NASA's new spaceship.
 

Well they've been showin some pictures of what they were thinking of doing for a little while now and i guess its official since it was on the news and they have a special start page for it.
So, here's how NASA is gonna get us to the moon (at first) and then to Mars.
We're supposed to be gettin to the moon by 2018 by way of this system, and the ball is rollin.

The spaceship actually launches in 2 parts, and joins up in orbit before taking off to its destination.

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/1...an_graphic.jpg

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/1...ckets_full.jpg

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/1...ocked_full.jpg

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/1...lunar_full.jpg


Here's a very kickass animation. It is about 25MB and quicktime.

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/cev/CEVedit2.mov


I think its about damn time. Hurry the fuck up already. :thumbsup:

Here's an article to go with the pictures.

http://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/cev.html

Thats awesome... I've been hoping NASA would get off its laurels and actually do something soon. Here's hoping that something other than a few press conferences comes out of this...

Great! We need something to get excited about as a nation again....

I hope this is it!

I saw this on the news... bout time

i really hope this goes according to their plan

This is good news.

Safe, reliable, affordable, re-usable. My defiinitions of those four words and NASA's definitions are usually in two different hemispheres. Here's hoping they're a bit closer this time.

I'm gonna go hangout with space guys and listen to discussions about all this stuff tonight. I can't wait!

Did anyone else have a little chuckle when you first saw the first picture?

Back on topic, I can't wait to see another person on the moon. It's not very long until we get someone on Mars.

I can't wait until we actually land on the moon for the first time. it is going to be an awesome event. If it isnt staged in some hanger in the nevada desert again. how do we know what is really going on. Its hard to prove now thats whats in the movies isnt real let alone what the government tells us. Does everybody in here believe everything the government tell them 100% of the time? Just a question don't bash me too hard.

It helps that all of the conspiracy theories are 100% full of Grade-A Pseudo-Science Bull-Shit "Evidence".

yea.. AMEN.

I wish you could have found bigger pictures.

Biggest waste of cash - evah!

(The above opinion is that of the poster and does not reflect the views of the Tilted Forum Project, it's staff, owners or advertisers).

Yes, people are starving in America, the schools pretty much suck and teachers can't live on their wages but hey buckeroos - let's waste all that money on the Space Program. Why?

Oh, yeah, maybe there's oil on another planet.
Let's Send Halliburton right away!

THere's plenty of money in this country to have people not starving, to fix up schools, and to send us into space. Write your senator and representative and tell them to put the money toward education and to help the starving instead of toward bombs to kill people on the other side of hte planet and maybe they will. You have any idea what ONE cruise missile costs?

Like it or not we need to go into space, for multiple reasons. Now is the time to get this shit done before its too late.

I don't dispute space exploration is important. However, I don't see a manned mission to the moon helping much. Been there, done that, let's move on - more (and lower cost) explorations by robotic landers and ships of our solar system, a better space telescope and so on, would be money better spent.

It's not just about exploration, its about survival of the human race, and as far as we know the only life in the universe. As of right now if a big enough rock comes our way we're fucked. There's also fun stuff like gamma ray bursts which can fry the planet and polar shifts (we're due for one very soon) which could lead to mass extinction. If you don't know what a polar shift is it's when the magnetic field of the plant literally flips (so your compass would point south instead of north), and this could lead to very dramatic changes in the way many things work on the planet. It happens like clockwork every once in a while and we're due for one any time now - it could happen tomorrow. Also don't forget the magntic field of the planet protects the planet from massive amounts of solar radiation, it's literally a planetary forcefield which pushes solar particles out of our way.. without it everyone on the planet would be dead.. and it would be a painful death. Then there's the issue of population.. we're rapidly approaching the point where the planet just simply will not be able to support the amount of people we keep squirting out. All human's could be gone from existance 6 hours from now.. I dunno about you but I think if we can get a few of us to another planet (or even the moon) to live to prevent our extinction we should move heaven and earth to do it.

These manned missions are only the first step in a looooooong journey, and all we've really done so far is tie our shoes.


As for the size of the pictures, you'll have to talk to the guys at NASA about that one.. all i did was copy/paste.

I want to add some new pictures. NASA put up some absurdly huge renderings of what the new ship should look like. They're massive resolution. I mean, massive.

I mean 5610x3156 massive.

Fast image serving though.

I also have to respond to a ton of comments I read on digg, where I originally saw the link to these pics.

I thought about spewing on my blog, but then thought better of it. I want discussion.

The majority opinion of the self appointed rocket-scientist crowd is that the "old style" rockets must be a huge step backwards. One of the most commonly referenced "reasons" the crowd put forth is that the rockets are disposable, therefore both stupid and bad.

Just for the good of my own self and general awareness, I have to respond to the idea that the type of ship depicted is "bad" "dumb" "a step backwards" etc. Seriously. There are some people out there that think they know everything, and I want to help make sure there are less of them. I hope to do this by putting correct info out in the world, or at least correct points for the discussion.

For starters:
The use of disposable rockets is not automatically dumb, overly costly, etc. That’s one fact we have to get straight right off.

The space shuttle has proved that human beings do not yet have the technology level to make a space plane that operates like the shuttle workable. We just can’t build, at a reasonable cost, a plane like that. It’s too complicated, and it’s not working. This is evidenced by the very high costs, low number of flights per year, time between flights, and continued catastrophic failures.

A disposable booster design has several advantages that are not to be casually dismissed. One of my favorite authors (Steven Baxter) puts the reasons well in some of his books. One of his characters builds the “BDB” or “Big Dumb Booster.” Given the level of actual human technology, and not what we wish we had, this idea makes the most sense.

You build exactly like the description says BIG and DUMB. You build it big, because you need to shoot a ton of shit into orbit. We’re not going to the moon or anywhere else useful by sending up ten tons at a time (I have no idea what the shuttle lifts, I’m making a case for “small” where “small = ten tons.”) We will get things done by lifting a thousand tons per shot. Whatever the actual goal, it needs to be massive.
The other side of the equation here is DUMB.

Your successful booster is dumb, and in the process it’s going to be disposable. This is not bad.

It’s dumb, because it really embodies KISS. The BDB shoots as much mass into a desired orbit as possible, that’s its job; it’s a “mass lifter” not an ocean liner, or the starship Enterprise. The BDB benefits from elegance of design by not having to be reusable. Reuse, raises the level of complexity by an order of magnitude.

Example: When designing a seal to last 1 flight, you only have to do the testing to replicate conditions on one flight. You only have to model 1 flight’s worth of stress. The solution can be elegant, cheap, simple, etc. It has to work once. That’s much easier to prove and guarantee than one that must survive multiple uses.
When modeling multiple uses the testing becomes exponentially more difficult, and it’s not just a matter of more computer modeling time. If only it were…. No, you have to remember there is an organization that has to have proved to it that a part can last multiple times. Now it has to be heavier, deal with repeated loads, be certified to deal with the unknown, multiple times. This is difficult. It’s not a trivial matter of telling a computer simulation “run the tests 3 times.” And even if it WERE, that’s not to say the fix is easy. Maybe a simple light-weight part will do you for one flight. Maybe that part fails spectacularly on the 3rd flight. If it’s reusable, you have to replace it every flight to maintain a man-rating factor. Then the processes have to be in place to monitor that part, to validate it was changed, to test the replacement was done right, to validate the parts around it that were moved, disturbed or changed, during the replacement were not harmed.

All that validation is where the shuttle becomes too complex for us. If you have a part that you KNOW will survive 3 flights, and your minimum safety ratings maintain a 1 to 3 relationship, which means every part must be at least 3 times safer than an absolute minimum, you have to replace all those parts every flight. The record keeping is a nightmare in and of itself. The processes to make sure flawed humans did all the work right is ALSO a nightmare in and of itself.

A disposable rocket saves you time and money by chucking all that. You don’t HAVE to make parts that last multiple missions; you just have to make it work once. If a part you put in is good for 3 shots, you have a 3x safety factor, and you’re good to go. Install it and forget it. The part isn’t going to return for its “next” flight, and it’s not going to have to be X-rayed, and tested, and validated to see if it has to be changed or modified for a “next” flight. All that goes with a reusable craft is what makes it hard for us humans to do.

If we HAD nifty tech that let us build incredible materials that held up forever, we’d be set, THEN a reusable rocket makes sense.

For now, you build something cheap, simple, strong, and you shoot the damn thing up at the sky. When you’re up there, you can get clever. Now you can make a craft that goes to Mars, and does all sorts of cool stuff.

As to rockets with the capsule on top being a step backwards, I say “not hardly.”

The shuttle showed over and over, especially recently how damn dumb it is to put your crew vehicle under a stack of explosives, where shit falls on it. It’s common sense.

Problems usually dictate simple solutions. The Apollo guys hit on it in the 60’s and it’s as good now as it was then. You put your crew above everything. If the rocket blows up, you light the escape rocket and pull the whole damn crew module away from the explosion. Obviously, that doesn’t work with the shuttle.

The shuttle was obviously a bad idea when it was conceived, and it’s a bad idea now. We don’t have Star Trek tech, and we won’t for a long time.

If we want our species to survive, we need to get into space, and we need to be there in a big, permanent way. We’re not going to get there dicking around in LEO. We’ll get there by throwing as many people and supplies into space as we can. We’ll shoot them up as fast and cheaply as we can.

The first ones up win; it’s pretty obvious. I’m not able to see the future, but the first country that makes it into space and starts exploiting the resources up there wins. This is a long term game humanity is playing, and we don’t win by dicking around with extremely complicated gliders that keep blowing up. The Chinese will take our lead in space away. They’re a lot hungrier than we are, and I think, they are willing to blow people up (in failed flights) for the good of the other 5 billion of them. We Americans, are not. Honestly, it’s going to happen. People will die, and they will die trying to get into space. Keep it to a minium, because blowing up experts in anything is an econmically expensive proposion, but damnit, keep on going.

Whoever wants it worst wins. Whoever opens up the consumables loop, by exploiting space’s resources, has a huge lead in surviving.

We need to get there now, and the best way to do that is with cheap rockets, that work. When they get up there, and we KEEP people up there, we provide dreams. We make the space race something worth trying for. We open up the new world again. That’s a dream worth dying for, and I hope it’s one we take our shot at.

Do you believe everything the conspiracy whack-jobs tell you 100% of the time?

"Continued catastrophic failures"...

That's two failures in over 20 years of flying? I don't know the exact dates for how long the Shuttle has been flying, but it's somewhere around there. Also, when you're dealing with any kind of space-flight technology, especially on reentry, the only type of failures you can have are fatal.

Didn't Apollo 13 prove that wrong? ;)

http://www.china.org.cn/english/2002/Oct/46878.htm

I hope our astronauts like Kung Pao.

I would chuckle if it didn't hit me so damn close to home. When we're driving somewhere together, my wife is always making fun of my "shortcuts" and this proves I'm right ...again ;) Thank you NASA for another good reason that the shortest line to a place isn't necessarily the best.

To boldly go where we've been before!

Somehow I think you missed the point he was trying to make. Look at the picture again. Try rotating it 90 degrees.

He's trying to say it looks like a giant cock and balls. Woot!

Anyway, we explore space for discovery. That's just human nature. I don't disagree with the folks who say the money could be better spent. The poor and starving will be taken better care of when someone figures out how to make money from doing it.

It just happens that we want to know whats out there and huge sums of money are being made to come up with the technology to take us there.

If it's reusable - great. if its safe - just as great. Is it affordable? oh what the hell am i saying....

but like so many things, ill be a skeptic until i see it. then ill believe it.

I think this idea is total crap.
We as a nation need to be focusing on how things are being run here on earth, not trying to waste money we don't have on something we don't really need.

We already have penty of people that are paid to fix problems here on earth (police, elected officials, tc). Talk to them about no doing thir jo if you think they arean't. The Space agency helps thousands of people in this country by giving them jobs. Every single last little tiny piece of the ship has to be constructed someplace, and you need people to do that.

We need a space elevator......whoever makes the first one, will own space .


http://www.space.com/businesstechnol...challenge.html

Don't we already know what's one the moon. Rocks, craters, coupla old golf balls ...?

So cool, I hope they have a moon base before I die.

There has been some serious talk recently about getting a space elevator up and running within the next 20 years. It may very well happen some time soon.
:thumbsup:

A space elevator? What exactly do we need an elevator to space for? You planning on meeting someone on the top floor? Or is it so we can cheaply exploit the natural resources of the solar system? launch satelties maybe? Neither of these things are particularly good ideas IMO.
Provides jobs??!!!
Thats the best rationalization you can come up with for WASTING MILLIONS of dollars every year?! That is pretty weak. (Give me all of that money, and i gaurentee i could employ EVERY person in the country. Not just egg-heads w/ a bunch of degrees, who could have gone into other fields.)

A space elevator would actually be a very, very good thing for us. Raw material comes down, people and cargo go up. And cheaply too.

Maybe you had't noticed, but the earth is kinda overcrowded. Employing every person in the country would only exacerbate the problem whereas taking steps towards colonizing other worlds would go a great deal towards alleviating said problem. Not to mention the jobs that will be created when such a feat is achieved.

"Teach a man to fish..." and all that.

A space elevator would be great for that ability to launch satellites alone. Even if it was very expensive to build it might easily pay for itself by reducing the need for launches. It would also help make economical some technologies like solar power generation in space that, needless to say, would be incredibly useful.

Regarding the jobs I tend to agree, but space research is not a wholly pointless endeavour otherwise.

This is all abunch of crap!
If we as a species cannot solve our problems, (Namely allocation of resources, and population management) we will only be putting off the inevitable by colonizing space. Cheap resources got us into this mess, that is not going to get us out of it!

Who's to say that colonizing space won't solve our problems? It sounds to me like it'd be a great way to solve resource allocation and population management. There would be much more room for people to inhabit, as well as a lot of resources (such as the asteroid belt) that we could harvest.

I would love to see any kind of manned spaceflight actually happen -- I kind of wish they would skip the BS and go straight to Mars, risky though it may be. Science and humanity in general could use the morale boost that comes with such a great achievement, and there is so much that could be learned from the trip.

Okay, crazy and (improbable?) scenario -- imagine China were to announce, right now, a solid, well designed plan to send a manned flight to Mars by, say, 2020. Would this spark another space race like the 1960s? A small part of me kind of hopes so...

Edit: ignore this lol :crazy:

Seems like a pretty complicated method. I think the lunar lands from the 60's worked pretty well. I guess mars is a different story though.

We'll be building a lunar base and departing to Mars from there. Or I think that is the plan anyway. The 2 launch method shown is for the moon shot only i think.

The stuff they had in the 60s may have worked a few times, but those capsules were tin cans. They were in such a rush to beat the Russians they didnt have much time to plan for things that could be fatal. Such as the one capsule accident they had where the oxygen in the capsure ignited by a spark and the crew all died. After that they started to mix the oxygen with a nitrogen (i think.. or something else that wont explode). An unimginable amout of upgrades have been made since then.

But basically this *IS* the old time type of ship, it just launches on two rockets. Getting stuff into space takes A LOT of fuel. There needs to be, like, around 3lbs. of fuel for every 1 pound of cargo they add to the rocket. That adds up damn fast.

They'll just be using the single rocket, on the right, for things like runs into orbit and to the space station (for crew that is). They'll use the one on the left to get up cargo to the space station, and also to join with the crew capsule for the moon missions. Both variations should get a good work-out.

Pragma,
Did you acutually read my post? Cuz it seems to me you stopped at the second line.
See that part where it says "putting off the inevitable"? That means that until we learn to not waste resources, and not produce more garbage/pollution than we can store/re-use we have no business looking for more planets to screw up. I feel VERY STRONGLY we should FIX our problems rather than delaying the consequences of our actions.

Broken,
A new space race would serve only to distract us as a civilization from addressing the real issues. Also, see above.
Besides, the first space race was only 'won' with lots of government pork and serious subsidies. (The gov gives money to private interests because they hope new weapons come out of it, and will be able to kill more people more cheaply. This is why they call it the 'military-industrial complex'. Is industrialized murder really in our best interests?)

Serpent7,

Launching satellites not a good idea? This is news to me. They're generally more effective in space than on the ground. What do they do up there that's good? Well, apart from communication, weather observation, military reconnaisance (which you mightn't think much of, but which helped the US to spend billions less than it might have on weapons during the Cold War, since it could get a more accurate idea of what it might face in battle that way), monitoring the health and distribution of different types of crops, keeping tabs on pollution, navigation, air/sea search and rescue, environmental research - apart from these, I guess not much useful. May as well scrap the lot of them.

As for you employing EVERY person in the US, how much money do you think NASA spends each year? Their annual budget is currently around $16 billion. Divide that amongst the entire population of the US (as you suggest) and everyone gets paid about $50 per year. Maybe you're only talking about the unemployed? How many is that? I wouldn't know the figure for the US, but even if it's as low as 5 million, that's still only $3000 each. Not a heck of a lot. $60 per week. I would HOPE that your welfare system over there is better than that! What would you have them doing for that sort of money? I'd bet those "egg-heads with a bunch of degrees" would be bored stupid, and take their knowledge and know-how to other countries.

Which, by the way, is another way in which the money spent is not being wasted. One reason behind the decision to go to the Moon was the perceived national need to not let the US aerospace industry slowly wither away. In Russia, that problem has come up since the end of the Cold War, with a bit of a twist. Many of these "egg-heads" could not be paid at all by the Russian government. Quite a few were forced into work which would leave anyone like that bored to tears. There was another alternative for them - go to work for some dictator somewhere who wanted the ability to build missiles. Not something that most people would want to see happen. So, one of the reasons for undertaking the International Space Station (a project which I'm very critical of, on other grounds) was to help to provide interesting and rewarding work for these "egg-heads" in preference to other, less palatable alternatives.

As for the government giving money to industry to produce new weapons to be "able to kill more people more cheaply", one of the main drives with modern weaponry has been to produce more expensive and (usually) more accurate weapons, to be able to kill LESS people - and to make sure as much as possible that the ones you do kill are the ones you need to kill, with as little collateral damage as possible. One of the more reprehensible pieces of anti-US propaganda I can remember from early 2003, before the US went into Iraq, was a claim from one of our local Aussie politicians that the US military was going to carpet-bomb Baghdad. Carpet-bombing is a tactic from an era when airborne weapons were VERY inaccurate, so you had to saturate an area, attacking with literally hundreds of aircraft, to ensure a reasonably good chance of hitting your intended target. Now, of course, the same job can often be done by one aircraft - the target gets flattened, rather than most of the surrounding city plus tens of thousands of civilians and (maybe) the target.

People often said that we should stop going to the Moon and eradicate poverty. The US stopped going to the Moon. I still see poverty. Ergo, poverty is not the result of space exploration. Giving up space exploration will not solve the world's problems, or cause them to be solved. You can expect that any money that is freed up by abolishing NASA would be frittered away on little projects, mostly designed to make your local senator or member of congress look good rather than to solve the world's problems. The world's problems can be solved - or solved as much as they're ever going to be - while we continue going "out there". They certainly won't be solved by offering to redistribute ~0.25% of the US federal budget.

Human nature virtually requires us to explore....and learn from these explorations. A mindset of stagnation will destroy the human experience, just as surely as poison. There were quite a few social issues in Spain when Columbus set sail. And I seem to remember a few wars as Americans expanded west.....but this did not stop humans from finding out what was there, and in my opinion, the payback in both money and psyche.....was well worth it.

Very good point. Humans have been exploring ever since we began to walk the earth.

How about instead of thinking this a nation's race. How about a human race? Astranauts in the future will be the ambassadors of earth and humanity. Would be nice to see humans join together in something.

Oz,
I agree satalites are more effective in space than on the ground. This was not the crux of my argument. I just do not think we need more of them, or need them to be cheaper, considering the damage the mass media is doing to us all as it is.
I MAY have been using hyperbole when i said i could employ EVERYONE in the us w/ the nasa budget. Mainly i was trying to point out that there are bigger issues going down in this country than whether or not we have a moonbase. It is of course all about peoples priorities.
I also said that "The egg-heads" could have gone into other fields of endeavor, not simply be cut loose to screw things up in other ways.
You are correct, that poverty is not the result of space exploration. (BTW, I never advocated ignoring space. More on that later.) It is the result of capitolism. or more accurately profit by controlled scarcity.
As for killing fewer peeps w/ new more expensive weapons, you are right,...and wrong. Mostly i was thinking about the NEW stuff, like directed energy weapons, or IPVs (This second one i have a REAL problem with.)
So, to sum up, i think we (Meaning all of humanity) needs to be A LITTLE more focused on improveing and protecting planet earth, rather than finding new places to screw up.

I've never believed the conspiracy theories before, claiming that we never went to the moon in the first place. However, I find it hard to believe that we went to the moon 30 years ago -- well before the Digital Age -- and now it will take us nearly 10 years just to get to the same place again. (And yes, I recognize that there was a restriction that we could only land on the equator last time, but that was a fuel restriction, not design.)

I have a feeling that if we wait until humans perfect the process of living amongst eachother and all the other living things on the planet, we'll be waiting until the end of time.
Serpent, perhaps you could stop wasting so much time on internet message boards and focus more of your energy on improving the situation of your fellow human and the planet earth. Actually, i don't really think that.
I just think that the idea that we should or should not do this or that because we could be saving the planet and ourselves is more of a non sequitur than anything else.

Filtherton,
Maybe you should spend more time shutting your piehole, and less time telling me how to run my life.
Besides, I was only trying to point out what i see as a disparity between most people abstracting thier ideals and notputting ANY of them into actual practice.

Serpent,

Not sure about your link between not needing more satellites, and the damage that the mass media is doing to us.

Also, note that "egg-heads" will not necessarily be interested in throwing themselves into any given person's pet cause. Different people have different things that drive them, and forcing them into something that they're simply not interested in is not going to be good for society - instead of getting the benefit that you might have got out of them, you'll get very half-hearted boredom, and that's not good.

Also, the "mess" we're in is not the fault of the "egg-heads". It would be very rare that a scientist would be faced with a moral decision to not proceed with research because of how it will affect the world. I would argue that "messes" derive more from the political and corporate worlds. Even in weaponry, you'll probably find that scientists working in that area do it out of a mixture of interest and a genuine belief in national defence.

For my part, given a choice between a job in the Moon program and an environmental job, I'd take the Moon job without a second's thought. That's what drives me. Personally I find environmental stuff a bit dull - and I'm turned off by the exaggeration and dishonesty that I believe to be coming from all too many of the more aggressive environmentalists, and the constant chanting that it's the most incredibly important thing of all. It gets old really quickly.

I agree that we can and should take better care of this planet and of each other - but I don't believe that this is a reason to slow down in space. Personally I'm very glad that the US is going back to the Moon. The US is rich enough to do that and fight poverty. Both are just a matter of political will. I don't believe that poverty will ever be eradicated, but it must be fought. However, the probable fact that it will always be here is why I can never support the argument that we shouldn't do X until we've eliminated poverty.

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble. More another time maybe.

He was using the "stop spending time on messageboards" as an example of things people should stop doing, not to insult you - so you didn't need to return it. Granted, he could have stated it better, but oh well.

The point is, instead of staying in college to get my Computer Science degree, I could drop out and join the Peace Corps. But I don't. Is that selfish of me? Sure. Is my CS degree going to help humanity? Probably not. Do I care? Not really.

Why do we spend time and energy trying to explore space? Because a lot of people believe that humanity's future, one way or another, is in space. There's lots of ways that we could "work to make society/humanity" better, but that's an entirely different discussion. Going to space does help us, as there are lots of technologies/medicines that are researched in space, or in the process of going to space, so it's not an entirely useless venture.

Oz,
The advertising driven Mass Media (Ie, t.v. and cable) is damaging to us in that it shortens our attention spans, and keeps us misinformed. (Read 'Manufactured Consent by Noam Chomsky for more on this effect.)
I never mentioned forcing anyone to do anything, let alone the egg-heads. While on the one hand, i do not think the state of the world is the fault of nor the sole responsibility of these geniuses, i also do not think they give much thought to the moral implications of the things they create. (Most computer science people i know cannot wait for AI to be a reality, even though they all recognize the folly of giving physical power to a cognitively independant being that possess no self restraint or morality.)
I agree w/ you that the moon job would be alot more exciting, but this is only because the environment is such an unknown and nearly unquantifiable endeavor. (The moon produces tangible progress and rewards, whereas how do you measure environmental success?)
I also agree w/ you that space should not be ignored, and that it is all a matter of political will. However, I also think that the earthly issues should not be ignored either.
As for being dishonest about how much damage is being done to the environment, no one knows how much the earth can take, because we have never killed one before! Unfortunately, many environmentalists make the mistake of trying to illustrate things through fear. This is (imho) because the damage done is hard to see, or quantify, or understsand, or communicate effectively.
The environment is important, but it is not the only important thing out there. So yes, i see your frustration.

Pragma,
I never faulted anyone for not 'dropping out to join the peace corps.' I never even blamed any one group for screwing up the earth. Mostly i was trying to encourage people here to acknowledge collective responsibilty for caring for thier own backyard, rather than worrying about what is over the horizon.
'Future' is a self-fullfilling prophesy. (People believe our future is in space, so they bend thier energy to that end, and ignore fixing things here. Therefore, space colonization becomes not just possible, but vital, and therefore inevitable.)
I never said 'going to space was an entirly useless venture.' to quote myself, "(BTW, I never advocated ignoring space. More on that later.)"

Serpent,

No, the difference in the excitement levels between the Moon and the environment is very much a personal thing. It doesn't have a lot to do with how unknown and unquantifiable the environment is. For instance, it was once suggested to me that I should get into naval architecture (ship design and construction). I don't think you'd disagree that this is a very known and quantifiable endeavour. Unfortunately it just doesn't float my boat. For me, space does - and it's not because you can get visible results in it. It's the way I'm wired. I get excited about it. For some people, it's sport. For some, it's their religion. For others, it's cars, or reality TV, or shoe shopping or what-have-you. For some, it's the environment.

Stating that the "egg-heads" could have gone into other fields of endeavour, rather than being set loose to screw things up again, does suggest that you think that they should have gone into other fields of endeavour, and that it is all their fault. What should they have done rather than get involved in space, or whatever else they're doing?

Oz,
I never assumed that 'the egg-heads' would screw anything up if let loose. I was merely articulating an assumption YOU made. (Several posts back.) I did say they could have chosen another field of endeavor.
I could keep splitting hairs and countering your false assumptions, but let me just finish this by trying to be as CLEAR AS POSSIBLE.
1) I am advocating taking on a personal responsibility for how things are being run.
2) I believe EVERYONE should be involved in the social and political dialog, and make informed choices.
3) I also think we (Meaning all of humanity) needs to be A LITTLE more focused on improveing and protecting planet earth, rather than finding new places to screw up.

Serpent,

You talk of me making assumptions. Fine, but where is my "assumption" that the "egg-heads" would "simply be cut loose to screw things up in other ways" (as you put it)? My bit about fears of Russian rocket engineers being tempted to sell themselves to the highest bidder and how preventing that was one of the motives behind the US inviting Russia into the ISS project is not my assumption, but a fear that has been stated in print many times and, it would seem, made a basis for US and Russian government policy. (Also, I'm not aware that any Russians actually *have* sold their services in this way. I would suggest that's a pretty good example of personal responsibility, and of them giving quite a bit of thought to the moral implications of the things they could create.)

I also noted your response to my question about your statement that we don't need more satellites or need them to be cheaper, given the damage the mass media is doing to us all. While I agree that we're not well-served by the mass media (after all, in the final analysis, commercial TV news doesn't exist to inform - it exists to sell shampoo and anything else anyone cares to advertise, for the right price), you didn't answer the original question: How does the performance of the mass media mean that we don't need more, or cheaper, satellites?

I won't argue with your three points - I'd consider them to be pretty self-evident (and I'd note that we're not looking for other places to screw up). I would point out though that I'd be more than happy to work in a civilian or military (under the right circumstances) space program - and in so doing, I wouldn't feel in the slightest bit irresponsible.

It's also worth pointing out that undertaking long journeys or setting up colonies in space or on other worlds pretty much forces us to conduct research on ecologies and how they function. This space-inspired work has been going on now for decades. There have been several attempts to set up completely self-contained habitats, including human occupants, and have them run for a year or more. There are lots of questions to be answered that are relevant not just for space flight, but also for here on Earth. How exactly does a whole ecology function? What is the minimum required to make one work? What can make an ecology break down? What can be done to restore it to health and normal operation? What is the best way to recycle waste products? What can be done to minimise or eliminate reliance on non-recyclable products? On a future long-term space endeavour, all these questions will be of high importance. Up there, an ecological system will be required to function with as little active maintenance as possible. After all, there's little point in sending people if they're forced to work full-time just on maintaining the life support systems! Also, up there, you can't just throw your stuff into a truck and move to the next town if your local environment goes down the drain. All these questions and their answers will feed back into better management of our own planet's environment.

On top of that, there are intangible environmental benefits. One of the environmental movement's most iconic images is the photograph of Earthrise taken from lunar orbit by Bill Anders on Apollo 8, the first flight around the Moon, in 1968. It has often been credited with helping to really get people thinking about how fragile the planet we live on is. It's interesting to speculate on just why that photo did it. We had pictures of Earthrise from a few years before, taken by the unmanned US Lunar Orbiter probes. They didn't have much of an impact. Is it because the 1968 photo was taken by a human? It is something I'd love to see for myself. I only wish I had enough to be able to afford the $100 million that the Russians are asking for a seat on their commercial circumlunar flights later this decade.

Finally, our first mission to the moon :)
(yes, I'm one of THOSE people ^^ )

Sweet, now all they need are some sexy uniforms, Starfleet style.