Were you willing to guarantee your projects were defect free? The FAA is an excessively risk adverse organization. In some ways this is good, it's safer to fly from LA to London than it is to drive 10 miles from your house to the airport, even though you're in a metal tube traveling at nearly the speed of sound (so fast that human reaction times are effectively a moot point, once you see an obstacle in your way you are already dead) through all sorts of crazy weather and other challenges. The downside of this is that it is almost impossible to get them to replace a working system, even if the replacement is objectively better than the old one. One problem the FAA runs into on a regular basis is that tertiary technologies (like their network and comms systems) are constantly going obsolete and most of the vendors disappear and the only ones that remain jack their prices up into the stratosphere because they know they have a captive market.

Nevertheless, it is not part of Libertarian ideology.

Personally, I think there is probably some middle ground. It is hard to find someone who thinks that we haven't gone too far, with corporations now even getting religious freedom and free speech. We could probably maintain some kind of tort protection for passive investors while at the same time removing limited liability for anyone active in running the business. It still wouldn't quite fit into libertarian ideals, but it would be a lot closer.

Thanks!

Brian Webb isn't listing this on his Vandenberg AFB Launch Schedule yet. I think he's going to wait until someone official tells him a date.

With some optimism that might only be thousands of years rather than hundreds of Millions.

But it's only necessary for Earth to be uninhabitable for a short time to end the Human race. And that can happen due to man or nature, today. If people aren't somewhere else during that process, that's the end.

Something like double liability might be a nice compromise that still allows passive investment without putting your personal property at stake. I think active participants in the business (employees, board members, executives, activist investors, etc.) should not have any kind of liability protection.

That was not a stab at implementing liberal ideals. Libertarians do not endorse limited liability as a concept - it breaks liberalism. It would not surprise a Libertarian to find out that a government invention (limited liability) ran amok, leading to the need for even more government inventions (anti-trust law).

No "-ism" is implemented completely anywhere. Ideology can only be a goal or guiding principle - reality will always prevent a full implementation.

Incidentally, the limited liability corporation runs counter to Libertarian ideals, so don't lump the corporate mess we are in along with the libertarians. Limiting liability completely screws up the personal property based incentive system.

The problem with "sticking true" in this case is that other people have had their hands in the system and liberalizing as single, small part of it will not do anything good. Among the anti-Libertarian features of the current ISP landscape: limited liability corporations, exclusive agreements with local governments, tons of existing regulation, etc. It may very well be that we would all be better off with the libertarian ideal of a free and open market where individual liability and property concerns keep everything self-regulated... but that is not even close to what we have. Trying to shoehorn a single scrap of Libertarian thinking on to a completely non-Libertarian system is a sign of poor critical thinking skills, IMHO.

(I consider Libertarian to be my base ideology, but I deviate from it wildly to try and stay pragmatic.)

Actually I was thinking nuclear power rather than magic.

I agree with the other commenter, there will be lots of people living in space if they can only get there. Mars is a good start.

Obviously I am missing something, then. Please fill me in on your better information sources. Email to bruce at perens dot com if you don't want to put them on Slashdot.

It's time to start planning another trip to Lompoc. The Motel 6 was sort of yukky last time. Maybe I'll try something else. There was an official visitor observation site that I found and got into last time, but that was for the Delta, and it was on Pad 4 if I remember correctly. This one is all the way on the other side of the base on Pad 7 or 8, isn't it? There are some farm roads that might be good observation sites if they are open.

I am not confident that the world will remain a hospitable place for life until we are ready by your standard.

Getting the resources and people there is very close to being within our technical capability. The task ourselves, if we perform it, will take care of the remaining gaps.

Creating a self-sustaining colony outside of the Earth's environment is going to need a lot of work, but it is not work that can ever be achieved on this earth. We have to actually put people in space to achieve this. Our best experience so far is with submarines. Academic research has so far yielded only farcial frauds like Biosphere II.

Technically, making transceivers work when there are 30 of them in vehicles next to each other can get difficult. People wonder why you can buy a dual-band walkie talkie for $60 but the one in the police car costs much more. If it's well engineered, the one in the police car has some RF plumbing that isn't in the $60 walkie talkie.

You are exactly right. One thing though, it's "Ham" or even "ham". It's not an acronym. Thanks!

You do know that science isn't the only reason to go to space, don't you?

There is the issue of continuing the existence of the Human race, and whatever other life we choose to bring with us.

Planets and suns aren't sure things, you know. We sort of take ours for granted, but there is the evidence of the sky around us. And the ominous silence of a galaxy that should be filled with intelligent life...

Is anyone still taking June 7 seriously? And where is it supposed to happen now? Cape Caneveral instead of Vandenberg? I would certiainly drive down if they held it at Vandenberg. I was there for the first try on DISCOVR.

The first test was supposed to come off much earlier than May. There are both commercial launches and government ones in the way, and there was the Helium pressurization issue which put some things off schedule.