The Space Flight Thread - Going out-of-bounds irl

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Blue Origin is streaming a New Shepard launch, and oh boy, that like/dislike bar.
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People are angry with BO for suing NASA because they didn't pick their lander, which is gonna delay the spacex lander funding.
 
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White Devil said:
Why? This shit [of companies who don't have a chance halting a contract for a while with a lawsuit] happens regularly in those industries. It's nothing new.
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"Nothing new" should have little bearing on our getting upset, especially about a particularly egregious example. Here we have a company who's never put a payload in orbit which per the GAO's decision and common sense doesn't have the slightest chance of winning the lawsuit on the merits using it to damage perhaps the single most fantastic company/operation in the world. That among other things, if Musk staying in control long enough, might make us a two planet civilization and therefore less likely to be wiped out etc.
 
rawhide_k said:
Nuclear technology has the answer again! or at least an answer. CRISPR will eventually help harden our worthless meatbags against radiation, and perhaps greatly expand our lives. whether that's solved before we can just upload ourselves, who can say. i'm personally in favor of a nanomachine virus that slowly replaces your meat brain with electronics over time.
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I wonder if we should pen a transhumanism thread. I hear about this stuff all the time but I don't think it's plausible. Thoughts?
 
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The scariest part of space travel is if we find out that the speed of light is indeed an inviolable upper limit on speed for luxonic and/or bradyonic matter. That would mean that just a fraction below the speed of light is the maximum rate of travel in the universe for humans. Near speed of light seems fast, but in terms of space, it really isn't. It would still take years to get to the next nearest star, and generations to get any appreciable distance away from Earth.

I think finding out that FTL is not possible would cause a serious depression in human progress for a time. Knowing that aliens almost certainty haven't visited earth, that there being a galactic community or just other intelligent life and meeting them would essentially be impossible, that the galaxy and beyond really is most likely never going to be explored. Stories involving the far reaches of the galaxy have been a part of human imagination for a long time. Knowing for a fact that it will never happen would be rather hard for many people to accept.
 
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Besachf Jhakut said:
"Nothing new" should have little bearing on our getting upset, especially about a particularly egregious example. Here we have a company who's never put a payload in orbit which per the GAO's decision and common sense doesn't have the slightest chance of winning the lawsuit on the merits using it to damage perhaps the single most fantastic company/operation in the world. That among other things, if Musk staying in control long enough, might make us a two planet civilization and therefore less likely to be wiped out etc.
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Hahahahahhaha.

Ok.
 
Lucario said:
That's metal as fuck.
I think that would just kill you and replace you with a self-aware copy of yourself that thinks its you. Personally, I think modifying our body chemistry would be a better way of doing this.
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I'm not sure if we know entirely how brain death works yet. I believe if the process was slow enough, your brain would 'learn' how to integrate itself into the technology that'd basically act as a substitute for parts (and eventually almost the entirety) of your fleshy brain. I'd personally imagine that your brain, once connected to the tech, would try and send signals to it which would vary depending on which parts it replaced. Say you replaced your cerebellum with some machines that mimic the function of your memory banks. Your brain would see the discrepancy of this new memory bank being completely empty compared to your actual memory, and would start to transfer some of your memories to this new bank to balance things out. We'd have to strategically replace, and leave parts of the brain, so that the original fleshy bits have a chance to transfer 'You' to the new ones. This is all theoretical of course. We don't know a lot about our brain.
 
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I went to Kennedy Space Center recently and it was a deeply emotional experience. I knew as a child about the Moon landings (though I didn't realize until a month ago that there was more than one) and that they were technically difficult, but I didn't until real recently, i think after I started watching For All Mankind, really appreciate them in the way that I think a lot of people old enough to have seen them do. I got teary-eyed seeing the flag that had flown on the 1st and 100th missions, up with Alan Shepherd and up on the space shuttle, and had this revelation that the Space Program is our wonder of the world, is the one thing that in the grand scheme of things makes America the greatest civilization and to stand all time. Then they have the Shuttle Atlantis and the Apollo 14 command module. I think it may have been the most awe-inspiring experience of my life.

I have a dream, might sound weird, that one day there will be an Apollo 11 National Park on the Moon.
 
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They actually managed to liftoff, damn. Let's see if nothing goes wrong the rest of the way. How long did it take for them to get here?
 
Glad it’s finally made orbit. Hopefully the rest of the mission ticks all of the boxes.
 
Too bad space flight in real life is probably limited to rockets to get up there - no "reactionless drive" flying saucers. And then rockets, solar sails, or "nuclear pulse propulsion" (Project Orion) to get anywhere. Seems antimatter is ridiculously expensive, warp drive doesn't work, that black hole thing uses too much energy, and even the Bussard ramjet looks impossible. Which means sending robots out there and launching manned missions to orbit is hard, manned missions to the moon are even harder, who knows if manned interplanetary flight can be done, and it looks like slower-than-light interstellar travel is near or at impossible for biological life.

I used to think that money and politics were holding space travel back - and they could be - but the more I learned about how space travel works in real life, the more I can see why there doesn't seem to be much progress in it. If space travel were easier, companies and even private citizens could be doing it more by now.

edit to add: lol I forgot I already posted in this thread earlier
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
I used to think that money and politics were holding space travel back - and they could be - but the more I learned about how space travel works in real life, the more I can see why there doesn't seem to be much progress in it. If space travel were easier, companies and even private citizens could be doing it more by now.
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Politics really fucked up the space program. During Trump's presidency, he pushed NASA to aim for the stars again instead of muh climate change but as soon as Biden took over, they went full DIE propaganda.
If Artemis is a success then it will be a miracle.
 
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