How is it that the bankrupt American Empire has to hitch a ride on the spaceship of our existential enemy – Russia – to get into space? I thought our economic sanctions were destroying Russia. How can they afford to send rockets into space and we can’t? Maybe it’s because we spend our money blowing up camel jockeys in the Middle East.
A Soyuz spacecraft launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome, heading for a historic one-year expedition to the International Space Station (ISS). On board are cosmonauts Gennadi Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko, along with NASA astronaut Scott Kelly.
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Good article ———- “No, Russia Did Not Just Kick the U.S. Out of the Space Station”
To long to post … here —> http://www.planetary.org/blogs/casey-dreier/2014/0520-no-russia-did-not-just-kick-the-us-out-of-the-space-station.html
The situation is both funny and depressing; funny because our all-powerful government is reduced to begging former a former adversary and supposed technological inferior for rides to the “space station”, and depressing because after all the promise of the beginning of the space age that we would one day be a space faring civilization, and over a half century later we are reduced to this? A token handful of government sponsored individuals endlessly circling the globe several hundred miles above in low-earth orbit?
I have long felt that at the root of almost all discontent in this day and age is the lack of new frontiers; there is nowhere to go for those who desire to be free and live by their own wits, beholden to none. Nowhere on this planet is beyond the reach of government, and those free thinkers and individualists stifle and chafe under it. Frontiers act as a safety valve; allowing those who have no desire to conform or be under the thumb of their neighbors, to emigrate and leave their pallid and weak sisters behind. Frontiers also improve the human species; the strongest, brightest, and most determined self-select to travel outwards and found new civilizations; along the way they are subjected to a brutal Darwinian weeding process; those who do not measure up perish. And those who do survive, reproduce with one another and pass their superior genetics on to their progeny. What we have now is a system of dysgenics, where with each generation we get dumber and less capable than our ancestors, with no sorting process to cull the population of defectives, and all manner of incentives to encourage the inferior and low class among us to multiply like rats. The tragedy of history is that at the one moment in human history when we had both the resources and the knowledge to leave the bonds of the planet for the stars, we instead pissed it away doing endless circles in low-earth orbit…
That makes for great oratory Simon, surely you jest. We cannot escape past the Van Allen belts. Man is trapped in this fishbowl called Earth, which is why T4C called it a prison planet. Dremaing of a space frontier is a delusion she said space is a cruel and uncaring place, meaning, uninhabitable. The Russians snookered us into a fruitless space race to save face. It was time to end it after going no farther than low earth orbit.
EL Coyote,
The Van Allen radiation belts do not extend into space forever. While it is true that space is full of radiation with no atmosphere to attenuate it, these are engineering problems which can be solved relatively easily. Shielding, either sheer mass interposed between occupied areas of habitats and spacecraft, or some form of generated magnetic field could solve the issue for interplanetary craft. And living below the surface of the Moon, ala Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, or Mars or the asteroids, would make these locations habitable as well.
The barriers to emigration to the stars at this point are far more political than technological. Cost and access to low earth orbit has always been extremely expensive, primarily because it was precisely governments who ran the programs and funded the endeavors. Since when has a government ever done anything that was simple and cost-effective? Why use a ten cent pencil for a job when a ten thousand dollar pen will do work? Even NASA is realizing that private spaceflight is key to cutting costs to routine access to orbit. A Single Stage To Orbit reusable craft would revolutionize the cost of accessing low-earth orbit; once you are there, you are halfway to anywhere in the solar system. And technology being developed would reduce it even further. Fibers strong enough to hold thousands of miles of their own weight are on the verge of being mass produced; space elevators will be reality at that point. The economic reasons for colonizing the Moon and the asteroids are many; fusion power plants will need Helium 3 if they are ever to be practical, and the Moon has it in such abundance that it will be reason alone to colonize. A single metallic asteroid contains megatons of valuable metals and rare earths that could be melted cheaply with solar smelters; this will be the key to building a space infrastructure. Plus mining asteroids and comets for ice and methane which can be turned into liquid water, broken down into hydrogen and oxygen, used as fuel for spacecraft, etc,. The possibilities are endless and the need for manpower will be immense. The barriers are political and social; a failure of the imagination and lack of human spirit. You are right though about looking to government as solution to getting the human race off planet. As in every other facet of life that government sticks their paws into, interference and control only ensures waste and failure…
http://phys.org/news/2015-03-russia-space-station-nasa.html
Russia on Saturday announced initial plans to build a new orbital space station together with NASA to replace the International Space Station (ISS), which is set to operate until 2024.
Say Stuck, wasn’t that kilometers and miles? I thought they crashed the damn probe due to distance, not weight. Although it’s the same premise…..stupidity.
“The barriers to emigration to the stars at this point are far more political than technological.”
———— Simon Jester
You’re reading too many sci-fi books, or watching to many Star Trek movies.
The nearest star after out sun is Alpha Centauri ….. about 4.37 light years, or almost 27 TRILLION miles away. Unfathomable.
A popular analogy sets the Sun all the way down to the size of a grapefruit. If you wanted to get from your grapefruit-sized Sun to a grapefruit-sized Alpha Centauri system, you would have to travel about 2,500 miles. Then you’d get there and go — “Oh, fuck! There’s no inhabitable planets here!!”, and you’d have to come back home.
Simon said:
“I have long felt that at the root of almost all discontent in this day and age is the lack of new frontiers; there is nowhere to go for those who desire to be free and live by their own wits, beholden to none. Nowhere on this planet is beyond the reach of government, and those free thinkers and individualists stifle and chafe under it.”
Yeppers! It happened before for the same reasons. The lack of frontiers led to the stagnant middle ages. All the resources and desirable land was owned and controlled by the 1% and the sheople languished. The discovery of the New World changed that and allowed the remaining hard workers with imagination, spirit and skills to take advantage of the new and unknown opportunities.
Now, we’ve just about settled into stagnation with the 1% once again controlling all the resources and desirable land and we are fresh out of New Frontiers. How many centuries will it be this time before a New Frontier presents itself? I don’t think space will be it. The barriers to entry are extreme in the extreme and humans are becoming less intelligent every year. NASA will never put a human into space again. A few private companies might but NASA is done. It’s a real shame too because NASA was the only govt agency to give back as much or more than it consumed.
While Charlie Munger and others like him lack tact, they are EXACTLY right: Prepare for a harder world.” We may not like what these people have to say or the way they say it but as Llpoh pointed out, most of us here say the same shit day in and day out. We know the the truth and Simon Jester nailed it.
Stucky “The nearest star after out sun is Alpha Centauri ….. about 4.37 light years, or almost 27 TRILLION miles away. Unfathomable.”
Fuck with the governments unfunded liabilities they indebted us on the order to 200 TRILLION pieces of paper. That is unfathomable.
Simon Jester logic: more money should be seized from the shacked sheeples to invest in more Space Balls programs so those select few who want to be free from the shackles of planet earth, which I take to mean government earth can enjoy an extra heaping of individual liberty , cuz freedum’ ain’t free , bitchez.
Perhaps Simon has already spent a little more time in a radiation belt than he was ‘spoed to?
Flash,
When did I ever say anything about a government funded space program? Actually that is a misnomer; the space program is a space program in name only, instead it is a jobs program for a number of congressional districts, and a self-esteem program to make mooslims feel good about their contributions to science…
Heaven forbid, if I were dictator for a day, one of the many things I would do would be to eliminate NASA entirely along with almost every other government activity. I would also eliminate any law or regulation which hinders private space programs and space activity.
Space programs by private individuals can pay their own way. There is certainly a healthy demand for space tourism at $20 million a ticket, and months of required training. And for suborbital flights offering minutes of weightlessness and spectacular views of the curvature of the earth for the measly sum of $100,000… Tourism alone will finance the design and construction of craft capable of reaching low earth orbit; it will finance the first civilian space structures such as hotels and sports facilities. Just as sex and porn drove the creation of the home movie technology and the development of the internet, it will also drive the creation of a healthy space tourism industry once people realize all the kinds of hanky panky that can be done in low and zero G environments. There is already a thriving commercial space industry in telecom, imaging, and weather satellites. Once there is cheap access, all manner of commercial activities will be viable, but this cannot happen as long as commercial space activity is regulated to death, and a government “space program” exists, which gives the plebes the impression that manned spaceflight can only ever be expensive, dangerous, and unbelievably complex.
Instead of going up into outer space we should be going to bottom of the ocean. That’s where all the oil and other resources are located. We need resources to keep this central banking system going for another 30 years. I will probably be dead by then.I’m getting to old for this system to collapse on my time .If I was still a young man I would say bring it on motherfuckers. Not anymore.
Technologically, the bottom of the ocean is a far more difficult environment to live and work in than the vacuum of space. But I am an “all of the above” kind of guy, so if the economics support it then it will be done and I am all in favor of it. Current state of international law needs to be updated to recognize the property rights of those who engage in resource extraction as well as salvage operations in international waters. A couple of high profile cases involving salvaged gold from old sunken galleons has demonstrated the need for law respecting the rights of those engaged in salvage. The bottom of the ocean isn’t far enough away from the reach of government for me though. At best, only five miles down, and completely dependent on surface vessels for every necessity of survival. I would take the asteroid belt any day…
” … it will finance the first civilian space structures such as hotels and sports facilities. ”
——- Simon Jester, who surely jests
Sports facilities in space? BWAAHAHAHAHAHA!!
Then again, if they put up a hoops court, I might be able to dunk. I think they should build a golf course in space so SSS could hit a golf ball over a mile.
Man, oh man, you DEFINITELY spent too much time under some type of radiation.
Simon , as long as your advocating for financing you own trip into the great outer limits,sure go for it, who am I to judge.. my advice is plenty of warm blankets , questionable food in a tube , oxygen stores and generators of every type and of course, always clean underwear.
Stucky,
Haven’t been near any radiation recently, although I was a maintainer on nukes a long time ago…
But I digress. Some people are passionate about sports. Others are passionate about wizened oligarchs. I happen to be passionate about the idea of private space travel and the opening of new frontiers.
Just imagine though, the kinkiness you could achieve in your nineties in a low-G environment! Then you could really put that horse-dong of yours to good use!
I think the real key to opening space is building an elevator. We have laboratory materials now that are strong enough to pull it off. Yes there is a good bit of development to take a material from the laboratory to the production floor, but there is plenty of precedent for that.
If you don’t know, rockets basic limitation is that it has to lift the fuel as well as the payload. The shuttle for example had something like a 200:1 ratio of fuel to payload. That inefficiency is a major component of the extreme expense associated with rockets. One of the reasons you see concepts like the big balloon/dirigible based launching platforms, or SpaceX’s high altitude launch from a larger mother ship is to reduce the amount of fuel used to lift the fuel to whatever height they can get to with alternate means. A space elevator eliminates the need for any fuel whatsoever beyond what energy you need to get to orbit, and the nature of that energy can be electric instead of fuel which means your costs go down by a staggering amount.
Yes building one would be a pretty monumental task, but whoever pulled it off would own space from that point forward. NASA said in 2003 that it would cost 6.2 Billion to construct. Using their track record from previous projects lets assume they are off by two orders of magnitude (600 Billion). For less than the cost of the Iraq war we could have a $250/kg road to space (versus $3000/kg ish via rockets). If we could convince Boeing, Ratheon, and Lockheed Martin to build it we might even get it past Congress. Of course then it would cost $6T and only work on Tuesday. Even so it would unlock our access to our own solar system at the very least.
Considering that our hyper-insane government seems hell-bent to use their first-strike imperative it might be a good idea to have a way off this planet.
In 1956, Von Braun & Co designed a Redstone class multistage rocket & satellite and proposed Project Orbiter to launch the worlds first man made satellite; but, the Swedish Jew Dwight Eisenhower hated Germans and forbid him to work on it. Congress also cut rocket funds. Dwight was POTUS and wanted his clan to get the dough, experience and glory. After Sputnik on 4Oct57, Congress told the rocket folks to spend whatever they needed and launch one ASAP. but, Dwight still held the Germans back. Atlas & Vanguard kept failing but Von Braun Co secretly built a rocket and satellite which was launched successfully on 1Feb58. In Mar2010, Obama launched Obamacare and in Oct2010, Obama privatized rockets and effectively canned NASA and our space program. I propose a memorial statue of Obama sitting on a toilet in Wash DC that forever emits the odor of a skunk.
Elevator to space is a pipe dream. The cable would need to be 22,000 miles long plus probably 1/3rd longer (33,000 miles) to be stable lifting heavy loads. Differentials in rotational friction between the atmosphere and space would cause the cable to be anything but straight. Storms on Earth would play havoc with it and the friction would create one hell of a static charge. Charged particle ejections from the Sun and varying solar wind would play hell with it. All of Earth’s orbit for hundreds of miles would have to be permanently cleared of hardware and debris. Anything hauled up the cable would have to be moved well out of reach of the cable as soon as it reached geosynchronous orbit due to the flailing about of the thing.
Your only energy/fuel savings would be in not having to lift fuel but then again in order to leave that geosynchronous area you are going to need energy/fuel.
It seems to me that having that big counterweight out there 33,000 miles from Earth would actually cause a change in the distance/stability of Earth’s orbit relative to the Sun/Moon but I don’t know shit about orbital mechanics. The rotational friction of the contraption might even change our length of day.
My biggest argument against it though is that it just allows us to live that much further beyond our means. The world is broke. Wholesome food, clean fresh water and energy will dominate our future needs. The first doomer I encountered in 2007 or so was Chris Martenson and his mantra of “A future of less” pretty much nails it. The Great Regression has begun.
some pretty nice discussion here on space elevators, pro/con
http://www.quora.com/Is-a-space-elevator-possible-What-about-friction
imho, it’s one of those things that is feasible on paper, not so much in reality.
One person made this interesting comment;
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There is another problem with the space elevator:
In rough numbers, the radius of the Earth is about 6.380 km at equator, and the surface is moving about 1.666 km/h to make one rotation/24 hours. The geostationary orbit has a radius of about 42.150 km, making the nescessary speed 11.035 km/h to make the rotation in 24 hours! Thus an elevator going up must be accelerated “sideways” from 1.666 to 11.035 km/h, and correspondingly decelerated when going down. This will put extra strain to the cable, -or require a separate propulsion system for the elevator.
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Other people mention the enormous amount of space junk, and that a collision with such is inevitable. Or, the likelihood that eventually the 25 thousand mile cable would pass through a meteor shower. Lookout beloooow!!
But the best comment was that the trip from earth to space would take a week, or more, and any human would be driven to insanity listening to the elevator music.
LOL…elevator music! Maybe capitol punishment can henceforth being a lifetime of rinding up and down listening to the keyboard version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.
Yes there are definitely issues that have to be addressed. Friction slowing down the world’s rotation is definitely not one of them. Self healing materials and/or the ability of the elevator or a maintenance version to repair holes and tears would be essential. If it got hit by a manhattan sized asteroid well then you’ll have to call Allstate, but those sizes of rocks are more easily spotted and potentially deflected. Keep in mind the math on the likely hood of a collision like that is very, very small. Getting perforated by orbital debris is much more likely.
Even so, none of the problems are “impossible” like our current understanding of our interstellar options. These are all just “difficult”. I agree with Chris Martenson on the future of less, but part of what makes us human is our desire to push past our limits and do what can’t be done. For all of the doom and gloom we consume here we still have impractical, impossible, unreasonable dreams that will despite the odds come true anyway because we work hard to make it happen. When we run out of clean water we will likely work very hard indeed.
What about a 238,890 mile cable hanging from the moon with a big enough glider on our end to serve as a landing strip. We fly up to it at about 50,000 ft and then ride an elevator the rest of the way to the moon. I’m sure there are some major problems I missed.