Slashdot Mirror
Come on Up (to the ISS) You're the Next Contestant
Ender writes "The Voice of America and the NY times (Free registration, yetti, yatta ...) are running articles informing us that the Russian space Agency Rosaviakosmos has an agreement with Moscow to send a TV contest winner to the International Space Station. All contestants would train for space flight during the programs and this would show the audience how cosmonauts are trained prior to their space flight." Boy bands are ineligible.
Are we finally seeing space travel as "Reality TV"? Im all for expansion of space but do we really need MTV's "The Real World in Space" TM? :-)
Just you're average nitpicker.
The Danish TV station TV2 did a similar show about a year ago. Check out missionen.tv2.dk. However, this was not to go to the ISS, but to win a trip on a Space Cruiser. (the site is old, and it looks not very well maintained)
I believe it is also being done on the Norwegian TV2 (no relation between the two).
Also is this a setback for NASA? Possibility, but I think there is a larger issue for NASA here.
The sad fact is that anything that is bad for NASA is probably good for the space industry. NASA is a massively inefficient bureaucracy and its gotten that way because it was always a prestige organization that never had to justify its existance economically.
About the best thing the US govt. could do would be to pay off or securitize NASA's debt, then sell it in an IPO. As a private company, it would be highly incentivized to both produce useful work and capture the public's imagination.
I managed to catch a glimpse of the ISS flying over the UK last thursday at about 8:15 pm, you can get the times that it will fly over your part of the world from sites such as Heavens Above - it is very cool, if you're into that kind of thing, it starts off as a bright light like a star, rising pretty fast, getting brighter and brighter and then fading out as it enters the Earth's shadow. It faded out before setting. If you have a telescope, or even a decent pair of binoculars, you can make out the shape of the station - it's about 400km up. Apparently when it's finished you will be able to make out the shape with the naked eye :)
Well said.
My favourite (verbal, undocumented AFAIK) Buzz Aldrin quote:
"I never imagined that space exploration would mean parking cargo in low earth orbit"
So sure, if that's all we're going to do, let's do it for profit, not for knowlege. Jeezus, we know how to park cargo in orbit.
Further, if the trillions pumped into NASA really can't be made to pay off, then we should do some pretty harsh assessment of what the purpose of a space program is. I don't mean that we should can it, I mean that we should skip the screwing around and just start flinging brave souls out in rickety generation ships to nearby systems on the honest basis that we're 99.9% confident of condeming them (and their possible children) to death, but that if we wait until we're even 10% confident that we can get a foothold on another planet, we'll never go, because our actual research has effectively stalled and we have neither the will to push it on, or the guts to accept failure.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.