Take a sailboat out in the South Pacific sea, get 500 miles from any port, and tell me how crowded the ocean surface (a 2D structure) feels.
The only thing that's crowded about space is the delta-V, there's plenty of room, but you really want that when relative velocities can be > 1 km/sec.
$200,000 is actually in reach of far more than 1% of the US working population... it's not an easy thing, but if it's all you ever want to do in your life, it's attainable with median income and a few decades of living frugally and wisely investing every spare penny.
This is a huge change from the late 1960s where your odds of becoming an astronaut were roughly equivalent to two lottery wins in the same year.
Yep, and many other technologies got set back like that, but mostly because there were safer alternatives.
To go from point A to point V, there aren't a lot of safe options, yet.
If the business plan for a new venture such as this didn't include unexpected "anomalies" in operations, it wasn't much of a plan at all.
Saying "I'll spend Billions until the first failure, then close up shop and go back to selling vinyl records" doesn't seem like the personality type we're talking about.
Search for "Bill Stone moon" and see what that guy's attitude is toward the future of spaceflight.
Some people still believe.
The suckers do it for their phones, why not a watch too? You don't have to impress the world for more than 16-20 hours at a stretch, you can take it off and drop it on the quick charge while you sleep.
Think about the labor pool - when you put out a want-ad for new employees, what type of people are you likely to find? 3D projection software operators with understanding of how it works, when it lies to you due to sketchy input data, etc. - or.... can you find somebody willing to work for minimum wage who can watch TV and count cracks?
Pahoa is Native town... these people don't have the kind of money that most Hawaii immigrants do, nor the financial ability to move elsewhere on their island.
The Oort cloud is supposed to be a veritable treasure trove of these things, all you have to do is tip them sunward (decrease their negligible orbital velocity just a little) and be precise enough about it to achieve Mars impact. The trick is getting a ship with any kind of delta V capability into the Oort cloud in the first place - solar power ain't gonna cut it out there, probably need a massive Thorium or Plutonium pile to make it go. Extra bonus, when you get there, the objects you are moving provide the reaction mass you need to move them (volatiles!)
I like the Dodge approach - build one level of trim, then strip out the customer facing "cool stuff" to make the base model... all the underpinnings are still there, base model probably costs about the same to make as the premium.
They already had fission power, and the fusion bomb, seemed reasonable at the time.
Question is: what would society look like with unlimited free energy? Even without greenhouse problems, can you imagine every hut in India, China and Africa powered with 500 amps of unmetered 220VAC? Stick a 50,000BTU wall unit in the side of an uninsulated hut, and you can have any temperature you want inside. Carbon arc perimeter lighting for the village, turns night into day. Melt the sand to make glass roads... it's all great fun in a first settlement colony in a science fiction novel, but when you've got a whole planet full of people doing it at one time, I think the ecology would be in worse trouble than it already is.
Advancing at 100x per year, they're only 2 years away from breakeven.
Of course, advances are rarely regular, so they could be much closer to breakeven, or further.
Yep - that fits the funding model pretty well, but from a practical standpoint, the astronauts probably need some non-flammable suits. Nothing says the suits can't be see-through, though - for, practical reasons.
He's proactively involved special forces in trouble spots before full scale deployments become necessary.
This is something every recent president has done. (And in many cases it gets us into trouble.) Do you have blind worship for this guy or something? I mean this statement alone suggests your nose is presently getting browner as we speak.
Lately I've seen a lot of flak about excessive use of drones, etc. etc. etc. So, sure, even Jimmy Carter tried to use the Seals, and it's always the CinC's fault when something goes wrong. Pulled out too early? That's why we've got ISIS. Pulled out too late? Fathered another Vietnam. Nuked 'em all? Oh dear, can't do that. Well, then, what are all the damn submarines and waste plutonium for?
In whatever year it was that Obama was elected, the USA had a choice, and we chose the less warmongering of the two parties... it's really the US voters who got that peace prize, the committee just needed a single person to award it to.
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!
