DARPA, NASA team on '100-Year Starship' project Those like us here on the Reg astronautical desk who are occasionally a bit disappointed at the limited scope of humanity's space programmes may be overjoyed to learn that NASA has just begun work on an actual interstellar starship. Well, kind of. The news comes in a recent US government statement outlining the so-called "100- …
So remind me again why instead of seeking to get business interested in long distance space travel they aren’t seeking to get them involved in mining the other resources our galaxy has to offer? Business need (and war admittedly) gradually improved the speed of travel across our oceans if you view space as a similar model then system wide mining could establish a space based industry and generate need for improved travel methods. Taking the very long view we could even establish a Jovian Vegas.
We traveled by ship and land to trade high priced finished goods. Latterly (last 150 - 200ish years) it was more rare, but still highly priced goods like coal and oil. Yes, minerals were carried because economics of material movement came into play. Latterly, again, it was about the cost of energy. Marginal value was key.
We won't go off-planet to mine in any significant manner and recover metals until the cost of energy rises to make it economic or the cost of space transport reduces.
Indeed, humanity won't go off-planet (except for vanity/scientific/weapons projects) in any significant way until we can't get an essential commodity locally, there is a 'need' - like possible extinction - or the cost comes down.
If energy becomes inexpensive enough to be ignored as a significant barrier then the game changes but until then ...
"So remind me again why instead of seeking to get business interested in long distance space travel they aren’t seeking to get them involved in mining the other resources our galaxy has to offer?"
I don't see how one can explore the galactic resources without long distance space travel capability.
Hardly. They didn't have space-ships in the Dark Ages, and the Catholic Church isn't keen on anything that takes people further away from Dark Age attitudes. Now if you happened to be an evil murdering despotic dictator packing your people into the torture chambers, they're good with that...
NASA I'm sure have already said that they suffer again and again from changing administrations, budgets, and flavour of the 'term'.
If they could get on with LONG projects they might be allowed to do something special, but having to get the funding and do it, before someone changes their mind is a difficult one.
So if it wasn't 'NASA' as we know it, but some independant outfit that didnt get involved in the politics and campaigning and votes I can see there could be some long term real results from this.
Just finding the way to stop the corrupt expenses and power loons from making a mess of it??? Thats the hard part.
"No human organisation has yet appeared with both the financial clout and the long-term commitment that would appear necessary to get humanity out among the stars"
Surely the Illuminati are up to the job?
And those groups that have been protecting bloodlines (no, not the Bene Geserit Sisterhood, they're into manipulating them) since about AD33 or thereabouts have demonstrated quite a commitment.
In the UK, the Wellcome Trust is the biggest at £13bn. The Wellcome Trust is the reason the Human Genome Project happened, for instance - the various governments funding it were going to axe it bcos they didn't want to compete with a private company doing the same thing. The Wellcome Trust said "screw you, we're going to keep it going, and if you want a piece of the action then you'd better stump up". If it wasn't for the Wellcome Trust, research into human genetic disorders would have been strangled at birth by Venter.
Then there's the Gates Foundation, which is currently doing great work in hitting a load of Third-World diseases which multinational drug companies have ignored as unprofitable, and Third-World problems like lack of clean water which the UN has singularly failed at tackling.
Nominally both of these are more into biomed, but that's simply bcos biomed is where the most work needs to be done for improving human living standards. It's not too hard to imagine one (or both) of these deciding to branch out into other long-term projects when human living standards worldwide reach acceptable levels and there's some spare money in the kitty.
Are you suggesting that capitalism only rewards short term gain?
That's like saying that energy giants won't investigate renewables as long as there's cheap oil underground!!!!
(Heartily sick of people telling me that "Shell will do this, Shell will do that, because they want to stay in business." Well exactly, Shell will continue to pump out and refine cheap oil and make profit from it, precisely because they want to stay in business. Pumping profits into windmills and funny wave schemes would kill their competitivity.)
100 years time ?
Put that in context - could the late Victorians have envisaged what was required for project Apollo ?
"The construction of the balloon would require a considerable increase in rubber from our plantations in the colonies. Also the gentlemen space travelers would have to be from the gentry classes because her majesty would surely request an audience upon their return ."
"Put that in context - could the late Victorians have envisaged what was required for project Apollo?"
Well, Tsiolkovsky published his "The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices" in 1903 (which just misses the "late Victorian" I guess). And the leap from the technology of his days to Apollo was probably much greater than from here to a starship 100 years from now.
Yeah, future fiction is full of such organisations; problem is to be plausible they have always been mega-successful in some tech enterprise, *without* going IPO. So the family owners can embark on a long-term, risky, expensive endeavour. Meanwhile all real companies in this world go public and have to feed (reports of) profits to shareholders, to keep the price up or be bought and asset-stripped. So they can't do it.
Don't worry, this problem will take care of itself. The Republicans are taking control of the US government again, so soon they'll decide to round up all the scientists and isolate them on the ISS. Once there, the scientists will get bored, commandeer all the pocket calculators, and work out a way to modify the station to become a long range starship.
Now if we can just plan ahead for how to handle the Mule...
is the use of words like "incentivize" (AARGH). This kind of committee-speak rarely leads to anything, except a smug feeling amongst committee-members of having finished a report, and THEREFORE having done something about the problem.
Other than that I applaud people even just thinking about the problem of star travel
In order to avoid being tied to market rate fluctuations and the withdrawal/introduction of currencies, the cost of this meeting must be measured in "number of biscuits consumed".
Thanks to Jeremy Clarkson for laying the foundations of such an important measurement unit.
"NASA has just begun work on an actual interstellar starship. Well, kind of."
well that's typical, lets make a comity to talk about it, rather than make something and Put actual
Useful devices On it to broadcast and seed inter stellar wireless Ethernet, still at least
the artificial lifeforms out there did see fit to re-fit and kit out "V-ger" so it could return home eventually ;) ooh wait that wasn't real was it.
take for a vulture paper "V-ger/voyager 1" with masses of self micro meshed radios and HD cam's made from paper and toy parts plan, and have beardy branson sling it into space with some old nicker elastic propellant on their next test run.
A colleague of mine commented:
'Actually, the original Heinlein multigenerational spaceship concept was found in "Orphans of the Sky" in 1941, but otherwise the article is right on target. "Time for the Stars" was published in 1956.
'Parenthetically, the Register's writer misses the biggest problem with an organization like the Long Range Foundation: how to keep it focused on technology advancement, instead of turning, over time, into a funding source for Marxist entities trying to create the New Soviet Man. The record of the Ford Foundation is illustrative in this regard.'
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