[Kosh]

The economist thinks so

HOW big is the Earth? Any encyclopedia will give you an answer: its equatorial diameter is 12,756km, or, for those who prefer to think that way, 7,926 miles. Ah, but then there is the atmosphere. Should that count? Perhaps the planet’s true diameter is actually nearer 13,000km, including all its air. But even that may no longer be an adequate measure. For the Earth now reaches farther still. The vacuum surrounding it buzzes with artificial satellites, forming a sort of technosphere beyond the atmosphere. Most of these satellites circle only a few hundred kilometres above the planet’s solid surface. Many, though, form a ring like Saturn’s at a distance of 36,000km, the place at which an object takes 24 hours to orbit the Earth and thus hovers continuously over the same point of the planet.

Viewed this way, the Earth is quite a lot larger than the traditional textbook answer. And viewed this way, the Space Age has been a roaring success. Telecommunications, weather forecasting, agriculture, forestry and even the search for minerals have all been revolutionised. So has warfare. No power can any longer mobilise its armed forces in secret. The exact location of every building on the planet can be known. And satellite-based global-positioning systems will guide a smart bomb to that location on demand.

I don't agree at all with this, and in fact I think they have it completely backward. Because of its design by committee comprimises and overengineering it was never capable of achieving the economies of scale needed to make it a viable launch platform. But now that it is out of the way NASA will no longer be able to monopolize american space flight to the extent that they have, now that we have SpaceX and other astronautics companies sprouting up the Space Age isn't over, but rather it is only just beginning.

Thoughts?

[Flipside]

It depends how you define 'The Space Age', every age, the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron age etc were all based on what we used as a tools at the time, even the 'Nuclear Age' was as much a reference to power as to weapons.

There's a somewhat US-Centric position to the entire article, as though the end of the Shuttle means the end of Space-Travel, when in truth it means exactly what it says on the tin. Europe, Russia and China are still sending up satellites to near-Earth orbits, which is, to be honest, the only bit of Space we actually use.

I'd class 'The Space Age' with reference to going to other worlds to be similar to what is loosely defined as the Age of Discovery, where the Western powers were sending ships off to the Indias and Americas and coming back with little more than trinkets to prove they existed. So there's two real points to be made here:

1: Using space as a tool has not stopped, and is not likely to in the near future.
2: The concept of travelling beyond the Orbit of the Earth has been centred on rare and specialised events.

In that respect, depending on view, the Space Age is still going, or hasn't really even started beyond dipping our toe in the pool to see how warm it is.

[NGTM-1R]

I don't believe Space Age ever properly began.

[Kosh]

2: The concept of travelling beyond the Orbit of the Earth has been centred on rare and specialised events.

That's really the point, so much of what NASA does and is about has been wrapped up in grandstanding and politics, but with arrival of private space companies and the failure to replace the shuttle, in the next 30 years we will start going to outer space for something much more practical and viable than media circuses: to make money.

[Flipside]

I'm inclined to agree, it'd be like going to the Americas, finding all it's natural wealth, saying 'Oh, that's interesting', and then never going back again.

That's not an Age.

[newman]

To put it simply, we need to go back to the lab and pull our sleeves up. Sure, right now we have the technology to send people to Mars, but not without enormous technical challenges, extreme risk, and an unbelievable price tag. So we have the technology to - sort of - get to the nearest planet; we don't really have the technology for it to make much sense at an acceptable risk. Anything that's beyond Earth orbit will likely remain the subject of unmanned missions until we develop the technical means to send people further out with a lower risk and cost. Until then, missions like Dawn and New Horizons will have to satisfy us space nuts
In the long run, whether or not you occasionally send a few people to low Earth orbit using a shuttle or a Soyuz makes little difference.

[Pred the Penguin]

I'm just happy I'm still living in an age that the Earth hasn't been completely ****ed over yet... We're gettin' there though.
My random opinion.

[Mongoose]

Considering that the main point of retiring the Shuttle fleet is to get NASA back to their original focus, pushing the boundaries of exploration, I'd say that the exact opposite is true...we're just getting started.  As generally successful as it was, the Shuttle was in practice little more than a glorified cargo ship.  It's time to let private companies start in on the "easy" stuff, ferrying people and goods to the ISS and LEO, and let NASA get on with pure deep-space exploration.

Also, this article is profoundly stupid from start to finish.  From the short-sighted digs at the ISS to the general tone of ignoring the majority of human history, it's a mess.  This is the sort of tripe I'd expect from a tabloid.

[Flipside]

Thing is, every great leap in exploration and expansion in human history have been intrinsically linked with exploitation of what we have found. It may not be an appealing picture to paint, but it is true. If there's Methane on Titan or Silver on the Moon, then, as long as it can be done safely, I'm all for mining the living **** out of them, so long as (a) It doesn't create danger and (b) It can be pretty much proved that no life, even bacterial, is present.

At least this time we won't be displacing, enslaving or destroying thousands of lives purely for the sake of resources.

[newman]

Yes, but for such interplanetary mining to even be feasible, we'd need to develop new propulsion technologies that make it a lot less costly to transport the stuff along such distances. Say a metric ton of an ore costs 1000$.. the point is kind of moot when even getting it to earth orbit would cost well over a billion
We're probably talking hundreds of years before we're advanced enough for such ideas to become practical. Provided we'll even need such resources at that point.

[Nuke]

what we need to develop is extraterrestrial infrastructure. maned and unmanned. fuel depots, mining, manufacturing, shipyards, refineries, agriculture, etc. the idea is to make access to space pay for itself. resources gathered in space would almost exclusively be used in space. to supply space missions and eventually space colonizations. the main cost of space travel is lifting assets into orbit. the cost is coming down but it is likely to remain prohibitively high for a very long time.

you take a layered approach. nearest body is the moon. so what we need to do first is to send a bunch of automated factories to the moon to produce things like water, oxygen, and fuel. perhaps also building materials, nuclear fuel (uranium, helium3, etc), metals, and so on. their job will be to create and maintain stockpiles of useable resources to facilitate future exploration. when enough resources are available to support a colony, then you send the first wave of colonists. their job is to essentially setup a habitat. underground habitation seems most feasible at first. of course when you start to do agriculture, you will need to start building surface structures. once you can sustain a population, then you start seting up industrial infrastructure, mining and so on to allow improvement of the colony.

with the colony up and going you can begin to build launch infrastructure. compared to earth getting stuff off of the moon is a much simpler task. it requires almost no fuel in comparison. also you could put up a linear accelerator to save fuel. resources provided by the lunar colony can now expedite the manned exploration and exploitation of the rest of the solar system.

[StarSlayer]

"DArgo, I havent heard of anything like anything before. My planet doesnt even go to the moon anymore."

     -John Crichton

[JCDNWarrior]

Too busy waging war and stealing people's money to allow us to go to space. The best thing you can expect now is a Alpha Centauri-esque UN mission where only the biggest richest bankers and industry leaders get offworld and leave us with a ruined Earth.

Compare the budget NASA received compared to 2008's banker bailouts, for instance.

[Luis Dias]

Kosh, I'm with you 200000%.

[Kosh]

To put it simply, we need to go back to the lab and pull our sleeves up. Sure, right now we have the technology to send people to Mars, but not without enormous technical challenges, extreme risk, and an unbelievable price tag. So we have the technology to - sort of - get to the nearest planet; we don't really have the technology for it to make much sense at an acceptable risk. Anything that's beyond Earth orbit will likely remain the subject of unmanned missions until we develop the technical means to send people further out with a lower risk and cost. Until then, missions like Dawn and New Horizons will have to satisfy us space nuts
In the long run, whether or not you occasionally send a few people to low Earth orbit using a shuttle or a Soyuz makes little difference.

Most of that extreme risk and enormous cost simply comes from the fact that the only missions selected to do it were trying to be like Apollo: Using a costly, huge, one time use rocket to send people there directly for a short period of time, after which point the entire platform expended and is essentially worthless. A much more sensible approach is to build something strictly for interplanetary travel along with the accompanying permenant spaceborne infrastructure to support it, along the lines of what Nuke suggested. Most of the cost is not getting from Earth orbit to Mars orbit, it's dragging the entire platform into orbit to begin with. The risk is mostly from not having a real permanent presence in space (the ISS barely counts), since that means you have no other spacecraft to back you up if something goes wrong, period. If we can have people completely underwater for 6+ months at a time why do we suddenly not have the technology to have people in a vacuum for 6+ months at a time?

Yes, but for such interplanetary mining to even be feasible, we'd need to develop new propulsion technologies that make it a lot less costly to transport the stuff along such distances. Say a metric ton of an ore costs 1000$.. the point is kind of moot when even getting it to earth orbit would cost well over a billion
We're probably talking hundreds of years before we're advanced enough for such ideas to become practical. Provided we'll even need such resources at that point.

Actually we had working prototypes of a propulsion technology back in the 70's that would have done just that, but as I said the cost is not in the interplanetary travel but rather just the launch. To give some perspective, despite being in the same payload class as the Falcon 9, the proposed Ares 1 would, at lowest, have costed $138 million per launch if launched multiple times per year or $1 billion if only flown once a year. The Falcon 9 costs $50 million to launch. Don't underestimate the amount that NASA's bloat jacks up the launch cost. In the future with stuff like the Skylon the launch costs will go down even more.

So hundreds of years? Only if we keep going with government dominated space flight instead of building a real spaceborne economy.

[Unknown Target]

The world is too risk-adverse IMO. We won't make it if we're so afraid of each other that we have to scan them every time they set foot on an airplane, let alone a spaceship.

Not just that, but space travel is dangerous. Trying to sugar coat it and say it's "safe" is belittling it. People need to accept risk and accept danger and accept that death is a part of life. People rave about the space shuttle not being safe enough; considering what it is, what it's doing, and how often it flies, two accidents with relatively minimal (and of course still unfortunate) loss of life is NOT the doomsayer of the program (various other things should be, IMO). Do you think the astronauts who perished would want the program halted on their behalf? Do you think that they didn't accept he risks and know the dangers?

[Luis Dias]

space hotel is being built to be launched in 2015.

Just to counter UT's rant a little.

[Unknown Target]

It's being built by Bigelow Aerospace, is it not? It's one of their inflatable habitats? I didn't know they were planning to build it so soon.

[jr2]

For long-term lifts to orbit, would building... I forget the name, but basically an asteroid anchored to Earth with an elevator make much sense?  Better yet 3 / 4 or more of them so that if something goes crazy wrong with one and you have to jettison it, you still have access.

[Luis Dias]

Space elevator. We don't have materials that are strong enough to build it. A Space elevator requires materials that are at least 130 GPa. The hardest steel I find in a second is alloy 1090, with a tensile strength of .84 GPa.

Now you see the impossibilities.