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."

Comments

We live in a money-centered world...

[matusa]

...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.

Irony.

[Mr_Icon]

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?

Space Travel, Internet Changing the Nation-State

[reallocate]

The Internet and the development of manned spaceflight capabiity have in common perhaps the most important political and economic trend of the last 100-plus years: creating, illustrating and accelerating the diminished relevance of the nation-state. Just as the Internet creates and exposes new forms of behavior and economic exchange that cannot reasonably be supported or regulated within the sphere of a single nation-state, a viable effort to put humans in space will further create and sustain the changing nature and increasing irrelevancy of the traditional nation-state.

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.