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Voyager and the Coming Great Hiatus In Deep Space
MatthewVD writes "Some time in the next decade, the Voyager probes will run out of juice and finally go silent after almost a half century of exploration. John Rennie writes that the lack of any meaningful effort to follow up with a mission to interstellar space shows the "fragile, inconsistent state of space exploration." It's particularly frustrating since the Voyagers have tantalized astronomers with a glimpse into about how the sun's magnetic field protects us from (or exposes us to) cosmic rays. Have we gone as far as we're willing to go in space?"
I'm 35 years old and the most exciting events in space exploration to happen in my life time have been two space shuttles exploding and killing the astronauts, sticking a station in space (that is at the end of its life already), and sticking a little RC car on mars. My parents and grandparents? They had the space race. First man in space. First space walk. First moon landing. In their life times, the world stopped to watch for news of events as they unfolded in space. In our life time, nobody knows the name of any astronauts and the only time there is coverage is when something explodes.
We will have no glorious moments like our parents and grandparents. There will be no amazing massive exploration event in our life time. People are more worried about potholes and "banning" gay sex than they are about furthering the progress of all mankind. So stop getting your hopes up that anything amazing is going to happen. For all intents and purposes, space exploration is dead.
Good one. But I'd say that voyager has to be one of the most ambitious projects ever made. I mean a space probe that would keep going deeper and deeper into space for years to come. Thats something to be excited about. Carl Sagan said "If the space is a big ocean lying out there, we have just started to dip our knees in the water". Well, I would want to swim as far as possible into it. Probably there are more important matters back here on Earth, but I would still go for another slice of space.
I think wealthy people still do think in terms of dynasties and legacy. You've got people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet doing a lot of work to leave their legacy on the world. And people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson have set up companies with ambitious plans to get into space.
I hope that what we're seeing is just a low point in history, where we're making the transition from government-funded space exploration to private funding.
This may be a good thing. While I think it's great that China is investing in space, we've seen with the United States that governments can quickly lose interest in space and stop funding exploration. Having private companies might be the only sustainable way to fund space exploration.
The problem with the space program is US funding. Increasingly citizens in the US want their entitlements without any strings attached.
Despite all the debates and rhetoric about it, entitlements aren't the problem. Social Security and Medicare the two big entitlements are in fact paid for from separate taxes that exceed the amount spent on those programs. Look at the federal budget. Military spending, is the biggest portion, bigger than all entitlements combined. NASA's budget is less than 1% of the federal budget. What's killing us are all the "wars", the overseas wars, the "war on drugs", the "war on terror", etc.
Don't misunderstand me, we need a military, we need defense. But the "war on drugs" is a complete waste, the "war or terror" is out of control, and the other wars are just a way for people supplying the military to get rich while bankrupting the country.
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The Voyager spacecraft computers are some of the last active computers in the Solar System still using hand-wrapped core memory. I think that says more about the space probe than almost anything else. There might be a couple museums which fire up a computer every now and again with such a memory module, but this is certainly the last one in a production environment. It shows how rugged that kind of design really can be.
Then again, saying it is the last one in the Solar System may not even be accurate, so it might just simply be said it is the last one currently running in the Milky Way Galaxy... unless we meet some alien races to dispute that fact.
My parents and grandparents? They had the space race. First man in space. First space walk. First moon landing
In short, all of the easy stuff was done before you were born. Getting into orbit has gone from being something on the national news to something that happens so regularly that a vast amount of modern infrastructure depends on it. In fact, it's become so easy that we now worry about the amount of stuff in orbit.
Once you've got into orbit, you're most of the way to the moon, in terms of energy usage. Going to other planets is harder, although we've done that with probes. But after that there's the question of motivation. There are lots of reasons to want to get into orbit - it's the ultimate high ground and gives you an unparalleled view of the Earth. Getting to the moon? Well, you can wave a flag, but after that it's a pretty uninteresting lump of rock. Mars? Even if it were made entirely of gold (or something actually useful, like refined uranium) then the cost involved in getting things back from there would make it largely uninteresting.
And the step beyond that, travelling to other stars, doesn't just require better engineering, it requires new physics. If anyone works out how to build a superluminal engine, then you can bet that there will be a huge amount of funding devoted to building it, but until then the problem with space is finding something useful to do there. Even scientific missions are better done by small unmanned probes.
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Here we go again. I remember how eagerly my church watched and prayed for the moon astronauts when they launched on their missions. Many of those astronauts were in fact Christians. This same lie appears on every single post here about any scientific topic. I for one eagerly support all exploration of the wonders that the Lord has created. The reason for the dirge of deep space exploration is simple to see and as usual it's all about the God of most people, the dollar. No one has figured a way to make money there in the short term so therefore the interest has to be carried entirely on the Governments dime. With budgets being trimmed and wars to fight that is one small dime nowadays. Personally I think it's foolish not to explore but I don't get to decide.