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| 16. |
Re: Out of the Blue |
Dec 20, 2009, 12:09 |
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What do you guys even mean by 'privatize NASA?' Do you mean that they should spin it off like the post office, or do you mean that we should all wish really hard and hope that the anti-research corporations should suddenly about-face and have an interest in actual science again?
If NASA stopped doing what it's doing, no one (in the US) would pick it up not because there's no point in doing it, but because it's hard, it's expensive, there's a lot of up-front cost and not a lot of immediate pay-off. A lot of the benefit from space exploration tends to be the spin-off technologies developed, and that's something that corporations aren't going to want to rely on.
The ISS might look sort of like a boondoggle, and you only hear about silly experiments being tested on it (does a boomerang work in zero-gravity?), but the whole thing is an experiment, as mentioned above. It's given us lots of experience and information with long-term human space-inhabitation. We've learned a lot about the problems we'd have to overcome on a long distance space flight, the social dynamics of people living together like that, repairing things in space, etc.
Okay, so you think there's no point in ever sending humans into space. Well, eventually we're going to use up this rock. Mining asteroids is absolutely something that we should be looking at doing in the not-all-that-distant future. We're already talking about beaming space-based solar power back to Earth. Those seem a little far-fetched right now, but they would be absolutely unthinkable without the initial research that's been done with public funds, because no private industry is going to invest in that sort of thing without the groundwork already being put down.
When an asteroid or comet heads for Earth (it's happened before, and it will eventually happen again), what are we going to do if we don't have any sort of space-faring tech? It's unlikely that we could do much to divert one even now, but we wouldn't be able to do anything at all if the only thing we had to go into 'space' was SpaceShipTwo.
Personally, I tend to think that space research is worth doing for the sake of doing it (I'm a scientist!), but it's also an insurance policy, a long-term investment, and ultimately necessary for the survival of our species. Eventually, when government entities have done all of the initial high-risk investment into lifting, propulsion, robotics, radiation shielding and whatnot, private companies will see immediate profit in asteroid mining, and then private corporations are going to start doing enough of their own work to keep the ball moving, but we're far from there.
NASA's totally not perfect, and I'm sure it's a bureaucratic nightmare for the engineers or anyone with vision, but it's a far sight better than the next-best-thing (ie nothing). |
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