Matter/anti-matter warp engines.
Posted on 07/19/2004 7:19:48 PM PDT by Brett66
The Night We Return to the Moon -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Commentary by Mark R. Whittington July 19, 2004 It is a summer evening in the year 2016 and something is about to happen that has not occurred in forty four years.
Human beings are about to walk on the Moon.
A person who was in kindergarten when this last took place would now be fifty years old. Most people now alive have never seen someone exploring another world.
The world has changed unimaginably in those forty four years.
Indeed, partly because of the effort that has led to this moment in history, the world has changed in just twelve years. Part of that change is the fact that the four astronauts preparing to walk on the Moon are not the only people in space.
Six of those space pioneers live and work on Space Station Reagan (renamed a few years before after the American President who first proposed it.)
Recently sold to an international consortium, the space station is home to a crew of scientists, conducting commercial micro gravity research. But they are not the only ones.
This night there are over a hundred space travelers in Earth orbit.
Two are servicing one of the man tended industrial space factories that have been producing products using micro gravity and the hard vacuum of space for the past several years. Three are Chinese taikionauts on board the Mao Space Station.
The rest are space tourists who have chartered private space liners in order to boast of having watched the first people to walk on the Moon in over a generation from the vantage point of space.
Historians point to two things that happened in 2004 that led to this interesting situation.
The first was a new policy initiated by the second Bush Administration that changed NASA from a high tech, space taxi service to a 21st Century Corps of Discovery, sending astronauts to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
Part of this change was the inclusive of the private sector as a full partner in the new exploration program.
The space shuttle, which had been America’s sole means of transporting humans into space, would be retired.
Henceforth, NASA would buy launch services from the private sector as a customer. Indeed, anything that could be done by the private sector would be done by the private sector, freeing NASA for cutting edge research and exploration.
Tax and other incentives, including a system of prizes, were passed to encourage private space economic development.
A treaty was negotiated with other nations defining private property rights in space, particularly on other worlds.
The second was the conclusion of the first private space race in the year 2004, featuring the first private astronauts flying the first private space craft.
The winning of the X Prize led to the brief but spectacular era of sub orbital barnstorming as the well to do and adventurous paid to experience being in space for a brief few minutes.
By the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, a team of entrepreneurs won the Orbital Prize.
As the second decade of the 21st Century commenced, new private space lines were taking paying customers on one to three day trips into orbit around the Earth.
Other entrepreneurs took advantage of the plummeting cost of space travel to finally fulfill the promise of space manufacturing.
By the time of the return to the Moon space commerce had expanded from a hundred billion dollar a year enterprise in 2004 to over a trillion a year. Plans for orbiting hotels, capable of accommodating a score or more guests, are well on their way to becoming reality.
The new, entrepreneurial spirit of space travel has altered the way NASA does business in hitherto unimaginable ways.
The moon ship was launched and assembled in Earth orbit with private sector launch vehicles. The crew and many of the supplies for the voyage were transported to the ship by private charter.
The new spirit even characterized the makeup of the crew. There are two NASA pilot astronauts and a scientist from Italy on board.
The fourth crewmember is a geologist who works for a private company that has bought mineral rights to a hundred square kilometers at the landing site.
His job will be to prospect for useful minerals and to test oxygen and ice extraction technologies at the lunar south-pole site.
The results of his work could lead to a settlement on the lunar surface that will be a center of science and commerce.
On this night of the first Moon landing in over forty years, the opening of the high frontier of space was well under way.
The benefits of this process have proven to be many times the cost.
The prospect of more seems as limitless as space itself, as people prepare to build settlements on the Moon and to launch voyages to Mars.
All of this might not have been so. Indeed this night of return to the Moon might never have happened.
The new policy changes and the new programs begun in the early first decade of the 21st Century were not inevitable.
But we did have the wisdom and the vision to reach for the opportunities inherent in literally reaching for the stars. Generations yet unborn will thank us for our foresight and courage.
Mark R. Whittington is a space policy analyst and the author of Children of Apollo, an alternate history novel set during the early space program.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtondispatch.com ...
Ping, let me know if you want on or off this list.
It auto-excerpted at the last sentence. LOL,
You mean Ted Kennedy is going to get behind the wheel of an Oldsmobile?
Waste of money and energy.
yet the posts continue.
No doubt the same was said in Spain when Queen Isabela sponsored Christopher Columbus.
For what it's worth, it's likely that the reason my dad and several of my brothers are alive today is becasue of what came out of what you call a "waste of money and energy." Specifically, weather satellites warned them and thousands of fellow commercial fisherman when a big blow was headed their way. If not for such warnings, believe me, they would have stayed out there fishing.
LOL.
Do you really believe that had we not gone to the moon, weather satellites would never have been created?
And another thing ... (!!!!) Little tiny Britain managed to built a world empire on which "the sun never set" because of its mastery of the seas. Whatever country gains mastery of space will have a clear advantage in future warfare. Had you lived in an earlier era, you probably would have been right in there with those who called for the court martial of U.S. Army General Billy Mitchell, who foresaw that air power could sink ships and win wars. No doubt his foes thought of America's investment in warplanes was yet another "waste of money and energy."
So, it's okay with you if your great great grandchildren grow up in a world where, say, Communist China "owns" the moon and are able to learn from it ways in which to colonize further into space, reaping its natural resources and benefits of a gravity-free environment for research and product development -- not to mention wage war. While Luddite Americans wisely understand that the Chinese are just wasting time and energy. *sigh* To quote Happy (the Carl's Junior star): "The guy's got no vision."
Do you really believe that without the vision of going to the moon, the pursuit of space and satellite technology would have captured the hearts of Americans? LOL!
Matter/anti-matter warp engines.
Waste of money and energy.
No doubt the same was said in Spain when Queen Isabela sponsored Christopher Columbus.
This alone is reason enough for me to want to go back.
The only change needed is establishment of private property rights in outer space.
People who only look at this in terms of short-sighted profit and loss and dredge up the old "if private enterprise won't do it, it isn't worth doing" canard give me agita, as they say back East.
Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene A. Cernan and Harrison H. Schmitt were the last men to walk on the Moon.
That was in December of '72, almost 32 years ago.
I suppose it's possible that Mark Whittington was 18 years old when he was in kindergarten,
but that really isn't the norm for the rest of us.
Pay attention Willie Green.
Mark Whittington wants us to pretend it's 12 years into the future.
That makes him only 6 years old the last time it was done.
That's still a little OLD for kindygarden, isn't it?
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