Re:Why I thought we'd all be living in space by now
by anamax on Sunday January 11, 2009 @05:17PM
(#429713)
> It's almost as if we've lost ground since the Apollo program ended.
We have lost ground since the Apollo program ended. At that time, we had some functional boosters left - they've been rusting in Florida since then. We also had the tooling to make more of the whole stack, but that tooling was intentionally destroyed as part of the Shuttle program. We have lost other material things.
The biggest loss is probably that we've lost the belief that we should go to space.
There are two paths to space: governments and private sector. The government path doesn't seem to have made a huge dent in the colonization goal over the last fifty years. It's almost as if we've lost ground since the Apollo program ended. And the reality of the "golden age" of space exploration is that the funding of the program was driven more by the need to beat the USSR than it was by the vision of space exploration as a worthy goal for humanity.
As for the private sector, the issue there is that huge profits could be made, but the risks are way too high and the timeline is way too long. The handful of companies that could afford it are already making huge profits here on earth in things they understand and their shareholders are apt to take a dim view of those companies risking billions of dollars with little hope of return within the next couple decades.
Sadly, the best hope for space colonization is either a) breakthrough developments in a tangential technical field that enable cheap access to space (read: nanotech enables construction of space elevator) and/or b) we trash our planet to the point that our survival requires governments to commit everything they have to space colonization.