Space Development

[Toastmaster]

Can anybody explain to me why we (U.S.) are not increasing our travel to space? If we're running out of resources, guess what? There's a large amount of resources on the moon! Why don't we increase our space involvment? Space is mankinds only salvation from extinction from either earth calamity or sun supernova? Why don't we?

 

[Boris_Badenov]

Can anybody explain to me why we (U.S.) are not increasing our travel to space? If we're running out of resources, guess what? There's a large amount of resources on the moon! Why don't we increase our space involvment? Space is mankinds only salvation from extinction from either earth calamity or sun supernova? Why don't we?

Earth is not running out of resources as yet. Copper makes an excellent example. Some sources claim that 50% of all copper on Earth has been mined. Well, prove it? While there is certainly more copper out in the Solar System, what we have here that can be mined from original sources or reclaimed from recycling is, currently, much more cost effective than what can be mined from Selene or from an asteroid.
Now don't get me wrong. I have absolute faith that in time Mankind will move off this rock into the Solar System. It's just not going to happen very soon.

 

[nimbus]

You're looking at the amount of resources in a vacuum.. If resources available drop, economics will drive technology to higher efficiency, or to alternative materials, etc.

 

[Toastmaster]

But it just seems like we're hesitating and fearing to increase our space exploration and program. Ever since the Columbia incident, we seem to be very afraid and held back from space. I say that it was a fluke, get over it, and lets focus on making this accident not happen again and learn from it.

 

[annodomini2]

The main issues and always have been are risk and cost.

Yes launching is dangerous, take the STS for example, at launch the liquid fuel tank effectively contains 750 tonnes of high explosive.

We all know how expensive launching into space currently is and until we do it more frequently with more reusable parts. The risk will remain constant and the cost high.

The ideal target atm is a realistic SSTO or TSTO fully reusable vehicle.

With the holy grail being a ship that uses relatively little propellent to achieve the same task, or some other means to achieve orbit.

Until these issues are resolved, commercial space exploration is still very cost prohibitive.

 

[emudude]

Risk due to radiation, hard vacuum outside of any structure in space, reliability on machinery for all things necessary for life, high potential energy when orbiting the earth, risk due to collisions with space-faring objects...the list goes on. There are obviously many engineering issues to be addressed when it comes to building anything in space. The fuel is what makes launching costly, as it requires so much to do so little. When we are able to reliably store antimatter (probably positrons because it looks like we should be able to produce a significant amount of them), we will see an enormous boom in the number of humans with access to space.

Unfortunately, while antimatter is by far the most energy efficient fuel (that we know is physically possible), there is a very high price to pay if you don't treat the fuel with the utmost respect; those massive liquid fuel tanks we use now are dangerous, but the small antimatter-matter tanks which we would need to use are pretty much the same in terms of explosive power, only it is condensed into a small can-sized tank. Better hope there's no power failure on your spherical capacitor tank, because once the charge keeping the positrons in place dissipates, your life will be over before you know what happened...