You mistake my point- I don't object to space exploration; I just object to people talking about a payoff. I think the raw knowledge we'd get is payoff enough.

The fact is, unless we discover practical interstellar travel, there won't be enough interest to really cause any big changes to society at large.

Ideas alone do not generate wealth in an information economy. Look at the companies who failed not due to lack of ideas but lack of timing. In order for an idea to generate wealth, it must come to a receptive audience, and I can't imagine any space exploration program generating that many new ideas.

Sure, there will be a lot of news coverage when we first set foot on Mars, and less when we go to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. But will that change anything?

During the Early Modern Era, exploration spurred organizational improvements because whole nations had something to gain from trade. Had Adam Smith written in the 13th century, we would have never heard his name.

Regardless of whether you're talking about a material or moral payoff in space, you're talking about the far distant future, and frankly the latter will come later than the former.

I think in justifying space exploration, we have to be very careful not to promise too much.

As a nation, we do have to think in the long-term, but until at least space becomes a place where most people can go, the scientific argument remains the best one we've got. Things that only a few can do only momentarily capture the imagination.

We're not on the same wavelength here.

I'm not talking about "exploration programs" or science or any of that NASA boy-scout stuff. That's just fluff.

The payoffs I'm talking about come from people LIVING in non-Earth places, planetary or orbital. Lots of 'em. Tens of thousands of dreamers and cranks and misfits and plunderers and failures and refugees and itchy-twitchy restless types cramming into steerage and heading out to places hostile and dangerous and poor but without bureaucrats and building codes and safety regs and limits-to-growth.

And I'm not talking about ideas generating wealth in the sense of Company X patenting its electric back-scratcher. I mean the deeper sense of ideas like, say, the American notion of the "melting pot," which is one of the sources of our current prosperity, and the lack of which is crippling to many European countries...

Space CAN be a place where lots of people can go--its perfectly possible. And NOT in the far distant future!

See here, for instance: http://www.randomjottings.net/archives/2004_01.html#000352

Or follow the writings of Rand Simberg.
try this: http://www.speculist.com/archives/000391.html

We've been brainwashed into believing that the present NASA stagnation is our only possibility. It's not true.

Hmm,

We are on the same wavelength as to when the payoff would come; we just disagree on when it could happen.

I don't think all the boy scout stuff is fluff. Yeah, the campouts on the ISS are stupid, but actually going to other worlds and doing research gives us more knowledge and is worthwhile.

From what I understand, even the wilder X-prize designs will only get the cost of getting into orbit down to about $100/pound, which means that getting a human into low orbit would probably cost $50,000 when you include all the clothing, food, water, and air they also need. So you're talking about more than the median annual US household income to get one person into space. And this doesn't include the cost of building whatever space station they would live in.

You make the point that they could mass produce rockets, and while I'll grant that costs like R&D would go down, big things are hard to put on assembly lines. And with something that has to be built as precisely as a rocket, you lose many economies of scale.

And then there's the question of what people would do once they got there. The biggest way people you describe got to the New World was as indentured servants. And how the hell would these people keep themselves supplied with food and air on Mars, let alone a more exotic destination?

Until the cost gets down to a point where many people can pay for space travel themselves (I'd say $5000 per ticket into low earth orbit might be a good point), or until there are good economic reasons why a company would want to pay whatever it costs to keep someone fed on Mars, I can't see it.

Disbanding NASA and letting private companies handle getting into low earth orbit might be a good start. It might push the start of the space tourism industry back into my lifetime. But my guess is that you're being as much of a dreamer as the folks at NASA who get paid good money to draw up designs of some giant rope going out into space in 100 years.

I think the issue we have in discussions like this is in the nature of the future. One thing I've noted is that every development either takes much more or much less time than we expect. The only constant seems to be that the rate of change keeps increasing, but neither of us can reasonably say where the changes will happen.

That's the problem with looking at movies like 2001 and saying, "why don't we have space transfer points yet?"

That is forgetting that lots of old depictions of the future showed us having hover-cars by now, and I don't think either of us could reasonably claim that our lack of hover-cars is due to some failure on the part of government. The technology just isn't there. But if you look at the "computers of the future" shown in the 1960s, our computers right now are far more powerful and pervasive than even the ones on Star Trek, which takes place 250 years from now.

So maybe tomorrow some engineer will figure out some new way of getting into space that makes manned deep-space travel practical. But I'm not holding my breath.

You are probably as likely to be right on this as I am. And actually I love the space exploration stuff.

I rant because we've all been brainwashed to think space=exploration, or space=science.

And space=expensive, space belongs to NASA.

Never space=frontier, or space belongs to us. It drives me crazy...

But a frontier is inherently something you explore, and with exploration, there is inherently some scientific aspect, even if it is just geology or something boring like that.

And it will be expensive until they figure out how to build some new kind of rocket that is much more efficient.

Space doesn't belong to anyone, unless you believe those people who will sell you a slice o' Mars.

See Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for a wonderful example of looney Science Fiction economics of space travel.

Farmers growing wheat for India in tunnels under the moon!

Great idea! We can do it now, using mines on Earth. Lower start-up costs. Shorter transporation distances (esp. for capital goods going to the farmers). Less need for recycling; easier access to organic raw materials and water. The farmers are not exiled from the surface of earth.

In fact, the same logic applies to earth-orbit colonies. The start-ups will probably have conditions similar to those in abandoned mine tunnels, unless someone provides almost unlimited free funds. Plus radiation and zero-G hazards.

Any Sci-Fi readers volunteer to colonize deep-Earth Ohio, establishing a new Libertarian Paradise?

Probably not. That's why so many colonists to undeveloped areas were indentured, slaves, or convicts -- N. America and Australia, unlike India (with large commercial opportunities).