There is an interesting sub-text here which should probably get more attention. Jeff Bezos funded this effort.
Let that sink in for a moment.
When the CIA wanted to get a peak at a Soviet Era sub that sank to 17,000' they paid Howard Hughes to build the Glomar Explorer [1] to go retrieve it. It was a mammoth undertaking which required the financial assistance of a nation state to make it work.
In 1982 when Forbes first started listing the 400 richest people they had 13 billionaires and 75 million made the list [2], which is about 167 million in inflation adjusted dollars [3], and the current lists #400 is is $1.05B so a bit over 6x larger even after inflation is considered.
The interesting bit for me is that the cost of 'getting things done' has not been going up in pace with the 'money people have' so wealth in the private sector is enabling individuals to do what used to take governments. Worse governments are horribly inefficient at doing things that individuals are efficient at (given their fiduciary responsibility to the tax payers)
I talked with some folks at Scaled Composites a bit after their successful X-Prize bid. A common theme was that they could have been successful earlier if it had not been for the red tape put in their way by the government. (some estimated two years earlier but I think that was optimistic).
And you look at the world concerns that arise when North Korea tests 'long range' rockets because building a rocket that can get a meaningful payload into orbit is 98% of the way to being able to drop something out of orbit pretty much anywhere you want.
Its very different world, and I could imagine folks who would sign on for orbital 'work' or excursions knowing that 5 - 10% of them would end up dying horribly. Not something the government can generally tolerate but explorers can.
The risk though is that you end up with a corporation that is has the capability of exploiting space and corporations don't generally sign treaties. That makes for interesting times indeed.
>The interesting bit for me is that the cost of 'getting things done' has not been going up in pace with the 'money people have' so wealth in the private sector is enabling individuals to do what used to take governments.
Wealth has been concentrating as well. If the rich continually get richer, it makes sense that at some point their capabilities become comparable to nation states.
I'd like to look more into this, and thank you for providing some further reading on that. However, regardless of how long wealth lasts, I'm only alive for this generation, so I can't say that it'd change anything for me personally if the trillionaires of 2112 aren't the billionaires of today.
Hundreds of greedy individuals with more power than some countries. What could possibly go wrong?
With barely any oversight, non-existent checks and balances, no social responsibility, an the power to sway the laws that the rest of us must live by, I urge you all to consider where we're headed. To me, at least, it seems that the age of kings is once again upon us.
It's not like government officials are devoid of greed either, by the way. Ever noticed that there are rarely any "poor" or even remotely middle-class person in politics to be seen ?
Private parties are subject to the law. They can be sued. They can be made to repair damage.
Governments ? They have no responsibilities whatsoever. Once their term is done, everything's forgotten and forgiven. Where is their social responsibility? Ever seen a president appear in court an unlawful attack on another country ?
> Ever seen a president appear in court an unlawful attack on another country ?
I have seen some presidents in courts of Justice. Bill Clinton, Jacques Chirac, also in different categories, Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. I would say that this is roughly as common as seeing a wealthy CEO charged for crimes that his company made.
Basically, when you give power to an entity, you must keep in mind what it will cost to remove it when it abuses its power. Corporations or public authorities are not that different in this respect : if a fairly elected body cannot keep them in check, or step in in case of abuses, don't give them power, even if they look "nice".
That is a simple principle to avoid violent conflicts. If NASA says it wants to start inject cesium in huge quantity in the atmosphere, vote them out in the next term (yes, voting can work, even in America). If Exxon wants to do the same, make sure that a justice+police environment exists that can forbid them and coercively force them to not do that.
Wrong answer - you mention presidents who were in trial not for unlawful attacks on other people (Chirac and Clinton) and others who were anyway losing the war they were involved in (Milosevic and Hussein) which is a totally different situation. I have yet to hear about presidents of "democracies" being charged of crimes of war, for example.
> hen you give power to an entity, you must keep in mind what it will cost to remove it
Agree with you, but why is it that in so many countries, elected officials are beyond the law in so many ways ? In France, for example, elected officials benefit of immunities and they cannot be sued during their mandate. How is that fair ?
> voting can work, even in America
Even in America ? A country when you only have a choice between 2 parties does not really qualify as "it's working" to me. It's like choosing between plague and cholera: you basically wonder every time which one is less harmful than the other.
We don't need more policies to protect the environment. If you gave actual ownership rights on the environment, people who own them would defend their ownership and sue polluters for damages and reparation. It's a well known problem called as "tragedy of the commons". When nobody owns anything, everyone will keep destroying the resource until it's gone. That's what's happening with Tuna fishing in the Mediterranean Sea currently. Ownership is the only answer to ensure there will be balance and retribution for unlawful acts.
Forbes 400 only lists Americans and those lists generally don't include people wealthy by the sole virtue of their government functions or closeness to the reigning family. But even when they do, industrialists still dominate.
I'm sure there's a lot of corruption going on at this level but it's just as much "owning the country" as it is "being extorted by the officials". Even in the first world (at least according to professor Lessig):
> “Our current tax system with all its complexities is in part designed to make it easier for candidates, in particular congressmen, to raise money to get back to congress,” Lessig said. “All sorts of special exceptions which expire after a limited period of time are just a reason to pick up the phone and call somebody and say ‘Your exception is about to expire, here’s a good reason for you to help us fight to get it to extend.’ And that gives them the opportunity to practice what is really a type of extortion – shaking the trees of money in the private sector into their campaign coffers so that they can run for congress again.”
With barely any oversight, non-existent checks and balances, no social responsibility, an the power to sway the laws that the rest of us must live by,
What could possibly go wrong?
We know what's going wrong - we're living it. The Federal Government has never been so dismissive of the law than it has been since well before 9/11.
Consider that we've gone to war six times [1] since 1945, never have declared war the way God [2] and the Framers said to in the Constitution.
[1] Maybe five. I'm counting really big efforts, involving at least a division of grunts. Libya made the cut because it irks me that there wasn't even a pretense of asking Congressional permission.
EDIT: I'm sorry, but was my request for a source considered rude? I don't understand the knock. I would really like to see some data showing the consolidation of wealth, if it actually exists.
Your phrasing reads with a sarcastic tone to me, intentional or not.
But I'd also love to see a source, the claim alone does not convince me.
I'm actually not even sure what the claim is, actually -- are we talking about the top 5%? The top 1%? And are we talking about distribution within the entire world or within some specific nations?
I believe at least when you get to talking about the single richest person compared to their nation of residence, the richest person for the past few decades has controlled a smaller percentage of the wealth than in the early to mid 1900s or late 1800s -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_f... -- but beyond that I have no idea how the distribution has changed either worldwide within nations.
I was simply trying to be helpful and providing data in response to someone who wanted some on wealth distribution. I can't believe you thought providing a source to closely related data deserved a downvote.
Sure, wealth and income are not the same, but they must be pretty correlated. I have read that the Gini is higher for wealth that income, but I haven't seen data for American wealth Gini coefficients over time. If you have that data, then you could be constructive and provide it.
they paid Howard Hughes to build the Glomar Explorer
It does not take away from your point to point out that one of the reasons they paid Hughes - instead of just banging up Glomar Explorer themselves - was to provide a cover story for the salvage.
Sea-bed mining was where it was at, according to 'My Weekly Reader' from then.
Its very different world, and I could imagine folks who would sign on for orbital 'work' or excursions knowing that 5 - 10% of them would end up dying horribly.
Work, yes. I don't imagine too many honeymoon flights would be booked unless it was safer than that.
Younger Me would have signed up for working in orbit, given those odds. Probably not now - I'm married, have a mortgage, and kids.
Although the pay would be good and the death benefits would set my heirs up pretty well.
In support: James Cameron's Challenger Deep dive (only the US Navy had before); and "only four entities have put a capsule
into orbit and recovered it - US, China, Russia and Elon Musk."
> Worse governments are horribly inefficient at doing things that individuals are efficient at (given their fiduciary responsibility to the tax payers)
Governments don't have fiduciary responsibility to tax payers.
Fiduciary responsibility has liability, as do all meaningful types of responsibility. Govts are liable for certain types of errors and omissions but other than that....
Democratic governments are "liable" in the sense that they can loose their jobs for screwing up. Or looking like they screwed up. Or getting accused of screwing up. Or because they just got unlucky.
> Democratic governments are "liable" in the sense that they can loose their jobs for screwing up.
Can, but don't. At best, a random staffer loses her job.
Moreover, you wouldn't say that McDonald's is "liable" for serving a hamburger that I don't like because I can refuse to buy their hamburgers and that's a greater consequence, so why would you say that govts are liable because they're subject to even less consequence?
Governments aren't liable. That's a problem. They're both socialized and systemic risk. That's a bigger problem. And, they're usually much larger than any "too big to fail" private company.
>The interesting bit for me is that the cost of 'getting things done' has not been going up in pace with the 'money people have' so wealth in the private sector is enabling individuals to do what used to take governments.
This is a very slippery path for us to be taking, however. Do we really want feudal lords to be the only ones with the power to get big things done? I'm not so sure I'm okay with that. It behooves us all to build, and properly support, better government so that we don't slip back into a world where entitled lords govern us.
Nothing like the Glomar Explorer has ever been built or attempted since. This is just some surface sonar technology at a location that we sorta knew. Not to dilute what Bezos did, but Hughes was seriously crazy.
Since I was a kid, space has always been a deep source of curiosity and wonder for me. With events like James Cameron's dive last week, Elon Musk's work, and this, it heartens me that private citizens are attempting rekindle the wonders they felt when they were younger for a new generation. All in reaction to the governments budget cuts and the limited ambitions of today's industry titans.
The longer term solution maybe showing tax payers scientific/statistical evidence that these sorts of 'stunts' really do yield an impressive ROI. It's a tough thing to do, but might be our way back to places like Mars.
It's not that strange, competition breeds ambition and innovation. It's in humans' fundamental nature to compete by out-innovating, which is one of the strongest arguments for free markets. Since the fall of the USSR, more competition has been inward focusing, between companies. Most companies tend to compete at a lower level than nation-states, which is why you don't see as many of these huge projects. I think if the US became openly competitive with China, you'd start to see some very large projects again.
"Though they've been on the ocean floor for a long time, the engines remain the property of NASA."
Interesting, I thought Law of Finds stated that abandoned property belongs to the person who salvages it (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6896645.stm), or maybe the engines were not abandoned?
The American law of finds applies in only two situations: "(1) where the owners have expressly and publicly abandoned their property and (2) where items are recovered from an ancient shipwreck and no one comes forward to claim them" [1]. I don't think NASA ever satisfied 1.
In international waters it seems like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea does "little to impinge on the applicability of the law of finds and the law of salvage," though "commentators have suggested that the law of finds is implied because there is no alternative ownership principle delineated in the provision" [2].
I find it odd that it can be considered "not abandoned" when NASA didn't even _know_ where they were. I can understand if NASA said something of the sort "its at XX latitude and YY longitude and we're leaving it there but it's still ours", but I find "we don't know where it is and we aren't actively looking to find it, but if you find it it's ours", especially given the Law of Finds.
Not a lawyer, but I would imagine the definition of abandoned has some sense of an indistinguishable owner. In the case of Apollo 11, the owner is quite clear.
On the other hand, if you consider the law of "Finders Keepers, losers weepers" It is clearly Bezos to do what he wants.
In that case, the owner of the ship typically is still the original owner, but there is a whole "law of salvage" that determines what payment, or share of the treasure if it's things like sunken gold, the finder should get.
I don't know if that is the case with state ships. Recently Spain has recovered a gold and silver treasure from the odissey company(they recovered it from a spanish sunked 1800s tall ship)
government agencies do not relinquish their claims lightly. They don't consider their hardware to be "abandoned", merely "very hard to get to".
My ex-coworkers at the Museum of Flight (in Seattle, mentioned in this article) know the exact location of a WWII-era fighter aircraft that crashed in Lake Washington. They recovered and restored one aircraft from the crash site at least a decade ago, but the Navy will not let them touch the other one.
It was a "non-fatal collision" between the two aircraft [0]. Both pilots were rescued [1]. One aircraft was recovered without incident; the other sits corroding at the bottom of the lake. While the second corsair is in worse shape than the first one and therefore a much more significant challenge to recover, I know several people who would jump at the chance to try if they could get permission from the Navy.
This is what gets me about the moon-shot deniers. If NASA was motivated to save expense and risk, doesn't the act of launching the first stages of a bunch of Saturn rockets going to mostly squash any savings flat?
Those things are huge, their launch was witnessed by many 10's of thousands, and their flight was tracked by the USSR and anyone else with the technical capability to do so. (Admittedly, the latter is probably only sporadic, but still an effective deterrent.) The second stages -- also huge, also tracked by the USSR and anyone else with the technical capability to do so. The third stages: the same. Even the command module+LEM: freaking conspicuous. And it's not as if you can send them up there, then fake the thing coming back -- you had to actually bring the freaking things back so the USSR and everyone else could track it then too.
So, after going to all that trouble, exactly how much money is going to be saved? How much risk is going to be saved? If you're faking a flight to the moon, and your fake command module misses its burn and flies off into the void, you're going to have to fake the deaths or kill off those astronauts anyways. If anything, one has greatly increased the risks by engaging in a such a huge and technically challenging conspiracy.
The audacity of the Apollo program and the amazing engineering successes were so incredible that I am not surprised there are still skeptics lurking about. They are incorrect in their belief, but their doubt is reasonably based. Landing on the moon and returning safely only 66 years after the first powered flight and only a few years into the age of transistors and computers was to put it simply, a completely unbelievable accomplishment and without precedent in human history.
I honestly cannot think of anything since that has rivaled it in terms of sheer audacity and a leap of pure faith.
You'd think with all our technical marvels now, we'd have something that can hold its own against the missions to the moon, but I'm honestly at a loss to suggest anything here.
I agree. If you haven't yet seen it, "Failure is not an Option" is an awesome mini-documentary about mission control from the early years through the Apollo program.
Landing on the moon and returning safely only 66 years after the first powered flight and only a few years into the age of transistors and computers was to put it simply, a completely unbelievable accomplishment and without precedent in human history.
Actually, I just plotted the flight distance records from Wikipedia, starting with the Wright Flyer record of .279km in 1903, to 18000km in 1946, to John Glenn's 3 orbits (~120,000km) in 1962 and Apollo 11 distance (~800,000km) in 1969. While the spacecraft points are clearly above the exponential extrapolation of the flight records between 1910 to 1946, they are much less dramatic than the improvement from 1903 to 1915, where flight distance increased by about 4 orders of magnitude. So while the distance flown obviously was without precedent, the rate of improvement was nothing like that of the first decade of flying.
Until you start looking at evidence you can publicly verify and start analyzing what it would cost to build what people and scientists actually observed, and the downside risks of the same. Really, what would be the worst-case downside for a Saturn 1B or Saturn V first stage? (Answer: a huge, spectacular explosion in front of thousands.) If you're trying to mitigate the costs and risk of failure with a hoax, why would you send up 9 of the former and 13 of the latter? Why would you do more than 1 manned mission?
Reflectors, actually. While normally an irrelevant detail, the distinction is quite important here: lasers reflected on mirrors reflect at a complementary angle, lasers reflected on a reflector reflect right back at the source, allowing us to actually detect it.
The problem is that one has to have research-grade equipment in order to make use of them. Whereas first-hand accounts eyewitnesses who saw the Saturn V rockets go up are available to those who want to do the legwork.
I like where he says "I imagine that NASA would decide to make it available to the Smithsonian for all to see." - creating enough publicity around it's eventual public display that NASA will have no choice but to do just that.
I remember as a kid going to Space Academy in Huntsville, AL. A camp counselor told us how the engines came to find a home at the Rocket Park of the Alabama Space and Rocket Center. NASA had placed the Saturn V on tour to show off this amazing machine - this particular rocket never went in space, but it was a _functional_ vehicle. The story goes that once the rocket was set up, the governor rallied for the rocket to be labeled a historical landmark. And since it really is an incredible chunk of American history, the motion passed.
And, as it turns out, you can't move historical landmarks. Apparently NASA was furious, but played it cool.
Or so a museum counselor told a band of 7th graders.
Side note: How is it that the Atlantic, despite having excellent quality in their articles, manages to consistently attract crap in the comments section? This is almost youtube-eque... (Might need to expand my "hide comments from certain sites" greasemonkey script)
It's not just the Atlantic - it's every single site. The age of comments is just about finished, I expect more and more sites to remove them (unless the ad views are so high that it makes up for it).
My theory is that the only (or the majority) people who have the time to post are those too stupid to have anything else better to do. And once the majority is stupid it becomes too toxic for anyone else to bother.
Good forums (like this one) require very careful curating.
Cute but silly really. If you want to see a genuine Saturn V rocket there is an actual one on display in the Apollo building at the Kennedy Space Center. It's open to the public and it's intact and it's amazing.
I think Bezos is just pulling a publicity stunt here as he makes no mention at all of the artifacts and treasures on display to the public at the inspiring Kennedy Space Center.
Your beef seems to be more with expensive fighter programs than expensive salvage efforts. I don't see how this really relates to the discussion.
Don't underestimate the power of icons. These are the rockets that put us on the moon, and a private citizen is planning on recovering them for posterity, using his own money. Hopefully future generations will be inspired to explore because of this wealthy man's efforts (or 'playtime', as you put it). This should be celebrated.
What if Jeff Bezos took that funding how much ever that he used to find the rockets and used that on education. There are many in different countries who doesn't even have basic education needs. I am not saying Jeff is the doing the wrong thing, he worked hard, he earned it, he might have or might be doing charity work, but the satisfaction you get just by thinking that you can help some kid get educated is more than finding rockets. Just my thoughts.
Let that sink in for a moment.
When the CIA wanted to get a peak at a Soviet Era sub that sank to 17,000' they paid Howard Hughes to build the Glomar Explorer [1] to go retrieve it. It was a mammoth undertaking which required the financial assistance of a nation state to make it work.
In 1982 when Forbes first started listing the 400 richest people they had 13 billionaires and 75 million made the list [2], which is about 167 million in inflation adjusted dollars [3], and the current lists #400 is is $1.05B so a bit over 6x larger even after inflation is considered.
The interesting bit for me is that the cost of 'getting things done' has not been going up in pace with the 'money people have' so wealth in the private sector is enabling individuals to do what used to take governments. Worse governments are horribly inefficient at doing things that individuals are efficient at (given their fiduciary responsibility to the tax payers)
I talked with some folks at Scaled Composites a bit after their successful X-Prize bid. A common theme was that they could have been successful earlier if it had not been for the red tape put in their way by the government. (some estimated two years earlier but I think that was optimistic).
And you look at the world concerns that arise when North Korea tests 'long range' rockets because building a rocket that can get a meaningful payload into orbit is 98% of the way to being able to drop something out of orbit pretty much anywhere you want.
Its very different world, and I could imagine folks who would sign on for orbital 'work' or excursions knowing that 5 - 10% of them would end up dying horribly. Not something the government can generally tolerate but explorers can.
The risk though is that you end up with a corporation that is has the capability of exploiting space and corporations don't generally sign treaties. That makes for interesting times indeed.
[1] https://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/jennifer.htm
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_400 (hopefully it is accurate)
[3] http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi
[4] http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/#p_40_s_arank_All%20industr...