2AC – Cap Good – Space

Thiessen ‘20 – writes a twice-weekly column for The Post on foreign and domestic policy. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. (Marc A., "SpaceX’s success is one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism," Washington Post, 6-1-2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/01/spacexs-success-is-one-small-step-man-one-giant-leap-capitalism/, Accessed 1-6-2021, )

It was one small step for man, one giant leap for capitalism. Only three countries have ever launched human beings into orbit. This past weekend, SpaceX became the first private company ever to do so, when it sent its Crew Dragon capsule into space aboard its Falcon 9 rocket and docked with the International Space Station. This was accomplished by a company Elon Musk started in 2002 in a California strip mall warehouse with just a dozen employees and a mariachi band. At a time when our nation is debating the merits of socialism, SpaceX has given us an incredible testament to the power of American free enterprise. While the left is advocating unprecedented government intervention in almost every sector of the U.S. economy, from health care to energy, today Americans are celebrating the successful privatization of space travel. If you want to see the difference between what government and private enterprise can do, consider: It took a private company to give us the first space vehicle with touch-screen controls instead of antiquated knobs and buttons. It took a private company to give us a capsule that can fly entirely autonomously from launch to landing — including docking — without any participation by its human crew. It also took a private company to invent a reusable rocket that can not only take off but land as well. When the Apollo 11 crew reached the moon on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong declared “the Eagle has landed.” On Saturday, SpaceX was able to declare that the Falcon had landed when its rocket settled down on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean — ready to be used again. That last development will save the taxpayers incredible amounts of money. The cost to NASA for launching a man into space on the space shuttle orbiter was $170 million per seat, compared with just $60 million to $67 million on the Dragon capsule. The cost for the space shuttle to send a kilogram of cargo into to space was $54,500; with the Falcon rocket, the cost is just $2,720 — a decrease of 95 percent. And while the space shuttle cost $27.4 billion to develop, the Crew Dragon was designed and built for just $1.7 billion — making it the lowest-cost spacecraft developed in six decades. SpaceX did it in six years — far faster than the time it took to develop the space shuttle. The private sector does it better, cheaper, faster and more efficiently than government. Why? Competition. Today, SpaceX has to compete with a constellation of private companies — including legacy aerospace firms such as Orbital ATK and United Launch Alliance and innovative start-ups such as Blue Origin (which is designing a Mars lander and whose owner, Jeff Bezos, also owns The Post) and Virgin Orbit (which is developing rockets than can launch satellites into space from the underside of a 747, avoiding the kinds of weather that delayed the Dragon launch). In the race to put the first privately launched man into orbit, upstart SpaceX had to beat aerospace behemoth Boeing and its Starliner capsule to the punch. It did so — for more than $1 billion less than its competitor. That spirit of competition and innovation will revolutionize space travel in the years ahead. Indeed, Musk has his sights set far beyond Earth orbit. Already, SpaceX is working on a much larger version of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket called Super Heavy that will carry a deep-space capsule named Starship capable of carrying up to 100 people to the moon and eventually to Mars. Musk’s goal — the reason he founded SpaceX — is to colonize Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species. He has set a goal of founding a million-person city on Mars by 2050 complete with iron foundries and pizza joints. Can it be done? Who knows. But this much is certain: Private-sector innovation is opening the door to a new era of space exploration. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, just as capitalism is allowing us to explore the farthest reaches of our solar system, Americans decided to embrace socialism back here on Earth?

Happens by 2050s---solves every impact BUT degrowth disrupts progress

Drake '16 – a science journalist and contributing writer at National Geographic. She earned an A.B. in biology, psychology, and dance at Cornell University, worked in a clinical genetics lab at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, then returned to Cornell for her Ph.D. in genetics and development. (Bynadia, "Elon Musk: A Million Humans Could Live on Mars By the 2060s," Science, 9-27-2016, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/elon-musk-spacex-exploring-mars-planets-space-science, Accessed 6-10-2021, )

In perhaps the most eagerly anticipated aerospace announcement of the year, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has revealed his grand plan for establishing a human settlement on Mars. In short, Musk thinks it’s possible to begin shuttling thousands of people between Earth and our smaller, redder neighbor sometime within the next decade or so. And not too long after that—perhaps 40 or a hundred years later, Mars could be home to a self-sustaining colony of a million people. “This is not about everyone moving to Mars, this is about becoming multiplanetary,” he said on September 27 at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. “This is really about minimizing existential risk and having a tremendous sense of adventure.” Musk’s timeline sounds ambitious, and that's something he readily acknowledges. “I think the technical outline of the plan is about right. He also didn’t pretend that it was going to be easy and that they were going to do it in ten years,” says Bobby Braun, NASA’s former chief technologist who’s now at Georgia Tech University. “I mean, who’s to say what’s possible in a hundred years?” And for those wondering whether we should go at all, the reason for Musk making Mars an imperative is simple. “The future of humanity is fundamentally going to bifurcate along one of two directions: Either we’re going to become a multiplanet species and a spacefaring civilization, or we’re going be stuck on one planet until some eventual extinction event,” Musk told Ron Howard during an interview for National Geographic Channel’s MARS, a global event series that premieres worldwide on November 14. “For me to be excited and inspired about the future, it’s got to be the first option. It’s got to be: We’re going to be a spacefaring civilization.” Mars Fleet Though he admitted his exact timeline is fuzzy, Musk thinks it’s possible humans could begin flying to Mars by the mid-2020s. And he thinks the plan for getting there will go something like this: It starts with a really big rocket, something at least 200 feet tall when fully assembled. In a simulation of what SpaceX calls its Interplanetary Transport System, a spacecraft loaded with astronauts will launch on top of a 39-foot-wide booster that produces a whopping 28 million pounds of thrust. Using 42 Raptor engines, the booster will accelerate the assemblage to 5,374 miles an hour. Overall, the whole thing is 3.5 times more powerful than NASA’s Saturn V, the biggest rocket built to date, which carried the Apollo missions to the moon. Perhaps not coincidentally, the SpaceX rocket would launch from the same pad, 39A, at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket would deliver the crew capsule to orbit around Earth, then the booster would steer itself toward a soft landing back at the launch pad, a feat that SpaceX rocket boosters have been doing for almost a year now. Next, the booster would pick up a fuel tanker and carry that into orbit, where it would fuel the spaceship for its journey to Mars. Once en route, that spaceship would deploy solar panels to harvest energy from the sun and conserve valuable propellant for what promises to be an exciting landing on the Red Planet. As Musk envisions it, fleets of these crew-carrying capsules will remain in Earth orbit until a favorable planetary alignment brings the two planets close together—something that happens every 26 months. “We’d ultimately have upward of a thousand or more spaceships waiting in orbit. And so the Mars colonial fleet would depart en masse,” Musk says. The key to his plan is reusing the various spaceships as much as possible. “I just don’t think there’s any way to have a self-sustaining Mars base without reusability. I think this is really fundamental,” Musk says. “If wooden sailing ships in the old days were not reusable, I don’t think the United States would exist.” Musk anticipates being able to use each rocket booster a thousand times, each tanker a hundred times, and each spaceship 12 times. At the beginning, he imagines that maybe a hundred humans would be hitching a ride on each ship, with that number gradually increasing to more than 200. By his calculations, then, putting a million people on Mars could take anywhere from 40 to a hundred years after the first ship launches. And, no, it would not necessarily be a one-way trip: “I think it’s very important to give people the option of returning,” Musk says. Colonizing Mars After landing a few cargo-carrying spacecraft without people on Mars, starting with the Red Dragon capsule in 2018, Musk says the human phase of colonization could begin. For sure, landing a heavy craft on a planet with a thin atmosphere will be difficult. It was tough enough to gently lower NASA’s Curiosity rover to the surface, and at 2,000 pounds, that payload weighed just a fraction of Musk’s proposed vessels. For now, Musk plans to continue developing supersonic retrorockets that can gradually and gently lower a much heavier spacecraft to the Martian surface, using his reusable Falcon 9 boosters as a model. And that’s not all these spacecraft will need: Hurtling through the Martian atmosphere at supersonic speeds will test even the most heat-tolerant materials on Earth, so it’s no small task to design a spacecraft that can withstand a heated entry and propulsive landing—and then be refueled and sent back to Earth so it can start over again. The first journeys would primarily serve the purpose of delivering supplies and establishing a propellant depot on the Martian surface, a fuel reservoir that could be tapped into for return trips to Earth. After that depot is set up and cargo delivered to the surface, the fun can (sort of) begin. Early human settlers will need to be good at digging beneath the surface and dredging up buried ice, which will supply precious water and be used to make the cryo-methane propellant that will power the whole enterprise. As such, the earliest interplanetary spaceships would probably stay on Mars, and they would be carrying mostly cargo, fuel, and a small crew: “builders and fixers” who are “the hearty explorer type,” Musk said to Howard. “Are you prepared to die? If that’s OK, then you’re a candidate for going.” While there will undoubtedly be intense competition and lots of fanfare over the first few seats on a Mars-bound mission, Musk worries that too much emphasis will be placed on those early bootprints. “In the sort of grander historical context, what really matters is being able to send a large number of people, like tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people, and ultimately millions of tons of cargo,” he says.

Extinction

Britt, 1 -- Senior Science Writer (Robert Roy, Space.com, “The Top 3 Reasons to Colonize Space” http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/colonize_why_011008-4.html) // DCM

It's no secret. Sooner or later, Earth's bell will be rung. A giant asteroid or comet will slam into the planet, as has happened many times before, and a deadly dark cloud will envelop the globe, killing much of whatever might have survived the initial impact. "We live on a small planet covered with the bones of extinct species, proving that such catastrophes do occur routinely," says J. Richard Gott, III, a professor of astrophysics at Princeton and author of "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe." Gott cites the presumably hardy Tyrannosaurus rex, which lasted a mere 2.5 million years and was the victim of an asteroid attack, as an example of what can happen if you don't plan ahead. But space rocks may not be the only threat. Epidemics, climatological or ecological catastrophes or even man-made disasters could do our species in, Gott says. And so, he argues, we need a life insurance policy to guarantee the survival of the human race. "Spreading out into space gives us more chances," he says. And the time is now: History instructs that technological hay should be made while the economic sun shines. "There is a danger we will end the human space program at some point, leaving us stranded on the Earth," Gott warns. "History shows that expensive technological projects are often abandoned after awhile. For example, the Ancient Egyptians quit building pyramids. So we should be colonizing space now while we have the chance.">