Again, in response to Dave’s comments in the last post:
That’s one of the great things (at the moment) about ESA — it’s not an EU organisation and has no political aspirations. NASA has recently been stymied by Bush’s redirection of funds and policy and, while I support Bush’s new direction, it must be very frustrating and is very wasteful to change on a whim like this.
When we look at what is spent on other good causes I cannot see any arguments against slightly more funding. Personally, if I could, I’d pay more in by donation.
But the private ventures thing is the future. The X Prize had me so excited I couldn’t sleep. What has kept everything tame is the enormous start-up costs and the lack of a real short-term economic goal.
That short-term economic goal should be created. ESA, NASA and Russia, China and Japan (if they’re interested) should collaborate to target the mining of precious metals from asteroids. Once that has been achieved the technology used to achieve it should be made freely available so that companies can start mining asteroids themselves with fewer development costs.
The myriad other economic ventures that branch off of that would surprise us, I am sure.
April 15th, 2006 at 8:23 pm
Hate to be negative as I am a fan of space exploration also, but once we reach ‘peak oil’ and the price goes high and stays high, will that not have a major impact on the cost of Space flight?
April 15th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
Actually no. Launching a space rocket relies very little on having oil around as rocket fuel is not oil: Gotta love Wikipedia.
Of course it may have some impact (as it would with all industries), but certainly not the same sort of impact as on freight and airlines.
April 16th, 2006 at 2:32 am
Oh, well I am supprised, I knew it wasn’t aviation fuel but I still thought it would be derived from oil in some way as a supprisingly large amount of chemicals are.
Glad to hear the situation isn’t has bad as I thought.