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Look, I'm a child of the 60's when the Space Race was HOT. I grew up watching the Gemini missions fold into the Apollo missions, moon landings and Skylab. I can't help but keep on eye on the three rocket men; Branson, Bezos and Musk. The recent flights of the first two billionaires has left me... disappointed.
Branson's space plane is innovative and looks as handsome as he is... but does his system _scale_? I mean, it would be great to hop aboard a larger version of Virgin Galactic and fly to the space station a la "2001 a Space Oddessy" but I can't see his system scaling much beyond his little hopper plane.
As for Bezos - his cute little rocket seems to work well but again... does it _scale_? He preaches about sending all our heavily polluting industries up into space but this isn't a new idea - it's been around since the 1970s. So where are the workers going to stay? I'm sure working in one of his orbiting factories will be as enjoyable as working at an Amazon warehouse. And I'm sure the delivery from space will be quite exciting especially if you like your items flaming.
As for putting giant solar collectors into orbit... won't it be easier and cheaper just to deploy them closer to the places where power is needed? You know... ON THE GROUND?
And finally we come to Elon. I have to hand it to him... Musk puts on a good show. Moving fast and breaking things in rocketry leads to big explosions which are entertaining as long as no one gets hurt. And I have to admit that (unlike most of his other business adventures) he has delivered. His rockets has sent both satellites and people _in orbit_. Not sub-orbital - but fully into space. If you want to go to space you have to send _tonnage_ and lots of it. But putting 10s of thousands of satellites up in low earth orbit to deliver Internet? And have the satellites burn up and need replacing every 5 years? I don't think you need to do much math to realize that fiber optic lines that need installed once will be a better and cheaper system in the long run.
As for living in space or on Mars... we still don't have enough data on our long term survival in either. Building an L5 station would be a safer option to work out *how* to survive in deep space. Mars is a long ways away. Our tinker toy probes are doing okay there but they are expendable. They don't need food and water and oxygen to survive - people do. These items are a little sparse on the red planet.
You want to save planet Earth? Great! Stop running away from it! Maybe we can leave this planet at some future date and there's nothing wrong with planning and doing the research that will make that possible and safe... but seriously, most of the solutions to our problems are ground based - not space based.
-m
Branson's space plane is innovative and looks as handsome as he is... but does his system _scale_? I mean, it would be great to hop aboard a larger version of Virgin Galactic and fly to the space station a la "2001 a Space Oddessy" but I can't see his system scaling much beyond his little hopper plane.
As for Bezos - his cute little rocket seems to work well but again... does it _scale_? He preaches about sending all our heavily polluting industries up into space but this isn't a new idea - it's been around since the 1970s. So where are the workers going to stay? I'm sure working in one of his orbiting factories will be as enjoyable as working at an Amazon warehouse. And I'm sure the delivery from space will be quite exciting especially if you like your items flaming.
As for putting giant solar collectors into orbit... won't it be easier and cheaper just to deploy them closer to the places where power is needed? You know... ON THE GROUND?
And finally we come to Elon. I have to hand it to him... Musk puts on a good show. Moving fast and breaking things in rocketry leads to big explosions which are entertaining as long as no one gets hurt. And I have to admit that (unlike most of his other business adventures) he has delivered. His rockets has sent both satellites and people _in orbit_. Not sub-orbital - but fully into space. If you want to go to space you have to send _tonnage_ and lots of it. But putting 10s of thousands of satellites up in low earth orbit to deliver Internet? And have the satellites burn up and need replacing every 5 years? I don't think you need to do much math to realize that fiber optic lines that need installed once will be a better and cheaper system in the long run.
As for living in space or on Mars... we still don't have enough data on our long term survival in either. Building an L5 station would be a safer option to work out *how* to survive in deep space. Mars is a long ways away. Our tinker toy probes are doing okay there but they are expendable. They don't need food and water and oxygen to survive - people do. These items are a little sparse on the red planet.
You want to save planet Earth? Great! Stop running away from it! Maybe we can leave this planet at some future date and there's nothing wrong with planning and doing the research that will make that possible and safe... but seriously, most of the solutions to our problems are ground based - not space based.
-m
