The future of space exploration.

There was only one reason, why humanity reached the outer space in the 60s: the Cold War or more precisely the nuclear payload, that if delivered is the ultimate weapon of our times. Delivered? German failed attempts to bomb London with fast and unstoppable rockets pointed world in the direction of intercontinental missiles, and what is the better test field, than space rockets. It doesn't create diplomatic or domestic tensions, yet the difference is none, since you can always just replace people with nuclear payload. Of course some will argue, that even if it was important, the curiosity of people was as important. At those times only two governments in the world was able to attract enough finances and people required to accomplish such a achievement.

Times has changed and now governments are slowly backing up from space programs, with one exception of China, which now tries to catch up. In spite of this regress, we have more space optimists, than ever before. A lot of people think, that nowadays a space exploration will be picked up by private sector. Here you have an interview by Economist with lawyer of Bigelow Aerospace. 

The first space flight of Space Ship One was the biggest accomplishment by private sector so far. It wasn't able to build enough speed to remain on orbit, nevertheless it ended an era of government monopoly on space flights. All thanks to one amazing constructor Burt Rutan.

When you listen Burt talking, you really do grow optimistic about the whole private space flights. Why shouldn't we be? If government can, a private sector surely is able too. Of course it is, but there is only one problem, private sector not always would want to. Private sector operates similarly to evolution: it can try things, but if it won't prove to be profitable, it will be abandoned. The only way the private sector will continue humanity chase after space flights, if it would prove to be profitable.

What are the ways, a space flight can be profitable. Let's review some of ideas.

There are plenty of people out there, who would pay enormous money to see the earth from space. If the ticket would cost $100k, than a company offering space flights, would have a constant flow of customers. To get near this amount the spacecraft needs to be able to repeat flights over many years with constant, high level safety, but it doesn't have to remain on the orbit. Burt Rutan's idea seems to do the trick, s if he will tune up some details, we may see such a offers in US' travel agencies. Would it drive space flights further? I seriously doubt it. Would people want to go to the Moon, Mars or Jupiter's moons? At the price $100k certainly, but it doesn't seem achievable in near or much further future. Even to the Moon? To the Moon, who knows, but is the Moon such an attraction? The other planets will be out of reach for tourists for a very long time. Why? There is barely anything we can do about travel time. There is a risk of space radiation, and preventing that is incredibly costly. Not too mention, that cost of obtaining orbit twice and changing a solar orbit is just cosmic. Yet if the tourism will drive the costs of getting to an orbit, that would be a huge step.

The next step might be a need for raw resources. The radioactive elements are probably the first ones to end up on Earth, yet they might still be needed in 100 years or so, since work on Fission reactor is progressing very slow. On the other hand a fission reactor may give it a boost anyway. If you would build an automatic mine base on the Moon, with an automatic "fuel station", than the costs of transporting many raw materials would be most probably low enough, thanks to low gravity of our sole natural satellite. Gravity of nearest planets and travel time seems to be to much obstacle for a private sector. 

What about energy? Under the condition, that the only workable fission reactor requires a great gravitational force. Meaning fission reaction, that produces more energy than requires to be sustained, happens only in stars. Obviously it would be a waste if we wouldn't harvest it. One effective way to do it, is to put a solar panels in space. Just putting panels in space is not harder than visiting the Moon, but since it requires more travels from the surface of the Earth to the near and far orbits, a space ladder might be absolutely necessary for it to be profitable. There is no way any single company would afford the costs of building space ladder, but the obvious advantages of such construction is so huge, that governments can step in, if only a political and economic support for such solution will be enough. At this time I don't see how solar panels in space would be more profitable than any other energy source, not to mention, that I am strongly convinced, that fission reactor is possible. Even if it did happen, it won't help the above. 

The private sector has a quite space to fill, but can he achieve more than that? By themselves this is as much they can hope for. However there is another foreseeable milestone, that the governments might be forced to accomplish. Colonizing Mart and/or Venus. A fear of going extinct my get us to these two planets. Both of these planets have features, that make them ideal targets. The most important is possibility of terraforming. Extremely costly? Yes, but who cares? We have to do it some time in the future. When that happens, the private sector will have another huge area to thrive. Interplanetary crafts, space ports, space safety. And to what will our governments be forced to after? Space elevators, space vacuum cleaners? How much we have to fear to create enough impact on governments? A lot. It may take centuries, before the technology will be cheap enough and our voice loud enough. If we survive until then, it will happen, no doubt about it.

Such a great future awaits us, but the private sector is not enough. There are milestones in our space exploration, which can be reached only by governments. Not because people without help from state wouldn't achieve it, but because people need to feed. Some milestones are to big steps to be crossed for economic reasons. Sometimes we must be organized by officials, forced to be taxed, so enough people would be able to work on reaching the goal, we all know has to be reached. The free market is great at micromanagement and steady progress. Private sector can only take small and relatively inexpensive steps, which need to bring it some profits. Not everything can be achieved in small steps.

Regulating economy and scientific method.

One thing people has in common is overconfidence in their own ability to reason and predict. Ian Ayres in his book "Super Crunchers" described couple of examples, where so called experts were easily beaten by simple statistical method called linear regression. The method is very simple. The whole idea is to chose some data, that we believe (or tested before using different methods) is correlated with the numbers we are trying to predict and then find some polynomial, that has most predictive qualities, what is generally almost the same as solving a set of equations. I won't be describing details about measuring probability of accuracy or overfitting, or trying to find a prediction with a non-polynomial function. 

Statistics are not some mambojumbo to tell us who is likely to win next elections. It is mathematical vehicle, that allows us to deal with uncertainties in a scientific way. Science is problematic in many areas. While in math and computer science everything is abstract and everything can be proven or disproved using logical rules, almost all science is dealing with a real world, where nothing can be really proved, so the only thing it can do is to test theories and go on with those, that were not disproved by empirical facts. In physics, chemistry, biology theories need to be always accurate and every contradiction disproves theory, but there are also economy, psychology, sociology, actually medicine is here too, where theories may be thought valid even if there are cases, where they didn't predict the outcome. Yet still certain predictions can be made and certain theories can be formulated, but to test them, we need mathematical tool, which is statistics. How science look in these areas? There is barely any theory prior the research, more often only a hunch, that something maybe interesting there. We conduct our experiments and then apply our statistical tools to see if something valid can be made out of the outcome. If there is something, then we formulate theory and look for another experiments, that may disprove it in a statistical sense. 

One problem many economists face, when doing their research is how to test their theories. Their theories deal with whole nations and you can barely conduct an experiment with whole nation. I mean you can't just create different scenarios and execute them on different nations, or can you? Of course there a ways to deal with this obstacle, since life sometimes offer us natural experiments, that maybe treated in a scientific way. Sometimes we don't care about scientific content of a theory and we just make a prediction without really testing the theory. That's how many financial experts work, but at least they use statistics, so it has at least some merit (ok, not all of them, but let's leave it here).

How then our governments introduce new laws? And when? The timing is really important. New law is brought under consideration, not when someone comes up with a new theory, but when some people see a problem with a current law system. Of course sometimes the problem is "obvious" to all of us, like for example during crisis. Sometimes is "obvious" only too a certain group or company, that is struggling under the current law. What happens next? Problem is "obvious" and often so is the solution, at least generally. The details are then discussed among experts and the new law is drafted. Then comes political machine and bargaining between different parties and their lobbyists. They believe the experts knowledge and intuition about how our economy should work. There may be some value in the opinion of experts, but regardless of that, what they actually do is that, they create a huge and yet scientifically invalid experiment, that is conducted upon whole nation. I find it kind of scary. Yet at the same time, no one is even thinking about conducting really useful experiments, that may bring us some knowledge, not only about how our society works, but also what is the best for us.

Concluding above I would like to bring up some theories, that were never tested and won't be in a near future, yet they may give us an idea of better behaving system. Let's start with a more reasonable one. In USA corn farming is largely subsidized by a government. Theory is, that subsidizing a certain crop will be more often used as a food for a live stock, regardless how healthy it is for animals and/or meat consumers. Patent law has negative effect on creativity, since every discovery published will be comprehended by others and may be use it to come up with new ideas, even though it will bring down profits from an idea. Another one: lack of intellectual property law won't make authors go bust, but only distribution companies, even though they may earn less money from their previous work, so it would raise a quality of our entertainment. 

We may argue about how valid these theories are, but the point is, that many laws introduced may not help a nation's economy, but only switch a power to a one side of the market, what translates to a better profits for some companies and people. Even though the experiments with laws are conducted on larger scale, when different countries create different laws, but in our times of global economy we can observe a tendencies to uniformity. What's more if you could valuate laws not only by its contribution to GDP, but also how it affects the lives of simple people, than maybe some laws we would find less profitable, yet still more attractive, because it increases the quality of our lives. There are many candidates for such assessment.