human presence.
I’d love to see a permanent human presence in space, and I think it would be of eventual great benefit to mankind, but a cost-effective effort is going to require both technological and political breakthroughs. The technological ones are straightforward but require significant development: a cheap, reliable ground-to-orbit capability for both personnel and heavy cargo; a habitat system capable of synthecizing gravity via rotation and providing shielding against solar and cosmic radiation outside of the Earth’s magnetosphere (for orbits above LEO); a propulsion system that allows high specific impulse, long duration thrust; self-enclosed environmental systems; and the necessary mining, energy generating, or other technologies to make a presence economically sustainable. There are resources in space–even in near planetary orbit–to fundamentally alter our world economy in ways we are barely even able to consider. But being able to extract these resources, while not an insurmountable challenge, will require decades of not only advancement of technology but also of manufacturing and processing methods in a free-fall, vacuum environment.
Some will, as Liberal does, poo-poo human presence with the argument that the hazards are too great. Such arguments should not be dismissed out of hand; it is certainly no exaggeration to say that environmental failure or exposure to a solar flare can be immediately lethal. But there are ways of mitigating these hazards; despite the fact that the RMS Titanic broke apart and sank, killing more than 1500 people, we have since built larger cruise ships that ply the North Sea without catastrophe. Safe spaceflight and space habitation is a matter of gaining a better understanding and appreciation for the potential hazard and building systems that are as fail-safe as possible; comparing the current state of the art and safety record to the potential future is like comparing travelling around the South Pacific in a canoe to sailing 'round the world in the QM II.
As for the political issue; this is far more damning. Such an effort requires a consistant policy and support, as well as an agenda based not upon mere showmanship, stunt missions, or one-upping the Joneskis (or the Chans) but on a continuous effort to expand, develop, and improve, with the ultimate goal of making space habitation not only economically viable but preferred for resource extraction (mining) and heavy or polluting industry. One questions whether any goverment has the wherewithall to sustain such an effort over a long term, and private industry has to show profits on their quarterlies in order to maintain investor confidence.
Someone will, someday (or humanity will be wiped out by some catastrophic disaster, possibly of our own making). But will it be in our lifetimes? It seems unlikely at this point.
JM$.02
Stranger
Up less than the distance from Charlotte to Atlanta, sure. But the OP is asking about a permanent human presence in outer space. That means a completely self-sustaining population that can cope with things like bullet sized meteors smashing into its protective structures at 50 kilometers per second.
No . . . a “completely self-sustaining population” would be a population of humans who were born in space, intend to spend their whole lives and raise their own families in space (or at least on planets other than Earth), and who could survive, at least for a time, if cut off from all contact with Earth. And I hope that will exist one day. But for purposes of this thread, I’m not aiming so high. See the OP.
I reject the premise that self-sustaining equates to aboriginal. An iron pebble will puncture the shielding of native and visitor alike.
So it will. Is there any technical solution to that?
Even back then, you (and many others) had better plans than “tourism” for such computers.
This is complete horseshit.
From the Expedition 12 Press Kit(PDF), pp. 39ff:
Pages 32ff of the STS-107 Press Kit(PDF), the final flight of Columbia, is dripping with experiments. Granted, some them are in fact high school science experiments, but providing a platfom for students to conduct such experiments is exactly what I would expect of a government space agency.
I disagree. I believe the lure of space tourism will turn a profit, once critical safety issues are worked out.
I suppose we thought computers would cure cancer or something, but as it turns out, they’re really just good for fragging bad guys in Halo tournaments.
Such with space. Maybe someone will develop a new medicine utilizing “zero gravity” but the real money’s going to be in zero gee sex, and lunar spelunking.
To be fair, there are a few other applications.
I’ll be happy to grant that if a way is found to drive the cost of space travel down in a way comparable to what’s been done with computing power, then we’re in luck. I don’t see quite how this will happen, but then few people saw it with computers 30 years ago.
There is a way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
Of course, it still needs a little work . . .
Hey! I wanna be the rock hard realist and not the guy in tights spreading fairy dust about our Star Trek future … but my role in this thread isn’t playing out that way. reaching for my dust
To me the big difference between the Government vs. Private is that all Private has to do is provide light, heat and windows. The Government needs extensive scientific justification. For instance, taking the the ISS as an example (where we always go for cost comaprisons) we really just need the initial mission in order to have a place were a few Millionaires can rotate out on a permanant basis.
Further, no one has mentioned Bigelow I don’t know if it is because we think it is pie in the sky (hehe) or what - but when we step back and look at it we have a major airline planning tourist flights to space and a major hotel chain with what looks like a realistic chance to put humans permanently into space in the next decade – maybe not (ever) the 50 in the OP – but, again, live to see I am taking as the next 50 years – that timeline is greater than the time-space from 1956 (pre-orbit, pre-NASA itself) to now. 50 years has proven to be a long time in flight and space technology .
From a (rah-rah) website Bigelow’s plan
*Robert Bigelow says when he started the project in 1998 he decided he could afford to put $500 million of his own funds into the effort by 2015 to achieve launch of full-scale hardware by then.
He says, however, that developments at his North Las Vegas plant and at his nearly two dozen subcontractors have put him as much as five years ahead of schedule, with at least the chance of launching the first 20-25-ton Nautilus for unmanned tests by 2008 and placing a crew on board that first unit as early as 2010. *
Throw in the liklihood somebody is going to throw manned bases on the moon/in orbit and again, I say “Yes”
:smack: the liklihood somebody is going to throw manned MILITARY bases on the moon/in orbit and again,
Yes. I mentioned it in the other threads. The moon is littered wth lava tubes. The ‘rilles’ you see on the moon are Lava tubes that collapsed while the moon was still geologically active. But it’s assumed that there are still plenty of them left, and now that the moon is geologically stable they will last for millions of years. Some could be near the surface, others could be miles below the surface. They could be hundreds of feet in diameter and miles long.
If we could find a suitable tube, big enough for a large habitation but small enough to be able to work with, we could coat the inside with a barrier, fill it with air and heat it. Voila - an underground city where hundreds or even thousands of people could live. According to the cite below, the largest ones could be half a mile in diameter and hundreds of miles long - large enough for a million people. They would be protected from solar radiation and micro-meteorites. If we can find enough water on the moon, we can create an atmosphere and provide water for farming and drinking. It’s not too hard to imagine a colony in such a place that is either self-sustaining or at least capable of providing for itself for several years without resupply.
See here for more details
That’s fine for a Lunar colony, but is there any way a free-floating colony or station could be reliably shielded from meteorites?
Meteors (meteorites are actually meteors that have crashed on the surface of a planet or moon) are not quite the hazard they’re made out to be. There’s certainly a lot of them out there–the Earth is hit by millions a day–but most aren’t large enough to do more than surface cratering of hardened steel. Even the impact of a larger one isn’t necessarily going to be catastrophic; the dramatic flash and sound effects someone sees in a large meteor are due to compression of the atmosphere. Striking a hollow can, they’re likely to just punch through. One assumes that any large habitat is both going to be seperated into some kind of compartments and/or have the faculties for self-sealing repair. In any case, larger impacts are exceedingly rare; between Skylab, the Salyut stations, Mir, and the ISS, none have seen an impact which compromised environmental or structural integrity; the much greater concern is being struck by artificial orbital debris which trashes up Low Earth Orbit.
Radiation, on the other hand, is a hazard that can’t just be sealed off; charged particles can be deflected by a strong magnetic field, of course, but uncharged radiation or highly energetic particles (cosmic radiation) can only be stopped by shielding–probably a combination of water, fluoidated boron, and massy (thick iron or lead) cladding. ([thread=346295]Here[/thread]'s a recent thread on radiation hazards in space.) By the time you’ve laid all that stuff up, you’re protected against small intrusions. Larger ones are just luck of the draw, but given that we’ve had great success in building vessels that travel hundreds of feed below the ocean’s surface withstanding thousands of psi of pressure, mitigating small punctures in spacecraft or habitats is not an insurmountable challenge. A big, fast one–the size of a basketball or larger–could do real, unpreventable, unrecoverable damage, but the incidence of such an impact is exceedingly rare in Earth-Luna system orbit.
Long term–on the order of centuries–we’re going to have to figure out how to occupy space without bringing along all the extra water and proteins and requisite support systems that are such a mass-waste, but that gets into the realm of extreme speculation.
Stranger
Not without lots and lots of mass.
What Stranger On A Train said. Small meteor impacts will be dealt with by the thick shielding we’ll have to have anyway, due to the radiation. Larger impacts are so vanishingly rare as to be meaningless. Anything big enough to wipe you out is also detectable well in advance.