Posted on 07/05/2002 8:39:21 PM PDT by Will_Zurmacht
He's dead on economically here. It would be dead cheap (comparatively) to just lug some asteroids slowly back to Earth orbit. Hey who knows, in a few decades (the time it might take perhaps to tug them back from the asteroid belt) we might not even be tempted to drop one on the Middle East.
On a side note, $20 Billion doesn't sound like as much money as it did a few years ago does it? You'd think the Russians are having some success with their Space Tourism thing- they could find enough techie billionaires to cough up a few billion a piece and just fund the whole thing privately. I don't know what the financial incentive for them to do so would be other than simply having the mission associated with their names and corporations. But there are plenty of super rich people and you never know till you ask.
Your credentials and CV please.
Because they can't do it themselves, either technologically or financially, so they want to hitch on to our coat-tails and get a piece of history. They don't want to be left entirely out of the picture like they were when *THE US* landed someone on the Moon. Not the West, not some international co-op, *THE USA*.
We can do a Mars trip on our own, too, if we had the gonads to try it. Russia can't, and they know it. I'm *so* sick with the socialists at NASA (and the Government in general) who squander our patriotism and knowhow in order to appease those who can't do what we can do.
Imagine the results if Kennedy gave his speech to go to the Moon and called upon the world to unite for the effort. It would *not* have galvanized the US the way his actual speech did.
Competition is a good thing. NASA and the US needs to remember that.
Tuor
Liar. We *could* do it. Stop looking for handouts and start working towards going to Mars. Compete, don't hold out your hand.
Tuor
That's not to say that we shouldn't develop the engineering side to be able to live more and more comfortably in Space, and to get around in Space, but without learning to offset gravity, the effort of just reaching Space will always be prohibitive.
The #2 goal should be developing engines or other means of propulsion capable of making at least intersystem travel more realistic in terms of duration. We can't take years to get to the outer planets if we are to be able to utilize them in any profitable manner. Months to a year, to reach most of the planets, seems to be the minimum for serious colonization/utilization of system-wide objects.
I don't think NASA is what will propel us to these ends. I think that private companies need to find a means of profit in Space, which would make them much more apt to devote the time and research to develop technologies that would enable increasingly useful/efficient means of space travel. To really make use of Space, we need to get a lot more people out there living in it, experiencing it, learning the various things that can go wrong out there and ways of coping with those dangers.
All that said, I don't think we'll be going to Mars any time soon. There are too many political considerations in no investing the time or money, or allowing corperations to do so, to make a trip to Mars or anywhere else outside of Earth's orbit a likely possibility, at least that's my opinion.
Tuor
My credentials are that I am sane. The guy you were citing obviously is lacking in that department. What he is doing is much like looking at clouds and making pictures out of them and, IMO, has about as much reality.
Tuor
Noting this image:
And using my Cray Multi-Parallel supercomputer, matching known features with flora and fauna structure, the program returned this:
The truth is stranger than fiction, is it not?
By the time OSHA is done with it, it will cost ten times that, and Russia's share will be 3%.
Bullshit.
New York's junior senator would definitely be in the front running.
Toward that end, I believe that a skyhook system is buildable. It would be expensive in that you would have to launch a total mass roughly equivalent to an aircraft carrier to construct one.
I agree with your later comment about cloud gazing. I can point out many faces I have discovered in the texturing of my bedroom ceiling. The formations on Mars are a result of our ability to falsely perceive patterns within randomness, esp faces. That and a good measure of wish fullfillment by individuals who want to see evidence of extraterrestrial life.
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