They may finally be on their way. But as the article says, we won’t understand their economics until they’re actually put into operation. And as usual, the Union of Confused “Scientists” will try to throw up roadblocks.
Interestingly we were working with Flour Daniel when I was at Rockwell working the Space Exploration Initiative on ISRU. I wonder how applicable these would be on the moon or Mars? There’s water for cooling in both places.
Jeff Bezos expanded on his space vision at Buzz’s gala in Florida:
Bezos rejects the common ‘Plan B’ argument in favor of human exploration; that one day the Earth is going to be destroyed, so we’d better find somewhere else to live.
“I hate that idea, and I find it very un-motivating,” said Bezos.
“We have sent robotic probes now to every planet in the solar system and, believe me, this is the best one – Earth is a gem, it’s incredible.”
He then went on to quote several Apollo astronauts about what they thought about Earth when they returned form the Moon, notably Apollo 14’s Alan Bean: ‘Since returning I have not complained about the weather one single time – I’m glad there is weather. I’ve not complained about traffic— I’m glad there are people around. Why do people complain about the Earth? We are living in the Garden of Eden.’
…For Bezos, colonising space is a more a simple necessity for continued life on Earth. The compound effect of the incremental increase in energy requirements will mean us having to cover every inch of Earth in solar cells, he said, while the solar system offers virtually unlimited energy resources.
“We can harvest resources from asteroids, from Near-Earth Objects, and harvest solar energy from a much broader surface area – and continue to do amazing things,” he said. The alternative, he said, was an era of stasis and stagnation on Earth, where we are forced to control population and limit energy usage per capita.
“I don’t think stasis is compatible with freedom or liberty, and I sure as hell think it’s going to be a very boring world – I want my grandchildren’s grandchildren to be in a world of pioneering, exploration and expansion throughout the solar system.”
He also suggested that exploration and colonisation of the solar system would make it possible to support one trillion people.
“Then we would have 1,000 Einstein’s and 1,000 Mozarts, how cool would that be?” he said.
“What’s holding us back from making that next step is that space travel is just too darned expensive because we throw the rockets away. We need to build reusable rockets and that’s what Blue Origin is dedicated to.”
Bezos’s vision is much more hopeful and expansive than Elon’s, which is more about fear (i.e., Plan B), and mostly constrained to a single planet (Mars). But I’m glad they’re both out there competing with each other to (finally) drive down the cost of access to space.
But I do criticize one aspect of the report:
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, based at Kennedy Space Centre’s Pad 39A where the Apollo missions launched from, is due to test its 229ft Falcon Heavy (FH) rocket this September. It will be the most powerful operational rocket in the world, though NASA’s Mars-focused SLS, at 365ft rocket, will takeover that mantle in 2028 or so.
The latter is not a reportable fact. I’d have written it as “though NASA hopes that its Mars-focused SLS, at 365ft rocket, will takeover that mantle in 2028 or so.” I think it’s a fantasy, if both Falcon Heavy (and maybe ITS) and New Glenn and New Armstrong are operational by then. The SLS jobs program will not survive that.
Gee, I’m old enough to remember when the future held endless drought.
Love the phrase "we found" with regard to a climate prediction, as though it's an empirical result, and not just another crap model output. https://t.co/5Km29m5lyN
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) July 16, 2017
Here’s news you can use: Everything you know about them is wrong. As was the case with Columbine and other places, idiotic advice from clueless people in charge helps increase the carnage. Which is part of the disaster that is American public education.
It’s nice to see that you can (Finally? Again?) get a clutch and gearbox with the higher-power version. I wish they’d bring back the three-door, like my ’87, though. That was a very practical car. But really, the Accord has gotten too big. To me the Civic is the new Accord.
Sarah Hoyt, on what an utter, catastrophic failure the American public-education system is. It’s one of the reasons we got Trump.
…can plan ahead better than many humans. Also squirrels are trying to save the planet by planting trees.
I upgraded to 26 overnight, and now I’m missing a (critical) font in Libre Office: Bitstream Charter. I have a huge document that was paginated and properly formatted in it, and now it’s Arial and all effed up. Anyone have any idea what might have happened, and how to fix?
[Friday-morning update]
OK, I went to the Fedora Forum, and they said to reinstall the font, so it works now, except the formatting got munged, so I have to go back and remove extraneous returns that got inserted under the Arial version.
As for the question of why did I “fix something that wasn’t broken,” Fedora is always broken to some degree (as is every OS), and I alway hope the latest version will fix some of the broken things.
I really need to start doing this.
So we bought this for Patricia’s new office this past weekend. Last night, I finally got around to finishing assembling it. I had tested the latching mechanism (I thought) before installing the drawers. I put them in, closed them, locked it, and they locked fine. I unlocked it, and they remain locked. I can’t get in to see what the problem is, because…the drawers are locked. And no, before asking, it’s not a lock combination problem. It’s still set to all zeros per the factory, and the knob turns to lock and unlock. It just doesn’t release the drawers when I turn it to unlock.
Sigh…
Not sure what to do. The least destructive way I can see to get in to it (in terms of how many parts and how expensive) is to cut the front off the top drawer. But maybe I’ll call IKEA and see what they have to say.
[Afternoon update]
OK, I had turned it over and banged on it, in the hope that it would knock the latch loose, and it didn’t seem to work. But when I flipped it back right-side up, with it unlocked, the drawers seemed to be freed. But I’m still nervous about locking it again until I understand what happened.