Human testing, obviously.
Such negative sentiment. Not everything is about rebelling against billionaires you know? Space travel is following the same innovation curve as any other mode of travel. Remember how expensive a car used to be, or flying? Those used to be only for the wealthy, now you can hop on a flight to the other side of the content for less than 100 Euro. It will eventually be the same for space travel. The cost of space cargo is coming down quickly, which will enable us to explore “the final frontier”. I hope I get to experience it in my lifetime and it isn’t really outside the realm of possibility either.
You get to see dead rocks and when you come back, you can’t walk anymore (because you spent too much time in Zero-G).
What a perfect idea of a vacation… 🙃
Maybe we get to see a rocket full of billionaires go pop. That’d be neat.
🤞
“I can see so many sick and impoverished children from up here!”
—Jeff Bezos, probably
They should have opened the door on his space travel
As though he cares to look.
They were obstructing the view.
Both the “space” and “travel” parts of “space travel” are disputable there. It’s not even “space tourism”. I’ll maybe give you “high altitude tourism”. Space tourism, to me, implies spending an extended period in space, not a minute or two. That’s barely enough time for a satisfying wank.
According to space, the end goal is
I hear there’s nuttin in space anyway
I mean it was never going to magically go from highly selective to anyone being able to go to space overnight. As time goes on and technology advances the “too much money” bar drops lower and lower.
Hopefully if society doesn’t collapse, it might be feasible for an average person to do it as a once in a lifetime experience.
First flight of an airplane: 1903 First landing on the Moon: 1969
67 years. Not even a single average lifetime.
66.5, even. Wright flyer flew in December, Eagle landed in July.
Technically correcter, therefore bester.
I remember there being a newspaper interview with an old lady. She was a child and saw one of the wright brothers first flights. She then got to see man land on the moon, at the other end of her life.
Look at the earliest airplanes. Little things made out of cotton and balsa that couldn’t outrace a strong horse.
Look at the earliest video games.
edit = I’m not a Bezos fanboy, but if we’re going to have space travel there are going to be stunts, just like there were back in barnstormer days.
Space travel is not the same.
Strictly considering low earth orbit, one needs to accelerate a payload to 25,000 km/h and like 500km above the ground. This is not computation or atmospheric flight. There’s no shortcut, no engineering to work out, the physics dictates this is a hard problem. Solutions:
-
You go up with a chemical rocket, where almost all the launch mass is fuel. To get the ratio in your head, think the liquid in a coke can vs the can that holds it… that’s the mass/fuel ratio we’re dealing with, and tricks like hybrid engines or booster returns barely soften the MASSIVE cost for even the tiniest things you send up.
-
You assist it from the ground. “Gun” launches, as some are developing (and that I’m quite enthusiastic about), can’t launch humans. Stratolaunches (from planes) only get you partway there, more like a booster.
-
You go nuclear. This is the only way to increase energy density vs. chemical rockets enough to make a difference. Needless to say, there are significant environmental/safety concerns when doing this on the ground, and I’m as pro-nuclear as anyone you’ll find. Check out Atomic Rockets for more on this, with concrete theoretical designs that are still batshit crazy: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engineintro.php
-
You develop a space elevator or some analogue. No commercial launch research is even pretending to develop this, and it would require massive materials science breakthroughs.
…That’s it. That’s how you get to space. This isn’t a “Wright Brothers vs modern jets” thing, that kind of cost optimization is just not physically possible. And whenever Musk lies through his teeth about practically colonizing Mars, people need to understand that…
I’m going to approach this from the perspective of someone playing Kerbal Space Program. Early on in the career mode, you need money to build new rockets, gather science, and develop new designs that take you further into space. Without early on tourists, you’re sunk. They provide a lot of the hype and money so you can research/get to that next phase.
Real life is different, I get it. I doubt these celebrities paid much if anything. It’s just rich people doing rich people stuff.
Play Kerbal Space Program Realism Overhaul if you want a … much closer to ‘real’ taste of how much more complicated and difficult an orbital flight is than a subortial flight, a lunar flight is than an orbital flight, an extraplanetary flight is than a lunar flight.
I’m not sure if it is still the unofficial motto of the mod… but it used to be ‘if you cannot figure out how to install this mod, you will not be capable of playing it anyway’, or something to that effect.
That sounds like a time sink but I may give it a try lol
… Hopefully the setup process is a bit more streamlined now, lol.
Also, this is KSP 1.
KSP 2 kinda… failed to launch, you might say.
Also… I haven’t messed with the Realism Overhaul in a few years, but uh… you’re gonna need a fairly poweful machine.
God speed, try not to instantly kill Jeb lol.
Yeah, low volume space tourism is fine. Bezos and such are funding quite a bit.
What I was getting at is the meme that “mass” space flight (much less interplanetary colonization) is in any way practical. It is not. It will not be, at least not until civilization is more along the lines of Orion’s Arm or similar sci-fi. KSP is a fantastic illustration of that, as (even with a much smaller planet than Earth) one pays for every ounce that has to move in space.
Oh how I wish the X-33 / VentureStar had actually worked out…
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar
Either something like that, or somekind of… craft that has both a RAMJet and also some kind of rocket propulsion… that or a SCRAMJet that actually works… could maybe help get us to, or toward, at least an SSTO craft, or system.
Hah, or we can go full conspiracy theorist and find and publicize the anti gravity field generator equipped TR 3B in Hangar 18 or whatever, haha.
You’re looking for the SABRE hybrid engine! It’s super cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SABRE_(rocket_engine)
It flash freezes air to liquid using a mad heat exchanger, until the atmosphere is thin enough to warrant switching to liquid oxygen. It’s better than what you describe, as it saves a tone of weight over separate jets and rockets! It was tested, and seems to work!
…But out timeline sucks, hence it was canceled in 2024 :(
Aerospike engines are awesome, but I’m skeptical of the X-33 TBH. It would’ve been cool if it had worked out.
Where you should be looking now is the “gun launch” startups. Once that’s figured out, it’s so much cheaper to launch “sturdy” payloads that way. Nuclear upper stages are a good option, too (with fission fragment drives being my personal favorite: https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php#fissionfragment)
So, you’ve never heard of asteroid mining?
And remember, there was a time when “Around The World In Eighty Days” was science fiction.
So, you’ve never heard of asteroid mining?
Per the point above, setting development/equipment costs aside, it would be like needing an oil tanker of fuel to bring back a small mass of ore.
…Can you do it? Sure. It’s already been done for scientific return missions, and that makes total sense.
…Is it economical? Hell no. Mining the ocean floor, a volcano, or under the antarctic ice sheet would be orders of magnitude cheaper, much less just prospecting new suface deposits.
-
Planes have a fucking destination and are designed to move volumes of people from A to B, and still can’t compete with rail over 1000km distances (see: France).
Video games were designed to be replayable and accessible to the masses, running on the common hardware at the time.
The Wright brothers didn’t have a fucking destination they were just trying to fly.
They were trying to invent a device of practical utility that could carry passengers and payloads, not to empower the eccentric elite
I don’t think there’s really any evidence of that.
I’m sure they were mindful of the potential applications, in the same way that we’re mindful of the potential for orbital solar arrays and asteroid mining.
You want to build a train from Japan to San Francisco? Bring back ocean liners like the Titanic?
I said 1000km - that’s short to mid-haul
Planes now: a huge waste of resources because people believe they’re entitled to traveling around the globe
How about we don’t repeat the same mistake with space travel?
Edit: always funny to see that progressives aren’t ready to question their first world privilege to travel around the globe to go meet people that will never be able to afford to do the same thing
I mean, people should get to experience the wonders of the world around them.
“Sorry, due to the circumstances of your birth beyond your control you only get to experience corn fields and the local grainary. If your parents had more opportunities maybe you would have been born where there’s cultural artifacts to experience, diversity and education, but you don’t and never will” is a pretty bleak standard.
What if instead of focusing on the people who want to see the world we focus on the people who made it so you can’t do so by train or boat?
Being able to go spend a week 5000km away from home at a moment’s notice wasn’t a thing 100 years ago, it’s a privilege, not a right and it’s an extremely wasteful privilege that can be afforded by a small minority of the world’s population. What you’re saying to ridicule what I said is exactly how the vast majority of the world will live their lives.
Exposure to other cultures is extremely important for building a just society. We have other options to make it more sustainable.
Edit: We’ve always been a mobile species. Sedentary lifestyles are extremely new to us, we are meant to travel and meet others. It’s healthy. Otherwise populations get isolated and weird.
Bingo, we don’t need everyone to go see with their own eyes the famine happening in a country for it to become something people care about.
You’re intentionally missing the point entirely.
We’ve always been mobile but we’ve never been that mobile. Traveling thousands of km was a commitment that would take people’s months if not years and, again, only an extremely small minority would travel that much in their lifetime, most people never traveled more than tens of km away from home.
So what if it’s new? Medicine that we now consider a basic necessity is newer than airplanes, and a significant portion of the world lives without it.
Something beneficial not being available to everyone isn’t an argument to ensure no one has it.
I wasn’t ridiculing your position, I was accurately stating how bleak it is. That you acknowledged that it was accurate but thought it was “ridicule” maybe says something about the position.
Very few things are a “right”, and being a privilege doesn’t make something bad, it just means that it’s good and others don’t have it.
Society advanced as we work to extend privileges to everyone, and it advanced faster when we take stock of the privileges we’ve developed and find ways to provide them better.
Air and car travel are resource intensive and dirty ways to travel. Instead of denying people the wonders of the world, we should find ways to provide better solutions to the problem of travel, and leave the intensive solution to cases where it’s speed is needed.
Instead of being mad at the family taking a plane to a beach vacation, be mad at the system that made taking the train more expensive.We should work to enrich the quality of people’s lives, not just leave huge deaths of people behind because it’s expensive or inconvenient to do otherwise.
Want to enrich the quality of life of people? Stop wasting resources to travel the world, reduce your environmental impact so the people you plan on visiting can keep on living where their currently live.
Are you going to give your phone away and live without?
So I should drive a huge diesel truck without a catalytic converter because if I don’t do everything possible I might as well do nothing? Traveling the world is a luxury, get over it.
Why? Our ancestors never worried about environmental impact, and it’s clear that the only thing that matters is what we used to do.
Our ancestors used to find themselves in an environment that wasn’t good and they’d walk to somewhere that was. Or starve.
Or we could, instead of shitting on people who want to see the world and and enjoy the abilities we’ve developed to do so, shit on the people who made the “not terrible” ways of doing that impossible.
Ok, so you’ll agree that in the meantime people need to stop traveling then? Right? RIGHT?
I think there’s a solution in taxing the heavy users while not punishing people who only fly every 1~3 years. This specifically needs to start with the abuse of private planes with ridiculously high carbon use per capita.
In the end those heavy users represent nothing compared to the planes used by regular tourists. On an individual basis then sure, they’re worse, but that’s like saying African countries need to stop using old cars because they don’t have modern emission equipment while you’re stuck in traffic in LA in your 2020 Honda Civic.
Traveling thousands of miles for a few days of vacation isn’t a right, it’s a privilege that people are abusing. People act like they can’t live without it but it’s a small minority of people who will take a plane in their lifetime.
Emissions at altitude are worse than the same emissions at ground level and planes don’t have any filtering equipment.
Their fuel economy per passenger isn’t that great either, two passengers in a small car burn less gas per km than if they were using the biggest plane full of passengers to travel the same distance. Four passengers in a V8 SUV are more fuel efficient than an A380 filled with passengers.
You do realize that tourism is a big part of a lot of ‘third world’ countries economy?
Stopping or restricting air travel means that the poorest places would lose a big part of their income.
Using that excuse we’ll never do anything about all the shit that has a huge environmental impact because the cost of it won’t be felt until decades later anyway.
“Those poor countries depend on the tourism that leads to climate change that will make their territory uninhabitable! Worth it!”
The hydrogen dream is a load of bs.
Awesome song about this that becomes increasingly more relevant every day:
What about Strauss-Kahn who lost the french presidency election because he wanked in front an hotel employee ?
deleted by creator
It’s to fund development of commercial grade space travel.
It’s gonna be expensive at start, but as it’s economised, less dangerous, more accessible, demand picks up, more infrastructure, even more accessible and bam commercial air travel/EV/Cars only in space.
Travel to where exactly?
So bored rich people can piss away a shitload of cash to look at the unrelenting blackness of space for a few moments before coming back to earth and continuing their lives of wasteful excess in a vacuum of ignorance, duh
While doing this they will emit the carbon dioxide equivalent of 395 transatlantic flights, or the c02 emissions equivalent of what 22-24 Americans output in an entire year from their average daily life. Meanwhile sabotaging an oil pipeline is called ecoterrorism but their behavior is called a fun experience. But that’s okay, katy perry had to see space! We don’t need those ice caps, really. Sorry your children will grow up in a post apocalyptic wasteland
Ecoterrorism is ecology-motivated.
Egoterrorism on the other hand…
Currently as a novelty attraction, you go for the experience. This was the same for the other exampled, and is the same for flying cars where they’re being tested.
Even electricity was launched in much the same way.
To do what when you arrive at this novel location? Leave Edison’s electrocution of an elephant out of this.
Is your imagination really this limited?
Building a proper space station as a jumping off point for further exploration of the solar system, asteroid mining, He3 mining on the moon. These are just the basic things that are envisioned/planned. All of which would require commercial space travel to be a thing. I’d much rather we extract that funding from taking a couple rich people for a joyride as opposed to getting governments to subsidize it.
If it is a benefit for everyone I would prefer the government subsidized the development of space travel by taxing those rich fucks instead of relying on their ‘good will’ to selfishly experience everything themselves.
I view space development as very, very, very nice to have, but not absolutely essential. I would prefer to tax the shit out of the wealthy to pay for essential things at home (such as health care), and let private equity fund the nice to haves like commercial space travel. The exception would be for science missions. I’d prefer for the government to continue funding pure research, so that knowledge doesn’t get gated behind pay walls.
GPS, solar power, and a shitload of science all benefited massively from space missions that used government funding through taxes. That is the approach that I am in favor of, not space tourism for rich fucks.
🎶They’ll say, “Aww, Topsy” at your autopsy…🎶
Colonize space of course!
Bruh…
You realize private planes are already a huge environmental hit, right?
Do you have any idea how much worse it is so some rich asshat can go to space?
Or that if they used it for “travel” it would still be much worse than private planes?
Just for the ultra wealthy to save a few hours when covering over like 25% of the planet.
You have put zero thought into this and it shows
All development is spending superflous resources at low efficiency.
I agree it’s totally tone deaf in the climate crisis, I’m just saying it’s business as usual. Billionaires gonna billionaire until someone stops them.
So in your mind there can be no good that comes out of this?
What about continually advancing the tech on a celebrities dollar so we can get people living on the moon and elsewhere eventually. What about the learned experiences from launches so we can eventually start sending up mining equipment for all the minerals in asteroids?
Yes it sucks for the Earth. I wish it didn’t. But if celebrities keep going up to space for a short amount of time, there going to eventually want to stay there. And when in the hotel they’ll want to go to the moon, and so on and so on.
I would love for this to be done through NASA or done do more good come come from it faster, but they literally stopped because public interest wasn’t high enough
What about continually advancing the tech on a celebrities dollar
And those dollars being spent are destroying our planet even more than private planes…
You’re acting like shooting a rocket almost to space is somehow making technology better, which is just completely baseless…
It sounds like you heard about how money invested in NASA generates innovation and parents the government owns which does trickle down into consumer products.
But you’re completely ignoring that even if these useless trips resulted in fucking any advances, a private corp will own all the parents and profit off any advancements.
but they literally stopped because public interest wasn’t high enough
Just completely ignorant of what you’re talking about
They definitely were getting their budgets cut left and right for a while, since not enough people cared about NASA and going to space. So much so that we couldn’t replace the shuttle program and were backing everything on Russian rockets.
Since Space X and others have been sending more people to space, NASAs funding has only went up. Because public interest is back and wants us to do it here.
So yeah, they had to stop sending up rockets cause public interest wasnt high enough.
Also, any rocket going up provides data. So yeah, launching a rocket almost to space even 1 times provides a lot of feedback. You’re talking like almost to space is the goal. The goal will keep getting pushed further and further until its not just scientists living in space. And then when that happens the goal will get pushed even further.
Plus, how many more people that wouldn’t be interested in space at all are going to at least be curious cause their favorite celebrity went? How many Katy Perry fans got to see their first rocket launch cause she went almost to space?
You’re just thinking so small minded
Yup, this is the sad reality of the system we live in. If we want space travel, it has to receive funding, and we have to hope that billionaires really want that wank.
deleted by creator
I know the chances of me going to space are slim to none at best
I’ll still root for the advancements of space travel cause not everything is about me
