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Man Conquers Space
dirtyhank writes "Half a century ago space exploration was the ultimate adventure and a team headed by Wernher von Braun dreamed about it for Colliers Magazine. Their vision of the future to come was too optimistic though and we haven't made to Mars yet. Now the dreamers are some people in Australia trying to produce Man Conquers Space, a documentary based on the premise that all that had been proposed in the early 1950's in Colliers actually came to pass - and sooner than they expected."
"Man wants bigger welfare check, retreats from space"
...and unfortunantely we will not be venturing into space until it is commercially viable to do so.
There's a whole slew of phrases like 'when in rome, do as the romans do' or 'the best way to change a system is from the inside'
I'm afraid we're just going to have to accept this fact (that space exploration won't get another kick 'til it makes people money), and work towards making new propulsion systems, more efficient systems, etc. until we get to this point, then hopefully awareness will increase and people will get excited about space exploration for the sake of space exploration again (after it has blown up again for the sake of money).
Of course, a miracle (or a disaster) could cause this to go another way
Call me a pessimist, or even a defeatist, but this is how I see things.
Kind of like when a bacterial culture gets week strains weeded out in a tough time, maybe this can be good... if it doesn't kill everything.
Star Trek, Red Dward, and Star Wars is nothing but opera. Only the most pessimistic of people can even begin to tender the idea you just did. The people over in Australia are not about story telling, they're about realization.
People may not realize it, but over the course of the past 50 years; we have accomplished what science fiction novels merely speculated about not as far back ago as the 1970's.
Being only 16, I'm not as knowledgable about it as you elder slashdotters; but American and Russian accomplishments in space are more monumental than we realize. Being a firm believer in the theory that we actually did put a man on the moon; I am one to pay attention at the tremendous problems and obstacles that the folks at NASA and the Russian Cosmonauts ran into.
These people are doing the same, but in a more intricate and viable manner. One that teaches others exactly what we are and have been capable of, as long as we put our heads together. One could argue that the step from putting a dog in space and a man on the moon is one so tremendous it makes the evolution of the internet look like nothing more than a grade school game of "Telephone."
Keep that in mind before you toss aside these people's efforts as nothing more than a redundancy.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
Is it just me, or does anyone else find the headline "Man conquers space" ironic coupled with the news of a half-mile-wide asteroid nearly missing Earth?
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
It is dismaying that so many posters here, and also in response to similar stories, criticize and deny the need for space travel (it is as natural and necessary as humanity's migration from th Great Rift Valley). Their imaginations and aspirations seem bounded by the limits on their credit cards.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Re-read Asimov's "The Caves of Steel" to get the
answer why space exploration stopped.
What we (I mean the world economy) need from
space technologies - GPS, InMarSat, Satellite TV.
It is almost all. For town-centric civilisation
it is cheaper to build cellular phone base-station
in every town and connect every TVset with broadcast-station via cable, than launch projects
like Iridium, which uses satellite technology.
If world population would spread more evenly (and welfare would spread more evenly among it) various space-based communication systems like Iridium
would be more viable.
Then they would bring hundreds of launches per year just for maintainance, and these hundreds of
launches would become cheap enough to make orbital production of certain materials (say semiconductor cristalls) commercially viable.
Then and only then space technologies would become cheap enough to allow individuals or private companies to think about interplatnetary flight.
Communication sattelittes are already part of world economy. I don't know how it is in America, but in Russia, where space technology is one of few high-technologies we can trade out, various sattelite projects are often mentioned on the first pages of financial newspapers.
I remember when I was a child I was taught in school that von Braun was a great scientist and an admirable man. I repeated this in front of my father (who had met and worked with the man) and his face turned hard as he told me, "Von Braun is a Nazi. He was always a Nazi, and he's been rewarded for being a Nazi, and he'll always be a Nazi."
Since then I've read stories from slave-labor survivors about the atrocities at Thuringen and Peenemunde. It appears that my father's judgement was sound; von Braun was a cold-hearted slave-driver at the very least - and if the most extreme of the stories that eyewitnesses have told are true, then he was a sadistic monster.
If we are to honor von Braun for his contributions to science, we should equally decry his history of racism, slave labor exploitation, and possibly torture. At the very least our government should stop trying to cover it up, and NASA's biography of the man should include the testimony of the workers at Peenemunde.