Why space stopped captivating minds ?

Space travel turned out not to be very fun. The rollicking exploration of pulp stories where you see new worlds and new creatures every week or every book was replaced by a reality of cold, dead, empty planets/moons. You need to travel weeks or months or years to get anywhere, and spaceships, instead of being comfortably elegant or adorably ramshackle with smuggling compartments are cramped, crowded, and require you to shit in a tube.

If/when space travel becomes a place for the very rich to vacation, such as on spacious air-filled moon-bases or on large space stations with artificial gravity, I think it might become exciting again.

I think this paper is relevant; on the whole, opinion polling indicated that, aside from a brief period after the moon landing, NASA was never popular, and the majorities almost always supported a smaller NASA. Meanwhile, there's still strong public support for some things- eg the Space Shuttles or a space station.

Peter A. Taylor (who seems to have occasionally read some LW/OB) has a few interesting essays on that on his home page:

• Why are space launch costs so high?

• Conflicting Visions of the Manned Space Program

• Where (in space) do we go from here? or Why do we have a manned space program?

I don't remember all the content of those essays, but the gist of what I remember is that we don't have a clear idea of why we want to go into space, and some of the goals (such as preparing space colonization) would be better served through other means (such as getting better at making self-sustained hermetic ecological systems, which can be done in a basement).

On an unrelated note, fans of space conquest might enjoy the song Fire in the Sky.

One story to explain it: Space filled a psychological niche for people, which something else now fills. A logical thing for that to be would be the internet and computers. For some of us who are hard core futurists, we also have far-future aspirations like life extension and uploading to concern ourselves with. It's not that we've given up on space, but it is less captivating because it competes with other interesting things now. With less enthusiasm for the topic on display it has subsided to one of many interests, of great concern for a few interested individuals but lesser concern for the population as a whole.

Interestingly, launch prices continue to go down and the specialists continue to accomplish amazing things. It is possible that a diminishment of far-mode thinking about the topic has actually lead to better business and pragmatic decisions than would otherwise happen. Instead of expensive moon shots, perhaps we will get there faster because we have private companies making millions by launching communications satellites and developing less expensive rockets.

The lack of human space exploration really doesn't help in terms of capturing the public's fickle imagination. Sending robots is just not as exciting, even to me. Additionally, NASA's failure to continue to show progress after the huge, dramatic victory of the moon missions was very bad, from a PR perspective. Many people feel that space is over, and that that chapter in humanity's history is closed. Which is very sad, because I think the moon missions were one of the best things we've ever done, as a species.

Phrase the question another way, why should we care about space?*

For our current space capability: There is nothing there we need. It is incredibly expensive to do anything there. The scientific experiments we can do there are of marginal interest.

For the longer term, it is hugely beyond our technological abilities, and the projected ones of the next hundred years assuming no singularity). Colonisation is a far off dream, whatever determines our survival as a species for the nex millennium will be decided on earth. And we are struggling with that right now.

*[Theres a phrase for this as a technique to reverse status quo bias isn't there?]

what happened to the space conquest spirit ? How did it disappear ?

It disappeared from government in the world recession of the 1970s. Since then the Space Age had to live on a budget.

I can just imagine the awkward situation of some of the last century's science fiction writers who have started to die off at fairly advanced ages since the 1980's, beginning with Robert Heinlein. They had made their livings decades ago by publishing stories premised on the idea that we live in a technologically successful manned "space age," yet in the real world they lived long enough to see that the "space age" effectively ended in the early 1970's. How does it feel to the still-living septuagenarian+ science fiction writers like, say, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven and Ben Bova, when they realize that they have outlived the basis of their careers by a couple of generations?

http://xkcd.com/893/

Self replicating (with remote human supervision) robotics for base on the moon is merely a very big engineering project. I'd say somewhere on the scale of modern operating system with the associated software (word processor, web browser, etc). Perhaps that plus the hardware and fab plant design, on the high estimate side.

But we have plenty of unused land and sea floor on Earth; the least hospitable place on Earth (excluding active volcanoes perhaps) is much easier to live in, than the moon.

Also, the practical uses of space have so far all been close to earth-- communication and weather satellites. Going to the moon-- let alone farther-- doesn't have any obvious payoffs.

In English, unlike in French, question marks (and exclamation marks, colons, etc.) aren't preceded by a space. Also, Apollo is spelt with one P and two Ls, and Cold War is usually capitalized.

Just wait until alien life (microbian or otherwise) is discovered, possibly on Mars or Titan, in 10 to 20 years.

I don't think the space conquest spirit was ever lost. It seems to me that science-fiction is still largely dominated by space tales. To the extent that enthusiasm has declined, it is largely a product of the stagnation in the technology. There is only so much you can do with chemical rocket engines, and anything beyond LEO (or, at best, the moon) is going to be massively expensive with little real-world payoff. The technology that could take us beyond the moon and inspire people to believe in space travel again would require nuclear engines, which are limited by a strong taboo and international and national regulations against fission devices in orbit.

I'm twenty and I feel like I missed the space conquest spirit completely. When I think about the scientific interests that appeal to my generation, I think that advances in health, computing, and sustainable energy seem far more important. I believe that we haven't really lost our need for conquest it's just moved into domain closer to home. The question now is, how can we improve life on earth? How can we extend life? How can we collect and analyze data in better ways than before?

I think that the decline of violence in the world may have something to do with this. Since there is less violence between nation states, there is less of an incentive for countries to show their dominance on an international level. This is just a guess though.

Because people get used to everything. Once antarctic expeditions attracted major interest, and now there is a base near south pole and most don't even know that it exists. That is normal way.

The space conquest spirit disappeared along with the conquest spirit in general. Without a great power struggle like the Cold War, the motivation simply hasn't been there do anything on the scale of Apollo again. This the great irony of the human condition that I as a Sith find so amusing: strife is the source of so much of our progress, yet "progressives" always strive to make peace. As Harry Lime put it in The Third Man:

“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Many of you are probably too young to understand that there has been a great cultural deconstruction over the past 50 years which has moved Western nations away from higher "imperial" visions toward more mundane ideals like equality, GDP growth, peace, technological progress and a hedonistic ethos. As Peter Thiel put it, "the hippies won," and the falling out of favor of von Braun, et al's "conquest of space" ideals was one of the first casualties of that defeat.

Old school civilization theorists usually associate the onset of liberalism with the declining or terminal phase of a nation, when it no longer has any strong ethos, vision or sense of collective destiny. Space could/should have been our collective destiny, but it seems that other ideas prevailed, and now we all may have to live in the ruins of that ideological failure. Meanwhile, in rising nations like China, the imperial spirit is returning and they are showing the kind of energy and cosmic ambition that the West had prior to our cultural deconstruction. Their space program is proceeding methodically according to a long-term vision, and there is no reason to doubt that they will own the Moon and Mars by mid-century. In my view, the West's liberalism and lack of a great enemy has been our undoing in space, and our democratic capitalism has been discredited as a system capable of sending mankind to the stars.

Since everything regarding space is so frickin' expensive (launch, engineering, software, manpower, training, materials...), the opportunity costs are simply too high for the expected short- to mid-term returns. You may ask yourself: what about the Apollo-Program? The 60`s spacerace was approved by politicians for signaling-purposes in competition with the USSR; such an external factor is currently absent.
With that said,on an optimistic note: a lot of people have held onto the dream of the final frontier and are exploring possibilities to reduce esp. the launch cost, eg. by starting rockets from flying boeings.

I remember hearing about the Challenger disaster. Probably a few minutes after it happened. I said to myself: ... looks like humans will never be on the Moon again. So, it will be no problem to "vonneumannize" it, when possible.

I haven't changed much since then, have you?