The articles in question are more than a year old, but I didn't see them when they were first posted, so James Nicoll's link to Monte Davis's "Thinking Clearly About Space" series (part one, part two, part three, part four) was very welcome.
Obviously, you should go read the whole thing (the parts aren't that long), but here are some choice quotes. On the politics of space:
So let's stop wondering who took away Humanity's birthright after Apollo 17. Let's assume that political leaders, who have the strongest possible motivation to assess what the public wants and will pay for, were doing just that in the 1960s, and have been doing just that ever since. To put it bluntly, public support for publicly funded space activity is a mile wide and an inch deep.
That doesn't mean space enthusiasts should stop organizing, proselytizing, and lobbying. It means that we should focus our advocacy on immediate and near-term steps, with realism--not frustrated cynicism--about funding, space policy, and what goes into the sausage. It means that we should stop raking over the past for scapegoats and "roads not taken." (Good night, DC-X... good night, National Aerospace Plane...) And it means that while there may be a planet-killer asteroid out there, until it shows up we're wasting our time trying to sell a lunar or Martian or L5 insurance policy to a species that didn't see the need for a tsunami-warning network in the Indian Ocean until December 27, 2004. As for CO2--no, not going there.
On chemical rockets:
Diminishing returns from technology are hard for some of us to accept. Rockets embody eight decades of great engineering, they are awe-inspiring to watch in action, and we love them for it. They are monuments to Humanity's Timeless Outward Urge, as well as the less cosmic 20th-century urge to blow things up from far away. We want them to be the Santa Maria or the Wright flyer or the Model A Ford.
Get over it. In any realistic comparison, the best of them cost outrageously more to take cargo or people to orbit than even primitive ships, trains, automobiles, or airplanes cost to reach the destinations we wanted from them.
On private development of space:
It's not guaranteed by the superiority of private enterprise over Big Bad Bureaucracy. That view has more to do with political and ideological trends since 1980 than with NASA's vices or Scaled Composites' virtues. It is reinforced by a deep American preference: we tend to root for maverick entrepreneurs with the Right Stuff over any agency ever funded.
t's not guaranteed because lean, mean teams always do better than big organizations under the dead hand of government. Robert Goddard worked with a handful of technicians in New Mexico, and never got a rocket two miles high. During the same period, Wernher von Braun directed a technical and testing staff of thousands within a nightmare bureaucracy. The result: 3500 state-of-the-art rockets were launched in nine months, brushing the edge of space on their way to Antwerp or London.
It's good stuff, and I'm not just saying that because it lines up with my pre-existing opinions. Wait, no, that is why I'm saying it. But it's still an excellent and clear-eyed presentation of the real issues involved with space exploration, and well worth reading.
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Or it could be as simple as we have only been able to reach space for about 50 years.
In historic terms, that just isn't very long.
It took centuries for Europe to really exploit the New World after its discovery. Space will be explored, homesteaded and its resources strip mined ( ;) ) in due course. For entirely economic driven reasons. But our first step on another body than the Earth is still less than 40 years behind us.
In keeping with the analogy to ships, IMO chemical rockets are the equivalent of a caveman paddling a floating log to a nearby island. The ratio of velocities availble by chemical means, compared with typical
velocities of astronomical bodeis, and the size of potential energy wells, is such a huge mismatch.
Whether or not really advanced post chemical vehicles are possible remains to be seen. Neccessity doesn't imply invention.
Benjamin: No contradiction at all... the book from which that essay came begins with a suggestion to take the word "space age" seriously, and recognize what early days these are. We began it with a sprint, but need to understand that it's a marathon.
bigTom: from p. 2 of Down to Earth: "To speak of 'the conquest of space' (the title of an influential 1949 book by Willy Ley and illustrator Chesley Bonestell) is more hopeful symbolism than substance, as if the first hominid to straddle a log and paddle a pond were to speak of conquering the ocean."
Carolyn Henson said the unspeakable ~30 years ago: chemical rockets "just barely work." A lot of the optimism of the early space age was based on a tacit assumption that we'd move on from chemical-level to nuclear-level energies for propulsion; Goddard saw it as necessary in a notebook entry from 1907 (!).
"A lot of the optimism of the early space age was based on a tacit assumption that we'd move on from chemical-level to nuclear-level energies for propulsion"
See, for example, Lem's works.