Quote:
Originally Posted by rkomar
All the off-planet work seems to involve sending robots out there, not people. People are heavy, fragile, and need food and water and warmth. They also need exercise, and are going to be bombarded with radiation out there. There are just so many hard problems with manned space travel. It's just so much easier with light robots. You don't have to be a luddite to think that us rocketing around the solar system, let alone the galaxy, is a pipe dream. Maybe in the future, people will view our manned space exploration fiction the way we view Heinlein's early novel about the space ship with the math savant doing all the navigational calculations in his head?
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Or maybe Heinlein was right and we get two space ages, the first strangled by luddites and small minds and a second driven by advanced technologies.
All I know is that manned space travel is not dead. Not yet.
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, China, and even crippled NASA are still working towards deep space manned exploration. Right now. To the tune of tens of billions.
And those aren't paper studies but actual engineering efforts.
Me, I'm putting my money on the combination of VASIMIR plasma drive and compact fusion, both being developed with private funds. But Musk's cheap rockets might get us there, too.
To paraphrase Arthur C Clarke: "when somebody says something is possible, they may be right or they may be wrong. But when they say something is impossible they are almost certainly wrong."
SF is all about looking just beyond the horizon, about "what if's", "if only's" and "if this goes on's". It requires imagination to appreciate and it might be that society evolves away from imagination and a sense of wonder.
But it hasn't yet.
Edit to add latest news:
Manned space travel is such a "fantasy", that the US (finally taking note of chinese plans) is setting down rules for *manned* Lunar Mining operations. At least one US company is already testing the hardware in space.
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space...ntures-n299126