Inner space is useful. Outer space is history

I very much hope that this article got it completely wrong.

Though perhaps true, this is one of the sadder articles I have read on this paper. I hope this is one prediction that you have wrong.

This article is shortsighted. Good economic times will eventually come roaring back and then we will start seeing space exploration as a priority once again.

The previous period of space exploration occurred in a time of economic prosperity. Once it returns we will see a renewed interest in more existential pursuits like space exploration. Buck up TE ;)

I expected 2011 to be alot like Star Trek, instead I get this:

"Low Orbit, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the DirectTV satellite. Its continuing mission: to provide television reception to subscribers, to drop coverage during snowstorms, and to boldly go on orbiting the Earth."

"[The ISS is] surely the biggest waste of money, at $100 billion and counting, that has ever been built in the name of science."

Why?

What pessimistic drivel. Humans are ripe with a natural, inherent propensity for exploration and discovery. As Carl Sagan noted in Pale Blue Dot, our earth is a lonely speck of dust, depressingly distant from any other habitable planet. And with that remote, humbling, and pixelated image of earth, it has become clear that there is no one coming to save us from ourselves.

Humankind will continue to push forward in exploration because it is in our common interest to--to see what is on the horizon, what is out there. We have to, because frankly, there is no where else to go.

We can rest on our laurels and wait for heaven (heh) or we can strap ourselves onto rockets and find it ourselves.

An educated prediction of the future based on careful analysis of facts and history is still just an oracle's prophecy.

Technology advances in leaps and bounds, and while we may be able to say with a 95% certainty that we wont be walking on Mars within 10 years, saying that the "space age is over" is akin to predicting the future 100 years out with 90% certainty. That is simply ignorance.

@noles82 said: "our earth is a lonely speck of dust, depressingly distant from any other habitable planet"

This appears to me to be exactly the reason we are not likely to pursue space exploration to any great extent in future. It would be different if we could go somewhere where humans could actually live or get useful resources from.

This article was, bar none, the stupidest and most innane drivel I have seen on the Economist's site. For some reason unbeknownst to me, despite trying to claim to be an intelligent person's place to turn for news and opinion, the Economist has taken a decidedly anti-scientific stance of late. Perhaps it is only a few rogue editors responsible for this drivel, but it is irresponsible and short-sighted to shoot the goose that laid the golden egg. Most of the great advancements of the 20th century have been related to technologies born in whole or in part from the space race, and I have seen no compelling arguments that investment in the type of scientific and engineering skills required in space exploration will fail to yield useful returns in the future.
This is shoddy journalism, based on the sixty second sound bite of the shuttle retiring, and has no tether to reality.

I'm certainly not a large supporter of the Space Shuttle program or the ISS. But I think it is too easy to dismiss space exploration by pointing fingers at the deliberately wasteful manned space programs and highly publicized missions that serve public relations first and science a distant second.

Many of those are pursued to "protect jobs" (at a cost on the order of $1millon each per year) and to shove a few tens or hundred million taxpayer dollars into the pockets of corporations who will use a fraction of the amount to finance local politicians' election campaigns.

Examples abound, just to point out another one: The Hubble space telescope is treated as if it was irreplaceable - at the cost of five manned Space Shuttle missions, which cost roughly $8bn in total. With that kind of budget, literally dozens of space telescopes superior to Hubble could have been build and and launched, by taking advantage of economies of scale and using ordinary disposable rockets.

But beyond that, there are some very genuine purposes at the core of space exploration. In order to protect the ever growing fleet of satellites, the sun must be constantly monitored and its activity be understood. Other planets provide valuable data to test hypothesis about earths climate, geology and other fields - because you can fit any given theory to explain earth as the only example we have around.

What exactly can be found there is impossible to predict. And if it seems like a dull field of inquiry, it is only because of the lack of both detail and sheer quantity of our observations of other objects in the solar system. Not more than a handful of asteroids have been visited by space probes and even those have brought us little more than pictures and roundabout inferences of their composition.

The main problem is that of the extraordinary cost.

Economies of scale are a very common, yet largely ignored, theme in space exploration. Building two mars rovers from scratch costs just as much as one. Two were sent, now a new one is being made from scratch all over again. The additional cost of building a series of 20 MER rovers like Spirit and Opportunity and upgrading them later would have been almost trivial and launch costs quite affordable.

Launch costs usually make up only about 10-20% of the total mission cost, despite the already unreasonably high price of rocket launches.

(Again, mostly due to lack of economies of scale, but also cronyism and unbelievable supply chains that span continents, where an economic solution would prefer to put them into one building! Some of that is being addressed by SpaceX - and hopefully they can make good on their promises.)

In the end, the success of space exploration will depend on economic decision making in science and the economic success of the more ordinary applications (weather/comm/nav satellites etc) that will bring down the cost of the basic technology.

So long as rocket science is thought of as being complicated and expensive - rather than an ordinary and somewhat boring part of the economy - the science will always be expensive and take a backseat behind the rocketry and especially the politics of getting the necessary funding.

On a side note, one of my prouder moments as a father came a couple months ago, when my 2-year-old was playing in the backyard near dusk, and looked up.
"Dad, look, that's a moon."
"Yes." I said "That's our moon, the Earth's moon."
"Yeah..." He said, and thought about it for a minute. "Dad, let's build a rocket ship."

The capacity to travel beyond Earth is now understood, at some fundamental level, by even the very young. There will always be a desire to push the boundries, despite the short-sightedness and fatalism of editors at this magazine.

I expect space exploration to be much like the ocean at the shore. It is all too easy to see a wave come ashore, and then retreat. And miss the fact that the tide is coming in. And the next wave will come farther up the beach than the previous one. That, I think, is what you have done here.

Are we witnessing the end of the initial wave of space exploration? (Or, at least, manned space exploration?) It certainly looks like it. Does that mean that we will not go forth again, probably with new technologies? Nope. Especially since the demise of government-sponsored space travel will open the way for private approaches to innovate, and get us away from the super-expensive rockets which were only the first way to get there.

This earth has limited resources, and to waste them on entitlement programs over space exploration is a huge mistake - a person will never say they have enough social security or money to pay for health improvements (these are black holes). Our finite resources should be devoted to exploring, mining and building infrastructure in space, as this is truly the unexplored final frontier. There are no more vast abundant supplies of unexplored energy or materials here on earth. Within the next 100 years, at the current pace, everything will be used up. The situation will be akin to Easter Island, where with no more resources the Polynesians weren't able to get off the island, and we wont be able to get off this planet.

Trumpeting the end of human exploration of the stars is one of the more baffling pet arguments of The Economist. While it may be true that on a simple level of metrics and inputs and outputs, space exploration and the possible colonization of other planets seems at present to be a foolhardy and wasteful venture, but then so have many great ventures in the time before they are truly ready. Space exploration and discovery speak to something more fundamental and aspirational, not so tethered to the possibilities that can be seen with what we have available to us today. It speaks to our dreams and visions of excellent tomorrows.

Perhaps we should subscribe to The Humanist.

An unbelievably naive and short-sighted article.

It is of course difficult to predict the future, but its hard to imagine that most of the solar system, and especially the asteroid belt will not be exploited one day. It may be centuries before that happens, but it will almost surely happen. Civilizations ebb and flow. There may be a future dark age(s) to come, but surely, in time, humans will exploit the solar system. The author of the article is thinking in a very near-term and short-sighted way.

There may be a physical, cold, hard fact that will make interstellar travel impractical though. It may be there is no way around the fact that matter can only approach the speed of light. Science fiction stories always make up a way around this with warp speed, folding space, or whatever, but it may be a fact that exceeding the speed of light is not physically possible.

You may have right on your side, for the moment anyway, but you have no soul.

The future has always belonged to the optimists - even if the pessimists are more likely to be right (ask any VC). As a young engineer (working on fibre optics) I was confidently told (with excellent trend graphs) that there was no demand anywhere for a link of more than 120MBit/s capacity. And we had just installed it. But now 50% of Japanese have more than this and the Economist depends on broadband. Fortunately I did not listen!

Mankind's great explorations have all been driven by a quest for money and power, not science and curiosity. I think the Economist has it pretty much correct, at least for my lifetime That having been said, with the appropriate advances in technology, something like asteroid mining might be worth the gamble within this century. It's unwise to predict too far into the future.

One way a resurgence of the space age may occur in the near term is if an up-start power such as China starts a serious space program. The old powers will scramble to keep up. It will be a matter of pride, and a fear that the up-start power will have a military advantage if they dominate earth's immediate space.

@ Mike Hoy

You're right, space is awfully big. But so was the Atlantic Ocean.

One has to wonder what Columbus, de Gama, and others must have felt glaring out at the vast blue sea dancing before them, as they made the audacious choice to throw themselves onto a boat and float across it: opportunity or solitude. I should guess the former.

The fact that we *shouldn't* do something because it's too big, too vast, or too ambitious, is counterintuitive to every major discovery and invention in our species' speckled past and is distinctly un-human. I shudder to think that such backwards logic proliferates today. Our greatest attribute as an evolved species is our intellect coupled with an unquenchable curiosity. This should be harnessed and celebrated, not stifled and squashed under the auspices of some trite excuse.