When I was a kid (back in the 60's), there was optimism that not only would there be a moonbase by the end of the century, but a colony on Mars and a permament space station in orbit.
And there is also the issue of flying cars...
When I was a new engineer fresh out of college in 1985, I testified before a commission on America's future in space. I emphasized that the Shuttle was great, but it had no place to "go to". I urged that we build a Space Station, and testified at length how its best use was as a transportation node in space, allowing flights to depart from near earth orbit for any place in the Solar System (and eventually the galaxy).
At the time, that was the vision for the space station: research, repair of spacecraft on-orbit, fuel depot...all the things.
The space station went through many iterations, losing capability each time it was revised. We got to the "dual keel" iteration, and an astronaut raised the valid concern that dual-keel would take too many spacewalks to assemble.
The "solution" was yet another iteration that deleted the last vestige of operational logistics from the design...a sort of "hangar" in which spacecraft could be stored pending refurbishment. Aside from reducing overall complexity, I don't know what that had to do with reducing spacewalks needed for assembly.
Every version of ISS after that was a pure research facility...a laboratory in space, and nothing more. So it is to this day and for the foreseeable future. Full disclosure: I was an ISS flight controller (PLUTO position) from about 2003 to 2010. At one time in my career before that, I designed ISS assembly missions.
About the time the announcement was made that Shuttle would be retired in a few years, an agency "vision" for ISS in a world without Shuttle was released. Specifically, in one sentence, it was to support the research needed for human exploration of the solar system.
Now, what can you think of that is the most limiting factor, the one frailty of the human body that keeps us from hopping in a craft bound for Mars tomorrow? Wouldn't it be the propensity for the human body to deteriorate in the absence of gravity over time? The longest stay in space in history was 14.5 months on Mir in 1994. Nobody has stayed on ISS a full year (although some have come close). With current technology, a Mars mission would take about 18 months.
The solution to this was well known in the 1950s, before any human had ever ventured into space: artificial gravity through the use of centripetal acceleration. Chelsey Bonestall was drawing covers for Collier's Magazine in 1952 showing a spinning Station. 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey had rotating structures. Since that announcement was made, do you think there have been any plans for a centrifuge aboard ISS, even a little one for small animals?
Nope.
So I view this all like the happy early days of ISS, when we would have a transportation node in low earth orbit that would allow us to repair, refuel, ride up on a Shuttle and then transfer to an interplanetary explorer, etc. What is proposed now is nothing less than the exact same thing in lunar orbit. They use pretty words that will be used to pry pretty dollars from the hands of taxpayers.
I will be very pleasantly surprised if any of the proposed logistics capabilities materialize. I'm not holding my breath.
I do not know. Obviously, if that much Germanium suddenly appeared on the face of the earth the price would drop an extreme amount. But what would the costs be of everything needed to mine an asteroid? Would said costs increase or decrease the end cost of the Germanium?
be of thousands/tens of thousands/hundreds of thousands of such drops be?
) and the crews were considered expendable (if necessary). The effects of long term living in space were not really taken into account as they really had no idea of what they were.
