Saw The Martian over the weekend, great movie from beginning to end.
On the topic of space travel, this is something I wrote on another forum, which seems appropriate here:
We're not going to the stars. We've shown no desire to even go to the MOON since I was a kid.
I'm a child of the space-age, I remember watching Neil Armstrong step onto the moon on a little 12" B&W TV when I was six. At least half the toys I played with were space-related (Major Matt Mason, little army-man style astronauts, even my GI Joes were astronauts).
We were going to Jupiter before 2001 (Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick said so!). We went from the very first heavier-than-air aircraft to standing on the MOON in ONE lifetime.
If you asked me in 1972 (the year of the last trip to the moon) I'd have told you (assuming we didn't all die in a nuclear war) that by the time I graduated college in 1985 we'd have permanent bases on the moon, that we'd have been to Mars and we'd be working on going there to stay, and we'd have begun exploring the other planets.
Now it's been decades since we've had a human beyond low-earth orbit.
I'm not sure what happened to a species that once looked at the blank spots on a map and said "I want to stand THERE, or die trying!" And make no mistake, if we ever re-ignite the space program people will die. When you're riding the bleeding edge of technology to send people places they've never been before, sometimes things go wrong. When things go wrong at multiples of the speed of sound it imparts forces beyond what the human body can take. Or it sends them places they can't return from.
Yeah, but now we've got free healthcare, yo!* Who needs to go to outer space?
*Your healthcare experience may differ from what was portrayed.
I hope you're wrong, Mark. I've been interested in space since having some kind of mock Shuttle manual when I was a kid. Velcro on a Swiss Army Knife to stick it to things? Cool!
I just finished reading "Packing for Mars." It doesn't go much into what is required for a trip to Mars, other than to say "This will be really hard, now look at our experiences from Mercury through Apollo." It rarely talks about the Shuttle, and a little about ISS.
It really made me realize how difficult everything is in zero gravity. From not showering to pooping, it all becomes a challenge. I'm hoping that we can soon have some better advances in either artificial gravity to make life easier, or in heavy lift/propulsion to get us there faster with nicer things. If we can lift the equipment, living on Mars becomes easy. It's getting there that's the problem.
Anything can be solved with enough money, but I'm betting on having the problem solved by SpaceX, not NASA.
What was the book where a bunch of motivated redneck engineers welded fuel tanks together to make a rocket ship to get to Mars?
We'll actually go to Mars when someone - not a government - says "F*** their rules, we're going! And there's not a damned thing they can do to stop us!"
And then does it.
If we wait for governments to do it, our grandkids won't even get there.
Arthur C. Clark, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein would collectively take a massive shit on the pussies in Congress who've de-funded and hamstrung NASA to such a waste of skin and oxygen, and the NASA administrators who've f***ed it harder than a pubescent Korean virgin in a Japanese Army comfort house.
"There are four types of homicide: felonious, accidental, justifiable, and praiseworthy." -Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
As I see it, the problem isn't that we lack the money, or the tech, or even the WILL to go there.
The problem is that we've become so damn risk-averse that we won't even try something if it's possible someone might get hurt.
In one of his videos Bill Whittle talks about the early days of jet aircraft, and how many test pilots were killed so we could have safe, efficient passenger jets today. Now NASA is so afraid of killing astronauts that their mission has been changed from "Going to space!" to "Make Muslims feel good about their contributions." Better NOT to go rather than risk another monument in Arlington.
I have my suspicions on why we've, as a society, become so risk-averse.
Here's another thread where I wrote about it as well.
I highly agree that we need to take risks. If it was Planet GunCounter, we'd have already launched folks to the Mun and farther for permanent colonization. And not just the people we don't like, either. But we also need to convince the voting...I suppose I'll call them idiots...the voting and/or Congressional idiots that this is a GoodThing.
MarkD wrote:As I see it, the problem isn't that we lack the money, or the tech, or even the WILL to go there.
I dunno - bad, baaaad things happen to humans during extended stays in microgravity.
Then there's the issue of food, no resupply on that long ass voyage.
Can it be done? Sure. But it would cost staggering amounts of money, and not really net us anything that the probes already have sent back, at a fraction of the cost.
HTRN, I would tell you that you are an evil fucker, but you probably get that a lot ~ Netpackrat
Describing what HTRN does as "antics" is like describing the wreck of the Titanic as "a minor boating incident" ~ First Shirt
HTRN wrote:Can it be done? Sure. But it would cost staggering amounts of money, and not really net us anything that the probes already have sent back, at a fraction of the cost.
I would disagree. There is plenty of value to the human race to be had from proper space exploration, apart from, and maybe even in addition to, money. Consider that the Apollo programme arguably kicked off the computer revolution, for example.
If space exploration provided us with the tools and knowhow to develop space solar power, for example, or nickel-iron asteroid mining, or... and on and on.
