Artist's rendering of an Orion launch.
Posted on 04/23/2012 5:42:46 PM PDT by KevinDavis
In an interview with a reporter from the Associated Press, Scott Pace, the current director of the Space Policy Institute at The George Washington University and a former NASA associate administrator, was asked to comment on the April 12th failure of the North Korean rocket launch. He noted that sending a vehicle into space is still a significant technical challenge, and added, “In many ways, the worst enemy of NASA is Star Trek… Captain Picard says ‘engage’ and the ship moves. And people think ‘How hard can this be?’” Filmmaker James Cameron supposedly made a similar comment about Star Trek’s depiction of space travel several years ago. This, so the argument goes, leads to unrealistic expectations in the public mind about where we should be these days on the Final Frontier. Reality has fallen far short of the galaxy-hopping future envisioned by Star Trek, and NASA takes the blame.
(Excerpt) Read more at thespacereview.com ...
Even a ship with some kind of nuclear drive is going to be lifted to orbit by conventional rockets.
That's too bad because it turns out it is not such a great risk. We could be launching ships as large as the Empire State Building from the surface with crews of thousands on board. But libs once again have done everything in their power to block the advancement of the human race.
Screw NASA. Just find the Star Gate and the technology will come to us.
NASA and Star Trek killed space travel, but not in the way people think. Star Trek got nerd’s expectations way up, and when NASA proved there were no hot green skinned women to be had on the moon or mars, people kind of lost interest in space travel.
If I looked like Sean Connery his prime (and his toupee), or even Daniel Craig, it would be easy. And if I had a spacecraft with warp drive, artificial gravity, machines that produce delicious foods from random atoms and serve them up on command, and a crew half of whom are gorgeous women in miniskirts space travel would be pretty damn nice. It's called fantasy.
McCoy,
It’s a TV show, Jim
(as appossed to the classic, He’s dead, Jim)
However we spent three times that amount bailing out GM so they could build the Chevy Volt.
Star Trek didn't kill space travel, Politicians did.
Easy? Ask Chief Engineer(and miracle worker) Montgomery Scott if it was easy?
That flying bucket of bolts was seconds away from blowing up or burning down each and every time he would leave engineering to take a dump. And there wasn’t a single power conduit that hadn’t been rewired, cross circuited or blown out three times per episode.
Easy? Not by a long shot.
I think Star Wars wins first prize for unreal-ism in space travel, ect. The ships flew through space similar to air planes. All of them seemed to have their own gravity along with spectacular flaming explosions in the Oxygen free vacuum of outer space. I won’t even mention traveling at light speed. (I wonder what they were supposed to be fueling those things with anyway) lol
Still great fun to watch though.
I believe there are thousands of civilizations similar to ours in the billions of galaxies out there with the billions of stars in each one. However, we will never know them and they will never know us because it is impossible to break the light barrier.
The RiffTrax guys (Mike and the Bots) did a great riff on Star Trek 5. They have done a bunch of Star Trek films, actually. If you are an MST3k fan, you should check them out.
It may be... or may not be. We just need the next visionary combined with raw intellect, like Einstein.
I am convinced the light speed barrier can be broken, and when we do it, it’s going to look so simple in retrospect.
A man can dream anyway. I hope to one day not just visit another star, but maybe another galaxy. However, according to statistics, I only have about 37 years to go to see that happen, and that kind of advancement probably won’t take place by then.
Really my only hope is that we build a artificial intelligence that can tackle the problem in just a few small years.
yeah and 200-300 years ago...the though of getting into a horseless wagon with heat and music and being able to drive 60 miles in 1 hour was too easy too....
....for THEN
And we would be able to do that if the politicians had anything approaching a vision toward the future.
Instead, we had the "Great Society" chew up trillions while our manned space program languished.
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