The Moon Is Open For Business
from the send-our-junk-to-the-moon...-for-a-fee dept
This seems like one of the more ridiculous plans I've heard of lately, but I'm sure they'll find plenty of people willing to sign up. A California company has signed a deal with the increasingly open-to-sending-anything-and-anyone-other-than-a-boyband-popstar-into-space Russian space agency to send a spaceship full of people's junk to the moon. For a ridiculous fee you can have your business card or the cremated remains of your relatives put on the moon for no particular reason. They'll be sent up in a tin can that will circle the moon for about three months before crashing into the surface and becoming moon litter that will need to be cleaned up whenever it is that someone decides to colonize the moon.
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Will space colonization ever be economical?
Sci fi authors of the 1960s thought that the moon would be essential for building better telescopes; but atmospheric noise cancellation technology now allows great telescopes on Earth, without the environmental stresses of the moon that would crack lenses.
Manned space flight is itself really an anachronism of the Cold War; back in the 1950s, people felt that space-based nuclear bomber crews would give strategic advantages. But today we have missiles, unmanned satellites, and exploratory robots.
As for the notion that the Earth will run out of resources -- 1. other planets don't have resources we want, and 2. we're getting better at recycling/extracting existing resources.
The International Space Station will perhaps be remembered as the greatest Welfare Project of the 20th century, giving artificial jobs to NASA and Russian engineers, so that astronauts riding $1 billion cadillacs... I mean, space shuttles, can perform useless science-fair experiments in space.
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Re: Will space colonization ever be economical?
What we should have been doing is using the gov't resources to develop access to space. Instead of funding a long string of expensive space stunts, we should by now have put billions of dollars into creating cheap heavy-lifting capability.
When, or pessimistically if, the gov't does use our resources to reduce the cost of reaching orbit to a price that corporations and banks can justify, then we'll see the creativity and entrepreneurial vitality of the American public finally open the potential of space
It would also help if the public wasn't fooled by toy cars on Mars or old men (Glenn) in space as "Science." Maybe instead of trying to "inspire" the children to study science, we should spend some money on teaching it to them...
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Re: Will space colonization ever be economical?
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Re: Will space colonization ever be economical?
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