Manned Spaceflight: The Future That Never Happened

Editor's Note: Earlier this week, our St. James Mulroy looked at some of the options NASA has for manned spaceflight after the Distance Shuttle program ends this summer. Merely not everyone is sol optimistic: Our President Lincoln Spector shares his take on the future of manned spaceflight present. Agree? Disagree? Read on, and leave a annotate with your thoughts.

I'm writing this equally the second-to-last Space Shuttle prepares to launch. It looks like, at to the lowest degree in America, the age of manned spaceflight nears its end. I don't expect IT to last long elsewhere, either.

It wasn't supposed to destruction like this. In fact, IT wasn't supposed to end. Space was to be the "final frontier," but we abandoned that frontier after half a century. Fifty long time ago last month, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to leave the Earth's air and adventure into blank, equally well as the first to orbit the planet.

In the 1960's, everyone was dizzy with the promise of an Earth-free future. Star Trek offered period of time adventures to ulterior planets—even up if they were, oddly enough, all but always populated by English-speaking Caucasoid race with a serious social problem. 2001: A Space Odyssey showed U.S.A what appeared to be a far Thomas More realistic space-age future. But it turned unstylish that the bulk of the film was as fanciful as the colorful closing. Ten years after the real year 2001, we stillness don't let commercial passenger shuttles taking us to a space station with artificial gravity and chain restaurants.

What happened? It overturned taboo that sending people into space provided no more benefit compared to sending machines, and sending the machines is far cheaper. They don't require food, operating theater water, or oxygen. Columbus would get given up likewise if he'd had to take his personal atomic number 8.

Smel at it this right smart: Long in front we educated how to write out or farm, human beings inhabited all of the Earth's continents leave off Antarctica, which is withal the only continent without cities, farms, or nations.

Why seaport't we colonised the backside of the world? The resolve seems so obvious that the question sounds ridiculous. Yet compared to space, Antarctica is a paradise.

Manned spaceflight was, and even is, a nice dream. But it's one that's not going to descend true.

[Photo: Matthew Simantov on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)]

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Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/491632/manned_spaceflight_the_future_that_never_happened.html

Posted by: jonesgrounted.blogspot.com

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