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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