Lies, distortions, and very weak memories allow those people to worship entrepreneurs who take $200 billion of public funding of research and development, $200 or more experience, and add $1 billion of their own and call it free enterprise.

Mars, outer planet, and basic research will always have to be funded by governments. As soon as there might be a return, the profiteers will force a government to turn it over. Up to then, except for the toys of a Paul Allen or a Jeff Bezos, who devote a small percentage of their wealth to them, governments will have to fund that which is in the interests of all mankind.

The guys who make money (not just in space) are the ones who look at a nail and pick up something entirely unlike a hammer. Who not only think outside boxes, but build new ones.

I think a couple of these outfits can make a go of it. I’m encouraged by the asteroid company, which is probably the biggest line to an actual resource tap that I’ve seen yet.

Here’s a question I’m thinking of for the future:

When the shit hits the fan (and it will) will these private guys have the right stuff to keep on trying? SpaceX has lost some vehicles, but no lives.

NASA came back from fearsome and fatal setbacks. The entrepeneurs will have to do this someday, too.

A lot of money has been made in space, Comsats, Landsats, and Navsats, maybe other things, but it has all started with the government taking the initial risk and developing the tech. This is not an ideological attack on the private sector, its just the nature of technology and the nature of business.

Surely you know enough about both to realize that the lack of space habitats in the Lagrangians isn’t really the government’s fault. Unless there is a two or three order of magnitude leap in our technology, it ain’t gonna happen in this century. The commercial development of space travel will not be a rerun of the development of aviation, the business model I suspect you are subconsciously visualizing.

This is not just a new century, its a new millennium.
There will be advances in engineering, and even in physics, but I suspect the low lying fruit has already been plucked.

But it became obvious to me many years ago that if humanity was ever going to get into space in a major way, NASA wasn’t the way it was going to happen.

I wish you could have been to early L-5 Society conventions. Everybody was about trying to convince the government that large-scale space settlements were a good idea.

After sitting in on like the fifth panel of the day listening to people pounding on the subject: “How do we get NASA to go along with this?” I stood up and told them it wasn’t going to happen. Government space programs were about money going to congressional districts more than anything else, and if they wanted to make any real progress they should be talking to people with money in the private sector and figuring out ways to make money in space.

Hadn’t they seen “2001?”

Of course, back then the “wild young billionaire” had yet to become a common species. Richard Branson was still doing record stores, and Paul Allen hadn’t even come up with DOS yet, so I suppose I was still too far ahead of my time.

But “practical?” The James Webb Telescope is wildly over budget, and eating other science programs. At present, the estimated cost of the project including a 5 year operating budget is almost 9 billion dollars.

My friends and I have had late night discussions on how space travel would have developed without something like NASA. We agreed that it would have taken more time to do things like land someone on the Moon, but it would have developed along a more “step by step” approach as was visualized in the dawn of space travel, like what Willy Ley wrote about in the 50s.

Note that Mt. Palomar, Mt. Wilson, Lick, and a number of other conventional observatories were privately funded. With “robber baron” loot, no less.

Bigelow Aerospace has two inflatable test modules (unmanned) in orbit right now.

Several other companies are working toward first flights.

I call that a pretty good start, and at least there’s forward motion.

Your adoration of the government is noted, as always, but governments tend to build amazing monuments and plant flags, not generate useful and practical technological systems and advancement that create more wealth than they burn. Witness “investments” in green technology, mass transit, and many other money holes. I’m sitting in a state going into the fiscal toilet and they want to build Supertrain.

I note in passing that those nations where all research and development is funded and controlled by the government have not exactly been wellsprings of technological achievement.

Then again, technology alone isn’t everything.

The rockets and capsules the Russians are selling us are based on technologies from thirty years ago. They steadily built plain workhorse rockets because they couldn’t carry off anything else.

Meanwhile we created technological multi-billion dollar marvels we couldn’t afford to build more than a dozen of (in the case of the Saturn V) or five of (in the case of the Shuttle). At least the Shuttle was partially reusable. The Russians managed to copy our Orbiter faithfully, flew their version once, and quit.

Here’s a little P.S. on the NDEA and its results. More light than heat, I guess.

But governments, however imperfectly or infrequently, can be influenced by their citizens and by economic and political events. When the resources or the vision are in short supply, priorities will change. For those of us who have a passionate interest in the exploration of space, this is a cruel blow. For space community Conservatives inclined to denounce the use of tax funds employed for purposes not to their liking, this is one purpose they DO like, and one they are willing to make an exception for. How many of our rocket scientists and space pundits would have had the opportunity to participate in this enterprise if it had not been for government? Even the education of many of our techie types was encouraged and partially subsidized by government technical needs (Remember the NDEA?). I know I personally benefitted from it because I exhibited interest in Sputnik when I was a child.

Capitalism provides an alternative mechanism to channel private dreams into public purpose. If enough people want to go to space, especially if they can be convinced it will profit them personally, then private resources could be diverted to a public purpose. It is the purpose of government to help identify these goals, and to assist them, with seed money, preliminary exploration and survey, protective law, proof-of-concept, infrastructure and any other form of state support, including subsidies. I think government has done its job. But it is now the responsibility of Capital to provide the vision, and to manage those resources. It has happened before; many of the world’s great engineering works were created through individual and corporate effort, with little or no assistance from government.

The question is whether the private sector is still capable of providing that vision. Here is its chance to prove it, not just talk about it. We are waiting.

I’ve got nothing against the “capitalist” space industry, its doing everything it can, considering how difficult it must be to raise capital for a project with no forseeable return in sight. But so far it has been short on results. At least all those liberal space entrepreneurs are putting their money and their reputations on the line, not just whining about it like the conservative space pundits. Smug condemnation of public space exploration might be a bit more convincing if the private sector could gen up a little investment. “We’re “giving the private sector its chance” right now. Well, lets see them DO something.

And as far as those tough, logical, right stuff rocket scientists are concerned, perhaps there are faster ways to get into space than by just slamming political science perfessers. After all, isn’t getting into space what rocket scientists are supposed to do? Or are they getting into the making excuses and finger-pointing business now.

Enthusiasm for space exploration is not ideologically determined, otherwise we wouldn’t be riding Russian rockets to the space station. This is not a conflict between right and left, or any kind of ideological struggle, no matter how much the right wing “space community” in one country would like to make it seem that way.