I can't see any other way for it to happen. The socialist dependent class isn't going to stand for their government wasting the money they want to serve their immediate needs for government largess on pie-in-the-sky space programs that take food out of their mouths, furniture out of their rent-controlled apartments, pricey designer clothes off their backs or which interfere with their cable reception of Snookie getting drunk and showing her twat to the world.mistermack wrote:I can't see that the private ventures have any relevance for the colonisation of space.
Commercialization of the vast mineral and power resources found in space, of course, as you point out just below.They might be relevant to the satellite business, and the technologies that rely on it, but other than that, I can't see it going anywhere.
Giving millionaires the experience of weightlessness is a bit of fun, but where can it go from there?
Good luck trying to get the barbarians in Islamic countries to agree to be taxed to support space exploration.I would like to see a WASA, funded by the world, to go on with space research.
The huge problem is the cost of getting materials into space.
If the private sector can make an impact on that, then I would say that they have done something useful.
It's not "your own idea" in the least. Mining and rail-gun launches of the moon's mineral resources for use by factories in orbit was first discussed during the Golden Age of science fiction in the 1950s by luminaries such as Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ted Sturgeon, Fred Pohl and a host of others, so you're just cribbing from the greats without acknowledging that it's their genius, not yours at work.My own idea would be to mine the moon, as I said previously, or, build some kind of gigantic gun, that could fire raw materials into space in a capsule, into the same orbit as the space station. The space station would then capture the capsule, and uses the raw materials for assembling and manufacturing stuff in space.
The thinking behind that is that most of the cost of a space rocket lifting off from the Earth is the cost of lifting the weight of the fuel, and the weight of the huge rocket needed to contain the fuel.
If you only lift the materials you require, and nothing else, it would bring the costs down to a tiny fraction of a rocket launch. I've go no idea what kind of propulsion you could use for the gun though.
But yes, that's exactly what needs to happen, and only private industry, with it's profit incentive, will be able to do it.
Want to know what the single greatest impediment to the commercialization of the moon's mineral resources is?It would have to be able to fire a projectile at least three hundred km in altitude, and have a final velocity of about 8 km/s.
I'd like to see the private sector have a go at that.
The United Nations.
There's this treaty, you see, that prohibits private ownership of any extraterrestrial object. All such objects are "declared to be the property of all mankind."
That's a rather large roadblock to commercialization of extraterrestrial mineral resources, from those on the moon to the asteroids or the gasses of Jupiter. No private company is going to invest the billions of dollars necessary to harvest those mineral resources if they cannot, in so doing, gain clear title to the products of their exploration and exploitation. Why would they invest money only to have the investment made worthless when "mankind" grabs what they produced for its own?
That conundrum, by the way, is precisely why America's 1892 Mining Law grants low-cost fee-title ownership to mineral resources discovered by any private person through exploration and exploitation of previously undiscovered resources. Without such title, there would be no exploration or discovery of needed mineral resources because there would be no profit potential.
Yes, this results in the transfer of ownership of public lands to private persons, but minerals are where you find them, and they must necessarily be extracted from where they are found, regardless of the impacts to the environment, which can be controlled and mitigated but not eliminated.
The same principle applies to space-based resources. Without the right of ownership, there is no point in investing money finding and extracting the resources. And since some fantasy world government space agency will never be able to get agreement on the allocation and disposition of the moon's mineral resources, and there will be endless bickering about who should benefit, its never going to be done by government either.
So, once again, socialism is the problem not the solution, and capitalism is the solution that is being hindered by socialism.
