US Spaceflight for the future [update]

lol
touche
you can see saturn's rings, and out to jupiter with an amateur telescope
there are websites that help you track where they are in the sky so you can find em
 
scheduled for today, but rescheduled for tomorrow

however, the scaffolding around the rocket (called a strongback) was moved today, so they may be doing some testing today as well

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a few good thoughts on human exploration/involvement with spaceflight

I think it is some kind of biological imperative. If you assume that life is more interesting or valuable than non-life, then it would be an overall improvement of the universe to bring life where it can currently not survive.

Humans are the only species that have a chance to thrive and establish a foothold for life in an environment as hostile as space. So that is what all this technology and intelligence is good for. In a working ecosystem a species that adapts its environment to its own needs always has to destroy something of value in order to thrive. In space there is nothing except dead matter, so every change would be an improvement.

Besides, there is also the issue of really building something out of nothing. For all our technology, humans are really freeloading on preexisting resources on earth. We consume resources like air, water, fossil fuels etc. that were provided for us by nature. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it would be extremely rewarding to create a thriving colony out of nothing but energy and raw matter. Something you can point to and say "I did that!".

In addition to these reasons, frankly I find it frightening that all the marvelous achievements in science and art of mankind are confined to a sphere with a diameter of 0.042 lightseconds, which is really not that much.
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To inspire creativity/imagination and to unite humanity.

The progress of a civilization is a function of its collective state of mind. What we accomplish, what we create, and what we discover are products of where our attention is directed.

Human spaceflight directs our attention to the endless possibilities afforded to humanity on the basis of our unique ability to use our intelligence to create and adapt. It gets us thinking about how we could create and adapt to change.

That state of mind generates value and improves our standard of living.

Human spaceflight has a way of transcending the distinctions that divide humanity. Even an overtly nationalist endeavor such as Apollo was seen as a milestone accomplishment of our entire species. It was man on the moon, not American on the moon.

Today, the ISS is one of the most powerful symbols of international cooperation, up there with UN. Space is a global front in the pursuit of world peace, and our responsible use of space for peaceful purposes lessens our will to fight. It blurs the distinctions we use to rationalize violent conflict.

In short, the purpose of human spaceflight is to promote peace and prosperity by changing the way we think about ourselves, each other, and our future together in this universe.
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anything beyond mars is just a joke, though

until you discover ftl its pointless to even try..

how many people you gonna fly up in LEO before it gets old
 
stick a vasimir propulsion unit onto an asteroid, have it trudge around space towards earth for x years, then stop in GEO or LEO or L1 or something

mine it

all it costs is the logistics, the propulsion unit, and the rocket it get it there, and time.
 
triple said:
anything beyond mars is just a joke, though

until you discover ftl its pointless to even try..

how many people you gonna fly up in LEO before it gets old
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just like it was pointless to try and sail across the pacific ocean before they invented offboard motors?
 
Tribalbob said:
just like it was pointless to try and sail across the pacific ocean before they invented offboard motors?
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you have zero sense of scale. space isn't a fucking ocean.

I just did some quick calculations.

At earth Vesc, it would take ~106k years to reach the NEAREST star.

Humanity would die out long before then.

Face it, we're stuck here.
 
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triple said:
you have zero sense of scale. space isn't a fucking ocean.

I just did some quick calculations.

At earth Vesc, it would take ~106k years to reach the NEAREST star.

Humanity would die out long before then.

Face it, we're stuck here.
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fuck it right? might as well not try to advance our understanding of physics or anything else for that matter; we're stuck here.
 
100thousand years to reach alpha centari? i think your math is wrong

true it will take a while currently, but i doubt that math
 
triple said:
you have zero sense of scale. space isn't a fucking ocean.

I just did some quick calculations.

At earth Vesc, it would take ~106k years to reach the NEAREST star.

Humanity would die out long before then.

Face it, we're stuck here.
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here we go:

The closest star is about 4.2 light years away or 24,635,923,200,000 (24.635 trillion miles).

A space craft traveling at 25,000 MPH would be solved by:
24,635,923,200,000/25,000/24/365 = 112,492.8 years.

A space craft traveling at 50,000 MPH would be 56,246.4 years

A space craft traveling at 150,000 MPH would be 18,748.8 years.

As the New Horizons launch approached, many news reports hailed the new probe as the fastest spacecraft ever. However, that is not quite correct. We have previously written about two vehicles called Helios launched to study the Sun during the 1970s. Both of these probes attained maximum speeds of around 150,000 mph (250,000 km/h) at closest approach to the Sun in their highly elliptical orbits. Helios 2 was slightly faster than its twin craft, and this probe still holds the speed record as not only the fastest spacecraft but also the fastest manmade object in history.
 
triple said:
you have zero sense of scale. space isn't a fucking ocean.

I just did some quick calculations.

At earth Vesc, it would take ~106k years to reach the NEAREST star.

Humanity would die out long before then.

Face it, we're stuck here.
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you have no sense of determination.

but i'm mostly just thinking about terraforming mars.
 
Closest star is about 4.5 light years away. Traveling at light speed, that of course takes 4.5 years. If you can travel at 10 times the speed of light, it still takes about 5.4 months. To get there in one month, you'd have to be traveling at 54 times the speed of light, roughly. To get there in a week? 234 times light speed.

(none of those take into account relativistic effects, which would shorten the length of the journey, unless the FTL is something exotic that does not actually accelerate mass, like a "warp" drive)

:shrug:
 
earlier in this thread i discussed, briefly, a field that is trying to flesh out a system that will allow for warp drive, more or less
doesnt break physics
(and there is a lot we dont currently understand anyway in regards to the sciences)
 
triple said:
Understanding physics doesn't make the impossible any more possible.
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Clearly you didn't get the sarcasm in that i was mocking you for basically saying that we shouldn't try shit because, well fuck we're stuck on this big blue & green rock according to you.
 
Ianboo said:
Closest star is about 4.5 light years away. Traveling at light speed, that of course takes 4.5 years. If you can travel at 10 times the speed of light, it still takes about 5.4 months. To get there in one month, you'd have to be traveling at 54 times the speed of light, roughly. To get there in a week? 234 times light speed.

(none of those take into account relativistic effects, which would shorten the length of the journey, unless the FTL is something exotic that does not actually accelerate mass, like a "warp" drive)

:shrug:
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Well you should really take into account relativistic effects since a trip at close to the speed of light wouldnt take very much time at all for the traveler.
 
triple is opposed to modernizing and advancing space travel because the negro in chief is for it.

but when bush was all for space travel and was cutting money to social programs he was like "yay space"
 
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