Billionaires in space

Nothing has changed in the physics, but the engineering has undergone major changes, and that’s basically all been driven by SpaceX (Elon Musk’s company). We’re able to re-use rockets instead of throwing them away on each flight, and the next SpaceX rocket system – Starship – is meant to get costs down low enough to make space accessible to a far vaster number of groups and people.

The ironic thing about the focus on billionaires going into space is that this is really more about letting people who aren’t billionaires go into space, at least briefly, in the case of Branson and Bezos’ respective companies. Billionaires have been able to go into space for nearly two decades now, because if you’re willing to fork over $20 million the Russians will fly you up in a Soyuz rocket. Dennis Tito did it 20 years ago.

Moreover, everything we have learned about our own biology has emphasised the lesson that we evolved to live here on Earth and nowhere else.

We evolved to live in a narrow segment of East Africa. Almost everywhere else on the Earth will kill us quickly without technology and know-how, including 71% of the planet’s surface. It’s the same with space environments, and nobody’s proposing people live in weightlessness for the long term.

“Nor we can afford a system that delivers a huge proportion of our collective income to a handful of irresponsible adventurers.”

Musk and Bezos (Branson is a rounding error here) have, what, $400 billion between them? Global collective income is around $100 trillion a year. I agree that $400 billion is “a lot” but 0.4% doesn’t strike as a huge “proportion”.

In slightly more detail, Bezos is said to be funding his rockets with $1 billion a year in stock sales. Sure, “a lot”. 0.001% of global income? “Huge proportion”?

It’s even possible that while humans up there is a waste of time and effort there will still be spin offs that are useful. Starlink might solve rural broadband for example.

“As for reusable space craft, wasn’t the Space Shuttle supposed to solve that problem?”

Well, yes. But the failure of a politically designed attempt, as opposed to the more capitalist success, might not be the lesson you quite want to be broadcasting. These varied Musk/Bezos/Branson versions do seem to work better. Certainly they work cheaper.

Which is really rather the point of what is going on now. Cost. Think it was Arthur C Clarke who pointed out that “once you’re in orbit you’re not half way to the Moon, you’re half way to anywhere” (at least in the Solar System you are). This reduction in cost going on now is akin to the price difference between sailing ships across the Atlantic and steamships for bulk cargo. That did rather change things.

Maybe it will again. And, of course, maybe it will not. But possibly worth finding out.

Of course, I’m hugely biased. I’ve done trivially, really terribly tiny, bits of work for Musk, NASA and the ex-Soviet rocket system in my area of technical expertise – weird alloys containing scandium. So it’s possible to argue that I’m over-invested in the idea for personal reasons.

But there is one interesting question I’d like to ask:

” a huge proportion of our collective income to a handful of irresponsible adventurers.”

OK. So, what portion of our collective income should be left to people to do as the hell they wish with? What’s the percentage of that global GDP that can, righteously, be left to people to waste on whatever? The same question the other way around, how much of the collective income’s use should be determined collectively? The 40% that currently travels through government? The 99.999% that would only just leave room for Bezos and his rockets? More than that?

Never heard of “Dogs in space”, but the Muppet Show’s “Pigs in Space” was always my favorite!

Physics says space offers the prospect of access to indefinitely large quantities of pollution-free resources without being a place that people can live. That seems to me to be exactly the thing required to maintain current human population levels without hitting environmental constraints.

It’s sort of the opposite of Australia, which provides the world with a limited amount of pollution-heavy resources, while being a pretty nice place to live. So adding access to space is economically and ecologically similar to deleting Australia. And probably easier.

Falling costs of access to those resources, like that of solar power, changes things. One change is that currently-rich people start paying those costs for frivolous reasons. Another is that it reduces the amount of successful political action required to achieve sustainable world-wide prosperity.

Perhaps some people think things are going so well that they would like to forgo those benefits? Raise the difficulty level, play politics on hard mode?

Space tourism will emit huge amounts of harmful emissions, climate destabilizing greenhouse gas emissions caused by the sheer waste of energy and also ozone depleting emissions directly deposited in the stratosphere. (https://theconversation.com/space-tourism-rockets-emit-100-times-more-co-per-passenger-than-flights-imagine-a-whole-industry-164601, (https://gizmodo.com/space-tourism-is-a-waste-1847285820))

The precise environmental footprint of the billionaire space flights is hard to know as long as they don’t measure and publish their emissions data but it’s likely to be orders of magnitude greater than commercial flight.

These irresponsible assholes are using up resources and causing irreparable damage to the planet, to all of us, for pure vanity, and they want to incite more rich assholes to do the same. These assholes already have an environmental footprint orders of magnitude greater than what the median earthling uses, and they don’t compensate the rest of us for the damage they do to us. They are parasites.

Or, in the immortal words of our favorite right wing loon:
“That’s just the way wealth distributions do work”

Yeah, quoting the quite misconceived Space Shuttle – a failed program, really – as a poster child for costs is a bit cheeky.

Not quibbling really, but that $55m is a gross overestimate for a Crew Dragon ticket – as the development cost is amortised (they’ve only done nine manned trips so far) Elon Musk is actually making a big profit per trip here. And you don’t have to be a Space X fanboy to believe his new Starship is going to get per seat costs well under a million a go (he actually claims it will be way under 100k a seat – to Mars! But I’m not sure he’ll achieve that).

He points out, for instance, that the fuel is well under 1% of current manned spaceflight costs – so that mass production of large capacity reusable rockets has capacity to massively slash costs. And the point above about the bulk of the energy needed for interplanetary travel is expended just getting in to orbit is true.

All in all, I think there could be a lot more harmful things our multibillionaires could be having pissing contests over.

“In slightly more detail, Bezos is said to be funding his rockets with $1 billion a year in stock sales. Sure, “a lot”. 0.001% of global income? “Huge proportion”?”

Wonder how many people $1 Billion dollars donated to a UN food aid program would save? Anyway carry on Tim….

I think we can use the shape of Bezos’ rocket to work out the real purpose here…

Some rich eccentric building a steam-powered supercar is one thing but the massive expense of this NASA cosplay, based on his piratical business practices, makes this look like a huge ego trip. NASA already has a long-term investment in facilities and people: why not just invest in that? You know, maybe with taxes or even as partnership?

Among those waste products is heat. We have Global Warming because more energy reaches the planet than is emitted back into space (the greenhouse effect decreases the amount emitted, which causes temperature to rise until a new energetic equilibrium is reached). So what do you think will happen if even more power “is transmitted to the surface via microwaves”? (MFB @8)

People really need to understand thermodynamics.

We need to remember that all of the early rockets in the NASA space programme up to and including Project Gemini were just repurposed ICBMs. It is only with Saturn 1 and Saturn 5 that we have rocket launchers designed from the start for human space travel. I can remember back in the 1950s before the first sputnik was launched, projections of us reaching the Moon in the year 2000, so to have achieved it before 1970 was a remarkable undertaking. Similarly, the Space Shuttle was the first reusable launcher, with all that means for cost.

There is nothing that Musk is doing now with his reusable rockets, that could not have been done, in principle, fifty years ago; it is just at that time the way forward in reusability was seen as the Space Shuttle, which drew on the USAF Dyna-soar (X-20) program. Other approaches like the Nonweiler Waverider or the British Aerospace HOTOL programme never had the level of funding needed to turn them from interesting ideas into fully-tested launchers. Rather like the development of civil nuclear power generation, many possible options were closed off early and military requirements figured large in the choices made.

Fundamentally, space travel reduces to how do we establish a permanent base on the Moon, for once there one can send payloads to anywhere in the Solar system using mass drivers, the updated versions of Eric Laithwaite’s linear motors, with everything built from elements available in the lunar crust and powered by solar PV.

@6 J-D

Musk wants to do colonies – including a city – on the surface of Mars. These could include pressurized facilities buried under Martian dirt, drilled into cliffsides and the ground, or even domes. Mars provides the gravity.

Bezos wants to go for habitats not on a planet or moon’s surface, but floating in space (such as the design called “Island Three” or the O’Neill Cylinder, and Bezos actually was at Princeton when the guy whose group came up with it was still there). These would be gigantic drum-shaped space stations rotating on their long axis to simulate gravity.

already happens–astronauts fall into the category of people who aren’t billionaires.

They’re also an extremely tiny fraction of people who have to spend sometimes decades training just so they can spend weeks in space. Stuff like Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic hold the possibility of far more people than that eventually being able to go to space.

@12 Tm

It depends on the fuel you use. Most existing rockets burn kerosene, which isn’t particularly clean – and the same goes for Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft.

However, Bezos’ New Shepard rocket burns hydrogen, which only produces water vapor as exhaust. Musk’s new rocket – Starship – burns methane, which produces CO2, but you can source the methane in a carbon-neutral way if you make it the same way he’s hoping to make fuel on Mars (the sabatier reaction with hydrogen produced from electrolysis).

I absolutely think we should pressure Bezos and Musk to source their fuels in a sustainable way. Blue Origin should only use “green hydrogen” in their rockets, and Starship from SpaceX should use methane made in the way I described (or maybe sourced from biofuels sufficiently processed).

@8 MFB

There are other proposed ways than rockets, but they just don’t make sense right now in terms of demand. It’d be like building a five lane highway bridge to an island with only enough travelers to justify a couple of ferry rides per day.

The answer to a budget problem was the Space Shuttle.

It’s really expensive to go to Mars and support humans living there. I have yet to see a cost-effective justification for going to the Moon or Mars. The Spanish explorations to the New World did eventually “pay off” for the explorers in gold, silver, food, and slave/indentured labor at the cost of massive death and destruction for the original inhabitants. What are people going to do to make money in space outside Earth orbit?

I don’t think space tourism will cut it, unless income inequality gets substantially worse than it is now, i.e., North Korea-type levels for the world as a whole.

All the other things don’t seem remotely cost-effective: water asteroids, mining Venus or Saturn for specific gases, etc. Who’s going to pay for all of those rockets and habitats on Mars and support them ad inifinitum? There’s no atmosphere and no real prospect of them being self-supporting.

Sure, you could have vanity projects, but they are much more likely to equivalent to Vinland than something like the settling of Polynesia.

Complete agreement with the original post!

But it will just bounce off. Even in this thread there are many who completely miss the point. Yes, engineering advances, fine. The reality still is and always will be that to maintain a colony on an inhabitable planet or moon, which is every planet or moon in the entire solar system, you have to constantly supply it very expensively from Earth, because there is just no way of maintaining a self-sufficient economy there. So, we can invest a zillion dollars to pointlessly put a thousand people on Mars or a zillion dollars here to make life better for several orders of magnitude more people.

If the idea is merely to create a stepping stone for interstellar travel, the next problem is that it is fundamentally impossible to survive that. If you could, hypothetically, travel fast enough to cut the journey down to a realistic duration, you would be traveling so fast that any speck of dust in the way obliterates the spaceship. If you travel slowly enough to avoid that, all the gas inside your vessel will leak out before you are 10% of the way, you would have to plan for numerous generations of people to live in the vessel, and, by the way, we haven’t really built any complex technology that still works reliably after a few decades, so it isn’t really clear how the spaceship would still work after thousands of years.

Anybody who believes this stuff is possible has read too many science fiction novels. Just because something is written down, doesn’t make it true or even just plausible. This is not “haha, two hundred years ago they wouldn’t have thought we would one day send somebody to the moon, so there”. All we have learned in the last few decades strengthens the case that Mars colonies are not sustainable and that interstellar flight is not survivable.

I don’t think there will be a lot of people willing to live on Mars if given the chance. But there’s almost 8 billion people on Earth, and I don’t think it’s a stretch that you might find a couple hundred thousand to a million or so who do out of that.

Whether something (such as living on Mars) is feasible does not depend on how many people are willing to do it. (Also, whether it’s a good idea does not depend on how many people are willing to do it.) I expect you could find a substantial number of people who would be willing (given the chance) to have their minds downloaded to the Internet, but the availability of willing participants is not by itself sufficient to make the project feasible (or a good idea).

We already know there are people who want to go into space. Whether there are people who want to do it is not the question.

I see a mixed bag here. Space tourism is obviously a frivolous waste of resources. But space is a part of our industrial economy now, as well as essential for an increasing number of scientific pursuits. While I think space solar is completely bonkers, the new high tech zero carbon economy we need to build will require lots of materials that are rare in earth’s crust, but may be available on asteroids. I expect asteroid mining is probably 25-50 years away, but am convinced that we will need it for long term sustainability.

At least Blue Origin claims to be using hydrogen fuel, which minimizes pollution, although I suspect high temperature rocket exhaust may mess with stratospheric chemistry, there is probably a limit to how many launches per year can be sustained, and that limit is probably below what space enthusiasts dream of. Once we get asteroid mining up and running, an increasing amount of the material needed in space can be sourced in space and will never have to transit through our planet’s fragile atmosphere.

If you look at the cheapest options for putting mass in orbit in the 1960s, and the cheapest options today, the cost of space launch has certainly decreased significantly, in large part with the introduction of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. If SpaceX can get Starship flying and it eventually lives up to their goals, it will massively decrease the costs even further (although it is not as certain as the fans like to believe that it will live up to their goals; it could succumb to some of the same problems as the space shuttle). Costs for transporting people will be more apparent when SpaceX is transporting its own paying customers on Dragon or Starship, as supporters could argue that NASA’s involvement in the Commercial Crew program make the costs SpaceX charges for astronaut transportation non-representative.

Ronald @10 “The problem is when people do something strange like shoot a human into space. Their capabilities haven’t improved at all since the 60s. In fact, on average, they’ve gotten heavier. Using them into space is like deciding to use a jelly spanner when you have a perfectly good tungsten carbide one at hand.”

I think that people forget that outside the structured environment of a factory or warehouse floor, and setting aside Roombas and Predator drones, robots kind of suck. Opportunity was an extremely successful Rover, and it went 45 km in 15 years. The Mars InSight lander was supposed to dig a probe down to 5 m deep, but only got to 35 cm before getting stuck, a problem that a person could have solved by pressing on it with a boot. By comparison, the Apollo astronauts were taking sample cores of the Moon 50 years ago. In fact, science was basically an afterthought in the Apollo program, but its scientific return in publications and quantity/quality of samples still dwarfs any robotic planetary science mission, or multiple robotic missions put together.

The ISS is not a great showcase of the scientific utility of humans in space (for anything other than studying human physiological responses to space) because it is a structured environment, and all the experiments done on it are basically automated already. But for something like a Mars mission, the environment is unstructured, and real-time teleoperation from Earth is impossible. A human mission could cost 100-1000 times more than a robot mission, but humans on the surface for weeks or months could likely provide >100-1000 times the scientific return. Thus you could probably get a greater scientific return per dollar spent. The question is if you would want to spend that huge overall amount of science dollars only on Martian planetary science instead of particle accelerators or geology fellowships or deep-sea expeditions or etc.

Counter-intuitively, the fact that robots currently suck raises huge problems for the would-be space colonists. Colonists on Mars would require intensive industrial processes to produce air, water, food and shelter. To be a viable colony, they would need to be able to run and maintain all the machines they use, and make new machine parts or buy them from Earth. (To actually be a safeguard against human extinction like people say, they need to be able to function as a pure autarky that can make and operate everything they need with no trade with Earth, but viability as a colony is a lower bar).

Small population, high-tech island nations like Iceland usually specialize in a few industries (fish, smelting aluminum and software for Iceland) and buy everything else they need from larger countries with the proceeds. If Starship reaches or exceeds Musk’s most ambitious launch cost goals, it might be $10/kg to low Earth orbit. With the refueling flights, this would mean ~$60/kg to Mars. This cost (and the cost to everywhere else in space, really) is hundreds to a thousand times higher than the ocean freight costs that allow places like Iceland to exist as developed nations. And Iceland has free breathable air, drinkable water, timber, cheap hydro and geothermal power and fish and farmland. They don’t have to mine glaciers for water, electrolyze oxygen out of it, live in the equivalent of underground submarines or farm in bigger submarines.

If Mars had some incredibly expensive, high-demand natural resource the Martians could specialize in selling that, but it doesn’t. If robots didn’t suck, they could do 99.9% of the work of building, running and maintaining the life support machines and basically take the place of the ecosystem on Earth, but they do suck. Failing that, unless every colonist has 100 PhDs and can work 10,000 hours per 24 hour day, the colony won’t be viable, with a successful SpaceX’s cheap rockets. An economically self-sufficient Mars colony naturally requires a place with the population of Iceland to have the industrial capacity and knowledge base of Japan.

One day, robots probably won’t suck; in, say, three centuries we could imagine that steady improvements in robotics could make something like the self-replicating lunar factory from the 1980 NASA study on advanced automation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine#Advanced_Automation_for_Space_Missions) possible. It’s the sort of thing you might expect to see with typical yearly productivity growth over three centuries. With something like that, enthusiasts probably could colonize Mars if they wanted to. But right now it’s a pipe dream even if SpaceX succeeds.

Re @ 10 and @16.

Really. Putting humans in space isn’t very smart. By the way, the reason the Webb telescope will be so much better than the Hubble, is that the Hubble was designed to be delivered and serviced by low earth orbit vehicles, and thus had to be in low earth orbit, which is about 1/1,000 the distance to the moon. (Low earth orbit isn’t really “space” at all, it’s well within the Earth’s magnetic field. So our twat billionaires haven’t actually made it into space.) The Hubble was a major irritation: if we hadn’t wasted all that money on the space shuttle, we could have afforded a much better telescope than the Hubble, put it in a far better orbit*, simply replaced it if it broke, and still have had lots of change left over from the money saved. From the very start it was designed as an advertising gimmick to sell the shuttle. It’s really sad how badly the English language press fell for the sleaze.

*: Low earth orbit is really low, so things in said orbit zip around the earth at insane speeds (a mere 97 minutes per revolution for the Hubble’s orbit: 28,000 km per hour), which makes it hard for a telescope to do good work (since tracking objects is hard, they go out of view quickly, and you miss half the events you are interested in). If you had a choice, you wouldn’t put a telescope anywhere near low earth orbit. If you cared about its performance, that is.

Even under the most dire worst case scenarios, the earth will remain a far more habitable place than Mars. It makes infinitely more sense to do everything we can to solve or mitigate our – mostly human made – earthly problems than to invest a penny in Martian escape fantasies. That this argument is even being made is indicative of how irrationally many of our (economic, political and even some scientific) leaders are thinking about the risks that humankind faces.

I am, no doubt, a hopeless naïf and romantic, but, much as despise Bezos and Musk as individuals and capitalists, I can’t help but feel that these are necessary steps on what has to be, for our own benefit as a species, a long voyage outward. I’ve carried these words around in my head for decades, and though I’m not one of the ones who will make any of this happen, I support the efforts of those who try to, and fail to understand the lack of vision of those who don’t.

Now, I don’t pretend to tell you how to find happiness and love when every day is just a struggle to survive, but I do insist that you do survive because the days and the years ahead are worth living for. One day — soon — man is going to be able to harness incredible energies, maybe even the atom. Energies that could ultimately hurl us to other worlds in some sort of spaceship. And the men that reach out into space will be able to find ways to feed the hungry millions of the world and to cure their diseases. They will be able to find a way to give each man hope and a common future. And those are the days worth living for.
— Star Trek, ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ (Edith Keeler’s speech), 1967.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on Man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that Man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

[…] We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
— John F Kennedy, speech at Rice University, 12 September 1962.

Musk started Space X precisely because he was concerned with existential risk and because he believes colonizing Mars and the solar system will reduce the threat of humanity going extinct. That is the ultimate goal for SpaceX. You can read about it here: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html

And it seems pretty clear that a world where humanity had colonized other planets would be more robust against certain forms of existential risk (natural or synthetically created pandemics, for example).

The real debate centers on what existential risks are most pressing and to what extent we can reduce these by colonizing other planets. For example, if you think that future artificial general intelligence poses the greatest risk, then you might think that these efforts won’t do much to avoid that, and that’s where marginal efforts should go. That’s what I’m inclined to think. But these are tough empirical claims and they are hard to figure out.

I’m also not sure your last point is supported if we think existential risk is such a pressing concern. That seems to be the suggestion – we have these billionaires throwing away money, when we have these existential risks we are facing. Well, I know of very few state’s that have invested considerable dollars into existential risk reduction. I hope I’m wrong and I hope this changes. But up until now, most of the funding going in to this area (to things like AI safety, for example) has come from philanthropic billionaires (Open Philanthropy, Elon Musk, and some others). We are lucky that we have some forward thinking billionaires when the funding coming from most states tends to be much more myopic in its concerns.

There’s an asteroid about 500 meters from my work place. Thanks to booming commodity prices it’s worth maybe $500 Australian per tonne. Sure, there’s gold and platinum in it, but only in the same way there is gold and platinum in the dirt in your backyard. Since random dirt is already here and space asteroids are in space, I’m not seeing a lot of incentive to mine space asteroids for materials to use on earth. Use in space is another matter.

Ronald @46

That’s kind of a silly argument, isn’t it?

For one thing, there are various different kinds of asteroid, not all of which are identical to “dirt in your backyard”, so extrapolation from a single asteroid near you is pretty meaningless.

(The initial evidence for an extraterrestrial impactor as the potential cause of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction 66 million years ago was the thin layer of clay enriched roughly 100 times in iridium relative to the concentration in the upper crust. Subsequent work has shown this pattern of enrichment extends to other platinum-group elements and related metals, including gold. Again, space is not identical to your backyard.)

And we don’t mine gold and platinum from “random dirt”, do we? We only mine it from specific places where it’s concentrated, easily accessible, and in a form we can profitably process and refine. The question is whether some asteroids might have economically valuable and accessible concentrations of some metals.

People suggest platinum group metals as targets for asteroid mining because they’re thought to be present in some asteroids, and at current prices of thousands of dollars per kg, it seems like they’re expensive enough that you could get more money per kg selling them than you spent bringing them back from the asteroid. If your asteroid mining venture brought back more than a token quantity however, it would drop the price of those metals drastically. Sometimes asteroid mining enthusiasts will say that’s good, because now we can build lots more things out of fancy metals, but it still means the asteroid mine is now running at a loss; the metals’ expense was the whole reason to target them. For asteroid mining to be successful, you really need a resource that is impossible to obtain on Earth, at least thousands of dollars per kg, and so in demand that people will pay that price for any amount of it. I don’t think anything really qualifies.

You can also say you’re mining the metals for use in space, but that raises the question of what you’re building in space that needs large quantities of raw materials, and how it pays for itself. There are some ventures looking to mine lunar or asteroidal ice deposits for rocket fuel for use in space tugs and fuel depots for satellites, or on a future lunar base; even some ULA executives have mentioned this. For the future government lunar base this may make sense; for commercial satellites it’s harder to say. It would be competing with the same cheap space launch that enables it, and with alternative satellite philosophies based around miniaturization and simple, reliable electric propulsion.

Somebody on Twitter (I’m trying to remember who) pointed out that current plans to return to the Moon and establish a human base match a general pattern in human exploration, and especially the exploration of Antarctica, in that there is an early herculean effort to make token visits to a place, largely for bragging rights, followed by a
~50 year lull in which technology improves, followed by a more sustained effort to establish a human presence for research and/or exploitation.

Somebody on Twitter (I’m trying to remember who) pointed out that current plans to return to the Moon and establish a human base match a general pattern in human exploration, and especially the exploration of Antarctica, in that there is an early herculean effort to make token visits to a place, largely for bragging rights, followed by a
~50 year lull in which technology improves, followed by a more sustained effort to establish a human presence for research and/or exploitation.

‘It happened with Antarctica’ is not sufficient to make it a reasonable expectation for the Moon.

Some friends of mine who have stayed in Antarctica (scientific base) say that although Antarctica is cold, having a breathable atmosphere makes it much easier than space…

@56

That could be partly behind the lull, but Chile and Argentina began major Antarctic programs in the late 40s and 50s, and I don’t believe either was particularly involved in the world wars.
I don’t think we’re going to have colonization of the Moon or Mars in our lifetimes, or at least not real colonization (perhaps some token “colonies” like Chile and Argentina have established in Antarctica at Esperanza Base and Villa Las Estrellas) but Antarctic-style research stations are entirely possible, and are ultimately what the US government and its partner countries are pursuing with the Artemis Program.
I don’t think there’s much of economic value on the Moon or Mars in the foreseeable future. Some companies are attempting to source propellant for satellite servicing from asteroids or lunar ice; it may work out.

The number of robotic or human missions is set by available funding more than level of interest, I’d say. If a government is willing to pay for the cost of a crewed Moon base or Mars mission for the sake of prestige (and the US seems to be, for a Moon base at least) then planetary scientists will happily accept the benefits, and will reap a greater scientific return than from the current robotic missions, and likely a greater return than from even the same amount of money spent purely on robotic Moon and Mars probes.

In the long run, I think real, self-sufficient space colonies are possible. Something like an O’Neill colony breaks no laws of physics, and would provide a hospitable environment. It just likely requires centuries of progress in automation and miniaturization until productivity has increased enough that the inhabitants of the colony would be capable of building and maintaining it.

This is completely OT but:

@David J. Littleboy 52
“So when did this symbolic reasoning ability appear in early hominids?”

Apparently there are two different theories, one says between 40.000 and 50.000 years ago and the other 75.000-150.000 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity

One thing that is fairly safe to say of space is that it is big, and contains a lot of stuff. 99.9999…. percent of the stuff that exists does so in space.

As such, it would be pretty weird if, amongst all that stuff, there was nothing that could be found, made or grown that was worth more than $10/kg. For example, put an automated greenhouse in space, grow strawberries and they would come in at a price somewhere between intensive and organic.

Which is a pretty stupid and impractical plan. But the fact that it gets to the point of being merely stupid, rather than ludicrous, means there are very likely to be other options that would work out.

Maybe Georgism will return as an economic theory once land is a strictly optional factor for production.

As Robert L. Park used to say, “If lead could be transmuted into gold by just taking it into orbit, it wouldn’t pay to do it on the space shuttle.” I don’t think the economics of space travel have changed enough to alter that conclusion.

Interesting comments, pragmatic (conservative?) mindset prevails. I’m reminded of this poem.

@60 Who said that modern computers wouldn’t work in space? For context, the galactic cosmic ray (GCR) dose rate on the surface of Mars seems to be about 2-3 times the dose rate on the ISS. The GCR dose rate in deep space seems to be around 4-5 times the ISS dose rate. Astronauts on the ISS use laptops with modern GPUs with no apparent problems. I don’t think there are deep space-qualified versions of recent hardware (i.e. with rad-hardening and error-checking) available yet, because space-qualified hardware is a very niche market that lags the consumer state of the art significantly, but I wasn’t aware anyone thought it was impossible.

@62 According to Zubrin, the theoretical energy limit to put a kilogram in Earth orbit (i.e. the kinetic energy change between ground and orbit) is about 9 kilowatt-hours. At grid prices in the 90s when he wrote his book, that means about $45 for a 100 kg person. That might be doable with something like a space elevator if the material science of carbon nanotube strands could be improved. More realistically, using the rocket equation and a cost of 20 cents per kg for kerosene oxygen propellant, he puts the lower limit for a ticket price for a person at about $10,000. Certainly manageable for research activities or once-in-a-lifetime visits in the near term, or immigration in the very long term.

@68 It depends on the complexity of the task. If the intent is only to take readings of the asteroid, scoop some loose material off the surface, or bag a small asteroid and push it home, that could likely be done autonomously (and would suffice for most projects envisioned). If one wanted to establish something like a large-scale modern mine on a large asteroid, a human presence could become worthwhile (although this would be a very long ways away).

@64 If nothing else, the old Orion drive concept could likely get a colonists to the nearest star within their lifetimes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion). You would need at least a few centuries of complete world peace before anyone would be willing to allow that, though. The “gradually spread out through the Oort clouds” model would take far longer, but that doesn’t bother me. We’ll all be long dead before any of this even starts, if it ever does. On the timescale of the problems that space colonization is held to solve (escaping the expansion of the Sun, maximizing knowledge of the universe, etc.) centuries or millennia of time are eyeblinks.

P.S. The Mongoose-V rad hardened MIPS cpu is rated at 10 to 15MHz, which is slow by modern standards. I take this as tentative support for the claim that you’re paying a speed penalty for rad hardening. (Even if it’s a matter of economics, not physics – smaller market for space hardware)

When you referred to a cult classic from the 80s I was certain you meant Morons from Outer Space. Never having seen Dogs in Space, I can’t claim that Morons is a more apt reference than Dogs, but Morons provides a very apt and comprehensive comparison.

Some (not all) of the issues with radiation can also be dealt with by having multiple processors in a voting configuration.

Looks like the most recent rad-hardened processor is the BAE Systems RAD5545 at 466 MHz.

The space radiation environment is harsher for chips than Earth, so you’ll always require more expense for the same capability, but I don’t think there’s any hard limit on how good space-rated processors can get. It’s just a small market.

And if your Mars/Moon base or space station has enough shielding to make it safe for long-term human habitation (doable on Mars or the Moon by piling up soil), then computers can also benefit, and the need for rad-hardening is reduced.

@78 Rad-hardened hardware significantly lags consumer hardware, because it’s built using non-standard processes by defense contractors for a small market of satellites and military vehicles. The lag could probably be reduced if there was more of a market for such hardware, which may happen (satellite megaconstellations, computation-intensive military robotic systems); and it could become less important over the decades as Moore’s Law diminishes. Still, this seems like it hurts the robots more than the crewed missions.

The argument for humans on the Moon or Mars is that robots aren’t very capable. It might cost 300 times more to send people (+robots) than just a robot, but those people could do >300 times the science. The Opportunity rover was enormously successful and lasted one and a half decades past its design life, and did what a human astronaut with a buggy could have done in several hours. And as the flagship missions have gotten more ambitious, they’ve gotten larger and more expensive.

Eventually, it could make sense to spend a few hundred billion all at once to send a crew of astronauts for a year’s stay, rather than build a separate billion dollar bespoke robot for each hour of those astronauts’ working time. Especially if the recent advances in launch continue to decrease the cost of launching bulk stores and shielding.

From all the moon landings, robotic exploration, orbital stations and telescopes, there has come very little of practical, scientific, artistic, philosophical or economic value, especially compared to the astronomical sums spent.

This is just spectacularly false. We know an incredible amount today about the origins of the universe (to pick just one example) that would not have been possible without orbital stations and telescopes. Just because some things are stunts doesn’t mean that real work doesn’t get done.

No need to be particular gloomy about space prospects in general to reject those efforts with current technlogy. If the hyperdrive gets invented some day, or just the space elevators, humans put in space now will contribute nothing to that progress. Maybe humans will figure out something promising in a thousand years or a million, or more. The lack of known aliens around does not make me particular optimistic.