50 years of space travel - should we be further ahead?

Metalface Mark

Metalface Mark

Metalface Mark

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Next month see's the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight in Vostok 1.

The month after see's Al Shephard's Freedom 7 sub orbital 50th anniversary.

When you look at the history of flight, it took us 53 years to go from powered flight to launching the first satellite.

We are finally retiring nearly 40 year old technology after 30 years of use, with no credible replacement, the democrats have no interest in space at all unless its a public relations exercise (Clinton paying for the upkeep of Mir to help improve relations with Russia for example), and every time a republican president sets a challenge to Nasa and offers funds, the democrats remove this when they get into power (both Bush's set ambitious space plans).

It will be 40 years next december since Apollo 17, we achieved more as a world in 11 years than we have in the subsequent 40 and the technological advances we had as a result of that were immense, whats happened to our sense of adventure? We should be developing travel to mars and utilising the worlds resourses to get us there.
 
ofcourse we should be much further ahead but funding was cut.

america will regret it when china or india lead the way with space exploration
 
We should definitely be further ahead than we are, sadly though we have frittered away money on less significant stuff rather than backing space programs.
 
arknor said:
ofcourse we should be much further ahead but funding was cut.

america will regret it when china or india lead the way with space exploration
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Thats in essence what we need I think, China, Japan or someone like them to start making plans to go further.

Its crazy though, having seperate space agencies, there should be one central space agency for the planet and pool resources.
 
It's definitely a shame - I still find it hard to believe that the US landed on the moon years ago and it hasn't been done since. Makes me slightly disbelieve it happened at all...

As mentioned - with unlimited funds, the advances would probably be incredible. All this talk about Mars, I find to be slightly irrelevant as well - surely if we haven't even set up something on the Moon, we shouldn't be going any further yet?
 
Marky said:
It's definitely a shame - I still find it hard to believe that the US landed on the moon years ago and it hasn't been done since. Makes me slightly disbelieve it happened at all...

As mentioned - with unlimited funds, the advances would probably be incredible. All this talk about Mars, I find to be slightly irrelevant as well - surely if we haven't even set up something on the Moon, we shouldn't be going any further yet?
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Well that was the plan, to go back to the moon before going to Mars, but Obama scrapped it.
 
Rather than going back to the moon (get ourselves stuck into another mavity well). It would make more sense to start developing technologies and strategies to extract resources from the asteroids close to earth.

I would not stop future plans to settle permanently in the moon, but the only way to attract investment is to show that mining in space can be profitable.
 
the moon has he3 though which may be very important, the asteroids don't iirc.

also i think they found water in the moon which could reduce costs of other bases if you could farm it there and move it to the asteroid stations/mobile stations easier and cheaper than from earth.


atm mining metals from asteroids is a huge waste of time and would result in a product thousands if not millions of items more expensive than the earth mined stuff.

it would only be viable when we're building things in space as it would be easier than shipping it up, or when metal becomes so scarce we're recycling 100% of scrap and it's still not enough.
 
Russinating said:
The only reason we went to the moon was to beat the Russians.
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That wasn't the only reason, though it certainly was a consideration. The Russians put a satellite up first, and put a man in space (and indeed orbit) first. The USA was not about to see NASA lose the race to the Moon.

But the overwhelming reason to go to the Moon? Because it's there, because no-one had been there before, and because NASA could. And those are plenty good enough reasons to go do something. It's about time Congress told NASA to aim for something grand and give them the budget to do it - certainly a bit more than the US$19b, or less than 1% of the federal budget, that they pull down currently.
 
jimbob27 said:
Britain went to the moon?
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Theres no need to be faceacious.

JRS said:
That wasn't the only reason, though it certainly was a consideration. The Russians put a satellite up first, and put a man in space (and indeed orbit) first. The USA was not about to see NASA lose the race to the Moon.

But the overwhelming reason to go to the Moon? Because it's there, because no-one had been there before, and because NASA could. And those are plenty good enough reasons to go do something. It's about time Congress told NASA to aim for something grand and give them the budget to do it - certainly a bit more than the US$19b, or less than 1% of the federal budget, that they pull down currently.
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I think the other reason, JFK set the timetable for the end of the decade, had he not died it could well have been cut (actually it was quite likely it would have been cut given the US involvement in Vietnam at the time). It was certainly a unique set of events that set the ball in motion.
 
simulatorman said:
Work on space exploration has not stopped:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/516651main_NASA_FY12_Budget-Exploration.pdf

In fact a considerable amount is being spent:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/516684main_FY12_summary_Budget_Briefing_final_21411_rev1.pdf

It's worth reading the current stategic plan:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/516579main_NASA2011StrategicPlan.pdf

Money isn’t being frittered away, getting to Mars has been and is only one of NASA’s objectives.
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Its a good chunk less (in comparison with the apollo development years (63-68), if you factor in the polulation on the states in about 40% more, its a reduction from the golden years per head of about 180% spent.

I bet if Obama gets a second term, he will cut the budgets by a good few billion as well.
 
why not just put them in space?

you would need less panels (and less resources).

also the big beams coming back would be fantastically dangerous and getting international permission would be pretty much impossible because whoever has control of it has a nice big super weapon.
 
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