Excellent. Happiest, most uplifting thing Iāve read all day. Naysayers, begone! 
not really. we pretty much went at full steam. A hand full of satellites to prove that those work, a hand full of dogs and straight to humans.
Once humans got to space we started hitting one breakthrough after another. First to sleep in space, first to eat, first to poop.
The first space walk was done in this:
http://www.airspacemodels.com/72rus4.jpg
a fabric curtain sticking out of a metal ball barely big enough to fit two people.
After Soviets stopped bothering to go to space, the race turned in to a slow crawl with barely any advancement. We still have to hitch rides on rockets that are practically identical to the one that got the above ball in to orbit.
Would you even think of using any vehicle from the 1960s?
Thatās how stagnant the progress has become and the sad thing is, thereās no reason why it should be. For a tiny percentage of national funding NASA can get to mars, mine asteroids and build a moon base and it will create new industries, give jobs to Americansā¦ but then America was never big on logic.
But thereās still hope! If China ever even hints at going to Mars weāll be rushing to get there and will have the first reality TV show orbiting Mars in three years tops.
Real World: Marsā¦ bleah.
How many man-made objects are actively working in space right now?
We all want our space elevator, and we all want to get some of our existential eggs out of this one basket, and itās ridiculous that we spend more on Honey Boo Boo than on earth-crossing asteroid trackingā¦ but man alive, my phone communicates with satellites every moment, and I was born weeks before there were human footprints on the moon. It sure feels like the space age to me.
I wont dispute that we are pretty much living in the golden age of robotic exploration in space but my question is what comes next? Yes, we have Curiosity, New Horizon, Opportunity, and others but most of these were approved before the recession and since then Congress/The President have slashed NASAās planetary budget twice. Next year NASA will have the smallest budget in purchasing power since 1986. So I donāt know what comes after these brilliant missions like Curiosity/etc. So far all weāve approved after the recession is Curiosity 2.0 and Phoenix 2.0. Which isnāt a bad thing necessarily, but what is the next great mission for NASA past the 2020ās?
You might say Orion/SLS but you must be joking. The manned program is even worse off. They are most certainly going to have delays. Lori Garver, leaving NASA after four years as deputy administrator admitted as much today. Which is fail when you think about it, because Orion/SLS have been around in some form since 2005. Yet even the 2021 time table is too generous.
That is 16 plus years of development. Compared to the 9 years it took to develop both Apollo & shuttle. Of course it isnāt like we havenāt seen this before. ISS didnāt exist until 12 years after Reaganās goal to build it in 10 years and then it took about 13 years to complete. Fail.
The only hope as I see it is Space X, if they pull off reusable Falcon 9 boosters like theyāre moving to do thatāll be a game changer. Which would change things for the better for not only manned spaceflight, but unmanned spaceflight.
Well, thatās a nice celebration of the unmanned space program and some reconciliation with harsh reality (even though itās written like something on Jezebel) but still thereās no question that as far as manned exploration goes we completely shot our wad on Apollo then clung to the shuttle program long, long after we should have moved on, then nothing. Weāve got the ISS, which is great, but itās not really even in space. We blew it there.
Of course we didnāt completely blow it. The unmanned space program has been a triumph, and thatās in a golden age. But donāt use that to gloss over our manned failures. A āsmart speciesā would be doing both in parallel, because individual humans are expendable. Weāre not in a Space Age till we are comfortably in space.
If your phone was relatively as advanced as the satellite it communicates with it would look like this:
The fact that we littered orbit with these things isnāt a feat one should be proud of, and itās a blessing that other fields of science arenāt as complaisant, otherwise weād be posting on BBS forums running on a 25 MHz server talking about how we shouldnāt be complaining about this awesome computer age weāre all living in.
Lots of good points, and Iād like to show it to fellow rocketry hobbyists who loudly and endlessly grieve over the fact that we canāt build Saturn Vs.
But I donāt think weāre quite in a space age yet . . . or we are, if we set the bar low enough.
Weāre in a period of active unmanned exploration, for sure. Iād love to see even more of that, and Iād like to see more research on long-game projects, like a GPS and communication system around Mars, āfuel depotsā at strategic points in the Earth - Moon system (which might eventually be topped off by H2 and Lox from the Moonās polar deposits), and nuclear power systems.
An actual āspace age,ā to me, would start once space travel and space resources are an integral part of our economy. Not just using space to park satellites or to part billionaires from some of their excess cash; an actual source of wealth.
The robots are doing a fine job. That is so much smarter than sending people at this stage. People are big and evolved to live at the bottom of this gravity well. Information doesnāt need to be big. It can be really tiny and still be amazing and useful. Getting little tiny bits of information from one planet to another is such a deal that we should be doing more.
The real problem is that our politics are a fucking mess. That is where we need the rocket-scientists and astronauts now.
Her premise is wrong. Lots of good arguments against it are made in the soon to be published book Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space.
dont forget the money and talent wasted on wars. Had that been rederected to space exploration every solid rock in our solar system could have humans on it.
So what youāre saying is my cellphone communicates with a satellite?
Just checking, because I had this idea of cells around a tower, and these towers are all over, and itās all terrestrial.
Though, to be fair, sat phones are still big. I donāt have one, but the ones I support are big and donāt even play snake.
and to be fair, satphones arenāt that big.
Arguably, some of the dissatisfaction may have more to do with what āspace ageā would mean for virtually everyone.
Even in ultra-soft sci-fi and space opera, what percentage of the population gets to leave their native gravity well, and how often?
Best case scenarios seem to hover around the level of āabout the same percentages that traveled between continents before air travel was cheapā and go downhill from there.
The people who are Very Upset that we arenāt cheering on our brave explorers on Mars by now at least have a point that could be reached by (nontrivial) reallocation of resources. Anybody who thinks that the āspace ageā starts when they get to goā¦ well, I hope they are either extraordinary, filthy stinking rich, or used to disappointmentā¦
It is not so much that the Space Age is dead as the enthusiasm of the public for space is mostly dead. I blame light pollution. The human race lived for centuries with this huge swath of sky right above their heads every single night that was splashed with countless points of light that twinkled and beckoned and fired our imagination. We made stories about these points of light and dreamed of reaching them one day. Now? Walk outside at night and most people will be lucky to see a couple dozen stars. Hard to keep your eyes on the prize in a situation like that. Most people encounter the beauty of the night sky via their computer and while I am grateful there are so many resources online, it doesnāt get you fired up in the same way as seeing the actual stars every single night.
They may have been referring to GPS positioning.
Should be re-titled āThis is the Space Age ā¦ For Robotsā.
Golly, we went to the moon and it turned out to be in Black and White. And just as TV was going color.
Bad marketing if you ask me.
Yup. Exclusively, if I could, but Iām weird about old cars.
Aye, but weād have no rockets.
