I believe in political solutions.
Political solutions only solve political problems, which space exploration and energy production are not.
Flying to the moon was a POLITICAL solution to the Soviet challenge of the space race; notice that as soon as that problem was solved, the entire program was shelved, its hardware and tooling dismantled. Apollo was never meant to open up the universe for human exploration, it was meant to
beat the Russians to the moon.
If you're mostly interested in making politicians happy and looking good in the newspaper, then yes, go on with your political solutions. It's only tax money, nobody REALLY cares how much of it goes to waste.
As you have described, solar costs are coming down, and that can easily be true for systems that have no darkness--or danger of bird strikes. In my earlier posts on this thread, I describe why space based solar enables other space tech growth--in a way ground based systems cannot.
You didn't "describe" anything at all. You made some unsourced, wishful-thinking claims about how "mass production" of SLS would bring costs down. You didn't explain how or why and didn't address the fact that the space shuttle program still ran close to half a million bucks per launch even when they were launching 5 times a year.
Gground based solar farms will compete with funding
No they won't. They're an entirely separate industry with an entirely separate funding stream. Even assuming that ground-based solar needs "funding" in that way, it's going to be profitable and self-sustaining LONG before space-based solar ever gets off the ground (literally and figuratively)
If a loner goes up against two great houses, he has no chance (Trump being the Harkonnen who got away).
But if one can pit one house against another--one can have a chance to do great things.
Which is why Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against the government citing unfair practices in the competition for military contracts. He's the Paul Atreides character, cornering a valuable commodity -- cheap access to space -- and carving out a business empire of his own. He can out-compete ULA and provide superior services, which forces the government (emperor?) to BUY his services rather than try to provide them.
In that environment it makes no sense to try and fellate congress into accidentally doing something beneficent for space exploration very once in a while. We have an entire industry that has always been working towards that goal, so now the game is about empowering the space flight industry to pursue manned space exploration for its own sake, rather than simply provide those services to government/military contract fulfillment.
I'll remind you again that every spacecraft ever made in the United States was manufactured by private industry -- aerospace contractors and such. They were able to do it because they were paid obscene amounts of money by the government to develop and build that technology; the costs were so high and the return on investment so low that they never could have even attempted it without the government underwriting everything.
So what if the Apollo program was able to produce a profit in its own right? What if they found a way to capitalize on the samples and data brought back from Apollo reliably enough to cover the costs of the program in its entirety? In that case, they would no longer be slaves to the political whims of the government or chained to the fickle tides of public opinion. They could launch more rockets because they WANT to launch more rockets; they wouldn't need funding, only permission.
Ground-Based outfits will never have the muscle of big aerospace firms behind it. That's the key...
The key to what? Big aerospace has NO INTEREST in orbital solar. None at all. They know it's a dead idea with no chance of ever being profitable. So how exactly are you planning to convince Lockheed, ULA, SpaceX and Raytheon to invest tens of billions of dollars in orbital solar technology that all math and logic says will never actually pay off?
The most you can do is trick the government into ORDERING them to do it for some asinine reason or another. And as soon as someone in the government changes their mind, or as soon as there's another war, or as soon as the newspapers stop paying attention, they yank the funding and transfer it to something else.
Political solutions only solve political problems.
I've also given technical reasons to support SPSS--not just keeping space dreams alive.
And I've given you the MATH that shows orbital solar is not and will never be profitable OR competitive with ground-based solar, even with technology ten times as advanced as what we have now.
Should you somehow SUCCEED in pushing the U.S. government to waste its money on this program, everybody who ISN'T a space enthusiast will be able to rightly point out what a massive waste if time and money this is and that every dollar spent on supporting space based solar power would be better spent on LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE. And they would be 100% right, in which case your only fallback position would be "But... but... but... but... SPACE!"
