Posted on 05/10/2008 9:44:03 PM PDT by neverdem
TO JUDGE from the news out of NASA these days, you might think we are witnessing the last gasps of the space age. The agency has announced that it will phase out its aging fleet of space shuttles by the year 2010, and the next iteration of the space program, known as Constellation, isn’t likely to be sending people into orbit before 2015. Back in 2004, President Bush exhorted NASA to return humans to the moon (and then continue on to Mars), but precious little has been heard from the White House on the matter since. The American enthusiasm for space travel that accompanied the first footprints on the lunar surface seems less ardent with each year that separates us from that one small step.
Yet human space flight hardly tells the whole story about launching pads and orbits. In addition to NASA’s current robotic missions — including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Mars landers and the Cassini spacecraft — there is also a large market for sending satellites into space. Between 1998 and 2007, 421 satellites were sent skyward. Government programs, commercial launchings and consumer products tied to satellites make up a $251-billion-a-year industry, according to the Space Foundation, a group that tracks the global space economy. The technologies in orbit serve the needs of television and radio; Internet and telephone service; imaging systems for military and intelligence operations (as well as commercial services like Google Earth); and the global positioning systems that help guide planes, boats and automobiles from Point A to Point B. Last year, according to the consulting firm Futron, about 70 orbital satellites were launched into space: roughly 25 by the United States and 30 by Russia...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Interactive Feature - Sure Shot
Same photographer with various subjects, not rockets or NASA, the audio has marginal volume.
If there is no military advantage to gain by going to mars or the moon, or for that matter space travel itself, then we should save our money.
I would agree with you. At least unless propulsion takes a leap forward. This guy claims to have a built a magnetic fusion containment engine when he was 17. He needs to put up or shut up. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEPYOad1cnQ&feature=related
There is always a military advantage in occupying the high ground, even with just a limitless supply of rocks to throw.
That high ground can almost certainly be more effectively occupied by robots than humans for the foreseeable future.
The whole concept of “demilitarization” of space is as stupid as demilitarization of the seas. Those who beat their missiles into plowshares will end up tilling for those who kept their missiles.
Not getting off the planet virtually guarantees at some point the human race will be forced into extinction by a natural disaster. We’ve been bottlenecked at least one time in the past. After that, there was probably about 5,000 humans on the entire planet. A super volcano is thought to be the cause.
We had a nuclear engine in the 70’s. http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/N/NERVA.html
When all kids have to dream about is a high score playing 'Guitar Hero', it is hard to get them involved in studying math and science.
At least we could dream of mankind going to the stars when I was young, now it will be a miracle if my great grandchildren's generation gets past the asteroid belt, in person, not just jockeying a robot from afar.
When the 'great society' was produced by the LBJ administration the missions to the moon were pretty much on their way.
I recall the hoopla then about how 'we should be spending that money here on earth and not in space, feeding the poor'... yadda yadda yadda.
Well, the poor are still poor, if well fed, but our national vision of going places and doing things seems subsumed by the collective, while other nations are vying to lead.
Let's put people out there, boots on the ground, so to speak, and revive the dreams of the next generations.
If our people do not lead, someone else's will.
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