Quote:
Originally Posted by PINeely
This assumes that the same innovations wouldn't have been made in the private sector. Did they develop faster because NASA happened to have the funding and specific need at the time, probably so. However, when you start talking about private industry in space particularly when you get into ventures like mining asteroids, you'd see the same developments at a much lower cost to the taxpayer. Just my .02.
When it comes to billionaires going into space I couldn't care less. Their money, they can do what they want with it. I'd love to be on one of those flights some day.
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I'd like to make the same argument about cars and efficiency and emissions. Would the American car companies reached the level of fuel efficiency and emissions reduction had the market driven the change vs. the EPA? I'm not sure it would have. It's a great question to debate.
But now the pendulum has swung the other way and the politicians think they can control the climate of the planet. The swing is fanatical to the point that some on this Thread believe a Billionaire is damaging the climate by basting off in a rocket unnecessarily consuming fuel and causing (hydrocarbon) pollution. Hydrogen and methane fueled rockets are pretty clean burning space vehicles.
The situation is IMO, private industry probably would have not created space travel without impetus from Government, because in the late 1950's and 1960's there was no profit motive to create space travel. Rockets were first developed for Government purposes as apparatus for war weapons/national security. The US Apollo Mission was a power play vs. the USSR as a FU to the Soviets satellite program (no internet thesis paper needed). Private industry did develop space travel because it was funded by the Government, but now there is profit in it because space travel (i.e. payload launches) has a commercial purpose.
And the lawyers have been kept at bay.
My 2 cents.