what kind of space mission would cause the same buzz as apollo?

[cdev]

It must be hard to be 'stodgy' in microgravity, I must say.

Okay, dogs have already been in space but the story is kind of sad and nobody wants to be reminded of it. However, to the best of my knowledge, cats have never been in space for any extended length of time (although they have gone on training flights which simulate microgravity in an airplane describing a very fast curve)

I would love to see a cat (wearing diapers to prevent - well...) go into space. Maybe with the option of it being a very short period, between supply runs or something.

Oh, actually, just thought of a deal killer, human cat allergies. 

[Nominal Animal]

NASA really needs to start scraping the bottom of the pop culture barrel.

If they want to be popular, yes.  If they spend millions in stuffy PR nobody is interested in, instead of spending that money wisely (bread and circuses), they're the ones at the bottom of the barrel.

Note, I never said that is what they should be and do. I only wondered why they're so inept at playing the popularity game. Takes one to know one, eh?

I think there's just not enough monosyllabic prose in NASA press releases in general.

Most humans are utterly, utterly stupid, yes.  To get popular among them, you do need to stoop to their level.

There is a stark difference between humans are theoretically capable of, and what humans are currently doing.  As I've already mentioned, me myself am not going to do diddly shit to help current humanity get off this rock; if they do, I'd consider it a small miracle for them, and tragedy for the rest of the universe.

Yet, I do try to keep hopeful. Maybe some of the current/future generations do better, and start to do something sensible instead of building comfy nests for themselves to die out in.  If that were to happen, I'd be happy to help, even without any chance of being there myself, or immersing myself in voyeuristic videos of their exploits.

[apis]

I find this much more interesting to watch than "the dull Earth control center stuff and voiceovers" to be honest.



What point is there in making videos if no one except a few space nerds watches it. Of course they should make popular videos if they want more interest in space exploration. (They should keep it dignified of course, they don't have to do the equivalent of the worst kind of reality tv.)

If they are publicly funded they should give something back to the people funding them. Just like publicly funded research should be publicly available. One problem with the world is lack of education, so every bit of extra popular education helps.

I only wondered why they're so inept at playing the popularity game. Takes one to know one, eh?

To be fair NASA is far better at public outreach than ESA are, and most other public organisations. These ISS videos only exist because their public outreach department decided it was a good idea after all.

[Electro Detective]

Send PSY up there to perform his signature tune, that should reel in a lot of viewers and phone junkies   

[Nominal Animal]

I find this much more interesting to watch than "the dull Earth control center stuff and voiceovers" to be honest.

My point exactly.  Look at the view counts on NASA uploads on Youtube.

What point is there in making videos if no one except a few space nerds watches it. Of course they should make popular videos if they want more interest in space exploration. (They should keep it dignified of course, they don't have to do the equivalent of the worst kind of reality tv.)

I agree. I'm pretty sure there is a good valid approach somewhere in the middle: interesting to the masses like the ISS "home movies" are, and not tasteless reality porn. After all, not all media we have right now is utter crap; just the most popular part of it.

To be fair NASA is far better at public outreach than ESA are, and most other public organisations. These ISS videos only exist because their public outreach department decided it was a good idea after all.

True. (By inept at the popularity game, I was referring to myself in particular; I've always hated that stuff.)

I don't know what is with ESA people, really. Their science and tech people I've met have had a pretty strong snobbish streak, while the ESA administrators seem to be career politicians with as much interest in real science and exploration as I have in the consistency of my neighbors pets poops.  Their outreach reminds me of certain religious sects, extolling their virtues, while everything they do seems to happen pretty much behind closed doors.  But that is just par for European politically administered organisations, really.

[BrianHG]

[BrianHG]

[coppercone2]

if they keep filming that control room nasa needs a Dwight character. I honestly don't watch the control room. It stresses me out.

C-span is more interesting then the control room footage. Nasa covered by C-span is still more watchable then the control room footage from nasa.

ESA sounds like its run by royal families, I never watched them before. What is a interesting ESA thing to watch?

[mrpackethead]

Launch Trump on a mission to the outer-edge of the universe, or just past an event horizon of a nearby singularity.

[coppercone2]

he will come back as the starchild

[Electro Detective]

A wall in space to keep out aliens would blow out the space budget 

[Echo88]

Bugs from outer Space who throw plasma projectiles at Buenos Aires would make quite a Buzz. Time to watch Starship Troopers again.

[coppercone2]

the two japanese CGI starship troopers movies are actually really good. much better then final fantasies or resident evils japan made. Also arguably (by a wide margin) better then any of the live action SST sequels. Well OK maybe the federation song in the third live action movie makes it the best out of all of them 

the power armor is badass.

[wraper]

Bugs from outer Space who throw plasma projectiles at Buenos Aires would make quite a Buzz. Time to watch Starship Troopers again.

That movie is so stupid that hurt my brain, and I felt like doing endless facepalm. It could pass as satire, but implementation is goddamn too serious.

[coppercone2]

why?

I just did not like how they did not show the cooler armor suits the book described but I thought it was excellent, it was like they put the spirit of the book "the forever war" into the story of starship troopers.

Its not really a starship troopers book, more like a bad trip someone with different political views then Heinlein got after reading it (which is basically the forever war).

The original book read like a porn advertisement for bipedal fighting robots and highly militarized government. I thought the original SST book was pretty fucking creepy in terms of what the author wrote (but I heard he mellowed out a bit later in his life), wheras TFW was way more my tune.

[wraper]

why?

I just did not like how they did not show the cooler armor suits the book described but I thought it was excellent, it was like they put the spirit of the book "the forever war" into the story of starship troopers.

Its not really a starship troopers book, more like a bad trip someone with different political views then Heinlein got after reading it (which is basically the forever war).

The original book read like a porn advertisement for bipedal fighting robots and highly militarized government.

It's like let's kill ourselves for no good reason. And it does not pass as satire too. Why in the hell infantry would fight insects on that stupid remote planet.

[coppercone2]

why?

I just did not like how they did not show the cooler armor suits the book described but I thought it was excellent, it was like they put the spirit of the book "the forever war" into the story of starship troopers.

Its not really a starship troopers book, more like a bad trip someone with different political views then Heinlein got after reading it (which is basically the forever war).

The original book read like a porn advertisement for bipedal fighting robots and highly militarized government.

It's like let's kill ourselves for no good reason. And it does not pass as satire too. Why in the hell infantry would fight insects on that stupid remote planet.

its supposed to be exoskeleton robots capable of flying with highly detailed space logistics. I always imagined they were basically trying to capture the queen to get the info on some kind of quantum-link between them or something (like the queen is some sort of transmitter that works in some kind of undetectable way)

I mean in the later movies and stuff they had the planet destroying bomb and everything, but I guess the problem was they were so wide spread that they were trying to hack some sort of organic bug internet.

You could also argue the federation could lose control of all its colonies and stuff (like the japanese cgi movies go into) if they just start blowing up planets (i.e. they are not capable of defending their territory anyway, so why bother paying taxes?)

If you mean why they did not just use drones the whole time, I don't really know. I think the CGI movie basically goes into the idea that the plasma bugs also acted as really big jammers/EMP generators that would mess with electronics (but the analog suits were more immune). They were capable of targeting space ships in high orbit or even far away from planets with barrages.

I think they are better thought of an advanced biomechanical army with a hive mind rather then just dumb bugs. The zerg in starcraft kinda made this work better because they were capable of space travel and space folding etc (you would need a operator to deal with that kind of shit).

[wraper]

its supposed to be exoskeleton robots capable of flying with highly detailed space logistics. I always imagined they were basically trying to capture the queen to get the info on some kind of quantum-link between them or something (like the queen is some sort of transmitter that works in some kind of undetectable way)

I mean in the later movies and stuff they had the planet destroying bomb and everything, but I guess the problem was they were so wide spread that they were trying to hack some sort of organic bug internet.

You could also argue the federation could lose control of all its colonies and stuff (like the japanese cgi movies go into) if they just start blowing up planets (i.e. they are not capable of defending their territory anyway, so why bother paying taxes?)

IIRC Paul Verhoeven thought it's a great idea to make a joke out of militarized government. But in result it neither represents decent original, nor it satirizes original. Just shitty movie. It's somewhere in uncanny valley.

[coppercone2]

I just made it work in my head pretending there were lots of deleted scenes that justified the bloody combat.

Kinda like a in-joke that the film itself was put through military censorship where 3/4 of it was removed. It was filmed too well to not like so I just played ad-libs with it 

I find you can enjoy quite a bit of what people to be consider crap with a bit of imagination and thought. And you can kinda take it like what the uninformed grunt thought about the conflict kinda, Rico was kind of a patriotic/vengeful zelot that decided to go avenge his family, what the hell would he know what some kinda high command is thinking? Like how churchill let his cities be bombed in WW2 so he can hide the fact that his goverment could decrypt transmissions. What would some british army kid know about what the royalty/international are deciding with their strategy? If you just made a movie about what some guy on D-day knew without going to the highly classified generals had you could say the same thing about Operation Market Garden (Like a distraction I guess).

https://www.noted.co.nz/culture/books/battle-of-arnhem-doomed-to-failure-anthony-beevor/
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11486219

They musta been thinking its a bad idea/useful as a distraction rather then something that would meet its objectives.

I mean look at the cover for the 4k, how could you not like that?


Also what comes to mind with starship troopers is the rather corny movie (but some people give this thing 9/10 and say its the best thing that came out in the last 10 years) Hunter-Prey, where there was basically a super-bomb ship developed that would destroy an entire planet. If the entire 'bug net' was linked, you could say the foot battles served as a distraction to fatigue the hive mind so that something could sneak deep into bug space, perhaps even a sleeper cell type unit, that could ambush the center CPU, destroy important nodes, etc. All the high command decisions of starship troopers were super cloak and dagger.

The book also had mention of other alien races like the Skinnies , you could kinda think about geopolitics in the sense that planet killer WMDs could provoke intergalactic war with neutral-hostile parties.  Perhaps their existence is classified in the SSM universe. Like a intergalactic super-start treaty with seldom seen races.

[CatalinaWOW]

People bring their own beliefs into these movies.  When I read Starship Troopers, many, many years ago, I took it very differently than most do now.

The vote was limited to those who had put in time in service.  Which wasn't just military though that was what most did.  The idea was that those in power, those starting wars, should have a very personal knowledge of the costs involved.  A solution to the common complaint that old men send young men off to die for old mens purposes.

And the book has to be understood in the context of the technology of the time.  While it was talking about spaceships and powered armor it was limited by imaginative extrapolation from existing technology.  Work in atomic energy had developed manipulators that mimic arm motions of the operators.  Naively it seems a straightforward extrapolation to powered armor suits.  Little did they know that it would take 50 years of development to almost get there.  Spaceships are just bigger, faster airplanes in this view, and quite reasonable considering how far airplanes had come in the previous few decades (from powered kites to supersonic jets). 

Drones, the internet and DNA weren't on the table when the book was written so they are off the table, but the Drake University experiments on ESP were recent and still somewhat credible.

All that said, the movie is a so so sci-fi shoot em up, that in my opinion misses the flavor of the book entirely.

[Mr. Scram]

People bring their own beliefs into these movies.  When I read Starship Troopers, many, many years ago, I took it very differently than most do now.

The vote was limited to those who had put in time in service.  Which wasn't just military though that was what most did.  The idea was that those in power, those starting wars, should have a very personal knowledge of the costs involved.  A solution to the common complaint that old men send young men off to die for old mens purposes.

And the book has to be understood in the context of the technology of the time.  While it was talking about spaceships and powered armor it was limited by imaginative extrapolation from existing technology.  Work in atomic energy had developed manipulators that mimic arm motions of the operators.  Naively it seems a straightforward extrapolation to powered armor suits.  Little did they know that it would take 50 years of development to almost get there.  Spaceships are just bigger, faster airplanes in this view, and quite reasonable considering how far airplanes had come in the previous few decades (from powered kites to supersonic jets). 

Drones, the internet and DNA weren't on the table when the book was written so they are off the table, but the Drake University experiments on ESP were recent and still somewhat credible.

All that said, the movie is a so so sci-fi shoot em up, that in my opinion misses the flavor of the book entirely.

It seems many people who read the book were confused by the movie, while people who just saw the movie took it for what it was. It seems both do very different things and are only loosely related. Obviously people who expect more of the book in the movie are going to be disappointed.

[CatalinaWOW]

In many ways the movie follows the book quite closely, in terms of details and overall plot.   The only big departure I can think of is the omission of the required civics class (required to take, not required to pass), and inclusion of all of the heavy handed propaganda.

Still results in a very different feel as you say.  But that always happens in movies that are patterned after books.  The only sci-fi book that I can think of that has translated well into a movie is Dune.

[wraper]

It seems many people who read the book were confused by the movie, while people who just saw the movie took it for what it was. It seems both do very different things and are only loosely related. Obviously people who expect more of the book in the movie are going to be disappointed.

I didn't read the book and still think that movie is a stupid POS. Maybe because I have allergy to stupidity.

[EEVblog]

Do you think a manned mars mission would cause the same buzz as the apollo program back in the day?

All you need a manned lunar mission.
Have a "chair" system like in Sagan's book Contact, and reality TV show to document the process.

The same buzz as Apollo though, I don't think that's possible, it was a different time and a different world.

[cdev]

Buzz?

This is making me think about the Jade Rabbit (translated) name of the recent Chinese space vehicle..

Which shares its name with a popular sex toy.

As far as chairs, there is an ancient Chinese legend about Wan Hu, an early would-be space traveler.


https://history.msfc.nasa.gov/rocketry/06.html

"According to one ancient legend, a Chinese official named Wan-Hoo attempted a flight to the moon using a large wicker chair to which were fastened 47 large rockets. Forty seven assistants, each armed with torches, rushed forward to light the fuses. In a moment there was a tremendous roar accompanied by billowing clouds of smoke. When the smoke cleared, the flying chair and Wan-Hu were gone".


(Illustration below courtesy of United States Civil Air Patrol)