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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."
Should Wernher von Braun be honored like this? I think he was an opportunist, he new what his work was used for by the Germans during WWII.
-- (:> jms cs.vu.nl (_) --"---
55:55:20 (9:07 PM CT) - Swigert: "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here."
Which is slightly different. You can read the transcript here.
It could be, right now. Some people are already paying millions of dollars for a seat in the ISS, more would shell out a few tens of thousands for a suborbital parabolic flight, which a few companies are working towards. "Real" access to space is currently viewed as "way too expensive" because it's the way NASA does it, and people use it as a reference. It's not the technology, see Rand Simberg's recent column, We Don't Need No Stinkin' Technology.
As for why NASA (and some other government agencies) does it that way, beyond the near-mythical "why have one when you can have one for the price of two", the previous one, Pork Versus Vision, could be interesting. Or Stephen Baxter's "Voyage", which describes an alternate reality in which the US go all the way up to Mars as early as 1986, but (as opposed to this documentary) with a realistic view about politics. (You want Mars? OK, scrap this Space Shuttle thing, Apollo 15-20, and you have just enough Saturn V rockets for a single mission; what more do you want? A space station? Get real, Vietnam is expensive, we need the money for serious things!)
I dunno about you, but I was all choked up just watching the teaser trailer (I was also amazed I *could* watch it and it hadn't been /.ed yet).
Maybe you had to grow up then. I remember staying home from school to see the Gemini flights, when they were spacewalking for the first time. And then watching the moon landing on the neighbor's TV (we were in the country in Vermont and didn't have one there).
People were astonished that it had happened. Even people who intellectually knew it was possible somehow on some level never expected it to really come true.
And then after the moon landings, and after JFK's promise (to put a man on the moon "in this decade")had been fulfilled... nothing.
Sure there was Spacelab, made from leftover Saturn V parts, and there was Apollo/Soyuz, which I never saw the point of, even though it was very politically significant, because nothing *new* was being done there in terms of space travel.
But after Apollo, the space program was cut back. Way back. The fact that the Shuttle program got going at all was nearly a miracle. And the shuttle design we have now, the one with the horrible semi-reusable solid fuel boosters and the ultra-expensive non-reusable tank was a political compromise due entirely to budget cuts and funding limits. The real shuttle design was fully reusable and much safer: no uncontrollable solid boosters to blow up.
The reason seeing this preview choked me up was because it brought back to me the thought that, yes, we could have done it. We could have put those space stations up, we could have gone to Mars. We could have done so much more than we did in space. Instead, the money was spent on military hardware.
An international pissing contest with the Chinese, if it took the form of a new space race, might actually be productive. Much more useful in terms of advancing our technology (if we could avoid giving it to them for free/letting them steal it) than squabbling with them over a plane that one of their hotdog pilots crashed into. China has big plans and their military talks like they have big balls... let them take a shot at space. If they try to militarize it, and they say that they want to develop anti-sat technology and deploy it, that would force the U.S. to follow suit. NASA with a military scale budget? New arms race in space? I bet that would give the space program a big boost. And no, I'm not saying that militarizing space is a good thing, but I personally think that's what is going to happen. If you think that the only reason the Chinese are interested in space is research and prestige you should read some of their military's views on unconventional warfare, space, and the United States.
We couldn't even go back to the moon again today because we have lost that knowledge base. Sure it was recorded, but the engineers that wrote it down have retired or died. There is a knowledge and experience gap with the following generation of engineers after the Apollo program who never had the opportunity to work under the masters because we stopped the big adventure and chose to stay in earth orbit.
The DoD will build a new fighter aircraft every 10 to 15 years whether they need one or not just so the next generation of engineers will know how to do it. It doesn't matter if it actually ever results in a procurement. The design process itself serves the purpose of training our engineers and keeping us technologically viable in that arena.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"