Posted on 10/21/2017 5:21:41 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Without the Crown’s investments, and most importantly “the top secret eyes only and SAP” maps they gave him he would have gone nowhere.
So any private investments are largely irrelevant to his voyage.
Please allow the rest of us to explore, if staying home and paying bills is your thing.
China will take the high road under the newly formed dictatorship of Xi Jinping unless the US government gets serious again about manned space exploration.
Yes.
We can use the moon (16% of earth’s gravity) to assemble the components for large deep space exploration vehicles. Once assembled the energy needed to launch them will be far less than from the surface of the earth, leaving so much more energy left for the trip out and back.
“Star Trek” really did have the right idea. Large ships for deep space travel and shuttle craft for moving from and to such ships orbiting above whatever space object is to be explored. Orbit paths once achieved do not consume a terrible amount of energy to remain stable.
Also, working with the moon we begin to achieve lessons learned that will serve us when establishing bases elsewhere. The moon is an ideal place for our first steps. When we are very accomplished there we will be so much better when we try the same efforts on places like Mars. We go to primary school before high school for a reason. We should respect our ignorance and immaturity when it comes to space travel. Learn to walk before thinking we can run.
Sure, the Space Elevator can replace several satellites but not all of them
A Space Elevator is fixed in place and there won’t be a lot of them. The nature of a Space Elevator requires that it be on the equator so places on the Earth north of the Tropic of Cancer or south of the Tropic of Capricorn will not be able to be seen very well (or serviced by communication satellites.
You will still need Global positioning satellites and communication satellites because of the static position of the Space Elevator and that there is only one or two of them.
And of course, there are spy satellites. Also, there are satellites the orbit from pole to pole that can’t be replaced by a Space Elevator.
I am all for exploration.
I just don’t think that a government that is printing money to pay its debts should be committing money it doesn’t have to long term projects with no certain benefit at the end.
Our economy is on the precipice of collapse now is not the time to be extravagant.
Exploration can be done from the private sector.
China doesn’t care if its people live in squalor or starve by the millions. Let them break the bank on projects that are pure window dressing.
Well sorry you feel that way - but then with that attitude push come to shove you’d protest companies raising their prices to pay for exploration. We’ll just leave it to Xi Jinping, the new dictator of China, to go for the high ground - you do know that the La Grange points and the Moon are the high ground militarily, right? Doubt your robots will be able to stop that, so just relax, learn Chinese and all will go swimmingly.
The La Grange points are great places to park a satellite I grant you, but militarily a satellite is indefensible.
Everyone knows it’s there and it can be taken out with one shot.
If China were to place an armed satellite in orbit we could take it out with a tiny stealth robot satellite and no one would ever be able to connect it to us.
China themselves demonstrated this fact to the world.
#10 hmm... : )
What makes you so sure?
places on the Earth north of the Tropic of Cancer or south of the Tropic of Capricorn will not be able to be seen very well
At the top of a Space Elevator, you are in a geosynchronous orbit, i.e., approx. 22,000 miles above the Earth's surface, with a great (sideways) view of both poles.
Regards,
You obviously have no idea of the military value of the La Grange points ... see you, ta ta
A wall would be all that's reguirerd to seal one end of this, which may be a lava tube, something long suspected and sought. The nice thing about these tubes is, given the lower mass of the Moon, such a roof could be stable up to a quarter mile across (and 50 km length? Nice.), leaving plenty of space (literally, space, almost no atmosphere) to equip with illumination, fill with air, heat, add water, and sow with plants. More colonization space than we'd be able to build in a century on Mars, and orders of magnitude lower cost.
Space tourism won't being to catch on until there's an actual destination. People with the big cash will pay for a weeklong orbital vacation around the Moon and back, some may want it more than once (I suspect that one of the two unnamed customers who have put down a substantial deposit for the first lunar loop trip aboard SpaceX vehicles is Dennis Tito; I suspect the other is Paul Allen, or Richard Branson), but until there's some kind of hotel (with a great view), a casino, an amusement park, and probably a zero-g whorehouse, we Earthlings won't be going anywhere.
Thanks TigerLikesRooster.
Well it might take a little more than that. We don’t know the porosity of the rock. It may require some kind of sealant to be applied to make the tube air tight.
Also, I would expect that you would build in some walls to make chambers that could be sealed off from each other in case of leaks or ruptures.
but until there's some kind of hotel (with a great view), a casino, an amusement park, and probably a zero-g whorehouse, we Earthlings won't be going anywhere.
Yes, we certainly wouldn’t want to leave our vices behind.
A zero-G whorehouse he says. Men will be falling over themselves...
Only one of those are a vice.
Anything can be a vice if taken to excess.
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