
Race to Moon by Private Companies - jamesbritt
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/science/space/22moon.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
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johngalt
To make space travel more common there must be an economic reason to make the
trip. Solve that problem, otherwise we'll always be confined to one off
stunts. Once the cost of a moon mission is a substantial net gain you'll see
the _real_ space race.

~~~
uvdiv
_...there must be an economic reason to make the trip. Solve that problem..._

Isn't that backwards? If moon travel is not economically worth it, that's not
a "problem", that's objective reality. And if you try to invent/force an
economic "reason" where there really isn't one, you are creating a problem
where there really isn't a problem. That means you are the problem!

~~~
keeperofdakeys
We can't 'force' this kind of knowledge to appear, but we can concentrate on
research to speed-up the discovery of such knowledge. We have no way of saying
that there isn't a reason, all we can say is that we don't know it.

Let's say there was an island that was Uranium rich and hard to reach in
ships. If we were in the 1800's, would it be worth the cost of building ships
to get there? The answer is obviously no. These days, however, it certainly
is.

We are dealing with unknown unknowns. Both in the substances the moon can
provide, and their possible uses. All we can say is that with our current
knowledge, we do not have an economic reason to go to the moon. Find some
abundant power source, like in the movie Moon, then it will be economically
viable.

Scientists can be impulsive beasts too, ignoring the facts and trying to prove
their hypothesis. They can even contribute work to a hypothesis, when they
don't even believe it themselves (maybe even trying to disprove it).
Schrödinger and Einstein had a rather negative view of a lot of quantum
mechanics, but they both made large contributions to it.

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luckyeights
"At the very least, a flotilla of unmanned spacecraft could be headed Moonward
within the next few years, with goals that range from lofty to goofy." Really
the one sentence that stuck out for me, before what I thought were a
disappointing list of overly optimistic ideas. While it's good to hear teams
getting inspired by Google's challenge, there's plenty of money to be made by
carrying payloads to orbit or further for various governments. Why do we need
to dream up these grand entrepreneurial ideas before it's clear these
companies can even make it into space?

Maybe I'm just disappointed after reading the title because companies I see as
more invested and practical - SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, or Blue Origin, for
example - weren't mentioned.

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melling
These prizes are a cost effective way to get people and companies to solve
difficult problems. The idea goes back hundreds of years. Take the Longitude
Prize, as an example. It was won by a clock maker.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison>

~~~
luckyeights
I don't mean to argue with that. I'm all for the prize; I think both Google
and these competing companies are doing great things for our space technology.

What I really want is for these companies to get inspired and make it to the
moon. Claim that prize. And once they've done that, I'll be more interested in
hearing about their commercialization and their "Moon Idol" idea.

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Yhippa
Google is putting up $30MM of their own money as a prize. This is surely not
just a tax write-off or something charitable. Surely this is an investment
where they are going to get more monetary value of this in the long run then
they're putting up, right?

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ajuc
They'll deploy army of dirt movers there, and sell "your logo on moon" ads.

~~~
iwwr
Autonomous swarms of robots which process lunar soil to build more copies of
themselves. The only problem is the prototypes cost <Voice name="DrEvil">100
trillion dollars</Voice>.

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sliverstorm
_One Silicon Valley venture, Moon Express..._

Hark! Do I see the ancestor of Planet Express developing before mine own eyes?

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pnathan
One of the things that would be amazingly cool would be to work on the
software that controlled the rocket ships.

