Path: ...!weretis.net!feeder8.news.weretis.net!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Bill Sloman Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design Subject: Re: Challenger Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2024 01:46:13 +1000 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 102 Message-ID: References: <5a5a6jtfh1je18lr297jrh10oihptl2tgo@4ax.com> <9dhb6j5fbjjin8gp4quf31nqaop0grjni2@4ax.com> <66672656$0$7078$882e4bbb@reader.netnews.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2024 17:46:20 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="1236ab842aa8558cc41d140afb35f582"; logging-data="1808192"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19zyjYSsVqWGmE9uYeRedhHJUprwbPw6aE=" User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird Cancel-Lock: sha1:uGBOaAAR0olv1MDDcjCTsov4KEs= In-Reply-To: Content-Language: en-US X-Antivirus: Norton (VPS 240612-4, 12/6/2024), Outbound message X-Antivirus-Status: Clean Bytes: 6026 On 12/06/2024 6:31 pm, Martin Brown wrote: > On 12/06/2024 06:17, Bill Sloman wrote: >> On 12/06/2024 2:11 am, Phil Hobbs wrote: >>> Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote: > >>>> Rocket launches and landings are intrinsically dangerous. On this I am >>>> inclined to agree with JL - unless and until we find something that our >>>> robotic and AI kit cannot do we shouldn't be sending people into space. >>>> >>>> It was the *only* way to explore the moon back in 1969 but not any >>>> more... >>> >>> Read the book if you have the chance. >>> >>> Space exploration has little value outside its cultural impact. >> >> And this will continue to be true until we find something interesting. >> The nature of exploration is that we don't know what we will find >> until we find it. > > OTOH we are much better equipped at remote sensing than they were. Our > robotics have now reached the point where they can do almost everything > that a man can do and they don't need feeding and air whilst in transit. What they can't do is notice the unexpected. > They also have multispectral imaging beyond what a human eye can see. > The vacuum of space is an incredibly hostile environment humans are far > too fragile to survive for long without a lot of support. The "hostility" is perfectly credible, and well documented. It can kill you even faster than an arctic or antarctic winter, if something goes wrong. > Sending humans to explore any of the interesting places in our solar > system is doomed to failure. Twaddle. It has to be done carefully, and you'd need a very good reason to do it at all, but an "interesting place" has to be interesting for a reason. > At best it will be a "Big Brother" reality > TV show with real teeth. John you have been voted out of the spacecraft: > the airlock is over there. You are the weakest link - goodbye. That's an idiotic proposition. If you want to make money out of revolting inter-person competitions, you won't want to spend a lot of time and money getting the contestants out to some extra-planetary location, which lying about where they were would be so much cheaper. > At worst we would contaminate a pristine unique independently evolved > biological environment with terrestrial micro organisms that hitch a > ride with us. A bit like introducing rats or hedgehogs onto remote > islands full of creatures that are unable to deal with such threats. It's easy enough to avoid. >> Residents of Australian find it perfectly sensible that people kept >> poking around the Pacific until Cooke found Australia and mapped >> enough of it to suggests that it might be worth establishing a colony >> there. >> >> Most the residents of North America with European ancestry would think >> much the same about Columbus and his daft misconceptions about the >> size of the earth, if they thought about the matter at all. > > There isn't anywhere remotely habitable that we can see within striking > distance at the moment. North pole of the moon might be OK for a small > lunar research base in the same way as we have in Antarctica and the far > side of the moon would be a nice radio quiet spot for radio telescopes > to use frequencies that are impossible from the Earth. That is about it. With the advantages we can see today.There may be others we haven't thought about yet. > Going to Mars with current technologies will merely result in the deaths > of the astronauts that we send. NASA doesn't deliberately set out to do > one way suicide missions (unlike some vocal proponents of manned Mars > exploration). It would be likely to result in the deaths of some the astronauts sent. It's highly unlikely to kill off the lot. > The main purpose of the ISS was to distract redundant Russian rocket > scientists away from ICBM design (and I suppose it worked for a while). > > Most of the "research" done on that low gravity platform wouldn't pass > muster at a high school science fair. It has fostered international > co-operation though - especially during the period where the US had to > rely on Russian space vehicles for transit to and from the ISS. Perhaps. The cube-sats now being sent up seem to be a very mixed bunch, if I'm to believe what my acquaintances tell me, and make money in variety of different ways, all of which sound plausible. No people yet. -- Bill Sloman, Sydney -- This email has been checked for viruses by Norton antivirus software. www.norton.com