It's always easier to criticize. The problem is that space travel is very, very, very hard. In that regard the Cold War was the best thing that ever happened to space exploration: two super powers spending crazy amount of money and human effort to beat each other 'who's gonna do THAT first?'. I think it was awesome: the best kind of competition you can have, almost like a high school science contest on a giant scale.
If you look around at other countries in the "space club" the situation is not much different. Launching 1gk of anything so high is so expensive that it makes very little economic sense. Private sector will never launch anything to Mars. Why would they? Private investors would never build a giant space station just to run a bunch of experiments on it.
The main message this article is trying to send is a bit creepy one (IMO): "NASA, you should do some kick-ass research using our tax dollars, and we'll be trying to make money out of what you will come up with". The problem with it is that only small percentage of what can be done in space is profitable: satellites, high-altitude tourism... that's about it.
I often wonder what could be achieved by privateers with just a fraction of NASA's annual funding. Just look at the incredible pace that X-Prize teams develop on comparatively minuscule budgets!
If you think about it, the situation mirrors that of startups. A small team of "hackers" can now build aeronautical technology better, faster, and cheaper than the big behemoth NASA can. And the reasons are also similar, in that it now costs less to build spacecraft than it used to.
Incidentally, some of these space "startups" are run by hackers. Like Armadillo Aerospace, which was co-founded by id Software's John Carmack. I guess hacking on aeronautics is in the same spirit as hacking on software.
I would really like to see what this article proposes: Focus on giving money to space "startups" and let NASA focus on the things that a slower moving, big company can do well, like research.
As a big aviation and space junkie, this has been buggin' me for some time.
I remember the astronauts on the moon (I was but a wee lad at the time) saying that in a few years, the new Space Shuttle would be hauling up cargo every week or so into earth orbit. Our new space pickup truck would mean space access for all.
It was all BS. In fact, there is a long list of BS that we've heard about NASA. The problem is that, just like big IT, NASA is big space. It works under the idea that one big honking agency can do everything for everybody. And when you really look at it, NASA is all about politics and not performance, as it is with most programs run by politicians.
NASA needs to do one thing: reduce cost to orbit by developing/sponsoring new high-risk technologies. If they can whack cost to orbit by a factor of a hundred, the market will take care of the rest. We won't have these political debates about whether to fix the Hubble ST because it will cost something like $100K to go up there and do it. Reducing cost to orbit just will change everything -- that is, if we can get them to do it.
This is kind of like IT was in the days before Apple. To do anything, you had to have a lot of money and staff. I'm looking forward to the day when space is much more like YC and the current startup world -- anybody with a small amount of money can get into the game and play with the big boys. We should encourage that progression. We need to for our survival, imo.
If you look around at other countries in the "space club" the situation is not much different. Launching 1gk of anything so high is so expensive that it makes very little economic sense. Private sector will never launch anything to Mars. Why would they? Private investors would never build a giant space station just to run a bunch of experiments on it.
The main message this article is trying to send is a bit creepy one (IMO): "NASA, you should do some kick-ass research using our tax dollars, and we'll be trying to make money out of what you will come up with". The problem with it is that only small percentage of what can be done in space is profitable: satellites, high-altitude tourism... that's about it.