[nlkndlk]

>That Arianespace, a French rival of SpaceX, announced on the same day that two satellites it had tried to launch to join the European Space Agency’s Galileo constellation (intended to rival America’s Global Positioning System), had entered a “non-nominal injection orbit”—in other words, gone wrong—shows just how difficult the commercialisation of space can be.

>If spacecraft are so precarious, then perhaps investors should lower their sights. But not in terms of innovation; rather in altitude.

As if constraining ourselves to low-earth orbit were too ambitious. It is absolutely disgusting to suggest that, after we gutted NASA in order to make opportunities for private enterprise, we should just stop sending stuff to space altogether. We need to face it: we're never going to become a interplanetary, space-faring civilization under this current economic system.

[privong]

> It is absolutely disgusting to suggest that, after we gutted NASA in order to make opportunities for private enterprise, we should just stop sending stuff to space altogether.

I do not think that was the point of the article. Some things do not absolutely need to be beyond the atmosphere, they only need to be up high. In the past, the technology to keep things at what might be termed "moderate" altitudes has not been available, so we pushed things above the atmosphere. But when you have technology to do the job better, it does not make sense to continue sending things up to space simply because that is what has been done in the past.

Not to mention, retrievable technology means it can be upgraded, rather than junked (as many satellites are). So this could very well reduce space junk (or at least reduce its rate of increase) and result in more rapid technology development.

There are certainly there are things which will still be easier or better served by the use of satellites up, and so that technology will continue to be developed.

[ericd]

He may have a point - it's locally optimal to decrease the cost of applications, but it may be globally optimal to pay more for those applications to increase space launch volume and decrease the marginal cost of a launch.

[spindritf]

NASA sunk itself with the space shuttle and politics.

http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/good-riddance-t...

[gizmo686]

Never is a really long time. Even if we make 0 investment in space travel, we will almost certainly be better equipped for space travel than we are today. The only possible exceptions to this that I can think of are: modern civilization collapsing (or some less extreme variant) or us having depleted some critical resource.

[aharonovich]

We also lose knowledge as engineers age and die.

[anigbrowl]

Lofting stuff up into space 'just because' rather than because it meets some technological or economic need is a waste of time. I am very much in favor of becoming a spacefaring civilization and will cheerfully argue for the necessity of manned missions despite the availability of robots and so on. But wasting money on putting things into space is counter productive to that end.

This has nothing to do with our economic system. It's basic economics, in the sense that it's resource-intensive to put stuff into space and some resources are scarce. Regardless of how your domestic economy is organized or what sort of monetary policy you favor, the physical resources required for space projects are steep.

[seanflyon]

> we're never going to become a interplanetary, space-faring civilization under this current economic system.

I disagree. Just look at SpaceX's development of reusable rockets. We are closer than ever before to becoming interplanetary [OK, that's basically a tautology] and developing space technology faster than any point after landing on the moon.

[blaze33]

>That Arianespace, a French rival of SpaceX

Well... almost as much as the NASA being a rival of SpaceX, Arianespace being the French/European initiative for space access. Arianespace was founded in 1980 to commercialize the Ariane launcher (planned in 1973 after the europa launcher failure).

[alexvr]

That's what Elon Musks are for :)

[TeMPOraL]

Maybe we're getting our technocracy after all. Increasingly, it's people like Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, et al. - ones with enough resources to liberate themselves from the yoke of the greedy algorithm our economy is, and at the same time with enough understanding to know and care about important issues - that are shaping the future of mankind.

[tsotha]

>Increasingly, it's people like Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, et al. - ones with enough resources to liberate themselves from the yoke of the greedy algorithm our economy is...

Eh, what? SpaceX is profitable.

And you can't get away from basing your space program on the economy, either because it determines your tax base or (potentially) because companies do space things for profit.

[TeMPOraL]

Let me clarify what I meant. Sure, SpaceX is profitable. It has to be. But Elon right now seems to be using the economy to pursue his own goals with Tesla and SpaceX, but those goals are not dictated by what is profitable. He had to amass some capital and then basically force the economy to accept his visions. Tesla Motors pretty much created the market for electric cars that don't suck. SpaceX and Tesla were not economically viable concepts at the beginning.

The thought I wanted to express is that our economic system is an optimization process that shapes (and is shaped by, in a feedback loop) the progress of technology. It's the economy that decided we won't be having moon bases or jetpacks anytime soon, even though we could. It's the force that decides that a random photosharing app is worth more than feeding the poor or curing cancer.

Current economy as an optimization process was aligned with human values pretty well so far (though not perfectly; government regulations are one of the tools we use to try and fix that alignment). But as a greedy process (in the CS sense of the word), it often gets stuck in local optimas. That's where Elons, Brins, etc. come in - they have enough cash and vision to force us out of the local optimum and help find a better one.

[th0br0]

Wonderful comparisons; I might have to steal them from you at some point. Thanks!

[TeMPOraL]

You might enjoy reading [0] - one of my favourite articles that dwells upon economic/game-theoretical concepts I addressed in my comment. It's rather long and somewhat specific, but IMO well worth the time to read.

[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

[gress]

In your view, what important issues do these people who are shaping the future of mankind know and care about?

[TeMPOraL]

Climate change, ensuring continous access to energy, making humanity an interplanetary species, giving everyone access to all knowledge of mankind, life extension, fighting disease and death. Stuff like that - things we all care about, but don't really do anything about them because they're not short-term profitable.

I don't mean to pass moral judgement here. I only observe that some of the most important problems we have don't yield themselves well to capitalism (which is sort of obvious - the ones that were important but compatibile with greedy optimization are the ones we already solved).