Requiem for the Once-Imagined Future 674
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The underwhelming Discovery mission has the Wall Street Journal Online's Real Time columnists lamenting the space program's failure to realize the sort of intergalactic exploration they once imagined as kids through the works of Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein. Considering the Viking landers were digging around Martain soil back in 1976, 'we figured the place would be necklaced with orbiters and cris-crossed by rovers by now. Maybe there'd even be astronauts (or cosmonauts or taikonauts) tracing the courses of unimaginably ancient rivers.' Instead, we get a mission whose highlights were 'a) it came back; and b) an astronaut pulled bits of cloth out from between tiles.' At this rate, the columnists fear the innovations of the future won't be much more exciting: 'Maybe Real Time 2030 will fret about how our college kids do little more than steal full-res holographic porn when they're not getting their financial identities stolen by cyber-jihadists eager to build more backpack nukes.'"
Project Orion (Score:3, Informative)
Project Orion [slashdot.org] would have made all these dreams come true. It still can, though we'd probably have to build one of these suckers in space.
Frankly, for travel in the solar system any other form of propulsion is misguided at best and outright stupid at worst!
Simon.
Re:Why Mars? (Score:5, Informative)
Hunger eliminated? I don't think so. (Score:5, Informative)
Check this link [bread.org] for statistics (with sources) - some 30 million people in the US itself experience some level of hunger.
I've been there; when I was a kid, there was a period of time when my parents had no food in the house, and my mother baked corn meal and water because we had absolutely nothing left. We were the recipients of the local church "feed a needy family" that year, and that wasn't really fun.
Re:The WSJ Op-Ed page is antiscience (Score:1, Informative)
Keep on spreading lies, though; I'm sure you have fun with it.
Re:Far greater things lie ahead (Score:3, Informative)
The English language has exactly three ways to form a superlative:
1. For "simple" adjectives: est
2. For other adjectives: the most
3. Irregular superlatives: best, worst, least, most, eldest and furthest.
The superlatives for each of your adjectives would be:
the most overblown
the most phantasmagoric
the most fantastic
the most delusional
the most raving
the most lunatic
The one that comes closest to qualifying for an "est" form is raving, but the resulting superlative is not commonly used and would convey an ironic tone: "You just made the ravingest post I've recently seen on Slashdot."
-Graham
The English language does have other ways of forming superlatives
Re:Don't do that! (Score:3, Informative)
Have you been reading Dan Brown again? There is no major conspiracy to keep independent launchers underfoot. Only a massive screw up perpetuated by bad politics.
The truth of what happened was that Nixon canned the Saturn V program because it was too expensive. He then told NASA to build a trophy vehicle that didn't cost as much and "maintained the US dominance in aerospace." The resulting design was the space shuttle. Sort of. Then the President demands that the Space Shuttle also meet the military needs as well as the civilian. So the military demands cross-range ability and greater payload. But then the costs of development mount so the government wants to stretch out the costs of building the shuttle. So the shuttle is reduced to a multi-piece/partially disposable vehicle. The comedy of errors caused by politics continues.
All during this time, NASA is planning to stop all existing commercial launches on vehicles other than the shuttle, as the shuttle is supposed to be much cheaper. So NASA stops ordering the Deltas and Atlases, thus making those rockets unavailable. The Shuttle is then introduced and turns out to cost way more than expected per flight. So NASA subsidizes each flight waiting for the costs to come down. After all, satellite makers would be pounding down their doors any minute now! (Cue animation of clock ticking.)
Then the Challenger goes up in fiery flames, and suddenly there's no space access at all. Satellite makers suddenly realize that they have no backup plans, and that all the old rockets are unavailable. Plans get underway to reintroduce the Deltas and Atlases as private ventures. Between manufacturing ramp up time and mountains of paperwork, it isn't until the 90's that this plan goes into action.
So the 90's come along and the shuttle is again flying. But something's not right. No one wants to fly on the shuttle anymore, as the old and cheaper rockets are available. Why buy unreliable and expensive shuttle space when you can just launch a Delta II?
NASA then focuses more on their space station (which was gutted by the Clinton administration) as a use for the Space Shuttle. Commercial launches continue to increase.
Today, we've got plenty of Atlases, Deltas, Protons, Long Marches, and perhaps even a Titan or two flying. All while the Space Shuttle is sitting in a hanger while politicians whine about the cost of sending someone up to the space station just to pull out a few pieces of insulation.
On the bright side, the CEV plan is finally the correct one. Stop with the super-tech, and just build from what we already have. While the CEV proposal has money earmarked for a new launch vehicle, there is nothing preventing a Delta IV or other existing booster from being that "new launch vehicle." The only requirement is that the CEV be lifted on a man-rated vehicle that has the necessary performance characteristics to lift a mated crew capsule. All future CARGO missions will be done with cargo boosters.
The shuttle's history is a quirky example of that (Score:3, Informative)
As long as we're talking about the shuttle, here, it's interesting to remember that it was the Nixon administration [chron.com] that essentially cooked the numbers to make the shuttle program seem cost-effective, and that got the thing through congress. Meanwhile the Dems, Walter Mondale prominent among them, regarded the shuttle program as wasteful high-tech socialism. (Can you say "enormous federal boondoggle" [abqtrib.com]?
With respect to the particular program, Mondale's argument had a big measure of truth. The "productive" space program in terms of science is pretty clearly the low(er)-cost uncrewed probes now, isn't it? On the other hand the engineering involved in crewed exploration has a different set of challenges, and the ISS and the shuttle are more about those.
Maybe we think the shuttle's an example of the sort of corrupt, pork-laden process you're talking about. "Military industrial complex" and all that. (Please, where is Mr. Eisenhower when we need him?) But the lines involved aren't nearly as clean as our more doctrinaire partisans would think. The Republicans were all for the enormous spending program, and the Democrats were extremely skeptical about whether it was cost-effective.
Re:The shuttle's history is a quirky example of th (Score:2, Informative)
Walter Mondale was a staunch critic of the space program in general. He wanted to kill the Apollo program after the Apollo 1 fire. His ultimate goal was that the money spent on NASA should be directed into social services http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Mondale [wikipedia.org]
He was probably right about the shuttle, but his bias against NASA was well known which ultimately weakened his position rather than strengthening it. (IMHO)
Re:DC-X (Score:3, Informative)
While the DC-X may very well have been intentional incompetence (since they really wanted the X-33 to fly), it was still incompetence. Or more precisely, no one was allowed to do their jobs, so nothing got done in a useful way. After all, why was the President dictating how the next craft should be designed? Was he an engineer? A scientist? Someone who would have any *clue* about what such a design as the shuttle would mean?
If President Nixon had listened to his people about what the actual options were for space craft (as opposed to what he wanted them to be), we wouldn't be in this pickle.
(If you didn't give the job to Burt Rutan; then you'd probably also get a moon base for that kind of money.)
Rutan's a pretty smart guy, but please keep the fanboy stuff to a minimum. Things are more complicated [daughtersoftiresias.org] than they may seem.
I just wonder what we could have had.
I can tell you exactly what would have happened.
1) Von Braun would have continued the Saturn V program.
2) He would have launched an Orion [aleph.se] on the back of a Saturn.
3) We'd have been to Mars by the 1980's.
Does that answer your question?