New Book on Space Colonies

>>
>>> I don't EVER expect private enterprise to get orbital society
>>> established simply because of the multitude of economic and
>>> technical interlinkages required make it unprofitable for any
>>> first mover to act.
>>
>> I differ with you on this point: I believe that the obstacles to
>> private enterprise creating a spacefaring civilization can be
> overcome.
>
> Did you ever hold two conflicting thoughts in your head at once?
[...]
All the time. By beating on the conflict between them I occasionally
gain new insights. Sometimes I just end up with a headache.

> What is that postulate, you may ask? It's simply that a product or
> service is identified that has such tremendous value and can only be
> provided in orbit, that the expense of establishing a bare minimum
> of orbital infrastructure becomes bearable.
[...]
Consider the fact that the market for many things changes with time as
new technologies are developed and new fads take hold. My opinion is
that it's way to early to look for the product that will provide jobs
for the workers in Island One. That's just too far down the road and
has too many conditionals. Nearer term it's clear that there is a
market for space tourism (or adventure travel if you prefer that term).
This market can support a few companies while they debug their
spacecraft and improve the performance in terms of dollars/kilo to LEO.
Once the price starts to come down new services and products will begin
to make sense, and those will provide funding for R&D that pushes the
price down still further.

> I haven't seen hide nor hare of that such a product or service, thus
> my pessimism.
[...]
There have been some near misses. Iridium would have been a serious
competitor for mobile phones if launch costs had been a little lower.

In the near term suborbital spaceflight looks like a winner for
tourism, imaging, and perhaps other things. As long as a few companies
are making a buck in suborbital spaceflight, that's all that's needed
to support the R&D needed to drive down costs to LEO. Once LEO costs
start to come down new services (like an extended version of Chrysler's
OnStar system, for instance) can start driving launch rates up.
> [...]
> But the devil is in the details. How do you know that you're at the
> right place, at the right time, and that your plan is the right one?

You don't. You pick the plan that seems best at the time, and work with
that. At the same time you try to encourage other people to pick the
plan that seems best to them, and to base their plan on realistic
assumptions (no NASA builds a base on Mars, for example). Some things
are certain, such as the conditions that must be met in order to raise
venture capital. Others are speculative, like the exact types of
technology that will be available in 15 years. As long as we agree on
the givens, we can disagree on the speculative stuff. In fact, it's
good to have some disagreement, since that way there will be people
well placed to take care of whatever opportunity arises.

[I wrote]
>> Create the market, and the colonies will come.
>
> That's a heck of a big assumption. What if there is no market?

Game over. No market, no colonies. The only other way is to effectively
enslave large numbers of people to provide the money to support
colonies that cannot be justified on their own terms. I'm not one of
the "all tax is theft" nuts, but simple taxation in a system of
representative government will never be enough. Unless the market
provides stepping stones, we will never leave the planet in large
numbers. The Soviet Union could have built Island One, given the
political will on the part of the leadership, but absent that kind of
single-minded purpose backed by a huge national-scale economy, there is
no way other than incremental, market-driven development.

> As I'm reading your post I'm reaching the conclusion that we're both
> on the same page.

I think so.

> If I accept the postulate that a future market
> develops then all you've written is logically consistent and I have
> no quibbles at all. OTH, if I don't accept on faith that a market
> will develop for a product that I can't yet imagine, then I don't
> see what the points are that we have to pass through to get to where
> we want to be.

There aren't any point on a straight line from here to Island One. The
path is necessarily indirect and winding. First reduce LEO launch
costs, then see what the lay of the land is at that point and plot a
course in the general direction of Island One, or at least past the
next obvious obstacle (which may be something we haven't yet imagined).
Right now the obstacles are silliness like whether suborbital
spaceflight will be regulated by AST (the Associate Administrator for
Space Transportation at the FAA) or under the FAA rules for commercial
aircraft. The latter sounds attractive at first until you realize that
commercial aircraft are subject to regulations that no near-term
spacecraft can hope to meet. Unless AST wins the internal fight within
FAA the game is basically over for suborbitals.

> Yes, CATS is critical because it lowers the threshold for the
> activities that require orbital presence. Further, with CATS I
> believe that the memes required will flourish when the reality of
> CATS becomes pertinent to the activities of an ever widening number
> of people.

Memes are the critical thing that individual activists can address. We
need to propagate the good ones and kill the bad ones. Currently the
dominant bad meme is that fancy new technology is needed for CATS. It
isn't. What's needed is the same kind of thing that's made other new
technologies cheap and reliable: markets. When people buy launch
services part of the money goes to improving the service: raising
reliability and dropping costs. That's why for less than 6 month's
salary I can buy a car capable of taking me on a journey that would
have required *years* a hundred years ago, and for a few years salary I
can buy an airplane capable of flying rings around the best top-secret
military aircraft of 1916.

......Andrew