Dan M. <snip> perfectly good reply. I don't want my post to be cast in the
romantic light, but I thought the manned missions were more for the
exploration idea than for pure scientific research. Were there no advances
that came from the space race of the '60's? Not the obvious stuff like
putting satellites in orbit, something along the lines of 'We had to figure
out how to do this with humans, and here was an additional benefit once we
figured it out' or even going down one path was a dead end but it gave us
ideas for something else.
Just getting the whole world working on something is reason enough in my
book. I was at a factory today, the manger said they wanted to get their
product to the point where making something for Europe, i.e. metric, would
be a simple conversion from the American plans. My jaw almost dropped off
my mouth. I'm thinking just make everything in Metric and let the American
buyer worry about the conversion. Didn't the problem with one of the lost
missions, the one where engineers were saying oh we thought it was in feet,
make everyone wince? If that happened with a manned mission, hopefully no
one would die, but there would be a national, worldwide, outrage.
Do you agree with (someone's post) about no R&D being done now in companies?
If you, or someone, had already replied then I'll find it.
An aside, the one hoped for benefit I remember about zero G was in silicon
chip manufacturing. Obviously it would be decades before they could actually
manufacture anything in orbit. Is there anything that would eventually
benefit from being in a zero G environment? Of course costs are prohibitive
now but wouldn't the mounting of manned exploration force advances, and
bring costs down at some point?
With Mars I'd hope that any mission would be longer than just three days on
the surface then return. And they couldn't take all the gear necessary for
true discoveries, but it seems if a human was there they can do stuff that
the robots can't with their lag times.
With the moon, have they found any minerals? Again it would be decades
before it was established but couldn't stuff for space be made on, or at
least lifted off of, the moon cheaper? I don't mean they'd be pressing car
parts for Detroit just cause the moon has iron but real space station gear.
And to really show my lack of knowledge: a lot of SF I read had them using
elctro-magnetic boosters on the moon for putting stuff into space, like a
runaway mag-lev with the end of the track terminating at a 45 degree angle.
Is that possible? If a moonbase became self supporting, capturing the sun's
energy for 14 days and not running out during the dark cycle, it might be
pointing towards relieving the earth's energy imbalance.
Just realized, Space 1999 was last year. Sigh, where is our moonbase?
Kevin Tarr
Trump high, lead low
