5 ms·
As someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s, I still yearn wistfully for the space race's unity and determination of purpose. It's hardly appropriate for HN, but
by bloopernova 8y ago
As someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s, I still yearn wistfully for the space race's unity and determination of purpose.
It's hardly appropriate for HN, but I wonder how differently the world would look if NASA had received a much larger budget. Probably taken from the US Military's allocation, how much would the loss of half of the US Navy have affected world politics and conflicts? Or what would the USA look like without the Iraq war of 2003 onward?
(I'm trying to be as neutral as possible in my language here, I don't want to start a flamewar about US and geopolitics!)
I doubt we'd have gotten further into space as some of us would like, but I do think we'd have already proven that asteroid mining can work, and some people would be living multi-year tenures on the Moon. Whether we'd have bootstrapped our way to mining and using nuclear materials in space is doubtful, but certainly possible. (in other words, building nuclear rockets that have never been close to Earth's biosphere, which would open up large parts of the Solar System for human exploration)
- mdorazio 8y agoCheck out this amazing plan from Rockwell produced in the 80s to see what that might have looked like [1]. I have a print out of it I like to look at once in a while to remind me what could have been possible if we had different priorities. [1] http://i.imgur.com/ntBHE.png http://i.imgur.com/ntBHE.png
- bloopernova 8y agoWOW That's an astonishing presentation of data/intent. I will have to see if I can find that as a vector and/or get a large format print. That's beautiful! EDIT: Here's a vector! https://cdn.makezine.com/uploads/2013/07/integratedspaceplan2.pdf https://cdn.makezine.com/uploads/2013/07/integratedspaceplan... (Found via Google, searching using "The Rockwell International Integrated Space Plan")
- chris_mc 8y agoI'm so depressed that humans won't ever achieve this. We'll fight and continue to hedonistically chase profit until we destroy ourselves.
- adventured 8y agoYou've got that exactly backwards. The pursuit of profit, which is the pursuit of greater productivity, is what makes it possible to pay ever increasing amounts of taxes, which provides for a radical improvement in the welfare of people on the planet. Just ask China. They went from being an anti-profit, anti-market country of near absolute poverty, to a heavily for-profit economy, lifting nearly a billion people out of poverty, and providing for an extraordinary base of increasing savings derived from profit (income beyond expenses). So much for destroying us, humanity has never been better off on average than it is today. Profit is a store of prior productive action that enables you to make future investments. To curse that is absurdity defined. It's the only reason we're all alive, it's a base requirement of all civilization (unless you like the odds of survival when you're living moment to moment, betting on never falling off the highwire).
- soperj 8y agoSo... how's the planet doing with all that?
- chris_mc 8y ago>They went from being an anti-profit, anti-market country of near absolute poverty There's a lot more history to China than 1980-now. What I see every day on HN (and elsewhere) are new startups which are simply rent-seeking enterprises, and I don't see how that helps us.
- shroom 8y agoThanks for posting this! Looks very cool never seen it before. I will follow your print out. It will make a nice poster! :)
- bencollier49 8y agoThat's remarkable. Looking at some of the marker points (e.g. a self-sustaining martian colony by 2035), it feels like Elon Musk is attempting to singlehandedly bring us back on track.
- drb91 8y agoIn retrospect, the amazing part wasn’t the science so much as americans working for something other than profit. Naturally, it was a proxy war instead. If only we could get our current batch of war hawks to push for research instead of bombings maybe we’d actually get something as a country out of our massive defense budget....
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y agoamericans working for something other than profit What do you think all those corporations were working for other than lucrative government contracts? What do you think all the employees were working for if not their paychecks? While I'm sure that many of them truly loved the work, their primary reason for working was that they got paid for it. Just like everyone else. Profit make the world go around.
- drb91 8y agoProfit on an individual level, maybe, but not an industrial level. Taxpayers funded it.
- Retric 8y agoThe economics of asteroid mining is terrible. Look at the % of world GDP spent on non organic non earth specific mining aka no coal, marble, etc and it’s really cheap. Now figure final prices would need to be cheaper for space mining to take off. Even recycling electronics filled with high value atoms is difficult to profit from.
- yellow_postit 8y agoGold’s price collapsing when a meaningfully rich asteroid source can be mined seems likely.
- skykooler 8y agoGold isn't a hugely valuable material as a target for asteroid mining. Platinum is a much better option.
- soperj 8y agoThis would be a good thing. It's a wonderful metal, just useless when it's worth so much. Silver would be awesome to crash too, since it's more conductive than copper.
- rtkwe 8y agoThere's one place it could really shine and that's manufacturing space habitats if we could successfully put manufacturing in space for those it might tip the scales since it'd remove the launch cost from a large portion of the structure.
- Retric 8y agoThat’s a real chicken and egg problem. Why put that many people into space in the first place? Tourism seems like an option, but if you can drop launch costs enough that it’s ‘cheap’ then sending stuff up is also ‘cheap’. IMO, the trick to getting space mining to take off is not robots it’s the need for billions of tons worth of low complexity stuff in orbit.
- gaius 8y agohow much would the loss of half of the US Navy have affected world politics and conflicts? Probably quite a lot; the 600-ship Navy was half of Reagan’s strategy to bankrupt the Soviets, the other half was Star Wars (SDI). The money that would have gone to NASA while everyone was still pumped from the moon landing went on the Vietnam War instead. By the time Star Wars came about, the momentum was lost.