Senate The Final Frontier: 2013 no space, ship no moon base.

What a disappointment my fellow space enthusiasts. Well I assume you are space enthusiasts because…well Star Wars right? The Shuttles have been decommissioned with no replacement, the international space station is…up there. I am unsure what they are doing but despite being on the frontier of human achievement, they don’t have a reality T.V show!

On the bright side Russia is keeping the dream alive with their Soyuz-TMA (That sounds naughty!) space craft. While the USA peppers the solar system with probe, after probe (that sounds dirtier than intended)

What went wrong? We were supposed to have moon bases by now, but all progress of manning the final frontier has come to a screeching halt. Sure maybe the Indians and the Chinese will pick up the baton and lead humanity into the future but what happened to the adventurism? What happened to the dream of space? The Space shuttle appeared in a Bond movie, it may have been a lackluster Machine but people were enthused by it! It seems like America stop caring, and I haven’t the foggiest idea why?

 

What happened? The economic crisis, and limited resources.

Once there's an economic benefit to space exploration/colonization, we'll go back. There's plenty of time.

It will be interesting to see how the two Asteroid Mining Companies go, which are going to start busines within a few years. If they're highly successful, we'll be back in no time.

 

I had a really long, angry rant that I was about to post, but I'll keep it short and sweet:

Because we're drowning in debt; the planet's a social and ecological mess; and because there isn't an ongoing antagonistic relationship going on between the two largest countries in the world, both eager to prove that they have the biggest penis better space program.

And, incidentally, there was always a large contingent of Americans that did not approve of the space program, that isn't a novel development caused by a "lack of ability to dream" or whatever it is entitled nerds like to call it this week.

 

The Planet has been an Social and Ecological mess for a very long time, dispite our debt we feild a military bigger than the combine forces of the next 5 runners up. And while yes a Large contigent of americans do not approve of the space program, there is a large contingent of american who always dissaprove of something the government does or funds, and it has not stopped them before.

 

Even without the economic crisis, the wars, the environmental mess and the aging population, it would take us decades to get the technology to build a moon base or go to Mars or whatever. Anyway as robotics technology matures, it should get cheaper to send probes into space, which would mean more missions.

Speaking of the moon base idea, what benefit would it be for us to build one? What purpose would it serve? Even if we found deposits of rare earth minerals and were able to extract it and process the ore, do we actually have a spacecraft that could lift a sufficiently large enough payload off the surface of the moon? We sent a massive rocket into space to land this puny thing on the moon, and if the next lunar lander is anything similar in size then there's not going to be any economic benefit to going to the moon.

 

There are many more reasons why NASA didn't follow up the Space Shuttle program with something more awesome; I think what had the most impact is that two of them exploded.

Still, fifty-two nations have space programs. One my fellow countrymen, André Kuipers, spent half of last year in space. ESA went into a joint venture with the Russian Space Agency, and launched Soyuz-2 rockets from Africa and South-America.

There's a NASA rover running around on Mars. An ESA rover is to follow in 2016. Both Japan and Russia plan to have a moon base by 2030. A probe to investigate the polar regions of the sun will probably be launched in three years. And good old Voyager has just left the solar system.

Many of these projects may not find their way into the public eye, because they revolve around scientific projects or communication projects rather than planting flags, but it seems to me the era of space cooperation is more constructive than the space race.

 

Truthfully? proof of concept, You would be suprised what industrialization of orbit could do for the world.

Polution? Its space. It's not the enviroment we rely on. You can't just ditch stuff that would be a hazard to navigation, or that would fall back to earth. But you could use all the chemicals you want.

Free energy, Solar panels could provide industry with all the power it needs, Heat dissapation panels radiate excess.

new ways of smelting, or material construction. Gravity effects everything metals, polymers, even ceramics. how does steel forged in micorgravity compare with steel forge in a graviational field? No clue. But it dose promote alot of high concept ideas that have a possiblity of payoffs. Not just esoteric cosmic study.

 

asteroid shield. ASTEROID SHIELD

GET IT DONE, PEOPLE

 

Sometimes I feel like 10+ years of typing on this subject has gone to waste.

 

I think everyone is going to have to deal with the fact that humans will never traverse the stars. It's just not going to happen.

 

Yeah, unless we somehow invent a warp drive we're not going anywhere. We've got a perfectly good homeworld, so let's focus on keeping it in good shape.

 

A moon base would be sweet. We should focus on matters closer to home but keep an eye out toward the stars just in case something happens

 

I'd point out that we have something in the works to follow up the shuttle. It's not being built by NASA, but it's still happening with NASA's involvement. When SpaceX gets things going well enough for manned travel, then we will have a vehicle to get into space again. I don't see it any different from how Lockheed-Martin and Boeing build things.

 

Given your Star Trek nature, captain Sisko agrees with you.

 

lmao, I was JUST listening to one of Sisko's lectures to his son in DS9 a minute before clicking on this thread.

 

And if it does happen, it will be a very long time from now. And we're going to need more motivation than uninhabitable lifeless rocks. Even the most optimistic educated people respond to "Can we get a human to Mars?" with "Yes, but it would be very difficult even with the feasible technologies that are on the horizon. Oh, and there's a bunch of stuff we currently have no solution for, like dissolving bones in zero-gravity environments. That's bad. And most people don't deal well with being cooped-up in a metal tube for a couple years."

 

Since first contact with the Vulcans will occur on April 5, 2063, that means Zephram Cochrane is 5-6 year old boy at this point in time. So we need to find out where he lives and keep him alive so that he can fulfill his destiny 50 years from now.

 

You know, it's much more realistic for him to have been named something like "Cameron Cochrane" or "Mason Cochrane" rather than that futuristic sounding name.

 

Aren't the Borg supposed to come from the future to stop first contact from happening? Yeah, gotta prepare for that too.

 

I hate to tell people this - genuinely, actually, because it is kind of disillusioning - but the space program of the Cold War era had approximately zip to do with man's burning desire to explore new frontiers and push the boundaries of human knowledge. It was basically all about the Americans and the Soviets each being afraid that the other would find a way to put a nuclear missile launch platform in space with which to rain down atomic destruction upon the other, and trying to be the ones who got to that point before the other one did. Anything else you got told it was about was basically just all bullcrap PR spin and rhetoric. Sorry, but that's just the harsh reality of the situation. As the threat of nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union diminished in the glasnost era, and then finally disappeared altogether, the real driving force behind the space program evaporated. And so it just kind of sputtered out, and is unlikely to come back.

Sorry, but that's the way it is.

 

It takes alot to make me feel down...sniff. You just did....sniff you have broke my maiden heart!

But I still Believe in humanity (shakes fist at air)

 

All the accomplishments in space exploration that happened during the Cold War would have happened anyway eventually because they were all very low hanging fruit. Per VLM's post, the energy cost of lobbing things into space is prohibitive. Beyond that, being in space for long periods of time is extremely unhealthy for humans. You could solve a lot of the health problems through a brute-force approach of lobbing all kinds of stuff into space to help deal with those health problems, but we haven't and aren't going to, because the cost is prohibitive.

And so we've did all the things in low earth orbit worth doing and made the quick and dirty trips to and from the moon that were relatively inexpensive, and we did them all going on half a century ago, and we haven't accomplished anything meaningful since, because everything else is too expensive.

 

Well, it's an old question - does mankind advance most through cooperation, or through competition?

In an ideal world, the answer would be the former; in the real world, the answer is the latter. A large number of the technical advances we've seen over the past two centuries have come out of military competition - either direct conflict, or of the Cold War variety. Most of the rest have come out of business competition - usually of the hard-nosed capitalist variety.

We human beings are what we are, and it's our motivations that make us.

 

And no rules for proper comma use, apparently.