Size – not manned – chemical propulsion launched Cassini to Saturn. Chemical rockets launched the Voyagers & the NewHorizons to Pluto and beyond.

a few ton at most and several year cruise time. That is going to work for our robots. But not for humans. And I was talking about humans. Not about our robots.

Funny you say that because they’d just started building & testing the Constellation & it was the one plan out of countless many that have been proposed post-Apollo that looked like it was finally starting to actually, tangibly *HAPPEN*.

Not even close, by far not. In no way close. And that even with a budget increase (which they got, because, as you might not know, NASAs budget was not cut, it was increased!).
Some people wanted to make you believe that they were further along, with the launch of Ares 1X. But that vehicle had as good as nothing in common with Ares1 (IIRC Buz Aldrin called it “a hoax”). It would have still been many years and budget overruns until the thing would have been ready. AresV was even longer down the road and Orion was not ready yet either.
None of them had even passed preliminary design review yet.

Commercial private space agencies such as Virgin or Rutan or Musk’s outfits would have already got off the ground if they were ever going to at this stage methinks. I hope I’m wrong but I’ve heard it all before when it comes to planned private commerical space groups and I will believe they can achieve something ONLY when I see it

What makes you think that? So far I have seen only evidence that they can make it. Falcon 9, which is in fact a real prototype of the very Falcon 9 that will bring crews to the ISS,
had a successful pad test today. Sure that may not mean a successful launch yet, but breaking stuff during tests is OK, IMHO. Still there is ACTUAL hardware. Ares 1X in contrast had NOTHING in common with the real Ares1. It was not even meant to reach orbit!
Burt Rutans SS1 and SS2 are only suborbital. So they cant be really compared to the others. In that sense you are right. But, they will open space/microgravity research to a much larger group of people. They have already proven that they can do it, more than once. They have the funding and there is no reason why they would not be able to do it again.
But, you failed to mention the ULA. Delta and Atlas rockets have been successfully delivering payloads for the military into orbit for many years now. They have a proven track record. They are also “commercials”, but people always let them conveniently fall under the table.

To all the Constellation- whiners here: Constellation would have never brought us anywhere. It was late, it was way over cost and even with the moderate budget INCREASE(!) that NASA got, it would have been completely impossible to do.

Funny you say that because they’d just started building & testing the Constellation & it was the one plan out of countless many that have been proposed post-Apollo that looked like it was finally starting to actually, tangibly *HAPPEN*.

Or at least, it looked like it was getting off the ground at last and, after much time and effort had already been put into it, before Obama in an unforgivable act of short-sighted stupidity and waste cancelled it and set human, esp. American, space exploration back another twenty years.

Now we’re thrown right back to the drawing board again – back to having a lot of vague plans and promises but nothing actually being built or tested. NASA had a plan -Constellation was almost ready to go – they just had to fund it and get behind it properly and it could’ve taken us to the Moon and more well within the decade.

Now I don’t expect to see any progress – at least not from the Western world – when it comes to people in space for many decades to come. Which is, IMHON, a disgraceful and depressing betrayal by Obama of the aerospace and wider US and western free world community. Hope and change? Yeah right.

Commercial private space agencies such as Virgin or Rutan or Musk’s outfits would have already got off the ground if they were ever going to at this stage methinks. I hope I’m wrong but I’ve heard it all before when it comes to planned private commerical space groups and I will believe they can achieve something ONLY when I see it.

I’m afraid that Obama will most likely go down in history as a one-term absolute disaster because of this idiotic decision among many other reasons – he raised such hopes only to dash them. I suspect we may find “all-talk” Obama has turned a whole generation of young people off politics and especially his side of it and guaranteed the Republicans many terms in office. And I’m a pro-science, progressive left winger politically For What Its Worth.

“Obviously you missed noting the size of Cassini.” Cassini was a manned mission ? wt..?

Hmm .. I don’t think RadWaste (#37.) ever said that Cassini was manned – let’s see :

37. Radwaste Says:

“Chemical propulsion is not going to get us to mars nor anywhere beyond short visits to moon.”

Obviously you missed noting the size of Cassini.

Size – not manned – chemical propulsion launched Cassini to Saturn. Chemical rockets launched the Voyagers & the NewHorizons to Pluto and beyond.

I think that was the point being made.

But people bleating, “It’s just not safe!” will hold us to an infinite number of video games, pointing all the while to how much we know. … Small lesson: Where are the names of the designers of the Bell X-1 in the record books? It was Chuck Yeager who flew the plane, who was the first to do something no one else had done before.

Yes, exactly! Well said RadWaste.

As a society we have generally become incredibly risk-averse, incredibly timid of doing extraordinary things and launching extraordinary adventures & I fear we are very much the worse for it.

Virtual Reality & spending your life online playing games is great fun but its not really, well, real.

Having robots on Mars & the other planets is great but it isn’t quite the same as having people there.

Who remembers the name of the first robot spaceprobe on the Moon? Who really cares about them? Who remembers where they were when the first robot craft landed on the Moon or on Mars or Venus?

(Very few if any hands go up in the audience.)

Now who remembers when men first landed on the Moon – who can name the starring astronauts and – if you were alive back then – who recalls seeing them walk on the Moon for the first time?

(Everybody in the audience has their hand up.)

I hope we change direction and do get to explore – in person with people – again. Ideally ASAP.

Increasing, all young people ARE like that. And their elders are so worried about money, except for war, that they never do anything OTHER than war to capture young imaginations. As Andy noted, youboob comments reflect the young sentimentality: “If you don’t get to kill something, it’s boring.” Look at the relative popularity of FPS games to flight simulator games.

Contrasting that with myself, who at the age of 6 watched Neil and Buzz do their thing, almost immediately knew that I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, and steadfastly pursued that right through college. Ask a modern teenager what they want to be, and few of them will say “engineer” and the ones who do will be thinking of computers, not lift and thrust.

Chip takes a cue from aviation history about where we might be in 35 years. To that I say that the age of aviation is coming to a close. This is the information age, where the only real advances in aviation in the last few decades have been *applying* the information revolution to aircraft, like glass cockpits, stealth and fly-by-wire artificial stability. We’re still flying in pretty much the same technology our parents did, other than that. In fact, our parents could fly in a supersonic airliner, and looked forward to that technology becoming widespread and common, but alas, that pinnacle of airliner technology has gone the way of the clipper ship, and instead we have on-demand movies, in-flight-wi-fi, more gigantic planes, but smaller seats on our fly-by-wire, glass cockpit, subsonic fanjet airliners nearly identical in aerodynamics and performance to those from 40 years ago.

Even the desire to fly has been on a steady decline for several decades.

Myself, soon after the aviation industry collapsed in the 80′s, in response to the USSR going down,while I was in college getting my Aero-E degree, I realized the age of aviation was over, and I migrated to the information industry, becoming a successful telecom software engineer.

If you can guess what the NEXT revolution past the information revolution is going to be, and you have the cojones for it, you could be the world’s first quadrillionaire.

I hope so Phil.

Shaun

Holy cow. And the timing of this video… will some kid in middle school watch this video, wonder what it would be like to really do this, and then, in 25 more years, be sitting at the stick of a Martian flyer?

More likely they will think something more along the lines of the comment that’s currently the most recent on that YouTube video as I write this…

While technically impressive this is one of the most boring animations I’ve seen so far

No sense of wonder in space anymore…

Obviously you missed noting the size of Cassini.

Cassini was a manned mission ? wt …..?

It’s just like trying to get somebody playing World of Warcraft outside for a change. They’re perfectly content indoors, pretending that what they are doing isn’t growing attached to their chair.

Not all people are like that.

Obviously you missed noting the size of Cassini.

But people bleating, “It’s just not safe!” will hold us to an infinite number of video games, pointing all the while to how much we know.

It’s just like trying to get somebody playing World of Warcraft outside for a change. They’re perfectly content indoors, pretending that what they are doing isn’t growing attached to their chair.

Small lesson: Where are the names of the designers of the Bell X-1 in the record books? It was Chuck Yeager who flew the plane, who was the first to do something no one else had done before.

I assume you mean the “real” Project Orion, not the one just killed.

of course. Chemical propulsion is not going to get us to mars nor anywhere beyond short visits to moon.

Remeber that the gravity on Mars is only 1/3 of Earth, thus the “angle of repose” of any pile of dirt will be much steeper. The moutains on the moon look a lot rounder because of erosion.

- Jack

I assume you mean the “real” Project Orion, not the one just killed.

- Jack

@Doug Watts: Human space exploration was never about sensibility. People have wanted to do it just to see if they can and to see strange worlds that no one else had seen before. The truth is that there’s not much of interest out there compared to what’s on earth and we can learn so much more by sending machines, but saying such things to those afflicted with the dream of space travel is futile – all they hear is “blah blah blah, can’t be done, blah blah blah”.