Big test tomorrow Orion blog, hopefully all goes to plan…
Anyone else getting excited already? Only 15 or so years to wait…I’ll be old and probably incontinent, I’ll never contain myself!
Bring on the pissing! 🙂
Sadly it will remain an ‘aspiration’ as much as the planned manned return to the Moon. Eventually there will be humans back on the Moon and landing on Mars, but NASA won’t be leading the mission.
Items including Ernie’s rubber ducky, Oscar’s pet worm, Slimey, and the Cookie Monster’s cookie are being taken into space by Orion and will later be displayed on the children’s television show in the hope that they could inspire the next generation of astronauts. Nasa predicts that the first astronauts on Mars will be today’s pre-schoolers.
Coincidentally I’m now about half way through reading ‘The Martian’ by Andy Weir, about a member of one of the first manned missions who gets stranded alone on the planet. Very good read so far.
Robot probes are ace, but it’a absolutely not the same as seeing a human set foot on Mars for the first time.
The technical challenges are enormous – how do you shield the crew from radiation for example? But we absolutely have to explore and eventually colonise other planets.
@MrSmith… I get that too… But they don’t have to be mutually exclusive, frankly the place to start there is stopping spending money on things that trash the world.
Thing is, space travel helps us to look up, which is exactly the sort of thing that encourages people to think bigger- whether that means mars, or this world, it’s easy to ignore global issues when you don’t think outside of your own local world. There’s also likely to be applicable tech, both predictable and unpredictable- the obvious stuff is in biosphere management, and really efficient resource use and reuse. None of that’s really stuff we couldn’t possibly do here, but there we couldn’t possibly not do it, motivation’s important.
I can’t remember who said it… Humans work best at the 11th hour, which is just as well because even when we see a crisis coming we tend not to deal with it til we absolutely have to. In space travel, you start on the 11th hour- you never have the choice of putting it off for generations like you can do in a big blue world, that’s always going to force results. Ironically living on a benevolent planet is what gives us the option of wrecking it.
PJM1974 – Member
The technical challenges are enormous – how do you shield the crew from radiation for example?
Why would you want to do that? Cosmic rays are awesome!
oh FFS! – we’ll never get to mars if we have to ‘hold’ whenever:
a) there’s a bit of wind
b) a boat floats onto the range – the range covers Xbillion square miles, there will always be a boat ‘down-range’
c) ooh! a squirrel!
d) etc.
oh FFS! – we’ll never get to mars if we have to ‘hold’ whenever:
a) there’s a bit of wind
b) a boat floats onto the range – the range covers Xbillion square miles, there will always be a boat ‘down-range’
c) ooh! a squirrel!
d) etc.
This +1000
Just shows how rubbish the current technology is ! We should have been on Mars decades ago.
I’m in Florida at the moment, and was at KSC on Tuesday… It’s an amazing piece of engineering they’re trying to get up there this morning.
I was going out to Cocoa Beach this morning to watch, but decided at 3am it was probably going to be cancelled with the weather, and went back to bed.
So I’m hoping I can catch the smoke trail if it does launch in the next hour (or so) from the side of my pool. Live Stream isn’t much better over here, that much closer it would seem
just a side note.. didnt the mission to the moon already sorted out the radiation and heat shield problem? You’d think a mission to the moon would be a good test. The we’re not sure how the radiation will effect chips seems a bit strange as i’m sure there has been other satellites and probes sent to mars already that are still functioning.
All a bit strange.. makes me think they never landed on the moon 🙂