Shut 'em Down!

Possibly before the first few attempts at entering space, but other than that, no. You can look back towards magazines/journals, and almost everyone thought that we would be significantly further than we are today.

The lack of privatization until relatively recently has more to do with increased ease of simulation, improved tooling/mechanization/miniaturization, and most importantly being able to convince private investors that some form of return on investment in a relative near term could be possible.

That's the story of progress in everything, the pursuit of profit by investors.

Yeah, because why should anyone do anything for free? (not being sarcastic, but being truthful).

Ninja Edit: Well, there are a few things that people may have done to help society, but ended up profiting from it. But that is very rare.

There are plenty of benefits for doing things for "free" (or rather, at one's own cost). However, it isn't easy to convince significant numbers of people to do that, all at once, particularly when you are dependent on rather specialized tools/training/equipment/personnel.

About the closest I can think of in that regard would be Copenhagen Suborbitals.

Companies engage in atrocities across the globe on a daily basis. Is that not *insert evil laugh here*? Diamond mines in Africa? Our coddling of Saudi Arabia? The pillaging of South America/Central Asia for natural resources? There are real Cohaagens out there with hired guns operating their fiefdoms while extracting resources and they aren't on Mars.

What do you think drives our foreign policy? The companies that stand to gain the most from overseas operations or domination of natural resources use the gov't to prop up dummy leaders or dictators that we then spend billions to take down afterwards. The gov't gets soaked on both ends, the people fund it and the companies make a mint in the process. Our buddy Saddam Hussain was useful until he wasn't, Osama Bin Laden was our chum till he turned the guns from the Soviets to us and Saudi Arabia continues to circle the toilet bowl on human rights while being one of our closest allies.

North Korea is bad but Saudi Arabia good? Oh right, it's because Kim Jong Un doesn't have enough natural resources for us to play ball.

Remove the gov't and action will be conducted through paramilitary organizations that will conclude in a fascist state. What would these companies eventually have to fear? The people? They only need answer investors.

I'm missing some major chapter in world history where a single private company even expressed aspirations of extra-orbital flight... unless of course you mean orbital flight, and then you're talking about 60 years after it was a frontier. private enterprise is never on the cutting edge of anything, it's not profitable.

the free market is hardly in the running for the greatest tools mankind has come up with. the scientific method, mathematics, physics, agriculture, common language, domesticated animals, artificial selection... a few things come to mind that trump free market economics by orders of magnitude.

edit: to my knowledge there isn't even a rocket in existence capable of any true extra orbital flight excluding probes, and even those require using the gravity of at least the moon and often other planets to achieve the velocity needed to reach anything father than Venus or mars.

I assumed he was talking about sub-orbital flights (specifically Virgin Galatic who bought has a joint venture with the developers of SpaceShipOne). The road to the tourism flights has been developing for many years.

However, Planetary Resources is developing rockets and spaceships (robot manned) for astroid mining. They just finished crowdsource funding one of their telescopes in July but they have a long road between now and mining an astroid. There are other companies currently around trying to enter into similiar markets.

But companies have no way to:
A) quantify the risks for full on space exploration without using old technologies and not developing new (companies really don't like to do that for large projects. Look at project finance which does multi-million to billion dollar projects but only or mainly with proven technology)

B) A way to quickly get money back to investors. Venture capitalists are only going to wait so long for return on investment and selling company bonds/options is rather difficult when you can't do a proper risk evaluation

It's why companies capitalize on previous R&D (in this case) funded via tax dollars. Aerospace companies started getting into private spaceflight in the 60's with the launching of satellites and have slowly expanded into other markets since then.

Edited~

Edit2: it looks like Golden Spike Company is trying to do a manned flight to the moon no earlier than 2020. They are looking to charge $1.5 billion per "two human lunar surface flights". They are using existing technology.

From the looks of it, Planetary Resources is combining existing technology as well. Mining asteroids is barely more than a mission statement at this point as the only part of their roadmap that is currently funded or planned is a network of observational systems to find potential resources. They aren't even as ambitious as NASA's plan to stick probes at Lagrangian locations, which is still barely extra-orbital. Lagrangian satellites are actually pretty ambitious even for the agency that put men on the moon.

I didn't mean to split hairs, just pointing out that there is virtually nothing besides pre-mercury planning stages of anything remotely extra-orbital or new on the private end of space flight, manned or otherwise. Backing up your point that private industry isn't on the cutting edge for obvious reasons.

All companies that are private space ventures are using existing technology. None of them are R&D intensive.

I think it's obvious as to why the companies are doing this but for some reason not everyone acknowledges this.

Edit: SpaceX is doing R&D but the funding is coming from NASA....so..yeah, not private R&D.

I don't think people are advocating for a military or fascist state.

Just less government to rule our lives...

It sounds nice in theory, but if you instantly downsize or eliminate government controls, you have a real mess on your hands, early 90's former USSR states being a good example.

Except with the size of our government now, instantly cutting off 100 billion isn't going to hurt at all. It would just barely put a dent of our accumulated debt, but it still will be rising -.-

More than 10% of the federal budget would most definitely be missed...

Budget for 2013 is around $3.8 trillion. $100 billion is around 2.5% or 5 times more than NASA's budget.

It would really depend on what is cut how that would hurt the economy, for long or short term.

That's the thing. People think "Oh, if you are going to cut $100 billion from the national budget, it is all going to come from one place, and with my overreactive imagination, it is going to come out of the one place I support the government the most!"

While in reality, it is going to cut nearly evenly across the board.

I say nearly evenly because the party in power will keep their pork projects going, most likely even see an increase in funds per year, regardless of the need to cut spending.

Until 2016, Obamacare isn't going to lose any money (unless for some miracle, the Republicans take the Senate in 2014 so Congress can actually start legislating again) because Obama has the backing of the media and gets a free pass for being a child. But if he is really serious about cutting spending, he will only do it to the Military (and blame Bush and the Republicans for cutting spending).

are you talking about total spending or the federal budget?

The federal budget

well you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs...

global economic collapse is a good thing, it will reduce carbon emissions!!!

You wussies keep saying you want things like carbon offsets but you ain't got the BALLS to do the dirty work..

You bunch of pansies!!!

LET'S DO THE SHUTDOWN AGAIN!!!!!!

Hey, I'm willing to "destroy the economy" if it will mean that I get that 20%+ spending cut we really need. Heck, I'll even take a tax hike on everyone to lower the deficit...

cutting that much from discretionary spending is what i interpreted it as, from the total budget it's much less significant.

Rich people don't pay taxes, and they ain't ever gunna.
Look at france, all the rich people are leaving in droves.

I wonder where the next cool place to hang out is? I could make a killing inflating real estate prices....

Recap of yesterday:

We got one person spouting Ayn Rand ideas about free market capitalism and how the "government" is responsible for monopolies.

That person ignores the fact that Rand is an expatriate from Stalin's Russia where the influencing economic factor was unilateral control of the Soviet markets by a government run corporation.

Leave it to the young and impressionable to espouse ideas that originate from a primary influence of pure communism to apply hyperbolic reactionary ideas to modern American capitalism.

For those that did learn political ideologies of the early 20th century and how they originated you already know that Fascism is the hyperbolic opposite of Communism.


Then you got an other person taking the last line of a post that was completely imaginative and hypothetical and then running with like it's a real statement. Is informed it was not real statement and continues running with it while spouting partisan conjecture and dribble.

Then you got Ren as president of the US making threating phone calls to Powered Toast Man Khrushchev.

All very entertaining in their own ways.

Not once was there a mention of the Tyrell Corp. or Wyeland-Yutani Corp. with respect to hypothetical global/cosmic conglomerates that control both governments and society. Which would have been the cherry on the cake.

Anyhow have a happy Friday and a good weekend. Try not to burn the place down.

FIRE GOOD!!!!

I think they should have instated an extra tax specific to the war...

Should have re-instituted the draft, that'd have taken the sails out of that Iraq adventure once the patriotism burned off.

I agree. That was one mistake made in the Bush Administration, but hey, what are you going to do now?

..not sure if real or sarcastic...

Blame Obama, naturally.

Bush didn't care about fiscal responsibility because soaking people with a war tax would have turned public opinion against the two adventures which have proven to be extremely profitable for everyone not named the American taxpayer. Have safety and some tax cuts instead.

Sometimes I like to think to myself how much it must have cost to catch one man, Osama Bin Laden. Like a dollar value.