Buzz Aldrin Blazing a Trail to Mars

techmaven writes: "In an exclusive, two-part article, Special Report: Buzz Aldrin Blazing a Trail to Mars and Buzz Aldrin's Mars Vision: There and Back Again, the legendary astronaut, whose footprints still dot the windless surface of the moon, describes his vision of the next step in space exploration. Cruise ships to Mars, but not with shuffleboard or bad lounge entertainers ..."

Comments

Speculation About Cyclers, Nukes, Probes and Geeks

[Spamalamadingdong]

My question is, why is this meme back in the public consciousness NOW?

Maybe it's because the 33rd anniversary of the first Moon landing is coming up? Or maybe that's how long it takes to get the news media to pay attention to an idea about space. Or maybe a reporter thought this was a gosh-wow neat idea because he'd never heard of it before (because he never bothered studying space, as most reporters don't) so he thought it would make a good article for his equally-ignorant readership. Whatever it is, it's pathetic.

Second question, where did the sudden push for NASA nukes come from?

The Bush administration is pro-nuke in general. It makes a certain amount of sense to push them for space, where the energy/mass ratio is so much more important than for anything on terra firma.

And my third question, why is space so passe to Slashdotters and by extension tech oriented fans in general?

First man in space was over 40 years ago. The last manned moon landing was over 30 years ago. To the average geek, the World Wide Web is now and s/he can have a lot of fun (and get a job) getting hands dirty hacking with the code. Space stuff is before they were born, making it pre-history, their parents' generation's stuff; it's passé. It's also locked up behind requirements of graduate school and other barriers which keep them from having a chance to play with it, so they migrate to the things which are accessible.

Hey, it's speculation, whaddaya want?

Re:Speculation About Cyclers, Nukes, Probes and Ge

[Tackhead]

> Maybe it's because the 33rd anniversary of the first Moon landing is coming up?

Yeah, and we could have had this meme hit public consciousness on the 30th anniversary of the moon landings, but some doofus decided to Darwin himself out of the gene pool by flying his plane in conditions he wasn't trained for, and the media completely forgot about anything else for the rest of the month.

Along those lines, allow me to draft an open letter/rant to celebrities in showbiz and politics:

I hereby request that for the 33rd anniversary of the lunar landings, that all celebrities and politicians kindly take one day off from slashing your wives' throats, letting your drunk chauffeurs drive you home, running into trees while playing football, skiing into trees, flying in dense fog, playing golf in thunderstorms, or standing on tops of hills in copper bathtubs raising lightning rods to the skies screaming "ALL GODS ARE BASTARDS!", or whatever else it is that celebrities do to attract attention.

Just one fscking day.

Thanks to a society that preferred celebrities like you, I'll never see ultra-mega-huge-baseline interferometric data from the worlds around other stars. Thanks to you, I'll never see pictures of what's under the ice of Europa. Thanks to you, I know I'll never see anyone, let alone me, set foot on Mars. Thanks to you, I know I'll never see goddamn low earth orbit, let alone explore another world.

The dinosaurs went extinct because their walnut-sized brains weren't enough to permit them to develop a space program. From where I sit, I see the odds of being wiped out by asteroid impact as far greater than the odds of seeing any significant manned space exploration in my lifetime. Maybe it'll serve us right.

The saddest thing is that I'm part of that transitional generation that did have hope of exploring the solar system in our lifetime. I grew up believing that happiness was looking at Earth in my rear-view mirror, and the realization that we traded it for a world of "punch the monkey" banner ads is a hell of a comedown.

Rant mode off. Thanks for reading.