Is human space exploration dead for the time being?
It seems the most powerful nations in the world are more concerned with building weapons at the moment.
Humans in space
Zachary Lopez
Charles Bailey
Government work is kind of pointless right now because it has been successfully privatized. Private corporations are successfully launching satellites and beginning to build manned rockets.
The future of space travel will be commercial and will really gain traction once it becomes profitable somehow other than just government grants.
Jaxon Price
Fuck human space exploration. Human space exploration is just plant a flag, take a picture, grab some rocks, then leave. I mean it's nice and all, but what we really need to focus on is changing the way we do space.
Right now we need to ship up everything from earth, if we're ever going to live in space this needs to change. What we really need to do is get In Situ Resource Utilization working. IE using shit from where we're sending people rather than hurling it from earth.
One of the best ways to start doing this would be to mine the Moon. So unlike asteroids, the Moon is damn close. Lag time is only like a second so teleoperating robots from earth is possible. This also means we can get stuff to the Moon within days of launch as opposed to years.
Now if you haven't heard, they just found a lot of water on the Moon
nature.com
Now water's cool for a number of reasons, we crack it into propellant, we can use it for a bunch of metallurgical processes to refine moon rock, and we can use it to keep meatbags alive
Water has been found on the Moon before in permanently shadowed regions. Except we know fuck all about permanently shadowed regions and it's hard to power a rover some place that is PERMANENTLY SHADOWED.
So this new discovery is that some rocks we have from apollo that turned out to have quite a bit of water aren't anomalous and are found all over the moon. And most importantly they're out in the sun, where we have energy to process them. The concentration of water is high enough that with a small rover like one of the ones used in NASA's regolith mining contest(nasa.gov
Once we have a way to make propellant, we can set up a taxi to and from the lunar surface to bring more rovers/extraction plants to make more propellant
Jason Johnson
Rate of CNS degeneration in open space, away from Earth, would render most humans useless in a matter of months. Who would have thought cosmic rays and iron / helium nuclei traveling near c pelting the skull for an extended period of time would damage neurological machinery in irreversible ways.
Luis Foster
Stupid comic.
There are no resources in space that we can't more easily get here on earth.
Brandon Murphy
Yeah, there's just an asteroid "nearby" containing several quadrillion dollars worth of platinum and to my recollection also helium.
Earth is finite. We're a mad, sloppy, degenerate, wasteful beast of a thing. Imagine the power of controlling that platinum. The parasite cannot resist.
Julian Reyes
False. that platinum is not concentrated native platinum. It's bound up in iron-nickel alloy. It's not worth shit because it would take too much energy to separate the alloy even if we had it here on earth. On earth, geological processes concentrate minerals we look for those concentrations. Let me guess... you also think it would be worth it to extract gold from sea water?
Christopher Perry
Space exploration is one gigantic waste of time. Everybody besides dumb neckbearded pseudo-intellectual redditors knows this.
Andrew Bennett
I didn't know that. I suppose it makes sense that the supernova waves of a collapsing star would disallow a high concentration of pure anything to exist, unless it was previously part of another more complex system. Which is very improbable.
The means could exist to make the endeavor viable, whether here or in space, but I don't really know.
Jose Rivera
>mine earth
>fuck everything up
>die off because the ecology just had it's asshole blown out
>mine space
>can use the resources to turn earth into a paradise
>live forever because we don't need to shit where we eat anymore
You're being retarded on purpose, I'd bet good money on that