The attitude of the company and the people who work there. I'm a space geek, I've always been a space geek and the thought of a man or woman walking on Mars is enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. NASA are however too cautious, the two shuttle failures have beaten the spirit out of the organization and now they only want to take the tiniest of baby steps. They might, maybe, make it to Mars by 2030 but it's more likely that they will piss away their time in low Earth orbit.
SpaceX are however different. Not only are they willing to make mistakes they treat those mistakes as part of the engineering process and then they try again, and again, and again until things start to work. This is what NASA did in the 1950's and 1960's until they ended up with Armstrong's 'one small step'. What's prompted this little piece? Someone sent me a link to the SpaceX Youtube channel where there are lots of cool rocket launches, and there's THIS! [...]
And I’m not sure how you can see innovation and inspiration in a video showing failures as silly as “ran out of fuel”. That, to me, just plain shows poor design or planning.
silly as “ran out of fuel”.
Quoteno one's going anywhere.I find that rather mediaeval thinking.
Quoteno one's going anywhere.I find that rather mediaeval thinking.
I prefer that to child-like magical thinking.
www.distancetomars.com
Antarctica during six months of dark winter is more hospitable to human life than Mars, where's your rush to colonize that?
NASA sent a small hatchback to Mars almost 40 years ago. Who is SpaceX "beating" to Mars here?
Are you software dreamers thinking of sending people???
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/why-not-space/
Reality is not like software; you can't just download a new reality when the old one doesn't satisfy you. Reality doesn't care about your thinking, your dreams, or where you believe you'll retire.
Grow up. We don't even have the Concorde anymore and you guys are picking out the counter finish on your Mars condos?
Antarctica during six months of dark winter is more hospitable to human life than Mars
Grow up. We don't even have the Concorde anymore and you guys are picking out the counter finish on your Mars condos?
Antarctica during six months of dark winter is more hospitable to human life than Mars
It has that small thing called oxygenQuoteGrow up. We don't even have the Concorde anymore and you guys are picking out the counter finish on your Mars condos?
Living on Mars for say the first 50 years after first settlement will still be nothing like the movies. It'll be a pathetic, cramped, bleak existence. There won't even be Johnny Cab or three boob mutants.
I didn't like Andy Weirs new book about the moon as much as The Martian, but his description of a practical colony on the moon sounds at least realistic compared to setting up a Mars colony.
We can get a lot more tonnage to the moon much cheaper and quicker, and tourists could take realistic two week long vacations there.
Mars is more hospitable to larger scale colonisation for sure, but several orders of magnitude more tricky.
The idea is to spread humanity beyond the Earth in case of a cosmic catastrophe.
The idea is to spread humanity beyond the Earth in case of a cosmic catastrophe.
You're an engineer who slams ridiculous concepts for a living, but lose your marbles over sci-fi daydreams. This space crap is a modern religion.
Why would tourists go to the Moon for two weeks? Just drop them in the desert and kick them for two weeks. I'll do it cheap!!
Quoteno one's going anywhere.I find that rather mediaeval thinking.
I prefer that to child-like magical thinking.
www.distancetomars.com
Antarctica during six months of dark winter is more hospitable to human life than Mars, where's your rush to colonize that?
NASA sent a small hatchback to Mars almost 40 years ago. Who is SpaceX "beating" to Mars here?
Are you software dreamers thinking of sending people???
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/why-not-space/
Reality is not like software; you can't just download a new reality when the old one doesn't satisfy you. Reality doesn't care about your thinking, your dreams, or where you believe you'll retire.
Grow up. We don't even have the Concorde anymore and you guys are picking out the counter finish on your Mars condos?
The idea is to spread humanity beyond the Earth in case of a cosmic catastrophe. No one is rushing to colonize Antarctica (located on the Earth) because it's irrelevant. It's a difficult problem to solve, but certainly not unattainable.
The same 'software' dreamers, as you call them, managed to land a rocket vertically in the middle of an ocean. Not so long ago it was considered science fiction. Give it some time and it will happen. I don't understand your point of view. What exactly do you propose? To do nothing at all?
You're an engineer who slams ridiculous concepts for a living, but lose your marbles over sci-fi daydreams. This space crap is a modern religion.
Why would tourists go to the Moon for two weeks? Just drop them in the desert and kick them for two weeks. I'll do it cheap!!
Are you serious?
If going to the moon was safe enough and relatively cheap enough, you would have a line a mile long for people wanting to pay top dollar for the experience of a lifetime, the ultimate bucket list item.
We already have rich people paying $20M a pop for the "trip of a lifetime" just a few hundred km above our heads.
That's about to get ever cheaper and more consumer friendly with Space-X or others no doubt.
It's practically guaranteed that individuals will continue to pay money for "space tourism".
Heck, you wouldn't even need to land on the moon, people would be lining up to take a trip around the back side and seeing it up close and doing the thumb thing with the earth in the window. Or landing and having a day walk around could be a package option, no need for a colony.
This is the complete opposite of a daydream, a space tourism lap around the moon is practically doable right now.
As someone who was born before Sputnik, and who both lived thru some of the coldest Cold War periods and the height of the Space Race, I can tell you that the Space Race was a very essential component of the Cold War.
The Space Race objectives were not only showing the rest of the World whose system was better, but the science and technology development involved with it, had immediate and very real military applications.
I don't see an existential threat like the Cold War today, and therefore neither the government nor the public is interested as much as it used to be.
Bullshit. It's been possible for decades. It always dies on the vine.
"If going to the moon was safe enough and relatively cheap enough,"
Yeah and if my grandma had wings she'd be an F-15. So what? It's all just bullshit dreams, Dave.
Going up in MiG-29 is not just "practically" doable, it is LITERALLY doable. How many do it? Did you?
Why not? Because you are more attracted to the dream than the reality. If everyone COULD go to the Moon, you'd want something even more exotic because this isn't about space, it's about a dream. You'd want to visit the core of Jupiter instead because THAT's unattainable.
That's fine, just don't confuse daydreams with the toxic space religiosity or sci-fi nonsense of children who grew up on TV and no critical thinking skills.
The idea is to spread humanity beyond the Earth in case of a cosmic catastrophe.
Paraphrasing Neil Tyson:
Whatever it takes to ship a million (insert your own number) people to Mars and make them permanently sustainable in a terraformed environment suitable for continuation of the species in the absence of Earth blowing up. It would be way easier to deflect the asteroid, control the virus, or reverse climate change, or fix whatever threatened earth.
People love to argue about the little stuff, but if you look at where American taxpayer money ends up (I say American because that's where I live and what I'm familiar with, not because I'm not aware other countries exist) our military expenditures absolutely dwarf everything else. NASA, the cost of healthcare, the cost of college education, and even smaller, even more hot button issues like welfare, that's all peanuts compared to what we spend on military. That's not to say I don't support our soldiers but come on, if there's fat to trim that's the place to look! I'd like to stop blowing up other places for a bit and focus on home.
The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.