I’m the same age, and actually I don’t think our generation is the problem. We’re only coming into our own now, in terms of influence. I blame the boomers. As a generation, they suck.
Our generation is turning back towards space. Opinion polls show support for space is high in the 25-54 demographic, and our billionaires are building spaceships.
Ours may be the generation that takes matters into its own hands and goes into space without NASA.
I’m in the same age group as Sam and levdrakon and agree. I hope Sam is right and we as a generation get our shit together and start things rolling again. I think Mars is important to go there for myriad reasons…but I think its VITAL that the US is involved in that effort either as the main driving force or at least as a main participant. JMHO of course.
-XT
In only 14 years, it could be a 2020s-style death ray! 
From a global perspective, there are some other problems like global warming that should take precedence. And from an American perspective, I’d kinda like to see us deal with stuff like national health care, getting our fiscal house in order, and getting us out of Iraq, before we take on another big moneyburner of a project.
Now THIS is cool shit. I personally find this a lot more exciting than landing men on Mars.
Well, I agree about Iraq and getting our fiscal house in order (you wouldn’t expect me to agree about national health care I’m sure 
). I’m assuming that eventually the pain will end and we’ll be out of Iraq and back on solid footing fiscally…our economy is strong atm after all and perhaps on another upswing.
I disagree that other things should be a priority…I think space exploration SHOULD be a top priority, though I agree this doesn’t necessarily mean Mars. I just want us to do great things…and I think Mars would be a great achievement, especially if they make the mission truely meaningful (or in other words…if they do it MY way 
).
Agree with both you and Sam on this…it IS very cool shit and I hope I’m around to see it happen.
-XT
One of the lesser-spoken-about problems with a manned mission to Mars is what would happen in the case of catastrophic failure, killing the astronauts; it would be a mission unlike any other, primarily because of the duration; people shrugged off or brave-faced the failure of Beagle not only because it was unmanned, but because, being unmanned, there was no reason to remain closely acquainted with its progress during transit.
A manned mission would be different - I would expect the crew to become global household names, and this can now happen in a multimedia sort of way that just wasn’t possible for the moon landings. By the time they get to Mars, there would be a lot of public emotional investment. If it failed, what would the backlash be like? It could trigger massive scaling back of plans and budgets that would reach much farther and wider than Martian exploration.
I agree a disaster would be bad publicity. But I would also argue humans are much better than computers at lots & lots of things.
During the 2004 Darpa Grand Challenge none of the computer-controlled cars could complete a 130 mile course through the desert.
I’m betting there are a lot of 10-year-old kids who could do it easy.
Had there been a highly trained & skilled astronaut pilot in control of Beagle, it probably wouldn’t have smacked into the side of a crater, or whatever it was that happened. Do we even know what went wrong? I’m sure a human piloted landing craft would have double, triple & maybe quadruple redundancies, etc. Something disastrous could still happen, but much less likely to happen with a human in control.
I don’t know… I could see it going both ways. It depends on what kind of people we have become. Are we sheep? Too risk-averse to tolerate failure without withdrawing into our shells? Or will we rise up, declare that those astronauts will not die in vain, and launch a grander expedition in their honor?
To be honest, I’m not sure. I’m scared that we have lost the spirit that existed in the astronauts of the 50’s and 60’s. We’ve become timid, and more interested in providing comfort and security for ourselves than taking risks and reaching outwards.
This is why I keep saying that having a frontier is healthy for a society. We need to stay in touch with that part of the human experience. If we stop exploring, stop testing our limits, and instead turn inwards and start gazing at our navels, we will begin to decline. I’m afraid that process has already started.
Burt Rutan has said that the problem with our space program today is that we’re not killing enough astronauts. He has a point - great achievements often carry great risk, and if you try for the achievements without the risk, you spend 100X more than you need to and take 100X longer. Back in the early days of the space program, military pilots and the early astronauts were killed regularly. Go back and look at the fatality rate in military test flight. The Apollo 1 astronauts were killed. Two astronauts were killed in training when they crashed their T-38. Other people who would have been astronauts were killed in test flight. The Apollo 13 crew was almost lost. In fact, the risk assessment of those first Apollo flights was grim, and everyone knew it. We got very lucky to only lose three Apollo astronauts. We knew the risk was there, but we went for it anyway.
Back then, when you strapped into an X-15, you knew there was a very significant chance that you weren’t coming home alive, and yet people did it anyway. And we tolerated it. Crashes didn’t make the front page of national newspapers, and we didn’t have days of mourning and we didn’t ground programs for years because of a technical malfunction.
If the death of a handful of people causes us to abandon our journey into space, that will say a lot about us as a people. Gone will be the meanest, toughest critters that ever lived, who rose to any challenge, who faced death for grand causes - replaced by quivering mice living in cushy homes and afraid to see what’s over the next hill.
Me too - but we should do both.
I don’t know what the theoretical limit is to space interferometry. I don’t know that there is one. With enough computing power and enough money, we might be able to build telescope arrays with effective apertures thousands or even millions of miles in diameter, and image details as small as buildings on planets orbiting other stars. I remember reading one of those ‘far out engineering thought experiments’ about an interferometry array based on satellites stationed in various points around Earth’s orbit, then using computing power to synthesize a synthetic aperture the size of Earth’s orbit. I don’t know if that’s feasible given what we know now about the structure of space, but that limit is pretty high. Maybe we’ll do something like that from earth orbit or moon orbit. These first interferometry missions are really baby steps.
Can you imagine the sensation that would be created if the Terrestrial Planet Finder finds a planet 10 light-years from here that is in orbit around a sun-like star, and shows atmospheric markers for vegetation or pollution? What would we do next? My guess is that we’d start immediately on a new generation of interferometry scopes to attempt to image the planet in greater detail, and we’d have radio telescopes all over the world trained on it trying to pick up any faint signals. It would probably also spur the development of propulsion technologies that might get a probe there within a couple of decades, or at least within the lifetime of younger people.
Nah. We might build bigger telescopes, but that’s it. According to RTFirefly, it’s more important to sit back and watch, then go out and do. There will always be global warming, and national healthcare, and Iraq. There will always be perfectly good reasons why we should just sit here where we are and it’s safe and familiar. The universe is scary, man! Let’s just stay home.
I did consider that it might spur us on to try even harder, but I fear it wouldn’t; not because we’ve lost the spirit, but simply because the arena for debate and discussion is much greater and more open now; in the (say) 18 months between launch and arrival, the public would not only be exposed to copious audio-visual detail about the mission (think Big Brother In Space), but they would have the chance to discuss and dissect it in minute detail, over and over again on TV chat shows, phone and text-ins, internet chatrooms and message boards, etc; plenty of time and opportunity for the negative elements to develop a complex and destructive ‘I told you so’ argument that might suddenly seem more reasonable in the event of failure; this additional to the shared public sense of massive disappointment. Of course plenty of time and opportunity for the others to discuss things positively, but in the case of large catastrophe, public attention (not to mention the attention of the media) tends to seek out those voices who say they saw it coming and nobody listened.
In the case of the moon landings, there was neither the time nor the opportunity for this sort of thing to occur and in the case of the recent robotic Mars missions, there was the time and opportunity, but not anything like the level of public interest and emotional investment (at least during transit) that there would be with a human crew.
I disagree. The first Apollo astronauts were household names. It took seven years for Apollo 11 to happen after Kennedy committed the U.S. to landing a man on the moon. Gus Grissom was one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, with his picture on the front page of Life magazine, back when everyone read Life. Ed White was the first person to walk in space. The Apollo 1 accident sent shock waves through America, but the reaction was, “Let’s try harder”, not “Oh, space is too dangerous for us!”
Just to toss out more data for consideration.
The current preferred mission profile (at least at the Goddard Space Flight Center) has the crew gone for about 900 days.
4-6 months in transit either way, and about 19-20 months on Mars. That’s the simple reality due to the necessary trajectories.
That’s up to 32 months of food, water, shelter, oxygen, and equipment they’ll have to pack into something.
The astronauts will be exposed to the gradually debilitating effects of the zero-g environment for two 4-6 month journeys, and need to be in condition to perform landing and/or self-rescue maneuvers at the end of that period. That’s what we have an ISS for. Underuse of the limbs results in calcium depletion in the bones, and, as of a few years ago, we didn’t have a full exercise regimen that could ensure that bone dissolution is kept to a minimum.
In between, they have to live in 1/3g for nearly two years, in a cold environment with 1/4 the sunlight (but a near-24-hour day, interestingly enough). No one has ever been exposed to such an environment for any length of time, never mind what is necessary for this mission. We have absolutely no baseline from which to guess what the physiological results could be. That why the ISS needs a centrifuge module, which we scrapped (as it turns out, the Japanese agreed to build it instead, which gives them more rights to the station, under the agreement that created it). However, the continuing problems with the shuttle have grounded it indefinitely.
Interesting topic, but you have left out the overriding consideration: How many frequent flyer miles will I get for this trip?
Straight-line distance? Will the orbiting earth miles count? Will there be space for my carryon or will I have to check it, etc…
You’ve missed or ignored my two main points - Yes, they were household names, but the flow of public information making this happen was mostly in one direction; from the top down - this simply isn’t the same today. Also, the duration of the project is significantly longer, so things have a much greater chance to build enormous tension, or turn completely stale - either would be bad if the mission was headed for failure.
Actually, I’ll rephrase that; you haven’t ignored my points, you just don’t appear to consider them significant; fair enough - it was never more than idle speculation anyway.