Answer to Post 421, 422, and 424

--- In spacesettlers@egroups.com, Ian Woollard
> rehaulku@h... wrote:
>
> > Answers will be in general. I can not manage to quote exact
> > paragraphs in internet yet.
> > 1. I have been very glad to hear that space programs has positive
sum
> > but I have suspects about it. I know that total cost was more
than a
> > trillion dollars at 1985 only for USA and ex-USSR.
>
> Most of that was probably going to the moon, or the
> space shuttle, which was a bad idea with hindsight.
>
> Going to the moon was a huge cost. America
> spent some enormous amount of its GDP for many years,
> like 3% or more on that. You can't expect a white
> elephant like the moon to break even; although it
> was a glorious undertaking nonetherless.
>

And it could have been so much more! A complete lunar base should
have been set up by now. Of course the costs were enormous, they did
it as a one-shot deal. There was no plan in place to have regular
trips to the moon, only the race to get there first.

> > 2. Space colonies can not have more than, let me say, 10,000
people
> > totally in the next 100 years. They can not be self-sufficient in
> > that scale. It means we will live discontinuities during
colonization.
>
> I don't see that point at all. First some technologies are very non
> linear e.g. the internet; 10 years ago almost noone knew what the
> internet was (I was on it though). I think we are approaching some
> more discontinuities: choose from 3D printers, advanced robotics,
> very much cheaper rocketry ($10,000 for a return trip to space),
> bigtime biotech and lots of other things. I think that space is
> about 15-20 years away from a big discontinuity.
>
> Secondly at present space is growing at ~15% a year. Therefore there
> should be more than 1 million people in space by the end of this
> century.
>

Once it becomes affordable for the average person, space expansion
will skyrocket (I couldn't resist, sorry). A parallel to consider is
the advances in computers: at first, it was the domain only of
governments and very large companies, and the real expansion didn't
begin until a personal computer was affordable to the average person.

I believe the 1 million estimate to be extremely conservative,
barring disaster.

> > 3. Cultural problem: I always ask why human being has gone to
space
> > in the last century, not before, not later. I don't belive in
> > historic determinism.
>
> There was an interesting discussion on that in sci.space.policy
> a while back. The bottom line was that certain key technologies
> didn't exist until 1870 or so; before that there was no chance
> of interplanetary travel, although the chinese had come up with
> some interesting weaponry (something that sounds like a combustion
> chamber full of gunpowder- i.e. a solid rocket) but they lacked
> the rocket nozzle- that had to wait for Goddard to apply.

Thank you, Robert Goddard!

:) ed