People aren't supporting Moon Plan

>>In short, it just seems too fanciful to expect an idealistic volunteer
>>effort to get us out of the gravity well. A concerted and coordinated
>>effort, which will be by necessity one that is capatilistic in nature,
>>will be needed to get us off planet in a significant way.
>
> [snip] Therefore my
> expectation is that there will be as much money directed toward space
> colonization as there ever was, zero. Having no money to buy expensive
> services, our only choice is volunteer labor no matter how painful that
> may be.

I must say I find all the comments on this topic both pro and con quite
exciting!

An interesting thing in the case of GNU/Linux is that for many purposes,
the quality of the volunteer effort is better -- both in the quality of
the deliverables and in the quality of the process. Take for example a
recent security compromise of the Debian GNU/Linux servers (and others).
Likely such exploits have happened with commercial code as well (perhaps
even Microsoft). Did Debian cover it up? No. Why should they? They have
no paying customers to alienate. They have no standard to uphold except
their own integrity. So they took down some servers for weeks, fixed up
stuff, audited things, and put them back up. Commercially oriented
people point to this and say, see, I told you those free software people
can't be trusted an aren't reliable -- because the server was down. They
say that wouldn't happen with Microsoft. And that is exactly my point, a
commercial effort would just as likely covered it all up because of the
social dynamics of commercial ventures. You might never have even heard
of the compromise, and if news leaked out, you'd have massive PR spin
control. Same with commercial development of space launches. With all
the pressure on to deliver and repay investors, they will be pressured
to cut corners or make other bad engineering decisions. I'm not saying
professional engineers would make these bad choices under pressure, but
it would take a lot of integrity not to both by engineers and their
management, and we've seen a couple of Space Shuttles destroyed when
engineer warnings about O-rings and falling foam were ignored.

Obviously, there are always risks -- even when all the facts are known
and fully discussed. There is always the "unknown unknown" -- the thing
you didn't realize you didn't know. Still, a volunteer effort for space
settlement can take as long as it wants to do the job right, and can
keep trying even after setbacks. Without a budget, it can never be cut.

--Paul Fernhout