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Sat 18 Oct, 2003 11:34 pm
Every time we shop at Walmart the Chinese warchest for a lunar base gets a boost; dont believe me? Try and buy a pair of shoes that's not made in the Peoples Republic.
We are the failed generation, history will look back and call this world wide lull in manned space activity as the equivalent of the dark ages in the design and production of manned space vehicles.
We don't have an answer to the British French Concorde in aviation circles(expensive and too small to be practical)but it pointed to a future that no civil aerospace firm in America ever claimed. What a shame! Materials, computer modeling , rapid prototyping and finite element analysis and other advances since the 60's and yet none of the major players or their investors seem to have been able to translate that into a practical design. Mock-ups and test beds are everywhere.. funding is spent and projects shelved or moth balled for lack of a viable commercial design.
NASA for all of the money the American taxpayer has given them has failed, they have failed to educate and build any sort of public interest in the future of manned spaceflight. Time after time they have proven themselves unresponsive to public requests for the re-imaging of certain features on Mars. Arthur C Clark has looked at images of Mars and comented that the objects on the images" look like banyan trees on earth".
NASA instead of targetting Cydonia and other anomolous locations on Mars for Rover exploration seem bound and determined to look anywhere else..ignoring, Arthur C Clark, Richard C Hoagland and their various engaged and interested constituents (of which I am one).
The arrogance of the high cabal continues and as we watch the Chinese prepare to go to the moon, with a moon base planned.. My question for NASA is: What have you been doing for the last 3 decades? Have you designed a heavy lift rocket using all of the advances available?
Mars has been waiting and we are waiting.. we want a manned mission to Mars... but maybe a long duration Lunar mission needs to be undertaken as proof of concept first.(Mars Direct would be better but we'll take what we can get)
The privately funded X-prize competition has placed the ball into the private sector's court. A ballistic sub orbital toss into space with a 14-day turn around before repeating the same sub orbital flight again. While it may capture the world's attention briefly, it should also focus attention on NASA's lack of progress in the development of manned space flight abdicating leadership and ceding the vanguard to the private sector.
We need to be manufacturing in orbit, the things we need to colonize space.. how can we do that without reliable , cost efficient launch systems? We have had 30 years..Its time to bring things to a halt and take a serious look at where we have been, where we want to go and what its going to take to get there.
Salute the past and then grasp the reins and lead on to the future. First a launch system less complex more efficient, second an expanded space station committed to the building in orbit of technologies in support of manned Lunar and Mars missions. La Grange points, Space Elevators and more unmanned missions would have to wait.
We need to get control of the monolith that is NASA and all of the funding that it uses and start directing the development in a War time footing effort to make a manned mars mission a reality within THIS decade or you can wait another 30 years for nothing to happen.
I challenge NASA to prove me wrong... show me where, when and how we are going anywhere.. show me the plans , the launch vehicles and the ability to get things done
The moon missions took a decade, you have had 30 years lead-time from the word go. You have 5 years now.. show me something .. anything I can believe in... We have all been waiting for far too long
Personally I think the only reason we went to the moon was to beat the Russians. The Chinese are not, and will likely never will be considered to-the-death enemies like the Russians were. In fact, with Globalism and transnational business more powerful than regional government, there will probably never be enmity between nations of similar technical levels, war being reserved to keep smaller powers from taking their place on the stage. Lacking that competition the US can not find the imagination and backbone to stay with the space race. Basically we are nation looking to make money, not spend it, and the exploration of space requires a lonnnnnnnng view. Our vision seems to give out just past our noses, where our eyes focus on the bottom line.
Big dumb cars, pop tarts and violent Science Fiction movies are more important to Americans than the greater universal progress. I think the true exploration of the universe will have to wait for the century or so it will take for local governments to become finally powerless, when live in a unified world just because there was no place else to go, and no more justification for war.
Patience.
A Canadian musician Bruce Cockburn
has a song called " Waiting for a Miracle"
One of the lines is "how come the future takes such a long long time"
I watched man walk on the moon on a black and white television in the United Kingdom and I have been waiting for the next big leap ever since. By the time the word TV means HD PLASMA displays and market penetration of the same is 80% then maybe just maybe ... NASA will be ready to do something.
I grew up on Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury,Poul Andersen. The space elevator concept looks really doable on paper but whether any one will step up to the bar and commit the funds and develop it.
Bill Gates are you listening? Paul Allen?
Patience.
Actually I don't think the elevator is terribly doable. Looks reasonable on paper but I think the real life engineering would be a nightmare. On top of which, it lifts to geosync points, which, closest at hand exist in the overly energetic Van Allen Belt, so the upper floor and a good deal of the last leg of it had better be seriously shielded or it will not be a safe zone of biologicals such as we.
Not to say the principle doesn't have an application, just to say it's not as immediately executable as optimists would like.
However, I think there are tons of related concepts, and god knows what technology is just one link from coming into being. The real challenge is to get the folks that just can't see the benefits of any of this (a sad majority) to take enough interest for space exploration to spark properly.
Now if China actually puts a base on the moon in the next decade, that may get some competition going... particularly if they find an economic advantage (mining or whatever) employing a magnetic sling to get the goods away from the moon and bringing the wealth home down the earth's gravity
well on the cheap.
Who knows. Hope I live long enough to see all this really take off.
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