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It's Baaack! XB-37B Finally Lands
ColdWetDog writes "The US Air Force / DARPA 'baby shuttle,' the Boeing-built XB-37B has just landed after 469 days in orbit. No official explanation of why controllers kept the mission going past the original duration of 270 days other than 'because we could.' I, for one, welcome our long duration, unmanned orbital overlords."
Oh... I'm so sorry. You should have posted that AC, because now the space nutters are going to have a field day with down-modding you.
You're right. But that doesn't change the fact that an obnoxiously loud contingent here on Slashdot watched Star Trek as children, and really, truly believe that they're going to get to bang vaguely ethnic looking space girls with pale green skin and silver hair on Proxima Centauri IV, just like Kirk did.
In reality, the life we're likely to encounter is probably slime molds and fungus, but hey... I'm sure some of them have that fetish, too.
To the space nutters: get over it. There is nothing to justify the massive expenditure of manned space exploration. The distances are too great, the energy costs are too high, and the performance characteristics required to keep a human alive there are too stringent to create any manned mission that will do anything more than go up, float around in orbit for a bit, and then come back down. Exploration will be done by unmanned robotic vehicles. You want to go out there? Go study physics and find a way to generate infinite energy for zero cost, and then find a way to bend space-time so that we can travel nearly instantly from one point to another. Can't do that? Don't expect to have a manned space program.