Sorry I’m responding to this blog so late. Work, family, the usual. My ideas in this area are already well-known to you. But for the record, my solid belief is that we need a return to NACA, or at least a fundamental restructuring of NASA to work more in the NACA role. It would be OK with me for the restructured NASA to disseminate funding to the private sector to stimulate governmental priorities (ala COTS), but the work needs to be done in the private sector. Ultimately, I’d like to see the US government get out of the way, since it seems no longer capable of leading.

Dave

Until we develop a new energy system, and a new propulsion system and such, even the dummies know that we’ve really hit a wall. The potential now is very limited. The perception is that there’s no there, there. No vision; no hope; no dream.

The real problem for advancement, in my mind, is we need a new organizational mode. Right now, second-rate guys become the bosses of first-rate guys. These are overseen by political cronies, the problem with all government agencies. All these guys are simply less smart and less qualified than the first-rate guys. It stifles achievement and vision. Real smart guys HATE working for stupid bureaucrats and brown-nosers. Maybe that’s just me, though.

I guess the only pioneers left are a handful of entrepreneurs like Paul Allen and Burt Rutan. Let’s hope their projects lead to something more interesting than NASA’s vision for space exploration.

You could only believe that if you believe the purpose of NASA is to build space stuff. It’s not. The purpose of NASA is to provide jobs, as Brian Wang noted above. The imminent failure of the Ares/Orion to come in at a reasonable price/performance point is due more to political constraints than any engineering challenge: It has to keep employed the people who are currently working on the shuttle. Since those people are the major cost component of the shuttle it’s difficult to see how the new system will be any cheaper, though I grant it may have a bit better performance.

Allowing the shuttle program to amass a permanent political constituency was the death of the American manned space program. It’s been dead for decades, but the body will be animated as long as the money flows.

If we were actually serious about getting cheap access to space, and we weren’t willing to let political considerations drive the process, Pournelle’s The SSX Concept would be mandatory reading for everyone involved in the process.

Unlikely. The hard science of unmanned space exploration and various EMF spectra telescopes is too important to end. It is “manned exploration” in search of a mission they can do better and for less cost than remote-operated or robotic craft that is the problem.

Just launching an ESA “supply barge” to the ISS cost 7.5 billion. That was a billion a ton. A manned mission to Mars would cost a trillion, and result in little more than a few days of footage of a few people prancing around, collecting a few samples and returning home.

The idea of colonizing space is not feasible now. Lack of cheap heavy lift capacity, lack of a good energy source, lack of elements and compounds essential for life in all areas explored (inc. Mars – no nitrogen to grow naything).
Plus substantial, at times lethal, radiation levels outside Earth’s magnetosphere.

Vast swathes of uninhabitable desert, arctic tundra, acquatic environs, even Antarctica would be easier to establish a self-sustaning colony on than any other celestial body or L-5 satellite.

If man does embark into space and survive outside the Earth’s shield and independent of its resources – it may only be when man reaches Kurzweill’s Singularity – and embarks not as a biological organism – but as resilient, very long-lived machines carrying human intelligence.

In the meantime, the real discoveries will be by robots, space and land telescopes, and the efforts of mathematicians and particle physicists.

Well, consider the development of aviation. It was about 32 years from Wright Bros. to commercial use of the DC-3, and another 26 from DC-3 to 707.

In 1969, one could say it was just 12 years from Sputnik to moonwalk. But since then, progress has stalled.

In 1968, one could still imagine “2001: A Space Odyssey” as a possible reality. But, it didn’t happen.

Manned space flight remains fantastically expsnsive, and seriously expensive. The Space Shuttle was touted as “the DC-3 of Space,” but DC-3 flights don’t cost $800million apiece, and DC-3′s don’t have a one percent chance of killing everyone on board on each flight.

And so, the enthusiasm’s gone. Commercial and explorative space has moved to robots because electronics (unlike space propulsion systems) has improved enormously since the 1960s.

Suppose that 1953 aviation had consisted of improved versions of the Wright Flyer– better fabric, more reliable engines, but essentially the same thing. How much enthusiasm would there have been about that?

We’d be better served digging more bomb shelters. The idea that we are anywhere close to a surviveable alternative to Earth is laughable, and it has nothing to do with our current NASA budget. Now start building a space elevator, followed by an orbital factory facility, and then we can talk about interplantary travel etc. But rushing some half baked mars mission to set up some sort of hippy commune that simply cant be self-sufficient is pointless. We should move one step at a time.

Now NASA is a bureaucracy whose purpose is to spread money (pork projects) to the districts of powerful senators and congressmen. Almost all of the money goes to facilities, ground jobs and research which while interesting will not lead to the opening of space.

That is why Virgin Galactic is exciting now. It opens up the possibility of space travel to ten thousands times more people.

The robot missions are nice. Everyone gets new pictures and some new science.

An exciting future is a lot more and soon all of us can go visit [for longer and longer trips] space and then everyone can choose to live and work there and go farther.