Posted on 10/01/2008 10:20:16 AM PDT by anymouse
Should the government continue to fund NASA or should private companies take over the space industry?
commercial space ping
When Space is outlawed, only outlaws will have Space!
Private Sector companies would love and ROI this high but alas it's the rocket scientists who chart our path to the future.
Burt Rutan, Space X, Galactic Virgins will have stratospheric profits cause they know that the
SKY IS NOT THE LIMIT!
When NASA became a self-serving bureaucracy, (see Newt's book on Change) they lost there direction.
Imagine if we had invested in High Frontier that O'Neil wrote of 30 years ago. we would have built satellite factories to build solar power generating satellites and clean electricity would be available now. Fusion reactors on the moon? Yup!
It's all UP for grabs!
I see it as a “have your cake and eat it, too” proposition. That is, there is a very good reason to go to the Moon right now. It is to get a large quantity of Helium-3, which is common in Lunar dust, but very rare on Earth, and has prospects of providing far less expensive, and clean nuclear energy.
While NASA is very good at making and deploying probes and other basic science, it has no grasp of practicality and efficiency, in what amounts to a Lunar mining operation. And this is where private enterprise comes into play.
What if NASA offers, say, a 10 billion dollar prize to whoever can get to the Moon and bring back a metric ton of Helium-3? Pure He-3 currently costs $4.7 million dollars a kilogram, which the company would be required to sell the metric ton to NASA at the going price of $4.7 billion dollars.
What this amounts to is building a spaceship that can land on the Moon, scoop up large quantities of Lunar dust, run it through a heater to make it give off its Helium-3, catching and storing the He3, then return to Earth when it is full.
No need for people to go along with, it can be entirely robotic and by remote control.
And $15 billion, less expenses, to whoever can pull it off. NASA will be glad to provide technical assistance to likely candidates.
The best part is that if scientists can make practical nuclear fusion with that He3, the winning company will have a good stake in becoming a permanent mining installation on the Moon, to keep harvesting and shipping back more He3.
We don’t have the money to do anything anymore because of stupid spending like “Have you been Drinking” ads and such nonsense. Our polititcians are so off track it’s pathetic.
Come to think of it, privatize the FAA as well... No Constitutional authority for either organization. They'd both be better run privately in any case... Competition would be good for them instead of this idiotic FedGov bureaucracy.
You rang?
Nothing is stopping the private sector from space.
A balance would be good. It goes back to the saying about “teaching a man to fish, and he will eat for the rest of his life.”
The axiom of socialism is that it only has purpose in situations of severe deprivation. If food is so scarce that it must be rationed, then it is only right that it be rationed. However, socialism falls apart when you have an abundance of anything.
This is why socialists always try to convince themselves and others both that we *are* facing scarcity, and that we *must* face scarcity.
Look at environmentalist doom-saying: Paul R. Ehrlich (a butterfly expert), saying that the world is doomed because of overpopulation. He supports his arguments with across the board predictions of shortage. And every single one is wrong.
James E. Hansen at NASA first wrote that the world is entering a new ice age, so we must curtail pollution and stop industrialism, the cause of the new ice age. Today he writes that the world faces global warming, so we must curtail pollution and stop industrialism.
Importantly, such people are easy to identify, not because they point out a potential problem, but because they always provide exactly the same solution, no matter what the problem is. They shout down any other effort to actually *solve* the problem, especially if it involves using “positive technology”.
Positive technology allows people to have more, better, and cheaper. So it is adamantly opposed by socialists. This is because for all their talk about “caring” about problems, they are indifferent to problems. All that care about is that the solution to any and all problems is found in socialism.
Their philosophy in a nutshell: “It is better to be a prince in Hell, than a servant in heaven.” So much so that they spend their time trying to turn the world into Hell.
“Nothing is stopping the private sector from space.”
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How about tax-payer funded government competition?
“I don’t think there is much money to be made
in sending satellites to mars etc.”
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And why is that?
Could it be because it has no REAL value?
“NASA’s investment in Space over the last 50 years
has returned $8.00 for every $1.00 invested.”
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I call B.S. on that.
The S Band Antenna that transmitted TV pictures from the Apollo landing sites back to a world that sat on the edge of their seats is now a common fixture on our TVs. Dish and Direct TV fight for market share.
Robert Heinlein, the eminent Science Fiction author testified before Congress on the medical treatments that extended his life and how these procedures were a direct result of the medical advances that came from NASA's space medicine!
Got a cell phone?? Guess what? NASA invention. Howsa about the GPS systems??
Maybe you need to do the math before you call my statement BS!
NASA PAO B.S.! I want to see that 8X ROI for the billions spent on NASA. Where is it?
Much of the "spinoffs" that NASA claims were develpped with Denfense spending, not NASA spending.
Socialism doesn't work in space any better than it does down here on Earth. It doesn't take a Rocket Scientist to figure that out.
That's enough, end the Space program until someone can explain just what the heck they are doing and what is the "Mission".
Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in New Jersy
You obviously know nothing about the space industry or the long history of the alphabet soup of acronyms agencies blocking commercial development of space - here are a few of them: NASA, FAA, DoD, State Dept., FBI, ATF, CIA, NSA, EPA, OSHA, NRO, FCC, FTC, SEC, etc.)
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