Moon Base or orbiting moon space station 2020-2030

[publiusr]

To hark back to our old stomping ground
http://www.bautforum.com/showthread.php/127444-Change-of-Focus-of-NASA?p=2001497#post2001497

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Yeah, Elon Musk is a person who tends to go for outrageous impossible things that only a complete nut would even consider.

Let's see:
* He pursued creating his own space company that would compete against aerospace giants that have been in business for decades... starting with a sum of money that wasn't enough to purchase a decent launcher at the time ($100M).
* He pursued creating an electric car that drives several times further than any other electric car on a single charge and would still sell. While also being an SUV.
* He decided he is capable of designing spacecraft on his own while having no education in the field whatsoever.
* He put windows on his cargo capsule.

That are the kind of statements that you know won't happen just by reading them. They are the walking definition of vapourware. When you read something like this you know you should discard it... Unless... that person has shown he's able to fulfil at least some of his unworkable ideas.

$500M for a Mars round trip might sound outrageous, and it might be impossible in the given time frame, but why are you so quick to discard the possibility that Elon Musk might be onto something? He has an idea that's part of a larger vision of his, and if his company gets going, he's going to be able to try this out. Which is exactly what a person interested in space travel should want.

Space travel is so difficult and expensive that it requires us to try out outrageous overly optimistic ideas until some of them start working. If someone is promising something that sounds reasonable, that someone isn't going to get us back to space.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

ULA blows hot and cold. If you have been over at Phil Plait's forum, you know that ULA is the king of crony capitalism. They went after ARES Constellation and wanted to supplant it with a depot system that ULAs own man--the designer for the DTAL lander--Josh Hopkins--said would cost more than HLV development, and confirmed by the AV week citation I posted at bautforum which questioned the cost-savings of the EELV-only depot architecture..

Which is one side of the story. There was a large group with an opposing opinion that the propellant depots would end up being cheaper than the Ares/Constellation architecture, especially once it became clear that Ares/Constellation was already dead in the water. Still, nobody at NASA really took it seriously until AFTER SpaceX hit the scene, by which time the push for the Senate Launch System had begin in earnest. Propellant Depots were arguably a poor alternative to the Ares/Constellation (I'm not convinced either way) but it stacks up nicely compared to SLS.

First the arguement was that we didn't need in-house arsenal method, and ULA made the claim that private space firms--meaning them--were capable of taking things over

And they were full of shit, and everyone knew it, which is why they're still not considered a frontrunner in commercial space despite their longer track record in the industry (and why man-rating the EELVs was never even considered as an alternative to Ares/Constellation; nobody at NASA really believes they'll be able to do it). Even Boeing's CST-100 design was primarily just thinly veiled attempt to suck up some of that CCDev cash. In a way, it still is; Boeing keeps on insisting that they can't develop it without NASA funding, and then they go ahead and develop it anyway...

Venture Capitalists run from aerospace with huge up front costs...

Crony Capitalists don't, which was kind of my point. They actually enjoy the high up-front costs, primarily because they know that the people who get paid for those costs ultimately work for them anyway. It would be like if the guy who owns a car company goes to the mayor and tells him it would be awesome for the city if they converted all the police cars to run on hydrogen fuel cells. The guy who does the convincing just happens to manufacture those fuel cells, and it's just a coincidence that the mayor's brother owns a factory that produces hydrogen.

There seems to be a level of contempt for rocket engineers which needs to be addressed.

Not for rocket engineers, exactly. There's growing contempt, especially in the newspace community, for the "conventional wisdom" crowd -- of which Griffin was a member -- who believe that ACCEPTING the cowardice of venture capitalists is a bad idea, primarily because crony capitalists (e.g. ULA and the Senate Launch System) will fill the void and nothing useful will ever get done. The idea isn't so much to depend on the courage of aerospace entrepreneurs, but to mitigate some of the risk that would cause them to run away in the first place. The best way to do THAT is to offset some of those huge upfront costs with some government subsidies, which AFAIK is something that DIDN'T happen with the Light Jet fiasco.

 

[throwback]

I was dreaming when I wrote my last post. Being realistic, I think there is a greater chance that humans will drive themselves into extinction than there will be an active campaign to colonize space. As a species, I feel that we haven't learned how to capitalize on the resources in space in such a way that the capitalistic system will benefit, and, until this happens, space travel will remain, for the most part, in the speculative realm of science fiction. I don't think sending rich people into space will change the equation as what they do already may as well exist on another world, and this will be one more thing that most people can't do.

I was born in the year of the last mission to the Moon, and I will die never seeing another human walk on the Moon or any other extraterrestrial body.

 

[Deckerd]

So long as it's prohibitively expensive to send anything into space at a financial loss, it won't happen. There would need to be a substantial financial return guaranteed before big money will be advanced by capitalists to fund space ventures. The closest we're going to get for a long time is joyriding in orbit, which may or may not be financially viable. Time will tell.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

That's why they start small. NASA has stuff it wants done in space and private companies can get paid to do some of that stuff for them. If they do it well enough and often enough, the amount that NASA pays them winds up being more than what they spend in doing it, and suddenly space exploration becomes profitable.

Servicing a space station for money is a good first step; the next step would be BUILDING a space station and maintaining it on NASA's (or someone else's) behalf. The trick to this is to figure out ways of doing this cheaper than NASA would have done it, which 1) has the long term benefit of reducing the cost of everything that's getting done in space and 2) widens their profit margins so they can eventually reinvest in new capabilities and get even more stuff done.

Like most new industries, an infusion of government cash is going to be required to get it all started. That's finally beginning to happen, and we can actually start to look forward to some progress in the not too distant future.