US space programme appreciation thread

[AndyDT]

I was reading recently about how the Apollo program had further ideas planned far beyond Apollo 17 and wondered why it was diverted into Skylab and the Shuttle.

Apparently a space station on the moon was not only possible but imminent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_Program (see Lunar Base)

And the USAF was confident about such a project years before independently of NASA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_base#Lunex_Project

It's amazing to think what would be possible now if the programme had been allowed to just run within the same budget perhaps. There could have been ample opportunity for research into long-term space travel, artificial gravity, cosmic rays etc meaning that we wouldn't have to wait until 2030 for humans to just orbit Mars or land on some asteroid.

[Sketchy]

*Appreciates not just the space programme, but pretty much everything to do with space and space exploration*

Space travel is just one of those things that are amazing. It just seems mindblowing to think one species somewhere in the universe can decide to go "screw this, I'm off to the moon" and actually get there.

[El Barto]

It's a real trip just how hit and miss our space program has been.  The effort to put guys on the moon only 12 years after mankind's first space launch was extraordinary.  We then blew that off in favor of the generally pointless shuttle program.  We put a telescope up that turns out to be a PoS, and then pull a monumental effort to turn the thing into one of our finest projects.  We try to put a satellite around Mars and plow right the hell into it due to 3rd grade level carelessness, and then follow it up with a pair of robots that outlive their projected 3 month lifespan by 7 years.  NASA manages 135 shuttle launches with only 2 failures, but then those two failures were caused by monumental systemic ineptitude. 

These guys either fail spectacularly or succeed brilliantly, and there's really never any way of knowing which is going to happen. 

[BlobVanDam]

These guys either fail spectacularly or succeed brilliantly, and there's really never any way of knowing which is going to happen. 

I think when space travel is concerned, there's no way to fail but spectacularly, is there?

Also, now that I think about it, why on Earth (lolpun) is this in P/R?

[MasterShakezula]

I've always wondered what exactly the point was of the space station and shuttles and that BS.

I say we should of spent the past 30 years sending people past the moon.  People haven't even gone out that far in almost 40 years, now, as a result of mucking around in the Earth's orbit.  Fuck that; we should of been to Mars or perhaps even beyond the asteroid belt by now. 

[El Barto]

I've always wondered what exactly the point was of the space station and shuttles and that BS.

James Burke would be happy to explain it to you.  This sort of attitude is precisely why Connections should be required viewing in every high school in America.

[AndyDT]

The US and probably humankind as a whole could have had a permanent foothold on the moon since the 1970s but it's almost like going back to square one again.


[That Obama paragraph was from edit 1 of the post by the way]

[ddtonfire]

"The Universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."

https://xkcd.com/893/

Hopefully cooler heads will prevail in the future and the space program will make leaps and bounds in the right direction. Space is still the future, and the only future.

That said, I appreciate what our space program has accomplished. Those pioneers are my heros.

[AndyDT]

Anybody seen what NASA;s sending to Mars next year? A buggy the size of an SUV:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-302

Why can't they stream live video from these things now?

I remember Huygens that NASA-ESA worked on and took pictures on the surface of Titan and wondered what that would have looked like descending:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_%28spacecraft%29

Huygens separated from the Cassini orbiter on December 25, 2004, and landed on Titan on January 14, 2005 near the Xanadu region. This was the first landing ever accomplished in the outer solar system. It touched down on land, although the possibility that it would touch down in an ocean was also taken into account in its design. The probe continued to send data for about 90 minutes after reaching the surface. It remains the most distant landing of any craft launched from Earth.

[orcus116]

I find it fascinating whenever I run into people who talk about NASA as a waste of money and their estimate of it as part of the national budget is wildly off (it's only 0.6%). Even then the space program is 1/4 of that so we're talking pennies compared to our war efforts to actually improve in science, technology and explore more of the universe.