Advances from Apollo were worthwhile mostly in hindsight. And surely you must know that Apollo was to a large degree for dick-waving reasons (and possibly pushed forward so ferociously also because its prophet, like every good one, died soon after bringing the good news); at its core it was a crazy unsustainable crash project, with scientific and technical benefits demonstrably more or less equalled by unmanned probes of the time (to say nothing of what we could have accomplished in the meantime, over the 4 decades, with ongoing systematic & mostly unmanned projects drawing from merely similar - but distributed over the decades - amounts of funding; instead, we mostly pushed "spaceplane fantasy").
Consider how, out of the twelve people we sent, only one was a geologist, during the very last mission (side-note: but we did broadcast a reading of a mythological story during the first manned lunar orbit; quickly after the first touchdown we performed a magical ritual and spells; we also left at least one tome of mythologies among our technical artefacts, two missions before the one with geologist; yay for us) - how the hell did we manage that / one of the saddest testimonies about humanity, mindsets which steer us...
...which might just have a chance of worsening if you start cancelling big scientific research. Making science even more "uncool" and, ultimately, impacting also biological sciences (while this is supposed to be a century of biology and related fields)
If the world could spread the costs
JWST is already an international collaboration, a joint project with ESA (it is scheduled to be launched by their Ariane 5; also core instruments, components, operations) and CSA.
When you drop your part of such projects you previously agreed to (and even pushed), throw them out, others will go elsewhere; and will be reluctant to come back (well, a Soyuz launchpad is just opening in the French Guiana...). Look how well cancellation of Superconducting Supercollider turned out, with the Tevatron soon closing down and the LHC being the hub of particle research likely for decades to come.
And you know what? I, my place in general, are sort of happy about that, I guess (though slower overall progress, from lower cooperation levels and overall activity, is unfortunate)
And you imagine this killing of a major project in one field to shuffle & throw, in practice, several more billion towards for-profit entities which are on a worldwide crusade against inexpensive generic drugs. Entities which also essentially create demand for superfluous "treatments" among impressible population longing to find something easy to put a blame on for their poor fettle (what is in reality often mostly a result of unhealthy overall life habits, traps of consumption).
NVM how we can do many things simultaneously, no need for either-or (not before looking at real major budget sinks). But, pretending to follow that mindset for a moment, might I point out that directing funds to saving such late-in-life-cancer victims would not be worthwhile compared to the efforts to eradicate poverty, unnecessary deaths among children (think of the children!) - so that (to be too frank) they can have the chance of losing their mother one day. To assure sustainable approaches to development, overall.
Moreover, the mobile phone transition was already well under way while Apple proudly showed us the nice iPod numbers (with "in those few selected markets" small print) during their media events.
It's clear the iPod really took off (and still only in few atypical places) at roughly the same time it happened also to mobile phones with music player capability (mobile phones which weren't castrated by carriers in most places)
Yes, their music capability isn't used so universally as in the case of iPods. For my region, it's something like 20-30% of all European mobile phone users also regularly listening music on them. But that already adds up just in that one region to an absolute value in the range of total number of iPods ever produced.
Anyhow, in a reasonably prosperous ex-Comecon late EU memberstate, I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've seen an iPod (well, excluding mine...). S1 mp3 players, and similar (Creative, et al), seemed to be typical for quite some time; largely replaced by mobile phones few years ago already (typically by so called "feature phones"...though, later, often touchsreens, in the style of LG Cookie).
And most places are less prosperous than mine, with even greater mark-up on Apple products.
Including / quoting the pope (so, the formal head of majority of Christians) might be more cute...and useful, to get the point across with some people; or at least get (a portion of) them to question the ancient preconceptions that had been passed onto them (emphasis mine):
1. In celebrating the 60th anniversary of the academy's [Pontifical Academy of Sciences] refoundation, I would like to recall the intentions of my predecessor Pius XI, who wished to surround himself with a select group of scholars, relying on them to inform the Holy See in complete freedom about developments in scientific research, and thereby to assist him in his reflections.
He asked those whom he called the Church's "senatus scientificus" to serve the truth. ...
How do the conclusions reached by the various scientific disciplines coincide with those contained in the message of revelation? And if, at first sight, there are apparent contradictions, in what direction do we look for their solution? We know, in fact, that truth cannot contradict truth ...
the magisterium of the Church has already made pronouncements on these matters within the framework of her own competence. I will cite here two interventions.
In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII had already stated that there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man and his vocation ...
the need of a rigorous hermeneutic for the correct interpretation of the inspired word. It is necessary to determine the proper sense of Scripture, while avoiding any unwarranted interpretations that make it say what it does not intend to say. In order to delineate the field of their own study, the exegete and the theologian must keep informed about the results achieved by the natural sciences ...
new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory. ...
A theory is a metascientific elaboration, distinct from the results of observation but consistent with them. By means of it a series of independent data and facts can be related and interpreted in a unified explanation. A theory's validity depends on whether or not it can be verified; it is constantly tested against the facts
You might also want to know that Baikonur is the "World's First Spaceport" / you should know better than to just reuse Foxnews headline as the title of your submission...
(and the reality you grumble about is how the world always looks like for vast majority of people / your place maybe just had a relatively brief period of masking it slightly better...and at what cost / not strictly on merit; while being at the bottom of developed countries in social mobility anyway, so "land of opportunity" or "American Dream" were a myth, in themselves just a product to sell, in any event)
...also because things which made it a great missile test range, make it a good spaceport, too. And plains are a bit more handy, easier to work on, when it comes to creating and operating such vast infrastructure and the accompanying city.
Generally, if you look around you, you'll see that a significant elevation above sea level didn't seem to be the goal of any existing spaceport. There's a very good reason for that - by far most of the "effort" when trying to reach orbit is expanded not on height but on achieving high horizontal speed (and those are absolute basics of orbital mechanics BTW - so maybe you should reconsider the propriety of criticising existing approaches and praising "alternatives"?).
Shaving off 1 to 2% out of one minor factor, in exchange for massive headaches with maintaining mountainous spaceport, is a not a good deal.
Also, the same endeavour apparently wants to operate from the Swedish spaceport near Kiruna, and somewhere from the Emirates I believe (and somebody else out of an island off the coast of Venezuela, IIRC)
It's not merely about being open to the widest market, I think (after all, most people interested in a suborbital ride can easily come to the US) - a view from the height 100 km of northern Scandinavia or Persian Gulf (or Caribbean) should be much more interesting, as far as tourist rides are concerned, than New Mexico...
Of course hat big, lovable(?) difference means they are at least an order of magnitude away, in energy expenditure required, from being able to reach orbit.
Locations are not that much of a problem, a lot of Earth's area is an ocean. Also, industrial complexes tend to be near coastline (even if their specific area is unsuitable for launches, it makes for an easy means to transport large cargo). Besides, the spaceport in question is also in rather desolated area. And generally, it's largely also about planned "crashes" of staging.
Those scramjet vehicles, that pop out now and then, might be possibly better described as "missile demonstrator" or "weapons carrier"...probably closer to the most feasible and/or intended function (which follow the form, and vice versa; nice overall, less geopolitical complications than with ICBMs, and without the need to have a launcher placed in the theatre (or bomber carrier getting nearby), how convenient; the good old search for tech which can destabilize the balance and trigger a new arms race / sales).
When you really seriously do the math (like they did with HOTOL, for example), ~winged orbital vehicles using the atmosphere during launch turn out not really better than a "dumb rocket" using comparable materials...which for a spaceplane are required to make it even barely feasible. Similarly, 3 km of elevation won't make much of a difference - the rockets cover that very quickly. Their main goal is not height, but speed (launching near equator is more worthwhile)
And X-34 (plus few others being worked on, Dream Chaser for example) is just a payload of ordinary rocket.
More generally, historically, everybody at first expected "aerodynamic" or "spaceplane-ish" shapes from reentry vehicles, and worked towards it hard. They proved relatively unworkable. Blunt shape entry capsule was quite late innovation, an improvement; and a bit of a surprise. There's nothing wrong with capsules. Physics, rocket equation, are a bitch - and they override dreams (here, about expected modes of space travel); dreams unduly extrapolating rates and directions of observed progress. Look at those airplanes from "our" times (imagined during rapid advances of marine tech; and we can even build them - take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy... still a horrible idea vs. "boring" reality).
Consider how the "spaceplanes" came to dominate scifi... around the 40s, during rapid advances of airplane tech (I can see a pattern...); how the designers and decision-makers of the Shuttle were undoubtedly raised on those works of fiction. How they gave us an analogue of Catalina, at best (Spruce Goose, at worst); but something which looked very soothing and "inspiring" to the already constrained public imagination, already quite accustomed to airliners / Concorde. Something which probably robbed us at least of a decade of progress; was conceptually obsolete (with automatic rendezvous, docking and routine return of large valuable cargo done since the 60s) before it seriously got onto drawing boards. Wasting most of upmass on airframe; a lot of good that does in space...where it doesn't matter how "sleek" something looks. We build vehicles meant for various environments in very different, specific ways. Making a spacecraft out of an aircraft appears to have limited utility (and by the time it maybe-who-knows might, we could be on our way to in-situ manufacturing and making the "from reactive atmosphere to low orbit" problem uninteresting)
Grandiose, fabulous, "awesome" styles typical of scifi (again, works of fiction) mostly just constrain public imagination, make them expect something palatable, nothing too uncomfortable and too
In the late 60's, the USSR was planing on using using a Proton to send a Soyuz capsule on a circumlunar flight. (Note that they weren't planing on orbiting the moon, just swinging round the dark side and heading back to Earth, similar to the course Apollo 13 used.) They flew four unmanned test flights, but they were unable to fly a reentry pattern that wouldn't have killed the crew. The plans were shelved after Apollo 8 beat them to it with their lunar-orbital mission.
Zond 5, 6, 7, or 8 did fairly well (6 depressurised while still in deep space, but that's unrelated to reentry). Skip reentry worked fine. Turtles were alive and well (except for those on 6 of course:p ). Their main problems seemed to stem from the late go-ahead, crazy schedule, lack of focus, and related technical problems, apparently.
Soyuz used for Zond missions didn't have the orbital module, that's where the lower mass is mostly coming from (and yeah, with how both Soyuz and Proton improved in the meantime...)
A single shot moon mission using a soyuz like capsule and a proton/ariane launcher is pretty much limited to only a flyby, if it is possible in the first place.
If? Zond 5, essentially a Soyuz launched by Proton, was the very first mission which launched macroscopic life on a flight around the Moon, and safely back.
Energia experience and tech lives on; quite a few of present and upcoming rockets make use of Energia-derived engines.
The concept of stacking multiple parallel stages is also being pushed further, and probably in a better way than Energia did it. Its approach to that was a bit flawed - either a big-hunkin'-stack around unique core stage, or using (and almost as an afterthought) the boosters singly (as Zenit).
But enter, for example, Angara. Made of 1 to 7 identical core stages (with... Energia-derived engines). Bringing the advantages of almost-mass-production, demonstrated by R-7. Perhaps even with a payload capability in the range of Energia, with a possible future heavy version of core Angara stage (so yeah, 2 versions would lose a bit the benefits of mass-production; but anyway, normal Angara 7 will also have a nice payload, and nobody does automatic docking more than the Russians - so it's perhaps even better to forget about heavy Angara core stages and just do multiple launches)
I can hope that the price will go down in time so I can make this trip one day:)
While hoping, better don't aim the chances of that happening anywhere above negligible to minuscule...physics, rocket equation, is a bitch.
Dreams of "big and glorious" space travel popularised by works of fiction (often a sort of scifi cargo cultism, and contrary to many core things we've learned about our world; they are a tool not of space travel, but of storytelling...if anything trying hard to not make the depicted world too different from earthly experiences, too uncomfortable and unpalatable for the audiences - limiting their imagination, really) simply hit the absolutely wild realities of actually existing universe. And/or they will have to compete with other approaches...
For example, vast majority of the passengers / colonists can be moved while they are highly miniaturised and in deep hibernation - something we already do routinely on Earth (but how many people even remember about it in context of space colonisation? There's that confined imagination...). Give me one medium launcher plus additional few dozen million bucks, and I can transport at least a thousand viable homo sapiens practically to anywhere in our system, now. Which could already mean at least below 100 thousand per ticket.
And by the time casually flying around would be maybe-who-knows feasible, the surrounding tech background is likely to be quite different; changing the rules. Heck, 'we' might as well have "magical nanotech" & mind uploading first, making the big & glorious modes of space travel known from scifi completelly superfluous, at best.
OTOH their manned lunar lander was the only part of the whole stack which completed development, passed the tests (also in LEO) and reached "flight ready" status.
The above, plus how they demonstrated capability to do automatic landings... I'm sure if you'd throw several hundred million more at RKK Energia, they would be more than happy to make you the thirteenth* man on the Moon.
*But will you dare after what happened to Apollo 13?;)
Russians are by far the most experienced at autonomous orbital rendezvouz (not much need for a spacewalk), and fairly good at launcher reliability for quite some time, so multiple launch route is the most sensible one - no need for large "dedicated" (small production run, expensive, unproven) launcher, you use what is almost mass-produced and reliable (it helps how the R-7 is "the most reliable... most frequently used launch vehicle in the world"; just opening R-7 launchpad in Guiana might help with notably greater payload, too)
Plus, at that time they will have half a century of experience in operating the Soyuz - a spacecraft essentially capable of beyond LEO operation. Also the very first spacecraft which took macroscopic life (turtles, most notably;p ) beyond LEO (around the Moon...) and brought it back, on a Zond 5 mission.
Speed is one thing, but Intel cars would include stuff like "engine has some fuel-efficiency features disabled, despite they being present and fully functional" (you'd think that would be an especially great thing for entry-level models; also manufacturers being responsible about environment / etc., what with how they want to appear "green") or "it could carry more people and luggage, there's already place for them (structure, seats, etc.) but it's permanently sealed off by a translucent barrier"
Of course, car analogies being overall stupid and limited as they are, it's not nearly as bad in the realm of chips, there's not actually so much waste involved.
However (and worse?) it's inconsistent, and just a small snippet in the specs (not even on the level of a translucent barrier, however hard to notice at first sight it would be; more like fuel efficiency evident only after some driving, and even then only "connoisseurs" can really see it?). Sometimes it gets outright weird.
For example, look at the low-end Intel hit (and I do mean it completely seriously, those are great) of the last 2+ years, Celeron E3000 series. Celeron Dual-Core E3400 costs a bit less than 40€ for quite some time & is apparently the least expensive Intel CPU now at retail (maybe even almost "historically"; nice deal overall - 2.6 GHz, essentially a C2D with large part of L2 disabled, down to 1 MiB, and 800 MHz FSB; imperceptible difference in daily usage - and note that I don't really mind the disabled cache)...
...plus it actually does have virtualization, Intel VT-x, for some reason (all Celerons from E3000 series do). And yet, so many "better" CPUs from Intel... don't have it. Why?
If paired with Saturn V-class launcher & NERVA upper stage, plus Russian-style "orbital" (not confined to LEO in this case of course) fission reactor & ion engine, it would also allow those probes to reach their targets much faster. And that's an essentially available tech; even such isn't used, for reasons outside of "possible / not possible" dilemmas...
By the time harvesting such antimatter belts would be maybe-who-knows feasible, the surrounding tech background is likely to be quite different; changing the rules. Heck, 'we' might as well have "magical nanotech" & mind uploading first, making the big & glorious modes of space travel known from scifi (which often shows limited imagination - to make the work of writers easier & consumption more palatable to audiences / not too dissimilar from earthly experiences) superfluous, at best.
How about "light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes"? Answer: all antimatter CERN ever made (plus how its production has 10^-10 energy efficiency; a bit less than storing energy in Li-Ion batteries)
(and while discussing "compact" don't forget about the infrastructure needed to actively keep, at all times, any meaningful amounts of antimatter from disintegrating the structure carrying it)
There is a reason Star Trek proposes using antimatter engines on starships
Yes there is - it is one of of their ways to woo the audiences, about how "advanced" the depicted world is...but in fact being largely a case of scifi cargo cultism; and contrary to many core things we've learned about our universe.
Come on - none of the starships ever having any visible (or not even mentioned in technobabble style!) heat dumps? (and there would be lots of waste heat around; the size & proportions of radiators in Avatar starship should be treated as a starting point)
Star Trek world is a tool not of space travel, but of storytelling. If anything, it tries hard to make the depicted world not too different from earthly experiences (and plots known since the times of Ancient Greece myths and theatre), to not make the audiences uncomfortable with the absolutely wild realities of actually existing universe. Limits their imagination.
In the meantime, how many of them even realise that we are already capable of sending humans while are miniaturised and in deep hibernation? Heck, give me few dozen million bucks plus one medium launcher, and I can easily transport at least thousand viable homo sapiens practically to anywhere in our system.
But the barriers to store it don't go away. When / if you have fusion so plentiful to contemplate producing (at inevitably immense inefficiencies) antimatter, you have most likely also fusion advanced enough to be nicely compact, etc.
(plus, the real limit of power outputs - how large and efficient you can make the radiator to dump waste heat)
Deaths during childhood don't make that much of a difference; none at all if the child died at an age higher than 2-3 / when the next pregnancy was "due" anyway. Add epidemics wiping out large parts of many groups (a very common, if recurrent, thing; one which we almost forgot). Or worse maternal care during pregnancy in general; stillbirths & infections often leaving the mother infertile.
Given a world / life / etc. which are anywhere near decent we can witness a completely natural and voluntary self-limit to ~2 pregnancies per female (as you yourself sort of point out); one which is happening pretty much anywhere where they can finally have a dignified life (that does include also many parts of Africa; and it was you who brought up not only a present edge case but also "laughable" past numbers, I just mentioned few reasons why the latter are most likely closer to the former than you think). So yes, demonstrably "its not natural"[sic] for humans...unless we assume the only "natural" is a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Don't project on the past 1) the survival rates of the present (majority of 100+ billion dead homo sapiens died during childhood) 2) the fertility of well fed human female (with even moderate malnutrition, breastfeeding essentially acts like a contraceptive, easily giving 2-3 years between pregnancies; it's related to how, nowadays, menstruation often ceases in sportswoman)
And that average of 6-8 children per woman includes fairly high maternal death rates, also before reaching the average.
You almost made it safe by focusing on "the last 5,000 years of recorded human history" / ~since the Pharaohs of the Two Kingdoms. Then you had to throw in millions. In such form, I'm afraid it to be disregarded by tax abortionists (roughly as a group) as some devil's propaganda or smth.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider how, out of the twelve people we sent, only one was a geologist, during the very last mission (side-note: but we did broadcast a reading of a mythological story during the first manned lunar orbit; quickly after the first touchdown we performed a magical ritual and spells; we also left at least one tome of mythologies among our technical artefacts, two missions before the one with geologist; yay for us) - how the hell did we manage that / one of the saddest testimonies about humanity, mindsets which steer us...
If the world could spread the costs
JWST is already an international collaboration, a joint project with ESA (it is scheduled to be launched by their Ariane 5; also core instruments, components, operations) and CSA.
When you drop your part of such projects you previously agreed to (and even pushed), throw them out, others will go elsewhere; and will be reluctant to come back (well, a Soyuz launchpad is just opening in the French Guiana...). Look how well cancellation of Superconducting Supercollider turned out, with the Tevatron soon closing down and the LHC being the hub of particle research likely for decades to come.
And you know what? I, my place in general, are sort of happy about that, I guess (though slower overall progress, from lower cooperation levels and overall activity, is unfortunate)
And you imagine this killing of a major project in one field to shuffle & throw, in practice, several more billion towards for-profit entities which are on a worldwide crusade against inexpensive generic drugs. Entities which also essentially create demand for superfluous "treatments" among impressible population longing to find something easy to put a blame on for their poor fettle (what is in reality often mostly a result of unhealthy overall life habits, traps of consumption).
NVM how we can do many things simultaneously, no need for either-or (not before looking at real major budget sinks). But, pretending to follow that mindset for a moment, might I point out that directing funds to saving such late-in-life-cancer victims would not be worthwhile compared to the efforts to eradicate poverty, unnecessary deaths among children (think of the children!) - so that (to be too frank) they can have the chance of losing their mother one day. To assure sustainable approaches to development, overall.
Moreover, the mobile phone transition was already well under way while Apple proudly showed us the nice iPod numbers (with "in those few selected markets" small print) during their media events.
...though, later, often touchsreens, in the style of LG Cookie).
It's clear the iPod really took off (and still only in few atypical places) at roughly the same time it happened also to mobile phones with music player capability (mobile phones which weren't castrated by carriers in most places)
Yes, their music capability isn't used so universally as in the case of iPods. For my region, it's something like 20-30% of all European mobile phone users also regularly listening music on them. But that already adds up just in that one region to an absolute value in the range of total number of iPods ever produced.
Anyhow, in a reasonably prosperous ex-Comecon late EU memberstate, I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've seen an iPod (well, excluding mine...). S1 mp3 players, and similar (Creative, et al), seemed to be typical for quite some time; largely replaced by mobile phones few years ago already (typically by so called "feature phones"
And most places are less prosperous than mine, with even greater mark-up on Apple products.
1. In celebrating the 60th anniversary of the academy's [Pontifical Academy of Sciences] refoundation, I would like to recall the intentions of my predecessor Pius XI, who wished to surround himself with a select group of scholars, relying on them to inform the Holy See in complete freedom about developments in scientific research, and thereby to assist him in his reflections.
...
...
...
...
...
He asked those whom he called the Church's "senatus scientificus" to serve the truth.
How do the conclusions reached by the various scientific disciplines coincide with those contained in the message of revelation? And if, at first sight, there are apparent contradictions, in what direction do we look for their solution? We know, in fact, that truth cannot contradict truth
the magisterium of the Church has already made pronouncements on these matters within the framework of her own competence. I will cite here two interventions.
In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), my predecessor Pius XII had already stated that there was no opposition between evolution and the doctrine of the faith about man and his vocation
the need of a rigorous hermeneutic for the correct interpretation of the inspired word. It is necessary to determine the proper sense of Scripture, while avoiding any unwarranted interpretations that make it say what it does not intend to say. In order to delineate the field of their own study, the exegete and the theologian must keep informed about the results achieved by the natural sciences
new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.
A theory is a metascientific elaboration, distinct from the results of observation but consistent with them. By means of it a series of independent data and facts can be related and interpreted in a unified explanation. A theory's validity depends on whether or not it can be verified; it is constantly tested against the facts
You might also want to know that Baikonur is the "World's First Spaceport" / you should know better than to just reuse Foxnews headline as the title of your submission...
...and at what cost / not strictly on merit; while being at the bottom of developed countries in social mobility anyway, so "land of opportunity" or "American Dream" were a myth, in themselves just a product to sell, in any event)
(and the reality you grumble about is how the world always looks like for vast majority of people / your place maybe just had a relatively brief period of masking it slightly better
Baikonur started as a missile range. It was only sensible to merely expand (vs. new expensive mega-construction project) and use it as a spaceport - and not only because, for example, "the most reliable ... most frequently used launch vehicle in the world" is a direct descendant of the first operational ICBM (developed and tested at Baikonur)...
...also because things which made it a great missile test range, make it a good spaceport, too. And plains are a bit more handy, easier to work on, when it comes to creating and operating such vast infrastructure and the accompanying city.
Generally, if you look around you, you'll see that a significant elevation above sea level didn't seem to be the goal of any existing spaceport. There's a very good reason for that - by far most of the "effort" when trying to reach orbit is expanded not on height but on achieving high horizontal speed (and those are absolute basics of orbital mechanics BTW - so maybe you should reconsider the propriety of criticising existing approaches and praising "alternatives"?).
Shaving off 1 to 2% out of one minor factor, in exchange for massive headaches with maintaining mountainous spaceport, is a not a good deal.
Also, the same endeavour apparently wants to operate from the Swedish spaceport near Kiruna, and somewhere from the Emirates I believe (and somebody else out of an island off the coast of Venezuela, IIRC)
It's not merely about being open to the widest market, I think (after all, most people interested in a suborbital ride can easily come to the US) - a view from the height 100 km of northern Scandinavia or Persian Gulf (or Caribbean) should be much more interesting, as far as tourist rides are concerned, than New Mexico...
Of course hat big, lovable(?) difference means they are at least an order of magnitude away, in energy expenditure required, from being able to reach orbit.
...probably closer to the most feasible and/or intended function (which follow the form, and vice versa; nice overall, less geopolitical complications than with ICBMs, and without the need to have a launcher placed in the theatre (or bomber carrier getting nearby), how convenient; the good old search for tech which can destabilize the balance and trigger a new arms race / sales).
...which for a spaceplane are required to make it even barely feasible. Similarly, 3 km of elevation won't make much of a difference - the rockets cover that very quickly. Their main goal is not height, but speed (launching near equator is more worthwhile)
...where it doesn't matter how "sleek" something looks. We build vehicles meant for various environments in very different, specific ways. Making a spacecraft out of an aircraft appears to have limited utility (and by the time it maybe-who-knows might, we could be on our way to in-situ manufacturing and making the "from reactive atmosphere to low orbit" problem uninteresting)
Locations are not that much of a problem, a lot of Earth's area is an ocean. Also, industrial complexes tend to be near coastline (even if their specific area is unsuitable for launches, it makes for an easy means to transport large cargo). Besides, the spaceport in question is also in rather desolated area. And generally, it's largely also about planned "crashes" of staging.
Those scramjet vehicles, that pop out now and then, might be possibly better described as "missile demonstrator" or "weapons carrier"
When you really seriously do the math (like they did with HOTOL, for example), ~winged orbital vehicles using the atmosphere during launch turn out not really better than a "dumb rocket" using comparable materials
And X-34 (plus few others being worked on, Dream Chaser for example) is just a payload of ordinary rocket.
More generally, historically, everybody at first expected "aerodynamic" or "spaceplane-ish" shapes from reentry vehicles, and worked towards it hard. They proved relatively unworkable. Blunt shape entry capsule was quite late innovation, an improvement; and a bit of a surprise. There's nothing wrong with capsules. Physics, rocket equation, are a bitch - and they override dreams (here, about expected modes of space travel); dreams unduly extrapolating rates and directions of observed progress. Look at those airplanes from "our" times (imagined during rapid advances of marine tech; and we can even build them - take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy... still a horrible idea vs. "boring" reality).
Consider how the "spaceplanes" came to dominate scifi... around the 40s, during rapid advances of airplane tech (I can see a pattern...); how the designers and decision-makers of the Shuttle were undoubtedly raised on those works of fiction. How they gave us an analogue of Catalina, at best (Spruce Goose, at worst); but something which looked very soothing and "inspiring" to the already constrained public imagination, already quite accustomed to airliners / Concorde. Something which probably robbed us at least of a decade of progress; was conceptually obsolete (with automatic rendezvous, docking and routine return of large valuable cargo done since the 60s) before it seriously got onto drawing boards. Wasting most of upmass on airframe; a lot of good that does in space
Grandiose, fabulous, "awesome" styles typical of scifi (again, works of fiction) mostly just constrain public imagination, make them expect something palatable, nothing too uncomfortable and too
In the late 60's, the USSR was planing on using using a Proton to send a Soyuz capsule on a circumlunar flight. (Note that they weren't planing on orbiting the moon, just swinging round the dark side and heading back to Earth, similar to the course Apollo 13 used.) They flew four unmanned test flights, but they were unable to fly a reentry pattern that wouldn't have killed the crew. The plans were shelved after Apollo 8 beat them to it with their lunar-orbital mission.
Zond 5, 6, 7, or 8 did fairly well (6 depressurised while still in deep space, but that's unrelated to reentry). Skip reentry worked fine. Turtles were alive and well (except for those on 6 of course :p ). Their main problems seemed to stem from the late go-ahead, crazy schedule, lack of focus, and related technical problems, apparently.
Soyuz used for Zond missions didn't have the orbital module, that's where the lower mass is mostly coming from (and yeah, with how both Soyuz and Proton improved in the meantime...)
A single shot moon mission using a soyuz like capsule and a proton/ariane launcher is pretty much limited to only a flyby, if it is possible in the first place.
If? Zond 5, essentially a Soyuz launched by Proton, was the very first mission which launched macroscopic life on a flight around the Moon, and safely back.
Energia experience and tech lives on; quite a few of present and upcoming rockets make use of Energia-derived engines.
The concept of stacking multiple parallel stages is also being pushed further, and probably in a better way than Energia did it. Its approach to that was a bit flawed - either a big-hunkin'-stack around unique core stage, or using (and almost as an afterthought) the boosters singly (as Zenit).
But enter, for example, Angara. Made of 1 to 7 identical core stages (with... Energia-derived engines). Bringing the advantages of almost-mass-production, demonstrated by R-7. Perhaps even with a payload capability in the range of Energia, with a possible future heavy version of core Angara stage (so yeah, 2 versions would lose a bit the benefits of mass-production; but anyway, normal Angara 7 will also have a nice payload, and nobody does automatic docking more than the Russians - so it's perhaps even better to forget about heavy Angara core stages and just do multiple launches)
I can hope that the price will go down in time so I can make this trip one day :)
While hoping, better don't aim the chances of that happening anywhere above negligible to minuscule ...physics, rocket equation, is a bitch.
...if anything trying hard to not make the depicted world too different from earthly experiences, too uncomfortable and unpalatable for the audiences - limiting their imagination, really) simply hit the absolutely wild realities of actually existing universe. And/or they will have to compete with other approaches...
Dreams of "big and glorious" space travel popularised by works of fiction (often a sort of scifi cargo cultism, and contrary to many core things we've learned about our world; they are a tool not of space travel, but of storytelling
For example, vast majority of the passengers / colonists can be moved while they are highly miniaturised and in deep hibernation - something we already do routinely on Earth (but how many people even remember about it in context of space colonisation? There's that confined imagination...). Give me one medium launcher plus additional few dozen million bucks, and I can transport at least a thousand viable homo sapiens practically to anywhere in our system, now. Which could already mean at least below 100 thousand per ticket.
And by the time casually flying around would be maybe-who-knows feasible, the surrounding tech background is likely to be quite different; changing the rules. Heck, 'we' might as well have "magical nanotech" & mind uploading first, making the big & glorious modes of space travel known from scifi completelly superfluous, at best.
OTOH their manned lunar lander was the only part of the whole stack which completed development, passed the tests (also in LEO) and reached "flight ready" status.
;)
The above, plus how they demonstrated capability to do automatic landings... I'm sure if you'd throw several hundred million more at RKK Energia, they would be more than happy to make you the thirteenth* man on the Moon.
*But will you dare after what happened to Apollo 13?
Russians are by far the most experienced at autonomous orbital rendezvouz (not much need for a spacewalk), and fairly good at launcher reliability for quite some time, so multiple launch route is the most sensible one - no need for large "dedicated" (small production run, expensive, unproven) launcher, you use what is almost mass-produced and reliable (it helps how the R-7 is "the most reliable ... most frequently used launch vehicle in the world"; just opening R-7 launchpad in Guiana might help with notably greater payload, too)
;p ) beyond LEO (around the Moon...) and brought it back, on a Zond 5 mission.
Plus, at that time they will have half a century of experience in operating the Soyuz - a spacecraft essentially capable of beyond LEO operation. Also the very first spacecraft which took macroscopic life (turtles, most notably
Speed is one thing, but Intel cars would include stuff like "engine has some fuel-efficiency features disabled, despite they being present and fully functional" (you'd think that would be an especially great thing for entry-level models; also manufacturers being responsible about environment / etc., what with how they want to appear "green") or "it could carry more people and luggage, there's already place for them (structure, seats, etc.) but it's permanently sealed off by a translucent barrier"
...plus it actually does have virtualization, Intel VT-x, for some reason (all Celerons from E3000 series do). And yet, so many "better" CPUs from Intel... don't have it. Why?
Of course, car analogies being overall stupid and limited as they are, it's not nearly as bad in the realm of chips, there's not actually so much waste involved.
However (and worse?) it's inconsistent, and just a small snippet in the specs (not even on the level of a translucent barrier, however hard to notice at first sight it would be; more like fuel efficiency evident only after some driving, and even then only "connoisseurs" can really see it?). Sometimes it gets outright weird.
For example, look at the low-end Intel hit (and I do mean it completely seriously, those are great) of the last 2+ years, Celeron E3000 series. Celeron Dual-Core E3400 costs a bit less than 40€ for quite some time & is apparently the least expensive Intel CPU now at retail (maybe even almost "historically"; nice deal overall - 2.6 GHz, essentially a C2D with large part of L2 disabled, down to 1 MiB, and 800 MHz FSB; imperceptible difference in daily usage - and note that I don't really mind the disabled cache)...
And even claiming such "worthless" gem could be perfect for, say, a secret base. Eventually.
Tempting. Sadly, the administrations involved usually mostly lack any sense of humour.
If paired with Saturn V-class launcher & NERVA upper stage, plus Russian-style "orbital" (not confined to LEO in this case of course) fission reactor & ion engine, it would also allow those probes to reach their targets much faster. And that's an essentially available tech; even such isn't used, for reasons outside of "possible / not possible" dilemmas...
By the time harvesting such antimatter belts would be maybe-who-knows feasible, the surrounding tech background is likely to be quite different; changing the rules. Heck, 'we' might as well have "magical nanotech" & mind uploading first, making the big & glorious modes of space travel known from scifi (which often shows limited imagination - to make the work of writers easier & consumption more palatable to audiences / not too dissimilar from earthly experiences) superfluous, at best.
How about "light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes"? Answer: all antimatter CERN ever made (plus how its production has 10^-10 energy efficiency; a bit less than storing energy in Li-Ion batteries)
Particularly when approaching it in a General Products hull.
Perpetuum mobile of the 2nd kind, in other words?
(and while discussing "compact" don't forget about the infrastructure needed to actively keep, at all times, any meaningful amounts of antimatter from disintegrating the structure carrying it)
There is a reason Star Trek proposes using antimatter engines on starships
Yes there is - it is one of of their ways to woo the audiences, about how "advanced" the depicted world is ...but in fact being largely a case of scifi cargo cultism; and contrary to many core things we've learned about our universe.
Come on - none of the starships ever having any visible (or not even mentioned in technobabble style!) heat dumps? (and there would be lots of waste heat around; the size & proportions of radiators in Avatar starship should be treated as a starting point)
Star Trek world is a tool not of space travel, but of storytelling. If anything, it tries hard to make the depicted world not too different from earthly experiences (and plots known since the times of Ancient Greece myths and theatre), to not make the audiences uncomfortable with the absolutely wild realities of actually existing universe. Limits their imagination.
In the meantime, how many of them even realise that we are already capable of sending humans while are miniaturised and in deep hibernation? Heck, give me few dozen million bucks plus one medium launcher, and I can easily transport at least thousand viable homo sapiens practically to anywhere in our system.
But the barriers to store it don't go away. When / if you have fusion so plentiful to contemplate producing (at inevitably immense inefficiencies) antimatter, you have most likely also fusion advanced enough to be nicely compact, etc.
(plus, the real limit of power outputs - how large and efficient you can make the radiator to dump waste heat)
Deaths during childhood don't make that much of a difference; none at all if the child died at an age higher than 2-3 / when the next pregnancy was "due" anyway. Add epidemics wiping out large parts of many groups (a very common, if recurrent, thing; one which we almost forgot). Or worse maternal care during pregnancy in general; stillbirths & infections often leaving the mother infertile.
...unless we assume the only "natural" is a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Given a world / life / etc. which are anywhere near decent we can witness a completely natural and voluntary self-limit to ~2 pregnancies per female (as you yourself sort of point out); one which is happening pretty much anywhere where they can finally have a dignified life (that does include also many parts of Africa; and it was you who brought up not only a present edge case but also "laughable" past numbers, I just mentioned few reasons why the latter are most likely closer to the former than you think). So yes, demonstrably "its not natural"[sic] for humans
Don't project on the past 1) the survival rates of the present (majority of 100+ billion dead homo sapiens died during childhood) 2) the fertility of well fed human female (with even moderate malnutrition, breastfeeding essentially acts like a contraceptive, easily giving 2-3 years between pregnancies; it's related to how, nowadays, menstruation often ceases in sportswoman)
And that average of 6-8 children per woman includes fairly high maternal death rates, also before reaching the average.
You almost made it safe by focusing on "the last 5,000 years of recorded human history" / ~since the Pharaohs of the Two Kingdoms. Then you had to throw in millions. In such form, I'm afraid it to be disregarded by tax abortionists (roughly as a group) as some devil's propaganda or smth.