What are the advantages of building a base in Antarctica? Benefits are fairly nebulous but still real.
Building a base in lunar or a halo orbit is pretty stupid. Very few advantages over earth orbit; substantially higher costs mean we'll use it a lot less.
An earth orbit station has been very useful. However once it ages out the best replacement is probably just fitting out a Starship to orbit for many months and return.
The bases in Antarctica are important because once there is a clear economic incentive, the Antarctic Treaty will end and each country will try to grab a piece. You can let the morons build bases there and nuke them at the last second, but it's more friendly to keep a few bases and use that as a antecedent to pick your part when the negotiations starts.
In the paper, the treaty if forever. But once there is a clear economical or military reason to have a non scientific base there, the treaty will melt in no time.
Imagine that all the nuclear powers (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Israel?, Japan??, South Africa???) decide to split the Antarctica in equally sized pieces. (Perhaps replace North Korea with Germany.) What are the other countries going to do? [Hi from Argentina!] Invade the Antarctica? Launch a conventional war? Blockade Antarctica? An economical blockade of the nuclear powers? Make a very long speech in the UN so the nuclear powers get so bored that decide to return to the previous status?
I agree. That's why each government force the local mapmakers to include every piece of land they are claiming in the maps, in spite it's controlled by other country, or the legal status is not clear like a piece of the Antarctic. Also, peaceful activities in the are like a research base of a small local population are considered in the discussions. Anyway, in these discussions it's nice to use a photo of your nuclear silos as the background of your video in Zoom.
A lot of small border disputes are resolved peacefully, but it's usually about an area that nobody cares too much, or that is small enough that does not justify the cost of a war.
> 'Rules-based international order'
Yep, but for some unclear reason the first 5 countries in the list have veto power in the UN. IIRC one had nuclear weapons before, and the other 4 decided that making their own nuclear weapons were a good idea.
I don't expect this to escalate to a global thermonuclear war. Some countries will just decide to abandon the treaty, occupy whatever part they like, with some negotiation about the border. And perhaps have some conventional naval and terrestrial forces nearby in case it's needed.
> Some countries will just decide to abandon the treaty, occupy whatever part they like, with some negotiation about the border. And perhaps have some conventional naval and terrestrial forces nearby in case it's needed.
Why? They signed the treaty, and many more, in the first place.
> each government force the local mapmakers to include every piece of land they are claiming in the maps
They do? It's hard to imagine a democratic government even having that power.
> A lot of small border disputes are resolved peacefully, but it's usually about an area that nobody cares too much, or that is small enough that does not justify the cost of a war.
Every dispute between democratic countries is resolved without war.
Would there be a commercial benefit for an earth orbit station? I believe not at current prices, otherwise companies would have launched one.
As soon as you consider private investment (as opposed to essentially charity funding of pure research/exploration), then looking at analogies vs an Antarctic site or deep ocean site may be quite relevant - those are also sites that are somewhat difficult to reach and build on but easier than Moon on Mars; so for any commercial argument in the form of "mining resources" there has to be an answer why suffer the difficulties on the moon instead of (lesser) difficulties in Antarctica.
1. If humans are a future part of the picture, buried structures on the Moon will protect them against cosmic rays - much harder to do that in an orbital station.
2. Same goes for gravity. While a huge rotating station is technically possible, Moon has its 0.16G naturally everywhere. Might be better for health, is certainly better for plumbing and other sorts of equipment.
3. Water is actually pretty important. The spots on the Moon where it can be produced may turn "hot", as different countries try and claim them.
Zooming into building on the moon vs. building in orbit, one big difference is that with some bootstrapping, on the moon a number of materials can be sourced locally. Some things will still need to be shipped in, but eliminating many of the most cumbersome materials (water, aluminum, iron, and titanium among others) will cut the number of supply missions down considerably.
In contrast, everything in orbit needs to be launched from Earth, and shipping up raw resources doesn't make sense because you don't really have the space for processing and manufacturing facilities.
That said, this assumes a more robust and steadily growing presence. If all you want is a tiny antarctic style outpost a lot of that doesn't matter.
All the resource questions essentially may make building the base cheaper by sourcing some materials locally and bootstrapping, but it does not answer the main question about the economic purpose of the base. What benefit exactly does having that base give back to whoever built it; who wants to pay for the existence of that base and why?
Insofar that the base provides materials and experience for building future bases, that just postpones answering the real question - what exactly is the expected benefit from those future bases?
Because the exact answer matters a lot for any discussions on where and how to do things.
If the eventual answer is "research and exploration", then suddenly it's very important to consider exact needs of the sponsors of that research which can't be done on earth - e.g. if it's zero-g research, then a moon base doesn't help that and you need orbit, no matter what the cost difference is.
If the eventual answer is "eternal glory to the sponsor", which arguably was the goal which funded a big part of the space race, certainly more than any pure scientific goals, then the appropriate metric is some sort of "PR per dollar" ratio, and there a Moon base probably wins over orbital bases simply because orbital bases have been built but a Moon base has not.
If the eventual answer is "make humanity interplanetary", then suddenly it's very important to consider what exactly the sponsors of that social project want (because in that scenario that's a subsidized colony that exists to fulfil the desires of some Earth people/organization spending resources to allow it to exist), but in any case it would look like that an orbital base likely does not fill that need and neither does Moon except as support for a potential Mars base, so again the cost difference doesn't matter because the other options simply don't fill the need.
If the eventual answer is "because it will be commercially self-sustaining" then that would need an explanation of what resources exactly would be cheaper to mine from there (at great cost and difficulty) for the purposes of Earth (because any non-Earth uses go right back to question of why would Earth fund those uses instead, they're just a discount on that purpose) as opposed from existing resources, or ocean floor, or Antarctica, etc because with current technology (hopefully changing due to Starship et al), if there were pallets of processed gold bars sitting on a prepared landing pad on the Moon, it would not be worth the cost to fly there to pick them up, much less ship mining equipment to do anything realistic.
It's easier to do that kind of thing on the moon, though, which is the color of asphalt and has almost no atmosphere. If you can manage ISRU, you could sputter a layer of quicklime onto the regolith from a lunar rover; if you fountain the molecules out the top of the rover, you could spread them over an almost arbitrarily large part of the moon. (Maybe a different abundant white mineral with a lower boiling point would be more practical.) If your pixels were 20 km square and 10 microns thick they would only require 13000 tonnes of quicklime each.
Still insane scale of project. Let's say you can spread 10m wide line, you can fit 2000 of these in 20km square each 20km long. At reasonable 40km/h speed it would mean about 1000 hours. ~41,7 days per pixel... Not counting logistics of getting the material ready and so on. And how many pixels you need? Also 10m wide spread might be optimistic, considering moon isn't easiest thing thing to navigate at this scale.
I was suggesting that you spread a line 20km wide by blowing the "paint" molecules out the top of your rover, which makes it 2000 times faster than what you're suggesting. You can't do that on Earth because your vaporized paint immediately crashes into air when it gets out of your smokestack, so it doesn't go high enough to land 10km away, and so smoke just sort of blows around in the wind.
(I think in reality it might be more like only 100 times faster, because I don't think you can maintain 40km/h.)
Hmm, let's say 100 times faster that is 10 hours. Pushing 1300 tons an hour or 0.36 tons per second of any material through sounds somewhat extreme. Hmm, 529 kw for 1 km height. I wonder what height is actually needed for 10km wide spread. That is quite a bit of power specially from rover. Considering it's solar panels would be getting coated at same time... And I suppose dragging kilometers long cable isn't an option.
A kilometers-long cable sounds totally reasonable to me, and you can put an umbrella over the solar panels if the paint is raining at a different angle from the sunlight. There are a lot of existing machines on Earth that handle volumes like that in six times stronger gravity. Big Muskie's shovel held 295 tonnes of rock; over its 20-year lifetime it averaged about 1.5 tonnes per second.
i heard at one point Carl Sagan was approached by some element of the US government about possibly calculating what kind of nuke thet'd have to set off to be visible on earth.
I know this sounds ridiculous, but "Moonball" is really promising as a televised professional sport. Think about it: who wouldn't watch professional athletes in 1/6 gravity? That means, 4 second long, 10ft high jumps. Assuming everyone would watch it, it's a real business opportunity.
It's not terribly hard, either. There are enormous moon lava tubes[1], so it would be possible to just inflate a sporting arena in the radiation sheilded underground. Importantly, atheletes could play without a special life support suit. However, you'd need awesome shoes with good ankle support for landing those jumps. I assume Moonball will first be played by mission astronauts, to keep fit. But within 20 years, I predict televised sports will be the biggest source of moon revenue, aside from govt income.
The moon is really small, visually - half a degree in diameter. That's the size of a dime at six feet, likely means such billboards would not be noticeable enough to be worth the effort.
There's an old joke about the USSR painting the moon red and the USA then writing "Coca-Cola" on it in retaliation. So I think the original poster wasn't entirely serious.
Much cheaper to build smaller ones in closer orbits, and you are not limited to just one big one (that will be covered up by some other wag by a smaller billboard in a closer orbit).
> However, you'd need awesome shoes with good ankle support for landing those jumps.
How does that work?
The energy (force times distance) your legs can impart pushing the ground up, must match the force time distance the ground will impart on your feet while you land. So, if any of that is significantly different from the dynamics in Earth's gravity, the same effect should matter on liftoff and not only on landing.
I assume the biggest risk on landing is that you risk losing balance, is that what you need better shoes, so you're more tolerant to a bad foot position on landing?
> I assume the biggest risk on landing is that you risk losing balance, is that what you need better shoes, so you're more tolerant to a bad foot position on landing?
That's my honest guess. Also, I'm pointing out another Earth-based market opportunity, viz Nike Moonshoes.
A competitive team sport in a chamber taking advantage of the lunar gravity was a very minor part of the world building of a moon base in The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov, honestly I thought he spent too long explaining it but you may enjoy it keeping in mind he only had the science of 1972 to work with. :)
What kind of dystopia is the world going to be with climate change raging, disease and poverty wiping out hundreds of thousands, lack of access to healthcare by millions while the rich and famous play moonball on the moon?
Hmm, I think disease, poverty, and lack of access to healthcare are less serious problems now than at any previous point in human history, even though covid has killed more than 4.69 million people so far, and probably closer to 20 million. (By way of comparison, cancer and coronary artery disease kill almost 9 million people a year each. Diarrhea kills 1.3 million.) So if those are your standards, then on four of the five axes you mention—climate change, disease, poverty, healthcare access, and moonball—this would count as a utopia rather than a dystopia.
Climate change is a pretty big deal, though, and it could undo all the dramatic advancements we've made in space travel, healthcare access, and fighting disease and poverty.
USans are only 5% of the world population, and even they have better access to healthcare than 40 years ago. Most of the rest of America (everything except Colombia, Venezuela, the US, and parts of Peru and El Salvador) does have affordable healthcare.
Might be a long ways out, as this article still seems mainly about research purposes, but if there's things like the Outer Space Treaty (which to my understanding theoretically limits country-based ownership of things like the moon), then to some extent it feels like there's no "law" on the moon, so will we see company's landers sabotaging other company's landers as they compete for resources? I guess I'm picturing something like the gold rush of the mid 1800's. Maybe orbits around earth are an example of where something similar is sort of "working out" ?
The treaty means you can’t claim territory, but you can establish bases, and extract and use resources. What it means in practice is you can’t make a claim, you just go and take what you need, and once you vacate a site others can come along and occupy it. They just cant interfere with any equipment you leave in place.
If private companies don't, nobody will. Most gov'ts are just not interested. Gov'ts move slower than a herd of turtles. The best thing the gov't involvement could be would to establish ground rules, er moon rules. Rules/treaties for Antartica could be a starting point.
The article is about private companies being paid to do it by NASA. Would these particular companies be doing it if NASA wasn't paying for it? Probably not.
I think the first purely commercial missions to the Moon are likely to be tourism. These particular companies are a long way away from being able to transport people – as opposed to scientific experiments. SpaceX is much closer. Blue Origin and Dynetics also have a chance, but I doubt they will be able to compete against SpaceX in the lunar tourism market unless they can drop their costs significantly.
Are there any non-government customers for delivering 100–300 kg of cargo to the moon? That's what these landers are capable of doing. I don't think there is any commercial demand for this service right now.
The first commercial use cases for lunar transport are going to be tourism and media/entertainment–both will require actually transporting people there, along with tonnes of equipment/supplies/habitats/rovers/etc, so several orders of magnitude beyond the current capabilities of these companies. Of course, maybe they can close that gap, but there are other companies – most notably SpaceX – which are much much closer to closing that gap than these companies are.
Why would you think that once a company started that they'd never grow/improve their offerings. SpaceX started with Falcon 9, grew to Falcon Heavy, and now working on Starship.
Any company that starts with delivering 300kg of cargo but never improves capbilities won't be in business long.
The problem these companies face – they are competing against SpaceX Starship which is a complete solution capable of transporting over 100 tonnes of payload from the Earth to the lunar surface, with a likely passenger capacity of at least a dozen people (maybe even multiple dozens), expected to be available within the next five years. How will they scale from 300 kg to 100 tonnes? How long will that take them? And where will SpaceX be by the time they get there?
SpaceX came into a market dominated by lethargic legacy space firms, and disrupted it by demonstrating a capacity for speed, innovation and cost-effectiveness which those firms are still struggling to match. These new upcoming firms have to compete, not against lethargic legacy space firms, but rather against SpaceX. Some may well succeed, but most will not. And I think many of these smaller CLPS firms, if they survive, it is most likely to be through ceding the core transportation business to others and focusing instead on value-added payloads.
> If private companies don't, nobody will. Most gov'ts are just not interested. Gov'ts move slower than a herd of turtles. The best thing the gov't involvement could be would to establish ground rules, er moon rules. Rules/treaties for Antartica could be a starting point.
This trope has to die. Private industry is great for some things, terrible for others. The same goes for government.
The government landed on the moon and drove around it 50 years ago. Now they're ('we're', it's our government) flying helicopters on Mars and may be driving on a moon of Jupiter in 10 years. We have been to every planet and are currently working in interstellar space (outside the solar system). We did that, through our democratically elected government.
The greatest explorers in the history of humanity, with nobody else within an order of magnitude, are a US government agency, NASA.
Where would we be if we waited for private companies, who won't do anything where they can't turn major bucks or that would risk a bad quarter, and who have little interest in science or discovery?
> Most gov'ts are just not interested.
Many governments are very interested in landing on the moon right now.
> The government landed on the moon and drove around it 50 years ago.
Yes, this was amazing. And then gov't got bored and cut the funding. Back then, there was no private money large enough to do this without gov't funding. Now, the economy has gotten to where it is that private individuals have more worth than some nation states.
The Gemini, Mercury, Apollo missions paved the way. Now, private companies are picking up where gov't stopped. Robots are fine for first missions.
>The greatest explorers in the history of humanity, with nobody else within an order of magnitude, are a US government agency, NASA.
That's great, but there's more that could be done. Robots are great first expeditions, but what would have happened if the great explorers of old only sent drones but no people followed? There would be no NASA.
You omitted the description of what NASA is doing right now, which is far, far beyond any private company.
> economy has gotten to where it is that private individuals have more worth than some nation states
Imagine if those private individuals all pooled some money, along with 320 million other Americans. Imagine the resources! We could fund a space agency that could do a lot.
Look, I'm not trying to shit on NASA, but their status as a space company went way down after losing the ability to actually, you know, get to space. They can design all of these kick ass rovers and drones and orbital surveyors, but without private launch companies, they'd be useless stuck on the ground.
Current state of space exploration is remarkably similar to the Age of Sail. Private players act with royal consent and protection, but under obligations to the King. If they fail, they are promptly forgotten (anyone knows who Ponce de León was?); if they succeed, they roll in wealth.
Fortunately, we might be spared the moral hangover this time, as there is no one to enslave or exterminate on other celestial bodies, just rocks and maybe some bacteria.
If you (or anyone reading this) likes Andy Weir and hasn’t read Project Hail Mary, I urge you to do so. Scratches the same hard sci-fi itch The Martian and Artemis does. Also narrated by the same guy who narrates The Bobiverse series (another wonderful hard sci-fi series)
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadYou've got infinite dust, from which can be made a kind of concrete. Infinite solar power. Possibly water. What else?
What are the advantages of building a base on the moon vs building it in orbit?
Building a base in lunar or a halo orbit is pretty stupid. Very few advantages over earth orbit; substantially higher costs mean we'll use it a lot less.
An earth orbit station has been very useful. However once it ages out the best replacement is probably just fitting out a Starship to orbit for many months and return.
Why not make a new treaty? It couldn't be more clear that it's doable and effective.
Imagine that all the nuclear powers (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Israel?, Japan??, South Africa???) decide to split the Antarctica in equally sized pieces. (Perhaps replace North Korea with Germany.) What are the other countries going to do? [Hi from Argentina!] Invade the Antarctica? Launch a conventional war? Blockade Antarctica? An economical blockade of the nuclear powers? Make a very long speech in the UN so the nuclear powers get so bored that decide to return to the previous status?
A lot of small border disputes are resolved peacefully, but it's usually about an area that nobody cares too much, or that is small enough that does not justify the cost of a war.
> 'Rules-based international order'
Yep, but for some unclear reason the first 5 countries in the list have veto power in the UN. IIRC one had nuclear weapons before, and the other 4 decided that making their own nuclear weapons were a good idea.
I don't expect this to escalate to a global thermonuclear war. Some countries will just decide to abandon the treaty, occupy whatever part they like, with some negotiation about the border. And perhaps have some conventional naval and terrestrial forces nearby in case it's needed.
Why? They signed the treaty, and many more, in the first place.
> each government force the local mapmakers to include every piece of land they are claiming in the maps
They do? It's hard to imagine a democratic government even having that power.
> A lot of small border disputes are resolved peacefully, but it's usually about an area that nobody cares too much, or that is small enough that does not justify the cost of a war.
Every dispute between democratic countries is resolved without war.
As soon as you consider private investment (as opposed to essentially charity funding of pure research/exploration), then looking at analogies vs an Antarctic site or deep ocean site may be quite relevant - those are also sites that are somewhat difficult to reach and build on but easier than Moon on Mars; so for any commercial argument in the form of "mining resources" there has to be an answer why suffer the difficulties on the moon instead of (lesser) difficulties in Antarctica.
1. If humans are a future part of the picture, buried structures on the Moon will protect them against cosmic rays - much harder to do that in an orbital station.
2. Same goes for gravity. While a huge rotating station is technically possible, Moon has its 0.16G naturally everywhere. Might be better for health, is certainly better for plumbing and other sorts of equipment.
3. Water is actually pretty important. The spots on the Moon where it can be produced may turn "hot", as different countries try and claim them.
In contrast, everything in orbit needs to be launched from Earth, and shipping up raw resources doesn't make sense because you don't really have the space for processing and manufacturing facilities.
That said, this assumes a more robust and steadily growing presence. If all you want is a tiny antarctic style outpost a lot of that doesn't matter.
Insofar that the base provides materials and experience for building future bases, that just postpones answering the real question - what exactly is the expected benefit from those future bases?
Because the exact answer matters a lot for any discussions on where and how to do things.
If the eventual answer is "research and exploration", then suddenly it's very important to consider exact needs of the sponsors of that research which can't be done on earth - e.g. if it's zero-g research, then a moon base doesn't help that and you need orbit, no matter what the cost difference is.
If the eventual answer is "eternal glory to the sponsor", which arguably was the goal which funded a big part of the space race, certainly more than any pure scientific goals, then the appropriate metric is some sort of "PR per dollar" ratio, and there a Moon base probably wins over orbital bases simply because orbital bases have been built but a Moon base has not.
If the eventual answer is "make humanity interplanetary", then suddenly it's very important to consider what exactly the sponsors of that social project want (because in that scenario that's a subsidized colony that exists to fulfil the desires of some Earth people/organization spending resources to allow it to exist), but in any case it would look like that an orbital base likely does not fill that need and neither does Moon except as support for a potential Mars base, so again the cost difference doesn't matter because the other options simply don't fill the need.
If the eventual answer is "because it will be commercially self-sustaining" then that would need an explanation of what resources exactly would be cheaper to mine from there (at great cost and difficulty) for the purposes of Earth (because any non-Earth uses go right back to question of why would Earth fund those uses instead, they're just a discount on that purpose) as opposed from existing resources, or ocean floor, or Antarctica, etc because with current technology (hopefully changing due to Starship et al), if there were pallets of processed gold bars sitting on a prepared landing pad on the Moon, it would not be worth the cost to fly there to pick them up, much less ship mining equipment to do anything realistic.
Anything truly visible from Earth would be absolutely massive and we haven't done anything like that scale on Earth even yet...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernicus_(lunar_crater)#/m...
(I think in reality it might be more like only 100 times faster, because I don't think you can maintain 40km/h.)
oh! seems he was a grad student at IIT Chicago and indeed worked on Project A119! i didnt know it was early in his career, or that he'd accepted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_A119#Research
It's not terribly hard, either. There are enormous moon lava tubes[1], so it would be possible to just inflate a sporting arena in the radiation sheilded underground. Importantly, atheletes could play without a special life support suit. However, you'd need awesome shoes with good ankle support for landing those jumps. I assume Moonball will first be played by mission astronauts, to keep fit. But within 20 years, I predict televised sports will be the biggest source of moon revenue, aside from govt income.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_lava_tube
maybe 2nd after advertisers building giant billboards visible from earth
How does that work?
The energy (force times distance) your legs can impart pushing the ground up, must match the force time distance the ground will impart on your feet while you land. So, if any of that is significantly different from the dynamics in Earth's gravity, the same effect should matter on liftoff and not only on landing.
I assume the biggest risk on landing is that you risk losing balance, is that what you need better shoes, so you're more tolerant to a bad foot position on landing?
That's my honest guess. Also, I'm pointing out another Earth-based market opportunity, viz Nike Moonshoes.
Climate change is a pretty big deal, though, and it could undo all the dramatic advancements we've made in space travel, healthcare access, and fighting disease and poverty.
The rest of Americans: affordable healthcare please...
If your goal for a just world is "nobody is ever unhappy or jealous of another person" then that is a very, very high bar to clear.
I think the first purely commercial missions to the Moon are likely to be tourism. These particular companies are a long way away from being able to transport people – as opposed to scientific experiments. SpaceX is much closer. Blue Origin and Dynetics also have a chance, but I doubt they will be able to compete against SpaceX in the lunar tourism market unless they can drop their costs significantly.
All these efforts are literally being paid for by NASA.
The first commercial use cases for lunar transport are going to be tourism and media/entertainment–both will require actually transporting people there, along with tonnes of equipment/supplies/habitats/rovers/etc, so several orders of magnitude beyond the current capabilities of these companies. Of course, maybe they can close that gap, but there are other companies – most notably SpaceX – which are much much closer to closing that gap than these companies are.
Any company that starts with delivering 300kg of cargo but never improves capbilities won't be in business long.
SpaceX came into a market dominated by lethargic legacy space firms, and disrupted it by demonstrating a capacity for speed, innovation and cost-effectiveness which those firms are still struggling to match. These new upcoming firms have to compete, not against lethargic legacy space firms, but rather against SpaceX. Some may well succeed, but most will not. And I think many of these smaller CLPS firms, if they survive, it is most likely to be through ceding the core transportation business to others and focusing instead on value-added payloads.
This trope has to die. Private industry is great for some things, terrible for others. The same goes for government.
The government landed on the moon and drove around it 50 years ago. Now they're ('we're', it's our government) flying helicopters on Mars and may be driving on a moon of Jupiter in 10 years. We have been to every planet and are currently working in interstellar space (outside the solar system). We did that, through our democratically elected government.
The greatest explorers in the history of humanity, with nobody else within an order of magnitude, are a US government agency, NASA.
Where would we be if we waited for private companies, who won't do anything where they can't turn major bucks or that would risk a bad quarter, and who have little interest in science or discovery?
> Most gov'ts are just not interested.
Many governments are very interested in landing on the moon right now.
It's not a trope. It's just time has moved on.
> The government landed on the moon and drove around it 50 years ago.
Yes, this was amazing. And then gov't got bored and cut the funding. Back then, there was no private money large enough to do this without gov't funding. Now, the economy has gotten to where it is that private individuals have more worth than some nation states.
The Gemini, Mercury, Apollo missions paved the way. Now, private companies are picking up where gov't stopped. Robots are fine for first missions.
>The greatest explorers in the history of humanity, with nobody else within an order of magnitude, are a US government agency, NASA.
That's great, but there's more that could be done. Robots are great first expeditions, but what would have happened if the great explorers of old only sent drones but no people followed? There would be no NASA.
> economy has gotten to where it is that private individuals have more worth than some nation states
Imagine if those private individuals all pooled some money, along with 320 million other Americans. Imagine the resources! We could fund a space agency that could do a lot.
It did?
Current state of space exploration is remarkably similar to the Age of Sail. Private players act with royal consent and protection, but under obligations to the King. If they fail, they are promptly forgotten (anyone knows who Ponce de León was?); if they succeed, they roll in wealth.
Fortunately, we might be spared the moral hangover this time, as there is no one to enslave or exterminate on other celestial bodies, just rocks and maybe some bacteria.