“OSIP is ESA’s website that enables the submission of novel ideas for space technology and applications.”
“Anybody is welcome to submit ideas through OSIP. The platform supports individuals who wish to contribute to European space research and interact with space industry experts. It also encourages ideas from legal entities interested in interacting with ESA and gaining funding or support for new research activities.”
I have plenty to submit to OSIP. The vision of Arthur C. Clarke in “The Promise of Space” was large human-crewed GEO platforms maintaining a global telecommunications network. It was always the logical and most efficient path but cheap and nasty and short-term profit have so far defeated any such construct.
Humans working in space in the interest of expanding our species into the solar system have always faced three obstacles: the profit motive, dosing and debilitation, and lack of political will. Gerard K. O’Neill correctly foresaw space solar power as the economic engine to enable space colonization. Evidence for ice on the Moon in 2010 solved the radiation problem by providing a source of shielding requiring 23 times less energy to lift into space than from Earth. The political will was always on the side of the DOD and the easy money of cold war toys.
Elon Musk has been the single biggest obstacle to any progress in space as he is a detractor of space solar power, made the Moon verboten for a decade due to his rocket not being able to transport any worthwhile payload there, and his starlink smallsat megaconstellation scam which has made Earth orbit the new get-rich-quick confidence game.
Weaponization of Earth Orbit and proliferation of small launchers. A very bad road to go down. Hand in hand with smallsat megaconstellations this is setting up a new cold war. All a scam. The smart move in any future conflict between peer adversaries is to wipe out all overhead assets with tungsten pellets. Like a “limited nuclear war” this preparation for space war is a farce designed to make billions of dollars for the defense industry- when and if it ever really happens it will all be wiped out in an hour.
Starlink is a slow motion disaster and never should have been allowed. The corruption and influence peddling that enabled it should be under investigation. Unfortunately it was the Obama/Biden administration that created the monster in the first place.
No thanks for spacex:(
Evidence for ice on the Moon in 2010 should have fundamentally changed the course of the space agency as it made a Moonbase practical. It was a tremendous development that was completely suppressed. The Falcon had zero lunar application and thus the Moon became a verboten subject for ten years. Musk then decided he was going to take over the planet by way of tens of thousands of pieces of space junk and that build-it-and-they-will-come flim flam became the new hobby project. There is no end to the damage a single “entrepreneur” can do if he has made the right back room deals. The worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.
The Falcon is a commercial satellite launcher, not powerful enough to launch the big spy birds and with little use for any deep space human missions. It is finally being used as an LEO taxi, as was promised so long ago, but the toxic dragon is a poor design and NASA made a bad decision to risk their people on it. Much like the shuttle. And the shiny is just a variation of the shuttle concept with many of the same bad design features.
In regards to Human Space Flight Beyond Earth Orbit (HSF-BEO) spacex has been the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. And the damage is accumulating. If not for Musk’s backroom deals and influence peddling the space agency would have redirected it’s focus from the dead end of LEO back to the Moon ten years ago (when evidence for water at the lunar poles was revealed).
Cheap and nasty is no insurance policy for the human race- and that is what space is really about. All the fanboys and “entrepreneurs” have increased the danger we will go extinct by distracting from the ultimate goal. But you and your gang have a loftier and more important goal: Going cheap and providing video gamers lower latency. I have zero respect for anyone gullible or twisted enough to support the NewSpace agenda.
It is all about going cheap and making a buck. The space age ended before it really started on the day of the Apollo 1 fire. Aerospace concerns realized any human space travel beyond LEO was going to be hard money and they went with the easy money of cold war toys. A good example is the F-104. Nobody really cared about all the pilots who died flying it. But three astronauts burning alive…see how that works?
If you are depressed about the con side of the profit motive then you should be in favor of state sponsored space exploration and not NewSpace.
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“The SLS development schedule continues to slip one year each year.”
Only because of those who wanted the ISS as their cash cow for decades (two decades so far) to come. It broke my heart and disillusioned many space enthusiasts when they killed Sidemount.
We would likely be on the Moon by now.
https://www.airspacemag.com…
And if you are wondering why there is no forum on the site I provided a link to it is because a certain Musk fanboy arch-troll threatened legal action against Air&Space magazine for not allowing his gang to harass and bully spacex critics. So that forum disappeared. Any forums that allowed people to criticize spacex are now low traffic because of moderators simply deleting the endless threads of trolling by Musk’s legion of cyberthugs.
And that is why, as I stated, I have zero respect for the misguided space clown wannabes and Ayn-Rand-in-space libertarian whack jobs who have bought into the NewSpace scam. The damage they have done to public opinion concerning space exploration is profound and unappreciated.
————————————————————————————————————————————————–And now my take on the Republics telling corporations to “stay out of politics.”
The right worships money as the god of this world. This is the simplest and most accurate way to explain the truth about our present culture and government. It is a case of that so accurate re-interpretation of the golden rule- those with the gold make the rules. In regards to our government the right is concerned with one thing above all others- to keep the rich from being taxed. The Republicans are accurately stating the fact that if corporations want to remain untaxed in the short term they should be supporting voter suppression. The corporations are not going along with it because their people are recognizing that if democracy dies then in the long run the resulting oligarchs will engage in a no rules battle that will cost all most of their wealth. The politicians on the right just want to keep their little kingdoms in power and the corporations do not care about that. It is an interesting study of individualism vs collectivism.
Ice on the Moon 