Maybe private interests are not the best way to compete in scientific discovery. Profit motive directly hinders discovery and safety.
I agree to an extent, but I think this is a good start. We can’t go on forever with nested redundancy. It would be good to have the ability to troubleshoot and self repair in space. This kind of problem will push us toward breakdown/fix mentality that we’ll eventually need if we expect to get off the earth and stay off. Private may not be the best for scientific discovery, but figuring out how to do it without massive government funding will eventually bring it closer to the common person.
It’s hard to have a single direction in a government with elected officials especially when the goal is more ambiguous. Look at the Space Shuttle. Many issues could stem from its design by committee ( size requirements due to the DOD, etc). By most metrics it was neither efficient nor safe. And this will always be a weakness of government agencies as competing political agendas will intervene.
Government-funded manned spaceflight programs aren’t done for pure science either. It’s a cool kids club where money is allocated for political reasons (“nation prestige” or some other bullshit). NASA didn’t land on the moon because American senators were fans of science, they were tasked with it to “beat” USSR.
Science-based space exploration should use automatic probes only, anything else is a waste of money.
That just sounds more like a culture issue than a scientific one. I agree with the other responder about fixing it without a government budget. But I also do not think we are anywhere near technologically advanced enough for availability to the public to really matter outside of maybe asteroid mining in the near future.
Manned scientific missions do matter. Especially for places with interest in human habitation. Those are few and far between for now but will matter at some point in time.
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ICBM development started decades before moon landing, same in USSR. It’s true that first space rockets were reused ICBMs, but the tech diverged after that. ICBMs use different fuel because they need to be stored for years with full fuel tanks, for quick deployment. There is no such requirement for space rockets. Space rockets are also much more powerful - you could fit dozens or even hundreds of nukes on Saturn V which is impractical - you don’t put all your eggs in a single basket. Saturn V was never intended to be used as an ICBM.
You don’t need a three stage Apollo rocket that can lift 150t to LEO for your ICBMs.
That area of launch ability was functionally complete in 1960 with Redstone and possibly a bit of showing off in the guidance phase with Gemini.
I wonder if the astronauts regret going up in the Boeing now.
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