Unless it a) is not an actual increment in safety, and b) is not the only imposition the FAA makes. There's also c) the estimate is a wild underestimate of the true cost (the FAA has an incentive to underestimate cost). Given that the air carriers are complaining so much, I think the FAA is probably low balling the cost and maybe exaggerating the benefit as well.

Look at some videos of Apollo astronauts on the Moon. Their suits would weigh about twice as much on Mars, but aside from that, it's pretty much the same environment.

The timing matters sure. I'll just note that the alleged cause precedes the alleged effect. That plus the correlation implies causation.

Why? Last I checked space science wasn't actually a high priority. This is a nuance that people routinely miss in my postings about manned space exploration. Keep in mind Keenmustard emphasized the value of science. In that light, then it matters what you use to get that science and on site humans have considerable advantage over current remote controlled robots in terms of scientific output for the dollars spent.

But if your goal is merely the appearance of doing scientific research, then robotics is the better deal since the ante is much smaller. You can throw something on the surface of Mars for a few hundred million dollars right now.

And that's fundamentally why surface-based lunar research stopped for forty years. There was nothing cheap you could do on the surface of the Moon that could look impressive after the Apollo missions.

I read through your essay. You spend way too much time talking about changing peoples' attitudes rather than concrete structural changes that would matter more.

For example, we already have part of the above. It turns out people are willing to borrow lots of money for an expensive education rather than get the cheap or free education. There's little difference in outcome between societies with free education and those with expensive educations.

And energy has been plentiful in the developed world for half a century or more. Same goes for opportunity through small businesses.

And housing isn't cheap because it isn't cheap to make or situate. The technology has to come about first in order for that to happen.

I'll just note that a lot of the obstacles to progress here come from your fellow utopianists who think that interfering with the above leads to their desired utopias. Perhaps you could all agree on the ideal approach (it'll only take forever, of course) while the rest of us build a nice society, which probably will include a substantial space-side presence?

Alternately, perhaps you could find a few perfect people who believe what you think needs to be believed, and implement a prototype of your desired society. If that turns out well, and it probably won't - be warned, then there will be a strong example for getting the rest of us to adopt the necessarily beliefs in order to implement your utopia.

That's a terrible risk diversity argument. There might be thousands or even millions of human generations before the next asteroid big enough to destroy human civilization on Earth. Taking fifty years to say, first develop the alleged "Star Trek" utopia wouldn't significantly change the risk for us.

Instead, I think far more mundane risks are better to consider. For example, there are routinely large economic downturns every ten to twenty years. A larger economy due to a space-side presence would help to smooth out the effects of such recessions.Or if there's a large war or disaster, there would be more resources available to help mitigate the harm.

Obviously, they don't provide a "killer ap" for space development, but there really isn't one over the span of a few human lifetimes except the opportunity to be at places that are completely alien to us on Earth and do things that haven't ever been done before.

Red cars are more easily seen. They have the most tickets but the least accidents. Yellow is similar. Dark gray cars have the least tickets (camouflage), but the most accidents by 10 times, because other drivers can't see them either. This is why I own black sports cars. They look great and have low incidence of tickets and accidents.

I didn't "find it wasn't". The bottom line on Apollo is that it was a national prestige projection which had scientific research as a lower priority. Despite that and various other constraints, such as the short time actually spent on the Moon, they did enough research to shut down all unmanned surface exploration by the entire world for forty years.

You are conflating vastly different meanings of "as a species". The species didn't invent the lightbulb, and the species didn't adopt the light bulb. Most of humanity didn't even have a thing to do with the creation of the societies that made invention of the light bulb possible.

And your "inevitable" replacement of previous technologies by the light bulb took generations. It was in high volume use long before the majority of humanity ever used one.

Finally, we go to the painfully obvious point that only a few people had anything at all to do with the invention of the light bulb. It didn't take humanity to make a light bulb, it took a few people working in labs over the course of 50 or so years to do so.

Currently, even putting things into Earth orbit take considerable economic effort. That will change just as it has for the past few centuries. Eventually, it'll drop to the point where a group with sufficient economic resources to make it happen will do so.

All of which is completely irrelevant to both the capabilities of manned space flight and the capabilities of future groups of people to engage in manned space flight. The "incidental science", for example, happened and we can use that as an example of human endeavors in that sort of environment no matter the motives of the time.

As the questions at the end of your post, they are remarkable only for their lack of ambition. For example, you could have asked instead "Want to establish a colony on the Moon?" which is a bit more involved than just picking up a few more rocks from the Moon. Well, you'll need people for that.

Going from 3,000 K to 3K is also cooling. This is what I'm speaking of. Do you have a point to your argument? Perhaps you ought to look at actual video of rocket plumes in space. They really do cool very rapidly to below ionization temperatures.

How visible? You're chasing a straw man here. I'm not interested in perfect invisibility, I'm interested in "stealth", making a vehicle hard enough to detect that it can sneak up on a target and get within range of making a useful attack.

That is incorrect. What happens is that as the exhaust plume expands, the motion becomes correlated. Everything has random motion, but only particles moving in the same direction will stay near one another. Thus, the random motion of heat translates naturally into translation motion. That's how the temperature will drop from expansion.

Doesn't work that way. It doesn't matter how expensive the infrastructure is, it's no more valuable to me than what I'm willing to pay for it. If the power company makes it too expensive to tie to the grid, then they aren't going to have anyone tied to the grid.

Depends what the free stuff costs and what you're getting back in revenue. I don't see that Ireland came out poorly on the deal.

Only if the transaction is interstate/out of state.

Your kids are going to hate you and rebel so badly. I had a friend who monitored his son like this. The son ended up going to jail.

I doubt there's 1 in 1,000 people in the US who pay for their insurance with cash. It's close enough to cashless. Maybe we ought to look at problems instead.