Get a chuckle, but bear in mind the man done good.

And, as I recall, the main body of Skylab — about the size of a school bus — missed the preferred 75% of the planet and the splashdown was dry, hitting hard earth, somewhere in Western Australian, so the splash on impact included a trail of ocean, followed by a very loud >THUD!< and a lot of dust. We learned a lot about reentry and ripples in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, then.

The main profit for space exploration comes from small discoveries, as with Tang, Velcro and the Vomit Comet. Smaller investors gamble that a discovery may be garnered and exploited for financial gain, thus bolstering further investor interest in their company, as well as their continued support for space funding. Company first (me), then them (space). If the primary investigator has no problem sharing its wealth of discoveries, just from building an exploration vehicle, whether successful or not, in becomes a boon for an investor, for he now holds intelligence data that others may wish to buy, and this same data then becomes theoretically priceless as a guide for future development.

We know it's not all fun and games, Tom, and is 99% dull deskwork, but still an incredibly cool involvement. We all wish the steps taken could be broader, as well as heavier, but understand the need for cautious scrutiny, to sort of sneak up on the Moon. Lives are at risk, in space, in the air, as well as on the ground. Anyone who has cracked the most vague reference book on space exploration knows this.

For this e-explorer, your direct involvement over the years is impressive, and typing with you is an honor.

Now, settle down and pretend you're among friends.

Vacation time — maybe? I know I need one.

These themes go back, way back, all the way back to Joe McCarthy.

We already have a proven space technology, most of it in the public domain, we’ve had it for decades, while the private sector spends money trying to duplicate what we already know how to do in order to fly the same missions for…government customers. There is no money to be made in space except government contracts. No products, services, raw materials, nothing.

The reason the government got out of space is because taxpayers got tired of picking up the tab for scientists’ hobbies and military boondoggles—and for private companies who got rich by taking over the few technolgies that did have a payoff, like comsats, earth resources and navsats. Apollo, Hubble, Mariner, Voyager, Pioneer, Cassini, were triumphs of the human spirit, but nobody made a nickel off them.

The question isn’t whether private enterprise can do the job. Every American, European and Japanese system was developed by private contractors funded by their governments. We know they can do it. The question is, why should they? What’s in it for them? In fact, I’m amazed they’ve been able to even do what they accomplished on their own up to now. Have any of their investors gotten their money back yet?

From the Wikipedia article for the film “Destination Moon”, (1950)…

When their latest rocket test fails and government funding collapses, rocket scientist Dr. Charles Cargraves (Warner Anderson) and space enthusiast General Thayer (Tom Powers) enlist the aid of aircraft magnate Jim Barnes (John Archer). With the necessary millions raised privately from a group of patriotic U. S. industrialists, Cargraves, Warner, and Barnes build an advanced single-stage-to-orbit atomic powered spaceship, named Luna, at their desert manufacturing and launch facility; the project is soon threatened by a ginned-up public uproar over “radiation safety.” The three idealists circumvent legal efforts to stop their expedition by simply launching the world’s first Moon mission well ahead of schedule,…

Note the usual libertarian, entrepreneurial themes here, even the Evil Green Party makes an appearance, right on schedule. We would have gone into space by now if it just wasn’t for the nasty ole gummint…
Cargraves, Thayer and Barnes…WASPS IN SPACE.

This fantasy has been playing on an endless loop for the last 64 years. But that don’t mean it’s history.

SpaceX was founded 11 years ago. In that time it has spent about a billion dollars to construct several rocket engines, launch vehicles capable of geo transfer missions, a capsule that is doing cargo missions to the ISS and will soon be used to bring people there.

Half that money was private investment, and they got a payload in orbit with nothing but private investment. The rest was advance payments on missions they have been hired to do for NASA and private customers (mostly NASA until recently).

NASA put men on the moon 45 years ago, and we haven’t been back. The Saturn V sits in a park and is a nest for owls. The Shuttle is in museums. The Space Station is a marvel of technology, like the Shuttle, but is eating anywhere from 2 to 3 billion a year, and will eventually be dumped into the sea like Skylab.

There is no Schadenfreude or gloating here. I hate this state of affairs as much as anyone who loves spaceflight. I grew up on the space visions of Ley, Von Braun, and Kubrick. But by the time I got to college, the university’s space program consisted of payloads for weather balloons, and by the time the Shuttle finally flew, I was already in the middle of my first space company startup.

My own efforts to get private space off the ground didn’t succeed in and of themselves, but some of the people who are in the business now are graduates of companies I helped found, or were inspired by what we did (Richard Branson). Be nice if I had a bigger piece of the action (although I am doing work right now on a contract from Virgin Galactic) but this is much, much better than if the whole industry had just plain died.

There are private companies working on launch systems, space station components, lunar rovers, and many other components for space exploration.

I will lay bets that the next people who take a turn around the Moon and return to Earth will be privately funded, and will likely have paid big bucks for the privilege.

Richard Branson at the controls of our ATV Roton prototype.

Galileo could go to the spectacle maker and buy lenses for his first telescope, or use them as a model to make one in his workshop. If you were Herschel or Rosse you could either use your own personal fortune or rely on a wealthy patron. The great telescopes of the 19th century were financed by wealthy philanthropists, but the Hubble, and the LHC was financed with public funding, it was the only way it was going to happen. The easy, cheap stuff has already been done. THAT is why “The idea of government-funded science was almost unknown until the 20th century”. It wasn’t until the 20th century that we needed it.

I am not attacking profit, or the profit motive, or accusing business of being incapable of doing anything of value without government goading. In fact, I thought I made the point very convincingly that private enterprise can raise even MORE funding than government, providing a plausible potential return can be shown to investors.

Of course, if you have already decided I do not believe that, and are determined to show how I am single-handedly trying to diss and dismantle the free enterprise system, then I guess there’s nothing I can do or say to stop you.

Ironically, Clarke was a major donor. Other donors to the SETI Institute include some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley.

Your belief that only governments do research and speculative investment is wrong. The idea of government-funded science was almost unknown until the 20th century, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) is only three years older than I am.

Bowser mentioned Bell Labs, one example among many of private pure research that created many of our modern technologies. The vast majority of R&D today is privately funded, as I showed in another thread. The R&D budget of Microsoft alone is $2 billion larger than the entire 2014 NSF budget request.

“Profit” means there is more wealth at the other end of a process than you started out with. This is not a bad thing, especially when there is now so much demand for programs that eat more wealth than they produce.

But like space, the key isn’t whether it is possible, but whether it is profitable. Sure, we’ve had the tech for decades, but there is nothing there to attract business, no opportunities for investors. All of Clarkes dreams of underwater mining and agriculture materialized in very differnt ways, ways which could be done remotely, from the surface. Government has done some useful scientific work there, (and some very impressive military ops) but there has been little cash return.

We have successfully exploited the continental shelves commercially in our search for oil, (offshore drilling platforms) which I guess is analogous to the private effort in comsats and orbiting earth resources and nav tech platforms, but that has not automatically led to the development of any further infrastructure which could lead to true colonization.

I hate to keep on harping on this, but after all, this is what this forum is primarily about, isn’t it? We should be speculating on where the money is in space, and then coming up with ways to lobby government to open up those fields so private capital will be attracted there. But the fact remains, if we are going to wait for private enterprise to lead us into space, we are going to wait for a long time.

Of course, if massive government exploration and survey work turns up something “out there” really worth going after, this could all change overnight. Private enterprise will have no trouble raising private funding and spending that money effectively. But it ain’t going to happen just because us space groupies want it to happen, or because we believe it ought to happen.

Just one wild-ass speculation: private SETI. If government investment turns up high bandwidth extraterrestrial signals, AND if those signals aren’t just beacons or hails, but are alien attempts to transmit their cultural and tecnological legacy across the galaxy, then monitoring and deciphering those signals could turn up information of immense financial value. This is a commodity people would pay money for, and other people would pay money to invest in its collection and processing (really big radio telescopes at the Lagrangians, or solar-powered laser telescopes).

A long shot? Sure, but no more so than asteroid mining, orbiting solar microwave power stations, or O’Neill habitat marijuana farming. At any rate, it would make a great SF story: Evil corporation lobbies corrupt government to gain monopoly of alien tech “intellectual property”. You want fusion power or a cure for cancer? Get ready to pay for it, bucko.

The realm outside your window would be very inhospitable, with death lurking around every corner — or just outside your front door.

Can we do it?

W’ll, hell, yeah! Personally, I’d love to give it a shot.

Will we do it?

Not with the current state of affairs with the surface dwellers, with some who would enjoy seeing such a project fail, and fail catastrophically. The construction of an undersea community, let alone a submerged city, would be fraught with finely defined properties and standards, with pressure control standing as numero uno. Maintenance of the site, of the structures and of the underwater vehicles would have to be ongoing, with cabin leaks and flooding, as well as individual drownings, becoming common tragedies.

We still need to work on:

* logistics
* transportation to, from and through the community
* communication with the surface dwelling public, as well as the inhabitants’ relatives
* recreational facilities
* waste disposal
* security

…and doubtless a great black bog of other issues, some undreamed of, waiting to be hammered out.

One day we’ll be there, but not for a while.

Asimov’s predictions have little resemblance to our world. The Science Channel has a series on Scifi writers and their predictions. Their hits look much better when singled out from the misses.

All the old masters missed the arrival of the internet and the effect of micro-chips on computers. Reasonably, they all imagined more progress in space exploration. Most imagined more progress in robotics and energy sources.