The Fermi Paradox

Id seen this past week or so, a creeping new interest in lunar exploration since the "Jade Rabbit" data indicated a sizeable "gradient" of the occurrence of He3 in the lunar regolith.
There is now some eye opening reasons to resume lunr colonization nd that China is taking these "small steps" that business interests in the West are viewing as desirable.

If the next gen of fusion reactors can be shown to be sustainable, He3 will be the oil boom of 2030.

I'm glad the Chinese are taking an interest. Commercial ventures will likely be the baby steps that take us out into the solar system.

They did a whole segment on the science hour last week and the commercial and govt hookup will probably spur the powers that oversee NASA to realize that there should be a program to return to the moon and go to planets and its all about "returns on investments"

Cool.

It is very cool, isn't it? Sadly, i will likely not live to see it in full swing. I was born at the dawn of the space age, and there was a lot of terrible foot-dragging in the 1970s and -80s. The United States and Russia really haven't done much in the 90s and the last decade either, other than keep their respective, collective hands in with that do-nothing, go nowhere space station.

The science segment about space harkened back to the Kubrick film where all the space gizmos (like the station nd the shuttle were "branded". The donut ring hotel in space was a Hilton and the shuttle was operated by Pan Am (poor choice of airlines though)

In the late 1960s there was proto-rap song entitled "Whitey's on the Moon." The rapper (one assumes a black man) catalogued all the horrible conditions on earth--poverty, hunger, racism, discrimination, war, etc.--and the constant refrain was "and Whitey's on the moon." Well, the space program in the 12 years from its inception fo the moon landing cost less than the average cost of one year of the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1975. It created an unprecedented scientific and technological renaissance in the United States, and it did more than send Whitey to the moon. We got pocket calculators, implanted heart monitors and pacemakers, new materials science which gave us teflon and the newer generation of coatings, "corningware" (Dow-Corning made a mint--some from direct contracts with NASA, but most of it from the new products they were able to sell the public), and so very many other products. That meant new industries and jobs, jobs, jobs. Ironically, much of the space industry was located in the South--Texas, Alabama and Florida principally. Thanks to government EOE polices, that meant that a lot of those jobs went to black men and women. Whitey on the moon was not such a bad thing.

And it started the process which may one day expand the human race to other solar systems. The longest journey begins with a single step.

Materials science and materials engineering are probably the biggests accomplishments of the early space age. Those materials and the process of creating new ones are, i think, crucial to the ongoing exploration and exploitation of space. I think a base on the moon would be interesting, too, for experiments in manufacturing and materials science in very low gravity--the moon is about .1 G.

Agree with most of that, but CorningWare was developed by Corning, not Dow Corning and was developed for missile nosecones in the 50's, not the space program.

Your assessment is rather naïve. The space program got funded precisely because the United States wanted to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles. When Corning got the contract for the missile nosecones, it was because that was what they were intended for. After the Soviets launched Sputnik in late 1957, the pressure was on to successfully respond with a reliable launch vehicle, but the American rockets failed. It was Kennedy in 1961 who created the space program with the goal of putting men on the moon by the end of the decade. It was a brilliant strategy: it was very visible, it restored American self-confidence vis–à–vis the percieved Soviet threat, it was "sexy" when going to Congress for funding, and it benefited the military's programs as much as it did the economy and private industry.

Pyroceram was invented in 1953, the space program was funded in 1958. Not arguing the tech benefits of government investment, just saying Corning did not invent Pyroceram because of the space program and Dow Corning has never been involved in Corningware.

I accept your correction about Dow Corning, but you continue to have a naïve view of the historical context. We were trying to develop ICBMs, but the Russians beat us to the punch. When Kennedy was inaugurated, his call for putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade was brilliant. He was inaugurated with Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex figuratively ringing in the ears of the electorate. I'm certain it echoed in the halls of Congress as well. Now a Congressman could vote large expenditures without worrying that an opponent would accuse him of wanting to start a nuclear war with Russia. Furthermore, Francis Gary Powers had been shot down on May 1, 1960 while on a U2 mission over the Soviet Union. (The Soviets always did have better SAM technology than we did, and that incident demonstrated that they were continuing to develop and perfect their system.) Having the ability to put up satellites into low-earth orbit became much more important as a result of the Powers incident. Kennedy's promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade made it possible for the defense procurement industry to go forward with purely military programs under the guise of the space program.

EDIT: The shooting war in Korea had ended seven years before Kennedy was inaugurated. The American involvement in Vietnam was not one of open, large-scale operations against the NVA. There was little justification for large military expenditures at the time, but the space program proved a fig leaf for systems development.

Not so much naivete as precise definitions. What do you consider military spending as opposed to "space program" spending? If you want to say that the space race generated a lot of technical breakthroughs (easy enough to defend) are you going to include all military spending as well? How far back to you go? Does all missile and avionics research after WWII count as the space program? Are you going to say Reagan's Star Wars program is awesome because it is part of our space program (laughable) and promoted technological discovery (absolutely certain)? If you count military research in with the space program, then we don't need a space program because the military has been funding scientific research even as the space program has seen continued funding cuts. If you are making an argument for the funding of a civilian space program, conflating it with military spending guts your argument both because civilian spending is no longer required and because a lot of people who might be otherwise sympathetic are not interested in the militarization of space.

Post WWII, Corning was involved in military research in a number of areas. Corning did some space program work as well. (Corning made the windows for the space shuttles and the mirror blank for the Hubble Telescope for example.) Corningware was not developed using space program dollars as defined as dollars Congress appropriated for the "Space Program".

The point, which you either missed, or are being obtuse about, is that the space program sought to combine the military spending with something Eisenhower would not veto. I doubt that Eisenhower was fooled, and that may have spurred his military-industrial complex remarks in his last state of the union address. Kenney essentially provided Congress with a budgetary bait and switch option whereby Eisenhower's warning could be ignored while continuing to fund the military aspects of development in space behind the smoke screen of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.

I am making no arguments at all about how things should be funded today. I also made no remarks about Reagan's plans. Perhaps you failed to recall that we reached the moon in 1969. I now declare you king of the straw men. I also did not say that civilian products were developed using government money. Your arguments are a mish-mash of several different kinds of bullshit, and you're now drawing far enough away from my original remarks as to obscure what i said and what it meant.

The Universe has given us everything it is.

If it did not give us aliens, then it does not have aliens.

I suggest that you do a little research on the Redstone Arsenal, the Ordnance Guided Missile School and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. At Eisenhower's behest, Congress created NASA (only Congress has that authority), and the employees, budget and facilities of Redstone Arsenal, which included the White Sands testing range and the Jet Propulsion Lab at Cal Tech. The Jupiter missile, which played a key role in the negotiations during the Cuban missile crisis wsa developed at Redstone, and handed over to the army after NASA was formed and the Redstone facilities handed over to NASA.

Did i get a lot of the facts from Wikipedia? Of course i did, but i couldn't have done that if i hadn't already known about the Redstone Arsenal. If you truly believe that there has ever been a completely independent civilian space program which has not benefited from military developments, and from which the military had never benefited, then you truly are naïve.

I believe that the space program in the 12 years from its inception to the moon landing did not produce Corningware since the breakthrough that produced Corningware occurred 16 years before the moon landing.

I've already conceded my error there. Is nitpicking all you have left? How sad for you.

From Wikipedia:



Now you can quibble about dates and whether or not that was the space program. See, i've given you more to play with.

Thanks, but I already have the dates. As you can see from my original post, that is what I have been saying from the start.