My head hurts.
Musk’s moonshot plan has been greeted enthusiastically by most space fans but some are a little doubtful.
That article link is a republication of a piece by Jeffrey Kluger at Time.com detailing the kind of technical minefields SpaceX needs to cross to get to the moon and back. No-one's doubtful. It's been done successfully plenty of times before.
Other commentators remain totally uninspired, ridiculing the idea as a gigantic waste of money.
Of course they would, few journalists are trying to push the narrative that military spending is out of control, for example, because bashing Trump is the in thing. No-one really wants to say that good will come out of this, because commercial space flight isn't that affordable, and once it becomes affordable it'll be an extremely lucrative industry if you make the right plays. And our technological advancement will shoot through the roof again - a jump just like the one we made from not having nuclear energy or computers to having it.
history shows that soon after the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, people switched their televisions to more down-to-earth events while wondering why NASA kept going back to the Moon again and again with Apollo 12, then Apollo 13, then Apollo 14 – all the way up to Apollo 17.
Gee, I wonder if that had anything to do with the public not being made to hype it up because America had already claimed their dominance of the space race and put much less effort into making the public interested in advancing STEM fields. Hurrah, we've beat the Russians! Now we can rest on our laurels.
Of course, every single mission we ever did during that time taught us new stuff and allowed us to make astonishing discoveries. There's pure aluminium on the moon. Pure! It came from asteroids ejected from the bowels of newly formed planets at the beginning of our solar system. You can't get much purer than that, and it's just laying about on the surface, doing nothing.
Of course, we also learned about existing in a microgravity environment which Mars has to some extent, but the government wasn't interested in NASA telling the public all this. Their attention was drawn to all manner of other things, which was fine. The U.S. wanted that money elsewhere, and NASA's budget got the cut every single year since then, and forms a small part of the governmental budget.
Musk would tell you he’s not using taxpayer funds for his moonshot and that his SpaceX venture is a private commercial business.
That's because it is.
But SpaceX’s only significant customer so far has been NASA – a taxpayer-funded agency that pays it to deliver cargo to the International Space Station.
Two thirds of SpaceX launch contracts for the next half-century, as of 2013, were for private, commercial customers. Not NASA. NASA might pay more money for the kid of work they're doing, but SpaceX does less collectively for NASA than what it's currently contracted to do by third parties. That number is even larger now, and they're easily looking at being a hundred-year-plus company despite being less than fifteen years old.
And even before SpaceX had delivered anything, NASA made a massive investment in the firm to get it up and running. Any claim that SpaceX is purely a commercial business, then, is also incredible.
NASA also put just over $250 million into Rocketplane Kistler (newly formed solely to apply for the funding) at the same time. However, while Kistler filed for bankruptcy because of incredibly tough deadlines, SpaceX was able to lean on Musk's finances to see it through.
That second line is also crap. NASA was ordered by government to find alternative sources of rockets because Russia's designs were getting old and expensive, and NASA's own designs were extremely expensive to use, not to mention that no-one wanted to tackle the 80's landing technology they had in-house again.
This author might also want to re-check their dates on when SpaceX was started - back in 2002. And their main intention back then was reducing the cost of space travel and going to Mars. It's always been Mars.
Being a fan of “space colonisationâ€, then, can be likened to rejoicing in the displacement of native peoples and celebrating the destruction of wilderness.
Hey, does anyone notice a distinct lack of life, microbial or otherwise, in the places we've landed spacecraft on so far? Hmmm. I guess this is not that.
Unfortunately, too often space expansion has utilised historic conquests to map out the future; witness Star Trek’s Space: the Final Frontier theme, or Musk’s own idea to colonise Mars.
Calling for a new “age of exploration†in space recalls past voyages of discovery ignores how Chritopher Columbus decimated native tribes with smallpox and how Spanish conquistadors ransacked Meso-America’s temples to loot gold.
It looks like someone hasn't read the Prime Directive as laid out by Starfleet. Maybe that someone should also read up on the Outer Space Treaty. It covers all of these scenarios.
But the plan to settle Mars, for example, and then to set about extracting valuable resources without working out if some alien species is living there – even if those life forms are microbial – seems reckless.
Which is EXACTLY the opposite of what every scientist in the field is suggesting. No-one wants to screw up Mars without having a pretty good idea of what's on there. Hence, the manned missions to Mars, because the rate of discovery will be more than 10,000 times our current pace with the rovers.
And those who first to get to the Moon or to Mars shouldn’t be permitted to plunder these worlds just for the sake of their own adventure or profit.
Again, there's the Outer Space Treaty for this sort of thing. Asteroid mining companies have filed for licenses nearly two decades out of planned missions. No-one, unless they're completely and utterly out of their minds on cocaine, will travel to Mars to mine something to bring back to Earth. No, it's much simpler to leave it there and build stuff on-site with 3D printers.
First, both Trump and Musk are notorious “big talkers†and they may be playing with the macho spectacle of space travel. If their space plans gurgle into an economic sinkhole, they’ll probably quietly abandon them.
I suppose it's edgy nowadays to publicly say that you doubt Musk can pull something off. He's a real-life Tony Stark. Nothing he's done has been for naught.
And the 2018 moonshot is not going to actually land on the Moon; it’s merely going to shoot around it and then head back to Earth. Nobody will get the chance to plant a flag.
That's because it'll launch in the wrong time frame to make a landing.
An outright Moon grab would also be illegal, since the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty forbids such acts. The US has re-interpreted this treaty to suggest that it permits resource extraction from the Moon and the planets in the Solar System, but not all nations accept this view.
Finally, a mention of the OST! However, on the bolded part, since asteroids are fair game for now, the kinks in space mining will be worked out eventually. They need to be, because we're going to build space stuff in space, not here on the ground.
If Musk does get his rich clients to circle the Moon next year, and then manages to set up bases and colonies on the lunar surface and then Mars, it won’t be because he’s made a business success out of space expansion. And it won’t be due to the scientific merit of moon bases.
Rather, it will be because he has managed to dupe the American taxpayer with expensive technological fantasies and because he’s broken the ideal of the common heritage of mankind enshrined in international law. Humanity and the Earth will be diminished in the process.
It’s possible the cosmos will be diminished and despoiled too with mining firms digging up the moonscape, rocket fuel spilled all over the Martian surface, and neon lights flashing in shiny space casinos.
Sounds like someone is salty for not being young enough to be able to see it all play out. Broken the ideal of common heritage? We're all made of star-stuff, you moron! The universe is literally a playground for us, and we're meant to be out there. If anything, we belong to it.
Besides, type 2 civilisations need to strip-mine planets in order to build Dyson spheres or harness dark energy. That's the only way they survive. We're a million years away from that. We're barely type 1, and we still haven't reached the point where we can legitimately call ourselves a type 1 civilisation.
