Now, on the other hand I also get tired of people that continually proclaim that we should just forget about moving into space until we figure out how to solve all our problems here on Earth. If cavemen had sat around huddled in the dark thinking they had to fix all their issues first before venturing outside we would likely still be sitting in there.

The atmosphere that supports your breathing only extends about 2.5 miles above your head. That means you wouldn’t survive your average commercial plane ride without some type of climate control and life support. We have the technology right here, right now to go live and work space. It takes a continued and methodical expansion of the technological envelope to find the method that works best. This means that we need to develop a real and working space infrastructure. NASA would serve us best if instead of fixating on building big dumb expendable rockets it instead developed technology that private enterprise feels to risky to take on. Something like a space refueling depot.

We should put aside politics, pork barrel spending, and regulations that the prevent people with the want and desire to develop resources on near Earth asteroids, the Moon, and on Mars. Those places right there represent enough new space and resources for Man to use for quite some time. We don’t need to overwhelm ourselves at this point with thoughts on how to get the Alpha Centauri or Pluto for that matter. Again, a steady, methodical, and practical approach is what we need to find success in surviving in space.

Finally, don’t forget that space also represent not only physical room and resources to grow into but also a new frontier in which Man can grow philosophically and ideologically. Every time man has up rooted themselves and ventured onto new lands here on Earth they always find a way to develop and define new governments and new freedoms so as to strip themselves of the tyrannies imposed upon them by old stagnant forms of government.

(The space shuttle uses a grand 1MB of memory in its computers! They didn’t even switch to semiconductors for the memory, from magnetic core, until 1991!)

The cold reality is that manned space program has had about a 1:10 ratio of commercial spin offs, which is really bad–most of the things often cited were already in development and would have happened anyway or were the result of non-space based military technological development. Unmanned space programs have given us satellites, which have been a boon to communication and navigation (though it should be pointed out that light fibers and “boring” undersea cable technology have had a much stronger influence on the internet and free speech than satellites.)

Basically, we have commercial enterprises filling in where they should, extending the envelope. We’ll have Mach 3 or greater passenger flights available in the coming decade and we can keep extending the graph upwards and outwards.

Space Ship One

Commercial companies are extending the flight parameters. In a few years we’ll have people flying Mach 3 or 4 around the world commercially.

Energy. Only so much solar power reaches the earth, and most people would rather use that space for living and grand vistas than miles and miles of solar panels. You can, however, place a vast solar array at, say, a lagrange point, and nobody will care. That solar array can beam its energy to earth in the form of microwave radiation, which we can collect and distribute.

Resources. Space is loaded to the gills with metals and stone. There are entire mountains of rock just floating around out there that nobody cares about. Grab them with whatever space-factory you have up there, and change them into whatever you need.

People. Once you have energy and resources, you have everything people need to survive. We can build colonies. I don’t mean colonies on planets, I mean colonies in space. Take one of this big space-mountains and spin it into a tube, use your solar array to power it, and you can have people living their quite comfortably. Oh, sure if the lights go out, everyone dies… but if earth-based infrasctructure completely collapsed, you’d see death rates around 99% too. Our entire civilization survives only because of our technology. Space will be no different.

This thread brings up “cost,” but the cost associated with space travel is almost entirely associated with getting out of the gravity well. Once you’re out there, you’re “halfway to anywhere.” Note most probes carry little bitty ion drives that can zoom them out to the outer planets in a decade. You don’t need huge expenditures to travel in space, just to get there.

So my point about these costs, this government space flight, is that it doesn’t have to beggar us. The government has done its space travel in a series of “one shot stunts.” They never stopped, never build infrastructure, never considered how they might turn the resources of space to the advantage of earth. Yes, space elevators and such, but consider, for example, Apophis, that big asteroid that’s supposed to just miss us. If we sent something out to meet it, to “catch” it and drop it off at a lagrange point, you’d have all the hard material you need to build a space station or a space factory or whatever you wanted. You wouldn’t need to haul these heavy space station modules into orbit, you’d just need to haul tools and workers.

We don’t need to spend more on space, we need to spend SMARTER.

Steve is wrong; others have answered so I won’t.

Environmental silliness has indeed hampered aviation (and energy production), but I think the Concorde is sort of like the Boeing Clipper: A beautiful expression of the aviation arts, but overtaken by technological progress. Branson and Rutan are aiming for sub-orbital inter-city flights; SpaceShip 2 is just a milestone on the way.

NASA should be removed from the transportation business and returned to its proper function, R&D, like the original NACA.

Materials science is the limiting factor in earth-to-orbit and return. Given where we were with the X-15, B-70 etc in the 1960′s, it is hard to believe that we have been stuck to the point where the space shuttle tiles were the best we could do. Hopefully the X-37 will advance the art.

The back-to-the-future ARES / ORION is an ill-considered, risk-avoiding place holder. If the best we can do is return people in a tin can under a parachute, we should just hang it up and leave space travel to the Chinese. We need a true space station / depot, where earth-to-orbit vehicles (aircraft, with wings) optimized for that purpose deliver the materials and people for further space operations.

Military necessity and greed drove mankind’s earlier explorations. There may or may not be commercial applications within current reach, but we had better get serious about the military realities of space. I can assure you our (potential) adversaries in China will.

And so, for a few years, the west was opened up by available technology – wagon trains and pony express. Not really all that fast, in terms of development.

But then some countries built trans-continental railroads, and then North America really opened up – which is why I think the long-term economics of a space elevator could be good.

To push the metaphor to its breaking point: over the very long term, of course, it was cars and trucks that really made America. So the article is right: until we can mass produce the Millenium Falcon, space travel will not be like a trip down to the corner store – but over the short term, it could be like a train ride from New York to California.

Sure, PC’s would have never come along hadn’t we first put a beer can on the Moon.

Problem is that the “space program” is subject to all the abuses and cost overruns any other collectivist boondoggle will be and IS. And the solar system is inhospitable in the extreme. And there ARE no such things as FTL drive, terraforming, extraterrestrial mining, or a single one of all the myriad fantastic imaginings of trekkies, not one of which has any grounding in cost, ROI, or even the nature of doing tiny little stuff in hard, cold vacuum except work a spanner or fix a bad toilet.

It’s more than four billion kilometers to Pluto alone — as far as we’re concerned, it could be a hundred billion. Anyone done that math, please?

NASA should be abolished. Private enterprise can instead, privately enterprise. The US is a million dollars a day in debt for the next quarter million years and we have a bunch of lousy Socialist bastards in DC, with all the plans in the world do do dirty Socialist junk for the foreseeable future.

Space travel and living in space are and have always been rubbish, notwithstanding all the sci-fi channel titanium nutheads. Maybe when we get things even remotely right on Earth we can come to some joint consensus how not to blow yet another half billion or so indulging our impacted Tom Swift fantasies.

The thing that has limited supersonic flight for all aircraft, not just the commercial ones, is the sonic boom.