People aren't supporting Moon Plan

>Date: Sun, 25 Jan 2004 09:47:31 -0500
>
>This is a really bad analogy. First of all, when one sets out to climb
>a major peak, the first step is always to train on lesser peaks.
>Nobody just heads for Denali or Everest without climbing many lesser
>mountains first (at least if they have any hope at all of success).
>Secondly, there is the issue that mountain climbing is well understood
>- it's been done before, many times. Space settlement has never been
>done.

Other than the 'bad analogy' part. I agree :). However, I think I may have
not been clear in my use of it. I have been involved in endurance sports for
all of my adult life, and use to compete in bicycle road racing. These races
were often in excess of 100 miles, and if I hadn't been focused on attaining
finishing the race, there were many intervening hills that would have made
my slow down at the top, or quit completely. Of course, many of my training
rides were quite a bit shorter, I made it through those also because I was
focused on an eventual race. If I focused on each of those hills or training
rides as a singular accomplishment, I don't believe I would ever have even
entered the race - I probably wouldn't have even gotten into shape. Som
while I agree with you on the details, I still stand behind my original
statement that the end goal must be set high, making the interim steps just
what they are: interim steps, This does not preclude the utility or
uniqueness of these steps, it is just a perspective designed to keep us
focused on the ultimate goal - more access to space.

>
>We had Mars as a goal, and the program went nowhere. We had ISS as a
>goal, and there it is, circling the earth every 90 minutes. Government
>has problems with managing long term projects because various interest
>groups try to hitch their wagon to the project, so government projects
>are poor analogies for anything other than other government projects,
>but the point stands that it's more likely that lesser goals will be
>attained than greater ones. The key to making real progress is to
>choose a sequence of lesser goals such that over time, as more and more
>goals are attained, what was once a great and difficult goal becomes a
>lesser goal.

We are definitely agreed on the gov't issues, I see :).

Agian, the interim steps/projects are not minimized by keeping the bigger
goal in focus - quite the opposite I'd say. The larger the effort becomes,
the more opportunity these types of projects and spin offs have of being
implemented and maximized. When the size hits some sort of critical mass, I
would expect huge access to space for all of the very good reasons that have
been discussed in this forum - everyone wins.

I completely disagree with focusing on all the smaller steps and expecting
to miraculously find ourselves one small step away from the big goals. This
makes no sense... The inefficienceies and the requisite luck are just too
glaringly obvious to ignore. Unless, of course, the overall plan for these
steps was developed with a larger goal in mind...

As far as the refernce to gov't only being good to describe gov't, well,
that is partiallly correct. The gov't exists as such as an example only
because it can: No competition, basically unlimited finances, the inevitable
politicing and so on leading to huge inefficienceies of all kinds. These
examples don't pop up very frequently in the real world because they either
die before starting, or become inefficient and die, for precisely the
opposite reasons that gov't examples live on and perpetuate.

>
>This is how large businesses develop. They don't set out aimed at 100%
>ownership of the marketplace (that may be an ambition of the owners,
>but that's not where they invest the majority of the effort).
>Successful businesses have long term plans, but invest effort in short
>term profitability. Microsoft started out doing no more than supplying
>the operating system for a niche market business machine. If they had
>not been profitably with MSDOS, they'd have folded. Attainment of the
>short term goal makes the longer term goal possible.

You contradict yourself here. If it is the ambiton of the owners, than of
course the resultant planning will be aimed at that goal. Success depends on
how well conceived that plan is, and how well implemented in the face of
competition that is trying the exact same things. The things that businesses
invest in are either aimed at growth over some timescale, or hedging to
prevent or limit a slide. Bill Gates stated goal was 'to put a computer on
every desk'. I would say that is a very broad and large goal, wouldn't you?
I would imagine that his long term planning did and does focus on these
longterm goals and treat the intervening projects as part of that process.

As far as profits, you are right. At some point there must be profitability
or the whole thing is bust. Of course, this is not true in the beginning,
and VCs provide the capital, perhaps. You will note that the tech bubble was
moving along quite nicely with P/E's over 200 - insane! But everyone was on
it for the quick buck, got even more greedy and crash. I would like to see
some planning for our space initiatives that avoids such things, and can
remain focused longer than the market floors!

>
>As another software analogy - Linux exists only because programmers set
>out to solve a set of relatively small problems one at a time, leading
>to the situation where all that was needed was someone to write a
>kernel in order to create an open source Unix. From that point to the
>current status of the system as a viable alternative to proprietary
>software has been a long chain of minor improvements, each on aimed at
>providing immediate useful functionality to the programmer and the
>community. That's why people do stuff for free - it's useful to them
>and it wins respect.

I agree on the respect thing, for sure. However, as I mentioned, no one
could usefully predict the success of open source OS's, much less even the
concept before it all started. From this I find it easy to conclude that I
cannot just throw grandiose plans out there and hope for the best. When we
conceive of such a goal, and develop a plan to reach that goal, I don't
think that any of us would be able to use volunteer projects as the majority
and expect it to work.

>
>If there's no positive feedback, people stop doing things. It's not an
>American thing, it's a human thing.
>

I agree, but I still say that Americans have become atrociously lazy. As an
employer I noticed the rarity of self motivated indivuals, as well as in the
military which has many levels of filters in place to weed those out. So I
expect it to be a rather common probelm in any random sampling of the
population. However, we are not limited to America for the labor pool, and
there are many peoples in the world who could provide a better source of
motivated individuals. China perhaps? Brazil? India?

>
>The clear rewards need not be financial. If they are in terms of
>satisfaction or personal utility from the work performed, then people
>will stick with things over a very long term. As a directly space
>related example, I offer the AMSAT series of satellites, developed
>primarily by volunteer labor. Open source software is another example.
> Volunteer efforts cannot be modeled on commercial efforts because the
>rewards for the volunteer have to be in some way directly related to
>the work done. That does not mean that volunteer efforts can't do
>remarkable things.

I agree. The AMSAT example is a good one, though I have no persoanl
knowledge on the percentage of volunteer labor. Again, though, this is
postscient, not prescient. I don't see the odds being in favor for the
expected success of a given endeavor.

I think that we could both agree that, in general, the greater man's
presence in space, the greater the opportunities for science projects, von
Neumann space habitats, moving heavy indusrty away from the biosphere,
etc... there will be. What I am advocating is catalyzing this process by
setting high, far reaching goals, focusing on those and making them happen.
Man on Mars... Perhaps we will see temporary delays in some science
projects, and acceleration of others, but in the end, we will all be much
further ahead.

Val