Menzo
4555
Yeah I don’t know, nor does anyone else. I don’t think it’s weird to think that what Bezos is doing is frivolous. Maybe it is. But society is filled with frivolous things, so to me it’s kinda weird to specifically angry about this one.
I dunno, I think you can make an argument for the importance / value / benefit of a genuine effort at space exploration while still thinking that what Bezos is doing doesn’t really qualify as that effort.
I mean, we’re angry about the yachts, too.
But of course that anger is about the wealth gap, not space travel.
I still say if you want to find a community of people to rally against space exploration in any form, Qt3 ain’t your place! :D
Menzo
4558
Which is perfectly valid IMO. The good news is that I think we could tax Bezos on his wealth and he’d still somehow manage to be able to fly to space whenever he wants. Win/win!
Timex
4559
Imagine if we had done what those people said, and instead of embracing space flight, we had devoted that money to eradicating poverty.
Today…we’d still have poverty, because that amount of money would not have fixed it… but we’d also be without the multitude of scientific advances that came through the space program.
Turns out, most people don’t really have any vision when it comes to doing big things.
So criticizing Bezos = being anti-spaceflight throughout history? Dude, get off the cross.
Lemme ask you: what has Bezos done, at all, that is an advancement over what SpaceX already did years ago? I’m all for R&D in this area, but Branson bopping around in a spaceplane and Bezos making a . . . rocket? isn’t really knocking my socks off, advancement-wise.
Timex
4561
I was talking about the folks who, at the time, said, “This is such a waste of time and effort.” Indeed, tons of people have said that through the entirety of the space program’s existence, even AFTER it resulted in amazing new things.
Now, you’re saying this is a big waste of time and effort, but you really don’t know what their overall roadmap is, right? I don’t. But I’m 99% sure that it’s not just Bezos riding up into space. So I’m not really gonna say that he’s wasting his time and effort.
Also… it’s his money anyway, so whatever.
All of these guys laid the groundwork to launch their own commercial spacecraft. Just because they haven’t done some totally new stuff yet doesn’t mean that it’s not coming… because this is essentially a required step to get to any of the new stuff.
Like I said, the fact that they sent up some rich civilians really isn’t the end goal here.
Sure, it’s easy to point at the Clock of the Long Now and say that it’s a waste of money or whatever, but I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the overall work the foundation is doing.
an effort to preserve all languages that have a high likelihood of extinction over the period from 2000 to 2100.
a linguistic project whose stated mission is to overcome language barriers to human rights, information, and opportunities.
- Seminars about long-term thinking
focused on long-term policy and thinking, scenario planning, singularity and the projects of the foundation. The seminars are available for download in various formats from The Long Now Foundation.[11] They are intended to “nudge civilization toward making long-term thinking automatic and common”.[12] Topics have included preserving environmental resources, the deep past and deep future of the sciences and the arts, human life extension, the likelihood of an asteroid strike in the future, SETI, and the nature of time.
Well look, if all you do is throw out one-liners then how is anyone supposed to reconstruct the argument that you might be making in your head, but never got round to actually typing into the forum?
Blue Origin may fail at achieving their goals, but your original comment didn’t acknowledge that those goals existed and implied that the purpose of Blue Origin was purely space tourism for the rich. By focusing on the “spacecraft” (the small and cheap bit) and hand-waving away the actual engineering achievement of the reusable launcher, you chose a framing device that seems designed for a snarky dismissal rather than a fair evaluation.
So now it’s clearer what you’re getting at, I’d still say you’re creating an unnecessarily hostile framing here, comparing New Shepard to Mercury - Redstone without mentioning that New Shepard is a launcher built for a fraction of the price of Redstone or Atlas, and is genuinely reusable. Something NASA never achieved despite all those billions spent.
Theorists and enthusiasts have for decades been touting space tourism as a source of the development money that would drive a commercial space industry. We’re now getting to see in practice whether those ideas made sense.
In the case of Blue Origin, it’s clearly a source of short to medium term money to fill the gap left by the government contracts they failed to win while completing the development of their full-size orbital launcher. In the case of Virgin Galactic, even though the goals are purely tourism, the money being spent is still funding companies like Scaled Composites and building the capacity of private industry to research new materials and designs and build new engines and vehicles.
What did it cost to develop New Shepard, and how much did the development build on prior work? I have no idea. What does it cost per launch for each New Shepard flight, and how does that compare to your typical Atlas launch? Again, I have no idea.
What I do know is that there’s not much to be gained in terms of space exploration by spending your effort on launch vehicles that can’t achieve orbit or on tourist pods to set atop those launch vehicles.
Matt_W
4565
It’s not actually clear what amazing new things have resulted from crewed spaceflight. I’m tepidly in favor of it and think the moon landing was a breathtaking achievement, but almost all the benefits of spaceflight are from having robots up there, not people.
It’s difficult to imagine any kind of commercial spaceflight endeavor that could be profitable except tourism and launch services. There will be no space construction project on any scale that will ever be profitable in a self-sustaining way, at least not on any timescale that matters, and probably not ever given the inevitable collapse of technological civilization in the climate apocalypse. The words he’s using to justify Blue Origin’s existence are nonsense… moving industries off earth? Millions of people in orbit? Will never happen.
Timex
4566
Crewed spaceflight has led to unique scientific research conducted in space aboard the ISS.
Ya, you’ll forgive me if I don’t take your word on this kind of thing, because I don’t think you really have any basis for such a far reaching prediction.
Matt_W
4567
I could be wrong, but I think very little far-reaching research has been done on the ISS. And most of the meatiest stuff has to do with human spaceflight, so is self-justifying.
You can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the costs of space industry and realize pretty quickly that it’s not ever going to be profitable to manufacture stuff or process raw materials in space for use on earth. Not without pie-in-the-sky tech like a space elevator. Maybe someday space-based construction of space-based facilities, but I don’t think there’s any economic incentive to do that.
Timex
4568
I’m not going to bother trying to explain why the unique research facility of the ISS and the work it does meets whatever bar you have for what constitutes important work. But I’ll point out that the self justifying research on human space flight is also required for future efforts in manned space flight, like colonization of Mars.
Now, certainly if you do not see value in such human endeavors, then I guess we won’t see eye to eye on that.
Consider that you probably don’t know what’s going to be economically profitable in the future. Very few people do, and they tend to become insanely rich as a result.
Matt_W
4569
I mean it would be easy to just point to some.
This will never happen. You’re right, we’re not going to see eye to eye on that. It would be far far far easier to colonize the bottom of the ocean or Antarctica or the Terran sky.
Colonization of Mars may be possible, on a timescale of thousands of years, beginning with a small population in tandem with some kind of terraforming and/or engineering feats.
Is it worth doing? In the short term, it’s hard to see why. In the long term it seems to me there are advantages to the species to have footprints on multiple worlds. In the looooooooooooooong term there is the fact that we will all die if we never leave Earth, but that’s like a billion+ years hence, and of course the times involved beggar anything human or historical. Still, someday Earth is going to become uninhabitable just because of what stars do, and if there is any sentient life there at that time, they are gonna be pretty unhappy.
I want us to go into space, but I suppose I have been contaminated by Star Trek and all that. If we wait until we solve all the problems in the world before we go, then we just won’t go, because we will never solve all the problems in the world.
I also chafe at the idea of limitations. The whole ‘because it’s there’ thing. If it is within physics for humans to go into space and stay there, I kinda want it to happen, because otherwise it means that we’re stuck, and being stuck is no fun. Of course, it’s not my ass on that rocket ship, but plenty of people seem more than willing to go.
I feel pretty positively about the Bezos/Musk/Branson stuff, though if they are doing this instead of Gates Foundation-esque philanthropy, of course you can knock that. As to the fact that they’re basically recapitulating shit NASA did 60 years ago - fair enough. But c’mon NASA, you were supposed to be on Mars by the '90s. (Granted, the robot probes have been absolutely amazing.)
Need a Space elevator to send heavy equipment, etc. to Space. Do-able with today’s tech, but expensive. Not impossible.
Timex
4572
Or you could Google it.
If you are going to argue about how none of the research conducted in the unique environment of the ISS is important, I’m not that interested.
Like I said before, you’ll forgive me if I don’t take your predictions as gospel. I don’t really think you know what you’re talking about.
You don’t have any idea what’s going to happen. We are far enough along on the technology development curve, that you have no idea what the world is going to look like at the end of your own lifetime, much less a century in the future.
That kind of depends, but prior to the Branson/Bezos’ flights, a grand total of 300 people in the past 60 years have gone to Space. Every single one needed to be working for the Gov’t, as either Military or Civilian.
This is a start towards changing that. Einstein wasn’t a Gov’t contractor for his Science, and the Gov’t may not be the gatekeepers to Space Science any more.
That is how Frontiers get explored.
Houngan
4574
True, but Frontiers seems a bit grand. Right now there’s about zero to be learned from shooting up non-scientists with no tests to perform. The only thing we learned from Branson and Bezos is that they didn’t die. Einstein, which is a great example but maybe in the different direction, didn’t need the government because he was so flippin’ brilliant he could dope out fundamental truths about reality while riding his bicycle. He certainly didn’t require private tourism to do it. Also a penchant for exposing himself to women, but I digress.
The idea that governments retard the advancement of science is a bit shaky, IMO. At a certain level such as space flight, you need those resources to even get in the game. Right now the only people doing science in space is still NASA, because they don’t have to turn a profit. SpaceX is a taxi cab model, and Blue Origin and Virgin are either people riding jet skis claiming to be marine biologists or someone reinventing a sixty-year-old wheel.
As far as gatekeeping, it’s not the government doing it, it’s the incredibly high cost of entry. The government is the one spending extra dollars to do speculative stuff, not the private sector.
