Cheap Astronomy - Dear CA Ep. 125: Pragmatism

Those tricky next steps.


Dear Cheap Astronomy – Could war get us into space?


There’s been a long-running dialogue here at Cheap Astronomy
about what economic drivers


might transform us into a proper spacefaring species with Moon
bases, Mars bases and all that.


And well, its been hard to think what economic drivers really
might work. Space is hard and it’s


also darned expensive. Tourism could be a driver, after all there
has been a bit of millionaire


tourism happening, mostly just flights above the atmosphere.


 


Dear Cheap Astronomy – What is new space?


You may have heard people talk about – old space and new space.
Old space is like NASA


pouring billions into the slow plodding development of huge
one-off projects like the Space


Launch System and the James Webb Space Telescope where they
operate with extreme risk


aversion, absolutely determined that absolutely nothing must go
wrong. New space is like


Space X, where they quickly launch prototypes and when those
prototypes blow up they have


the data to explain why so the next ones don’t have that flaw and
if they blow up then they get


rid of those flaws as well, and so on.


 


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