31–40 of 50 posts
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It was nice to get an alternative to the idiocracy theory that we're getting stupider because stupid people are having more kids. That sort of thinking is doomed to turn a grave social problem into a two sided us-vs-them culture war.
People still look at me funny when I say I'd like to have 3-5 kids...
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yes. A moon base established by any one country would be a massive massive coup. Your on the very frontier of space and if you get a foot hold chances you will be at that fore-front for decades. From the economic perspective there is a massively lucrative tourist market to sell. And above all of that you have proof of the countries dominance over the earth. Some of their residents are literally untouchable :) EDIT: i…
All very vague. What is the actual strategic value in this? What would you be able to do that other spacefaring powers couldn't, and why would it matter in a strategic context? "Some of their residents are literally untouchable" It's trivially easy to stop shipments to the Moon. How long can a lunar biosphere last?
The moon project was given high political priority because of the cold-war impetus to outdo the Soviets. Substantial funds were devoted to the project and the goal itself was specific, symbolic, and achievable (as it turns out, though the underlying effort was obviously an amazing achievement).
Once that was achieved, nothing of comparable impetus has arisen in the space program to excite the public imagination in a similar way, and it is the public imagination that sways political decisions, not abstract judgments made in the name of advancing "science."
Average people may be largely ignorant of science but they like what it brings into a society even if they don't understand how it comes about. The American infatuation with "progress" for the past couple of centuries has largely been tied to a national pride over scientific achievements and nothing has changed in this area. A century ago, they were proudly boasting of Thomas Edison; today, they boast of Silicon Valley.
I would guess that it is not so much an antipathy to science that has caused politicians to pull back on the space program as it is a general loss of focus in that program that has caused the public to look at it with apathy. No public support. No political support. No political support. No "billions in funding."
The appallingly low level of scientific knowledge in the general population is real but is likely not (in my judgment at least) the cause of this particular phenomenon. The author does make his point with great vigor, though, and the piece is fun to read.
because there are only a few shuttle missions left. After that, nada. Nothing. Zilch.
True, there are only a few more shuttle missions(http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle). However this isn't the end of manned space exploration, check out the Orion spacecraft(http://www.nasa.gov/orion/). NASA recently tested MLAS(http://www.nasa.gov/centers/wallops/missions/mlas.html).
Oh sure, NASA talks about designing a space plane- but they’ve been talking about designing a space plane since before Neil took his ride- and I ain’t seen one yet.
NASA has worked on this, many pilots of the X-15 qualified as astronauts, though I would not consider this a space plane either. Several Single Stage to Orbit ships have been built(none of them coming close to orbit)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-stage-to-orbit).
NASA isn’t going back to the moon, not any time soon.
Bah! Constellation program, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Constellation)
It bothers me that posts like this with such misinformation exists. Does NASA not have enough publicity to get this information out there?
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The problem is that they worry foreign companies will muscle into the picture. Imagine if China landed the first Moon Base in 2020 and was wellestablished there before the US even landed another astronaut. Highly unlikely BUT the fear is there - and with that fear comes the other one; strategic habitation of the Moon establishes something of a superiority over other countries. Summary: the US govt. will guard NASA as…
Can you think of any strategic value to the moon? I can't.
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I can think of a few. There's supposedly fuel on the moon. He3, if I'm right. You'd be much more easily able to control space (orbital space), because you'd have fabrication plants on a place with about 1/6 of the gravity, making escaping that gravity much, much easier. It would bring you a lot closer to the goal of space colonization. Plus, lasers.
What advantage does the moon give to fabrication plants other than, say, building fabrication plants directly in high orbit as space stations?
The author seems to be a bit misinformed. because there are only a few shuttle missions left. After that, nada. Nothing. Zilch. True, there are only a few more shuttle missions( http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle ). However this isn't the end of manned space exploration, check out the Orion spacecraft( http://www.nasa.gov/orion/ ). NASA recently tested MLAS( http://www.nasa.gov/centers/wallops/missions/mlas.html ). Oh sure,…
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I can think of a few. There's supposedly fuel on the moon. He3, if I'm right. You'd be much more easily able to control space (orbital space), because you'd have fabrication plants on a place with about 1/6 of the gravity, making escaping that gravity much, much easier. It would bring you a lot closer to the goal of space colonization. Plus, lasers.
What advantage does the moon give to fabrication plants other than, say, building fabrication plants directly in high orbit as space stations?
2) There is evidence that there is water and oxygen on the Moon. Again, it is cheaper to collect these on the Moon and send them out to the orbital factories and space-based solar collectors than it would be to do so from Earth.
Good article, but I disagree with his future shock theory. I happen to have grown up in Eastern Europe. When communism fell you had a flood of new technology pouring in. The society, from a technological point of view, was leapfrogging tens of years in a matter of months or short years. He had computers, color TVs, calculators, more TV time than ever before, all the electronic appliances you can think of, and so on.…
Case in point: cellular phones. I remember when they first came out, first the wired-in car phones, and then the "bag phones" with the lead-acid batteries. And almost immediately you had a class of people saying "I hate those things, I'll never own one." Anyone older than 20 or so can remember a lot of backlash as phones started to get smaller, cheaper, and more popular. Very few of those people are still without cell phones. A few holdouts here and there -- I know a couple, we all do -- but fewer and fewer every day. The vast majority of people who initially rejected the technology as being too disruptive were brought around, sometimes grudgingly, into accepting it. The same story repeats itself over and over with many new devices or technologies.
We tend to vastly underestimate our own ability to deal with change, even very disruptive change. The whole concept of "future shock" was a manifestation of this underestimation; it didn't happen this way.
The explanation for the failure of the US space program, I think, is much more simple and is put forward in one of the comments to the linked piece: during the Cold War, Americans were content to spend large amounts of money on Apollo, in order to beat the Soviets to the Moon. Without that competitive aspect, public interest disappeared.
People are simply not as willing to spend money on pure exploration as they are on a meaningless competition between nations.
If you could frame the current space program in some sort of nationalistic, competitive terms -- perhaps versus the Chinese? -- people would probably be interested again. But since the public perception is that the US "won" the space race, and that nobody is currently that close (although the gap is narrowing), large investments like we saw in the past are simply not on the table.
The author seems to be a bit misinformed. because there are only a few shuttle missions left. After that, nada. Nothing. Zilch. True, there are only a few more shuttle missions( http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle ). However this isn't the end of manned space exploration, check out the Orion spacecraft( http://www.nasa.gov/orion/ ). NASA recently tested MLAS( http://www.nasa.gov/centers/wallops/missions/mlas.html ). Oh sure,…
Ares and Constellation are dead, except in name. The NASA budget has been reduced to a level that is incompatible with completion of the program. I've read NASA insiders acknowledging this on semi-public message boards.
See this, for example: http://www.spacepolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/grif...
> But work at the staff level continues out of view of the nation’s elected leadership, and in the recent passback to NASA from the Office of Management and Budget, the news is not so good. After a small increase this year, Exploration Systems at NASA goes down by $3.5 billion over the next four years. When combined with earlier reductions of almost $12 billion during the Bush Administration, well over $15 billion has been extracted from the Exploration Systems budget in the five short years since the new space policy was announced. Funding for lunar return in the Constellation program was already less than $4 billion in the years prior to 2015. This was to be allocated to early work on the Ares 5 heavy‐lifter, and the Altair lunar lander. With only a half‐billion dollars now available, this work cannot be done.