Ceres as revealed by NASA's Dawn spacecraft on May 4, 2015, from a distance of 8,400 miles (13,600 kilometers). The bright spots may be water ice.
We throw a lot of terms around here on Daily Kos, mostly in politics, sometimes in science. One of the latter is NewSpace, which can mean different things to
different people:
NewSpace—formerly alt.space; also "new space", and entrepreneurial space—are umbrella terms for a movement and philosophy often affiliated with, but not synonymous with, an emergent private spaceflight industry. Specifically, the terms are used to refer to a community of relatively new aerospace companies working to develop low-cost access to space or spaceflight technologies and advocates of low-cost spaceflight technology and policy.
But NewSapce means more than just space exploration, it also means using resources in space back here on Earth, where we are likely to run low on key elements and other substances in the forseeable future.
It's interesting that one of the people who first glimpsed that looming shortfall half a century ago had nothing to do with space exploration or aerospace technology in general. His bailiwick was the oil business. Follow us below and we'll briefly review the frightening immediate future.
Marion King Hubbert was born in 1903 and went on to work as a geoscientist for Shell Oil in Houston, Texas. It was during this time that he developed what is now known as Peak Oil Theory. Simply put, Hubbert determined that production in a given oil field tended to peak out when about half the recoverable oil had been extracted. Further efforts to increase production beyond that point would run into diminishing returns.
That simple analysis has frightening implications for world oil production and the global economy. Much of the world's production comes from a handful of very large fields, with Ghawar in Saudi Arabia leading the list. When those fields begin to peak we may be at the start of a down-slope that cannot be reversed, no matter how many smaller fields are tapped or fracked or whatever we try to do. We won't "run out" of oil, but oil will grow inexorably more and more expensive with potentially catastrophic consequences for interest rates, inflation, and the world economies. As if that's not bad enough, a similar calculus may apply to other key ingredients for modern civilization. Including elements like iron or copper, which cannot be made short of magic transmutation technologies that do not exist.
As our population increases, and the standard of living in former third-world countries rises, the demand for energy and other raw resources only goes up. By some estimates we're near extraction limits now. Higher efficiencies and better extraction methods can only do so much. We are starting to run out of everything from water to zinc.
The resources in space are, essentially, limitless. Just the iron or water ice in a single modest asteroid would make a difference, if the stuff could be found and moved back to where it's needed. That's why exploring and domesticating our solar system is so important. Indeed, for those of us who love space exploration in general and hope those resources can be brought to bear on shortages back home, it's a no-brainer. Invest in space, reap the scientific and economic rewards. But there's a problem, and would you believe it involves politics?
Most of our space exploration infrastructure was developed by private contractors. A high level NASA administrator once told me that about 85 percent of every NASA dollar goes to the commercial sector and that that number has been steady for decades. That means mostly traditional defense aerospace firms that designed the rockets and pads, the onboard systems, and other important pieces during the Space Race heyday. Those companies aren't particularly interested in sharing those taxpayer space-bucks with NewSpace upstarts like SpaceX or Blue Origins or anyone else. In fact, for many years, a lot of those contracts were awarded on a cost plus basis.
The whole thing has degenerated into an endless battle where aerospace companies and their lobbyists fight bitterly for every last taxpayer scrap. It's a fight that defies the usual left-right axis; you can find ardent small government conservatives who find themselves cheering on Big Gubmint space projects and Big Gubmint Democrats working with NewSpace firms. It sometimes shakes out based on district and local constituencies—which is arguably how it should work—and at other times it breaks down completely to the point that it's not even clear what politician stands where, let alone why.
As a result, the U.S. space program has entered into a near crisis phase. As the shuttle was retired we lost our local manned access to Low Earth Orbit. We now depend on Russian rockets to move astronauts back and forth to the International Space Station. We even depend on Russian rocket engines to launch some of our most important unmanned missions. And yet domestic aerospace companies continue to fight tooth and nail, up to the point of damn near sabotaging one another politically, just to gain a small, short-term advantage.
All the while trillions of terra-watts in solar power, billions of tons of water and raw materials, and even trillions of dollars in platinum group metals if you're into that kind of thing, continue to float around in the solar system, free for the taking, if only we can get our space-shit together. That's really the goal of NewSpace and probably provides a more accurate definition: a group of space enthusiasts who seek to develop space-based resources to a degree that they become culturally and economically irreversible. And if this seems vague and preemptive, I'm going to be writing about it, on and off, for the rest of the year. Because, it can be exciting ...
