“Very few people have the money to start a space based company. The challenges in starting a successful one are far greater than the quality of an idea.”

There are lots of ideas. Chris has plenty of them, along with opinions for how the U.S. Taxpayer should fully fund them.

My point is that waiting for the government to do something that the government really has no interest in doing is fruitless. Instead, people like Musk actually put their money where their mouth is. And yes, they could fail – SpaceX was going to fold if their 4th Falcon 1 flight didn’t work (but it did).

The Apollo program has screwed up our perceptions of how we’re going to do things in space. Unless there is an identified “National Imperative”, the U.S. Taxpayer is really only willing to let space be a small investment, not a big one. We are talking decades to create a presence in space that is able to be sustainable and growing, since until we find a revenue stream for living in space, there is just not enough money from NASA do keep too many people in space.

That’s a ridiculous argument. Very few people have the money to start a space based company. The challenges in starting a successful one are far greater than the quality of an idea.

It hard enough to write a business plan and get a loan or put up your own cash ranging from a couple thousand to a million dollars for a business. And it is magnitudes harder to write a business plan and seek billions in funding and not being able to show a return for decades.

Someday, maybe it wont take FU money to get something done and anyone with a good idea can work to implement it.

This is sad on so many levels.

“Most people in the space interest community totally ignore the fact that the vast caboodle of technological systems needed, do NOT exist and/or remain unproven.”

Uh, Chris? The same could be said for going back to the Moon. Don’t you remember the $100B Constellation program that was cancelled because it was going to cost way more than $100B?

“Whatever NASA has been able to work with, on board the ISS, would be completely inadequate for any deep space crewed expedition.”

Well duh. Part of that is because the ISS hasn’t been up long enough to help develop and prove some of those systems that we need. The other part is that the ISS was never intended to develop everything for going to Mars, since the ISS is in LEO and can’t prove out fuel depots, radiation mitigation techniques, and other such stuff.

“Things like dust-management, have been routinely ignored by the space media.”

Yes, let’s blame the space media for not enough money to worry about dust management…

“…yet they totally ignore the Moon as an intermediate goal: which is a terrible mistake.”

And what are you doing about it beside moaning and groaning? Huh? Musk is staking a large part of time and money to reach Mars, so if you have a beef with what he is doing, and suggest you do the same. Put your money where you mouth (and keyboard) is. No Whining!

While I have my own views on our nations proper response to AGW, I need to point out to you that the leading voice in AGW scepticism has been and is Benny Peiser, who for years ran the Cambridge Conference, which focused on the impact hazard, and its effect on climate.

Now that that’s done with, the blunt fact is that NASA’s cometary impact estimates appear to be about 2 orders of magnitude too low. By your logic, then, since AGW scepticism is correct, the higher cometary impact hazard estimate is correct as well.

I myself view the two issues as related only by the fact that both of them concern the climate. And I agree with our host Jeff’s decision in that regard.