What ever became of the "Big Dumb Booster" proposals?

I wish Google Mars would have taken the ESA shots instead of Nasa's as they're in color at least and seem better quality.

I like the GAIA project for Microlensing: (If we're going to go out there it would help to know where). I also really like the mapping ESA did with Mars.
http://gaia.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=26

I am interested in The Spaceeward foundation for more independant type projects:
http://www.spaceward.org/

They are doing the elevator 2010 project:
http://www.elevator2010.org/site/index.html

Remote robotic assemnbly:
http://www.spaceward.org/rra.html

Obviously nano or any tech isn't totally perfect. Some people are selling it for more then it's worth; but the space elevator seems OK so far... Entropy makes sense.
I think inventing ant-gravity is important for most of this and extreme health break-throughs. Any of this type of extreme activity is going to require more rugged humans.

The Bristol Spaceplane designs look promising... have they ever been studied seriously?

Of course a refueled-in-orbit Space Shuttle can get to Lunar Orbit. That was described in an Analog article. It was then pitched to Rockwell Space Division management by a plagiarist claiming the idea as his own. Rockwell demurred, just as they did when VP Dan Quayle asked if they had anything on the drawing board like "beam me up on Star Trek." I pushed them to do an "unsolicited" white paper on teleportation, and get some quick bucks, but management was afraid the story would get out, as their "engine that never needed to be refueled" had done when pitched to Idaho National Energy Labs.

Rockwell hoped to make the big time with the cargo-only Shuttle-C I worked on that proposal), and various Manned Orbiting Vehicles and the like. They had an entire Lunar-Planetary program (to which I was assigned half-time) which dead-ended when another proven plagiarist drove out all the MIT and Caltech graduates who kept pointing out his errors (such as cubical inflatable Moonbase buildings).

The true absurdity of how the US Space program shot its feet out from under itself is too tragicomic for this blog, and I hope to novelize it someday...

The last time NASA scheduled a gap in manned spaceflight -- from Apollo/Soyuz to Shuttle -- it ran over by, oh, about five years. Just one whoopsie late in the shuttle program (after, say, 2007) and I can see them cancelling the whole thing and going straight to CEV. Which will, of course, be late.

CEV is planned to do Apollo-type stuff and act as an orbital crew taxi, which is what the Shuttle ended up doing (despite being specced for a whole lot of much more ambitious stuff). So muttering about a shuttle to the moon isn't necessarily totally daft, if CEV == shuttle ... except that CEV isn't designed to deliver and retrieve KH-11s from polar orbit. Sigh.

I wish ESA would just bite the bullet and upgrade ATV to full man-rated status -- all it needs is a re-entry capsule and an escape tower and it'll be the second coming of the GE Apollo design, and it's already due to launch within the next 12 months.

The ignorance on the part of whoever wrote the original article is astonishing.

Aiming to test just the first stage of the launch vehicle in 2012, with dummy upper stage and CEV is hardly a landmark. And the though that Shuttles could go to the moon?

How do you count-down in Chinese?

The current hesitations in Shuttle operations are, as with the post-Challenger interruption, apparently temporary. The gap between Shuttle and CEV looks deliberate. And it's far enough ahead that people can plan for it.

There's all sorts of reasons why not to expect a Chinese Apollo program, and a good deal of the original which was slowed by the newness of the tech and the environment--no capsule fire forcing a redesign.

But the history says that 8 years is enough time to do something big in manned spaceflight.

Betcha the CEV is overdue, over budget, and doesn't perform to spec.

And we'll lose another shuttle.

Edited by author 08-25-2005 12:10 PM
Also, there seems to be an explosion of implementations happening.

We have three areas: Electronics (fast chips), material (space elevator, space ship hulls), and health.

This could be the greatest invention ever.
Carbon is a very root pure substance as a basic building-block to all life. If you burn anything allot of it turns into carbon. It combines strongly but is easily broken apart.
Diamonds have similar, very structured, carbon like properties so are the strongest (most valuable) substances known to man. The Carbon Nanotube process probably is stronger and able to be created on the fly as well as manipulated. Having control at this root level provides a large chance to construct just about anything hence infinite commercial apps.

Building Blocks:
http://www.ccmr.cornell.edu/education/ask/?quid=1017

Interesting older article about the “Diamond Age.”:
http://www.dse.nl/~hkl/e_nano1.htm
 
Extremely fast circuits and computer chips being created/invented
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/01/040107072303.htm

This is known as an NED computer screen where it will consume low power, 50 watts, and will be very cheap, like 300 USDA, for an 80 inch screen maybe 50 for a 19 incher. plus flexible like the newer screens are like OrganicLED screens. It will also have the same picture quality as a tube monitor because it uses light on phosphorus as well. Funny that basic life is made of phosphorus and carbon.
http://nanotechwire.com/news.asp?nid=2187&ntid=130&pg=1

Kill yer cancer (safely):
http://nanotechwire.com/news.asp?nid=2187&ntid=130&pg=1

Yes to build large ships in space we need this type of material in their hulls. No more flying foam problem.

"I'm going into orit, I'm going into orbit!" (in sing song voice.

Killer app for sure! Something we need to make all our sfnal dreams begin, and has a good enough capitalist interest to make people pay for it!

Killer App!

I remember nanotubes in Popular Mechanics about 15 years ago but didn't know if they developed anything realistic st the time. So now it's workin and I'm still alive!

Captain, is that transparent aluminum? No, Scotty...

Transparent carbon nanotube sheets created
DALLAS, Aug. 18 (UPI) -- A University of Texas at Dallas-led research team and an Australian colleague have produced strong, transparent carbon nanotube sheets.

The transparent carbon nanotube sheets are stronger than the same-weight steel sheets and have demonstrated applicability for organic light-emitting displays, low-noise electronic sensors, artificial muscles, conducting appliques and broad-band polarized light sources that can be switched in one ten-thousandths of a second....

    Related Headlines
Study:
Nanotubes may replace transistors (August 16, 2005) -- California scientists say they've found customized Y-shaped carbon nanotubes can compute more efficiently than conventional transistors.

Well, on the subject of simple things, reimplantation of removed stripes of ovarian tissue post-cancer treatment *has* been reported as leading to successful pregnancy.

Of course, doing something "simple" and expecting a good result leads to, for example, the fad of surgically transplanting ram testicle tissue into human testicles, to treat impotence. There was (many a year ago) a 250 Kilowatt pirate radio station broadcasting Howling Wolf and others into the southern USA from Mexico, sponsored by a doctor who did just that. His ads promised that men who went to Mexico for his operation would become: "The Ram what Am for any Lamb."

Doing something simple, but ahead of its time, is ure to be ignored by The Eastblishment, especially if one is politically suspect. For instance (skip this if you're Math challenged):

members.fortunecity.com/jonhays/clifhistory.htm

"I found reference to Rodrigues in Rotations, Quaternions, and Double Groups, S. L. Altman, Clarendon Press, 1986. Altman is an Oxford University crystallographer, who taught rotational theory for a decade before writing this book. On p. vii, '... rotation operators are often obtained as by-products of the angular momentum operators in quantum mechanics. Partly as a result of this approach, rotations are then parametrized by means of the familiar Euler angles, which suffer from three defects: they are not always unique, they are very cumbersome to determine in the finite rotation groups (point groups), and they do not provide a scheme for the multiplication of rotations. An entirely different approach to rotations is possible, which was introduced by Olinde Rodrigues in 1840 but which has never been used. The rotation operators in this approach are obtained by an entirely geometric method, which ... leads most naturally to the parametrization of rotations by parameters that coincide with quaternions. These parameters are unique, exceedingly easy to determine, and -- because they are quaternions -- they provide an algebra that permits the multiplication of rotations in a simple way. At the same time, and most importantly, these parameters determine unambiguously the phase factors that appear in the angular momentum representations for half-integral quantum numbers. [Quaternions discovered independently, and spinors in 1840!] This result leads to a rigorous formulation of the representations of the rotation group, either as projective representations or by means of double groups.'"

{in our world, Spinors were popularized by Roger Penrose a couple of decades ago.}

There is so little about Rodrigues in The Literature that many misconceptions are said about him. Elie Cartan (1869-1951), who is credited with discovering the spinor, invented a nonexistent collaborator for Rodrigues by the name "Olinde" (Rogridgues' middle name), a mistake repeated by Temple. Others misspelled his name as "Rodrigue" and "Rodrigues". Altman refers to the familiar "Euler parameters for rotation" as "the Euler-Rodrigues parameters".

Rodrigues became the patron and financial supporter of Count Louis Saint-Simon (1760-1825), founder of French Socialism. After the death of Saint-Simon, Rodrigues became head of The Socialist Party. So religious and ethnic discrimination, political discrimination, and the discrimination of Mainstream mathematicians contributed to the present obscurity of this creative man.

Wow -- doesn't it strike you how simple the experiments are that led to some of the most important recent biological discoveries? Ian Wilmut's team starved cells, arresting them mid-cycle and that made nuclear transfer (cloning) possible. The phenotype of nematodes is being unravelled by _feeding_ them short bits of double stranded RNA and then observing the effect of silencing the corresponding genes (hey, you don't actually have to do this at the bench any more, you can just determine the phenotype by database search these days) -- and now this!

Now that Dr. Robert Forward has passed away, I'm one of the few science fiction authors to have been paid to research Fusion Drives and interstellar missions and, for that matter, writing software for Galileo to Jupiter. See, for instance,

http://www.magicdragon.com/ComputerFutures...ations/210Ways.html

I happen to recall, while at Rockwell International (which shares the blames with Morton Thiokol and NASA for killing astronauts in batches of 7), I know that we officially proposed hibernation as a technology supportive of manned Mars missions. The project manager who submitted the paperwork was Edward McCullough. he was a big Jack Chalker fan. So, I guess, people will go to the planets in cryosleep if and only if the science fiction writers who inspire the aerospace engineers don't die off too fast.

And, as someone who worked on half a dozen Space Shuttle safety projects, each of which was ruined by criminal fraud, and as someone who testified about that to the NASA Inspector General, I sadly report the inevitability of another Space Shuttle failure fairly soon. At which point Europe, Russia, Japan, China, and India can go to the planets without the USA.

Eric: If sex cells don't suffer different levels of damage than do other cells (and I'm thinking specifically of males ones here, since female ones are fixed from birth) then what happened to Dolly the cloned sheep w.r.t premature aging would happen to offspring of older males, which does not appear to be the case.

It is entirely possible that this will have been a result of either 1) butchering the cell during the currently incredibly crude cloning process or 2) non-nuclear DNA, which really isn't terribly well understood. In either case, all bets are off as far as knowing what cloning can actually do.

Bruce: "more generally, I really wonder what's going to happen when they do the hibernation thing to higher animals where they can really test what it does to various longer-term life processes and more particularly cognitive function."

I suspect there'll be a bit more to human hibernation than merely huffing H2S while enduring low body temperatures, else by the law of averages (hydrogen sulfide is quite common) we'd have had a fair number of cold-sleep people by now.

And there are all kinds of interesting developments if you google for "fusion rocket". The papers tend to indicate flight times to Jupiter could be reduced from years to months, so now it's whether hibernation or fusion is made to work first. Some authors have already used the idea of fast ships overtaking slow boats - here's a non-spacewarp way it could happen.

Two significant announcements recently. The previously mentioned hibernation research and also the story that Cyc, a "hard AI" database will be released onto the net soon (hopefully to learn and grow, but probably to become a victim of the new net game--Poison Cyc :-)

Now, if only SMART-1 can find a monolith on the Moon...

Edited by author 04-22-2005 12:56 PM
The aging process isn't really reversible in sex cells. They suffer DNA damage and related problems, just like any cell.

But because DNA damage can lead to cancer, the body has certain defense mechanisms. One of these is a "countdown timer", which causes cells to self-destruct after some number of replications. Since cancer cells multiply far more often than normal cells, they tend to encounter this limit far earlier than normal cells.

This "countdown timer" is implemented by chopping a few base pairs off the end of DNA strands on each replication.

This is an ingenious anti-cancer mechanism, but it won't work for sex cells, which are passed from generation to generation. So the body has an enzyme called "telomerase", which replaces the missing bits of DNA. But telomerase can't fix other DNA damage, so sex cells tend to accumulate damage as you age. This is why the rate of birth defects rise as parents age.

Sure, you could activate telomerase in other body cells, but it's a bit like replacing a blown fuse with a copper tube--you haven't fixed the underlying problem; you've only removed a safeguard. You'd greatly increase your risk of cancer.

This isn't to say that we won't eventually be able to reverse aging. But there's no magic bullet--fixing age will be like restoring an old Model T to mint condition, except we'll need to deal with a few trillion(!) parts.

On the other hand, we could conceivably have nanotechnology and AI before 2050, which would let us perform the necessary repairs. We live in a pretty fast-moving world, as Stross's post on hibernation indicates...

Mark: It's fairly clear that this ageing process is either not occurring or is somehow reversible in sex cells, so it's just a matter of duplicating that on demand.

more generally, I really wonder what's going to happen when they do the hibernation thing to higher animals where they can really test what it does to various longer-term life processes and more particularly cognitive function. Anyone want to bet that they're /not/ going to find all sorts of odd corner cases, broken memory circuits, or personality disorders? At first, anyway.

Wow, things are moving along so quickly. Now only if we could get that cloning in order.
About the "clone aging issue" I think that is might be related to a genetic fault where the genes mutate as we age. So if a clone was taken from a person of about 40 that mutation would be inherant in the newly cloned object.

"Dave . . . What are you doing, Dave?" HAL asks.

Well, we might have cold sleep tech on the way. But I don't worry about that so much as I do the overpowered, souped up autopilot/alarm clock that is supposed to wake me up.

Still, it is good news.

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country

I use O2. You need to set your access point to open.internet and set the Treo to dial *99# The user name and password are both 'gprs'

Check out http://www.taniwha.org.uk/gprs.html for information on other networks.

David -- which network? I tried O2 (ack, spit), got nowhere. Tried Meteor, got nowhere. Not sure if I tried Vodafone, but I don't remember seeing any GPRS signal on my Treo. Any hints would be useful for next time I visit ...

"I hit Dublin last Friday, with a somewhat sore chest, only to discover that none of the local cellphone carriers provided GPRS service"

Yes they do. I used the bluetooth connection to my mobile phone to surf the Web with my Powerbook during Phoenix Con. - David

PS: Got the Atrocity Archive in London. Great stuff.

"..not three minutes in a supersonic vomit-comet." Absolutely. Seriously Charlie, track down a copy of the DVD. What they've done is recreate some of the capabilities of the X-15, from 30+ years ago, on the cheap. What they want to do, the dream, is real space tourism, orbital hotels, the works, and at this point they've got a more impressive track record than any of the beanstalk people. It's far too early to say they'll pull it off, especially at a price point you and I can afford, but the dream is very clear.

Actually, SS1 managed more like 12% of orbital velocity (for a sensible orbit) but that's not the real problem. It might be 7/8 times the velocity required, but that's 50 times the energy needed. Makes for a hell of a scale problem when you look at it.

I think the orbital tower is looking far far more interesting. I'm just hoping that nothing crops up to spoil carbon nano-tubes like it did for long chain ceramic fibres in the late 80s.

I said a holiday in orbit, not three minutes in a supersonic vomit-comet.

SS1 managed to reach, oh, almost 20% of orbital velocity. To get the remaining 80% of the way will require a heat shield and a buttload more fuel, driving up costs. And Branson is talking about that three minute boak-bounce he's going to sell costing $120,000. Yes, there's room for prices to fall -- but I'm an SF writer, not a venture capitalist or a captain of industry, and I am very unlikely to have a spare $240K to drop on a glorified roller-coaster ride any time in the next 25 years.

"..I figure is a hell of a lot more likely to give Feorag and myself a holiday in orbit before we're 65 than any rocket technology..."

In case you haven't seen it yet the documentary "Black Sky The Race For Space" about SpaceShipOne does a nice job of showing that the dream of orbital holidays is alive and well and in some pretty capable hands. ( http://shopping.discovery.com/stores/servl...717&catalogId=10000 ) I'm not saying they're going to succeed, but you really get the feeling that the future is back on track.

[ Just back from Brussels ...]

Yup, I've been saying this for a while: the problem with fission reactors isn't high level waste, it's high level waste in close proximity to a biosphere. I've seen cost estimates of $7-9Bn to build a version 1.0 space elevator ... and $7Bn to build the Yucca Mountain waste repository, which will only be storing high-level waste for the USA. Frankly, the space elevator is looking like a more and more attractive option all the time.

The Moon is where we put the high-level waste from the restarted fission programme, until we can think of a better use for it. Not useless at all. The beanstalk provides a nice slow safe way of getting the stuff there.

What makes you think Mars is dead? On Earth, life seems to extend back in the geological record as far back as we can read it. Extrapolating from this one sample (very, very dangerous statistically) leads to one of several possible alternatives:
1) Life is quite likely to arise, given suitable conditions.
2) Life arrived on the Earth from space.
3) The conditions for life forming are only present in the very early geological history of planets. For example, organic molecules formed in space may be required, and these are swept clear from solar systems shortly after their formation.

In either case (1) or (2), life is likely on Mars, although it's going to be single-cell organisms that live in rock.

Looking at the history of Earth life, the hardest part seems to be going from single-cell organisms to multicellular organisms. This took 4 billion years. After that, it was only a short 600 million years until we got to intelligent life and technological civilization.

The rightful name is 'Beanstalk', not 'space elevator'.

Mars is a -very- interesting place, scientifically. The Moon is a gravity well, a pointless waste of Delta-V on the way to Mars and the Main Belt.

Steven: the budget proposals I've seen start with $7-9Bn for a first space elevator. It would be able to launch a 1-2 ton satellite into geosynchronous orbit once a week and after the fixed construction costs the running costs would be an order of magnitude lower than a comparable booster. As Ariane V cost $5Bn to develop, and the Airbus A380 around 6Bn, this isn't beyond the capacity of private industry.

The sting in the tail is that if satellite launch customers aren't using the skyhook to capacity the spare capacity can be used to launch additional fullerene tapes, allowing it to be expanded or additional elevators to be built -- so the cost comes down rapidly once it's up. In other words, the money to fund elevator #1 is available because it costs as much as any other medium launch vehicle to build, and it rapidly turns into an enormous cash cow.

Methinks the usual tech investors will be salivating over this one just as soon as the materials technology gets there ...

Apropos the experience thing, I'm with the rest of you guys. I'm just trying to be cautious.

after I die from old age. The first time.

Sign me up. Mind you - perhaps a before and after, just so you can say you were lucky enough to do it first time round; pre-sleeving.

On a slighlty unrelated note - I just went on an aerobatic flight as a gift. After that, a space plane of somekind is the only thrill left so need this more!

I live in hope of maybe actually getting to see the Earth from orbit before I die of old age.

Personally, I hope to see Earth from orbit after I die from old age. The first time.

Nearly as important as the engineering and technical aspects, I'm forced to wonder just what type of human organization will be required to build something like this. What will the costs be and can enough interest in the long range benefits be generated for this project?

Perhaps recent engineering efforts like The Chunnel could serve as a guide, at least on the organizational aspect of it.

But I get the impression that neither private enterprise nor government organizations alone could do the job. It would take some type of consortium.

Any thoughts?

Respects,
Steve
From Flyover Country, U.S.

FWIW, Hugens landing is next January, not this July. And the good news is that current thinking is its likely to be a splashdown, not a touchdown. Ever better ir pictures of the surface taken by the Keck and the VLT suggest that it will land in one of the dark bits of the surface, likely (but not certain) to be seas of methane/ethane and some other stuff.

Well, at least it's too late for the current administration to do any further "budget optimizations" that could potentially disturb the Cassini mission. I've been looking forward to its eventual findings ever since watching Cosmos and hearing Carl Sagan so enthusiastically speculate on a variety of subjects dealing with Saturn and Titan.

Here's to the Huygens touching down and fulfilling its mission without a hitch.

Natacha, why don't you get back to us when the "Alliance for Justice" starts asking for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg to recuse herself from all cases involving NOW and NARAL. Until then, spare us the spam.

Back to the topic at hand...

The Alliance for Justice has launched a new website urging Justice Scalia to recuse himself from the Cheney energy case! Check it out: www.ChooseToRecuse.org Scalia can recuse himself anytime before the Supreme Court renders its decision.
There is a great flash animation that goes with it too. You have to see "Quid Pro Quack" http://www.allianceforjustice.org/action/scalia/flash.htm Duck'em!

The Russian "plan" is pretty sketchy on details. They claim to be able to get to Mars for $3 to $5 billion. That assumes that every single thing goes right. That also assumes the "Clipper" is built on time, in budget (and that price tag does not include the price of the Clipper). And it also mandates reliance on some boosters that have a less than stellar record.

I'm all for the plan. I hope it goes forward, a little competition is good! But, I have more faith in the Mars Society getting "Mars Direct" going than this one.

(On the other hand, using left over modules from the Mir replacement and the like does give the whole thing a lovely Stephen Baxter alt-space-history feel to it!)

Aargh, no, must resist plugging DVDs...

No, I can't do it. Have you seen Killer Robot? It's a Machinima feature film about robots on Mars - I mention it not least because it includes a factual animation about one possible way to use robot missions to build a base for manned expeditions. I think. I wasn't too clear on the details - it's cool, but kinda technical.

Oh, yeah, and the film's really good too, using all artificial voices.

without the images my goerge bush moon drivel isn't quite as effective .. so incase this quicktopic place doesn't support tags - to see it goto -

http://citizenjones.typepad.com


 
<img alt="mn_bush_space.jpg" src="http://citizenjones.typepad.com/citizenjon...ush_space-thumb.jpg" width="350" height="230" border="0" />

As the perceptive former English teacher, Sting, mentions. "I hope my leg don't break walking on the Moon."

So who's going to teach Mr. President to Moon Walk? Surely not Sting. You have to learn how to moon walk there's no doubt about that sir, and we all know who the master of that particular talent is ..

<img alt="moonwalk.jpg" src="http://citizenjones.typepad.com/citizenjones/moonwalk.jpg" width="151" height="229" border="0" />

"Bush suggested the moon might be used as a fuel depot and manufacturing site to stage longer mission, avoiding the need to escape Earth's gravity on atrip to a distant planet. It's unclear how such a plan would save any expenses in the long run, however, because nearly all the components and supplies for a moon camp almost surely would have to be lifted up from Earth anyway." -SF Chronicle

Walking On The Moon by Sting and the Police

<img alt="sting.jpg" src="http://citizenjones.typepad.com/citizenjones/sting-thumb.jpg" width="350" height="246" border="0" />


Giant steps are what you take
Walking on the moon
I hope my legs don't break

<img alt="babylegs2.jpg" src="http://citizenjones.typepad.com/citizenjones/babylegs2.jpg" width="188" height="250" border="0" />

Walking on the moon
We could walk for ever
Walking on the moon
We could live together
Walking on, walking on the moon

<stong>Walking back from your house
Walking on the moon</strong>

<img alt="moon.jpg" src="http://citizenjones.typepad.com/citizenjones/moon.jpg" width="175" height="153" border="0" />

Walking back from your house
Walking on the moon
Feet they hardly touch the ground
Walking on the moon
My feet don't hardly make no sound
Walking on, walking on the moon

<img alt="moonfootnosound.jpg" src="http://citizenjones.typepad.com/citizenjon...otnosound-thumb.jpg" width="350" height="262" border="0" />

Some may say
I'm wishing my days away, no way
And if it's the price I pay, some say
Tomorrow's another day, you'll stay
I may as well play

Giant steps are what you take
Walking on the moon

<img alt="giant20steps.jpg" src="http://citizenjones.typepad.com/citizenjon...nt20steps-thumb.jpg" width="250" height="360" border="0" />

I hope my legs don't break
Walking on the moon

<img alt="babylegsincast.gif" src="http://citizenjones.typepad.com/citizenjones/babylegsincast.gif" width="163" height="292" border="0" />


We could walk for ever
Walking on the moon
We could be together
Walking on, walking on the moon

<img alt="moon3.gif" src="http://citizenjones.typepad.com/citizenjones/moon3-thumb.gif" width="299" height="294" border="0" />

Some may say
I'm wishing my days away no way
And if it's the price I pay, some say

"Bush said he would add $1 billion to NASA's $15.5 billion budget over the next five years and reallocate $11 billion in existing space agency programs to support the moon-Mars effort." - Houston Chronicle

Tomorrow's another day, you'll stay
I may as well play

<img alt="scan0001.jpg" src="http://citizenjones.typepad.com/citizenjones/scan0001-thumb.jpg" width="350" height="282" border="0" />

Unfortunately no, no story there. But I've got another CD piece -- on why I'm skeptical about manned Mars missions -- to add to the blog soon. When I get over this damned cold.

re: Mars Attacks - did you think maybe you've got a basis for a really neat satirical short story there?

It's deja vu all over again ...

Reading the older comments on this thread, which date back to the Chinese manned mission, I can't help thinking that they're exactly appropriate to the new, improved, Bush II vision of NASA. No science missions, dump Hubble, dump the whole idea of a winged reusable ship and go back to capsules, go plant a flag on the moon, then go play golf on Mars. Whee, back to the future! (And not in a good way -- I was kinda getting to like seeing fleets of robots aerobrake into Martian orbit every two years: I don't want to have to wait a couple of decades then put up with some bumptious jarhead going walkabout on behalf of Uncle Sam. Or, more likely, not getting to go walkabout on account of there not being enough money to pay for the project.)

NASA, since about 1975, has been crap at running manned missions, but they more than make up for it with their robotic science probes. Now they're going to throw away the thing they're good at in order to focus on the thing they're bad at, with no sign of a budget to pay for it ...

Maybe the Martians are Oasis fans or something?

Hmm. Its more retro in that it seems to be a politically motivated project surrounded by a lot of secrecy involving putting a man on top of a bloody great missile, and that plans for mining the moon etc... may just be wild dreams and propogandist sci-fi. But I'm all for it just in case it does lead to something.

The Chinese effort is sooo retro. Its the low rent version of the early sixties Soviet space program.

Actually, as the Oct. 2003 issue of Scientific American points out, the Shenzhou spacecraft only supewrficially resembles the Soyuz, and is in fact both slightly larger and somewhat technologically superior.

Even if it is "retro", so what? If they're getting the results they want, who cares how "retro" it looks?

You too may be a big hero
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
"In German oder English I know how to count down
Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun

You didn't follow the links, did you?

Or is this just an excuse for some gratuitous China-bashing?

What's up -- can't stand the thought of America not being number one any more?

I hope they aren't "recruiting" astronauts at their prisons.

The Chinese effort is sooo retro. Its the low rent version of the early sixties Soviet space program.

I think you make an interesting point there. The great achievements of the late 60's (which are starting to look even more stunning, given the level of technology at the time) were executed in a climate of extreme National Pride at the height of the Cold War.

The Chinese programme clearly has an ideological element to it, as China continues to pull itself up by its bootstraps to join the "modern" world.

The US hasn't seen such current levels of National Pride in decades...

Time Will Tell / Interesting Times / etc. etc.

S.

I've one weird, rather warped, hope for manned spaceflight.

America has a President who wants to do memorable things that make him look good. Being the President who ended American manned spaceflight is not likely to look good in the history books, especially if the Chinese plans succeed.

When we hear the word "Challenger" it brings up images of disaster, just as much as the Russian word "Chernobyl" does. Now we have a new word to add to the canon - "Columbia".

What now for Discovery and Atlantis?

ESA's Rosetta mission has been seriously delayed by the recent Ariane 5 failure... The ISS programme was already under budgetary stress, and given the undoubted grounding of the remaining shuttles...

SF was right. The future of manned space flight belongs to the Chinese...

S.

Seven hours later.
Seventeen years and four days ago, seven hours after 51-L blew up at Mach 2.2 and 100,000 ft., my father drove me past the post office near the hospital. We stopped at that post office; I mailed a letter to NASA. The letter suggested that the accident might have been caused by a fuel-warmer/turbopump failure on Challenger's SSME's.

This time around, I don't have the illusion of technical mastery that I possessed when I was ten, so I have no suggestions for the flight engineers.

Seventeen years make a big difference.

This is such an incredible bummer on all possible levels.