I’m 23. I like to believe that I will be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere (enter space) sometime in my life for a practical amount of money. Does anyone else think they will be able to do the same thing in the next 50-some years?
I’m sure that after the first rocket-to-space, everyone felt the same wishful thinking. But now it’s not so silly. Who knows, by the time I’m 40, there may be workers living on Mars.
I just hope it will happen. If I die without going into space, I was born in the wrong time for sure.
By the time you are 40 social security will have played out, Global warming will have started to cause serious trouble, and resource depletion due to overpopulation will be resulting in conflict, disease and massive migrations. Barring the discovery of a simple method to extract energy from the vacuum, practical antigravity or some similar advance it’ll be a hundred years or more before any Government or corporation has the excess cash needed to build the superstructure needed to get people up there in significant numbers. Can you honestly see the Feds increasing NASA’s budget for a Mars mission at the same time e.g. Texas is turning into a desert, or private industry exhibiting the vision needed to plant a base on Gaspra ? Without that sort of investment we will all remain here at the bottom of the local gravity well.
actually, in a not-so-hard-to-believe world, I do see more attention given to space programs than is healthy. The more we get into it, the more we discover we can do, and the more lust for expansion we will have.
There’s the Earth-first people, and then there’s me. I say dump the Earth, build a comically collossal spacecraft, and send the world’s best on a fantastic journey through space to find a larger, more welcome world to start over on with the new precautions we are already aware of. May the virus spread.
no really, I don’t see it as bad as you do, squink. The economic gap between the superpowers and the otherwise dying countries will continue to widen, but the pursuit of space expansion will not fall in. Science is gaining ground, far as I can see.
Did anyone catch the Discovery article that shows Bernoilli’s Principle wrong?
Yeah, sorry, it’s a privilege to live in such “interesting times”. Someone will probably come along and solve the traveling salesmen problem in linear time, or disprove the Riemann hypothesis or something that’ll change the world in ways that the average Joe in the blue states will never even begin to comprehend, but it’s just depressing as all get out to see our leaders rushing to apply the old set of solutions to the new set of problems. If we choose wisely in the next decade or two you MIGHT get into orbit by the time you’re 60. If we choose poorly, you might just get your behind blown into orbit by a Pakistani suitcase-nuke smuggled across the Mexican border.
Gorbachev offered Reagan the opportunity to go to Mars in the late 1980s as a joint US-Soviet manned expedition, but Reagan rejected it.
Without sufficient impetus, such as the Cold War, it seems unlikely this will happen anytime in the future, unless the Chinese mount a trip to the Moon. That would put the cat amongst the pigeons.
In respect of near Earth travel, space tourism for those of us who aren’t multi-millionaires is still a way off economically. Apparently whatever we put in orbit has the same value per kilo as gold. I know I’m worth my weight in gold, but my credit card doesn’t. Bummer.
Forgive me Evno, but I don’t see a different question.
I fail to see where this is any different than “When will commercial space flight be feasible?” It has been shown that $20 million can get you into space (Tito), but that hardly qualifies as commercial or a practical amount of money. The qualifier of “space travel like TRANSIT, or SERVICES” didn’t appear until the last post.
yeah, I know, forgive my inabilities to say what I mean.
Here’s what I mean.
Back before people rode trains, they rode horses. When trains were invented, people were scared of the idea, saying your face would surely peel off at 30 or 40 MPH.
But people got used to it, and it became ho-hum.
Then there were cars. A car would travel at, probably, a decent 50-60 MPH, and that scared people as well, but not as bad.
And they got used to it, and it became ho-hum.
Then planes. Planes were fast. People were scared. They seemed impossible, and impractical.
And people— you know.
OKAY — maybe “regular person” space flight won’t happen in my time (in a ho-hum way), but I really do believe that when I’m about 65, I’ll be able to pay a couple hundred bucks to bounce out for awhile.
It’ll be more of a vacation or thrill ride then, but it’s really only in a couple lifetimes that we’ll all be riding space buses and cosmic jets with a “rather read the paper than look out the window” attitude.
Just a reminder, folks… This is the forum for facts. Speculation about the future is fun and all, but it’s awfully hard to find cites for it. Unless anyone else can find some facts here, I (or manhattan) will probably be moving this thread over to IMHO within a few posts.
