Neil deGrasse Tyson on Innovation, Education, Economics, Politics

[Space Racer]

The development of space isn't about exploration. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella didn't sponsor Columbus so that he could go exploring. They wanted him to find a trade route to the east and to claim undiscovered lands for Spain. Columbus was an explorer, but the people who wrote the check had other motives.

If we rely on government to continue its snail paced investment in the development of space transportation, and to restrict private development in innovative fields, our economy and our education system will continue to founder. Increasing the rate of space transportation to a point where we can see the results of our work will cause a natural interest in innovation, and stimulate a desire for education and economic development in related fields, much as it did in the 60's.

The Dept of Ed is bigger than NASA. It has ruined our education system. Putting some DOE money into the development of space transportation and economic development of the solar system will cause students to compete for educations with backgrounds in math and science. Government won't have to step in and put bandaids on a failing methodology.

Instead of government stepping into everything, burying people under the bureaucracy of the bandaid mentality, and destroying the attitudes of leaders and innovators, a practical application of space development can be one of the methods by which we once again look to the future with a sense of hope and accomplishment.

Before you comment on this, see the interview. The above remarks only present a glimpse of what Dr. Tyson talks about.

http://spaceref.com/event/28th-national-space-symposium/a-conversation-with-dr-neil-degrasse-tyson-at-the-28th-national-space-symposium.html

This is a direct link to the video:
http://vimeo.com/40658876
.

[tunnel_rat]

I agree completely...Sure gov't stifles everything it touches. Space X , a private company, just docked with the ISS. Whether profit or exploration is the motive is irrelevant. As long as it happens. Profit is not a 4 letter word. The govt has ruined the schools, as well as everything else it touches, like the opposite of the Midas touch.

[Space Racer]

http://www.americaspace.org/?p=21049#more-21049

I don't agree with everything Dr. Tyson says, but his heart is in the right place, and he makes a lot of sense when he talks about space tech leading the way.

[Space Racer]

China's new space economy is ready to blast off:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-06/18/content_15510049.htm

[printer2]

I agree completely...Sure gov't stifles everything it touches. Space X , a private company, just docked with the ISS. Whether profit or exploration is the motive is irrelevant. As long as it happens. Profit is not a 4 letter word. The govt has ruined the schools, as well as everything else it touches, like the opposite of the Midas touch.

Yeah but who paid for the trip, government? If it was so profitable going into space there would be private flights going up every day. Government stopping them? Heck the Cayman Islands would probably give them the green light. What can we get up there that would not cost us less here? They talked about perfect ball bearings from a factory in space since the effects of gravity would not distort the manufacturing. See many perfect ball bearings around? The need for them does not justify the cost.

Getting minerals from space? Cheaper to pull it out of the rock here on Earth. It just costs too much energy to make round trips off this rock to justify most endeavors. When the cost per pound comes down you will see private money getting in the game. The whole idea is profit and it aint there yet.

[Space Racer]

China vs. SpaceX:

http://www.policymic.com/articles/9816/china-space-race-will-not-be-with-nasa-but-with-spacex

[Space Racer]

X Prize Foundation drives innovation:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/mf_icons_diamandis/all/


Greenwald: When did you realize that the X Prize could be a series of challenges that address a variety of other problems?

Diamandis: I saw that it was an incredibly powerful engine for innovation. The $10 million Ansari X Prize drove $100 million in investment by the competitors. It resulted in 26 designs from seven companies. SpaceShipOne was inducted into the Smithsonian, and it’s hanging in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, right above Apollo 11, right next to Spirit of St. Louis.

At that point, we had to decide: Do we declare success and shut down because we’re out of money, or do we turn what we’ve learned into a platform for creating more breakthroughs? I was invited to speak at Google, and afterward a guy in a backpack and T-shirt walked up and said, “I’m Larry Page. Let’s have lunch.” He funded the foundation to look at other areas, and the scope of the X Prize was broadened to address more of humanity’s grand challenges in exploration, including space and oceans, life sciences, education, global development, energy, and the environment.


Greenwald: Could anything derail us from this path?

Diamandis: Yes: the risk aversion we’ve developed as a society. Lawyers have ubiquitous power. If someone is always to blame, if every time something goes wrong someone has to be punished, people quickly stop taking risks. Without risks, there can’t be breakthroughs. I got this from Internet law expert Jonathan Zittrain: We’ve gone from a society where if something wasn’t prohibited then it was legal to a society where if something isn’t explicitly permitted it’s illegal. In the early days of aviation, you could do anything you wanted as long as it wasn’t illegal. Now the laws are so extensive that they say, “Show me where it’s allowed.”


Greenwald: It sounds like being told no only energizes you.

Diamandis: I have the general philosophy of creating the future you want to see. Years ago I first saw a poster of Murphy’s law: If anything can go wrong, it will. That’s ridiculous. So I wrote a set of alternatives. I call them Peter’s laws: If anything can go wrong, fix it. “No” means begin again one level higher. Do it by the book, but be the author.


Greenwald: Your most recent enterprise, Planetary Resources, aims to mine asteroids. That’s bound to test legal limits on the space frontier.

Diamandis: We’re working with the US government to define regulations that allow commercial exploitation of asteroids. Unlike oil reserves or even the oceans, which are limited, resources in space are infinite. Anyone who wants will have access to them, so everyone benefits when a company like this succeeds.

Greenwald: What resources are you after?

Diamandis: Asteroids called carbonaceous chondrites, also known as dirty ice balls, are up to 20 percent water. You can use solar energy to break up water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, which is rocket fuel, so you can create filling stations for deep space operations or oxygen and water for human consumption. Launching water beyond Earth orbit costs $20,000 per kilogram using the lowest-cost launch vehicle, so you save a lot by mining it in space. We’ll also be looking for what I call strategic metals. Another category of asteroid is rich in platinum-group metals such as palladium and osmium, which are used in medical devices, computer hard disks, LCD screens, and other electronics. They’re rare on Earth, but not in space.

Greenwald: NASA talks about spending $1 billion on a single asteroid mission. How can you mine asteroids cost-effectively?

Diamandis: Our goal is to bring down the cost of deep-space satellites for doing the imaging, remote sensing, and reconnaissance by a factor of 100. We can do it by reinventing how we design, build, test, and operate these systems. That’s where exponential technologies come in: Robotics, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and new materials will make it possible.

[Space Racer]

Yeah but who paid for the trip, government? If it was so profitable going into space there would be private flights going up every day. Government stopping them? Heck the Cayman Islands would probably give them the green light. What can we get up there that would not cost us less here? They talked about perfect ball bearings from a factory in space since the effects of gravity would not distort the manufacturing. See many perfect ball bearings around? The need for them does not justify the cost.

Getting minerals from space? Cheaper to pull it out of the rock here on Earth. It just costs too much energy to make round trips off this rock to justify most endeavors. When the cost per pound comes down you will see private money getting in the game. The whole idea is profit and it aint there yet.

Private space companies have been around for a while, and they have been stealing market share from NASA. For example, Arianespace, a company formed in 1980, has competed with NASA for satellite launch business, and has gotten to the point where it now holds more than 50 percent of the world's business for launching satellites to orbit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianespace

But in the US, the government has been willing to pay ten times what it costs private enterprise to accomplish the same tasks, so private companies take the money and run. Unfortunately, without the advantage of competition, we have complacently come to believe that NASA's large expenditures should be the norm.

Now that cash is tight, and technology and economies of scale have reduced a few obstacles, the curtain has been pulled away, the blustering wizard exposed, and private space companies are popping up like weeds.

[Space Racer]

How the Lunar X Prize Is a Preview of the New Space Age

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/moon-mars/how-the-lunar-x-prize-is-a-preview-of-the-new-space-age-10624613

[Space Racer]

Their View: Space pioneers have shifted from public to private sectors
By Andrew Follett
Posted: 07/15/2012 07:13:17 AM MDT

On July 20, 1969, two men landed on the moon. At the time, many thought this "one small step" marked the beginning of a new Age of Exploration.

Breathtaking opportunities for all mankind were within reach. Today, NASA cannot put men into space. The agency's troubled Constellation program, meant to replace the Space Shuttle fleet, was canceled after billions was spent. What happened to the American dream of human space exploration?

Put simply, government happened. To beat the Soviets to the moon, it created a bureaucracy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which quickly devolved into a jobs program to bring home the space bacon. NASA lacked incentive to pursue its primary mission of exploration and scientific inquiry. The United States today lacks manned spaceflight capability for the first time since 1961. How can we dream of the stars without the iconic shuttles?

SpaceX, the brainchild of PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, has answered this question with its Falcon 9/Dragon space launch system. The Dragon capsule recently made headlines as the first private craft to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. Each Falcon 9 launch costs around $54 million. If the Space Shuttle were around today, it would cost more than $1.6 billion per launch. It is hard to imagine a better example of the private sector's amazing ability to out-compete government bureaucracy. One shuttle launch could pay for 29 SpaceX launches, and leave $34 million to spare.

Unfortunately, the government has been going in the opposite direction. Under President Obama's new NASA budget, money is shifted from the successful parts of NASA, like its robotic exploration program, to areas which produce nothing tangible, such as its environmental sciences program. Obama's budget manages to cut every part of NASA that actually works, including planetary science programs, technological development programs, and many important future Mars missions - without saving any money! As none other than Neil Armstrong, who is rarely outspoken, puts it, NASA is basically doomed to yet another decade of doing nothing in space.

NASA has actually been reduced to holding bake sales to try to convince lawmakers to save these programs. Unfortunately for the agency, it doesn't have a strong case. Estimates put the cost of the now-cancelled Constellation program at $230 billion. The original cost estimates for the George H. W. Bush era Space Exploration Initiative, projected to stretch across three decades, typically fell in the range of $400 to $500 billion. Contrast that with the $300 million spent by SpaceX to develop the Falcon 9 in a little over four years, and the difference between government and private enterprise becomes clear.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of private spaceflight was achieved by aviation pioneer Burt Rutan in 2004, when his company, Scaled Composites, put a live human crew in orbit with its innovative vehicle, Space Ship One. For its feat, the Space Ship One team won the Ansari X Prize, which is awarded by the nonprofit X Prize Foundation.

The X Prize offers a useful example on how to tap the immense power of free enterprise to put America at the forefront of space flight again - all while cutting costs. Interestingly, Newt Gingrich made a similar proposal when he was Speaker of the House. Essentially, he wanted to create a $10 billion prize to be awarded to the first private entity to land a human on Mars. While private funding for such a prize would be ideal, a federal prize would be a great value if NASA wants continue their role in space travel.

The prize wouldn't be paid out until the mission was complete, so the opinions of politicians about the feasibility of a Mars mission would matter less than the willingness of entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Burt Rutan to accept the risk of pursuing such an award. A system based on a fixed prize would end government cost overruns and waste.

It is a simple fact that people spend their own money more intelligently than that of others. Private American space firms are currently pursuing accomplishments beyond those of SpaceX, and more advanced and ambitious than the entire government space programs of China and the European Union. Bigelow Aerospace, for example, has created an expandable hotel in space and launched two component units into orbit. It is now possible to buy a ticket for a suborbital spaceflight today with Virgin Galactic. Mars One is even planning a private Mars mission by 2023, decades ahead of NASA's schedule. The spirit of innovation and ingenuity that drove the early Apollo missions never died - it simply took root in the private sector. The new Age of Exploration, a competitive, profit-driven space race against the limits of human imagination, is only just beginning.

http://www.lcsun-news.com/las_cruces-opinion/ci_21077914/their-view-space-pioneers-have-shifted-from-public

[Space Racer]

Elon Musk on innovation and going to Mars:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VInhqPfNgNY&feature=related

[Tool-Slinger]

Elon Musk on innovation and going to Mars:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VInhqPfNgNY&feature=related

We have pretty much determined that Mars is an uninhabitable rock. Why bother? Is there some other hope?

[Space Racer]

It's not uninhabitable. It's less hospitable.

Musk and others plan to colonize Mars.

[printer2]

So what does Mars have that we do not here?

[Space Racer]

Capitalism in Space

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/313417/capitalism-space-rand-simberg?pg=1
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/313417/capitalism-space-rand-simberg?pg=2

[Space Racer]

So what does Mars have that we do not here?

There are tons of articles and essays about why we should risk human life and billions of dollars on such an extreme frontier. One of the best reasons not to go to Mars is the high probability that anyone who goes there will die of cancer in a relatively short period of time, because of all the cosmic radiation people will be exposed to when they get away from Earth.

But this video puts the desire in a greater context:

http://vimeo.com/46906998#

[printer2]

There are tons of articles and essays about why we should risk human life and billions of dollars on such an extreme frontier. One of the best reasons not to go to Mars is the high probability that anyone who goes there will die of cancer in a relatively short period of time, because of all the cosmic radiation people will be exposed to when they get away from Earth.

But this video puts the desire in a greater context:

http://vimeo.com/46906998#


I tend not to watch videos I like print where I can skip over the unimportant bits, they tend to go on and in the end I want my 10-15 minutes back. One day we may venture out into space in a big way but as you know it is a harsh environment and even if we solve the radiation problem living on Mars would make Amazons look short.

[Space Racer]

Watch the first two minutes.
This video might be famous someday.
It's part of a new documentary on space colonies.

[Space Racer]

The Perverse Incentives of Government Space Programs

by edward wright


A basic principle of economics says that if you reward a behavior, you will get more of it.

Unfortunately, government programs frequently have perverse incentives, which reward behaviors and outcomes which no one desires. Education is an example. If a private school does a poor job of educating its students, parents will remove their children and the school suffers financially, but if a public school performs poorly, it is likely to receive a budget increase in order to “fix the problem.”

In government space programs, managers who overrun their budgets can expect to receive additional funding. Managers who come in under budget may be targeted for future cuts. Their success proves they “don’t need” as much money. The system rewards managerial failure and punishes success.

This dysfunctional pattern passes for normal. When there’s a deviation, managers actually get upset.

In 2011, NASA associate administrator Dr. Edward Weiler resigned over what he called “irrational” cuts to NASA’s Mars science program. The Planetary Society has protested the proposed cuts, as have a number of Congressmen.

The protestors fail to mention the reason for the proposed cuts, which are an attempt by the Office of Management and Budget regain control of a space science budget that’s badly out of control. This situation was caused by massive overruns in projects such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Mars Science Laboratory – both projects managed by Dr. Weiler.

Dr. Alan Stern, who preceeded Weiler as NASA associate administrator for space science, has described such overruns as “a cancer overtaking the space agency.” Dr. Stern warned that, “This decision to go forward with the [Mars Science Laboratory] was made even though it has tripled in cost since its inception, it is behind schedule, there is no firm estimate of the final cost, and NASA hasn’t disclosed the collateral damage inflicted on other programs and activities that depend on NASA’s limited science budget.”

Stern was forced to resign from NASA when he attempted to get spiraling budget costs under control.

Even more frightening are perverse incentives in manned programs. Commentators have said that NASA engineers are afraid to take risks because Congress punishes NASA every time it loses an astronaut. In fact, that isn’t true at all. The late, legendary aerospace engineer Max Hunter, father of the Delta rocket and the Delta Clipper Experimental, once remarked that every time NASA lost an astronaut, the agency has received a substantial budget increase as a result. At the same time, no one is fired. Max Hunter did not live long enough to see the Columbia accident, but that pattern still holds true.

By contrast, a private transportation operator that loses a customer (or even an employee) in an accident will suffer an economic loss. The company may even go out of business as a result. They do not have the same perverse incentives that NASA does. Yet, ironically, we still hear the argument that private companies can’t be trusted to exercise the same degree of care which NASA does. We hear that argument from some members of Congress – generally lawyers, who have no operational or business experience but great confidence in their own ability to regulate safety.

According to the naysayers, private enterprise will inevitably “cut corners” to save money. In the real world, however, you don’t save money by sacrificing safety. That’s a misconception – a “false economy.” Accidents and mishaps cost money. Again quoting Max Hunter, “Almost anything you do to improve reliability and safety will also reduce costs, and vice versa.”

Southwest Airlines has the lowest ticket prices in the industry, not because they have the worst maintenance program but because they have the best. If they didn’t maintain their airplanes to high standards, they would never be able to maintain the high operational tempo they are famous for. Revenues would decrease, and costs would go up. We need a Southwest Airlines for space.

NASA’s human spaceflight program is run with a high degree of professionalism, and no one believes that NASA managers would deliberately endanger the lives of astronauts – despite the perverse incentive Congress has given them to do so. If we can trust government employees to act ethically, even when it’s not in their best economic interests, we can certainly trust private companies to act ethically when their economic interests require it.

http://moonandback.com/2012/08/27/the-perverse-incentives-of-government-space-programs/

[Space Racer]

Boeing and the Fear of Competition

http://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/boeing-and-the-fear-of-competition

[Elfshadow]

So what does Mars have that we do not here?


A way of dealing with overpopulation. I would take that trip in a heart beat.

[Space Racer]

Outer space is like California. Far out, man.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2175/1

[Space Racer]

Commercial space development and transportation over the next two decades:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcZAidM0kaM

[Space Racer]

The Shifting Tides of the New Space Age

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/01/the-shifting-tides-of-the-new-space-age/