Lately, I’ve been reading up on NASA’s past, present, and future.
It would seem as though they are returning to the UNIX methodology of building a whole bunch of reliable, simple components that are used together to the get the job done rather than one horrifically complex component. In the past, the simplest answer was big rockets with stuff on top used to get off of the planet. This worked. This was how we got to the moon.
Then we built the space shuttle and we really haven’t done anything cool since. Of course orbiting the earth in a livable vehicle is a great accomplishment—the problem is that it doesn’t really get us anywhere closer to any of the standard sci-fi space travel timelines. We’ve just kinda been stuck on a plateau ever since we got the damn shuttles. This is my ideal extrapolated timeline for extrasolar travel:
- Get into space.
- Orbit the earth.
- Send pieces into space orbit and later assemble to form a freighter.
- Fill it with lots of supplies and mining equipment.
- Go to the moon & build a mining outpost (return to step 4 as necessary).
- Use materials from moon to forge components for moon habitat.
- Open the operations up to the private sector to get more funding.
- Use the environment of the moon to study harsh space environments and use the constant spaceflight between the earth and the moon to improve the transport mechanisms.
- Construct further components for a real space station on the moon because the energy required to escape the moon is far less than on earth.
- Learn how to build space stations with no gravity.
- Repeat the above steps as needed to get the “hang” of space engineering.
- Now we can start to think about Mars.
- Do for Mars what we did for the Moon.
- Leave the solar system.
- Colonize the solar system.
- …
Hi,
I’m a writer currently looking into Chaotic Transport and it’s applications for extra-solar travel, which is how I stumbled onto this entry.
I like it, agree with your comments, and wondered if you’d agree with me that we’d probably be better off sending missions to one of the ‘Near Earth Objects’ components of the asteroid belt in order to both get more accurate data about prolonged exposure to a deep space environment, and also possibly to acquire additional wealth with which to fund various space programs (my reasoning being that carbonaceous chondrite asteroids are rich in hydrocarbons and presumably easier to live off, nickel-iron asteroids are rich in mineral wealth, and if we hollow out one and give it a spin we can induce simulated gravity, a must for any long term space mission).
Oh, something else I agree with you on - Yes, New Orleans is indeed beginning to resemble Raccoon City.
Take care, and best of luck with your studies.
I was just watching this, and I thought about what it would be like to colonize other planets. If we do end up colonizing the solar system, I think the biggest hurdle would be the political factor. That’s just something that I won’t look forward to.