RIP, gentlemen.
One has to wonder if, in today’s world, we would have ever made it to the Moon.
Probably not. The ridiculous dangers that we put these guys through would be politically impossible today, IMO. I think it was Grissom who said that the space race was worth the risk of death (prophecy of a dying man?). He may have been right, but I’m not sure anyone would have gone along with it today.
An alternative interpretation would be that without the Cold War hysteria, everyone realizes its kind of pointless.
Nope, I’m pretty sure that they’d find a way to end up in Iraq instead.
There is no evil superpower competing with us on even technological terms in the way the Soviets were. I don’t think that should diminish the achievement that was made. We made it to the moon and during the process we lost very few lives (none in space itself) and made some technological leaps and invented a lot of technology that is still in use today.
I do think that Heinlein was right though, and that the future of space exploration will probably lie in private industry. Once businesses realise the profit to be made out there, it will start to happen, and is already happening.
Yeah, you really have to recall the difference in the political environment back then. When Russia announced they had put a satellite in space, before us, in an era in which people were building bomb shelters and both nations were racing to have the most nuclear weapons pointing at each other, the Cuban missile event, etc., the U.S. was in a panic. The thought of the USSR having satellites orbiting over us with cameras (or death rays ;) - but weapons was a real concern) and being ahead of us was scary. The two superpower nations sprinting to get ahead of the other in the space race.
Today, even a techie like me, someone who watched all the launches from Mercury 1, wonders if we’re really gaining our money’s worth from shuttle flights.
I’m hoping China will push us back into space.
Stop posting.
The meek shall inherit the earth, the rest of us will go to the stars.
That’s the only thing on the near horizon I can see that will really kick our space program back into gear. China does seem to be making significant progress in space, although we can certainly coast on our laurels for quite a while before they come even close to us.
They say it’s not very dense-- looks kind of like it could be an exit wound.
I understand the reasoning behind this thought, but I seem incapable of sharing it. Getting off this planet and putting humans on another sphere seems to me a transcendent achievement, something in which the whole species can take pride and inspiration. And if (however unlikely it may be) some descendant of our intelligence exists when, millions of years hence (or perhaps sooner?), the earth ceases to be a friendly harbor for life, then we will have had to begin the process of learning how to go elsewhere; and why not begin it in 1969?
One can of course argue that the resources spent on manned spaceflight could have been spent on eliminating poverty, curing disease, and so forth. I can’t really dispute that point, but I can point out that many of the great cultural and scientific achievements of humankind were in part achieved because energies were directed to those things that might instead have been directed to the immediate necessities of the moment.
It’s just very hard for me to view the moon missions as a bad thing. I am probably contaminated by all those Star Trek episodes I watched as a kid. I can’t claim to approach the topic from an entirely rational perspective.
edit: changed “all” to “many.” :P
I get a hardon for spacetravel as much as the next geek - but pray tell, what did we get out of going to the moon? (and please don’t say teflon, Velcro and ICBMs).
Bless you, sir.
The moon travelers were trailblazers. The trail they blazed has lain idle for a few decades now, but that is soon to change. Those original travelers transformed science fiction – a cosmic dream – into reality, permanently deepening humanity’s sense of itself as able to realize nigh anything it can conceive.
One or two hundred years from now, when humanity is spreading through the solar system and making plans to travel to the stars, people will still be looking back on the first moon voyagers and remembering them as the first footsteps on what will ultimately be the greatest venture humanity – and possibly, for all we know, life itself – has ever undertaken.
Simply put, the moon voyages made history, in its truest form.
It was an amazing tactical achievement, technically, in support of a totally pointless strategic goal.
It’s also obscenely expensive and provides no benefits at the moment. You could just as easily put “living forever” in that sentence; somehow I doubt you’d argue it’s a good idea to spend billions and billions of dollars on steps to achieve that with no payoff for hundreds and hundreds of years. That’s the thing I don’t get - medical research goes to stuff that’ll provide benefits now or very shortly. Manned space exploration goes for…fuck, I don’t know. Inspiring people to do it far in the future, when there’s an actual point, and they probably won’t need inspiring what with it then being viable and all?
As far as I know, it’s flat-out impossible at the moment to establish a self-sustaining off-planet species reserve in case of Earth getting hit by a civilization-ending meteor or something. Spend all you want on research to change that, but I don’t see any point in manned missions establishing it still doesn’t work. They’re effectively extremely low ROI PR to get more manned space program budgets.
The technology for even an extremely rough version of the Red Mars series is, what, 100 years off at least?
You would think this argument would have died out after Magellan and Columbus…
The technology for even an extremely rough version of the Red Mars series is, what, 100 years off at least?
Much less than that. You could start now, easily. It’s a matter of will.
Of course, if you don’t actually try to do it, the answer isn’t X number of years off, it’s never.
Now, by and large NASA’s manned space programs have never been about advancing humanity into a spacefaring species, and that includes Apollo. But that’s a whole different matter entirely.
Lino, trying to colonize Mars right now, to continue the example I was using, is ludicrously impractical. We can build literally nothing of the essential stuff described in Red Mars necessary for a self-sustaining colony, much less do it in a cost-effective manner. Automated self-replicating factories, to take one, are blue-sky at the moment. You could make a colony entirely reliant on periodic drops from Earth at some obscene cost, but what’s the point of that?
It’s not a “matter of will”; if it was, we could do it if we decided to want it badly enough. We flat out can’t. We could redirect our entire society to researching that stuff, and maybe we’d be ready in fifty to one hundred years, but that’s not the same thing.
Not really; you can wait around until the private sector gets you nearly to the tech you need. Everything necessary to colonize Mars but a few spaceship-specific items will be probably invented by the private sector over the next century or two. Private sector spaceflight make take care of the rest too; I don’t know.
You are jumping to the end without the beginning.
Colonizing Mars does not require starting with a self sufficient colony.
Making a colony self sufficient does not require terraforming.
Reducing cost to LEO and establishing a permanent manned orbital presence makes such an endeavor practical.
Not really; you can wait around until the private sector gets you nearly to the tech you need. Everything necessary to colonize Mars but a few spaceship-specific items will be probably invented by the private sector over the next century or two. Private sector spaceflight make take care of the rest too; I don’t know.
We better have a backup-plan in place before that level of technology comes to pass. I’m not rosy of the odds.
It is going to happen, it’s just not going to be by NASA.