Well congratulations to India. It's about time the Space Industry got more diversified. NASA is a constant source of disappointment, it's current devotion to human space exploration is something I see as highly important as it is actually advancing useful technologies. However, due to lack of funding all its other projects are at risk of getting axed more now than ever.
The last mission to the moon was in 1972, since then the technology for interplanetary travel hadn't advanced. There's so many complaints that there's no reason for landing humans on the Moon or Mars, and generally yes there's nothing there that a robot can't do. Except all the people stating this neglect the fact that there's billions of dollars worth of potential income tied up in what's necessary to get to Mars.
If humans can safely travel to Mars, then the whole prospect of space stations becomes easily accessible. Not to mention that finding a light weight radiation shield has applications all the way from portable x-ray machines for the third world to being able to efficiently build nuclear powered aircraft. Hell, nuclear ramjets have already been tested and low-weight radiation shielding could help push to a completely reusable launch vessel.
The "throw money at it and we might get some cool tech as side effects" argument that is often made for government space funding could be applied to any random research field.
It's one of those tired old saws that everybody believes, but I never bought.
That argument is usually made as a reference to the original Apollo program which DID succeed on the metric of advancing the state of the art in multiple fields from materials science to physiology; with public funding.
The mistake many people make is thinking that that success can be repeated merely by giving money to NASA. The success of the Apollo program as an incubator of scientific and engineering accomplishment was directly tied to both the sense of mission that the participants felt, and the fact that it was widely perceived as a race with a rival power with potentially apocalyptic consequences for losing.
It's not categorically impossible to create that sense of mission anew, but recreating the overall context would be difficult. The closest we've seen to public programs that capture the competitive juices of the participants are contests like the DARPA robotic vehicle challenge.
Any actual examples of useful new technologies that were developed during the Apollo program? Any that couldn't have been had two orders of magnitude cheaper if funded directly and not as a "side effect"? Not that I'm against manned space flight or public funding of it.
I would like to believe that the side effects of the space race couldn't have been easily emulated by just funding projects directly. I think a lot of the technologies that came out of the time period weren't "Oh, let's make a <technology>." Development seems to have been a result of NASA encountering a problem and then inventing something to fix the problem. That new invention then just so happened to have applications to other fields.
For me, space exploration is one of those things that has some intangible benefits that regard pushing the limits and doing something to be proud of. I don't really care who funds it, but exploration often seems to be funded by governments... because in its early stages, it's sort of "basic research": you don't know what, if any benefits will come of it.
What drives our interest in space exploration? I haven't seen a convincing case that it gives us a lot of something, besides the excitement of having a new frontier to explore.
If we're looking for new places to live, I think on or under the sea is a more practical initial direction.
433 Eros, the asteroid NASA investigated contains more gold than ever extracted on Earth. The total amount of gold on Earth is calculated at $3,000,000,000,000 and this is excluding all the stuff held in private collections and any fabled Aztec lost city of gold. However, I think there's enough economic incentive in space if we actually put a little money in to begin with.
If you're wondering just how much 3 trillion dollars is, well that's like the entire cost of the Iraq War there in one rock. Hell, you could buy Alaska and still have like 2.5 trillion to spare.
This is the ridiculousness of the arguments against advancing space exploration and technology, because there's more gold in one rock than in the entire world. That's not to mention, there's predicted to be asteroids containing mostly platinum and even more precious metals. For an asteroid of similar size to 433 Eros containing only 10% of its mass as a rare-precious metal like platinum, well that's when you get the capability to buy out the entire planet.
So I call 100% bullshit on people claiming there's no economic incentive in space exploration. There's more precious metals than anyone has ever dreamed of, there just needs to be a little spending to get it. Once companies like Virgin and all the other ones trying for space flight and then lunar orbits, it isn't going to be long before one of them figures out they can get to a rock like Eros and mine the hell out of it.
Actually, injecting 3 trillion dollars of gold in the market is just going to drive the price of gold way down. It's almost the same thing as printing cash, really, since the value of gold is mostly figurative.
Its not finding gold and bringing it back here that's necessarily the draw. Its finding enough titanium outside of the gravity well to build a space station the size of Texas...
Hell, if we're outside the well anyway, we could build the flippin thing from concrete.
In short, mining space solves just about all of our resource problems, up there and down here, forever.
Not really, you can take a small loss by consistently selling the entire global demand at a lower cost, and as we're talking about gold from space it would be exceptionally easy to deliver anywhere in the world. The other thing is that the processing cost for 'new' gold today is ridiculously high, where as from an asteroid like Eros it's purely mining costs that you need to absorb in the price not the billions of dollars of equipment required to get microscopic amounts of gold out of rock.
The value of gold will only drop to slightly below the base price of every other company in the world. Once Mr Ore Processor in South Africa can no longer pay for his billion dollar equipment to sift dirt, then the price becomes fixed. It's like coal in the UK, there's still millions of tonnes of reserve, but until the price gets high enough there's no point in hell of mining it.
So yes, you can't sell 3 trillion dollars of gold in a single day and expect to get what it's worth at market value. The prospect is that, you could probably undercut every gold producer in the world and still make a tasty 1.5 trillion (or more when companies start going out of business) in the long run. You could run it like the oil industry, just supply enough to try and keep the price in a nice range for the foreseeable future.
Edit: My point is that you'll make far more profit mining it as pure gold than the current processes on Earth. From a little research, global demand is already almost 50% higher than the supply. So supposing you sell the global demand of 3800 tonnes per year at half current market price, would still be 50 billion dollars a year, every year for 30 years.
We were a little ahead of ourselves with the Apollo program, but precociousness isn't a bad attribute for a species to have. We explore space because it is the final frontier. It is one of few unknowns remaining. Beyond the desire for exploration inherent to humankind, there is a lot of energy in space. Eventually we'll colonize other worlds and build superstructures, and for now, we explore the solar system.
I think people here appreciate the Indian achievement because it reflects on a number of Hacker News axioms:
1. It's better to hack something than design for perfection. India had a number of launch failures prior to this success, but kept at it at low cost. They literally launched early and got feedback :-)
2. The cost of creating technology start-ups is getting lower all the time. India did this on the cheap and was able to piggy back on years of prior work. It would be interested to see a comparison of the cost of getting into lunar orbit between 1945 and today.
3. It doesn't matter who you are, it's what you do that counts.
4. There are some places in the world that are best suited for particular technology start-ups: Boston and SV for software, anywhere along the Equator for a minimal delta-v.
<i> India had a number of launch failures prior to this success, </i>
If you are referring to a lunar satellite kind of mission, this is not true.
"Chandrayan- I" is their very first shot at it.
Even the launch vehicle (PSLV) has a very good track record.
[http://www.isro.org/pslv-c11/brochure/Page10.htm]
"During 1993-2008 period, PSLV had twelve consecutively successful launches carrying satellites to Sun Synchronous, Low Earth and Geosynchronous Transfer Orbits."
As an Indian, I couldn't be more proud... what really excites me is that they are doing it at 77 million usd... There are many dot com companies that get sold for more than that!
I've always been fascinated by different types of orbits, and the math that goes into calculating them. Does anyone know what a good resource might be for learning about them? Are there any college classes that deal with them specifically, or is that just wishful thinking? Thanks!
The last mission to the moon was in 1972, since then the technology for interplanetary travel hadn't advanced. There's so many complaints that there's no reason for landing humans on the Moon or Mars, and generally yes there's nothing there that a robot can't do. Except all the people stating this neglect the fact that there's billions of dollars worth of potential income tied up in what's necessary to get to Mars.
If humans can safely travel to Mars, then the whole prospect of space stations becomes easily accessible. Not to mention that finding a light weight radiation shield has applications all the way from portable x-ray machines for the third world to being able to efficiently build nuclear powered aircraft. Hell, nuclear ramjets have already been tested and low-weight radiation shielding could help push to a completely reusable launch vessel.