I wish someone would instead come up with a project to really capture the public's attention about space exploration. More interest means more funding. The U.S. Budget is measured in billions. The New Horizons project, for example, only cost $700 million.
The Lunar X Prize might have been that project but it doesn't seem to be making progress:
I saw a lot of people complaining online about the cost of New Horizons. I took the time to explain that if we had foregone a single aircraft carrier, we could have sent nearly 20 such missions to Pluto. And that was just for the carrier, not for the support craft, aircraft, etc.
A carrier costs roughly $12 billion, and costs about $1.5 billion per year in operational costs.
People really have no concept of how much NASA costs. They think NASA gets an insane amount of money. We'd have moon bases and maybe even a Mars base if NASA got the funding people think they get.
Hi, I'm a member of one of the GLXP teams. There is progress. But it's hard and mostly invisible to the outside world. Basically we are small teams catching up to what governments or larger companies are doing. It takes time.
1. Tech development: It requires changes in thinking, tools, procedures etc. Perhaps harder than tech itself is to acquire the required mindset.
2. Legal: Space law is fun but complex once it goes into the details. US laws like ITAR (now a bit milder than before) haunt us. Plus plenty of other laws.
3. Funding: It's hard to make business cases for a (literal) moonshot. Sponsorship and payload are the main revenue sources, but most teams don't succeed. Their story (or presentation) is not exciting or convincing, their team is not adequate (skills, mentality, manpower), so they don't get sponsors, investors, or customers. Or they're just in a country where risk is not rewarded or capital is absent.
4. Launch: Finding the right rocket is important; it influences spacecraft design. Then negotiating a contract and sticking to it. Many hurdles. And it's expensive before the launch. Launch is the biggest cost center.
5. Politics: XPRIZE Foundation is a US org, so US law and politics determine much of what you (not) do, e.g. avoid tech or people from blacklisted countries. Or when geopolitics kicks in and the rocket in another country suddenly or potentially becomes unavailable.
And much more. So we're making progress. But it's not something we talk about much.
I just realize that I wrote the five points above in a kind of negative tone. They're not. E.g. once you have the required mindset, you're filled with nearly unshakable certainty about what you do and why. Laws are solved problems--or when they work on them, they make open problems pretty clear. The pressure to find business cases makes you think hard about what is possible and economical at what time, you start to see a roadmap of doable things until you reach your goal; after all to kickstart private space is one of the GLXP's intentions. The launch sector is a funny business, you meet interesting people and it gives you insights into one of the greatest filters that still stops humanity from going into space at large scales. Politics is not always a burden, it can also be a source of support and goodwill; e.g. if you align interests and avoid stepping on the wrong toes, it can be very helpful.
> I wish someone would instead come up with a project to really capture the public's attention about space exploration.
The imaging and spectroscopy of exoplanets has proceeded quickly [1] and in a not-too-distant future we may be able to roughly analyze the composition of the atmospheres of exoplanets.
Now, given that microbial life formed on earth pretty much right after the young planet had cooled down, it may not be too far fetched to hope to find a planet with oxygen in its atmosphere, signaling the presence of at least microbial life.
I am surprised they haven't kickstarted a mission yet. $700 million is less than $3 per person in the US, and probably something like $10 per person with an interest in space travel in the developed world. I'd love to see such a mission with 70% devoted to science, and 30% devoted to awesome spectacle like high-resolution stereoscopic video.
We need to build a huge space ship with a fusion engine and send it to the nearest star. But that sort of doesn't make any sense because we have lots of our own solar system to explore.
There might also be the small problem of actually building the fusion engine first. I don't think that's something we're really able to do right now, is it?
Right. I'm sure fusion will one day allow us to do incredible things. We just haven't figured it out, yet. Right now, our best attempts at fusion (to my knowledge) put in orders of magnitude more energy than they get out. And the first applications of positive fusion energy would likely be to generate cheap power on Earth, long before it reaches a point where we could drive a ship with it.
Daedalus is not even a high level concept at the level we are talking about, it's a completely different level altogether. Project Daedalus was more like a project to establish reasonable parameters on which to base a high level concept.
sorry to break your perception (or not), but even as a space exploration enthusiast, never heard of that. but then again, podcasts generally are on outer rim of interest of general population
Are there any good space or physical science focused episodes? Whenever I check in on Radiolab it seems like it is all about pop-psychology topics or TED-ish "turns out this counter-intuitive notion is true" stories.
The US is richer, and has a larger GDP as of now (post Dollar run and Euro drop) than the European Union. The US has about ~40% of all private wealth (globally private wealth is around $270 trillion, with US households holding $86 trillion [1] of that; then furthering that are US corporate assets, which are far larger than European corporate assets).
By comparison private wealth in all of Europe is about $60 to $65 trillion. [2]
Better yet, why does it have to be an "individual nation" thing? Why can't all (or even just some) of the developed nations collaborate and pool funding and have a bigger team to work on the problem?
Sure. And we definitely need some kind of motivation to focus our efforts on space exploration (it's very noticeably become an afterthought ever since we stopped trying to compete).
But if we could somehow find that motivation, it would be far more productive to work together -- we'd have a lot more manpower and a higher budget that way.
The Lunar X Prize might have been that project but it doesn't seem to be making progress:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize
http://lunar.xprize.org/