🚀 SpaceX is making a space Mayflower voyage possible

The massive decline in launch costs in the New Space Age is helping fulfill a famous thought experiment about asteroid colonization from physicist Freeman Dyson

NASA's Artemis program has spent nearly $100 billion without yet reaching the Moon, plagued by skyrocketing costs and a complex mission design. That’s why Michael Bloomberg comes quite close to arguing for cancellation — "rethink the program in its entirety" — saying Artemis and its pricey Space Launch System are unnecessary since robots can handle lunar tasks and SpaceX offers cheaper alternatives. As the billionaire puts it: "There are government boondoggles, and then there's NASA's Artemis program." Tough stuff.

In other words, not enough has changed with NASA since physicist Freeman Dyson of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study wrote an intriguing essay in 1977 comparing the economics of historical colonization ventures — the Pilgrims' journey to the New World in 1620 aboard the Mayflower and the Mormon migration to Utah in 1847 — with the potential costs of settling the Solar System. Dyson argues that establishing colonies beyond Earth could be made affordable by following these historical private models rather than expensive government programs like Project Apollo.