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C00002 00002	THE PROSPECTS FOR A PRIVATE SPACE PROGRAM
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THE PROSPECTS FOR A PRIVATE SPACE PROGRAM


	There is a gloomy possibility that the U.S. government will not
finance a long term manned space exploration program.  The reasons would
be that populist politics would put equalitarian social goals ahead of
it for the indefinite future or that anti-technological ideas would
prevail.

	In my opinion, space travel is very important for mankind's future
in order to provide safety for the species from nuclear war on earth
and to provide a frontier so that groups that don't like the way things are
going here can escape.  The matter has been put extremely well by Freeman
J. Dyson in (Dyson 1968) and (Dyson 1969).  In these articles he
elaborates the above arguments for emigration into space and discusses
the technology of interplanetary and interstellar travel.  His conclusions
are that interplanetary travel can become reasonably economical rather
soon and that interstellar travel is also possible though not in hman
lifetimes.  He does not propose emigration from the earth as a solution
to the population problem, and I agree with him in that.  His solution
to the interstellar problem has a capital cost equivalent to a present
U.S. GNP, so he thinks that interstellar travel will not begin until
the GNP is many times larger than it is now.  I have an alternate scheme
with a much lower capital cost that will be discussed in Appendix A, but
it also does not permit interstellar trave in times short compared to
human lifetime, and I also think it will be one or two centuries before
interstellar travel can be attempted.

	The situation is different for emigration into space.  I think it
is cheap enough to be done with non-governmental resources, i.e. I think
it can be started for a billion dollars given a relaxed schedule and
an extremely economical project management.  At present, however, the
U.S. government is doing enough so that a private project would be redundant,
but as I said above, the government may falter.

	Suppose, for example, the government falters after the Shuttle has
been built in the sense that it does not undertake any ambitious missions,
but it will make Shuttle missions available at a price.  At present the
NASA sells launches about at cost for communication satellites launched
by other governments and it has committed itself to continue in order
to get other governments to plan to use our launchers rather than develop
their own.  The purpose, of course, is to offset some of our development
costs.  Whether the government would sell launches to American private
organizations is another matter, but I think it would if the purposes
of the organizations did not fall in an area the government is presently
in the habit of regulating.

	The cost of a Shuttle launch will probably be ten to twenty million
dollars and the launch will put 100,000 pounds of payload into a low earth
orbit.

	Consider a private project to put a colony into space.

	The motivation would presumably be to escape bureaucracy here on
earth and to run the colony according to the doctrines of its sponsors.
The kind of sponsors that would have both the money and the motivation
would probably be free enterprisers trying to escape the welfare state.
It is doubtful that the welfare state has become sufficiently odious
to the very rich to induce one or more of them to put up this kind of
money, but it might happen, and there may be potential sponsors even
now.

	As Dyson has pointed out, the best place for such a colony is
not on another planet but in interplanetary space itself.  This is because
all other planets in our solar system have unfriendly environments that
are more difficult to protect against than the vacuum of space, because
large structures can be built in space more readily than on planets and
because solar energy is more readily collected in space than anywhere else
because the energy collecting structure can point at the sun all the time.
The problem of settling in space is material, and Dyson attaching the first
colonies to comets which have materials of biological use available without
having to take it out of the gravity field of a planet.