"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 10 Jan 2009 11:00:42 +0100, in a place far, far away, jacob
navia made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such
a way as to indicate that:


The technology for human space travel is just not there. Look at the
best humans can manage now: The ISS. It is a few hundred Km away, and
it is still plagued by a lot of problems, it has no closed system
it needs supplies from earth. etc.

It's quite stupid to infer that the ISS is the best humans can manage
now.

I think the above thread illustrates my comments well enough. All that
stuff, no direction. "HARD," Navia says. *Of course* it's hard, if you
don't have a direction, if you don't know where you're going. Look at
the development of the nuclear bomb, for example (not my favorite kind
of thing but it's a good illustration). At the time the work was
undertaken to develop the thing, what resources existed to do it? Whole
new technologies had to be worked out, tested, used or discarded. But
they had an objective and they got there.

Look again at the Apollo program. It was directed to a specific
objective. The technologies to do it did not exist, only small
indications that they might be developed if someone set out to do it.
We all know, they did it. (Decades ago. Then something went terribly
wrong).

Now look at space. It's not a science-fiction kind of thing that you
cannot do space small. Space is different from he to live anywhere
in space requires an industrial triad of of a lifespace, an industrial
base to build and maintain it, and an ongoing commercial/business base
to give it reason to exist and to support it. Which means, settlement
in space must be an ongoing effort of sending out one and then another
and then another settlement, one after another, until the commercial
ecologies and networks to exist there are built there. I can't see
anything novel at all in this thinking. It's just a repeat, different
in detail and environment from what we've seen here on Terra.

As for "HARD" and all that, of course it's hard. Our remote ancestors,
finding out by trial and error and thru evolution how to live on dry
land, will tell you what's HARD. Uncounted millions of them must have
died, over hundreds of centuries. But natural selection is the slow and
difficult way to accomplish something. Today, we have the industrial
capacity, enough of the knowhow, and the resources to do it. The HARD
problem seems to be to win enough money away from wars and political
corruption and economic inefficiencies to do it.

Which requires to begin with, an *objective*. Which objective in turn,
begins with some people getting away from a Terra-centered outlook, to a
space-centered outlook. What is space *for*? ?? I'm surprised how
many people just don't figure it out.

Titeotwawki -- mha [sci.space.policy 2009 Jan 10]