Space Travel
Jul. 23rd, 2009 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chris_gerribSo, I frequently bash Rand Simberg's politics. However, when he talks about space travel, the guy makes a lot of sense.
This article at The New Atlantis is an example. It's a lengthy but very on-point article suggesting how the US space program went astray and how it should be fixed.
Rand's arguments are:
1) "The United States should become a spacefaring nation, and the leader of a spacefaring civilization."
2) To do that, "it isn’t NASA’s job to put humans on Mars; it’s NASA’s job to make it possible for the National Geographic Society, or an offshoot of the Latter-Day Saints, or an adventure tourism company, to put humans on Mars."
He also makes the great and often-forgotten point that marginal costs determine overall costs:
"For example, a large restaurant with a full staff (a high fixed cost) but only a couple of diners would have to charge thousands of dollars each for a meal. But the marginal cost of feeding the next diner is only the cost of the food, and as the restaurant fills, the average cost can drop to where the price of a meal becomes affordable. (In this analogy, our current spaceflight practices are akin to burning down all the restaurant’s furniture after every meal and buying it all anew before the next one; marginal costs are quite high in that scenario.)"
All I can say is "amen."
This article at The New Atlantis is an example. It's a lengthy but very on-point article suggesting how the US space program went astray and how it should be fixed.
Rand's arguments are:
1) "The United States should become a spacefaring nation, and the leader of a spacefaring civilization."
2) To do that, "it isn’t NASA’s job to put humans on Mars; it’s NASA’s job to make it possible for the National Geographic Society, or an offshoot of the Latter-Day Saints, or an adventure tourism company, to put humans on Mars."
He also makes the great and often-forgotten point that marginal costs determine overall costs:
"For example, a large restaurant with a full staff (a high fixed cost) but only a couple of diners would have to charge thousands of dollars each for a meal. But the marginal cost of feeding the next diner is only the cost of the food, and as the restaurant fills, the average cost can drop to where the price of a meal becomes affordable. (In this analogy, our current spaceflight practices are akin to burning down all the restaurant’s furniture after every meal and buying it all anew before the next one; marginal costs are quite high in that scenario.)"
All I can say is "amen."
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-24 01:30 am (UTC)Particularly if they celebrate High Mass. In Latin of course.