Becoming A Spacefaring Species
Destroying a unique resource — Paramount
Keith’s note: We threw away Mir to make room for ISS since “there could be only one”. Just remember: once we splash ISS its capability – and decades of blood, sweat & tears – will become a coral reef. If we’re not creative enough to build permanent things in space then we will never truly become a spacefaring species. Just sayin’
2 responses to “Becoming A Spacefaring Species”
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You are spot on about this. Hopefully if Starship pans out, we can begin building structures of substance in space. The problem up until now, has been the cost of putting payload into orbit. Structures had to be created to be as lightweight as possible, and this of course meant that they weren’t very durable. Having a launcher that can put 150-200 tons in LEO at a small fraction of the price of previous rockets, will go a long way towards improving the substantialness of what’s being sent up.
Sadly this situation will only get more and more disheartening given the way the future is heading. NASA wants to just play as another user of space infrastructure and not be the one putting up shop at the edges of the envelope. Selling of science will never get humans in mass off Earth, so what exactly will humans be doing there? No one wants to fully vet this questions. All commercial companies, since at least 2008 have attempted to drink the cool-aid that human spaceflight can be commercial and a profitable capitalistic game. And all space tourism will remain an ultra-rich persons playground for the foreseeable future. Lastly, as climate change continues to eat up societies fiscal resources, because nothing will stop humans from driving CO2 above 550 ppm by 2070, then things like human spaceflight and science will be evermore cut from budgets. Sad but nothing indicates this is wrong.