Man doesn't have a great track record of making that much progress in 30 years. The fact we've made so much technological progress in the last 100 is an anomaly.

Humans are attuned to survival not coordinating millions of people to a common goal.

Give us a break!

The problem with getting off this earth is the people who are good at conquering other people through politics and emotions.

Von Braun was the first to make a guided rocket (developments like the de Laval nozzle and rocket equation had just been discovered). The US poached him and sent him to West Texas, then Alabama, without a whole lot to do. Probably to keep him out of enemy hands. The US government had their money and "intelligence communities" lined up behind the Vanguard rocket. It was only because the Vanguard rocket failed so embarassingly while the Soviets won the space race that Eisenhower started NASA and gave Von Braun some funding. So Von Braun wrote a letter to Kennedy, and he got his childhood wish to go to the moon. And he did it. The greatest engineering and technological achievement in history. All the politics (like cost-plus suppliers) still hurt the program, but they really made a lot of progress. So then the new NASA bureaucracy pushed him out and went on to do bureaucratic things like build the ridiculously badly conceived STS (they proposed ideas and Nixon picked it), and crash it even when NASA engineers told them before hand that a foam strike was going to happen as was the case with the Challenger Groupthink disaster.

The Soviets also had plenty of childish and embarassing dramas and politics of their own going on as well.

It's all a shame, really. People can do amazing things, but I'm not willing to pretend our shortcomings aren't because of moral failings.

There is no legitimately good reason for the Challenger disaster, or having to rely on Russians for their superior rocket tech to get into orbit.

I mostly agree. I used to buy into the narrative of human progress over the course of 10,000 years of civilization. Now I see human knowledge/achievement much more as an ebb and flow with some momentum retained across time and societies. I see our current state of progress as a kind of happy accident. Some combination of Secularism, Legalism, Bureaucracy, Entrepreneurship, Socialsim and Education has created the imperfect but better world (mostly better for humans) we inhabit today. Which means to me that none of us really know what's created this progress and we can't be entirely sure what has arrested it at times. There isn't an arrow of human progress but a churning jumble that right now has come out with a relative lull in human suffering and a corresponding bump in personal convenience.

The upside of this is that if we can maintain this cocktail of traits while curbing the more obviously dangerous ones, we may be able to surpass greatly what we've accomplished so far. I hope anyway.

I really think the lesson is one of competition. Without it, we'd never have the V2, and even if we did have the V2 we would still never have had the Saturn rockets. The Russians would never have developed the RD-180, and so SpaceX and BO would never exist.

WWII is what gave us the V2. Reducing the deadliest conflict in human history to "competition" is... Troubling.

Ultimately what seems to drive us forward (IMHO), is finding new ways to kill each other.

Von Braun is not quite my idea of a moral exemplar.

Tom Lehrer's take strikes me about right: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5V7me25aNtI

His past patriotic allegiance to Nazi Germany is a difficult stain on his legacy that can blind one to his technological achievements.

However, during the end of WWII he intentionally surrendered himself, his team and capital into our hands -- the Americans. He came to America, assimilated and oversaw the greatest engineering feat in history when we were losing the space race to Russia, and would have continued to lose without him.

I would also consider, what should he or could he have done in his time? OK, how about what have I or you done to stop the genocide in Darfur? Nobody in the Western world did much, and we didn't do anything at all about the Cambodian genocide. The American Government has also never officially acknowledged the Native American genocide, or paid reparations for it--these would be crimes in Germany today.

In my mind it is important to address these moral questions, which are indeed difficult, but if we are not honest about them then we find can at times be the pot calling the kettle black.

It's nice to dream about how different space travel would be if our gravitational well wasn't quite so deep...

Then stop being lazy and build that mass driver to make this gravity well less deep, one escaping pellet at a time ;)

(Has this ever been explored in fiction, a very determined and patient civilization digging themselves out of an unrocketably deep gravity well?)

If you can fire pellets out of the well using a mass driver, I'd think that firing whole spacecraft out is going to be a much more viable option than trying to reduce the depth of the well to any noticeable degree.

Yes, spacecraft are more fragile than pellets, and canned primates even more so, but a ludicrously long acceleration track is still going to cost peanuts compared to the kind of planetary liposuction you're talking about.

Didn't the moon form from such a mass driver?

Seems like a space elevator is a less scattershot approach? Even on rockets the acceleration your passengers and cargo experience is pretty serious, I'd hate to be in a rail gun's bullet.

Building a space elevator involves getting a substantial amount of stuff into orbit, i.e. the cable and counterweight, so this sounds a bit like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

Maybe you could launch materials and construction robots for an elevator using a mass driver then use the elevator for passengers, I dunno. Still need some non-rocket way to get things up there.

True, though in most fictional accounts the construction mostly happens out of the gravity well - e.g. move an asteroid or iceball into orbit as a counterweight, and start building down from it (and up from the surface).

And how do you get your spacecraft up out of the gravity well and out to the asteroid, so you can move it into orbit and start recycling it into elevator? It sounds suspiciously like you're solving the bootstrap problem by tying strings to your bootstraps and pulling those instead.

Well just wait a while. With every launch out of LEO we're removing a little bit of mass, and every day the solar wind blows away some.

Meteorites.

Edit: Dang, and yea we also the sun and cosmic rays increasing the earth's mass. Radioactive decay also decreases the mass.

So are we getting fatter or slimmer? By a quick Google survey it depends which estimates one trusts, but probably losing a bit.

The delta v required to get off Luna is way less than earth. That's one big economic advantage.

Yes. But only regarding another colony farther out in space, say, on Mars. Therefore comes back the original question.

The clearest answer to the economic question I've seen is asteroid mining. A single asteroid can contain orders of magnitude more platinum than has been mined in all of human history, in a very concentrated form. Which would obviously crash the market for platinum, and could encourage interesting new uses for it when it's no longer ~$1,000 per ounce.

How is that a clear answer? You're still shipping massive amounts of rock through outer space. If it costs you $100M/oz to mine and transport the stuff, then selling it for $1000/oz doesn't even make a dent. And crashing the market doing it is just lose-lose.

Everything is economically viable when you can employ fantasy magic technology to make it happen.

Why would it cost that much to transport it? You've got lots of gravitational potential energy to work with, in terms of shipping down to Earth, so it doesn't take the kinds of fuel that it takes to ship things out of the Earth gravity well. And you don't need to bring back the whole asteroid, just the products, so you're not shipping "massive amounts of rock through outer space".

Are you familiar with the companies that are being set up to do this, and that are backed by Eric Schmidt et al?