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Water Droplets In Orbit On the International Space Station
BuzzSkyline writes "Astronaut Don Pettit, who is aboard the International Space Station right now, puts charged water droplets into wild orbits around a knitting needle in the microgravity environment of the ISS. A video he made of the droplets is the first in a series of freefall physics experiments that he will be posting in coming months."
This is the kind of news that saddens me. The grand endeavor to explore the universe that I knew as a kid has turned into, well, basically nothing at all, and the astronauts that once went where no one had gone before have turned into Mr. Wizards doing Newtonian physics demonstrations for ten-year-olds. I mean, the off-the-cuff demonstrations of floating pencils one saw in the Apollo program videos, in between doing stuff like developing space rendezvous techniques and going to the moon, have turned into the raison d'etre of the space program.
I am depressed.
It's worth remembering that the V2 effort helped Germany lose WW2 - the energy needed to produce the fuel meant shortages of fuel for aviation and transport. The private space initiatives are relying on the custom of a few billionaires - and once they start getting sued for environmental damage, and the price of their fuel is driven up by the inexorable laws of supply and demand, I doubt they will have a future.
The sources of energy that are rapidly declining in price - solar and wind - or are already economic - nuclear and gas - are not suitable for space vehicles. On the other hand, the attempt to produce low cost, low power universal communication tools has been successful beyond the imaginations of people even thirty years ago, and fundamental physics research would simply awe the likes of Feynman and Dirac if they were around to see it. There has been great endeavour in science and engineering, it just turned out that space exploration wasn't it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I don't care what you say, that is pretty cool, On his free time he is making great videos that, potentially for hundreds of years, will be available for future generations of k-12 science classes.
Is it really that inspirational, though?
I mean, think of what really inspired generation X. I don't think it was just the prospect of having a chance to sit in a cramped capsule in orbit for two days, and even that chance being lower than being hit by lightning.
I think it was more like the extrapolation of where it's going. SF told us stories of it becoming a mass thing, every other guy being at least a space freighter pilot, and the cool ones like us would be space FIGHTER pilots, exploration, whole colonies on other planet and in orbit, meeting horny green alien babes, and going bald where nobody had gone before. Oh wait, the last one was the porn ;) And not just space travel. It told us tales of robots, lasers, near-infinite sources of energy, etc.
It was an age of very rapid progress in a whole bunch of domains, and a naive linear extrapolation ahead promised to soon take us where we can't even imagine. Now it was the moon, tomorrow it will be colonies on Mars, and the day after tomorrow probably meeting the Vulcans.
It was that imaginary destination, not the current state that got us SF nerds dreaming.
Nowadays, it seems to have pretty much become a horizontal asymptote. Or near enough. Within your lifetime, or even your kids' lifetime, we'll probably still have half a dozen people in orbit. Your grandkids' chances of being an astronaut will still be lower than winning the jackpot and retiring to a tropical resort.
And even if they won that lottery, what will they do in orbit? Where does that extrapolation lead nowadays? They'll maybe levitate droplets of oil instead of water? Study the growth of mold on a petri dish in zero gravity?
Even robots are not what we dreamed they would be. Instead of cool HK-47 style androids at the bank teller, we have the more logical thing of a box with a screen and a keypad. Instead of robotic vendors, we have the more logical vending machines. And instead of having a robot copilot, you just have an autopilot AI, because it would be stupid to build a humanoid frame where just a few chips will do the same job better. And instead of C3PO style protocol droids, we have cell phones with translator apps, or just a browser to point to Google translation. Again, because it makes no frikken sense to actually build a dedicated humanoid frame for just one application, when an app on a general purpose gadget will do the same thing.
And you can forget the whole space fighter thing, since not only it turns out that blowing enough shit up in orbit would nix all our access to space, but pilots are being replaced by remote controlled drones even on Earth. And in space probably even more so, since you can do much tighter turns and accelerations if you don't have to worry about squishing the human inside.
So, you know, inspire kids to aspire to... what?
But even forgetting the extrapolation, the thing about the human brain is that it works with differences more than with absolutes. To be interesting enough, something must be different enough. You wouldn't think for example that a new LCD TV is new and interesting if it just has the buttons in a different position than yours.
At some point there was enough change per time unit to be interesting. Yay, we went to the moon. Yay, we have a space shuttle that promises to make space travel cheap and often (yeah, right.) Yay, we have a space station.
Now it's, what? Yay, we're stuck in the same orbit, but we can do another elementary-school level science experiments in space? :p
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.