Winner: I think the governments should still be funding the space research. This means satellites & robots, etc. This needs to be done because there's a public benefit to space research & it's under-invested-in through the market.
The space adventures should be left to the private companies. Someone upthread mentioned safety: modern governments need to be safe, private companies don't need to be. A company can engage in high-risk adventurism, and that's where we're going to see all the progress.
I don't think your approach could ever work, and even if it did, you'd be recreating the Wild West in space.
Publicly funded spaceflight is not meant to be an adventure for few crewmembers, it's meant to pave the way for other people, including private companies. You show them how it's done, you develop the 'infrastructure' and then you provide incentives to kick start the process, until it can support itself.
People are dissatisfied with NASA's 3% (irrc) fatality rate for human launches. Virgin Galactic, though, is shooting for about 1%. They're not promising iron-clad safety, they're promising risk. And there's a giant discount to adventurism if we're willing to accept some risk. If we tack on a reward system, countries get a huge bang-for-their-buck in space development. A gov't dollar spent is gone. A gov't dollar put into a prize pot often generates about 10x in private seed money.
No. A dollar (or euro, or ruble, or yuan) spend in the space programme gets to the private sector too - all major space agencies are closely tied to private companies which are developing the technologies they request. ESA awards money to Arianespace, Alenia or EADS/Astrium to mention just a few, NASA cooperates with Boeing and Lockheed-Martin and RKA with Energia. It is and always has been a public-private partnership. In this system, the government can provide stable funding for private companies which gives them the long-term financial security they need to be able to focus on highly specialized and very expensive space-related technologies.
In your proposed system of incentives, the companies do not get any funding in advance and during planning/development stages, which means most of them will never get the capital necessary to even start out. And if they do, many of them will go bankrupt before they accomplish anything.
And if you want to provide such money, then you'd be doing the same thing we're doing today, just without any control over how the money is spent.
I don't mean deep ocean basins. I mean wherever there are resources at the bottom of the ocean that would make sense for a colony.
Also it could be done at a tiny fraction of the cost. Please go look up the cost to establish a moon colony, if such a ridiculous calculation even exists. We're not going to have that kind of money available for a long time, and that is the next step in human space exploration, not 7 day multi-billion dollar camping trips on the moon.
Oh please. Everything of this sort is difficult and costly at first. Building an underwater colony would costs billions too. The difference is that with an underwater colony, you'd still be stuck on Earth, whereas with a working colony on the Moon, you'd gradually open the whole universe for exploration and colonization. Universe > earth oceans
Once again, this is a budget proposal. When you say "NASA doesn't have the money for an extension of the Space Shuttle program," you're not making any sense. NASA's budget changes every year, they can be given the money as part of the new budget.
No, you're not making sense. Space Shuttle programme has been winding down for years. The contracts which are being made long in advance are running out, new external fuel tanks are not being produced (why would they?), some shuttle-related activities have simply been ended because they are no longer needed, etc. Not to mention that NASA's planning doesn't count with Shuttle being operated beyond 2011 and the funds have been re-allocated.
If you now decided you want several more years of Shuttle operations, you'd need to spend billions to restart the programme.
BTW, how's throwing the 9 billion dollars that has already been spent in Constellation out the window a good idea, that's also beyond me.
Also, Obama's plan is to cancel the Constellation program, as you keep stating over and over. But...
Its ultimately Congress's decision whether or not to cancel the program. We won't know exactly what the actual plans are for months.
Suppose Obama gets it through and the Shuttle is retired - explain what space launch capacities will NASA retain post-2011. I am waiting for an answer for several posts already.
