

NASA has no money for its human-spaceflight plans. The private sector has plenty - ryanb
http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14401165

======
SamAtt
Personally I’d like to see NASA morph into an agency that supports the private
sector somewhat in the vein of the FCC. Because there’s another problem out
there that no one’s really talking about and that’s the fact that private
investors are working with very little oversight right now. Not a big concern
for people yet but the first time a private space craft explodes on national
TV it will be (unless we prevent that from happening up front)

NASA has no money but they have a lot of experience and the backing of the
Government. The private industry has a lot of money but no experience or
backing. So have NASA provide regulations and act as an agent for
collaboration between private firms while private industry takes on the
expense of actually launching manned space missions.

~~~
georgekv
How about more like the FAA?

~~~
SamAtt
That's what I meant :)

------
DannoHung
I just don't see the point of putting humans in space unless we're going to
use them to build something permanent.

Asteroid surveying would be an awesome goal for NASA, something where the unit
cost is low, it can serve as testbeds for automation, propulsion, and science,
and we may very well hit the jackpot and find rocks with high rare earth
contents.

~~~
patio11
_find rocks with high rare earth contents_

It wouldn't matter if you found a mythical space-goose which turned anything
they touched into gold, you'd still lose money on the transport costs bringing
the goose trash and returning with treasure.

~~~
jerf
Earth -> Space is fundamentally expensive. Space -> Earth is not; there's a
lot of tradeoffs available to you to cut down price, mostly in exchange for
receiving the goods later. You can bring an moderately sized asteroid to us
reasonably easily, if getting to space was easy itself.

(And that is how you do it; bring the resources to us. I don't know what we
could do that would involve carting atoms into space, getting them space-
blessed, then carting them back to Earth.)

------
anigbrowl
But other than tourism and rapid transit (noted above, and not
inconsiderable), what does private business have to gain in the short-to-
medium term?

I'm thinking of the history of sailing and later aerial travel. It was
expensive and risky, but this was considered worthy of investment because
there were known destinations and thus opportunities for the procurement of
fabulous wealth.

By comparison, space looks rather barren. There is commercial gain in
launching satellites which allow us to communicate or observe things on earth
more easily, but we've more-or-less automated that. Moving to the moon or Mars
would be cool, but the moon is a total desert and Mars and Venus aren't
exactly welcoming either - terraforming would be cool but is a truly humongous
undertaking. Meantime, it's not like we see lots of asteroids zipping around
bulging with desirable rare minerals.

I want to love the idea, but I don't really see where the business model is -
the number of people who _need_ the speed offered by suborbital travel is
really low, and we're quite a ways off from showing how it would be cheaper
than atmospheric flight. Seems to me that a space elevator which did away with
the need for expensive rocketry would be a much more attractive investment
opportunity.

EDIT: to clarify, I think private sector + space = win. I'm just not sure
where the _human_ spaceflight is a really big opportunity. The article seems
to suggest that the best return would come from even cheaper satellite
launching.

~~~
jsz0
I completely agree. I think we're in for a very long wait. We over achieved
getting into space and landing on the moon so quickly. (barely 50 years after
air travel was a viable technology) I don't see a private industry for space
travel unless a few things happen:

1) Earth's resources are depleted to the point where we need to harvest them
from another planet. The situation would have to be VERY bad for us to get to
that point. More likely than not it would be another dark ages for most of
humanity with private space travel extracting valuable resources for the
extremely rich & powerful.

2) Contact with intelligent life. It seems certain now this will not be in our
own solar system so this raises the bar on the technology private industry
would have to develop to travel so far. Very likely it would span the
lifetimes of several generations of humans traveling to even a nearby solar
system.

3) Over population on Earth becomes such a problem that a massive number of
people are driven to taking the huge risk of re-locating to some underground
colony on Mars. If you had 100 or 200 million people willing to relocate to
Mars there would actually be a viable business model there I bet. (kind of
similar to what happened with immigration to America early in the last
century. It was expensive, dangerous, and life wasn't really that much better
when you got there but the alternative was just so bad people were willing to
take the chance)

So realistically I think we're probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of years
away from the standard sci-fi dream of accessible human space exploration. LEO
flights could be a profitable niche in the short term.

------
DanielBMarkham
NASA should promote spaceflight and bolster technology innovations by offering
tremendously huge prizes for companies that can overcome major obstacles, like
lowering cost-to-orbit by a factor of a hundred.

They shouldn't be the space police, or the space bureaucracy, or the space
experts.

If we were to reduce cost-to-orbit by a factor of a hundred, then you could
launch satellites for a couple of hundred thousand dollars. You could have
deep space telescopes for the cost of a new luxury airliner. It changes
everything.

Whereas if we keep doing these one-off missions where we do this huge
development effort and make no major breakthroughs, everything stays expensive
for a very long time.

~~~
SamAtt
I'm not sure I see the incentive here. Follow my logic. A prize is valuable
because it's something you couldn't afford yourself. If I offered $1 prize
people probably wouldn't be too psyched about it because a dollar is something
they could spare out of their own pocket.

The whole point of this article is that NASA doesn't have enough money to
overcome the hurdles you refer to. So it stands to reason that companies would
have to spend more to overcome the hurdles than the prizes themself would be
worth.

Which is why I don't see how prizes would have any positive impact.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
By offering a prize, a large organization can "pay ahead" the cost of
developing, testing, and implementing a new technology.

Look at it this way: let's assume it would cost the government $20 Billion to
reduce cost-to-orbit by three-fold, say through the use of hybrid-magnetic
launchers or some such. But that $20 Billion would take 20 years and dozens of
missions.

Instead the agency could offer a $10 Billion prize for any company that had
three successive launches at one-third the cost in the next three years. Each
year after that the prize would increase by $1 Billion.

Now, instead of one technology, pursued by one agency, you have a dozen
possible solutions pursued by a dozen organizations. At some point the prize
money is paid out -- arguably much earlier than 20 years but who knows? It's
definitely not going to cost any _more_ money, and now _you've decreased cost-
to-orbit of every other mission you ever want to have_. That means for every
mission you have after the goal is reached, you've reduced launch costs by
two-thirds.

Forever.

In addition, you're likely to end up with 3 or 4 technologies that all can
reduce cost-to-orbit, all that are viable.

That's why reducing cost-to-orbit is such a critical goal. It's this huge
productivity multiplier. Yes, you spend more now, but it makes all the other
decisions easier (eventually). You quickly reach a point where lots of
entities have the funds to do multiple missions using lots of new technologies
-- a much better situation than continuing to pay more and more money for less
and less return.

------
gamble
For cargo, yes. But humans? NASA has spent decades trying to make space travel
safe, and the shuttle is still one of the most dangerous ways to travel on a
per-journey basis. NASA doesn't have to worry about turning a profit either.

It will be interesting to see what happens to space tourism after the first
fatal crash...

~~~
oconnor0
Perhaps the same thing that happens after a fatal airplane or automobile
crash.

------
mhb
Bill Stone says "I'm going to the moon -- who's with me (TED video):

<http://blog.ted.com/2008/08/archive_bill_st.php>

