I "saw" the Space Shuttle launch last week. I didn't go up to Cape Canaveral this time, and just as well since the launch was delayed again, but the launch was still visible--158 miles away (as the crow flies)!!! It took less than five minutes. A tower of thick white smoke, a vertical cylindrical cumulus cloud, shot up into the breaking dawn with a point of intense yellow-white light atop it. The light seemed to come back down again, an optical illusion, as the shuttle curved off to the northeast away from where my brother and I were standing on the front lawn. We "saw" the booster rockets fall away in a flash of light that stayed behind and below the main show.
It was all very depressing.
Why?
Because by the end of this year, the shuttles will be retired and the nation that put men on the moon will no longer have any manned launch capacity at all. We will ride into low earth orbit as passengers on Russian ships. Because we won't be able to do it ourselves. We're too busy holding Tea Parties and celebrating Confederate History months, objecting to evolution, embracing anti-scientific non-rationalism and gutting our own economy while lashing out militarily around the world.
This is what a civilization in decline looks like.
I really want to believe the president when he says we will go to Mars and an asteroid. Maybe we will. Maybe we can do it in spite of not having the cutting edge technology, and the launch capability and the trained teams, both ground and orbital. Just because his predecessors promised the Moon and Mars and the rest while cutting NASA's capabilities doesn't mean his flat NASA budget portends the same.
Maybe private companies will take over the lunar program. Just because the railroad companies required federal land grants before they built transcontinental lines, just because the airlines required federal airmail subsidies before they would fly coast-to-coast, just becasue no one but the federal government would or could build the interstate highways and national air traffic control systems, doesn't mean private companies won't jump to fly to the space station and the moon without any immediate visible payoff for them.
I want to believe. Really, I do. In the long run, private enterprize in space is the way to go. In the long run. I'm just not sure we have that kind of time, anymore.
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I'd like to believe the same thing, but unfortunately I don't think the economics of free-market space travel are supportable. It's a very large initial investment with a long time horizon for profits. Realistically, it looks very much like only a government can provide both the amount of investment capital and the long-term will to persist with the project.
ReplyDeleteI found this essay a few years ago that provides a rather thorough and convincing analysis of the situation: http://www.transhumanist.com/volume4/space.htm
Jimcat,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link. This is the point I was trying to make. The railroads would not have been built except for grants of huge tracts of land, the highways and air traffic control systems were built directly by government (although using private contractors). There will be no long-term space development without that kind of subsidy contracting by governments...and we are opting out, to our long-term detriment.