Will China's lack of democracy give it a leg up in the next wave of human space exploration? Michael Hanlon argues the next big step in space exploration takes too much time for a democracy to fund it.
It may simply be that space exploration is incompatible with US democracy. A Mars shot would take four presidential terms at least. No president will ask taxpayers to fund something he won't be around to take credit for.
He's probably right given the way we've approached space exploration to date. As long as we approach space exploration as something to do with small incremental improvements in technology we are going to spend vast sums for stunts of little lasting significance (e.g. the Apollo program to the Moon). I question the utility of spending 16 years and large sums of money to go to Mars for a brief human visit.
I think in terms of enabling the next big step in human colonization. Why go if you can't stay? We really need to develop far cheaper technologies for space launch and space travel. Spending big money to develop conservatively designed rockets for a Mars trip does not develop the level of technology we need to move enough stuff and safely move enough people to Mars to set up a permanent colony.
The Apollo program and moon shots should teach us that getting to some place at high cost per trip and without staying power ends up turning into a short term stunt that leaves no enduring presence off-planet. Great video. Some cool rocks. But then no further action for decades.
The space shuttle and space station are boring and not accomplishing much.
Another big problem is the legacy of some terrible decisions that left NASA with the expensive, dangerous space shuttle and a white-elephant space station that manages the feat of making space seem as dull as cardboard. The whole thing is a mess.
The space shuttle is old technology and highly cost ineffective. Funding it has provided video footage of people hurling into space. But it hasn't done anything to advance the state of the art for space launch for a very long time.
Funding the usage of old space technology is a waste that is done as a form of entertainment. The proposed Mars mission would use pretty conventional technology for space launch and for interplanetary travel. I see this as a waste of time. We need bigger steps forward that can lower costs and drastically cut risks. A space elevator made using nanotechnology could radically slash the cost of reaching low Earth orbit. To get to Mars a nuclear electric plasma propulsion system could transport humans in less than 6 weeks.
For humans to travel safely to Mars and beyond, it will be important to make the trip as quickly as possible and thereby reduce the crew's exposure to weightlessness and space radiation. With today's chemical rockets, a round-trip to Mars would take over two years, with much of that time spent waiting for the right planetary alignment to return. More rapid transits are possible with a VASIMR® propulsion system powered by a nuclear-electric generator. With 12 megawatts of electrical power, a ship could reach Mars in less than four months and with 200 megawatts of power the outbound trip could be as short as 39 days.
Our first priority for space exploration should be the development of technologies that make a human presence off-planet sustainable and low risk. Fast cheap safe transportation is a key piece of the puzzle.
By Randall Parker at 2009 November 24 06:57 PM Space ExplorationWhat are the benefits of space travel? Peter Diamandis, of X-Prize fame, talks about mining asteroids for profit. Sure, someday.
In the meantime, I'm much more concerned with Randall's principle of "First, don't die." In other words, space tourism would be fun, but on the other hand, "surprise brain cancer" is one of the worst surprises.
We had better hurry, since at the rate the Earth is warming there will soon be no dry land left on which to live. Waterworld will be an understatement. Pati Freedman and his seastead lagoons may be the only way besides space migration that humans will survive.
Seriously, global warming is killing us all and the Chinese are smart to look for a way out.
Jim Bowery
PO Box 1981
La Jolla, CA 92038
Phone: 619/295-8868
Space News April 14, 1993
Springfield, VA 22159
To the editor:
Sooner or later, we must recognize that the government's best technology
investment is no investment at all -- it is the purchase of desired results.
Therefore, It would seem that proposals to lease space on privately developed
space facilities are the way to go.
However, Bruce Webbon's article "Make Station a Private Enterprise" feeds the
fallacy in our current technology paradigm when he says private enterprise,
rather than government, should build a space station because "the risk
inherent in offering the necessary facilities and services is minimal." Mr.
Webbon asks us to believe that the public sector is better equipped to take on
and manage technical risk than the private sector.
This begs the questions:
Is the government more intelligent about making technology investments? If
not, then do government dollars grow on trees? If so, then why is the
government demanding that I send it so much of my income?
In truth, the government functions best in proven areas with the least risk
such as roads, law enforcement and human capital. Government is the worst
where there are many politically acceptable excuses for failure, such as
technology development.
Since we, unlike our former communist enemies, have qualms about shooting or
imprisoning our public sector bureaucrats when they fail, we must leave the
risks of failure in those areas where accountability is inherent, such as in
the military and commerce.
When that happens, our long national malaise will be over.
Sincerely,
Jim Bowery
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.space/browse_thread/thread/a41465a1e22c0a5/76fdab6aff201e3
Jim,
The US government ought to offer prize money for construction of solar-powered ion propulsion space craft that accomplish various goals such as traveling to the Moon's orbit or a Lagrange point.
Democracy just means that you get a government that the people support. If people in America are short sighted, the government will be short sighted. If more Americans were pro free market, or more Americans were anti-immigration, than Market bailouts would stop, and immigration would be stopped. As the US electorate becomes increasingly heterogeneous and ideologically divided, expect politics to go in that directions.
We should let semi-autonomous robots lead the way into space. They can mine near-Earth asteroids and comet cores for water and building materials, and prepare habitats for more fragile humans. Build the robots to look like Mickey Mouse and they can be entertaining as well.
I believe that self-sufficiency, in other more hostile worlds, will likely require the use of molecular machinery that can self-repair and expand colonies or terraform if desired.
As the US electorate becomes increasingly heterogeneous and ideologically divided, expect politics to go in that directions.
GS, as we become ever more divided, expect politicians to become ever more united. In many ways, politicians like having lots of small competing factions in the electorate, because these groups are easier to buy.
Flash Program,
Yes, once on Mars we need nanobots to do manufacturing because with so few humans economies of scale won't be possible. We'll also need genetically engineered organisms that can grow food, fiber, and structural elements.
We aren't ready to go to Mars to set up a colony even if transport was a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper. Our tech requires too much scale to make more of it on Mars. Self sufficiency of colonists will become more achievable with advances in nanotech and genetic engineering. But that'll take a couple of decades.
The US military space program is over $20 billion annually. The US manned space program currently cost less than $10 billion a year (about a month occupying Iraq). And China spends much less than this on their man space program. So our manned space program really isn't that expensive.
The fundamental problem with the US manned space program is that it is primarily an exploratory (even though robots are substantially cheaper) program or a political and public relations program (we just like the idea of having folks in space and meeting folks from other countries) instead of a colonization program. But many people are not comfortable with the thought of extraterrestrial colonization since they're use to viewing Earth as the center of the universe.
But I actually think most people would be strongly in favor of a colonization program! And it really wouldn't cost much more than we're already spending on the current shuttle (~3 billion a year) and space station (~2 billion a year) once the new beyond LEO transportation system is developed (~3 billion a year).
There's no logical reason why we couldn't land a couple of habitat modules a year with bedroom size interiors on the lunar surface every year: that's 10 habitat modules in five years, 20 in ten years. And 100 meter in diameter inflatable domes sent to the lunar surface could provide a lot more space for a lunar facility.
> global warming is killing us all
Unless something is done soon, CO2 emissions from SUVs and coal plants will cause runaway solar system warming, making every planet and moon in outer space uninhabitable.
@Xian Fui - perhaps you've been out of touch for the last week. Maybe you should Google "climategate"
... But I digress; this post is about space exploration, not about global warmingBOO!.
I see no reason that the free market approach to space exploration could not lead the way to colonizing the solar system. I would gladly - and I'm sure many millions of other people would - sign any liability waiver for a chance to be a space pioneer.
@Randall - I would rather that government holds off on doing an "X prize" until private enterprise starts one. I'd rather see government sweeten the pot, so to speak. Say, match whatever private X prize money is out there, not the other way around. That being said, I agree in part that democracy will probably not be the way we conquer the solar system. I believe free market is the way.
IMO government, at minimum, just needs to get out of the way.
Goret,
I like your expansive worrying. Not a provincial Earther who only thinks about the effects of CO2 in your own neighborhood.
But I like to see opportunities in potential disaster. In this case fun climate engineering technologies including unmanned automated robotic water spray mist ships could cool the planet Earth and avert disaster.
@Xian Fui - perhaps you've been out of touch for the last week. Maybe you should Google "climategate"
Man, this is happening on every blog. Its really funny to see how many GWs are hooked into Pravda. When the MSM refuses to report, their followers look stupid.
I think in the future we will realize that many of the things once considered incompatible with democracy will be found merely to be incompatible with a left-leaning media intent on hastening the US' adoption of socialism and/or social "justice."
"Seriously, global warming is killing us all and the Chinese are smart to look for a way out."
Phooyey, Fui, you need to check out Climiquiddick and get over this fraud perpetrated myth. Anyway, if the Chinese are looking for a way out, they are looking for a way out of the pollution they themselves are generating and will just take the same polluting life-style with them to implant where ever they are going.
The problem with space is that it was based on childhood cultural imprinting.
We were exposed to this meme as kids. Spacecraft would rocket around the solar system (or wider universe)! Exploration! Adventure! When we got a bit older, alien women! This was how the future was going to be.
So, along comes NASA, and it looks like those tropes are going to become real. Abandoning NASA (and travel into space in general) would feel like betraying the future. Notions that reinforced the meme we accepted (being careful not to look too closely to see if they actually made sense). Arguments that contradicted the meme we rejected and hyper-criticized (even if the criticisms were often shallow and flawed). Those pandering to the memes were idolized; those pointing out the emperor had no clothes were demonized.
But in the end, fantasy has to give way to reality. We're now at the point where the wave of disillusion has crashed through the general public and most of the former fans.
No, China's not going to grab the solar system. Economic realities apply to them as well as to us. The grand fantasies of space colonization were castles built on clouds. It's time to grow up and move on.
If, at some point in the distant future, wider exploitation of space becomes economically rational, there's no reason why democracies should have any harder a time going out there than authoritarian states. One aspect of being economically rational is having a short payback time, and being attractive to private efforts. If you need government to invest in something, it's a strong indicator the investment isn't a good one.
Wasn't it Bob Zubrin who said that the USA couldn't go to Mars in 20 years, so we'd have to do it in 10? (2 presidential terms plus one Congress.)
There's plenty of attractive stuff in space. One small earth-crossing asteroid could provide materials for a good-sized solar power satellite. Cheap energy means economic superiority, and whoever commands the high ground has military superiority.
Our pols and public are too stupid to see this, and won't try to pry anything loose from the destructive interest groups to make it happen. We could have fixed poverty with a one-child policy for people who can't support themselves, and now they're too big a voting bloc to revoke their subsidies.
GS said at November 25, 2009 7:55 AM:
Democracy just means that you get a government that the people support.
Democracy is mob rule. It's two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
A republic is a well-armed sheep ...
Engineer Poet: Are you assuming that a solar power satellte could be built in space starting from raw ore? That would be a huge challenge.
Also, there's plenty of space-colonization oriented research which could be done cheaply here on Earth or on the ISS. We need to build closed-cycle ecological systems and figure out how to make them sustainable. There are very few such facilities in existence, and one of them (Biosphere 2) failed due to unforeseen issues such as unexpected sequestration of carbon dioxide.
E-P,
I do not see the point of trying to colonize until it is cheap to do so. It might make sense to go hunting for minerals as you suggest. But my guess is we need better propulsion systems to use to move the asteroids to where we can use them. Just finding the right asteroid to move (mineral wise) won't be easy. Plus, we need much better tech for doing the manufacturing. So I do not see that happening any time soon.
You don't have to colonize space to grab materials from it. Just sifting a dustball for metals and rolling them into sheet could do quite a bit. Sheet can be made into mirrors and a host of other things, and solar heat can accomplish quite a bit without much in the way of tech. You propel things by sifting the rock for raw materials and throwing away what you don't want as reaction mass.
Gerry O'Neill and his crew did a bunch of work with a "beam builder" which took a spool of sheet (a metal tape, more or less) and used bending and spot-welding to produce structures. If someone comes up with a chemical system which could convert silicates into silicon and be operated on a spacecraft, that plus metal sheet/foil gives you most of what you need for vacuum-deposited PV cells. Leave the people on the ground.
Yes, we need better tech. I don't think that's the expensive part, it mostly takes a few hundred good brains, some decent labs and quiet time to get work done.
I was pondering the idea of rolling metal into sheet and using light pressure to ship it where desired, but my quick BOTE calculation finds that 24-gauge sheet metal makes a lousy solar sail; it would accelerate at perhaps 11 cm/sec/day. However, if metal can be rolled into sufficiently thin foil, the resource sifted from asteroidal regolith could be turned into its own propulsion system to bring it back to Earth.
Only private industry would be stimulated to take on a bold mission like landing and mining an NEO for it's goods but it's at least 30 yrs away. Like the author said propulsion needs to become cheap and this depends on new(out of the box)technology. I do believe towards the later part of the 2040's the private sector will be in employing people on NEO's the moon and beyond. Exploration/science doesn't pay the private space sectors investors, turn around on the investments do. The government will continue it's slow and deliberate exploration projects as usual because they have justify tax payer funds. Ad Astra ppl.
It may simply be that space exploration is incompatible with US democracy. A Mars shot would take four presidential terms at least. No president will ask taxpayers to fund something he won't be around to take credit for. It has more to do with congressman making sure he/she get's elected the next time around. The congressmen representing those states receiving most of the tax payer money which supports Nasa and or those contractors which make the rockets and systems may rally harder for it's district. Basically the president's hands are tied to an extent. Mr Kennedy was president in a unique in our countries history and equally proposed the moon when it was new and interesting to us and the world, it's very hard to get he general public now away from reality tv.