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[Ulphus]

To paraphrase Chuck Yeager, when they can have a spacecraft take off successfully without everyone in the control room feeling the need to applaud, then I'm interested.

[Wanoah]

The alt text sums it up for me tbh:

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

I personally fear the sort of stagnation that seems to be taking place these days. Sometimes it seems like the great leaps forward of our recent past have been replaced by the tiniest of cautious baby steps moderated and all but drowned out by the clamouring of the ignorant. I fear for a world where the accountant is king, aided and abetted by craven hand-wringing risk assessors, and there's no place for a Brunel, or Concorde... or for men standing on the Moon looking back at this tiny blue pearl and reminding us that all our eggs are in this basket.

[Aria Jenneth]

I personally fear the sort of stagnation that seems to be taking place these days. Sometimes it seems like the great leaps forward of our recent past have been replaced by the tiniest of cautious baby steps moderated and all but drowned out by the clamouring of the ignorant. I fear for a world where the accountant is king, aided and abetted by craven hand-wringing risk assessors, and there's no place for a Brunel, or Concorde... or for men standing on the Moon looking back at this tiny blue pearl and reminding us that all our eggs are in this basket.

Agreed. Although, one interesting thing about the rise of the ultra-rich and the multinational corporation is that we have a sort of second tier of entities with the potential capability to get deep into space exploration. And a certain number of these people are arch-technocrats. While I don't tend to agree with some of their politics, I can't really turn up my nose at the idea of a Mars colonization mission or a space elevator, corporate or otherwise.

Sooner or later, the more malign aspects of corporate control will be recognized (re-recognized?), but, even so, private initiative may yet get us out of the bottom of this gravity well.

Failing that, there's always the proud, ambitious, resource-hungry, overpopulated, environmental-degradation-conscious-because-gee-it's-right-next-door Chinese. Assuming they don't decide to celebrate their ascendant power with a war, instead, that is.

I grimace every time I hear about more power accruing to the Chinese military-- or about its increasingly aggressive, confrontational, nationalist culture, which it seems to be encouraging in the general population, as well.

[orange]

The "governance" of early (later 21st century) off-Earth settlements will be interesting to say the least given the 1960s Outer Space Treaty, time-to-travel, and threat-to-life that goes with living on a hostile-to-life world.

It will be the first time in almost 200 years that a human settlement is months away from its "authoritative" government.  Imagine the government/corporation appoints a person as the settlements "governor," only to have the settlement's population (company employees!) decide that he is an asshat 1 month in and depose him!

What happens then?  It isn't like the employees can be arrested or even fired, unless they return to Earth or someone pays to have them forcible returned.

It brings up lots of interesting challenges to be considered.

[Casiella]

Mhmm. I don't hold to all of the ideas in it, necessarily, but The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress was a very influential book for me as a young man.