Humankind is not ready to return to space - we have not demonstrated the capacity or maturity to responsibly undertake such ventures.
We have grossly mismanaged our planet and face multiple long-term threats to our civilizations.
We treat international waters as lawless territories - routinely engaging in illegal resource exploitation, environmental destruction and slavery of shipboard crews.
Our space programs originated with ballistic missiles weaponry and developed during a hostile cold war that led to militarization of our near-earth environment and weaponization of space technologies.
We have yet to fully realize the benefits from these investments - and are learning that many perceived breakthroughs that enjoyed commercial success have created unforeseen risks and liabilities.
Backing out of such technology dead-ends is a luxury we can no longer afford - yet we persist in squandering or misallocating our scarce resources.
Our collective technology roadmaps need to be aligned, integrated and directed toward realistic, sustainable goals.
Our planet is a universe unto itself. Go climb a mountain or jump in the sea if you are looking for an adventure. Try joining and sustaining a small remote community if you are a colonizer. Demonstrate that you have the capacity to sustain life on small islands here first.
Feel free to turn to the movie industry for all future financing for your space missions. No rats fleeing this ship.
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in which tech realizes that some things are hard
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How about a Climate Change X Prize? The winner gets to save humanity. Plus, we already know how to get to the moon.
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Google just realized they didn't want to have to pay for all of this.
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While there is interest in projects for human space travel, let’s get real here.
The total cost of sending humans to the Moon or worse to Mars would be morally wrong. Such projects would be so prohibitively expensive that it begs the question of the use of limited, valuable and scarce resources for conflicting needs and demands on this Planet Earth. This applies to the social, educational and infrastructure needs of humans on earth, not just in the more prosperous countries in the West but particularly in developing countries.
To be fair and to clarify the real issues and conflicts here, it would be of great value in the national debate on the budget for NASA if the NYT would conduct an analysis and review including economists and others to debate the conflict between the options of spending huge sums of money and other resources on (1) human space travel versus (2) the social and educational needs of humans on this Planet Earth.
This could be analyzed and debated in examining the benefits versus the costs of the two options.
In the final analysis, it may be of greater benefit to continue to send robots into space. The costs are more reasonable and the benefits would be still high. The engineering demands and costs of sending robots into space are much more manageable than sending humans into space.
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I wrote about this X "Prize" in 2016. It's really no different than a Ponzi scheme, IMO. The whole thing is obscenely wasteful, self-indulgent and a scam.
https://schatziesearthproject.com/2016/04/26/is-the-xprize-really-a-priz...
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Thus proving once again the wisdom of the marketplace. There is no earthly reason to visit the moon again, at least as far as capitalism is concerned.
I see two important lessons here:
First, going to outer space is very, very, very difficult. It's easy to underestimate how difficult it is.
Second, privatization (taxpayer money going to private enterprise to solve problems that government used to solve) is not a good answer for some problems, or even most problems. We still need government to do things that government is best at doing.
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Privatization isn't exactly that. It can be, but more often than not, it is partial privatization called privatization where private corporations receive funding from wealthy individuals or other corporations in return for some return of profit or share. In this case, NASA and other government run agencies are still the ones who receive the taxpayer money, but there is privatization to a certain level, but the funding doesn't come from taxpayers. I do like your first point, though.
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Aren't gov funded projects, taxpayer funded projects? Private industry isn't using tax payer money.
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"Although they were disappointed to not have a winner, the organizers maintained that the competition was a success."
The operation was a success but the patient died, typical of today's society where we cannot admit failure but rather deflect or twist it into meaningless verbiage meant to placate instead of motivate. Going to space is incredibly complex, you do no honor/respect to the thousands of people who toil daily over many years, some in the public eye and some in relative obscurity, by making it sound any easier than it really is.
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How absolutely right you are. My wife & I having been involved in QA in a related field for many years, we have seen the growing folly of seeing the Spec rewritten to match the defect rather than the other way around as it should be.
"we cannot admit failure" - it would mess with our false sense of "Exceptionalism". And we can't have that now -can we?
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As marketing-not-tech corporations like Google would do.
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