The objective of space exploration is not exclusively scientific. Robots cannot bring living space back to us. Robots cannot move ideas out into the cosmos. If we wish to preserve our lives (see above post about the sun expiring someday) and our way of life, we must move PEOPLE into space. It has to happen EVENTUALLY. The ones who get there first have a big leg up on the ones who get there SECOND. So we gotta do it sometime, I’d rather it was now and I’d rather it was us.

Oh, and quintiple NASA’s budget. Space exploration is the closest thing humanity has to a “destiny”.

Whenever life get you down, Mrs. Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you’ve had quite enu-hu-hu-huuuuff

Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour
That’s orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it’s reckoned
A sun that is the source of all our power
The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way

Our galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars
It’s 100,000 light-years side-to-side
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light-years thick
But out by us it’s just 3000 light-years wide
We’re 30,000 light-years from galactic central point
We go round every 200 million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whiz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed there is
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space
Because there’s bugger all down here on Earth

- My compliments to Eric Idle for writing this song.
http://www.sjaa.net/eph/0312/b.html

This article shows entry-level use of randomly embedded hypertext that was all the rage in 1995 when HTML was becoming mainstream, people were still surfing with Mosaic, and most of the world ended with edu or gov. Write your story, and here and there in random appropriate locations, link your text to something else that might enrich the experience of your readers should they choose to follow the link. Nicely Done! /golf-clap 4u

However, you missed the perfect opportunity. There’s a line in your second-to-last block of text that really could use some hypertext lovin’….

…launching Space Shuttles and expendable rockets keeps food on my kitchen table.

Link back to your own {expletive deleted} steak post!

Do I have to think of everything?

In any case, you’re full of brilliant ideas… too bad you work for the biggest corporation ever: the us government. Bummer….

Think about it. The Earth travels through space at approx. 29.5 km/s (roughly 106,200 km/h or 66,400 m/h) and the trip from the moon back to the Earth takes approx. 76 hours (or did, when Apollo 11 made it). That means when you leave the Moon you need to be aiming for where the Earth will be 76 hours from now, and that’s approx. 8 million kilometres or 5 million miles from its current location.

The Earth and the Moon are separated by approx. 385,000 km (give or take 20,000 km), so if your calculations are off by just a little bit, even just one minute off, at 29.5 km/s the Earth can travel approx. 1,800 km in just 1 minute. That doesn’t sound like much in the cosmic sense of things, but the Earth is barely 12,750 km in diameter (approx.) so in 10 minutes it will move 1 1/2 times it’s own diameter. In other words, in order to ensure you hit your 29.5 km/s, 12,750 kilometre-wide target, from 385,000 km and 76 hours away, you need to have less than 0.22% margin of error in your calculations.

What does that equate to?

The Earth moves at approx. 29.5 km/s through space, but it’s difficult to judge exactly how fast it moves. A 0.22% margin of error based on 29.5 km/s means if the Earth moves slower than 29.435 km/s or faster than 29.565 km/s, you’re dead in the water, or space as it were.

Daniel helping to launch manned shuttles into orbit but not willing to go up himself is not a conflict of interest (IMO), it just means he’s not willing to accept those 1:100 odds of a failed launch. He knows how much safety and planning goes into preparing for a launch, but he also knows that in spite of all the preparation, that 1 in 100 launches will fail, potentially fatally. Daniel is not prepared to accept those risks just to go into space. Other Astronauts are, Dan is not.

I think I emailed you a while back about the space program and you said something to the effect of this post. I remember thinking you were wrong and that man needed to explore space firsthand.

After getting into astronomy a bit, I think I completely agree with you now. We need to have someone like Mark Cuban start a space exploration gig that will crank out modular, cheap, light, simple, and sturdy rovers, probes, and orbiters. Why in the hell do we not have rovers, probes and mapping orbiters on every planet and moon in this star system? If you take all the “important” planetary bodies, moons, and asteroids in this star system, we know a bit (not all) about 1 of them (Earth), and a very very small amount of 2 of them(Moon, Mars). We’ve got about 1-2% of all the important bodies in our star system figured out. (probably less)

If NASA is bitching about the costs of these explorers, then they need to take a close look at them. For this blanketing project, put radar imaging, cameras, infrared imaging on the orbiters, and video, sound, cameras, and maybe a drill/analyzer on the rover. THATS IT. Keep it simple. Keep it cheap and light. No exotic experiments, no complicated or delicate equipment. Essential basic data gathering, mapping, and recording of every important body in our star system. THEN, if you find something earth shattering you might have the public support and will to bring more complex machines or even humans there.

Right now, we send in these multi-million (billion?) dollar satellites and rovers that are extremely complex and delicate with so many different tests and experiments that it’s hard to keep track of. You’ve got to get the cost and weight and simplicity DOWN, so we can send MORE of them out to the really important stuff around our neighborhood. The argument that this can’t be done is weak and tired. SpaceX has lowered costs in some cases 4 fold to get into orbit- probably even more with Falcon9. It can be done, people are doing it.

Anyone know why we haven’t sent a probe or sat to Phobos since the Russians did with Phobos 1 and 2? The Russians think they see a UFO there, some scientists think it might be hollow, and we don’t think that’s worth at least checking out? I’m with you Daniel, I think the reason we’re all frustrated is because the technology and industry is HERE to do this in an economical way. There isn’t anything really stopping us from knowing so much more about our own star system. People think we know everything about it and that all the scientists and astronomers have figured it all out. If that’s the case, can you tell me if Pluto is a planet or not this week?

(seriously, I’d like to know.)