Space, what happened?

[AuronKae]

Remember in the days of John Kennedy? He pushed so hard for America to be the first nation in space, and ever since we did things like that have quieted down, and now we barely notice it when another shuttle is leaving Earth. The government sure doesn't tell us anything interesting. Makes you wonder if they're hiding something up there. :ninja

 

[ssl]

Ah! Another conspiracy theorist!

*runs*

Hahaha, yeah, there is probably something up there.

But in reality, the government has attributed higher priorities to other things closer to home.

 

[Minor Axis]

My impression is that the most affordable course of action is "unmanned" action, although we do have an active space station. I forget the ratio but they can finance a large number of unmanned missions like the Phoenix Mars Lander for every manned mission. At some point though, manned missions will have to go (I think) to keep the program viable. At what point? I don't know 10-20 years?

Hmm, I wonder what they could have done with the trillion dollars that have been waisted in conflict?

 

[ssl]

My impression is that the most affordable course of action is "unmanned" action, although we do have an active space station. I forget the ratio but they can finance a large number of unmanned missions like the Phoenix Mars Lander for every manned mission. At some point though, manned missions will have to go (I think) to keep the program viable. At what point? I don't know 10-20 years?

Hmm, I wonder what they could have done with the trillion dollars that have been waisted in conflict?

Probably two manned missions to the moon, get some basic infrastructure (unmanned missions) on the moon, possibly get some robots to set up a mining facility.

Who knows?

 

[AuronKae]

Hope they do something. Starting a colony on Mars would be awesome, too.

 

[Andre]

October 1st is NASA's 50th birthday.

Part of why we don't get much hype about shuttle launches is probably to do with the Challenger disaster (which you can see on youtube of course). In my country all launches priot to that event were televised, and none have been since.

 

[Carthage]

Remember in the days of John Kennedy? He pushed so hard for America to be the first nation in space, and ever since we did things like that have quieted down, and now we barely notice it when another shuttle is leaving Earth. The government sure doesn't tell us anything interesting. Makes you wonder if they're hiding something up there. :ninja

See what happens when you put the Space Industry in the hands of the government - you get a few years of movement, then it fades in the midst of all the other problems in this world.
I doubt the government has the efficiency to hide anything major.

 

[skyblue]

I think that JFK's openess on the subject was one of the reasons he was killed.

just one of the many reasons

 

[Andre]

Remember in the days of John Kennedy? He pushed so hard for America to be the first nation in space, and ever since we did things like that have quieted down, and now we barely notice it when another shuttle is leaving Earth. The government sure doesn't tell us anything interesting. Makes you wonder if they're hiding something up there. :ninja

Kennedy's push was at the height of The Cold War and the space race was one of the fronts it was being fought on. The Cold War is over.

Also America was not the first nation in space - the USSR was. If you're interested have a read of this:

Space Race - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The government releases plenty of interesting information about space, but a lot of it is scietific data of course.