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> - James Cameron (goog) I don't think Cameron is involved in Google, is he?
No. This is James Cameron the director. Same guy that funded Deepsea Challenger. This guy is doing some pretty cool stuff with his money.
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Replace "," with "and".
This is actually one thing I've always been wondering about as a non-native speaker when reading English headlines. Is there any reason newspapers prefer this style? It sounds weird to me.
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All it would take to get governments back into the game is some private firm proving the value of resources that can be mined there. If governments get a clue of how valuable space real estate, energy and resources can be. Expect a space race, like weapons race. In fact you can expect wars on the basis of who controls which asteroids and who gets to stay where on mars.
I can see perhaps the Chinese and maybe the Russians looking to own asteroids, but that would require they pull out of several international treaties (not that big of a deal). For the West, their model has always been government-backed private monopolies (Hudson's Bay Company, East India Company, United Fruit, modern oil companies, etc). The American government would be more than happy to let Planetary resources do t…
It really bugs me when billionaires do the same thing I would do with billions of dollars before I have billions of dollars to do them with. Seriously. Space mining and pressure from environmentalism is going to turn this whole field into rivers of gold ... in the sky.
If I had a few billion dollars I'd (like to think I'd) happily plonk my cash into space mining. Even if I was unlikely to see a return before I died.
I'm surprised at how invigorated this news is making me feel, like a weight has been lifted. SpaceX is great, but until now they've mostly been talking about missions that would have to be paid for by the government and subject to the agonizing budget-cutting that seems to happen every time an exciting mission is planned. If these guys succeed, it will emancipate the future of space exploration from congressional bud…
I'd come to a point where I honestly thought I'd be dead before this kind of thing happened. It really is a powerful feeling to know the push to space is back on.
It really bugs me when billionaires do the same thing I would do with billions of dollars before I have billions of dollars to do them with. Seriously. Space mining and pressure from environmentalism is going to turn this whole field into rivers of gold ... in the sky.
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I suspect that the cost could be cut quite a bit, especially since the design is already done. Also, the Mars landers cost $250M, well within the budget of a billionare investor.
Even if you had blueprints that said "here's exactly how to build a space telescope" just building it and going through all the proper testing would be quite expensive. Certainly you could just privately fund, say, Johns Hopkins University's APL to build a spacecraft for you, but it would still cost hundreds of millions of dollars and still be a comparatively risky endeavor. More so when you consider that the operati…
As launch costs go down, the cost of experimentation is going to go down, leading to faster turnaround and less on-the-ground testing. Rapid iteration will eventually be the norm.
The next space race will be between Google and Paypal.
I'm a little surprised that billionaires haven't already done things like launched a couple more Hubble telescopes. The design is already done and debugged, just clone it, and launch it. The same for several other successful interplanetary probes - build a (relatively) cheap fleet of clones of successful designs, and send them out to explore the solar system fully. Heck, you don't even have to come up with all the mo…
In fact, a lot of the exploration journeys of the 1800s were financed by advertisers and newspapers looking to sell newspapers.