Re: ...Nasa/Griffin LYING about Public Support for Moon/Mars Missions!

Jim Davis <jimdavis2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

But I'm not making an educated guess about whether there will be
space colonies in 2050 or 2500 or ever. I doubt many people are.

I have a special interest in this, because just in the 1977-1980
period when I got to know O'Neill and interviewed him for OMNI, I was
also in regular contact with engineers and managers working on STS. By
then they all knew that the Shuttle that was coming would be a lot
less capable than that projected in 1970. A fair subset of them had
taken the next step, and understood that there hadn't been in 1970...
wasn't in 1980... and wouldn't be in the foreseeable future remotely
enough demand to make economic sense of that kind of reusable system.

So there was a huge disconnect. On the one hand, O'Neill (whom I liked
and admired), with his wonderful picture of self-sustaining
development that could take off in the 1990s, as soon as we had a few
hundred way-beyond-STS vehicles to get the lunar manufacturing and SPS
assembly operations up and running. On the other hand, hard evidence
from people at Marshall and Kennedy and Rockwell that we'd be very
lucky if we could get three flights a year per orbiter... with
predictable implications for the economics of STS, and beyond that for
the political prospects of any STS 2.0.

What's most striking today, a generation later, is that the disconnect
is *still there* -- if anything, worse, with 25 years of impatience
and frustration. I can't help wondering where we'd be if a fraction of
the energy and enthusiasm that has been devoted to space colonies had
gone into support for grittier, less thrilling, but realistically
achievable near-term steps. I love SF, I love all the visions of a
spacefaring society -- but they've been almost entirely irrelevant to
what has happened over the last generation. I used to think that space
enthusiasts' reluctance to assign realistic time scales to them was a
harmless quirk; I've come to believe that in fact it does more harm
than good.

Monte Davis
http://montedavis.livejournal.com
.