![]() ![]() And while there were numerous scifi stories about first Contact and exploration, a lot of the hard, practical scifi of the time was about the commercial exploitation of the solar system. In the 50’s, it never occurred to anybody that the astronauts and cosmonauts and sinonauts would be government employees instead of commercial spacemen (sure, sure, there were tales of “the Patrol” or whatever the Space Navy was called, but they were there to fight off the aliens or impose law and order on the civilians, they weren’t the only people in space). Nobody was going to foot the bill for government to build its own station.īack then, it never occurred to futurists like Del Rey that spaceflight would become the exclusive domain of governments. The basic concept was that while government might lease a major chunk of the station, it was the commercial aspects that made it a viable concept. According to the novel, the station was built under government contract, in order to support a military mission - but the heart of it would be commercial, as a way station and stepping stone for exploration of the rest of the solar system, for manufacturing, as an astronomy outpost, and as a commercial broadcast site (remember, this was in 1954, the concepts of orbital telescopes and communications satellites were strictly in the realm of hairy hairball science and barely even a twinkle in science fiction’s eye - unless you were Lester Del Rey or Arthur C. ![]() Step is centered around a corporation’s efforts to construct the station on schedule and under budget - it’s the first time I ever heard the contractual phrase “penalty clause” and ever thought about the commercial and business aspects of space exploration, pretty heady stuff for a ten year old. The thing about this book, and many others of similar vein from the same period, are two basic assumptions: 1) we would build space stations and go to the moon and Mars and beyond, and 2) those stations and colonies and ships would be built by civilians. The book tells the story of a young welder, Jim Stanley, and the construction of the first space station - the first step on mankind’s journey to the stars. (One of the first science fiction books I ever read was Lester Del Rey’s Step to the Stars.)Ĥ0 years after I first read it, Step to the Stars remains vivid in my memory. Plus the chance to do an end-run around the profit motive problem by utilizing a non-profit oriented Eastern culture. discover an incredibly valuable resource in space that requires human beings to harvest: "MacGuffinite".reduce the support costs of keeping human beings alive in space.reduce the cost per kilogram of delivering payload into space.So the way I understand it, one can attack the elephant by: In other words: a rocketpunk future will be created by chasing profit, but there isn't any profit to be had. A space elevator, maybe a rocket is too inefficient. ![]() SF author Charles Stross goes further, and states that if we expand into the solar system, we're not going to get there by rocket ship, at least not the conventional kind. The problem is that expanding in to space is so freaking expensive that there does not seem to be any way to make it turn a profit. The implication is that the only way widespread expansion in to space will happen is via the free market and the profit motive (this does raise the interesting possibility of an Eastern non-profit motivated culture given access to the required industrial base, SF authors take note). Now, currently, pretty much all of the nations on Terra that have the industrial infrastructure to expand in to space tend to have capitalistic cultures. Like I said about FTL travel: you want it, they want it, everybody is doing it. Since everybody is busy ignoring the elephant in the room, nobody will notice if you ignore it as well. Just keep in mind you are always free to ignore the problem in the same way most SF authors ignore the difficulties associated with faster than light travel and chances are any arguments you have are addressed below, so read this entire page first. Yes, I can already hear the outraged screams of SF fans, and the flood of arguments attempting to refute the elephant. Basically, there currently is no reason compelling enough to justify the huge investment required to create an extensive manned presence in space. However, regardless of whether the proposed science fiction background is Rocketpunk or something more like NASA, there is the elephant in the room to consider. ![]()
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