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40 Years ago today

Brovane

Brovane

Diamond Member
40 Years ago Today Apollo 16 astronauts where doing EVA 1 on the moon.

Now we need to hitch a ride with the Russian's into order to get into LEO.

Am I the only one embarrassed by this state of affairs?

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You're not the only one. Sadly, we as a country care far more now about tax cuts for the wealthy than we do about national pride in our space program.
 
Kadarin said:
You're not the only one. Sadly, we as a country care far more now about tax cuts for the wealthy than we do about national pride in our space program.
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We also care more about entitlements, high tech military junk and also tax cuts for the wealthy. At some point this is going to bit us in the rear.
 
Brovane said:
Now we need to hitch a ride with the Russian's into order to get into LEO.

Am I the only one embarrassed by this state of affairs?
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Embarrassed? WTF? Roscosmos and NASA are partners on multiple projects. They have already completed ISS together (bigger than Mir or Apollo/Soyuz). SpaceX Dragon is making great progress which should replace the aging Soyuz. Cold War ended 20 years ago.
 
gevorg said:
Embarrassed? WTF? Roscosmos and NASA are partners on multiple projects. They have already completed ISS together (bigger than Mir or Apollo/Soyuz). SpaceX Dragon is making great progress which should replace the aging Soyuz. Cold War ended 20 years ago.
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It is embarrassing that we don't currently have a US man-rated vehicle for taking astronauts into space. We should have had something in-place before the shuttle retired. However we have been jerking around with shuttle replacements for the last several decades and after billions of dollars we have nothing to show for it. The first step back was when he decided to shutdown the production line for the Saturn V at 15 rockets.
 
I'm for a mission to Mars - it would be a challenge for all of humankind - but, what would the teabaggers think..... sadface.........
 
We replaced the space program with bloviated lead balloon ideologues. Yeah, these tea partiers and occupy Wall Streeters are holding forward progress back. lol Maybe we can revive NASA with mandated one-way trips into outer space.
 
Brovane said:
40 Years ago Today Apollo 16 astronauts where doing EVA 1 on the moon.

Now we need to hitch a ride with the Russian's into order to get into LEO.

Am I the only one embarrassed by this state of affairs?
Click to expand...

Why would you be embarrassed?

Bush said we had to shut down the Shuttle fleet and we did so what's the problem?
 
The space program has been withering for decades. The shuttle was a failure from the start but inertia kept it going despite the fact that it served no real purpose. By the late 1980s we should have started work on a shuttle successor, instead NASA kept on rehashing plans for an equally purposeless space station. It is a good thing that the shuttle is gone, what's shameful is that we didn't replace it with something better.
 
Not to sound too incendiary, but the first "American" to space was actually born in Cameroon. Prior to sending up men to orbit around the Earth, we sent Ham the chimpanzee. He pushed a button. What he accomplished isn't significantly less than the scientific progress gained on the International Space Station, with the exception of knowledge of the long term effects of micro-gravity on humans.

At present time, human space exploration is a matter of putting the cart before the horse. I agree with Ichy above that the space station is mostly purposeless. (With the exception noted above - study of effects on humans.)

But, I disagree with the comment that the space program has been withering. Look at our sudden rapid discovery of exo-planets. We've sent a flyby craft with a probe to impact a comet (comet Tuttle 1, deep impact probe), the little Rovers on Mars, studies of Jupiter and it's moons, as well as Saturn and its moons and rings, etc. Not to mention a lot of the data collected about our own planet. The most significant science and learning has occurred without manned space flight. We sent men to the moon - it had one major accomplishment: we beat the Russians to the moon. For the cost of another manned mission to the moon, we could instead be learning even more about many of the moons in our solar system, and probing the liquid water oceans that exist on a few of them. Is there other life out there?
 
ichy said:
The space program has been withering for decades. The shuttle was a failure from the start but inertia kept it going despite the fact that it served no real purpose. By the late 1980s we should have started work on a shuttle successor, instead NASA kept on rehashing plans for an equally purposeless space station. It is a good thing that the shuttle is gone, what's shameful is that we didn't replace it with something better.
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I wouldn't go that far,in fact, one of the bright spots for the Space Shuttle program was fixing the Hubble Telescope.
 
Ausm said:
I wouldn't go that far,in fact, one of the bright spots for the Space Shuttle program was fixing the Hubble Telescope.
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The shuttle was supposed to deliver cheap, reliable and safe transportation to low-earth orbit. It failed at all three of those goals.

The Hubble servicing missions were an amazing accomplishment, but that's also pretty much the only unique capability that the shuttle had. It pains me to say this but in the grand scheme of things we would've been better off just building new orbital telescopes rather than servicing the existing one.

I'm a supporter of manned spaceflight but I think that we need to be honest about the fact that it is not and never will be the most efficient way to accomplish science in space. The reason I support sending people up is because I believe that human exploration of the unknown is a worthy goal in and of itself, even if it's not the most efficient way to gather data. The problem with the shuttle was that it couldn't explore anything.
 
Ausm said:
I think most Teabaggers believe we never made it to the Moon.

😉
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And liberals believe in a Grand Conspiracy of all the Corporations (including those run by women) to pay women 77 cents for every dollar a man makes...

Who is really the crazy one?
 
Human civilization has reached a new era. As the population increases resources become more scarce. Food, water, energy ,etc. New land is not discovered or exploited to make up for it.

The prices on resources rise, we lose the capacity for many things. Throughout this century the need for simple food and water will become the primary driving concern.

Space is another world away. A world that has abandoned growth for sustainability. Maybe when we have food in our bellies we can again look to the stars.
 
Kadarin said:
You're not the only one. Sadly, we as a country care far more now about tax cuts for the wealthy than we do about national pride in our space program.
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Oh, **** you!

Please define wealthy.

The classical liberal/Democrat definition of a wealthy person is one that has a non-governmental income.
 
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