Posted on 05/23/2007 4:56:11 AM PDT by Condor 63
NASHVILLE - The first man to walk on the moon told an audience of nearly 3,000 Intergraph customers and employees Tuesday that although a mission to Mars would be difficult, it can be done.
Neil Armstrong, the commander of Apollo 11, spoke for nearly an hour on stage at the Gaylord Opryland Convention Center, reflecting on the space age that began 50 years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at al.com ...
How do you figure? Lack of will? Technology? Cash? What?
Or, alternatively, send some spacecraft containing only fuel and supplies in advance of the trip. Such cargo could be sent with existing technology (in no particular hurry, using the most economical orbit and means of propulsion) long before a manned craft was ready. A supply line of ships sailing the solar wind could be established in anticipation of a large colony.
And these are what??? We have no commertial fusion reactors yet...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:JointEuropeanTorus_internal.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fusion_target_implosion_on_NOVA_laser.jpg
I don’t know about decades but I do know he refuses any autograph requests.
I think I remember him appearing when the 30th anniv. of Apollo 11 happened in 1999.
Why?
At age 2, Jesse Owens didn’t leap up and run a 10-second 100 yard dash.
We’ve got to take steps. We’ve been to the moon. We then go to Mars. Then Saturn or Neptune. Then out of our Solar System.
Explore. Advance. Improve.
All of the above. For one, it would take a year to get a spaceship from Earth to Mars. You’d have to resupply it several times along the way. Even if you could do it, which is highly doubtful, it would cost a ton of money, and the astronauts would not be in any physical condition to perform the mission when they got there, much less be in condition for a one year return flight.
An O'Neill colony, built with lunar material, could drift towards Mars at a leisurely pace.
Well, see, you've missed the problem right there. We went to the moon .. almost 40 years ago. Full stop.
Why did we stop there? It's really quite simple: the politics didn't support it. And the main reason why the politics didn't support it was that Apollo was essentially a novelty program -- once we actually succeeded in reaching the moon, there was no further return on the investment. Meanwhile, there were more politically compelling alternatives for the money, right here on Earth.
Explore. Advance. Improve.
Sure, but don't be stupid about how you do it. Space travel needs to find some mission that will provide a real return on investment. We don't have that yet, and we never will unless we can put in place some serious orbital infrastructure.
No, it's not sexy -- but infrastructure rarely is.
Oh, and please don't try the tired old "let private enterprise do it" canard. They're even more focused on "return on investment" than the government space program is, and there is no return on manned spaceflight.
The truth is that space is likely to remain a government-funded thing for a long time to come.
I’d volunteer Rosie O’Donnell and Michael Moore for a one way trip to Mars but the payload would be prohibitive, Mars would be ruined, and any re-entry due to an aborted mission would be a serious threat to our planet as well. Guess they’ll just have to stay here as laughing stocks.
If I’m not mistaken, this is the first public appearance he’s made in decades.
“Explore. Advance. Improve.”
If I read my history books correctly, Columbus, Magellan, DeSoto, Pizarro, all of the explorers into the unkown or newly discovered were all government funded.
I’m an ultra-conservative sitting in a NASA office. Think about NASA this way - We spend money on research to find out what WON’T work. What does work, we give to the public.
IF we stop pressing forward in exploration, our sciences will slowly begin to die. The desire to “find out more” applies to space, also.
“I don’t really think it’s doable under the present circumstances.”
The response from most Americans when asked about going to Mars is a big yawn.
Mars ain’t gonna happen anytime soon.
Why not? Many Americans liked having Philanderer, rapist, sworn perjuror, war criminal and benefactor of Arkancide as 42nd president. The man who brought BJ as a family discussion topic.
How having space Frank Lee Morris can be worse than that?
Wasn’t he with Crosby, Stills, & Nash...???
It appears so.
That's right. Make it an American thing--commerce. The Treaty will have to go away; stroke of the pen.
There's just that little problem of making money.
And without space infrastructure, there is no way to maintain a credible, sustainable space program. So there would seem to be a chicken-and-egg situation.
The Apollo program inspired a generation of America's youth to go into science and engineering.
True -- that was the payoff from the run-up to the Big Event.
The problem with Apollo was that the missions themselves didn't really provide much in the way of actual returns -- in the end, it was not much more than a cool stunt. After Apollo 11, the general public had pretty much lost interest in the missions, which made it easy prey for politicians who were more interested in using the money to fund Great Society programs.
You want space infrastructure? Make an interesting goal in space.
"Interesting goals" are all very well, but to be useful they must also point to tangible returns. Space is intrinsically cool -- most everybody is thrilled by the idea of manned spaceflight. Where the arguments start is in trying to justify the huge costs involved, which is why finding missions with "tangible returns" is the biggest challenge facing the space program.
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