To make space travel more common there must be an economic reason to make the trip. Solve that problem, otherwise we'll always be confined to one off stunts. Once the cost of a moon mission is a substantial net gain you'll see the real space race.
If they can pursuade consumers and/or governments to cover the costs of each trip (and the initial funding costs), then they have found an economic reason.
Example being Virgin Galactic - being able to sell tickets for a profit is a pretty sound business plan. Obviously it remains to be seen (at least as far as I'm aware) how successful they will be, maybe they'll quickly realise that the number of people willing to pay is much smaller than they have predicted.
But the point is, an economic reason doesn't have to mean that going to the moon is in itself profitable, just that there is a way to make money from the trip.
...there must be an economic reason to make the trip. Solve that problem...
Isn't that backwards? If moon travel is not economically worth it, that's not a "problem", that's objective reality. And if you try to invent/force an economic "reason" where there really isn't one, you are creating a problem where there really isn't a problem. That means you are the problem!
We can't 'force' this kind of knowledge to appear, but we can concentrate on research to speed-up the discovery of such knowledge. We have no way of saying that there isn't a reason, all we can say is that we don't know it.
Let's say there was an island that was Uranium rich and hard to reach in ships. If we were in the 1800's, would it be worth the cost of building ships to get there? The answer is obviously no. These days, however, it certainly is.
We are dealing with unknown unknowns. Both in the substances the moon can provide, and their possible uses. All we can say is that with our current knowledge, we do not have an economic reason to go to the moon. Find some abundant power source, like in the movie Moon, then it will be economically viable.
Scientists can be impulsive beasts too, ignoring the facts and trying to prove their hypothesis. They can even contribute work to a hypothesis, when they don't even believe it themselves (maybe even trying to disprove it). Schrödinger and Einstein had a rather negative view of a lot of quantum mechanics, but they both made large contributions to it.
"At the very least, a flotilla of unmanned spacecraft could be headed Moonward within the next few years, with goals that range from lofty to goofy." Really the one sentence that stuck out for me, before what I thought were a disappointing list of overly optimistic ideas. While it's good to hear teams getting inspired by Google's challenge, there's plenty of money to be made by carrying payloads to orbit or further for various governments. Why do we need to dream up these grand entrepreneurial ideas before it's clear these companies can even make it into space?
Maybe I'm just disappointed after reading the title because companies I see as more invested and practical - SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, or Blue Origin, for example - weren't mentioned.
These prizes are a cost effective way to get people and companies to solve difficult problems. The idea goes back hundreds of years. Take the Longitude Prize, as an example. It was won by a clock maker.
I don't mean to argue with that. I'm all for the prize; I think both Google and these competing companies are doing great things for our space technology.
What I really want is for these companies to get inspired and make it to the moon. Claim that prize. And once they've done that, I'll be more interested in hearing about their commercialization and their "Moon Idol" idea.
I'm familiar with CMU's effort and am pretty sure they are still planning on using SpaceX's Falcon 9 to launch the robot.
The entrepreneurial ideas are necessary because going to the moon is very, very expensive. Even with the $30M prize, significant additional funds are necessary to get us there.
That's true, they're still planning to use the Falcon 9. I'm all for Google's prize and I think CMU is doing a great job. What bothers me is that significant incentives exist; SpaceX bids for plenty of contracts to deliver payloads to orbit or the space station. (http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php)
Yes, there's plenty of room to expand into space tourism, space reality TV shows, and make money from that. But take the last paragraph of this article - "People become part of moon exploration" - why so rushed? Let's get a commercial crew to space in one piece first, and talk about bringing the people in later.
Really I agree - I just think the entrepreneurial ideas have gotten away with themselves too early in the game.
The NYT is good at a lot of things, but I'm not sure if I'd put space reporting on that list. This is the same fine institution that assumed that Robert Goddard didn't understand the first thing about basic physics.
Most of those ideas are hair brained, serve only to waste dollars and I think that is the editorial board's point. So I'll just smile as history repeats itself.
It's probably precisely because SpaceX is practical. They are approaching space in a very businesslike fashion, which is very poor for generating hype & interest, which is sorely lacking right now, and very much needed if we are going to launch another "space age".
Google is putting up $30MM of their own money as a prize. This is surely not just a tax write-off or something charitable. Surely this is an investment where they are going to get more monetary value of this in the long run then they're putting up, right?
Autonomous swarms of robots which process lunar soil to build more copies of themselves. The only problem is the prototypes cost <Voice name="DrEvil">100 trillion dollars</Voice>.
