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I want to talk about space travel, once again. NASA's mission back to the moon, Artemis, is slated to launch in less than a week!
Luckily from my perspective, it seems that space travel hasn't been THAT politicized by the culture war, yet. Yes the left and environmentalists hate it, but it hasn't become a hot button, tribal trigger in the way gun control, or abortion, or other major culture war issues are.
Ideally I think space travel will continue to fly under the radar, and slowly get better and better. I know there are some fascinating scientific projects unfolding around space like algae to produce plastic in space, plans for asteroid mining, various organic compounds that can only be created in zero gee, etc. Also of course we now have Space Force, and a renewed space race with China seems to be heating up, potentially.
I'm curious what folks here think about space - are we optimistic that space travel and research will become a genuine market in the next few decades? What are the political fault lines people seeing potentially being an issue here?
I've never heard a leftist snarl about space IRL, and trust me, it a leftist snarls about something, I hear it.
You may be too young. Around the time after the moon landings, there were protests of the kind "could not this ointment be sold and the money given to the poor?" about it. Space exploration was not seen to be doing anything, sure we'd been to the moon but so what? just sending up more landings was doing nothing, meanwhile we have all these problems on earth of poverty etc. and isn't it better if the budget devoted to useless rocket launches, coming out of taxpayer money, is instead spent on the sick, poor and homeless here in our own countries?
I'd be more optimistic about the New Space Age were it not for having lived through the Old Space Age. We do not have the moon bases and so forth that were the golden dreams post-moon landing. I don't see any reason for it to be different this time round, except that private commercial operators are now up and running. Asteroid belt mining will remain the province of SF.
EDIT: I am extremely bummed out about the space shuttle, for instance. This was meant to be the future, yet it seems to have fizzled out in "too expensive, not really doing what it was supposed to do, back to old fashioned heavy rocket lifts".
I can count one of my ratchet clicks away from leftism when I first heard the performance of the poem "Whitey on the Moon."
From 1970, complaining about the moon landing whilst poverty exists.
Just an insane level of scope blindness. "How dare you move the course of human history and the frontiers of exploration forward while I have to pay more for food.
Which ignores that we can walk and chew gum at the same time, but also represents the kind of envious Luddism that threatens to keep us confined to this rock forever.
(And no, this isn't a feature that is limited to the left).
There's a limit somewhere, though. Do Moon landings benefit humans? Obviously, as a step toward extraction and colonization. Do Saturn probes benefit humans? Maybe, if I squint. Do deep-space telescopes benefit humans? I personally don't see how.
Haha, no.
We had humans on that rock 50 years ago. Did fuck-all to step us towards extraction and colonization.
Let's do some math. Let us take the ISS as a LEO habitat. It has a crew size of perhaps seven and weights 450 tons, for 64 tons per person, offering a comfort level in which specifically selected and trained astronauts have survived for a year without going insane. (Yes, you could also go for the Moon or Mars, where you will in theory have more material to build habitats. However, it also takes 5x as many launches to transport anything there. To build a practically self-sustaining habitat would be a massive endeavor -- you would have to copy a good fraction of the supply chains of the world economy.)
Take the Falcon 9, one of today's best rockets. It gets 22 tons tons to LEO, so we need about three launches to get a one person habitat up there.
The commercial price for a launch of the Falcon 9 is 70M$. Even if internally, SpaceX could launch at 10%, that is still 21M$ per colonist for the privilege of spending years encased in a habitat which would concern animal rights activists.
The fuel of a Falcon 9 is about 400 tons, which yields about 300 tons of CO2, generously assuming that Musk invents a catalytic converter (!) for his rockets so that CO2 is the only thing which we need to worry about. That is about the CO2 an American might produce in a lifetime. If you want to colonize space, getting controlled fusion power is the first (and one of the easier) steps.
Now, if there was Unobtainium in space, that might still be worthwhile. If Moon rock was the perfect material to build tension cables for a space elevator for, then I would be all for mining Moon rock (preferably by robots) and shipping it to Earth. Sadly, the rest of the solar system contains nothing we don't have on Earth for cheaper. This includes He-3: Earth price is 20M$/kg. If Moon regolith was 10% that stuff, that would be great. As it is perhaps 15ppb, so you need to go through hundreds of thousands of tons to get a kilogram.
The sad fact is that we will all die in the gravity well we were born, PRNS.
I think having the ISS to study the effects of microgravity on humans (and do all kinds of other experiments) is a great idea, if we find a material for a space elevator tomorrow, it would be embarrassing not to have done our homework beforehand. I also generally like space missions advancing our scientific knowledge, but that is a matter of taste, if someone wants to argue that the JWST will never teach us anything relevant for human life and we should therefore not fund it, that is a perfectly coherent position.
I was thinking of orbiting habitats with spin gravity, as set forth in The High Frontier: 3,000,000 tons of radiation shielding, using Moon regolith launched by an electromagnetic mass driver to reduce lift costs, for a 10,000-person cylinder. But I haven't done any research into the topic beyond reading that book.
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