The Next Fifty Years In Space 273
MarkWhittington writes "2007 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Space Age, agreed by most to have begun with the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik, on October 4th, 1957. While some are taking stock of the last fifty years of space exploration, noting what has been accomplished and, more importantly, what has not been accomplished, others are wondering what the next fifty years might bring."
Re:Sorry, no colonies on Mars or the moon in 50 ye (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What the next 50 years will bring (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Next 50 years (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sorry, no colonies on Mars or the moon in 50 ye (Score:3, Funny)
"Turn left now"
But there is no left.
Re:Next 50 years (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Imagine if the World Trade Center... (Score:2, Funny)
Right after we rounded up all astronomers and astrophysicists and put them Gitmo for withholding information, never mind we didn't listen to one word while they were shouting "look out for that asteroid!" And then once we liberated the Moon we'd welcomed as liberators!
Re:Sorry, no colonies on Mars or the moon in 50 ye (Score:4, Funny)
The atmosphere on titan is so thick, and the gravity so weak, that humans could fly about by flapping wings attached to their arms.
I want to go to titan NOW!
One of two things, then one more (Score:4, Funny)
Private space start ups will successfully sell and launch tourists then branch out into exploration projects intended to lead to colonization, or
Governments will allow them to develop to the point where it can let them think they're competing with Big Aerospace, offer them 10% of what it pays its corporate welfare favorite children, then have them merged and absorbed into those corporations to provide the equivalent of generic brand launch systems for resale to customers who couldn't otherwise afford it.
Then:
On the first weekend in October 2057 the last three living members of the National Association of Rocketry will meet up at the annual Homer Hickam And The Rocket Boys book signing and barbeque in Coalwood, West Virginia to fly some model rockets and brag about their massive knowledge of widely known (though incorrect) tricks for optimizing drag reduction and nostalgically misremembered trivia from space history, as all 200 citizens of Coalwood try to sell hamburgers and snow cones to the 15 tourists who've shown up to listen to the old farts and gawk at the Homer-shaped robot purchased with funds from the West Virginia Tourism Council, autographing paperback books and DVDs of "October Sky", while the Chinese Ministry of Smiling and Showing Off Our Glorious Technology for Public Relations Purposes launches a Soviet R-7 shaped Long March IX to orbit a Sputnik replica carrying a sample of Burt Rutan's ashes purchased on eBay from one of the 17 of trillionaire His Honorary Majesty Lord Sir Richard Branson's clones.
I intend to be one of those three.
Re:Sorry, no colonies on Mars or the moon in 50 ye (Score:2, Funny)
But "there is no left" either? Oh my god!
Re:Sorry, no colonies on Mars or the moon in 50 ye (Score:3, Funny)
Star Trek was guessing about computers a couple of hundred years in the future, but our current computers are already pretty close to their mark.
>>
Naah. The flashing checkerboard lights and MO-NO-TONE COM-PYU-TER VOICE alone will require another fifty years at least.
Re:Sorry, no colonies on Mars or the moon in 50 ye (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sorry, no colonies on Mars or the moon in 50 ye (Score:3, Funny)
Looks like Science fiction (Score:2, Funny)
The most unlikely event to happen is nations actually co-operating to build a space faring race, but this is also the most likely to succeed where resources and expertise can be combined. Of course that could imply a World government, beyond our federal systems of government. I think people might be afraid of that for the same reason we are afraid of the multi national corporation's capability to behave as a law unto itself.
The irony is with the resources of space our wasteful economic systems, that do not consider the externalities that have been trashing our planet so far, may even start to make sense. More likely though our economic systems will have evolve to deal with, as simple as it seems, waste to resource processing here on earth. I mean can you imagine any large scale space station, or long term space flight, that cannot reprocess resources? Isn't this what "Life Support Systems" would be?
Of course there is one other incentive - survival - a true galvanising force. If the survival instinct soaks into our mass consciousness it may happen, because the human race deserves to survive, deserves a space faring future.
I don't know how the future of space exploration, well any future, will be like in 50 years, I only know how it will start...
By seeking to avoid annihilation, ten years of frenetic activity turned human beings into a space faring culture...
Get of this rock or die!