Space topic

Quite wise indeed. The guys they sent up there first were mostly test pilots, i.e. people who were used to putting their lives on the line for the sake of technological advancement. The scientific aims and value of the lunar mission were minimal to mediocre, it was mostly about showing the world the Americans could land on the moon before the Soviets did. It was better to risk the lives of test pilots for that rather than important members of the scientific community.
 
They landed five times without a scientist. FIVE. The fifth(!) had still minimal to mediocre scientific aims? And then, the sixth time, the only time in hindsight, they took one. Brilliant.
 
I am not really sure who landed matter much, they collected a bunch of data and samples that were brought back which were reviewed by scientists. Add to that, several missions were cancelled which probably would have brought more scientists with them and go to more parts of the moon ... and the assumption that we would have gone back by now/unmanned probes can gather information as well.

The main thing is we went and we made it there and back .. which is a pretty massive achievement.
 
^ massive is an understatement.

@Forostar, we're talking about early space flight. So candidates needed to be experienced in long range, high stress flight, not science. Once computers were trusted to bear some workload, you could smuggle in somebody more mission-oriented.
If you want to book a flight to ISS via Soyuz, for $4.2m if I recall correctly, your appliance could be denied if you aren't good enough with machines, you need to operate stuff on Soyuz too and up there on the station. And of course, physical fitness is a huge factor. No manned space vehicle ever was deployed purely for tourism or science application, everyone on board is involved with the operation of the vehicle itself. So if you want some biologist to be sent straight outta college to conduct experiments, then no. I'm afraid that's some decades into the future when we figure out cheap low earth orbit flights.
 
He was the only scientist who ever went on a mission to the moon. Also, in all earlier space missions (landing on the moon or not), never a scientist. I realize that non-scientists could do a lot of work as well (placing tools etc.) but I still find it remarkable.

There is a reason why this has changed over the years. Why space crews only have scientists "these" days (these days? over the last decades!). I never expected it took so long before the first one went.
 
Last edited:
Forostar said:
He was the only scientist who ever went on a mission to the moon. Also, in all earlier space missions (landing on the moon or not), never a scientist. I realize that non-scientists could do a lot of work as well (placing tools etc.) but I still find it remarkable.

There is a reason why this has changed over the years. Why space crews only have scientists "these" days (these days? over the last decades!). I never expected it took so long before the first one went.
Click to expand...

maybe consider the early space flights had 1,2, or 3 people all of whom had specific roles in having to fly the spacecraft ... The Space Shuttle had room for a much larger crew where you could have pilots and other people .... Not really sure what the issue is here, on the early missions the main goal was to make sure these things could fly where they were supposed to go and get back safely in small craft that had a limited crew compliment.
 
Not seeing the problem with not sending scientists to the moon during the earlier flights. Test pilots are smart as hell and they learned how to do science in order so that science could be done. Personally, I see little problem with this.

Today's space crews still usually involve at least one military member. For example, look at the various expeditions to the ISS - they all have at least one non-scientist in them, usually an engineer or a pilot.
 
This animation (annotated) shows the path of the interstellar asteroid 1I/2017 (`Oumuamua) through the Solar System. Observations with ESO's Very Large Telescope and others have shown that this unique object is dark, reddish in colour and highly elongated.


ESO Observations Show First Interstellar Asteroid is Like Nothing Seen Before
VLT reveals dark, reddish and highly-elongated object


For the first time ever astronomers have studied an asteroid that has entered the Solar System from interstellar space. Observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other observatories around the world show that this unique object was traveling through space for millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system. It appears to be a dark, reddish, highly-elongated rocky or high-metal-content object. The new results appear in the journal Nature on 20 November 2017.

On 19 October 2017, the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawai`i picked up a faint point of light moving across the sky. It initially looked like a typical fast-moving small asteroid, but additional observations over the next couple of days allowed its orbit to be computed fairly accurately. The orbit calculations revealed beyond any doubt that this body did not originate from inside the Solar System, like all other asteroids or comets ever observed, but instead had come from interstellar space. Although originally classified as a comet, observations from ESO and elsewhere revealed no signs of cometary activity after it passed closest to the Sun in September 2017. The object was reclassified as an interstellar asteroid and named 1I/2017 U1 (`Oumuamua) [1].

“We had to act quickly,” explains team member Olivier Hainaut from ESO in Garching, Germany. “`Oumuamua had already passed its closest point to the Sun and was heading back into interstellar space.”

ESO’s Very Large Telescope was immediately called into action to measure the object’s orbit, brightness and colour more accurately than smaller telescopes could achieve. Speed was vital as `Oumuamua was rapidly fading as it headed away from the Sun and past the Earth’s orbit, on its way out of the Solar System. There were more surprises to come.

Combining the images from the FORS instrument on the VLT using four different filters with those of other large telescopes, the team of astronomers led by Karen Meech (Institute for Astronomy, Hawai`i, USA) found that `Oumuamua varies dramatically in brightness by a factor of ten as it spins on its axis every 7.3 hours.

Karen Meech explains the significance: “This unusually large variation in brightness means that the object is highly elongated: about ten times as long as it is wide, with a complex, convoluted shape. We also found that it has a dark red colour, similar to objects in the outer Solar System, and confirmed that it is completely inert, without the faintest hint of dust around it.”

These properties suggest that `Oumuamua is dense, possibly rocky or with high metal content, lacks significant amounts of water or ice, and that its surface is now dark and reddened due to the effects of irradiation from cosmic rays over millions of years. It is estimated to be at least 400 metres long.

Preliminary orbital calculations suggested that the object had come from the approximate direction of the bright star Vega, in the northern constellation of Lyra. However, even travelling at a breakneck speed of about 95 000 kilometres/hour, it took so long for the interstellar object to make the journey to our Solar System that Vega was not near that position when the asteroid was there about 300 000 years ago. `Oumuamua may well have been wandering through the Milky Way, unattached to any star system, for hundreds of millions of years before its chance encounter with the Solar System.

Astronomers estimate that an interstellar asteroid similar to `Oumuamua passes through the inner Solar System about once per year, but they are faint and hard to spot so have been missed until now. It is only recently that survey telescopes, such as Pan-STARRS, are powerful enough to have a chance to discover them.

“We are continuing to observe this unique object,” concludes Olivier Hainaut, “and we hope to more accurately pin down where it came from and where it is going next on its tour of the galaxy. And now that we have found the first interstellar rock, we are getting ready for the next ones!”
 
Watched the SpaceX Launch today. that was really cool and impressive landing the rocket back, the fact that the US can send up it's own astronauts again, and that this is really the start of commercial space flight. Good job Elon and company .. really could not have gone better
 
Yeh, I just watched the SpaceX live stream. It's been so depressing watching the news from America, so this was a welcome change. The one African American commenter said it best after the launch: "That's what America can do, if we stand together and work together."
 
Good job. But the politics arena is still the king - SpaceX et al. will go nowhere, conceptually and literally, if the state agencies don't keep the ISS flying. "Space race" is bullshit, we need countries to cooperate so we can built shared infrastructure that can be used by civilian entities for both commercial and non-commercial services under rules and regulations. Commercial vendors like SpaceX need contracts, they cannot operate as consumer driven and it is a question whether that will ever be possible. In this century "space" tourism will remain a small fleet of luxury suborbital flight craft that'll allow up to 24 hour cruise on some high altitude 30-50km where you clearly see the globe and the stars. The average human is feeble and weak, it cannot survive the launch and the prolonged space flight. We're constrained by universal laws of physics and local energy magnitudes we work with. There's no way to provide artificial gravity unless you accelerate at G. Even low earth orbit is more extreme, to the nth, than places like Mariana Trench. The poles are a paradise compared to it. So the idea that random people would and could go there if they had the $ is iffy at best.

If you need systematic long term funding you need either a stable consumer market or government expenditure. There's no third sustainable way of providing billions yearly. For the reasons above, consumer market doesn't and won't exist for some time, and the conclusion is that USA needs to increase funding to NASA and generally look at space in a different manner if they want companies like SpaceX to succeed.
 
bearfan said:
Watched the SpaceX Launch today. that was really cool and impressive landing the rocket back, the fact that the US can send up it's own astronauts again, and that this is really the start of commercial space flight. Good job Elon and company .. really could not have gone better
Click to expand...

Private Space is definitely here, Elon's SpaceX, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and now Jeff Bezo's Blue Moon.... Starting to think they should just join forces... space forces....
 
Eventually this will drive the cost down ... NASA paid less to SpaceX to send the astronauts up than they were paying the Russians and a lot less than maintaining the shuttles .. while at the same time modernizing rockets and capsules away from the 1960s-1980s model we have been in for some time.
 
The Space Shuttles were an incredible boondoggle in terms of funding and maintenance. It was a neat idea but because of the way NASA was treated by government they went well beyond their design life. I think partnership with SpaceX and Boeing will help a lot.
 
LooseCannon said:
The Space Shuttles were an incredible boondoggle in terms of funding and maintenance. It was a neat idea but because of the way NASA was treated by government they went well beyond their design life. I think partnership with SpaceX and Boeing will help a lot.
Click to expand...

They were cool, I remember watching the first launch and it was neat. But I think this is the new model and really step one toward actual travel (obviously expensive as hell), further exploration which might be fueled by things like mining and development of things that can only happen in zero G.

And seeing the Space X rocket land itself to be re-usable was really neat as an added bonus.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top