If we're having trouble funding the Joint Strike Fighter, I don't see this coming "off the ground" any time soon.
Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD
111–120 of 127 posts
Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD
#112Earlier 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.
The other ship on the front page of the enterprise web site the `skylon`, looks awesome, almost like it was designed by Apple compared to the current crop of 'beige box' rockets. Its design spec seems to put it in the class of space DC3 too.
Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD
#113There's a lot of negativity around this idea, and mostly for good reason. But if you peel away the "let's build the Enterprise!" specifics and think about the core of the proposal, I believe it is sound. A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s. The ships look the same, the suits look the same, the propulsion technologies look the same, and what's worse... w…
The public was not that excited about space in the 60s either. http://si.academia.edu/RogerLaunius/Papers/93299/_Public_Opi...
Perhaps not in the USA but in the UK everyone I knew was glued to the TV to watch the Apollo launches. Of course there was a big layer of Cold War propaganda added, but it was an exciting time.
Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD
#114Fun fact: that 100MW laser is in "cut the ISS in half in a fraction of a second" territory. 5KW lasers are used for cutting through 1/4" aluminum.
And this guy still wants it to have one-minute sustained output. He hasn't provided anything that I consider a compelling reason for this.
Lasers with a power this high only come pulsed as of now. Instead of continually outputting it "collects" and gives the radiation in short pulses (up to femtoseconds - 10^-15s), which, if you calculate the output (Energy over time), gives you the high numbers.
Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
What captures peoples' imaginations isn't the vehicle. It is the journey. Or, more importantly, the destination. The vehicle is just the can they sit in to get there. 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…
I agree, what we really need is to equip a Mars rover with a digital IMAX3D camera.
Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD
#116Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD
#117Besides the technical and ideological objections, no one seems to be mentioning that 1 trillion USD just won't cut it ? Those few new shiny F-35 Joint Strike Fighters will cost "an estimated $1 trillion to develop, purchase and support through 2050" http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/f35-budget-disaster/ And you expect to build the frickin' USS Enterprise for 1 trillion ?
It really hard to imagine the entire trillion dollars went into the development of the F-35. Maybe it did, or maybe there was another secret plane developed at the same time...
Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD
#118So after the ISS and Space Shuttle, what we really need is an inefficient, pointless white elephant to get things going again. Because those two other big pointless white elephants weren't big enough, or white enough. Or something.
What we need to get the public interested in space is realistic, achievable worthwhile goals. 'Building stuff in space' isn't a worthwhile goal in itself, hence the ISS is a waste of resources. Building rocket ships so they look cool isn't worthwhile either, hence the appalling inefficiency of the shuttle programme.
At last we're going back towards projects and goals that are based on actual honest to goodness good engineering, like capsules for manned space flight and Planetary Resources' sober plans for asteroid resource recovery. This is not a bad thing! The space cadets had their day and they blew it badly. Time for some proper commercial engineering to have it's chance.
Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. If you ever read Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near, that's what we'll end up as at some point in the near future. It starts with google goggles, proceeds to more integration and then becomes us. I wouldn't say no to assimilation when I think about it.
I remember a great comment from a talk by John Searle about the scariest way that this could happen. Imagine that you get just such an implant, and suddenly, you just feel woozy or tired, as if something is really going royally wrong, as if your consciousness is no longer really "in control." The Doctor starts the checkup and says "how do you feel?" and you internally think, "lousy! I need you to remove it, get it ou…
The short sf story Learning to be Me by Greg Egan explores this scenario. Well worth a read.
Re: Build the "USS Enterprise" in 20 years, for 1 trillion USD
#120Here's NASASPACEFLIGHT.COM making fun of this: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=28821.0
Fantastic final post: "Sci fi fans taking on NASA engineers is too funny, but also a waste of time. We deal with real hardware here. Locked." Bingo. The project is to build a very poorly designed spacecraft to perform a mission it's not well suited to for a ridiculously large sum of money. If we're going to build a spacecraft to journey to Mars, we shouldn't force it to conform to a 1960s fantasy hull design.
To be fair, the shuttle is also a 60s design... So much for NASA engineers.