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Back in the 1970s, I fully expected to look up by about now and sometimes see this slowly traveling across the sky, rotating majestically as it went...
I never thought we would have flying cars. Too unpredictable, dangerous, and invasive of personal space.
Well After the ending of shuttle program and the financial rape of NASA I see the U.S. at least being at the mercy of other countries programs in order to travel to and from the ISS.
As for anything innovative coming from the private sector I have little hope.
Space travel should be a source of national pride and should be ran as a non profit national agency.
Here in this country only ghosts of what was remain.
When i was a kid i always watched the tv series Space 1999 (Martin Landau, Barbara Bain) back in the 1970's and i really thought that we'd have a lunar base by now just like in the sci-fi show.
Having been a part of the space program, and understanding just how hostile Space is to the human body--not to mention how difficult and dangerous it is to push a fragile person (or spacecraft, for that matter) through 7+km/s of delta-v, and then dump all that velocity again by smashing into the atmosphere, I'm less surprised at the way space exploration has gone.
Moonbases, Mars Missions, Exploration beyond the inner planets; all this is unsustainable and pointless without some economic motive. Columbus didn't sail for Antarctica--he sailed for India. And, if he'd happened to run into a Mars-or-Moon-like environment on the way, you can bet he would've turned right around and never gone back.
Fortunately, there do happen to be vast amounts of untapped natural resources within the solar system. We need to concentrate on finding ways to exploit them for the benefit (and profit) of mankind.
As for where I thought we'd be? Well, I thought we'd still be flying a dwindling shuttle fleet, perhaps perfecting a liquid fly-back booster and developing a replacement vehicle based less on what hotshot pilots want (crossrange) and more on common sense; keep it simple, stupid.
After Columbia, Bush saw to it that the shuttle flying part wouldn't happen, and congress has seen to it that we continue to creep along with the replacement vehicle. Now, perhaps, we're keeping it too simple.
SpaceX seems like the one bright spot in the whole equation, unless you count the Chinese. However, even if they can turn a private profit and corner the market (unlikely), there's not going to be much of a market if all we do is shoot of LEO and GEO comm and spy spots. However, the unfortunate reality; that we saw in the 80's, and which remains true today, is that the resources of Mars/Moon are about as useful to us as Iceland and Nova Scotia were to the vikings.
I was reading Mechanix Illustrated back around 1950, when they promised me that cars would levitate on magnetic highways somehow by 1985. They lied, but that's OK, I doubt if I seriously believed it even when I was in junior high school. I didn't really have any clearcut expectations in my mind then about what the future would be like. I did expect to live to see 2000, though, which would occur when I was 61. Even when Sputnik went up, in my second year of college, I immediately abandoned my science major, deciding I didn't want to be a trained monkey for the highly politicized organ grinder soon to take shape as NASA. At least, I was pretty clairvoyant about that.
I was reading Mechanix Illustrated back around 1950, when they promised me that cars would levitate on magnetic highways somehow by 1985. They lied, but that's OK, I doubt if I seriously believed it even when I was in junior high school.
These do, in fact, exist.... but not in the US since our infrastructure hasn't moved since the 1950s. If you go to China, Japan, or South Korea they do have operational maglev trains. The whole train has no wheels, but it slightly levitates off the ground, so you get no noise/pollution associated with trains, works great in cities.
Having been a part of the space program, and understanding just how hostile Space is to the human body--not to mention how difficult and dangerous it is to push a fragile person (or spacecraft, for that matter) through 7+km/s of delta-v, and then dump all that velocity again by smashing into the atmosphere, I'm less surprised at the way space exploration has gone.
Moonbases, Mars Missions, Exploration beyond the inner planets; all this is unsustainable and pointless without some economic motive. Columbus didn't sail for Antarctica--he sailed for India. And, if he'd happened to run into a Mars-or-Moon-like environment on the way, you can bet he would've turned right around and never gone back.
Fortunately, there do happen to be vast amounts of untapped natural resources within the solar system. We need to concentrate on finding ways to exploit them for the benefit (and profit) of mankind.
As for where I thought we'd be? Well, I thought we'd still be flying a dwindling shuttle fleet, perhaps perfecting a liquid fly-back booster and developing a replacement vehicle based less on what hotshot pilots want (crossrange) and more on common sense; keep it simple, stupid.
After Columbia, Bush saw to it that the shuttle flying part wouldn't happen, and congress has seen to it that we continue to creep along with the replacement vehicle. Now, perhaps, we're keeping it too simple.
SpaceX seems like the one bright spot in the whole equation, unless you count the Chinese. However, even if they can turn a private profit and corner the market (unlikely), there's not going to be much of a market if all we do is shoot of LEO and GEO comm and spy spots. However, the unfortunate reality; that we saw in the 80's, and which remains true today, is that the resources of Mars/Moon are about as useful to us as Iceland and Nova Scotia were to the vikings.
i realise its a question which can only really be guessed but do you think thier will be a manned mars landing by 2100
A Moon base and extensive exploration of the solar system by space probes.
[we don't have the first and the second is rather limited and hardly makes the news]
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