Thanks to redistricting, she won’t be my representative after this year. Good riddance.

“a group of people who leave their native country to form in a new land a settlement subject to, or connected with, the parent nation.”

History has shown many examples where people have left their parent country to form a colony in a distant land only to fail. One thing that all colonies seem to share is that the colonists will own land when they get there and can start being self suffient. This also provided them with a lot of relatively cheap resources.

I can not imagine a group of people calling themselves a colony but no one is a landowner.

I see that voodoo is your meme of the day. I’ll see what I can work in…

“By solving practical problems of real commerce and security that we can actually solve now, we create self-sustaining and growing industries where one practical innovation leads to the next.”

No argument there. But none of that happens without pouring money into those areas before reaping the rewards. Fully functioning and profitable industries don’t appear overnight you know. And that appears to be our major area of disagreement.

So far we have been investing in space for 3-4 generations (counting at birth), and what profitable, fully commercial (i.e. no government support at all), industries do we have to show for it? Satellites services. I don’t even count the launch services part since a lot of it is government subsidized in one way or another.

“The basic problem here is that you have no idea what space colonization entails”

Au contrare. I’ve never stated that I did. In fact I have been clearly stating on this blog thread that no one knows if we can even thrive as a species off planet Earth. That’s part of the reason why I think NASA’s money is being spent incorrectly, because it’s not addressing survivability issues – we’re not going to Mars, or likely not even to the Moon for more than short jaunts until we solve the huge number of health issues. We are far more fragile than our technology.

But everything we want to do must be done by investing far before the need. It’s the same here on Earth, it’s just that we do it so well that most people (like you apparently) never see it or realize what’s happening. On the news today I heard a discussion about oil exploration, and one oil industry person said that one oil company had invested $10B into just developing an Alaska oil field – no oil production has even started.

It’s the same with space, but it’s going to be a much larger investment over a much longer period of time. And like I was telling Oler, no one knows when tipping points come – those times when suddenly it becomes much easier to do something.

IF SpaceX were to perfect reusable rockets, and IF autonomous rovers were perfected, then the Moon could be explored and mined for a much lower cost than what we can do today, and that might change the economic equation for building structures in space. What structures? Rotating space stations that allow humans to live in space without the detrimental side-effects of zero-G.

Is that the way the future will unfold? I doubt it. But we won’t get there at all if we don’t invest in the future – whatever amount that may be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_SuLjt_kr4

In reality, neither the ISS, nor the hypothetical moon bases and Mars missions would solve any of the most important problems facing (what you at least admit to be far future) space colonization. Indeed, since most of these problems are economic in nature, these preposterously expensive, completely unprofitable (except via government contracts) and completely dependent astronaut cathedrals take us in the opposite direction of where we need to go: which is expanding and improving space industry and transportation, or the precursors of future space industry: for example subsea extraction telerobotics, which is developing most of the technology we will need for future space extraction industries, essential to “living off the land” instead of launching everything out of a deep gravity well.

By solving practical problems of real commerce and security that we can actually solve now, we create self-sustaining and growing industries where one practical innovation leads to the next. That, and not heavenly voodoo, is the key to growing our capabilities towards space colonization.

JD Black RGO

“Our space faring technology (including cost and utilization) are so immature that any effort to “settle the planets” (or anywhere off world) is doomed to glorious failure.”

Today, sure.

And yet 100 years ago we were just getting used to driving cars instead of horses (the Model T was only 4 years old), and 57 years later we were walking on the Moon. It’s hard to predict technological tipping points.

Besides the big question of whether humans can live out their lives in 1/6 or 1/3 gravity (lots of known zero G gravity issues), I think we’re not that far away from being able to survive long-term in space, and then it’s just a cost issue for being able to travel between planets. Not next year, but maybe in 57 years or so.

Two main things holding us back though. The first is money, and it is rightly the biggest one. Part of that can be mitigated if we can dramatically drop the cost to get payloads to orbit. Musk thinks he might have found the right combination of technology & technique, so maybe we’ll know soon.

The other is a focused approach to doing this. I’ve mentioned it before, so suffice it to say that I don’t see one today, which I think leads to a lot of wasted time and money. I also think the approach should be international, or at least with international partners that we trust. There would probably be some inefficiency inherent in that approach (like there was building the ISS), but I think spreading the risks/costs makes up for it.

Oh, and public buy-in from our political leaders. Or not. We’re in kind of a middle area right now – no firm yes, no firm no.

Robert G. Oler wrote @ March 20th, 2012 at 12:48 am

“this is a point I have been making here and other places for sometime. In the end at the cost that human exploration takes, there is no possible justification for it.”

you replied:
“Can humans expand our species away from Earth? Completely unknown.”

The problem is that when societies tend to tackle technological efforts for which they are vastly immature for…usually end up proving the futility of the effort period and move away from it. The Vikings trying to settle “North America” were clearly out of their league in terms of the technologies to do so…and there needed to be some “non exploration” development before the effort was doable. (we have had our own history of that actually the SST issue was just to technologically immature to even attempt to be successful.)

Our space faring technology (including cost and utilization) are so immature that any effort to “settle the planets” (or anywhere off world) is doomed to glorious failure.

What we need to do is to proceed along other lines and hope the great impact is far enough away so we have the technology to deal with it. RGO

“If, however, there was an actual serious plan to go to Mars, the first thing NASA would do is actually have astronauts stay on ISS for Mars missions durations, see what problems arise, and try to solve them.”

Part 2

Oh, and here is an interesting news item about NASA wanting to use the ISS for a Mars mission dry run.

According to your measure, I guess they are serious about Mars…

I propose House Appropriations Committee NASA Budget Hearing Drinking Game, although I warn you to do this at home because you will be in no shape to drive by the end of the hearing

(1) Chair Frank Wolf mentions China … Take a drink.

(2) Representative mentions jobs in his/her district … Take a drink.

(3) Charlie Bolden cries … Take a drink.

(4) Representative accuses Obama administration of stealing SLS money for commercial crew … Take a drink.

(5) For each representative who does not attend the meeting … Take a drink.

(6) Representative muses whether we’d be better off continuing to pay Russia than investing in American aerospace to fly U.S. astronauts … Take a drink.

(7) Representative claims Obama cancelled the Space Shuttle … Take a drink.

(8) Representative thinks Constellation is still the current program … Take a drink.

(9) Representative claims SLS/Orion is a backup option for space taxi to the ISS … Take a drink.

(10) Representative accuses Obama of surrendering our space program to another nation … One drink for each country listed.

Any other suggestions?