Reply #15: We don't have to stay stuck [View All]

Until recently, there was no significant progress in rocketry for about 30 years. Even so, some launchers are approaching $2,000 per pound. Elon Musk is aiming to price his Falcon rockets at less than $2,000 per pound, but that's just the beginning. He can go lower with higher volume and reuse of some of the stages, if he succeeds. If he doesn't someone else will. It's time to railroad.

And that's still just scratching the surface. The fuel cost of getting into orbit is only about $50-100 per pound. The rest is all throwing away expensive hardware and paying thousands of technicians. Historically, mature transportation systems spend at least 20% of total operating expenses on fuel. Airlines spend about 40% on fuel. If space launch were a mature industry, that translates to $125-500 per pound, which shows how far we have to go. That's an order of magnitude less than the current prices. Orders of magnitude can change business cases.

Beyond that, no single answer is going to be enough to solve the energy challenge. I don't think you realize how much energy it's going to take to bring all of humanity up to a decent standard of living. We need small is beautiful, fusion energy, space-based power, and any other half reasonable idea, and all together they might not be enough. We are, for the time being, still a wealthy civilization. We shouldn't be playing stupid either/or games with each other. We should be doing at least proof-of-concept research on as many ideas as possible.

Or are the progressives arguing for no progress?