There’s still a bit of atmosphere, not a lot. Enough that the ISS needs a bit of a nudge from time to time.

As for speeding up and slowing down, things get a little counter-intuitive when things are in orbit.

And you’ll need a lot more than a coat 😉 That’s a bad one.

Depends on your view of the Earth. If you view the earth as some form of magical land that must remain un-touched then you probably can’t see the point. The reality is that the Earth is but a temprary lifeboat for the human race. The Earth is doomed even if humans had never existed. If the Supernova of our own sun doesn’t get us, some huge meteorite will. It’s inevitable and only a matter of time.

If you believe that the human race is to exist beyond the life of the Earth then the Earth is but a lifeboat and we should utilise the Earths resources and strive to find a way off the Earth and survive away from it, wether that be on large space stations floating about in space or by travelling to another habitable planet.

Either way to develop all the technologies we need to do that will take us many thousands of years and we need to be cracking on.

But our understanding of the Earth full stop would be a fraction of what it is now without the Space programme.

my bad, I meant atmosphere, not gravity.

Budget shmudget, we should blow trillions on space ventures. If I spend my life on this planet having never witnessed another man walk on the moon or another planet then i’ll be royally pissed off with my primary school teachers. And the human race.

Personally speaking, I am 100% for space experimentation and exploration (and think we should be spending more than we are), but we shouldn’t even consider colonising other planets until we can learn to look after our own.

I think ours is probably pretty much beyond saving by now.

my bad, I meant atmosphere, not gravity.

Well the ISS is certainly outside the atmosphere – well subject to andytherocketeer’s post.

Not that the Universe is sustainable either, because that’s only going to last 22 billion years.

Depends which model turns out to be correct.

I reckon other factors will apply earlier. Who has any idea what sort of organism we will become over millions of years (if we continue to exist at all)?

If you believe that the human race is to exist beyond the life of the Earth then the Earth is but a lifeboat and we should utilise the Earths resources and strive to find a way off the Earth and survive away from it, wether that be on large space stations floating about in space or by travelling to another habitable planet.

Strange way of putting it. A lifeboat is something you use to save you from a sinking ship, not an entity in it’s own right. Without the Earth human life wouldn’t exist. And I don’t believe we could exist without it. There are no reachable “lifeboats” to jump onto that will sustain us.
This programme covered similar ground and is worth a watch (don’t let the cheesy title put you off) http://bbc.in/1SyIz7H

With you OP.

😀

My major issue with human spaceflight is it seems stuck in the 1950’s, look at Tim Peake and Chris Hadfield, both ex-test pilots, why? The Space Shuttle programme showed that people from a wider section of society were equally able to function in space, and brought new and important skill sets, but we’ve gone backwards over time.

Criteria for being an astronaut:
The criteria for what constitutes human spaceflight vary. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) Sporting Code for astronautics recognizes only flights that exceed an altitude of 100 kilometers (62 mi). In the United States, professional, military, and commercial astronauts who travel above an altitude of 50 miles (80 km) are awarded astronaut wings.

My major issue with human spaceflight is it seems stuck in the 1950’s, look at Tim Peake and Chris Hadfield, both ex-test pilots, why? The Space Shuttle programme showed that people from a wider section of society were equally able to function in space, and brought new and important skill sets, but we’ve gone backwards over time.

It certainly grates that the future I hoped for hasn’t come to pass. Instead of having colonies on the moon, asteroids mined for rare Earth metals and orbiting space stations a la 2001, we’ve expensive mobile phones that play tinny R&B music through a speaker and a vast proportion of our available data storage consists of dancing cats.

But sadly, the shuttle was a compromise between the needs of the military and requirements of a civilian space programme. It proved to be expensive and inflexible, especially compared with a Soviet designed capsule that dates from the mid-sixties.

Blimey, Sputnik only went up in 1957. I don’t think we’ve done badly given the challenges – the main one being keeping people alive and healthy in space.

“999 disappoints”

Hardly, even discounting the support crew needed to get one astronaut into space, you’ve got the cream of the crop, all with advanced degrees and doctorates in multiple subjects needing something to do.
Medicine, biology, physics, engineering and so on.

And i’d guess they won’t be sitting around doing the donkey work either.

It certainly grates that the future I hoped for hasn’t come to pass.

All that stuff you were promised in the 60s, that wasn’t business, that was just scifi and speculation. The dreamers never stopped to think if we’d actually NEED to spend the quadrillions it would take. People swallowed the stuff about the space programme being essential science, when really it was just to get one over the Soviets.

The problem with space exploration is that space is very large indeed, and there’s very little out there. Despite what Star Trek would have us believe, there’s really very little point in sending people to colonize other solar systems besides ‘for the hell of it’. Which I’m fine with personally, providing the money can be found – but ‘for the hell of it’ only goes so far – we only have one Elon Musk after all 🙂

Missions to understand the universe though – that’s cool with me – more worthwhile and also cheaper.

All that stuff you were promised

yep, Tim Peak was very dull, no lazer battles in space…

and there’s very little out there

How do you know?

Well there’s a lot out there. Just nearly all of it is beyond human reach, at least with Einsteinian physics.

I think the big benefit of setting big targets is that targeted research gives much faster results than having 500 people in 500 different research institutes with no big targets.

I mean, most of the spin offs from space research you’d not have thought of without the big targets.

Get a bloke to the moon has a lot of spin offs.

If the Supernova of our own sun doesn’t get us, some huge meteorite will. It’s inevitable and only a matter of time.

Our sun is too smal to go supernova, it’ll possibly go nova, as it’s a G-class, main sequence star.
It’s a supernova somewhere within 50 lightyears that we need to worry about, trouble is, we won’t know until the light actually reaches us.

Speculation as to the effects of a nearby supernova on Earth often focuses on large stars as Type II supernova candidates. Several prominent stars within a few hundred light years of the Sun are candidates for becoming supernovae in as little as a millennium. Although they would be spectacular to look at, were these “predictable” supernovae to occur, they are thought to have little potential to affect Earth.

It is estimated that a Type II supernova closer than eight parsecs (26 light-years) would destroy more than half of the Earth’s ozone layer.[5] Such estimates are based on atmospheric modeling and the measured radiation flux from SN 1987A, a Type II supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Estimates of the rate of supernova occurrence within 10 parsecs of the Earth vary from 0.05–0.5 per Ga[4] to 10 per Ga.[6] Several studies assume that supernovae are concentrated in the spiral arms of the galaxy, and that supernova explosions near the Sun usually occur during the ~10 million years that the Sun takes to pass through one of these regions.[5] Examples of relatively near supernovae are the Vela Supernova Remnant (~800 ly, ~12,000 years ago) and Geminga (~550 ly, ~300,000 years ago).

Type Ia supernovae are thought to be potentially the most dangerous if they occur close enough to the Earth. Because Type Ia supernovae arise from dim, common white dwarf stars, it is likely that a supernova that could affect the Earth will occur unpredictably and take place in a star system that is not well studied. The closest known candidate is IK Pegasi.[7] It is currently estimated, however, that by the time it could become a threat, its velocity in relation to the Solar System would have carried IK Pegasi to a safe distance.[5]