America to return to the moon?

[Jonny Nexus]

Actually, no. A bloke called Robert Zubrin came up with a very clever way of getting to Mars that could go straight there without space station or moonbase.

Oh, and the other clever thing he came up with is tethering the hab to the spent upper stage booster, and then spinning the whole lot to make artificial gravity. This means that you don't need to do lots of zero-G research on a spacestation.

 

[Desdichado]

HOORAY!! When I was a kid, I remember vividly reading kid's books on space that all confidently assured us that we'd have a manned permanent presence on the moon at the turn of the century. I'm still bitterly disappointed to find that's not so.

 

[Jonny Nexus]

HOORAY!! When I was a kid, I remember vividly reading kid's books on space that all confidently assured us that we'd have a manned permanent presence on the moon at the turn of the century. I'm still bitterly disappointed to find that's not so.

I still want to know what happened to the jetpack I was promised.

 

[Staffan]

I still want to know what happened to the jetpack I was promised.

Jetpacks, schmetpacks. Give me domed cities instead.

 

[Dirigible]

"You've got the Chinese saying they're interested -- we don't want them to beat us to the moon. We want to be there to develop the sweet spots," Republican Senator Sam Brownback says.

Can't talk about politics can't talk about politics can't talk about politics can't talk about politics...

 

[Desdichado]

I still want to know what happened to the jetpack I was promised.

Even when I was a kid I knew that'd never happen.

 

[Jonny Nexus]

Even when I was a kid I knew that'd never happen.

Well alright, I knew the jetpacks weren't going to happen (although like most other people I did get very excited about Project Ginger, and was a bit disappointed when it turned out to be an electric unicycle; a very impressive electric unicycle, I grant you - but they said it was going to be a anti-gravity jetpack, damnit!)

But I guess as a child in the mid-seventies I did figure that by the 21st century we'd have:

* Single-stage-to-orbit spaceplanes, with the reliability and frequency of airliners.

* Proper space stations (i.e. with hundreds of people on board - and perhaps even O'Neal type habitats with thousands of people on board).

* A moonbase.

* Men (and women) on Mars.

* Public rapid-transit systems consisting of "robot" auto-cabs going from any point to any point.

* Cures to cancer and all other similar diseases.

* Possibly probes to nearby star systems being launched.

* 20 hour work weeks.

* Hypersonic airliners.

It seems to me that the only SF dream gizmo that actually came in on time, and on budget, was the Internet.

Other than that, we're living in exactly the same houses as we did, doing pretty much the same sorts of jobs (they might be in IT, but the nature of being employed as a white collar worker is unchanged), driving pretty much the same sorts of cars, and watching pretty much the same sort of TV - except that the cars are slightly sleeker and the TVs are a bit clearer, a bit bigger, and a bit flatter.

It just doesn't feel like the future. This isn't tomorrow, it's just a slightly improved version of yesterday.

 

[the Jester]

Interesting... notice the pace of change today; it feels like the future to me! I remember before the first atms! I remember when microwaves and vcrs weren't in nearly every home, much less pcs. Heck, I remember when Showtime and HBO were new and sexy. I remember when every space launch was special enough to get major coverage on every network. Cell phones, GPS, spy satellites- there's a lot of new weird stuff out there, we just get used to it quicky because it comes so often. (Palmpilots!! MP3 players!! The list goes on...)

And I'm just over 30.

Sure is weird...

 

[Jonny Nexus]

Interesting... notice the pace of change today; it feels like the future to me! I remember before the first atms! I remember when microwaves and vcrs weren't in nearly every home, much less pcs. Heck, I remember when Showtime and HBO were new and sexy. I remember when every space launch was special enough to get major coverage on every network. Cell phones, GPS, spy satellites- there's a lot of new weird stuff out there, we just get used to it quicky because it comes so often. (Palmpilots!! MP3 players!! The list goes on...)

And I'm just over 30.

Sure is weird...

Yeah, you're right - there is a lot of incredible new stuff out there, which we often overlook. I suppose a good example is to ask how we would have reacted 20 years ago - to the idea that one day we would all be carrying around tiny mobile communication devices through which we could talk, or send messages, to anyone on the planet.

But nowadays we all carry mobile phones around without a second's thought.

I suppose what I'm saying is that we haven't got the SFish kindof stuff. In computers / communications / entertainment, things have progressed hugely. There are things (such as today's computer games) that would have blown us away twenty years ago.

But if you go back to the early seventies, when they had spy and communication satellites launched by expendible rockets, and a space station (skylab) serviced by three-man capsules also launched by expendible rockets, how impressed would they be to find out that the only thing that would have changed 30 years later is that the space station (serviced by *two* man capsules launched on expendible rockets) has *two* docking ports, and that the TV satellites are powerful enough to beam to small home dishes?

I suspect not very. In fact, I suspect that they'd be more impressed with the portable DVD player on the space station, and the fact that the the satellite TV offers late-night programming of a morally dubious nature.

I suppose what I'm saying is that aside from kitchen improvements, improved communcations, and the ability to transmit hard-core pornography to every home on Earth - what "great advances" have we actually achieved in the past 30 years?

 

[Ysgarran]

Buzz Aldrin had an editorial in the NY Time entitled "Fly me to L1".

Excerpts:

"Instead, I think the next step in our space program should be to create a floating launching pad for manned and unmanned missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond. This is not a task for the unfinished International Space Station, which is intended to be a floating laboratory rather than a bridge to the heavens.

A much more practical destination than the moon or the space station is a region of space called L 1, which is more than two-thirds of the way to the moon and is where the gravity fields between the Earth and Moon are in balance. Setting up a space port there would offer a highly stable platform from which spacecraft could head toward near-Earth asteroids, the lunar surface, the moons of Mars and wherever else mankind decides to travel. "

....

"It would also be relatively cheap, at least in terms of space travel. To create a port at L 1 we can use the building methods that have already proved successful for Skylab and the International Space Station — and we can probably get it up and running for $10 billion to $15 billion, significantly less than the International Space Station, which will likely exceed $100 billion in the end. We can also save money by shifting away from using the space shuttle as the transport vehicle and by developing a new, more flexible launch vehicle and crew module to get people and cargo up to the L 1 port."

....