What happened to the dream of space exploration?

What happened to the dream of space exploration?

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It was only a dream
we're stuck on this shitty rock forever

Conservatives buthurt about money.
It's ironic that they fueled a generation of passion just to beat communism at chess and drop the whole thing once it use for propaganda had been depleted.

An emphasis on space investment would get my vote instantly, but politicians fail to realize this.

Diversity happened.

Oy vey can't let those non-whites starving here on earth while you go out into space you evil white supremacists.

The money dried up when the Cold War ended and space stopped being seen as a national security issue.

Space has always been a fucking meme.

The USSR failed to go to the moon and so the US never felt the urge to one-up them like they had in the past.

>Conservatives buthurt about money.

No, actually much of the pressure to cut NASA's manned space program came from the 'We should be spending that money on more social programs on Earth" crowd.

And of course, the Apollo program was fantastically expensive. (Yes, not much per person and all, but still a very large expenditure.)

Factor in disillusionment with government in general as Watergate, Vietnam, and such, came rolling through, and the fact that the whole venture had been sold as a Race to the Moon (and what sort of fool keeps running AFTER they win a race?) and the support for manned exploration dissipated. You could see it in the TV ratings of coverage of each successive Apollo fight after 11.

>get my vote

If it would get more votes than yours and mine they'd be all over it. But other than a few areas where aerospace employment is a big thing, there is not much for a politician to gain by being a big space advocate. It's not that they don't realize how may votes they'd get -- it's that they Do realize the number is small.

There is an interesting story that the idea was floated to send a cosmonaut with 17. It was shot down pretty quickly, and the Russians probably would not have gone for it -- still, I like to think there is an alternate history where Leonov got to the moon with Cernan.

All of the "low hanging fruit" of space exploration has already been claimed. The next big steps, like visiting Mars or building a permanent colony on the moon are extremely expensive, and more importantly, will take longer than a single president's term from start to finish.

The campaign cycle of democracy has a huge impact on policy decisions. If you start a project with a price tag in the hundreds of billions, and it hasn't yielded results by the time you have to face reelection, you're fucked. There's a massive incentive to favor short term interests.

>more importantly, will take longer than a single president's term from start to finish.

Not sure how true that part is -- Kennedy set his goal, everybody got excited, and we got to the moon within his deadline not under Kennedy, not under Johnson, but under Nixon.

If there is big buy-in for the goal, but you might not be able to pull it off, there is a lot to be said for getting the glory of the historic setting-us-on-the-path part of things, and letting your successor have the headaches of actually achieving it.

That's IF you can get the huge buy in. If you don't, you just quietly forget it and take little damage for it. How many Presidents since Nixon have announced how we're going to Mars, folks, in about 10-20 years, then never mentioned it again?

The technology is still in development. The space race really just 'forced' the moon. The tech did not exist to go to the moon in any reasonable way, so they just forced it by throwing money in to building unfeasibly huge moon rockets and having custom, non-programmable computers engineered from the ground up to do precisely the thing the apollo mission needed and nothing else. Both of which are absurdly expensive and require tons of manpower to design and build and are not useful for any other application besides sending some men to the moon.
When you read articles mentioning NASA saying they're getting close to being able to go back to the moon, what they mean is technology is getting to the point where we can go to the moon with reasonable costs and safety.

Oy vey, that goy knows! Shut. It. Down.

the Soviet Union collapsed
and now the United States is going to collapse
the only ones left to explore the stars are the motherfucking Chinese

The moon was much easier because
1. Low hanging fruit (easy-ish)
2. "We gotta beat the commies!"

>US of A
>collapsing
lmao

Hate on him as much as you want, I'll always respect him because he's putting his money in innovations to make humans a multi planetary species.

Shit doesn't survive in space with mad amounts of radiation not even satellites really the van Allen belts make sure of that

you realize the van allen belts are, you know, belts, right? They are bands in the earth's magnetic field (or any magnetic field large enough) where charged particles tend to get funneled because of how magnet fields are shaped. Just don't hang out in them. Plenty of people have passed through without harm. Neil Armstrong only died a few years ago from old age.

Necessity is the mother of invention. There was a need to "win" the space race, there is no need now.

Is he doing anything outside of low earth orbit?

Blacks chimped out about "Whitey on the moon" and effectively neutered NASA.

And of course, the Soviet space program collapsed with the Soviet Union.

youtube.com/watch?v=Ja4ZlswGvpE

We are still exploring it but there is no point in sending people anywhere. Space is dead and we will are probably never leaving our solar system

They went through a weak part of the belt supposedly but apparently the real damage occurs once your outside the magnetic field

I need them aliens to come and give us interstellar flight. Then I can leave this stupid rock.

Flat Earth proved there is no space

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Honestly, this

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Why's that guy got a sledgehammer? Surely that isn't what's keeping us from mars

Elites cares about muh money.

childhood is idealizing a future of manned space exploration with conventional chemical propellants
adulthood is realizing it's a huge money sink that doesn't serve a real purpose and that humanity will never leave the solar system thanks to the laws of physics and the only way space can be truly explored is via silicon based artificial super intelligence and that we are simply the meat bag intermediary for this ultimate end game

Spaceflight is ludicrously expensive and with current tech we really can't get anywhere.

Yes.

SpaceX's launch system will be used to assemble both a Lunar and Martian expeditionary craft in LEO. It's feasible they could do both of these before NASA's planned visits in the coming decades.

What's more, reducing launch costs into LEO is a great help to governments interested in deep space exploration.

Money/Sex > High goals

He's done

No true. Technology has advanced significantly since the 1960's and launch costs have come down as a result. Space exploration is very cheap on a national scale, especially for the US.

There are also a number of drives we've designed that could drop costs further and get us deeper into space cheaper like VASIMR drives and NTG drives but most of these require the ships being nuclear powered and general populace has swallowed the blue-pill when it comes to nukes.

Public opinion is the only thing barring us from colonizing the solar system.

Without FTL, space is a fucking meme.

please stop this meme, there is nothing to colonize with current technology, perhaps never

Thanks Obama.

Helping the poor and stop world hunger is more important then science/space exploration.

if you want to end hunger then nuke africa
if you want more starving niggers then keep feeding them

How can you develop the technology to colonize distant bodies without sending people there to gather data on local conditions? How can you even state something is uncolonizeable without having sent a single person there?

inb4 robots

Robots can only do so much beyond the moon due to lightspeed lag. Any real science on Mars or any other planet for that matter needs to be done by people.

FTL is the meme, there are over 100 systems withing 20 lightyears of us. You could send colony ships to those at like, 5% of lightspeed and easily colonize all of them. The technology to move at those speeds ought to be achievable a few centuries, maybe less. In the meantime we have an entire system to exploit.

Whos bitch this is?

we don't need to fly to sun to know that if you go there you will die
if you want to colonize mars then start with terraforming antarctica or something
also any percentage of light speed is a meme and saying it will be possible in a few centuries is the biggest meme ever
in conclusion: everything is a meme

We found out there aren't hot alien chicks on Mars or Venus

Basically this.
The Space Race didn't even start because of anything other than Sputnik panic. And Sputnik was low hanging fruit, if impressive low hanging fruit.
And then USSR eventually collapsed, because they didn't have to guts to keep on going.

Partially this.
Going to Mars is hard, because its basically 210x more expensive than the cost of going to the moon. And thats a lot of stuff, once you consider that durability is a issue in all aspects of space travel.

Space exploration still happens, its just that its cheaper and safer to with robots. Eventually, costs will come down enough to easy human travel to LEO practical.

It's still happening/having progress. I don't know what you mean. We haven't seen humans to Mars yet because it's much more efficient and safer to use robots to do it instead, we likely won't have the technology for space settlement for another thousand years or so.

We realized that humans are squishy little meatballs not meant to venture past the protection of our atmosphere.

It'll take some time before we develop the materials necessary to allow economical and sustainable space travel.

Niggers were a mistake

wtf, we're spending over 2 trillion on welfare??? we're basically commies, fuck

Public attitude became that NASA was taking money that could have been spent on welfare.

???

What we need to do is Andrew Ryan this bitch first.

Space sucks, let's get fucking Rapture.

>niggers and white trash cost us a Mars colony-worth of funds every year
Marvellous, simply marvellous.

old people were a mistake

Cold War ended, no government involvement with trying to beat the Soviets. NASA was disappointed to find no aliens on Mars. Private companies decided they can profit from stuff. Let space go to the free market for colonization.

We can't let humans starve on earth while whites waste valuable non-renewable resources like minerals in outer space.

Good post.