Well, that’s perfectly true, and kudos to you for taking on the job. But the thing is, it’s been done quite a bit here, and attracted some real nutcases. So some folks may be a bit wary of taking on the job.
Check out this ten-page tinfoil hat party.:eek:
In 1999 our local newspaper printed a short piece each day that had been written by subscribers. The series was titled “Remembering the Century” I submitted a piece about the moon landing and it was printed.
http://www.cjonline.com/stories/072699/mcc_people.shtml
And yes, I am still in awe that this was done. If NASA would send another “civilian” into space I’d go. All I would ask would be a 50/50 chance of getting back, the experience would be worth the risk.
Let’s face it, it doesn’t seem as impressive if you grew up hearing about it. Even I was born after the moon landings. While I admire the accomplishment, what’s even more amazing is that nobody has gone back to the moon since before I was born. I grew up thinking that commercial space flights were only a few years away, and that I’d eventually be able to move to a space colony. It’s rather dissapointing to see NASA still flying the same Space Shuttles I saw when I was 5 years old.
It frustrates me every time I think about it; we were just getting good at going to the Moon, when we pulled back, and we’ve been afraid to venture beyond low Earth orbit ever since.
So here’s my plan: China is trying to get into space. We help them send a cheapy, crappy little robot to the Moon, which rolls all over Tranquility Base and knocks down the American flag. If that doesn’t get us back, I don’t know what will.
scr4, those aren’t the same shuttles: they just look the same. Sorry if I didn’t make this clear before, but they are vastly more sophisticated than the first one. As a vague analogy, take a look under the hood of a car, superficially, the engine looks and works about the same as it did 40 years ago (there are more wires and pipes, but the basic mechanics are the same). But there’s billions of dollars of research and improvements in the latest car engines. Not the same engines, at all.
Bryan Ekers, there’s no intent the space station be used to refuel missions to other planets. Trust me, I spent years working on (insignificant) parts of its design. The “refueling” idea came, in part, from Von Braun, and his ideas in the 1950s about getting to the Moon and Mars. The concept was somewhat reasonable given the assumption there were going to be constant manned flights, (even impromptu manned flights!). Nowadays, the strong preference is to launch the whole payload at once.
Perhaps it would be more practical in the future to have automated factories on the moon construct the spacecraft and launching facilities, then have a crew shuttled to the moon and launch from there, where I would imagine the escape velocity would be considerably lower
Yes, I do know that it would take energy to get fuel/raw materials up there, but what about using railgun/supergun technology to launch non-human things into orbit?
In many ways the most amazing thing is that it took only 66 years between the first plane flight and the trip to the moon. Considering the gigantic difference in technology and distance between the two, it’s an amazingly small period of time.
Also considering that genetics and IT are far more advanced today than aviation in 1903, you wonder what the next 50-60 years will bring in those areas.
In late 1999 I read an article about what people in 1899 would have thought about our progress over the previous 100 years. The article said that they would be less amazed that men had landed on the moon in 1969 than that we had lost interest less than ten years later.
Haj
Good points, all, Incubus, CyberPundit, and haj.
Using the moon for mining and manufacturing is a very attractive idea. If we actually had found massive amounts of water at the poles, there’d probably be missions planned for the moon, right now. As it is, we need to get a little further with automation before taking advantage of the moon’s low gravity makes a difference. Rough guess, between 15-40 years.
Kennedy “pushed” things by making the moon missions a competition with the Russians. Unfortunately, there weren’t sound scientific/economic reasons, so when the competition disappeared (that is, when it became clear the Russians weren’t about to invade the moon), it suddenly became obvious to just about everyone that what we’d accomplished was completely out of scale with its value.
Although they mostly keep it out of the press, there’s been a huge argument at NASA for decades about whether manned space flight have any purpose at all, right now. I know one of the astronauts, and their motivation is essentially from “The Right Stuff”: this person is incredibly competitive, who sees being an astronaut as winning a big contest. While this person is extremely intelligent, they really don’t care whether machines could do their jobs better.
An amazing technological feat, but manned spaceflight is one of the great boondoggles.
The future is not in sending people into low-Earth orbit (which is all we do now) or even to the moon and other planets. There will never be a reason to do so other than “because it is there.” Colonization doesn’t make sense unless it is forced because anything people could be doing out there, machines could be doing better.
All that said, if someone offered me the chance, I’d be there without a second thought; I don’t know that I would require even the odds that Baker asked for.
Amen. There were people alive who, when children, though man would never fly in heavier-than-air craft. Many of these same people lived long enough to watch the moon landing.
I find that just utterly phenomenal.
The way things are going, the moon landings may turn out to be a one-shot event. 300 years from now, people may look at our era as ‘that time when people went to the moon’. I’m worried we’ll never go back.
The really amazing thing isn’t that man walked on the moon, but that 33 years after the event, we are farther away from being able to do it again than we were when Kennedy first announced that a man would land on the moon within ten years.
Sam, I take it that you know NASA was asked in the 1980s how long it would take to go back to the moon? The answer was 20 years. That honest retort got a considerable reaction! The reason given was that the organization had become ineffective, and filled with bureaucrats.
The fact that we walked on the moon still amazes me too.
The fact that a huge asteroid cruised past the Earth a few weeks ago and missed us by a mere 75,000 miles without anyone noticing until it passed, amazes me also.
To me they are the same Shuttles - except for the Endeavour, they are the same airframes with the same names. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the basic capabilities such as turnaround time, launch cost and payload capacity haven’t changed significantly. And I don’t think automobiles are a valid analogy - automobiles from 40 years ago were already mature technology, and improvements since then have not been very visible or substantial. The same can’t be said of the Shuttles.
I’ve reserved 75% of my hero-worship supply for astronauts, particularly the ones that went to the moon and the ones that will go to mars. It is the most awesome thing that’s ever happened. The importance of it doesn’t necessarily lie in the practicality of it, but the opportunity for man to spread his wings and realize dreams. It’s the shit!
Here’s a site describingshuttle upgrades. It mentions, for example, three major engine redesigns.