Herman Rubin wrote:

I am suggesting that non-profit organizations be allowed to
do this with essentially no government interference. There
are people with money to invest in the future, not in lowering
our population to serfs.



I don't think there is any law against that nowadays; if a number of
people wanted to get together and build a manned orbital rocketship at
their own expense or via public donation, I doubt the government would
have any problem with that, provided that they had a safe place to
launch it from.
I would be concerned about a fly-by-night organization doing a "The
Producers" routine in this regard though- raising a huge amount of
money, putting it into a design that they know won't work, and then
saying "We tried really hard, but..." and pocketing the majority of the
cash. But proper financial oversight should avoid that problem.



Many men were lost in exploration
projects of all types, with few problems, even if they
were government run. Any frontier has risks.







And payoffs for the risks....if you're lucky, like the search for the
Northwest Passage that never panned out.
But voyages for the sake of pure exploration that received major
government funding weren't all that numerous, and were sometimes done
for reasons of purely political prestige for the sponsoring country,
like the exploration of the poles.
Private voyages of pure exploration were pretty darn rare, and were
limited to fairly low cost operations like climbing Everest.



There are millions of people who believe that much of man's
future lies in space. They are not the poor, but they cannot
do much now without having to get the government's approval
for anything they do. Let them do it as people, not as agents
of the government, and you will see the money available.



I think the new space tourism bill that passed Congress recently
specifically was aimed at making that happen. Burt Rutan privately built
a spacecraft and flew it successfully with minimum government
interference to win the Ansari X Prize; SpaceX is trying to get their
private Falcon 1 to work properly.
If you want to run a private space program via public subscription, more
power to you. Hell, I might kick in $5 or $10 toward such an endeavor
provided that the company doing it was on the up-and-up, and I got some
sort of certificate to hang on my wall.

In fact, at this time, one could not sell stock in a space
company; the SEC would rule it as too speculative. There is
some activity going on in the "entertainment" category, as
this is recognized to be highly speculative.



By selling stock, you just moved from the realm of a non-profit
organization into one being done to make a profit.

I doubt that any of the present governments want to have people
living and working in space. They want people under their control.



You know why? Space pirates, that's why! (cut to image of grizzled
codger with one eye in pressure suit, one-eyed, peg-legged parrot, also
wearing pressure suit, floating from umbilical cord attached to his
shoulder.) ;-)

And it was done on the cheap- sometimes floating on a log over to the
nearby uninhabited island, or walking over the land bridge into North
America.



Barring a MAJOR breakthrough, this will not happen in space.


Wait around; major breakthroughs happen every few years now. You can see
the first glimmers of a understanding of gravity that may provide a
breakthrough of major import a few decades down the line even nowadays.
To give you some idea of just how unpredictable progress is, I'm going
to send you a copy I made of a illustration from the 1917 edition of
"Our Wonder World" showing what they thought space exploration would be
like in the future, and the amazing speeds that the....well, I don't
know what exactly you'd call them....transatmospheric vehicles, I'd
guess, although that doesn't seem to do them justice somehow....would be
capable of achieving as they "invaded" space.

One such very early voyage of exploration was made by the


people who would become the Australian Aborigines ...at the time the
voyage was a major success- Australia was a verdant land and the
population that settled it quickly swelled and became very populous
...but then something changed its climate (whether it was a natural
climate change or caused by the new inhabitants is still being argued)
and the population went into steep decline in a land made barren.
In this case, the exploration was a major mistake- the explorers and
their descendants would almost certainly have had a better life if they
had stayed home and not headed out to sea. The Moon makes even
Australia's outback look like Eden by comparison. On the other hand, the
explorer's who landed on Hawaii and Tahiti hit the jackpot for
themselves and their descendants.



Despite what you have been told, Hawaii was not that great.
Except for birds, fish, and coconuts, native Hawaiian biota
could not provide them with much of anything. They introduced
pigs, chickens, and taro.



Beats the hell out of the Dry Tortugas though, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, the Dry Tortugas beats the hell out of the Moon in that
you at least have air to breath on the Dry Tortugas.

If there is water on the moon, it will not be anywhere near as
bad as you think.


That is still very, very, speculative. Arecibo still hasn't spotted it,
and those hydrogen detections might just be the end result of solar wind
hitting the lunar regolith up at the poles.
Even if there is water ice up there, you need it in sufficient
quantities and concentrations to be usable for a base.

If not, the moon is still a good base; it
has the materials for construction, and for low-cost launching,
as well as a better base for optical and radio astronomy.



If you end up having to lug water and oxygen all the way from Earth,
it's going to be very difficult to sustain. You're going to need a
pretty much closed ecosystem to make it doable.

Other possibilities are living in asteroids. A colleague of
mine in astrochemistry tells me that carbonaceous chondrites
are rich in phosphorus. This means that all that is needed
is hydrogen and nitrogen, and enough nitrogen is there to get
started.


Again, very steep start-up costs.
Note that Antarctica is fairly cheap and easy to get to, probably has
great mineral wealth of some sort or another hidden under the ice, and
yet there isn't any great drive to let people privatize it and start
moving there in the millions.
Nor do we have cities sitting on the continental shelf, despite the ease
of getting there also.
Cold temperatures prevented the Russians from ever fully exploiting
Northern Siberia for its mineral wealth, and Siberia has air to breath.



But there's a major difference here; when these explorers set off on
their voyages, they never knew what to expect at the far end Was it
going to be a paradise, or was the island's volcano blow up and wipe
everybody out? The inhabitants of Thera might not have settled there if
they knew that several thousand years down the road they were probably
going to be the inspiration for the Atlantis myth.
On the other hand, we do have pretty accurate data on our two most
likely targets for manned exploration; the Moon and Mars...and not to
put too fine of a point on it, both of these places suck as far as easy
human habitation go.



Don't be so sure. If there is no water on the moon, and not
enough on Mars,


Oh, Mars is probably chock full of water ice, especially at the poles.
It's the delta-v and time required to get there that are the problems
in its case.

Pat