Good to watch...
Hadn't really appreciated that my mistakes in KSP (hot staging) were a real technique
European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Tim Peake, NASA 'naut Tim Kopra and cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko blasted off this morning from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan en route to a six-month stay aboard the International Space Station. Tim Peake, Yuri Malenchenko and Tim Kopra See you in six months: Tim Peake, Yuri …
Or not paying attention for the last couple of years.
There seem to be many roads leading to a "Flat earth" position. (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Flat_Earth)
But most seem to be caused by carefully ignoring evidence to the contrary. Or just a case of doublethink in order to be seen to be special and/or different?
I remember as a kid watching Michael Foale going up to Mir, and amazed with the fact that someone from a country that doesn't really have a space program (not like America or Russia) could actually get in to space. I was also amazed, and continue to be amazed, at how no one died on Mir during those final years.
"schoolchildren seeing this today could be the first to walk on Mars."
Just going by my history lessons and what happened today, the kids seeing this in school will be lucky to make it to the end of the road when they grow up. He's gone considerably less far than a moon landing.
Don't get me wrong - excellent achievement for the man but the giant leaps for mankind seem to have died away somewhat while we've been busy on social networking and other fluff...
> Don't get me wrong - excellent achievement for the man but the giant leaps for mankind seem to have died away somewhat while we've been busy on social networking and other fluff...
If every astronaut went to the moon, they wouldn't be able to get their work done on the ISS.
In terms of achievements, did you miss Rosetta, New Horizons, Dawn, Curiosity, the continued work of Cassini, etc. ?
I watched the livestream at work with a few of my colleagues on a spare monitor. There is something amazing about watch a bloody great firework blasting off.
My daughter went to a science centre and watched a Tim Peake video which got her interested, Ill likely set up the launch on the TV in the lounge for her to watch later as well.
Great to see it all go according to plan so far!
...on my mobile phone over a wi-fi connection it struck me that if spaceflight technology had proceeded half as fast as the communications technology on which I was watching it we'd have a lot bigger presence in space than we currently do.
The Soyuz launcher that carried Tim and his companions aloft has very few engineering differences to rocket craft of the 1960s (mostly in the area of digital control systems), whereas today's mobile phones would barely be recogniseable as such to a Motorola user of the 1980s....
Shame, really.
@ Vinyl-Junkie - I think the answer might be just 'keep it simple'. Those who design, build and operate such things know all to well that if it works and you know the system backwards, not to change a thing, or at least not very much in the way of critical things. Much of the best engineering, however ugly or elegant on the surface, is based upon that principle.
Scott, you have a point! However I think it has a lot more to do with under-investment as there is no real profit in it. Once the "beat the Ruskis/Yanks (depending which side of the Iron Curtain you were)" went out of it, so did the investment.
Perhaps a better comparison would be the development of the steam locomotive; barely more than 100 years separate Stephenson's Rocket from Gresley's A4s, and the engineering principles they use are broadly similar; yet Mallard could achieve over 125mph with a train weighing in excess of 240 tonnes; a long way from Rocket's performance at Rainhill!
That's exactly what happened; the USA was hot to beat the Russians into space, and ultimately the moon, so it was easy to get all the funding needed to perform this herculean feat. Once all the fuss was over, and the ticker tape swept up out of the streets, most everyone turned their attention back to our little planet and the goings on closer to ground. Look at what has happened with the Space Shuttle; many successes, but we lost two craft over the years and the funding dries up, and people lose sight of the many many great technologies and advances in material and life sciences it brings. If it's not a money generating or otherwise popular endeavor then it's hard to get clueless government people to send money to fund something worthwhile, yet not immediately profitable. Advanced medicines, metals, computer technology, and Tang are all worth it to me. Money better spent for the gain in knowledge, rather than on more spy technology to "catch" Terrorists™.
I'm an oldster, so Apollo 11 happened when I was five. My first "I love science" moment was when I saw the moon landing on TV, I ran out to the front yard to see if I could spot any of the astronauts on the moon. Never mind I had no telescope or binoculars, I HAD to go check! From then on I craved all the latest science and technologies, and it ultimately led me to the computer science field. You know the rest.
Three cheers for Tim Peake! Hip hip hooray!^3
From then on I craved all the latest science and technologies, and it ultimately led me to the computer science field. You know the rest.
You mean enthusiasm, disillusionment, and eventual full on computer technology phobia ....
The above said, which is more a reflection on corporate computing, and "For he is a jolly good fella" .
"yet Mallard could achieve over 125mph with a train weighing in excess of 240 tonnes; a long way from Rocket's performance at Rainhill!"
And according to my grandfather it took 3 weeks afterwards before the track was fully repaired. The steam locomotive was kept going long past its best before date by conservative thinking, long after the Swiss had perfected electric traction. Compared to a Swiss electric locomotive Mallard, pretty as it was, was hopelessly unreliable, uneconomical and polluting.
Space exploration is for machines designed with human ingenuity.
Britain was stew post war because it didn't have the money to electrify. That the war also dropped a load of cheap road transport into the mix probably didn't help.
By the time they got around to it, the money needed to be spent on trackwork left insufficient for complete electrification and giving us - diesels!
Spaceflight technology did increase very fast; it just increased in the same direction as communications technology, i.e. better computers, remote control, sensing and imaging. Communications technology doesn't get you across the Atlantic in a few minutes; it makes it unnecessary to cross the Atlantic in many cases. The mistake is to identify progress in space with propelling wetware ever further and faster, when it fact it has been to make it unnecessary to send a load of wetware to get good pictures of Pluto.
We can analyse the atmospheres of planets going round other stars. I'll swap that (or the Mars Rovers) for somebody going on a one way trip to Mars in the interests of patriotic willy-waggling.
It might be a lot easier to get to space if the rocket could stop to buffer every few seconds.
In reality space is an unforgiving mistress and people don't like to die, which is perhaps why the heroes of space today are robots.( Seriously who here ever expected to live in a world where the surface of Pluto is as familiar as the white cliffs of Dover or the Grand Canyon.)
When the ISS passed overhead in our neck of the woods a year or so ago I wandered out with a pair of binoculars to take a gander. Unexpectedly I was completely knocked out that I was looking at an actual piece of orbiting machinery. I haven't had an astro-thrill like that since I first looked at Jupiter through a telescope.
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