New Space Age

Interesting article in Wired magazine about the new generation of space entrepreneurs. In particular it talks about Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, and his ambitious plan to get us into orbit (instead of the boundaries of space as Burt Routan has done).

Possibly one of the reasons we are not on the moon and on Mars is that space travel has, since its beginning, been left in the hands of NASA.

Since Gordon Moore recognized that the number of transistors on a circuit at similar cost doubled roughly every 2 years, we have come to expect massive increases in computing power on a year by year basis. Storage, though less noticed, has also undergone a similar revolution. 2 years ago, i bought a 1GB memory stick for $100 approximately. It is now possible to get a 4GB memory stick for $50 (an 8 fold increase in 2 years).
Computing could have gone the direction of space travel if the government had been in charge. 60 years ago the Eniac cost around $5 million (in today's currency). The US government was just about to launch an ambitious program to develop better and more efficient nuclear warheads and the need for computational power would by necessity increase. If they had decided that computers were a national security issue they could have set up an agency to handle computation. Civilian computation needs would be satisfied by the state agency. Today we probably would have had machines considerably more powerful than the Eniac but only a handful of them, each of them costing a fortune and probably taking up entire warehouses (this is often the case in science fiction books from that era). Only the biggest corporations would have been able to afford time on them.
Space travel went down the state controlled route and computing went down the entrepreneurship route. Needless to say, there is no Moore's law for rockets. If there were, today we could be vacationing on Mars, sipping a pina colada under a thin plastic dome at the foot of Olympus Mons.