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[Senn Typhos]

I sincerely doubt that commercial space travel will come into being at any point in the near future.

It already takes 5 hours for an American flight hub to decide whether or not and individual might be a terrorist, their industries are still failing, and let alone the discomforts of your average atmospheric commercial flight, imagine trying to make a comfortable flight through space. Not to mention the potential environmental impacts that will probably be bitched about for decades.

Hence Europe 

Oh, whatevah, whatevaaaah. >:/

[Mithfindel]

Europe is not a nation. Some Americans seem to confuse the EU even for some kind of United States of Europe, it is not. Right now the big question is what to do with the banks that have destroyed the economy and want the taxpayers to pay for their failures. The consensus is that it's still cheaper to bail them out rather than let the trash banks collapse a few countries.

Admitted, the university where I work doesn't have a aerospace engineering department, so I am not very well aware of what's happening there. HUT (or Aalto University's faculty of technology, as it is now I guess) did have a project to build their own satellite, though. I'd assume it's still a lot cheaper to buy a commercial carrier to orbit and/or buy a suitable design than to start from scratch. One of the next big things scientifically, however, is trying to get the experimental fusion reactor going. (Welding lab in our university is involved in developing tech that may be used to build the thing.)

[Esna Pitoojee]

Watched the liftoff today... damn, that is one beautiful thing to see. Hopefully some of these next-gen spaceplanes come into maturity soon.

[Ken]

Europe is not a nation. Some Americans seem to confuse the EU even for some kind of United States of Europe, it is not. Right now the big question is what to do with the banks that have destroyed the economy and want the taxpayers to pay for their failures. The consensus is that it's still cheaper to bail them out rather than let the trash banks collapse a few countries.

Talking about space here, not Greece.

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/index.html

[orange]

Mithfindel, I recognize and understand that Europe (the European Union) is not a state.  I am not confusing the EU for a modern United States of Europe.  There are however areas where there is a European consortium doing things paid for by various European national governments.  ESA is an example of this, CERN would be another.  In the US, there are national level organizations that do similar kinds of work (budgets may vary).

We could list out every member of ESA (or CERN), but it is simpler to say Europe.

[Mizhara]

This made me wonder when it was that we lost the romanticized view of Space Exploration.
Then I realized... I didn't lose it. I just forgot it. I think I'll go outside tonight and watch the stars for a while.

[orange]

Thanks for the video Miz.

[Ken]

<3 Sagan

[Desiderya]

Thank you for the video.

[Raze Valadeus]

Thank you for the video, indeed.

[Mebrithiel]

This made me wonder when it was that we lost the romanticized view of Space Exploration.

Was I the only person who cried when seeing the disparity between the worlds military and space funding? 

[orange]

Was I the only person who cried when seeing the disparity between the worlds military and space funding? 

A little American centrism here, but it illustrates your point.  It also is useful because the US spends the most money of any country on its military and civil space efforts (the politics of this is a different topic).

The US defense budget makes up ~19% of the US National Budget (2010).  This includes some space related activities, some of them very much needed (debris tracking and notification for example), but that is also besides the point.  NASA (civil space) gets ~0.5% of the US National Budget (2010).

In the United States, defense spending is nearly 40x that of civil space spending.

The question becomes what is the purpose of a space program?  And what are people, a nation, the world, willing to spend to achieve those goals?

[Lyn Farel]

Thanks for the vid.

Mithfindel, I recognize and understand that Europe (the European Union) is not a state.  I am not confusing the EU for a modern United States of Europe.  There are however areas where there is a European consortium doing things paid for by various European national governments.  ESA is an example of this, CERN would be another.  In the US, there are national level organizations that do similar kinds of work (budgets may vary).

This is not that far now. EU has its own legislative assembly, its own president, and has a lot more impact on laws in every member country that we could usually think. All the laws concerning customs, eco politics, money, etc, are at various degrees directly discussed and decided by the EU and not the member states.

[Archbishop]

A little American centrism here, but it illustrates your point.  It also is useful because the US spends the most money of any country on its military and civil space efforts (the politics of this is a different topic).

The US defense budget makes up ~19% of the US National Budget (2010).  This includes some space related activities, some of them very much needed (debris tracking and notification for example), but that is also besides the point.  NASA (civil space) gets ~0.5% of the US National Budget (2010).

In the United States, defense spending is nearly 40x that of civil space spending.

The question becomes what is the purpose of a space program?  And what are people, a nation, the world, willing to spend to achieve those goals?

I view the space program like I do drug research.  Working in a hospital I see the advances in medical technology and drugs and I also see the costs.  With drug research they spend $$$ hoping to improve life down the road, sometimes with failure, sometimes with success.  Space travel is like that in a way.  It's a bet on the future nothing more.  I know they use the I.S.S. to conduct experiments in a way much like a drug lab or a technology company.  So how much are we willing to spend on the chance to make the future better.

Space is an easy target for budget cutters because gains are way way way down the road.  Not years but decades.  But look at what was accomplished in such a short time in the 60's & 70's.  With that type of focus and the spending we could get to Mars.  But America isn't willing to spend the money on that right now so it won't happen.  It's a real shame because something like the Apollo missions created an entire generation of kids who wanted to be astronauts and scientists.  Now we don't have that anymore.  Likewise the national pride that comes from something like the Apollo missions doesn't come from anything else.  It's even more then national pride it's world pride.  I've talked to people overseas in their late 40's like me who can remember watching the landings as a kid and they'll agree it was "special" regardless of where in the world they were.  To loose that is a horrible failure and misjudgement in my opinion.

Archie 

[Horatius Caul]

NASA budget in 1966* - $32,106m
NASA budget in 1969* - $21,376m
NASA budget in 1970* - $18,768m
NASA budget in 1975* - $11,131m
NASA budget in 2011 - $19,450m

*adjusted for inflation to 2007 dollar value

NASA has actually had some very generous budgets since the 80's, after the lean years in the 70's. The space shuttle program was conceived in the 70's, when the US government was saying "Okay, now what?" and the spacey-wacey fellas had to come up with an answer. They managed to get it off the ground (literally) in the early 80's, apparently suitably impressing Congress enough to wrangle some cash out of it.

However, the space shuttle has really been a massive money-sink. It was just the other week when I read someone arguing that the scrapping of the space shuttle is the best thing that could have happened to get NASA off its ass. Their budget is ample, but they haven't been able to accomplish much because they've had this fleet of big whales on the launchpads and these costly missions made up just so the shuttle would have something to do. I'm inclined to agree.

The space shuttle was designed to be reusable, but the constant complications and expenses of maintaining a shuttle fit for re-entry makes the whole thing a big funeral pyre for money. One shuttle mission costs just as much as a whole modern rocket like the Taurus, for example (perhaps a rocket that's less of a complete failure would have been a better example, but it's a bit tricky to dig up launch costs for these things). And that's just taking the single flight into account. If you take the cost of the entire shuttle program and divide it by the number of missions, it comes out to one point five billion dollars per launch.

The shuttle was a milestone of scientific and engineering progress, but it was a dead end. Let NASA and the rest go back to the drawing board and come up with a proper, intelligent, modern solution.