SpaceX for comparison only relieved about 100m a year[2], or 0.0026% of the federal budget. Boeing and other groups have similar funding for their space programs. They also, as a commercial company, must be profitable (or try) which isn't as easy as it sounds.
Rocket development is slower even with better modern tooling because we just don't put any money into it anymore.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA [2] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-annual-budget-of-SpaceX
It's hardly appropriate for HN, but I wonder how differently the world would look if NASA had received a much larger budget. Probably taken from the US Military's allocation, how much would the loss of half of the US Navy have affected world politics and conflicts? Or what would the USA look like without the Iraq war of 2003 onward?
(I'm trying to be as neutral as possible in my language here, I don't want to start a flamewar about US and geopolitics!)
I doubt we'd have gotten further into space as some of us would like, but I do think we'd have already proven that asteroid mining can work, and some people would be living multi-year tenures on the Moon. Whether we'd have bootstrapped our way to mining and using nuclear materials in space is doubtful, but certainly possible. (in other words, building nuclear rockets that have never been close to Earth's biosphere, which would open up large parts of the Solar System for human exploration)
That's an astonishing presentation of data/intent.
I will have to see if I can find that as a vector and/or get a large format print. That's beautiful!
EDIT: Here's a vector! https://cdn.makezine.com/uploads/2013/07/integratedspaceplan... (Found via Google, searching using "The Rockwell International Integrated Space Plan")
The pursuit of profit, which is the pursuit of greater productivity, is what makes it possible to pay ever increasing amounts of taxes, which provides for a radical improvement in the welfare of people on the planet.
Just ask China. They went from being an anti-profit, anti-market country of near absolute poverty, to a heavily for-profit economy, lifting nearly a billion people out of poverty, and providing for an extraordinary base of increasing savings derived from profit (income beyond expenses). So much for destroying us, humanity has never been better off on average than it is today.
Profit is a store of prior productive action that enables you to make future investments. To curse that is absurdity defined. It's the only reason we're all alive, it's a base requirement of all civilization (unless you like the odds of survival when you're living moment to moment, betting on never falling off the highwire).
There's a lot more history to China than 1980-now. What I see every day on HN (and elsewhere) are new startups which are simply rent-seeking enterprises, and I don't see how that helps us.
Probably quite a lot; the 600-ship Navy was half of Reagan’s strategy to bankrupt the Soviets, the other half was Star Wars (SDI).
The money that would have gone to NASA while everyone was still pumped from the moon landing went on the Vietnam War instead. By the time Star Wars came about, the momentum was lost.
What do you think all those corporations were working for other than lucrative government contracts? What do you think all the employees were working for if not their paychecks? While I'm sure that many of them truly loved the work, their primary reason for working was that they got paid for it. Just like everyone else. Profit make the world go around.
Now figure final prices would need to be cheaper for space mining to take off. Even recycling electronics filled with high value atoms is difficult to profit from.
Tourism seems like an option, but if you can drop launch costs enough that it’s ‘cheap’ then sending stuff up is also ‘cheap’.
IMO, the trick to getting space mining to take off is not robots it’s the need for billions of tons worth of low complexity stuff in orbit.
The moon program was always controversial and it came close to cancelation several times.
If you were looking at $/kg to orbit I'd suspect that we've made far faster progress recently than ever before.
So, overall, I'd say SpaceX specifically was pushing towards better margin products pro-actively, rather than dragging their feet on R&D to milk an older cash cow.
It's quite morbid that the technology that put man on the moon was originally intended to destroy life (developed by a particularly odious political regime no less), but that's how it turned out.