Space travel peaked 38 years ago

they actually tried to do a reality show for mars one

NASA: "What about a telecope... IN SPACE!!!"

back then it was a national priority with an unlimited budget and popular support from the public.

now there is almost no budget and the American people have been propagandized into thinking that its a waste of money because the world is flat

We can't actually go to space

>many more pressing issues

Little wake-up call: Nothing is about "pressing issues". There is no grand vision, no straight road to a better future. It's all about getting elected. What the public cares about is malleable.

how many of those kids are white? who cares otherwise

>white
>kids
What are those?

Because the only countries with enough money for the development of space technologies (USA and Russia) are both fucking dumb. NASA doesn't even get half a percent of the US discretionary budget, meanwhile the military gets like 50%. We could build 6 ISS' with a single year's US military budget. You cunts aren't even at war with anyone, if you NEED to spend all that cash on weapons, then at least develop some sick Mobile Suits instead of boring-ass tanks.

We could have a lunar colony by now, fuck Americans.

>unlimited budget
The highest NASA's budget ever got to was 4%.

>Did you know over 20 million children are facing starvation right now?
You would need to go to war with dozens of dysfunctional countries to actually DO something about that. In the case of NK you would have to expect a nuclear war with chances of Chinese involvement. The troubles in the Middle Easy are a walk in the park in comparison with the enormity of the scale of wars you have to ignite.

You will find it is much cheaper returning to the Moon.

>baby takes a few steps and falls down
>baby: "walking peaked several seconds ago. what went so horribly horribly wrong?"

Let the disfunctional countries duke it out for themselves, I say, if we keep 'feeding' them the they would become dependant and then you're all out of luck.

Whites, the only race to care about exploration, became 60% of the population instead of 90%.

Sorry if that sounds /pol/ to you, but it is true.

How about the mixed bunch. Those explorers also probably left their tracks in the genepool

>We make it to the moon by the skin of our teeth using a huge amount of hacking and "duct tape" solutions
>decide we need to be more rigorous about things
>Create a structure THE SIZE OF A FOOTBALL FIELD in orbit that costs multiple billions of dollars using a spacecraft that, for all its failings, had a remarkable safety record
>Just for people like you, who probably spends most of his time in his mom's basement, to decry our space technology as less advanced than the 1960's

>a remarkable safety record
Sure, but not the good kind of remarkable.

It killed more astronauts and a higher proportion of its astronauts than any other manned orbital vehicle. It lacked basic safety features and operational precautions.

There has literally never been a manned spacecraft with poorer demonstrated safety, or less concern for safety in its design, than the shuttle.

As for ISS, it's not "more rigorous". It's still full of hacking and duct tape. Mostly it's less ambitious. For instance, where Apollo was breaking new ground, ISS is a meaningless bureaucratic repetition and scale-up of Mir. Where Apollo was a do-or-die long-range expedition, ISS is play-it-safe camping in mom's back yard, which gets regular resupply, and can be abandoned and returned to as often as they're willing to pay for the launch, with the crew always mere minutes from the Earth's surface if something goes wrong. They had parts of it up there for years to check and fix before people went up there to stay.

Skylab was launched in 1973! The only reason it didn't get occupied continuously for years is that they cut its operation budget in favor of the horrible shuttle pork program, which was actually supposed to visit Skylab, but was so ridiculously late that Skylab's orbit decayed years before the shuttle flew.

No it didn't.

Fun fact

We are still trying to reverse-engineer the shit scientists developed back in the early to mid 20th century. As I heard someone on Veeky Forums succiently put it, they are basically the ancient wise ones.

Honestly popular entertainment has screwed us.. I can't imagine the things I could have achieved if I had spent the thousands of hours I have wasted on 4chin and watching TV on developing my skills as a scientist. Boredom breeds genius

Take a moment to think about how pathetic that really is if it's true. They managed this in the 19-fucking-60s. And we in 2017 are (failing) to reverse engineer decades old technology. Something doesn't add up. What if the moon landing really didn't happen?

...

>Space travel is pointless when we have bigger issues at hand like Climate Change.

I bet you don't back up your data on two separate hard disks, do you?

Also re: climate change, just take off your coat and move like 20 miles further from the ocean, problem solved until the next ice age. At which point you put your coat back on

I didn't happen. Not with that sort of technology.

Think about how hard it is to take a rocket off into space, make its module land on the moon, then make the module take-off from the moon and them come back onto Earth all in one piece.

Sure, maybe people have already gone their wit their little UFO machines but it's not happening the other way.

>Did you know over 20 million children are facing starvation right now?

Did you know that in the 20th century WE caused that to happen by going full retard and handing out gibs to people with IQs too low to realize that if they had children they would starve?

Stop the gibs, let the African population stabilize (yes millions will starve to death but I'd argue they shouldn't exist anyway) and we can spend the money we saved figuring out how to reverse desertification and terraform inhospitable land.

Or we can just continue to spend billions metaphorically breeding rattlesnakes and dumping them into the middle of our town square by the millions, sure it's suicidal but we already bred a billion of the snakes by accident and letting nature run its course to thin them out would be unethical!

...

That's not really true, it's more of a difference in context.

While we're far more technically adept, it's harder to organize a program efficiently today, with anti-discrimination laws, affirmative action, environmental regulations, and the general growth and increasing entrenchment of bureaucracy and salaried careerists over time. So we're effectively more organizationally incompetent, and are required to spend large amounts of money on people who will make problems and slow the work down.

As for simply copying things as they were done in the past, you run into immediate trouble with being in a different industrial context. We do things in different ways now. Many industrial products and processes have been replaced with ones that are better, but incompatible. For instance, we'd do a complex piece of metalwork like the F1 booster engine for Saturn V with complex castings or 3d printing, but in the 60s, they did it by welding together a lot of small pieces by hand.

There's no escaping the need to do design work. Once you do, why restrict your effort to radically updating an old design? Why not apply other new technology?

That's why something like SpaceX's ITS makes a hundred times more sense than something like recreating Saturn V.

...

You're right, of course. It's incredible how a lot of western people say they don't want children to help overpopulation. If they REALLY cared about over population they'd advocate to stop sending aid to the third world. They don't, of course.

space travel, not space exploration - why waste money to provide a novelty for some individuals? The moon was about petty politics, not exploration or humanity.

>I bet you don't back up your data on two separate hard disks, do you?
It's true, I don't. Want to be triggered? I have an MP3 collection I have built up over 15 years, it's not backed up and I can already hear errors in the tracks.

When we die, we die, and that is all there is.

>babby's first existential crisis
How's middle school?

I'm 31 darling. But if becoming an adult means accepting death will grace, I suppose I will always be a child.

with*

Cold war ended

The development of manned space flight was artificially accelerated by a political contest between the US and USSR, pushing both nations to "firsts" in space.

The US was successful in defining the ultimate prize of the race as manned missions to the Moon -- a goal chosen because it was far enough beyond the capabilities of both nations that the US had sufficient time to catch up and surpass early Soviet developments in space flight.

The problem with this approach, in making it a race for political bragging rights and with a specific destination defining who wins, is that once one side wins, the race is over.

Once the US landed men on the moon, the Soviets cancelled the remains of their lunar light program, and US interest in continuing flights fell rapidly, resulting in cancelled missions and even expensive Saturn V rockets and Apollo capsules left unused.

The Apollo Applications project tried to find ongoing uses for Saturn Vs and 1-Bs, and Apollo hardware, but other than Skylab none of them were made into working missions.

The Soviets continued their development of orbital labs, and the US went off into the blind alley of the shuttles -- which might have been made a workable spacecraft for continuing advancement of manned spaceflight were not the budgets continually slashed. (Resulting in an overweight ship with no capabilities to boost above LEO and the most expensive way to put a kilogram f mass into orbit yet put into use.

Nope, it's too late. You already made the typo, thus invalidating every shred of substance your post might have carried.

Sorry. :^)

You do realize that they do not fuel the rockets with flaming streams of money, right? Money spent on space flight is not spent in space.

N-no

I worked hard on my post...

We, at this very instant, have "defensive systems" with offensive capabilities positioned in Romania, and have troops positioned all along the Russia border. We've expanded NATO into Ukraine and are using these countries as arms markets. Gorbachev recently stated we're now closer to nuclear war than at any point during the cold war.

The cold war never ended.

>space travel peaked 38 years ago
It was 48 years ago.

The peak performance was in 1972 when they brought a geologist (or selenologist rather) to the Moon.

And they still have not yet analysed all samples returned from the Moon.

>Want to be triggered?
Not sure why you'd think I would be mad about the fact that you are a dipshit

>what went so horribly, horribly wrong?
right-wing mainstream denialism

There is a bit more to it than that, like the emphasis of tech rather than paper pushing.

Simply put the guy who knew what they were doing were allowed to get on with what they knew. That always gives results.

1960: Gary Powers shot down in his U-2
1964: Blackbird takes to the skies, with impunity.

Something went wrong in the 1970's, not sure what. Skylab fell out of the sky. F-35 has been in development for over a decade and still only "operational" given enough inverted commas.

We still haven't recovered.

Or we could just feed children but capitalism

There's literally no reason to go beyond LEO/L points, excluding fundamental science, which is done with probes and observatories. There's little reason to put people in orbit at all.

The manned space program exists solely because of politics and propaganda, and doesn't belong to Veeky Forums. Backing our home up is a meme.

Your plan sounds harsh but it is actually a good solution.

9052397
That is one dank shitpost
You absolute mongrel

Capitalism. We decided collectively that the only reason to do anything is in order to acquire imaginary resource credits. Since going into space costs a lot and we are too unimaginative to make up a fake reason to generate imaginary resource credits from space travel, we abandoned the idea. Furthermore the best capitalists make lots of money for little to no effort, innovation is actually bad for the economy in the short term, they want less competition and less ideas to maximise profits.

Go home commie, you got shit on last time because you don't understand how shit works

>capitalism
Agreed, except I would add corruption to the mix to be really accurate
>Go home commie
hi conservacuck still humping your guns down in Tuscon?

Not the same as whoever it is you're talking about. Capitalism is fine as long as it's controlled. But the most powerful nation on Earth is controlled by fat old oligarchs who hate innovation and don't care about long term thinking. China is brutally capitalist as well but they put a bullet in the back of the head of rich fags who get out of line and damage their long term interests. China will be the one to get into space, not cucked Americans. It's too late for us, we're gonna be slaves.

Actually, no. The race to the Moon was won, and the US was not being sportsmanlike by beating that fact into the world's mind. The *left* argued that the money could be better spent on social programs.

Sage (as in "wise") posts.
I was a young teen when XVIII was cancelled. I was incredulous. The uneducated failed to understand the benefits garnered from Apollo, and became literally bored after the second landing, then antagonized by XVII. NASA created "Spinoffs," a series of publications that explained the tangible benefits, but the uneducated never read them - it was all preaching to the choir. NASA needed a new mission to survive, so they came up with Shuttle. Then Shuttle had to have a purpose (launching satellites was a job more economically left to simple rockets), so ISS. The Hubble failure was a sort of windfall of support for Shuttle.

Capitalism and consumerism.

You can't make any money going to space.

Misleading imagine. Social Security has its own budget, and it collected separately from taxes.

You can't build proper rockets without me.

Does he have a model V2 in his office?

Of course. The first rocket to reach space. October 3rd 1942.

There are only 760m white people.
So we are at ~10%

What a shitty and edgy plan. As much it'll most likely work, the public would freak out. Look at what those hippie faggots did with the Vietnam war. Now with the internet millions more people than the hippies ever had would join together in hopes of saving millions of suffering people. Their death is inevitable and people are only gonna make then suffer more.

What's the alternative though
Cut them off now when there's a billion of them, or continue feeding them until there's 4 billion
No ethical way to do it, their population far exceeds the carrying capacity of the area, either it's a big population crash now, or a colossal one down the line, world war Z style, when we stop having the production capacity to hold them up

jews

The fall of the Soviet Union and loss of competition.

Number 2 from left looks suspiciously V2-like.

The first major US and I think also British missiles were V2 derivatives with a fresher paint job.

Boomers.

Have you seen the craftsmanship on these things? The F1 engines were essentially knit together with impeccable welds. You couldn't find anyone with the skill to do this these days, and there aren't enough skilled welders in the country do do this on an industrial scale anymore. The whole thing would have to be redesigned from the ground up.

>I am the only one I know who thinks the moon landing was real

Fuck this gay earth.

Computers were a mistake.

>Yeah, but...

Money if fungible, and the money in the SS "trust fund" can be and is invested in what amounts to government bonds to fund the deficit, essentially defraying some budget expenses, and eventually having to be repaid from the budget and taxes.

So the difference between the two pots of money is not as absolute as your post implies.

/offtopicbudgetdiscourse

The Atlas in his display is one example of a proper rocket built without him.

Also, whats the one at extreme left? Anybody know?

Also, what's the gold one in front of the Explorer/Redstone?

or train anew generation of weldrs, again..

>space travel peaked 38 years ago

>1979
>OP has a picture of something that happened 10 years earlier
>none of the mathematician wannabe's ran the numbers

I don't run the numbers, I just crunch them

We went to the moon to beat the Russians. There's no incentive to beat the Russians again.

Not even worth it. You should check out some of the detail pictures of these things. They're an absolute work of art. But then, we can simplify them by orders of magnitude now, and manufacturing techniques, metallurgy, and engineering have changed so much that it would be completely pointless and insane to build it the same way they did in the 1960's. Hence why we can't just up and build a new Saturn V.

Computers are fine, it's standardized testing and hugbox schools, along with the elite wanting dumb consumers not competitors.

Oh no, we can build some incredible hardware these days. Vastly superior to what we had during the Apollo program. The problem is the cost of doing so is incredibly high and it requires a whole lotta balls to do it within a reasonable time frame. NASA has become incredibly risk averse and they move at a snail's pace on everything that a human could possibly ride on. The motivation, ambition, and youthful energy just isn't there for a project like this.

We stopped having an arch-rival.
America is literally lost if it doesn't have a villain to be plotting against. The War Machine is how we saved ourselves from The Depression and the Cold War kept fueling out advancements, but after the Wall fell, we didn't have a villain and we just kinda didn't know what to do with ourselves.

>what went so horribly, horribly wrong?
jews

looks like some kind of commemorative model of Explorer 1

>Idea
Make jews the villians, so we try to stop the wars on middle east, conquer everything there and bring mid-term peace

No profit thats why.

Demographics of the country makes that impossible

People think this is a troll post, when it is the real answer.

Moonbases don't get politicians reelected.

>Moonbases don't get politicians reelected.
... unless it is a Chinese Moon base set up for mining the Moon, occupying all Peaks of Eternal Light.

At that point the newspapers will brew up about the "Moon base gap" and heads will roll, grand speeches will be made and new politicians will be elected.

>people still believe that the moon landing was real

something something can't put a meter on it
something something black budget
mumble mumble weaponized

My high school principal legitimately believed it was fake

>We are still trying to reverse-engineer the shit scientists developed back in the early to mid 20th century
bullshit