31–40 of 127 posts
Ho Hum. What we need to do is sample return from the moon's north pole and see if there really is a glacier there!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. And that's why I think a lot of the criticism of the project is valid. The solution is to build something that captures the imagination. Something that LOOKS like a ship from the future. It doesn't have to be the Enterprise.
If you want to capture the imagination, you don't need a ship that looks snazzy. You need a ship that can safely and reliably take people to Earth orbit and back at a price normal people can afford. As long as space travel is the province of billionaires and test pilots only, nobody will care about it. What you need is a space DC-3.
That's what needs to be actually built, but it's not how human imagination works. To capture imagination, you make people watch this:
http://youtu.be/_yijcWsLda8?hd=1&t=9s
or this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7DEw70LVWs
You need to touch the heart, connect with people's desires, emotions and dreams they already have. And be it or not, Star Trek, et al. is something that is closer to general audience than another rocket. I'm not saying "let's build the Enterprise", but we shouldn't ignore the popular culture vision of space, because it's mostly Hollywood, not NASA, who drive the dreams. Let's find a way to connect to that.
BTW., to remind everyone, the very first Space Shuttle was named "Enterprise" for a reason.
If we are going to build a ship from fiction, we probably should start with the Discovery One from 2001.
Maybe this is a joke and I'm taking it too seriously, but doesn't the Enterprise run on antimatter? I don't think we're going to be able to manufacture antimatter in large quantities in the next 20 years.
I hate hate hate this idea. It's so very wrong headed. Yes, it'd certainly help bootstrap manned spaceflight. But I talked to someone who knows about these things and he told me a secret, no matter HOW you spend a trillion dollars on a space project you're going to do a hell of a lot to bootstrap spaceflight. We don't need this, it's silly, we should not be taking it seriously. We already have the technology and the…
Heck, assuming the funds are to be spend at a constant interval it is 150 usd/year. Which is a lot less than the wars have cost.
to my knowledge they are used in spacecraft that can afford acceleration cycles that last several years and "rapid" maneuvers that last several months. ion engines produce very little thrust but for a very long time. i'm not sure how practical they would be for anything except a lifetime spent aboard a ship on a never-ending quest to reach somewhere distant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to capture the imagination, you don't need a ship that looks snazzy. You need a ship that can safely and reliably take people to Earth orbit and back at a price normal people can afford. As long as space travel is the province of billionaires and test pilots only, nobody will care about it. What you need is a space DC-3.
> You need a ship that can safely and reliably take people to Earth orbit and back at a price normal people can afford. That's what needs to be actually built, but it's not how human imagination works. To capture imagination, you make people watch this: http://youtu.be/_yijcWsLda8?hd=1&t=9s or this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7DEw70LVWs You need to touch the heart, connect with people's desires, emotions and dre…
People (the vast majority, anyway) don't travel because they like to travel. They travel because they want to get somewhere. What excites their imagination is the thought of being at that place, not how they got there.
Part of the reason people aren't excited about space travel today is because there's nowhere to go. There's no orbiting low-gravity resort to vacation on, no Mars colony where Cousin Phil lives with his family to go to for Thanksgiving. And a big part of why those things don't exist is because getting people into space is a damn expensive and risky business, even today. If the only way to get to Disneyworld was to spend $20,000,000 and ride a thirty-year-old Russian relic, Disneyworld wouldn't exist either.
A cheap, safe and ugly ship would do a lot more to solve that problem than an expensive and beautiful one would.