Posted on 10/13/2006 4:00:57 PM PDT by tricky_k_1972
| Ad Astra: Taking Spaceflight Into Our Own Hands By Clifford R. McMurray  National Space Society posted: 12 October 2006 10:51 am ET
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Let’s try a little thought experiment. Suppose that a stranger walked up to you with the following pitch:
“Good morning. I and some friends of mine are planning a trip to Antarctica. We’d like to ask your help. It’ll be great fun, a great adventure, the trip of a lifetime, really. I’m sorry we can’t invite you along, but it’s very expensive, and there’s room for just a few of us on the boat. So you can’t go – in fact, you can never go – but we’d like to ask you to help financially. We figure if everyone we talk to chips in with a few bucks, we’ll be able to make the trip. And in return, we’ll send you back some postcards.
“They’re really great postcards…”
Would you be inclined to help this fellow out? Or would you be rather more likely to tell him, with varying degrees of profanity depending on your upbringing, that since he’s the one who wants to make the trip, he should whittle himself a canoe and stop bothering you?
There are some generous souls who would reach into their wallets. But I suspect that this pitch lacks great appeal for most of us, myself included. Yet it is pretty much the same pitch we’ve been using with the general public to sell the idea of a space program using government funds.
We will never make it to the stars on handouts. We need to take responsibility for the financing of our own dreams.
An entrepreneurial spirit
It is very true that getting to space in any big way will require a lot of money (though people like Burt Rutan are in the process of proving that it can be a lot cheaper than previous methods). But that’s not a reason to throw up our hands and haul out the begging bowl. It’s a reason to educate ourselves in the ways of wealth.
We have role models showing us the way – people like Paul Allen of Microsoft, who gave Burt Rutan the funds to build Spaceship One, and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who are shelling out large sums from their own fortunes to develop launch systems that will be cheaper to operate, and open space transportation as a profitable business. We need more financiers like them every bit as much – perhaps even more than – we need more engineers like Burt Rutan.
All three of these entrepreneurs made their fortunes in software, but that’s only the newest route to wealth. Richard Branson, the money man behind Virgin Galactic and The Spaceship Company, made his own fortune in several other businesses before he turned his gaze in our direction.
The mathematics of making money is a lot easier to grasp than physics and engineering. You don’t even have to be particularly good at making money, you just have to be good at saving it. When Albert Einstein was asked what the most powerful force in the universe was, he replied, “Compound interest.”
Yet whenever I attend a space convention, the finance track seems to be one of the least well-attended. Most of the space crowd would rather sit in on another panel with brand new viewgraphs of exciting new spaceship designs, most of which will never – never ever – make it off the drawing boards because our community isn’t devoting an equal amount of time and effort to the question of funding.
A reason to get rich
If you really want to get to space, I have a simple suggestion: devote at least half as much time and study and effort to making yourself wealthy as you give to whatever else you’re doing to get there. It’s fine to start small, but start. Add a subscription or two to business and financial magazines to your subscriptions to Space News and Ad Astra. Join an investment club. Start saving money, and look for ways to invest.
It would be great to have a few more billionaires on the rockethead team, but a few thousand millionaires will be just as good. Begin planning and working now to be one of them. Even if you don’t wind up with enough money to fund The Spaceship Company, you just might wind up with enough money to buy a ticket.
Getting rich(er) isn’t just the practical way to get there sooner, it’s the morally right thing to do. This is our dream. We should be the ones to pay for it.
Just a bit of advice: try making the idea of private space ventures appealing on their own merits instead of bashing NASA. I mean, if the idea is all it's cracked up to be, it stands to reason that it can be pitched without acting like dork who's been stood up by their prom date.
If we can find a President with that vision thang we could withdraw from the 1967 Treaty and open a Land Office for recording celestial body deeds.
Comparing space exploration with earthbound geological exploration is ridiculous. The amount of return just from the research and technology for space easily justifies the expenditure IMHO.
Like my wife says. We've got all of our eggs in one basket here on Earth. If we can get out and build colonies then a major disaster on Earth won't extinguish the Human Race. Not too many people can think that big.
What's with that treaty? How do you determine the dispostion of things that you don't possess and can't even reach? Egocentric beyond belief.
A couple of things:
The research and development for space exploration pays off tremendously in the expertise of the engineers.
Thinking that we can have colonies off earth that would contribute to survival of any earth species any time soon in case earth becomes uninhabitable is possibly going to sell some merchandise in Washington and in private space tourism business, but is thinking really far ahead--thousands of years at least.
The signatories of the Treaty have asserted thereby ownership of the entire visible universe including what we can reach now and what we may ever be able to reach. That's right. It's public property--all of it--and private persons are not allowed to enter onto or claim any piece of it.
Addendum: Corporations organized within the United States per the 14th Amendment are considered persons and are also excluded from utilizing space resources.
Hear that Rio Tinto? Hear that Alcoa?
I'll bet the Altairians would laugh their multiple heads off if they knew about that treaty.
(returning to reality now)
Thanks for the pings. tricky_k_1972, please add me to your list also, in case I'm not on there already.
Well, if we don't have that much time, then what are we waiting for? We should be underway already, whether or not the odds are extremely not in our favor. Are we to sit on our haunches around a desert campfire waiting for who knows what?
Americans, mired in commerce as they are, see only immediately profitable enterprise as worthwhile, so might be excused. Other people with loftier human aspirations have no excuse whatsoever. IMHO.
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