Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD

http://www.buildtheenterprise.org

by oconnor0 • 14 years ago

154 123 14 years ago

buildtheenterprise.org

tptacek2• 14 years ago

Here's NASASPACEFLIGHT.COM making fun of this:

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=28821.0

Natsu• 14 years ago

I can't believe that none of them commented on the giant laser in the front.

lotharbot2• 14 years ago

Fantastic final post:

"Sci fi fans taking on NASA engineers is too funny, but also a waste of time. We deal with real hardware here. Locked."

Bingo. The project is to build a very poorly designed spacecraft to perform a mission it's not well suited to for a ridiculously large sum of money. If we're going to build a spacecraft to journey to Mars, we shouldn't force it to conform to a 1960s fantasy hull design.

gaius• 14 years ago

To be fair, the shuttle is also a 60s design... So much for NASA engineers.

rednum• 14 years ago

This thread is actually kinda sad. The guy seems to be full of passion, but doesn't have knowledge of actual engineering/science to do anything useful in that direction; (and seems to be unwilling to criticaly think and learn something, but that's another point). I wonder, if somebody set him in right direction when he was younger (think a good math teacher) would he work with those nasa guys now? It seems to me that true passion is a resource many tech communities could really use.

anigbrowl3• 14 years ago

I wish the engineers at NASA spaceflight, instead of taking a dump on the guy, would applaud his enthusiasm and then explain the better and cooler things that could be achieved with a trillion dollars over 20 years. Technologically they're dead right, but they come off as a bunch of unimaginative jerks.

tptacek2• 14 years ago

It's true, but I don't know what the norms of that community are, so I wouldn't want to criticize.

nextstep• 14 years ago

Maybe this is a joke and I'm taking it too seriously, but doesn't the Enterprise run on antimatter? I don't think we're going to be able to manufacture antimatter in large quantities in the next 20 years.

rmc2• 14 years ago

The faster than speed of light thing'll be hard aswell.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

No worries, we'll just reverse the phase polarity.

thebigshane• 14 years ago

Simple. Change the gravitational constant of the universe.

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708699/quotes?qt=qt0403693]

falcolas• 14 years ago

This seems like a "how can we make the Enterprise with modern materials/techniques", as an inspiration to get to the stars.

The design, aside from the overall shape, is completely divorced from the design of the ships in the shows.

fennecfoxen2• 14 years ago

The Enterprise runs on Westinghouse nuclear reactors burning enriched U-235 (93%+). Also, the quoted price tag here seems steep when you could, quite literally, build the USS Enterprise 52 years ago for $451.3 million USD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(CVN-65)

greyfade• 14 years ago

Bah. Those are dirty reactors. Why don't we talk about Thorium or something?

sp3322• 14 years ago

The engines on this one use ion engines at about 1.5 GW total. They would be powered by 3 nuclear reactors producing a maximum of 2.5 GW. http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/engines and http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/nuclear-reactors

joejohnson• 14 years ago

A trillion dollars is $50 billion per year over 20 years. From the site:

“It is proposed that the US dedicate .27% of its GDP each year to the NASA Enterprise program. To get some sense of what spending .27% of the GDP each year will mean, consider that between 1963 and 1972, during the Apollo era, the US spent on average .50% of GDP per year as shown in the center column in the table to the right. This is about double the level of spending proposed for funding the Enterprise program.

.27% of GDP will be about $40 billion for the year 2012. $40 billion is certainly a lot of money to spend – but it’s not that much when you consider that the federal budget in 2012 is $3700 billion ($3.7 Trillion). $40 billion seems like pocket change from the perspective of federal spending. $40 billion is 1.1% of the 2012 federal budget. This compares to an average of 2.8% of the federal budget which was spent each year on NASA between 1963 and 1972 as shown in the rightmost column in the table above.”

untog• 14 years ago

Congratulations on copy and pasting from tptacek's link.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

I hate hate hate this idea. It's so very wrong headed. Yes, it'd certainly help bootstrap manned spaceflight. But I talked to someone who knows about these things and he told me a secret, no matter HOW you spend a trillion dollars on a space project you're going to do a hell of a lot to bootstrap spaceflight.

We don't need this, it's silly, we should not be taking it seriously. We already have the technology and the know how to build cities in orbit and colonies on Mars, we should do that directly instead of being distracted by this side show.

Edit: If we gave SpaceX a contract for a trillion dollars (only payable upon completion of each task) we could probably have 10 million people living on Mars by 2030.

mparlane• 14 years ago

Now THAT would be cool.

qq66• 14 years ago

SpaceX will not have 10 million people living on Mars in eighteen years, whether you gave them a contract for $1 trillion or $10 trillion or $100 quadrillion.

mongol• 14 years ago

Exactly. The global economy is not structured to achieve that at any price.

PaulHoule• 14 years ago

Ho Hum.

What we need to do is sample return from the moon's north pole and see if there really is a glacier there!

wormhit• 14 years ago

Good one! Nasa is dreaming about Mars and still cannot go to moon yet :D

sp3322• 14 years ago

I think that will only excite scientists. Who cares about a bunch of water? Bring back some high-grade Armalcolite ore, and you might spark some interest.

iRobot2• 14 years ago

Someone should explain to this guy the concept of bootstrapping.

Saying that a man should be allowed to dream big and NASA are the ones who we should be laughing at considering they currently cant even send a man 100 miles into space.

Hopefully Elon and the new generation of space entrepreneurs will remedy this over time.

protomyth• 14 years ago

If we are going to build a ship from fiction, we probably should start with the Discovery One from 2001.

jasimq• 14 years ago

I would like some pod racers from Star Wars first.

smacktoward4• 14 years ago

Or just the landspeeders! Imagine the savings on highway maintenance if we all drove cars without wheels...

breckinloggins2• 14 years ago

There's a lot of negativity around this idea, and mostly for good reason. But if you peel away the "let's build the Enterprise!" specifics and think about the core of the proposal, I believe it is sound.

A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s. The ships look the same, the suits look the same, the propulsion technologies look the same, and what's worse... we can't even DO the cool stuff we could do in 69!

If you had asked someone in 69 what spaceflight would look like in 2012, they would probably have visions of Moon bases, space stations with gravity wheels, and routine manned trips to Mars.

But we have none of those things. Instead, we have a recently-retired space truck, a space station that looks like a larger version of Skylab, and all of this stuck in low Earth orbit.

How. Incredibly. Disappointing.

I want to get excited about space again. I really, really do. The recent gains made by private companies (with Scaled Composites in '04 and SpaceX today) have helped a lot. But we shouldn't shy away from bigger ideas.

I know it sounds silly to people in the space business, but the public could really use some futuristic looking space ships and more exciting missions to get excited again.

In the end, I believe that private industry will make this happen once space tourism becomes more affordable (simply because the different companies will have to start competing on something other than "look, we're in space!").

Bigger, cooler looking space ships that are built in orbit and make regular trips to and from Mars would be REALLY exciting. It doesn't have to look like the Enterprise. What about a small Klingon Bird of Prey or even a UFO-style flying saucer?

So, no, we don't need to build the Enterprise, but we DO need to take this as a marketing lesson about why the public seems to yawn when they hear anything about space and Nasa these days.

smacktoward4• 14 years ago

> A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s

So the solution is to build a ship based on a design from 1965?

breckinloggins2• 14 years ago

No. And that's why I think a lot of the criticism of the project is valid. The solution is to build something that captures the imagination. Something that LOOKS like a ship from the future. It doesn't have to be the Enterprise.

WalterSear2• 14 years ago

How. Incredibly. Disappointing.

javert• 14 years ago

I know it sounds silly to people in the space business, but the public could really use some futuristic looking space ships and more exciting missions to get excited again.

Who cares what the public "could use"?

This is a self-defeating argument because you're starting with the premise that the govnermnet ought to be in the business of making people excited/happy, and then argue that therefore, we should build awesome space ships. Once that premise is accepted by society, it'll be all about wealth redistribution, healthcare, and regulation (and ultimately economic stagnation), and building space ships will be the last thing on anyone's mind.

This post also really bothers me because it's not like the public is a bunch of 4 year olds going "oooh, shiny." And if they are, we need to be finding ways to improve that problem, not playing to it. If society is that messed up, society is headed for the gutter anyway.

drewrv• 14 years ago

Getting people excited about space travel isn't the goal, it's a means to an end. The end goal is investment in new research, technologies, and education, which will help the economy and improve the wellbeing of society. Getting people excited about space travel can create the political will to accomplish those things.

I'm not saying we should spend billions on pointless feel good projects, but if painting the space shuttle silver or making a robotic probe slightly anthropomorphic would convince hundreds of thousands of grade schoolers to stay in school and do lots of math, I think it's worth it.

pygorex3• 14 years ago

> A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s. The ships look the same, the suits look the same, the propulsion technologies look the same,

And the ideal of manned spaceflight should remain in the 60's - at least for the foreseeable future. We are magnificently evolved to inhabit this planet. The remainder of the solar system is insanely hostile to our form of life. It's far more sensible to engineer machines that can act as our eyes & ears and extend our narrowly evolved senses to far-out and lethal environments.

anigbrowl3• 14 years ago

We're not all that great at swimming either, and yet building oceangoing boats and ships has turned out to be an important part of our technological development. Likewise air travel; we're only evolutionarily optimized for walking about on land, but have used technology to travel and transport goods over large distances on water and in the air.

blackhole• 14 years ago

So long as we don't blow said planet up, which so far we have come disturbingly close to doing several dozen times.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

The same could be said for climbing mountains or racing cars at high speeds. The point isn't just to gain knowledge though, the point is to go, to do, to live.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

As a huge fan of space I agree we need progress, but we can achieve that by no longer 'visiting' space and instead 'moving' there.

I was talking with a JPL engineer about SpaceX and he said something which really knocked me for a loop. He said "We don't live in space, we camp there." And by example he suggested what if there was no food, fuel, or running water in Barstow California. Everyone would have to carry what they expected to use from Los Angeles, stay for a while and then go back to Los Angeles to reload with supplies. Now imagine there is a toll gate on I15 outside San Bernadino that charges you $100M to use the road between LA and Barstow. Now what kind of town would Barstow be? A ghost town.

Space, and low earth orbit in particular, is the same way. We don't have any infrastructure up there. Just a single campsite. Every time we launched the shuttle we took perfectly good fuel and burned it up in the atmosphere because we had no way to take the left overs from the external tank and store them in orbit. If you consider just that one problem, keeping fuel around. You see how far we are from living in space vs just visiting.

At $54M/pop SpaceX will make somethings a lot more accessible in space. Putting some infrastructure in space like a gas station and a space tug, will go a lot further.

stcredzero4• 14 years ago

Back in 1988, a Canadian scientist was commissioned by a 2nd world power to build a system that could be used for orbital launch 4 orders of magnitude cheaper per pound to orbit than what SpaceX can do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon

It would have involved firing payloads out of a very large cannon, then firing a rocket onboard to circularize the orbit, so this is not for manned launch, but we should be able to ship bulk items like fuel, oxygen, and water this way.

Every time we launched the shuttle we took perfectly good fuel and burned it up in the atmosphere because we had no way to take the left overs from the external tank and store them in orbit.

We also burned up a perfectly good contamination free vacuum-proof hull the size of a 747 fuselage that was already 99% of the way in orbit. (External tank.)

stcredzero4• 14 years ago

So, no, we don't need to build the Enterprise, but we DO need to take this as a marketing lesson about why the public seems to yawn when they hear anything about space and Nasa these days.

The lesson is: "Sell them what they want, but deliver them what they need."

mchanson• 14 years ago

The public was not that excited about space in the 60s either.

http://si.academia.edu/RogerLaunius/Papers/93299/_Public_Opi...

smackay• 14 years ago

Perhaps not in the USA but in the UK everyone I knew was glued to the TV to watch the Apollo launches. Of course there was a big layer of Cold War propaganda added, but it was an exciting time.

furyofantares• 14 years ago

> simply because the different companies will have to start competing on something other than "look, we're in space!"

Price, safety, quality of the trip? It seems a long way out before space travel is a commodity such that a large percent of those wanting to travel can afford to do so. The majority of air travel now doesn't compete on style of the vessel, does it?

gouranga4• 14 years ago

I'd rather spend the money replacing our fragile and short lived meat sacks first. Building massive space ships to sling us across the universe is a problem which only exists when we have meat sacks.

Voyager 1 and 2 have done well with ancient technology and no meat sacks.

MichaelApproved• 14 years ago

Continuing both themes, I'd rather spend the money to make us us Borg.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_%28Star_Trek%29

gouranga4• 14 years ago

Indeed. If you ever read Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, that's what we'll end up as at some point in the near future.

It starts with google goggles, proceeds to more integration and then becomes us.

I wouldn't say no to assimilation when I think about it.

pygorex3• 14 years ago

Agreed. The future of spaceflight belongs to engineered beings - be they artificial machines (androids), genetically-modified humans or some combination of the two.

jeffbcross• 14 years ago

Yeah, androids can endure the lengthy flights without getting bored...unless we make them too human-like.

dullcrisp• 14 years ago

You realize that building new meat sacks is a much more difficult problem than slinging meat sacks into space? It's like wanting to rewrite an entire operating system from scratch instead of fixing a difficult driver bug (terrible analogy, I know).

gouranga4• 14 years ago

Personally, I think that slinging meat sacks into space without breaking them or letting them rot is harder than building a new operating environment.

The meat bit isn't all that useful so we need to get rid of it. In fact it's a pain in the arse.

The thing that is superposed on top of the meat is the important bit, you know like CDs don't really matter but the data (music) does.

Imagine if you had 1000 hands that worked in -50oC to 300oC, another couple Tb of persistent state and a rewire which allowed you to do sequential calculations efficiently (rather than lots of useless parallel ones), oh and you never had to poop.

Tloewald• 14 years ago

Exactly right. Alternatively, if the meat sacks lasted longer, or could be stored for long periods of time, etc.

civilian2• 14 years ago

If we build a space elevator for 10-20 billion USD, it would bring down the cost of building the USS Enterprise (and really, all space construction) vastly. I think a space elevator is a better thing to build!

theorique• 14 years ago

Would a space elevator cost only $10-20B? Burj Khalifa, a half-mile high building cost $1-2B already. Hard to imagine a space elevator costing only 10-20x the price of the world's tallest building.

A space elevator would presumably need to use a range of as yet non-existent and/or unproven technologies (very long carbon nanotube ropes, etc).

civilian2• 14 years ago

Yeah. I think the 10-20b is based off of stronger carbon nanotubes. But I think we have strong enough nanotubes at the moment. However, the stronger they get, the fewer we have to use, and the cheaper it will be.

warfangle• 14 years ago

If you front-load the cost of a mostly-automatable construction of a space elevator (factory in orbit spitting out woven carbon nanotubes in opposite direction like a spider's spinnerets - this is almost definitely wandering into the realm of sci-fi, but maybe?), synthesizing the manufacturing components and launching them to orbit will be the most difficult part.

And if we can refine those materials from asteroids, that cuts the resource extraction cost as well - no need to ship it to orbit. (besides, what if the manufacturing technique for said carbon nanotube ropes require a weightless environment?)

There's even research into using the earth's magnetic field to generate electric potential this way.

Then of course there's the collision and weather and so on and so forth.

moconnor• 14 years ago

I love the idea that someone is dreaming this big; as others have said this is clearly a terrible way to go about space exploration, though.

Building X 'because we can' is never as good as building X 'because then we can do Y'. Planetary Resources have it exactly right - find an economic imperative to go into space, and ingenuity will follow.

WalterSear2• 14 years ago

Wow. There isn't even a space boom yet, and there's already a bubble for it.

existentialmutt• 14 years ago

What, no kickstarter page?

tomjen34• 14 years ago

Do there even exist a trillion dollar? I don't mean a trillion dollars worth of wealth, but a trillion dollar in currency (or even as deposits in banks)?

waiwai933• 14 years ago

Well, the US Gross Domestic Product is over $15 trillion, so presumably, yes.

fennecfoxen2• 14 years ago

The Federal Reserve can answer your money-related question! Let's go to their website and look at H6, "Money Stock Measures" - http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h6/current/h6.htm

According to this release, as of April 2012, the money supply measure M1 (currency + check-like thingies) consisted of $1707.9 billion, of which $1036.9 billion was actual circulating currency (not in vaults). So, yes. There is roughly $1 trillion USD currency circulating.

If you include savings-account-like thingies, M2, there is $9842.2 billion in money.

lumberjack2• 14 years ago

Personally I don't see us achieving anything close to pop-sci space exploration fantasies when four fifths of our species are still struggling to survive day by day.

tomjen34• 14 years ago

I used to think like you.

But we have been trying to solve that problem forever. It is not going to happen. Ever.

So might we not have fun as part of the 1/5 who make it to space?

lumberjack2• 14 years ago

You sort of misinterpreted my post. My fault though. My post was a bit ambiguous.

I wasn't implying that we should abandon all current space endeavours so as to focus on humanitarian causes. I wasn't even implying that we will never do any advancements in space exploration without first solving these socio-political problems. But I don't see the current first world countries and their resources as having the means to do what is envisioned in the article (which is a far cry from our current space programs).

And note that I wasn't only talking about the economic stratification. One fifth of the world might be in an economic condition where big space exploration would be feasible but do they have the right mindset, education and motivation? Are they willing to throw away their greed and nationalism and collaborate with the rest of the first world to reach another milestone? Do they even value such an achievement?

I myself am a great advocate of space exploration. I was merely pointing out some inefficiencies in our socio-political ecosystem that are holding us back.

sparknlaunch12• 14 years ago

Wow. This has been deeply thought through. I don't think the final design will mimic the fictional one, but certainty have to admire the passion. Hopefully some people with the money and the brains can get behind this.

Scramblejams• 14 years ago

> This has been deeply thought through.

It hasn't. Read tptacek's link to see why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4009591

tomjen34• 14 years ago

Thats only 3k for each american (roughly). Obviously that is a lot of money, but I doubt it is impossible to get.

Heck, assuming the funds are to be spend at a constant interval it is 150 usd/year. Which is a lot less than the wars have cost.

leeoniya2• 14 years ago

"The Gen1 Enterprise will be powered by three ion propulsion engines. These will provide constant acceleration, and versions of this technology are already used in spacecrafts."

to my knowledge they are used in spacecraft that can afford acceleration cycles that last several years and "rapid" maneuvers that last several months. ion engines produce very little thrust but for a very long time. i'm not sure how practical they would be for anything except a lifetime spent aboard a ship on a never-ending quest to reach somewhere distant.

rvkennedy• 14 years ago

Actually, a "long time" in space propulsion terms means more than a couple of minutes. The specific impulse of ion engines is sufficiently high that with sufficiently large engines, you would be talking weeks to get to Mars, rather than months by rocket.

leeoniya2• 14 years ago

well, there's this one under development http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17476-ion-engine-could...

which says a pound of thrust and Sun -> Jupiter (483 million mi) in 19 months and mars in 39 days (from earth i think). edge of the solar system is another 88.8 billion mi. that's a long time just to get out of the solar system.

i always imagined the USS Enterprise to be an interstellar ship. but it could work as a solar system taxi as well :)

horsehead• 14 years ago

will it have beaming capabilities? That's all i care for.

gojomo• 14 years ago

I believe the two largest items in the budget are:

$890 Billion - licensing fees to Roddenberry estate & Paramount

$67 Billion - overturning relativistic physics

hwillis• 14 years ago

Fun fact: that 100MW laser is in "cut the ISS in half in a fraction of a second" territory. 5KW lasers are used for cutting through 1/4" aluminum.

wtracy2• 14 years ago

And this guy still wants it to have one-minute sustained output. He hasn't provided anything that I consider a compelling reason for this.

zephjc• 14 years ago

Romulans

kaybe• 14 years ago

Lasers with a power this high only come pulsed as of now. Instead of continually outputting it "collects" and gives the radiation in short pulses (up to femtoseconds - 10^-15s), which, if you calculate the output (Energy over time), gives you the high numbers.

ddet• 14 years ago

Why don't you build a fusion reactor instead?

technomancy• 14 years ago

I eagerly await the inevitable arguments from TNG fans about why the NCC-1701-D design is superior for this purpose.

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

Isaac Asimov expressed an interesting view of the future development of space travel [1].

Basically, humans develop true AI first in the form of positronic computers/brains. Then, the AI figures out how to make Hyperspatial travel work, something humans had been unable to do.

Obviously we're nowhere near that yet, but one can dream.

1. http://literature.wikia.com/wiki/I%2C_Robot (search for 'Escape' or 'the brain')

guest• 14 years ago

didn't they finish this thing in the eighties?

pdonis2• 14 years ago

Has anyone found a calculation in the specs of whether the power requirements given are sufficient to produce the required thrust, given the total mass of the ship? Here's what I come up with (rough numbers):

Ship mass: 85,000 metric tons, or 85 million kg.

Effective exhaust velocity: 150,000 m/s (1 g, or 10 m/s^2, times the quoted specific impulse of 15,000 s)

This implies a power requirement of 75,000 Watts per Newton of thrust--half the effective exhaust velocity, since we're in the non-relativistic regime. For details, see for example here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_impulse

Thrust required: 1.7 million Newtons (quoted mass above times 0.002g, or 0.02 Newtons/kg)

Total power required for thrust: 130 billion Watts, or 130 Gigawatts, or more than 50 times the power quoted in the specs.

Am I missing something, or will this ship need 50 sets of reactors to power its engines?

pdonis2• 14 years ago

I have posted a comment in the Build the Enterprise forums here:

http://www.buildtheenterprise.org/forum/build-the-enterprise...

jamesflorentino• 14 years ago

This reminds me of those naive individuals wanting to develop games without knowledge whatsoever in the engineering and programming aspect of building one. Beat me up, scotty.

JabavuAdams• 14 years ago

This is stupid. The real thing is happening right now, but it doesn't look futuristic enough.

What we need in space now is infrastructure. Unsexy, boxy, gantried infrastructure.

Why can't I get HD video from the moon without pointing a 20m dish there?

madao• 14 years ago

I think we really need to look at this historically, the first sailors used smaller ships which were only able to follow the coast or travel short distances up rivers, further development in navigation and hull designs allowed them to cross the great depths even further. I think we are still in the Raft stage of space exploration, although it is a great idea, I think we need to work on those little steps.

Getting back to the moon and/or perhaps chasing asteroids seems much more practical at this time I don't think colonisation of mars will ever happen unless we gain the capacity to build bigger ships in orbit of earth, it just costs to much to get things up there. If we can solve the issue of getting basic materials and manpower into orbit and then set up supply lines that do not involve earth then we will be ready to start making caravels instead of rafts.

sevenstar2• 14 years ago

So we could have had 15 of these already ? http://www.usdebtclock.org/

toong• 14 years ago

Besides the technical and ideological objections, no one seems to be mentioning that 1 trillion USD just won't cut it ?

Those few new shiny F-35 Joint Strike Fighters will cost "an estimated $1 trillion to develop, purchase and support through 2050"

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/f35-budget-disaster/

And you expect to build the frickin' USS Enterprise for 1 trillion ?

Sapient3• 14 years ago

It really hard to imagine the entire trillion dollars went into the development of the F-35. Maybe it did, or maybe there was another secret plane developed at the same time...

yaix• 14 years ago

There is a DARPA financed project called the "100 Years Space Ship", that's the real Enterprice building project.

http://100yss.org/

Mission Statement: "100 Year Starship will pursue national and global initiatives, and galvanize public and private leadership and grassroots support, to assure that human travel beyond our solar system and to another star can be a reality within the next century."

bashzor• 14 years ago

If we're having trouble funding the Joint Strike Fighter, I don't see this coming "off the ground" any time soon.

simonh• 14 years ago

So after the ISS and Space Shuttle, what we really need is an inefficient, pointless white elephant to get things going again. Because those two other big pointless white elephants weren't big enough, or white enough. Or something.

What we need to get the public interested in space is realistic, achievable worthwhile goals. 'Building stuff in space' isn't a worthwhile goal in itself, hence the ISS is a waste of resources. Building rocket ships so they look cool isn't worthwhile either, hence the appalling inefficiency of the shuttle programme.

At last we're going back towards projects and goals that are based on actual honest to goodness good engineering, like capsules for manned space flight and Planetary Resources' sober plans for asteroid resource recovery. This is not a bad thing! The space cadets had their day and they blew it badly. Time for some proper commercial engineering to have it's chance.

Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD

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