Following on from a discussion myself and kleinbl00 had over here
- In Houston, the same silence creeps through rooms where technicians once huddled over computer screens as voices from space crackled over loudspeakers. The screens are black now, the mission control rooms empty, and most of the staff have already gotten their pink slips. On the Florida coast, where rusting gantries creak in the wind and bats flutter in cavernous buildings raised for the sake of a very different kind of flight, another set of lauch pads sinks slowly into their new career as postindustrial ruins.
I think this is an interesting discussion to have for the simple reason that it presents a perspective more than an argument. If by "Age of Space" (capitalization included) we're talking about the Cold War grandstanding that masked a staggering amount of militarization in the name of ideology and profiteering, then yes, that age is largely over. If we're talking about the "space age" then I'm a little less maudlin. The perspective presented in this essay is largely naive and wholly American. I mean, Context matters here - when Sputnik went up, we were overflying the Soviet Union with U2s. Contrary to popular myth the Soviets not only knew it, they'd registered protests in the UN and routinely fired 10-20 SAMs at each flight. It was an untenable situation. Fortunately the USSR obliged Eisenhower by launching Sputnik, thereby providing justification for constant overflight by satellite and allowing Ike to shift surveillance power away from the USAF. Also worth noting: the USSR regarded the space race as submariner duty. It was dangerous and people died all the time. for the United States, on the other hand, death of our national heroes was absolutely not an option. Part of the reason was that Soviet automation and computerization was decades behind the United States; we could automate a lot of shit while the Soviets had to put people up there. We had one manned spy satellite on the docket. It died in committee. The Soviets, on the other hand, lofted three. And while we gave up on our "throw up a bird" approach to satellite surveillance in the '70s, Russia shows no signs of letting up. The US puts less hardware into space these days because the US needs less hardware in space these days. What we're seeing is the function stripped of the bravado and flag-waving. The Mars Opportunity Rover has been doing science for ten.fucking.years without a break - Apollo 17 spent three whole days on the moon. And yeah - there's less bravado for a robot than there is for three dudes but 3.2 million people watched Curiosity touch down on the web alone. Right now, we're experiencing a lack of organic need for space. I'm not sure we'll ever achieve the pressing drive we had when our true purpose was ideological in nature, but I am sure that whatever happens next will come from a healthier place. You climb the mountain because it's there, true. But as Al Gore pointed out, if you could somehow fill the Orbiter's payload bay with feathers and magically turn them into gold in space, you would land having lost only a half million dollars in the process. There's mountains and then there's monumental cost overruns. Enough delta-V to cross the Karman Line will never come cheap... but the arc of history is long and it bends towards MC^2.The first, simply put, is that the United States has lost the space race. Now of course it was less a single race than a whole track and field competition, with the first event, the satellite shot-put contest (winner: Russia, with Sputnik I), followed by the single-orbit dash (winner: Russia, with Vostok I) and a variety of longer sprints (winner: much more often than not, Russia). The run to the Moon was the first real US gold medal—we did half a dozen victory laps back out there just to celebrate—and we also scored big in the planetary probe toss competition, with a series of successful Mariner and Voyager missions that mostly showed us just how stunningly inhospitable the rest of the solar system was. The race that ultimately counted, though, was the marathon, and Russia’s won that one hands down; they’re still in space, and we aren’t.
I hope Snooki sounds good by now. Wait.... No I don't!
Dude, I just mashed my keyboard and almost hit reply, that's how hard I'm laughing. It's Deepak meets Jersey Shore, and I just about wet my pants after merely 4 seconds into the video. I'm still watching, but god (or whatever deity of your choice) bless you for not offing yourself after a day's work. The audio quality is excellent, and the video quality is great as well, but the quality of the content? Oh, hey, look at the time, I gotta go!
I'd like to think you hear the words as necessary to do your job, but don't really process them. That's the only way you're still alive.
It's the end of the Space Age, but it's not the end of the age of space. Why? Because the end of the age of space will only come with the end of the age of humanity. We're not there yet. I can fully understand why someone born at a certain time would believe this; it's difficult not to view the present day as the finish line, the be all end all. But, of course, it isn't. Some of the things he wrote in 2011 are already proving false. The future is in motion, as ever. EDIT: and some of them, like this -- -- are extremely misinformed. Good read, though.Mind you, I’m not cheering. Though I realized some years ago that humanity isn’t going to the stars—not now, not in the lifetime of our species—the end of the shuttle program with no replacement in sight still hit me like a body blow. It’s not just a generational thing, though it’s partly that; another large part of it was growing up where and when I did.
The United States kept its empire intact, and as a result it has continued that futile but obsessive fight, stripping its national economy to the bare walls in order to prop up a global military presence that will sooner or later bankrupt it completely.
This is overly America-centric. Like reading an ancient Greek historian equate the dissolution of the triumvirate with an impending disuse of the Corinthian collum. How could he know that Rome would use it ad absurdum? Well, it's both decorative and retains the efficient load bearing function of the Ionic and Doric collum. Why wouldn't it last? Similarly, there are more solid elements like nickel in the asteroid belt than there are on 100 earths (based on what we've observed so far). The first company or country to exploit the resources in the asteroid belt will be richer than anyone or any country in history. It is literally a floating gold mine out there. And, like the Greeks, the fall of their empire triggered the rise of another, as niches get filled by rule of necessity. Similarly, there are plenty of obvious and probably plenty of obscure nations or collectives ready to fill the niche left behind when the US finally putters out as a world leader, however long that takes. I don't have to try hard to imagine India or China filling that niche rather quickly. They certainly have the muscle and the expendable resources (and people). So while I agree that the current state of human space exploration is dismal, I think the author is confusing a corner with a dead end. Somebody is going to get to those resources or that money (or bring it to them by "catching" an asteroid), it just probably won't be Russia or the US who pulls it off. Tl;dr - there is way too much unclaimed wealth floating in space to believe that no one will find a way to get to it.
You're absolutely right. I just find it unfortunate that the spirit of manned spaceflight will shift from an exploratory, scientific nature to a profit-based, corporation-driven endeavor.
Once the technology is routine, someone else might use it to explore. But if you think about it, "exploration" was just window dressing on the Apollo missions. Those were about the cold war in terms of funding and public support. Even "Apollo 13" the film admitted this. Once we had beaten the USSR, people didn't want their tax dollars spent to keep going back. Columbus found the Caribbean while trying to forge a shorter trade route to India on behalf of the Spanish crown. It's all about money and power. It's ALWAYS been about money and power.
I wasn't alive yet during the cold war, and am admittedly romanticizing our space race... it was indeed an arms race, first and foremost. Spot on again, AdMan.