In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:
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.

There is no explicit law, but there are laws which have
been misinterpreted that way. The government would decide
what is "safe", and they are likely to invoke laws against
dissemination of certain types of information and materiel
(including laptops) to "unfriendly" nations. Other things
have been invoked against space uses by Americans, including
at one time preventing radio amateurs from using foreign
launches for their equipment.

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.

I am not worried about that many people being suckers.



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.

I am not at this time interested in space tourism. The
government prizes are not for anything other than suborbital
at this time, and are for snails-pace progress.

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.

Will it be approved by the government? There are restrictions
on non-profit organizations, and they are VERY strong.

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.) ;-)

No; it would provide a place for man not under their control.

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.

I know of none, other than the improvement of radio
communications and computers, which have any value
whatever. One of the late Willy Ley's articles pointed
out that the last scientific discovery used in the
German rocket development was made in 1906. Has the
development of tiles really helped space exploration
that much? Right now, the Russians are the only ones
with good capability to supply the space station. The
successor to the Shuttle is still on the drawing boards.

We need a scientific breakthrough, not engineering, and
have we had any recently in physics?

--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558