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The Next Fifty Years In Space
MarkWhittington writes "2007 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Space Age, agreed by most to have begun with the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik, on October 4th, 1957. While some are taking stock of the last fifty years of space exploration, noting what has been accomplished and, more importantly, what has not been accomplished, others are wondering what the next fifty years might bring."
A lying car - like when it says the tank is full even though it's empty? Already got one of those...
What makes you think that a national policy of running huge deficits and growing our national debt at an almost exponential rate will lead to insolvency for the U.S.? Surely the good times can never come crashing down, right? Right?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Ok, fact of the week:
The atmosphere on titan is so thick, and the gravity so weak, that humans could fly about by flapping wings attached to their arms.
I want to go to titan NOW!
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
Either:
Private space start ups will successfully sell and launch tourists then branch out into exploration projects intended to lead to colonization, or
Governments will allow them to develop to the point where it can let them think they're competing with Big Aerospace, offer them 10% of what it pays its corporate welfare favorite children, then have them merged and absorbed into those corporations to provide the equivalent of generic brand launch systems for resale to customers who couldn't otherwise afford it.
Then:
On the first weekend in October 2057 the last three living members of the National Association of Rocketry will meet up at the annual Homer Hickam And The Rocket Boys book signing and barbeque in Coalwood, West Virginia to fly some model rockets and brag about their massive knowledge of widely known (though incorrect) tricks for optimizing drag reduction and nostalgically misremembered trivia from space history, as all 200 citizens of Coalwood try to sell hamburgers and snow cones to the 15 tourists who've shown up to listen to the old farts and gawk at the Homer-shaped robot purchased with funds from the West Virginia Tourism Council, autographing paperback books and DVDs of "October Sky", while the Chinese Ministry of Smiling and Showing Off Our Glorious Technology for Public Relations Purposes launches a Soviet R-7 shaped Long March IX to orbit a Sputnik replica carrying a sample of Burt Rutan's ashes purchased on eBay from one of the 17 of trillionaire His Honorary Majesty Lord Sir Richard Branson's clones.
I intend to be one of those three.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B