Slashdot Mirror
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."
...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.
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 (_) --"---
quoting the Tom Lehrer tune as found at http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/vonbraun. htm
Wernher von Braun:
And what is it that put America in the forefront of the nuclear nations? And what is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old American know how, that's what, as provided by good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun!
Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown,
"Ha, Nazi, Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.
Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
You too may be a big hero,
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun.
naah sig schmig
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
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.
Man Conquers Space
yeah...
Kinda like how I conquered the mighty oceans last week when I went for a little paddle in the surf.
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
... I thought the moon landing was faked! Now we're going to go to Mars?! Why do you people keep rocking my world?!?!!? ;)
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
There are some other interesting Mars mission links. There is a planned British mission here. The 2001 odyssey mission to mars is here. And info about the NASA missions here..
Oh, yes. One of my favorite documentaries is by Steven Spielberg and is based on the premise that an alien was stranded on earth and befriended a human boy to help him get back home. Man, that documentary footage of those flying bikes is still vivid in my head.
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.
The final frontier. Consider how big our own galaxy is, and imagine a beowolf cluster of 'em, how long it would take to explore it let alone conquer it?
Too many zeros, not enough ones
I realize it's harmless, but ManConquersSpaceEnter.html is abbreviated MCSEnter, and the MCSE doesn't get past the firewall here.
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.
How can you have a documentary that documents something that didn't happen? I've already read and seen this. It's called "science fiction". It's not new. Can you explain what makes this piece of science fiction more worthy of interest than any other?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
When the first V-2 hit London von Braun remarked to his colleagues, "The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
The single most important thing that humanity can do is get off this planet. Do we have problems in society that could use the extra money gained by dismantling the space program? Probably. But all the money in the world isn't going to help when (not if) the next asteroid comes along and blows us all to kingdom come. If humanity intends to survive on the long term, our absolutely highest goal must be to spread somewhere else.
No, it doesn't help the average person. But if it isn't done, sooner or later there will BE no more average people.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I dunno about you, but I was all choked up just watching the teaser trailer.
If you're hungry for more, read Voyage. It's the story of a manned Mars mission conceived after the moon landings, and finally coming to fruition in 1986, championed by JFK (who was only wounded in Dallas in 1963).
~Philly
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.
Well said.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
A funny quote from von Braun:
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
And one that's less than funny:
I aim for the stars, but sometimes I hit London.
Unless von Braun was sarcastically mocking Oscar Wilde's comment:
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
The current cost to LEO is about $2600/kg. I predict it will be $1300/kg in 2006.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Slashdot has proved to be an excellent resource for links to the Buran's design. Thanks slashdotters!
Well, I have this question about the American shuttle's design compromises. I have heard that political pressure from the USAF, and the military-industrial complex, resulted in a larger shuttle, capable of carrying larger, military payloads. I read that a smaller shuttle would have been cheaper to build and run.
True?
Safety? The Burans had four ejection seats.
The Buran could have carried five times the payload of the American shuttle.
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"
that could be true, as the voyager space probe is leaving our solar system is speed is slowly increasing, our old stuff is a lot further out that people think
To boldly place junk where no-one has placed junk before
"Increasing"? I don't think so. The sun's gravity is pulling at it. Some other force would have to be acting on it to be accelerating, and unless you found the stealth deathstar, there is not much out there.
Table-ized A.I.
Mr P understands gravity. Yes, gravity sweeps a lot meteors to strike the Earth all the time. If I was a grammar nazi I would argue over the dividing line between a small asteroid and large meteor. Life is too short for that however.
Instead I will give you some friendly advice.
Mr P, you understand gravity perfectly. But Mr P, it is not enough to understand gravity. Sometimes you must understand the opposite of gravity -- comedy!
The use of lots of exclamation points should have been your first clue.
Thats right! Completely useless! I don't need the superglue that they used to put my car together, or the weather proof materials they make huge buildings out of, or that make my airplane rides safer and swimming pools last long enough to be worth having. And I wish my computer only had the power of a calculator. All of these things are just worthless crap: technically amazing, but totally useless in practical terms.
And FORGET all the processes we have developed to package and freeze food for long trips as a result of NASA. Refrigeration was good enough, and when people go into the deserts of third world countries, they can just eat raisins and rice.
Do you know why the government started putting much more money (than before that) into Universities after WWII? Because they realized that the atomic bomb was the result of "silly physicists" working in labs on things that were "technically amazing, but totally useless in practical terms." Good ideas abound when there is a way to cultivate them, and sometimes they are very fruitful. Also, necessity (of getting the job done, in this case) is the mother of invention.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
A recent American Heritage of Invention & Technology article, To Boldly Paint What No Man Has Painted Before is a fascinating read about Chester Bonestell, the painter who, among other things, illustrated the Collier space-flight series and collaborated with Wernher von Braun on the US space program. His realistic, scientifically-founded paintings apparently were a huge inspiration to scientists and sci-fi writers alike.
(* Both Voyagers are currently experiencing anomolous acceleration that remains unexplained. Understandably, this worries some physicists/atronomers. *)
These are accelerations *relative* to expected position, not global acceleration relative to sun. (And the phenom is tiny.)
Also, my recollection is that they only found it in the Pioneer probes and a few others. For some unstated reason, they could not measure the affect on the Voyagers (even if it existed).
Table-ized A.I.
Another documentry from Australia:
Geeks Conquer Females, a documentary based on the premise that all that we dreamt of as adolescents actually came to pass - and sooner than we expected.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
;)
This sentence is random filler to get past slashdot's random filter.
- undoware.ca
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.
Sure. Have at it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
(* W von B isn't that notorious as a Nazi villain with her generation because his rockets came so late in the war.... *)
Hitler was known to spend lots, perhaps too much, on high-tech gadgetry. His final tank was an expensive Edsel because he kept trying to top the prior one with size and power and went overboard.
If the war went on longer, then a lot of these "toys" may have been much more dangerous if perfected.
Perhaps von-B actually *saved* lives by making them spend effort on rockets rather than something with a sooner "payoff".
If you did the war accounting, I bet rockets were not a good expenditure in hindsite.
Table-ized A.I.
OK, Mod as Troll or Flamebait if you want, but this is how I honestly feel, and considering the points I'm going to make (although rather harshly), I feel it is entirely valid.
<rant>
#1: You're Offtopic(-1) until the last line, lucky for you, but please link when speakng of URLs. It makes life easier for us, and it makes you look smarter and more professional, even if it is just a simple thing.
Maybe you should get your mind out of the gutter. "Man" in this context is not in refferal to "Men only", but to "mankind" or "humanity". Your so worried about wether a word has testicles involved or not you're missing other important things in our world you should worry about, like Palladium, or the DMCA. Or civil liberties? OR slave labor, starvation, or genocide in 3rd world countries?? Instead, you act as if use of words is a conspiracy to keep women on the babymaker leash, and this is the problem with the world today. OKAY, right, i'm sure that "keeping my bitch in the kitchen" was the first thing on these people's mind when naming a fictional movie about space exploration.
Might I also point out that this movie is supposed to be a direct reflection of the time period it represents, at which time no one would give a flying fuck about a name like "Man Conquers Space". In fact I'd be suprised to see a documentary style film from the sixties or earlier called something as lifelessly PC as "Humankind educates and nourishes their skill and creativity, allowing for the graceful exploratrion of Space". Ironically enough, this sounds just like a passive little housewife...hmm i thought the whole point was to get away from that?
When will all these PC retards realize that they are the only truly offensive people? The rest of us really don't care that much, and I think if the world would lighten up a bit we'd get along better and get alot more accomplished, instead of constantly worrying that we might "offend someone" because they "dont' liek what we have to say"...hey, isn't that called censorship?
</rant>
Ok now that my blunt point has been made, I'll be a bit nicer by saying this: See how worked up I get when people get worked up about things like that? This just goes aroudn and around, so why even worry? No one is going to think "Women can't explore space" due to such a title. Anyone who does is either undereducated or intoxicated, both of which are unrelated problems.
:-)
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
It's a FICTIONAL WORK.
Christ.
Otherwise good points, I think we shoudl get up there too. I know I'd love to go....
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
That was my dream, to walk the Red Planet.
We were told this as children, that we would travel space, the legacy for those of us who were born on the year men first walked the Moon. We watched reruns of Star Trek and marveled at the possibilities.
We dreamed.
Instead, we have the truth of a fucked up world were the Welfare State is the reality, and War is the only truth.
Help me dream again...
I am going to repeat my main point. Von Braun was prepared to risk his life to make a point. And the point he risked it to make was that he thought the Nazis were wasting money, not that they were wasting lives.
You suggest that most senior Nazis weren't stupid? Did you check out the link to the brief biography of Rudolph Hess? Clearly nutty as a fruit-cake.
Jacob Bronowski describes how one of the senior Nazis, Goebbels or Himmler IIRC, wanted to take Heisenberg away from atomic research to try to prove, once and for all, that the stars are made of ice.
Look at the German research into atomic weapons. It was a complete failure, but no one was shot, or thrown in prison. In his book "Surely you are joking Mr Feynman" Richard Feynman describes how he supervised a team of young Army enlisted guys, who were chosen right out of basic training because they had scientific ability. These guys were human calculators, and ran punched cards through big mechanical calculators, to perform the very labourious calculations necessary to determine the amount of Fissile material needed to make a bomb. Heisenberg's group did the same calculation, but their answer was wildly off. They thought a bomb would require hundreds of kilograms of U235, not a kilogram or two.
The suggestion has been made that Heisenberg, or someone in his group, purposely fouled up the calculation.
If Leo Szilard hadn't escaped from Germany one step ahead of the Nazis do you think that he would have refused to work on German weapons research? Szilard circulated petition to Truman among the other scientists pleading with him forgo dropping the bomb on a Japanese city before it had been demonstrated to the Japanese high command.
Szilard gave up Physics after the war. He wrote some science fiction. This collection includes the short story "My Trial as a War Criminal", which I will strongly recommend...
You know, regardless of how the real world happens to be in regard to actual space travel, I think NASA's optimist's conquest of space film would make a cool basis for a story series.
.
If written well and produced well, it would be fun!
Especially the part where greed, human stupidity and war-mongering don't get in the way of progress and exploration.
I guess that's where ol' Gene R. came from. .
-Fantastic Lad
Let me see if I have this right. Von Braun was a card carrying Nazi wasn't he? We are not talking about an innocent civilian. We have a guy, who is head of weapons development programs that caused thousands of deaths, correct? Or possibly tens of thousands, as one of the other contributors to this thread said that many slave labourers were worked to death. We have this weapons developer, and you defend him because he might have been afraid to quit?
You really should read Szilard's "My trial as a War Criminal". It is set in 1949. The Soviets conquer America in a sneak germ warfare attack. President Truman, Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of State Byrnes are to stand trial for their decision to drop the bomb. Szilard stands trial for his role in the development of the bomb. (After the Soviets offer him the same deal the Americans offered von Braun -- charges dropped if he moved to the Soviet Union, and worked on their weapons programs.)
Szilard is, I believe, correct to believe he and Truman would have stood trial under those circumstances. Truman is convicted of violating the 'customs of war', because prior to Hiroshima, it wasn't 'customary' to drop atomic bombs on cities.
And my interpretation would be that Szilard thought the Nuremberg trials were about vengeance, not justice. Germany and Yugoslavia had laws, which presumably included laws against kidnapping, rape, murder. Should those who ordered or committed kidnapping, rape or murder stand trial under the laws of their own nation? Or the nation where the crimes were committed?
If the reasons we didn't trust the Germans, Japanese to conduct trials for the crimes committed on their territory is that we don't trust it will result in a satisfactory verdict or sentence, then were the trials about justice, or vengeance?
If the war trials were truly just then Allied soldiers who committed war crimes should also have stood trial. Saving Private Ryan portrayed Americans shooting prisoners who had already surrendered. That is a war crime. I know these kinds of incidents happened -- maybe not on Omaha beach, but they did happen.
Are you suggesting that von Braun shouldn't have stood trial in Germany because his role was ambiguous? Isn't that what a trial is for? Or are you suggesting that von Braun shouldn't be punished because some other criminals slipped away unpunished? Mr or Ms Anonymous Coward, I have had occasions in my life where I have had my courage tested. I witnessed what appeared to be Police Brutality from my office window some time ago. I reported it to the Police Complaints Commision. Which resulted in having the investigator lean on me, and try to intimidate me. He made clear that before he investigated his fellow officers he was going to investigate me. In spite of this pressure I was dogged in my pursuit of the truth. I stuck to my principles. It took five months to learn what had really happened. Yes, frankly, it was frightening.No, this test wasn't nearly as challenging as those I believe von Braun should have faced. But then I didn't choose to manage a huge weapons development program.
I find it a bit ironic that you should question my courage, when you choose to post as an "anonymous coward".
About von Braun's status as a Nazi party member -- I was told this by a buddy of mine, who was a big fan of space exploration. He had read a biography of VB, and explained he wasn't really a Nazi. He just wanted to make rockets. He told me VB joined the Nazi party just because he thought it would make it easier for him to use his political pull to enable him to build rockets. My buddies interpretation was that VB was taking advantage of the Nazis.
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?