Private Company On The Moon?

[DerekL1963]

So let us focus on the services and those people who are willing to give money for a dream of going to the Moon or Mars. Okay, a reality television show seems weird but it is one way to help collect some of the money. SOME.

For certain very small values of "SOME". Last time I did some BOTE figuring, the "Reality Show In Space" show would have to be a hit on the level of... well pretty much no TV show ever to raise even a small fraction of the cost. You'd have to produce the equivalent of an Avatar or a Titanic every year for the better part of a decade to pay for the mission, and TV shows don't gross nearly that much.

[The Jedi Master]

But we are always working on plan B. We went from human power to animal power. Than animals, who powered our mills and pumps, were replaced by windmills and water wheels. Wood and bones were replaced by coal to heat homes and cook meat and boil water. Oil soon entered the world stage, creating fuels, building materials, and so on. Did we run out of trees before switching to coal? Did we run out of horses before we switched to cars and trucks? Our resources are not infinite - we just jump from one to another as our science allows us to advance from one technology to another. We face problems, we solve them, we create new ones, we solve them. Sooner or later we're hit a glass ceiling and die out.

There are a hundred plan B's being created. The USA has their idea of the perfect plan B. So does NASA and the UN and so did the USSR and the Third Reich.

How well we do in the future will depend on which plan B we end up with. I hope we have the good luck to pick a good one.

I hope we get to the Moon - if nothing else but to learn from it and use the knowledge for Mars and the Belt and beyond.

"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."

Carl Sagan

People don't like change. This fact has been repeated by everyone, but that is because it is true. Change is scary, unknown. As such, people will try to stop change, even though it is futile. Politicians will avoid new environmental or economic plans that seem 'too radical' or 'too ambitious'. Citizens will claim that all the evidence is false, scaremongering, overreacting, too optimistic or pessimistic, what have you.

As such, can we be sure that any of the Plan B's will be implemented, without people trying to stop the change?