Paul F. Dietz wrote:
Tom Cuddihy wrote:

But you have to start somewhere. ESAS is what you call a 'baseline.'
It's the fallback. If all the other budding space projects fall through
completely, if SpaceX stalls after launching one or two Falcon 1s, if
all of AirLaunch's test engines blow up and Blue Origin kills a family
of 5 on their first suborbital joy ride, at least the ESAS will still
be in progress, keeping the public interested in man's outward destiny,
keeping at least a cadre of personnel knowledgeable in the issues of
manned space launch, hopefully beyond LEO.

Your argument makes no mention of the benefits of ESAS, or the costs.
Your argument would apply no matter how high the costs, and no matter
how meager the benefits. This is obviously nonsensical. Your argument
proves too much to be valid.
That's a logical gem. I'll take 'your argument proves too much to be
valid' as a criticism every time.

I take as proof #1 that NASA is not designing ESAS as a way to keep the
commercial market out of the business:

http://www.space.com/spacenews/busin...ay_051107.html

I'm not claiming they are. What I am doubting is the worthiness of
ESAS even in the absence of putative future alt.space capabilities.
So YOUR argument basically comes down to just ****ing in the soup,
then?. Anything in the future should be assumed to be unworthy until
proven otherwise? That's 'zero sum game' bull****. You can't calculate
the future benefits vs. costs of ESAS any more than I can calculate the
future costs of NOT doing ESAS.

Zero sum ecomomics is a theory particularly loved by liberal economists
because it buttresses the Marxist notion that all profit comes at the
expense of someone else. But it's baloney, because it's flatly
contradicted by reality. The biggest hole in that perspective is that,
while it is easy to calulate the average future worth of material
assets, it is literally impossible to compute the exact nonmaterial
benefits from an action. It also completely discounts the future
economic value of human knowledge and experience.

The only solution to this problem is to act from a consistent set of
principles, and to remain flexible as the market develops. One of my
personal principles is that an exploration program that consumes .07%
of the federal yearly budget is WORTH doing. The efficacy of ESAS as a
whole should be judged, however, on the basis of its accomplishment of
short term goals, not its putative physical goal.

I do not see the main benefits of ESAS as a set of empty descent stages
at Aitken basin and a few empty orbital modules in low lunar orbit. The
main benefit is to the larger experience and knowledge base on manned
off-planet operations, and the societal knowledge base and interest
base on continued manned exploration.


Don't forget Ferdinand and Isabella sent Columbus out to the Spice
Islands by sailing west in 1492.

Don't forget Columbus is an utterly bogus analogy for space exploration.

Paul

What part of 'the point being not that the first CEV returning from
Aitken basin is going to bear a cargo of expensive spices but..' did
you ignore? Columbus was an analogy about the ability to forcast the
future, not a template for space exploration.

Tom