I work in the space industry. I feel like I should be celebrating this, but I just find it hard to be enthusiastic about the commercialization of space.
I didn’t get into this to build hotels, and mine asteroids. I feel like as a species we should continue to explore, and push the boundaries.
I just can’t get behind private industry on the moon. This is a bad move for humanity overall.
Space is expensive, and never gets the attention it deserves. Only a handful of countries could do much space exploration and as they try to explore more it rapidly gets more expensive, longer timeframe. We need to face that from a societal perspective it just doesn’t scale.
Commercializing space doesn’t just mean silly things like orbital hotels, but it means more, better, cheaper access to space and space resources. It means distributing efforts for better scalability. It means multiple funding sources so we’re less dependent on the whims f politicians. It means someone else can take care of the “easy” stuff, so NASA/ESA/JSA/CSA/ASA/etc can focus on the bigger challenges of exploration.
More international cooperation is also a huge part of this. We need to continue the model of cooperation from ISS, so we can all build on each other’s efforts, and reach out into the solar system as “humanity”
You do realize these “commercial companies” such as SpaceX are funded by government contracts right? You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. And you’re also not going to change my opinion. Space isn’t meant to be the next capitalist playground, which is what we are trying to do.
You do realize these “commercial companies” such as SpaceX are funded by government contracts right?
Yes, but it will be cheaper for NASA to outsource cargo and crew transport than if they did everything themselves. Just look at the success of the NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services and Commercial Crew programs. Cygnus, Dragon, and Falcon 9 are way cheaper than Orion and Ares I would have been for low earth orbit.
This leaves NASA with more resources to devote towards interesting science and exploration missions. I don’t see why lunar exploration would be any different.
Space is unfathomably enormous. I’d much rather have heavy industry fucking up shit in space than destroying our planet to strip it of its resources. I say let them go up there for asteroid/moon/whatever mining.
Space, the final frontier. trumpet music These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, on a mission to explore strange new markets, to seek out new profits and new business opportunities, to boldly trade where no one has traded before. doot DOOOOOOOT
While I agree, isn’t the end goal setting up a base on the moon?Hopefully it will be science first and tourism later. I wish I could just fast forward to star trek time :)
Probably, and as much as I love the science fiction of space travel, real life me isn’t so into have space truckers hauling dorritos to the moon.
This stuff creates environmental damage, tons of space debris, and the more activity there is in near earth orbits, the more possibility there is for conjunctions, which means moving your satellite and wasting fuel. It’s just not that smart.
But we’re gonna do it anyway.
The Cold War fueled space exploration up to the point political support waned. It would be nice to see another space race to foster competition and technological advancement, hopefully without the Mutually Assured Destruction this time around.
Private industry is going to fill the void of a politically unpopular public space program, which is a shame.
It’s not very reassuring that the last attempt crashed and burned, then NASA had to come in with the save on the landing for this one (the lander’s laser landing guidance failed, and NASA jumped in with “don’t worry, we brought one too just in case”
Just waiting to see if it landed upright and we can get some pictures!
That third-person camera they were talking about sounds really bad-ass. I’m hoping for some pictures too!!
It looks like this: This Is What a “Second-Person” Video Game Would Look Like
It is very, very weird.
Second person point of view uses the pronoun “you” to address the reader. This narrative voice implies that the reader is either the protagonist or a character in the story and the events are happening to them.
You can’t really have a second person camera angle, it would still be a first or third person perspective.
“The lunar lander was privately built thanks to decades of public research and development and public funding (in the form of wage theft / tax evasion) which allowed the company to have enough capital to design and build the lander”
While I find the news generally exciting, damn was that a weird live stream. It all felt very anticlimactic.
