Is this possible?

Could it be that NASA funds are being cut, NOT to help other budgets, but to ENCOURAGE more PRIVATE sector investment. Why not? This way, space CAN be monetized, as science fiction feared, and corporations will keep exclusive rights to all tech, and discoveries. Could this be the beginning of Space: Above and Beyond?
 
Could it be that NASA funds are being cut, NOT to help other budgets, but to ENCOURAGE more PRIVATE sector investment. Why not? This way, space CAN be monetized, as science fiction feared, and corporations will keep exclusive rights to all tech, and discoveries. Could this be the beginning of Space: Above and Beyond?
Cut not eliminate. The private sector badly needs other encouragements, other forms of incentivizing, to operate in and open the space frontier to the rest of us it is not getting from governments. Just the opposite is what is what is in place, thus opening space gets strangled by the process of government cutting financial support, and at same time virtually punishing private risk taking by not incentivizing it beyond anything that doesn't have anything to do with mankind's, and life's, breakout and expansion to the space frontier.

Such efforts as 'Voyager Station' (and any other '2001: A Space Odyssey' gravitied station type commercial effort) needs to be untaxed in any profit it brings in for about fifty years beyond its build and getting started in Earth orbit or anywhere at all in space. Untaxed just as long as the effort proves for real. All actual direct and indirect contributing to such effort, proving, needs to be untaxed and relatively loose in any regulation of it. The risks are going to be as great, the losses as great, as any frontier risks and losses, in the history of mankind, and governments have to largely keep away from regulating that frontier effort (of getting mankind out there) like it regulates just about everything on Earth now.

Anti-trust type laws need to be put aside and only loosely monitored by governments. East India and West Indian type Companies (non-governmental subgovernments), with monopolies in certain building and accesses out there, but open virtually wide open to investment and any return on investment, need to be created.

Mankind's breakout and expansion to the space frontier needs to be energized, needs to be encouraged, needs to be incentivized, to the maximum extent possible. Has to be energized, encouraged and incentivized beyond anything else at home on Earth. But all that has to be focused on Mankind's breakout and expansion to the space frontier. It can't be a fraud, a caricatured nothing of effort, perpetrated by either the public sector or the private sector, or both at once. That -- an expensive fraud like no other perpetrated -- is what we've had for the past forty years and more.
 
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But the taxpayer funding IS the principle commercial opportunity, either as direct funding or as government contracts. NASA has always contracted out the development and production of rockets and most hardware. Now it contracts out the launch services to companies they provided taxpayer funding to, to develop the space capabilities it wanted.

There is real commercial opportunity in launching satellites for communications including satellite internet and Earth sensing but these are entirely based on Earth customers and Earth resources; no space based resources are used. None are viable to be used. The nearest physical commodities are on the moon and there are none that are even close to commercially viable; much cheaper to get them on Earth.

Without a viable commercial foundation - actual profitability from actual space resources - any exploration and exploitation we do in space will continue to need to be paid for by taxation. Failure to be income positive will prevent any breakout and expansion into space.
 
All we have to know is how breakout works, and why breakout and expansion to the space frontier -- thus into mass and energy: mass and energy transformed to life -- [is] energy, thus [is] money, to know it is an imperative.

Michio Kaku wrote of mankind's increase in numbers one-million-fold over the last two million years and how that wasn't the problem. The problem is similar to the child in the womb in the ninth month of its life and its future in the womb versus birth out into a new frontier. It has space age limbs, space age organs, space age energies, and space age needs and wants, without having any real space (thus real time), without having any real space age! It cannot remain without birth, a plant cannot remain without seeding, and so on. The increase in numbers one-million-fold from two million years ago means nothing. Mankind's increases since then in energies, infrastructure, complexity and reaches, two-million-fold average per every man, woman, and child living now (one-million-fold of that two-million-fold coming in the last 78 years) means it all.

Rome's closed systemic implosion once it reached its limits of European, Asian, and African expansion (limits to growth) in the ancient world; Communism's closed systemic implosion behind the "Iron Curtain," and a child's implosion in the womb after a due time of starting birthing out, is nothing to what is coming for mankind on Earth if it can't, or won't, break out in expansion to the masses, the energies, the space, and the time, of the High Frontier of the Solar System.

Stephen Hawking saw the physic and warned about it, Will Durant, the chronicler of Civilization and the lessons of history, saw it in a different context, among many others in many different fields who've seen, realized, and warned that mankind is in danger right here on Earth if cannot or will not breakout in expansion to that space frontier. Michio Kaku didn't put it exactly so, but the meaning of what he did tell us was that what we do face is a growing entropy, a growing degradation and deformation, in the closed bubble of [a distance shrunken] Earth. We can do nothing about the inexorable increase in entropy over all mankind's world here on Earth without breakout and expansion now; due to our space age increases in energies, infrastructure, complexity and reaches, two-million-fold average per every man, woman, and child now living. It will be suicide not to break out. Not only mankind's suicide, but because of what mankind is, possibly all life on Earth's suicide. Worse may be, if a pyramidical life on Earth produced us at its apex for exactly the reason of being life's carrier, life's Ark so to speak, in life's breakout from Earth to that outland Hight Frontier as a natural measure against life's inevitable mass extinction in one single mudhole . , , on one single rock . . . in one single world. If we can't or won't do it, if there is time, we could then be made extinct, or our civilization made extinct, and be replaced with another species, or species of civilization, less caring of Earth by itself and more single-mindedly ruthless enough to do the job of breakout. And how it might go about doing extinction (so to be replaced) might not be very caring or very pretty.
 
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One of the more human, or more apex species, ways physics, history, always repeats itself:

"Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
And weak men create hard times."
-- G. Michael Hopf
 

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