Ross Douthat wonders what happened to it:
Go back and read the science fiction of the 1940s and ’50s, and you’ll be struck by the vaulting confidence that this expansion would continue upward and outward, and that a new age of exploration was just waiting to be born.
Today that confidence has vanished. Our Mars rovers are impressive and our billionaires keep pouring money into private spaceflight, but neither project captures the public’s imagination, and the very term “Space Age” seems antique. The Kepler 62 discovery might have earned more headlines at a less horrific moment, but it would have fallen out of the news soon enough.
It’s possible that we’re less interested in space travel because we feel that it’s a luxury good at a time when we have bigger problems here on Earth. But it’s also possible that we’ve gradually turned inward, to our smartphone screens and Facebook profiles, because we know that spaceflight isn’t going to get us to another world anytime soon.
Actually, if the latter is the case, “we” are too pessimistic, because we’re paying too much attention to NASA’s dysfunction, and not enough to what’s happening in the real world of spaceflight. I do think that the billionaires are capturing peoples’ attention, and as real things start to happen, they’ll do so much more.
“Go back and read the science fiction of the 1940s and ’50s, and you’ll be struck by the vaulting confidence that this expansion would continue upward and outward, and that a new age of exploration was just waiting to be born.”
Don’t even have to go back that far….
go back to 1968 when 2001: came out – nothing there, spaceship-wise that we couldn’t have achieved, if we wanted to. Some stuff we have – like Skype for the video phone Floyd used to talk with his daughter.
Or look at 2010 which came out in 1984. Same thing. We are nowhere near those spacecraft capabilities…but could have been.
I was speaking to a law student a couple of weeks ago. He is quite excited about space, but feels that there is something “not quite right” about all the private activity. He wishes it were the government. I told him it was pretty darn impressive all these people putting up there own money, instead of using other people’s. The billionaires are putting their own fortunes on the line. Was he looking for the Federation? Only NASA could do it? He said he understood all the virtues of the private approach, but it didn’t feel right. He wished it could be bigger or something. I told him he was a victim of the propaganda, but I wasn’t talking about space propaganda. I worry that the entrepreneurs truly have been demonized.
To get an idea of why he feels this way, go over to CosmicLog, and look at the comments for Alan’s most recent article on the SAA between Bigelow and NASA about Moon Bases.
http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/19/17829546-to-the-moon-bigelow-aerospace-and-nasa-look-at-private-exploration?lite
You don’t go very many comments down before hitting the first of several who are afraid of billionaires who will take over the Moon, and everything else, apparently, just because such people are inherently evil.
While the class bigotry of this sort is seldom so out in the open when talking about Spaceflight, the persistence of it within the academic community is still a major problem waiting to bite us down the road. If your student friend has been inside academia long enough to be in law school, then he probably was doing better than most who aren’t aerospace engineering majors and active participants in building some Space hardware for launch. It sounds like your law student knows that private groups *are* doing it, but has been told its correct to feel beslimed when a private person is determining the course of so much of our species future. He sees government as the stand in for “the rest of us”, because those billionaires *aren’t among “us” in the first place? If he’s like those student’s I’ve talked to over the years, thinking otherwise is
Also, if you read Sarah Hoyt’s (SF writer) blog, the publishing houses of the last few decades are looking for dreary, dystopian, “the-future-sucks” material. Exploring–or, God forbid, conquering–a new frontier, is not cool.
You have to look to e-publishing for the exciting stuff. I just finished Andy Weir’s The Martian. If anyone wants optimism, space, and harrowing heroism, give it a try.
“My asshole is doing as much to keep me alive as my brain.”
Great stuff. They will need live soil folks. I’ve got to get a copy of the martian.
We will have a frontier only after people see it a such and not just death and money sinkhole.
Getting to mars is hard. Living there is another story. It’s a different kind of hard that frontier people are used to. It’s withing their means.
Until it’s done, naysayers have the upper hand. Once it’s done, naysayers will move on to the next thing they can pretend they know something about.
Psst, Laura: In the Shadow of Ares
New frontier, capitalism, settlement, optimism…
Mars Development Authority??? No thanks. There’s no comparison. It sucks. I’m getting ‘the martian.’ I usually don’t like single person stories, but that one was a grabber.
They’re the bad guys Ken.. sheesh, try reading the book before criticizing it.
Thanks! I’ll check it out.
Ever since we stopped having politics of growth and went to politics of zero population growth and austerity. Ever since politicians stopped looking at the big picture to look only at how to serve their own petty interests. This is what happened. Instead of getting out of the hole we keep digging deeper.
Thankfully we have people in the private sector like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos investing in space development otherwise this would be another grim decade for human space.
I personally wish someone would overtake SpaceX so their government funded “public-private partnership” approach is not seen as the best way forward. Not going to happen I expect.
Not until SpaceX makes enough money to attract the capital, financial and otherwise, to the field. Then we will see many, but there’s a limit to the number of billionaires willing to takes these risks as long as the returns are unproven. Plumping down their money in return for dreams is not how *most* billionaires made their billions.
The “partnership” itself of an SAA is at least as valuable to anyone in that situation as the money that may attach to it, as it doesn’t so far in Bigelow’s case. As long as a new company is competent it gives investors a place inside NASA to go for an evaluation by someone who knows the program, but isn’t eating off the company’s dime, when they get a phone call from a Center denizen telling the investor he’ll lose his shirt with “those amateurs”. The attitudes inside NASA of the anti-private campaigns between 1979-2004 are not yet dead by any means!
Actually, Bechtel joining with Planetary Resources was one of the most uplifting of recent stories. Bechtel isn’t a company out to capture unicorns.
They will need a market for their mines. I suggest fuel for mars colonists.
I don’t either, but you’re absolutely right.
When a Space Conestoga is available — a long-range, family-sized spacecraft priced for the settler’s purse — we’ll have a real space frontier.
Sorry B Lewis, that doesn’t get us there. Travel through space is always going to cost too much. I assume you want the family wagon in space to be mobile. That will probably require solar sails since the rocket equation kills ya.
Travel where? Between O’neill islands I suppose (economic nonsense and handwaving – High Frontier is the primer.)
We will have a frontier when we start with the most livable places and gradually grow into more difficult places.
It can’t be done, until we wrap our minds around, it can be done.
When I say go to mars now, that is an example of my idea of gradual growth. I understand most people are not with me on that.
Wrong analogy. A conestoga worked because there were resources along the way to use (water, for example) that lightened the load. The more applicable analogy remains the sailing ship. Colonists pooling resources and purchasing travel to a destination is the more apt model.
The viability of the destination is still open for debate of course.
Back when NASA was going to the moon, it was easy to believe that the future would take humans further afield. That ended 40 years ago. Since then, NASA has spent several hundred billion dollars “going boldly where they’d gone before.” They proved that not only were they uninterested in ordinary people going into space, they really weren’t that interested in going anywhere above LEO themselves. There isn’t much of a frontier in LEO but apparently a lot of pork.
Back when NASA was going to the moon, it was easy to believe that the future would take humans further afield.
Why was it easy to believe ? NASA back then was as much state socialist enterprise as it is now – so why would anyone expect it to conquer a new frontier ?
One thing that WAS different back then was that US aerospace industrial base was much more vibrant, diverse and competitive, but after the wave of consolidations even that is gone.
It wasn’t that we thought NASA would conquer a new frontier, we just hoped they’d keep going further. Lewis and Clark didn’t conquer the American west. Instead, they explored it and reported the results so that others would follow. Space might possibly have followed the same model with astronauts doing the initial exploration to be followed by others later. Instead, NASA retreated to Earth orbit where little has been accomplished for the past 40 years.
It wasn’t that we thought NASA would conquer a new frontier
I am not that old, but from what i read and research thats exactly what a majority of the general public thought. Which is bizarre – as the country was competing against soviets and the evils of communism and socialism, by establishing and putting all its faith in its own socialist space enterprise.