Start up your redesigning and/or kitbashing engines!

[Paper Kosmonaut]

Originally Posted by thorst

You are certainly right PK, working together at expensive projects makes much more sence. But I guess it's also much harder to work with different kinds of organization structures, budgets and visions, as well as with the political meaning behind all the space exploration. Hope this aspect will be a success, otherwise we can forget about the spacecraft...

Thorsten

Indeed, Thorsten. You're right about the huge bureaucratic and financial impact the joining of all those organisations have. Look at the fast developments with SpaceX for example, I think Elon Musk knows a lot of the people on the actual workfloor, doing the assembly of their spacecraft, by name. The magic word to quick development is short lines.
Perhaps there should be something like a small international space council that gets a multi-governmental "carte blanche" to make long term decisions on what's next without having to put tonnes of paperwork through the slow grinding bureaucratic machineries of their respective governments.

[thorst]

But what you don't say directly is that this "carte blanche" would also mean that this council would make off bureaucratic decisions about money, which is utopic.

By all critisism for big governmental programs which appears on this board from time to time, we should not forget that both superpowers of the last centuries managed to build up impressive manned space projects, with the moon landing and the construction of space stations beeing the result, and all this in a time of just a few years.
My impression is that this was possible because it was seen as manned exploration of an unknown world, satisfying the wish to do something like Columbus did and accepting that this wish is not only scientific but for the most part just a challenge we have to master. Today, the manned space exploration has to be funded with the promise to give scientific answers for each penny and thereby exploiting the small budget of "real" space science with telescopes etc.. I think this is the problem. We as men should admit that we only want to go to space because it's our nature to go where we hardly can go, and give this a special place in our budgets.

Thorsten

[Paper Kosmonaut]

Thorsten, the biggest achievements in spaceflight development were made in an era when the earth was in a permanent state of hostility. The Soviets and the Americans were having a show-off of who was the most technologically advanced power. And there was money generated to so so.
When the ultimate goal of the space race was achieved, a manned moon landing, the public and the government lost interest, also due to other, more pressing issues like the Vietnam war, an energy crisis, changes in power, changes in policy, and so forth.

What I try to say is that the initial space efforts were very much made because there was enough political reason for decent funding of sometimes insane or very experimental projects what would otherwise never have gotten any financing at all.

In these times, with a much lesser tense atmosphere between those once opposing super powers, there must be another need to finance projects with which the assurance of financial profit is almost nil. For a lot of nations, spaceflight is not a big issue on the political agenda, it merely is a small drain in the treasury. And for commercial contenders, just a scientific value for a visit to an asteroid or the moon is not enough. It has to be profitable in some way.

Concluding, This time is lacking a kind of urgency and a well laid out vision on how we (preferably as the people of earth) should go and discover space.
That is why I think there should be an international comittee. Nations should hand over the budget they want to spend on spaceflight (other than commercial) and let this committee spend it. I am sure it will be spent better than it is now.

[thorst]

Yes I fully agree. What I tried to indicate is that we could increse this "urgency" by finally recognizing the real driving force behind manned space exploration in the sentence from Star Trek "where no man has gone before". It's not growing crystals in zero-gravity what fascinates us when we think about astronauts, is it? But because we are not honest, we don't get what we really want. I'd be willing to pay taxes for both, science and a non-scientific space exploration program, and I'm sure more would. It doesn't need nuclear weapons or the clash of politic systems if you can directly speak to the child in everyone by just telling the truth...

[Paper Kosmonaut]

Indeed! I completely agree with you, and it is not just the child in ourselves that might appeal to this but all of our natural curiosity, exploration drift and thirst for knowledge. Now all that is left is to convince the rest of the world. Let's start right now. That is, in fact all it needs. To just simply start this. Leave the rivers and canals behind and build something big to sail this new ocean.