281–290 of 649 posts
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That was the pinnacle. Now we're too busy with wealth extraction and making a couple of dudes ever richer.
Eh, the future of space travel and exploration is very bright.
This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.
I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover from this event and restablish communication.
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There are many, many unmanned missions happening now making amazing discoveries. Cassini was nothing short of mind blowing. I'm somewhat sympathetic to your claims, and I wish more people were intellectually curious, but there are very likely more people in absolute numbers performing scientific research now than ever.
I'll believe it when I see it. For now the Voyagers are the only thing out there that are expanding our envelope of influence, everything else is just data and will eventually evaporate. Think about it from a non-solar system perspective. Nothing we've done since Voyager has had any effect outside of our solar system and if we don't change our attitude it is quite likely that nothing ever will. Everything else we've…
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Eh, the future of space travel and exploration is very bright.
There remains a fairly good chance that Voyager will be the last surviving thing in the universe made by humans. It may not be our pinnacle, but it might be our legacy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_l...
"Even though Voyager 1 travels about a million miles per day, the spacecraft will take about 300 years to reach the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud and probably another 30,000 years to exit the far side."
I have to hope that in the distant future we will hopefully have spaceships that will pass voyager still traveling along in space, doing its thing as a relic to us early space traveling humans.
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Looks like once you escape earths orbit at 11km/s, you still need another 30km/s delta-v to then escape the solar system
Why do we need any additional speed to escape the solar system?
One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the following quote written: This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. I get chills everytime I think about this. I hope we can recover from this ev…
How is it possible to still be able to get a signal from a spacecraft that's so far away? How can the antenna be directional enough while still being pointed right at the Earth? How do we remove the noise?
https://www.space.com/22787-voyager-1-signal-interstellar-sp...
A long-distance glitch The mission team first noticed the issue November 14, when the flight data system’s telecommunications unit began sending back a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes, like it was trapped in a loop
Poor little guy voyager! must’ve hit the age of our little historical diorama. Very Truman show.
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I'm not so sure about that. Humanity is turning ever more inward and education is getting worse and worse with the peak somewhere in the 1950's. If we have a bright future in space travel none of the countries with launch capability today look like they will be the ones driving it.
I don't see where you're getting this from? It's so blatant that things are only improving, the US is running so many high profile missions, SpaceX alone has launched almost 100 times this year, Starship testing is proceeding well, we're reasonably on track for a long term human presence on the Moon, we're gradually preparing for Mars, China is managing to maintain its own space station, India is closing in on its ow…
> SpaceX alone has launched almost 100 times this year, Starship testing is proceeding well, we're reasonably on track for a long term human presence on the Moon, we're gradually preparing for Mars, China is managing to maintain its own space station, India is closing in on its own crewed spaceflight capability, South Korea achieved orbit last year and so on.
Yes, we had all that and then some. Somewhere between the 60's and the 80's we took a detour and since then we've been losing momentum ever faster. I'm not one of the believers in Elon Musk, his Mars Colony is just a way to get people to do what he wants them to do. China has so many internal issues that I highly doubt they will be able to sustain any long term efforts and India may well be the future, though it would have to deal with a lot of internal problems as well if it is to happen. South Korea 'achieved orbit' on a SpaceX rocket, not by their own power.
You can label all of this as progress and in terms of volume launched into space it is impressive, but it doesn't move the needle in terms of actual progress towards anything much larger. It's like the software people with 30 times one year of experience, we're getting really good at redoing the years between 1939 and 1969. But we haven't progressed to 1990 even once. 1977: peak humanity.