Space is still expensive. SpaceX is awesome, and they're making things cheaper.
Really though, the solution is increasing productivity. If all 6 (7?) billion people's productivity doubles, the cost to go to space is cut in half. Our infrastructure isn't good enough to make space cheap.
As powerful as Microsoft was for business, Gate's curing malaria will probably have a bigger impact. millions of people not dying means a larger market. Millions of minds trying to make the world a better place - at least making stuff and buying stuff.
In the long run, getting everyone enough food and clean water is probably the best answer to lowering the cost of going to space (and everything else). If the billion people that get by on a dollar a day can produce more because they're not sick and dying, everything gets cheaper.
It is far from given that Microsoft has had a positive impact on the world's economy!! It shouldn't have to be stated but you cannot measure contribution by the economic size of an organisation, or even assume it is a positive one (counterfactually).
It is all speculative, but in my opinion by being a monopoly provider they have held back innovation by several years, and effectively taxed large amounts of money out of the rest of the economy.
Healing people and giving them food and water does exactly nothing. A country with bad politics that does not grow and produce does not have a positve impact. If we can get these people into the market economy then it will of course produce massiv positive impact. If they live in a country that has bad policy, it might even have negative impact. Making it easier to substain a army and fight wars against other nations.
By far the simplest way of doing this would be to change immigration policy in all of the western world. All the tools we have, forign aid, pease misssions and so on, the most effective is immigration. Even most extream anti immigration economists, can only come up with numbers like "5% pay retraction over 30 years for uneducated americans" looking at the past.
However, sadly, the in general the west congratulate itself on the bit of forign aid (that is counter-productive about half of the time) and prefers to keep living with no 'outsider' that 'destroy' there culutre and language.
Just too many of us. Yet several generations of a 'one-child-per-couple' policy would quietly reduce our numbers enough for us to cope with our over-population and unsustainable use of resources.
But that sort of thinking is taboo. 'Interstellar', here we come. But unfortunately, there won't be that convenient wormhole waiting for us.
Forcing developed nations with relatively decent educational systems to lower reproduction rates is not the answer. We need more problem solvers on Earth, not less. Malthus has consistently been proven wrong - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
Can someone explain to me what nautil.us is? It looks like some sort of Wired 2.0 (if anyone remembers Wired at the beginning, it was kind of well written and on-topic, now its really trashy).
Sort of a 25¢ answer to a $1B question, no? Yes, I put together the bit about reusable rockets on my own.
The author doesn't really close the loop on the imagination problem, also known as the political problem. How much of the power of this idea in the 60s was due to the cold war? Hard to say, but I would characterize the interest in space exploration among the non-technical people I know as non-existent -- and tweeting the latest pictures from the Hubble doesn't count as interest.
Really though, the solution is increasing productivity. If all 6 (7?) billion people's productivity doubles, the cost to go to space is cut in half. Our infrastructure isn't good enough to make space cheap.
As powerful as Microsoft was for business, Gate's curing malaria will probably have a bigger impact. millions of people not dying means a larger market. Millions of minds trying to make the world a better place - at least making stuff and buying stuff.
In the long run, getting everyone enough food and clean water is probably the best answer to lowering the cost of going to space (and everything else). If the billion people that get by on a dollar a day can produce more because they're not sick and dying, everything gets cheaper.