Answer to Ian Wollard

Ian Woollard wrote:
rehaulku@... wrote:
> I am not sure about money. Till today space exploration has negative
> sum at the balance sheet for billions of dollars.
Satellites aren't negative balance. They represent most
of space at the moment. Exploration is always costly
pretty much by definition, but there's profit being
made- satellite TV?

a year or two ago commercial space dollar volume exceeded government spacedollar volume for the first time. Presumably commercial space iscash positive by at least a little bit, although the space insurance industryhas lost money in each of the last two years,. The government space programis definitely cash negative (lots of expenditure, very little income),so globally we're probably spending more than we're earning in space thesedays in strictly dollar terms, and by quite a large margin.
'Why are we bothering with space when we haven'tsolved
all the problems on earth yet?' as if all problems are
ever solvable; it's not conceivable.
I'm quite sure will never be out of problems anywhere, but space has helpedsolve several problems for us already, and we can expect future performanceto improve. Space has helped with:
-- preventing nuclear war via spy satellites. This may have been decisive. Hard to tell.
-- improving communication via communication satellites
-- helping understanding the global environmentvia Earth resources satellites
-- allowing us to say: "If we can go to the Moon,why can't we ..." via the Apollo program.
Al Globus
aglobus@..., (650) 604-4404
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html
The dinosaurs weren't spacefaring. We are. I don't think that's an accident.
Maybe we are life's taxi to the stars.
I think we should:
1. Devote half of NASA's budget ($7 billion) to reaching NASA's 2020goal of
reducing launch costs to Low-Earth-Orbit to $220/kg with a 0.01% failurerate.
This should enable space tourism. The resulting orbital hotels willneed to
develop efficient orbital life support and other necessary technologies.
2. Build orbital space colonies. The materials in the largest asteroidare
sufficient for orbital colonies with a combined surface area about500 times
greater than Earth's. Eros alone could make over ten thousand spacecolonies,
each with about about 10 square kilometers of 1g living area.
3. After a few generations of orbital living, people won't need theircolony
to be near Sol. Then small groups of colonies with populations in the
tens-of-thousands can set out on multi-decade journeys to nearbystars.
Except the launch goals, none of this is even a little bit official.