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Question About media covarage!
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 |
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