Time to put the Space Shuttle painlessly to sleep .... and return to SPACE work that's got a future !

Time to put the Space Shuttle painlessly to sleep .... and return to
SPACE work that's got a future !
RANT-SPACESHUTTLE 13.8.05
DREAM :- ...Riding a light wave it takes 1.3 second to the moon ; 8.2
mins to the sun ; 3 minutes to Mars (at it's closest) .... now that is
going some ain't it ? Sure is ... a steady hold-your-hat-on-tight
grip-hard-with-your-knees 187,000 miles every blessed second - every
time you blink you've been round the world 7.5 times ! You'd like to
go a bit further, Mr Bush, you'd like another first for America ....?
well then, how about a return trip to the very nearest star to us, Alpha
Proxima, it'll take a bit longer though .... around 9 years plus or
minus a month or two. Still not far enough for you . .! I see, you
want to really explore ...? of the billion or so stars in our Galaxy
you like the look of the shiny 50 light years away one ...? good, very
very good ! If only ....!
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REALITY :- escape velocity 5miles/sec ... sometimes planets are in
conjunction etc so there are times when inter-planet speeds can be
speeded up to 10miles/sec by 'sling-shotting' So, Mr Bush, divide
DREAM by REALITY (187,000/10) and I think you will find that you'll have
to improve your SPACE EXPLORATION act by 18,700 times - no mean feat
even for a boaster like you.
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Why this rant ....? due to this on and on, on and off boring space
shuttle launch business of course. I mean, there has been over a
hundred or so of them and what have they achieved ? Outside of Hubble
work they have contributed precious little to our Solar System knowledge
base, and such returns as there are, for all the money invested, are
ever diminishing. I am sure that I am one of many who are sick of it
all ... and sick of the television spectacular which is all it now is.
Sick that the scientific payback is ever less and the costs ever more of
the faulty shuttle and the ridiculous never-to-be-finished space station
: that other prestige and politics driven WHITE ELEPHANT floating above
our heads ! (and what's it good for even if it were to be finished ?).
Demonstrably, the bulk of the space budget is unnaturally allotted
towards the impossible : "Man's conquest of Space" pace Francis Drake
and Christopher Columbus, at the expense of other more worthwhile and
realistic robotic space ventures geared to increasing "Man's knowledge
of Space".
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Compare the Shuttle's meagre returns on money spent with those from
elsewhere within the space program. To what use do you put a
comparatively useless set of Russian/American 'How man copes and works
in Space' almanacs (additions to which can now only be largely
repetitive) ..? It's just SAD when you compare that with the already
large solar system knowledge base accumulated from the relatively few
(to what there could/should have been) cut-to-the-bone unmanned
successful space shots. And let's not neglect mention of the great
returns from Hubble and the ground based observation teams working on
the same lines ....and particle physics (i.e. CERN and the Hadron
Collider etc) : all dramatically cash starved by comparison ; yet in
bangs per dollar leagues ahead of the Shuttle. Happily, just about the
time we watched the desperate daring do of the shuttle landing, the
recent mini-bus sized Mars Orbiter soared away out of NASA's grasp. A
timely escape ... before it's money too was perhaps sucked away for the
more important research into 'why do the tiles keep on dropping off'.
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The TV companies lap it up of course : the more dodgy it all seems
thro' bits dropping off and thus the less certain the eventual building
of the space station becomes, the more they abandon normal programming
to have so-called 'experts' chew over every nuance of everything said
and done. It's unsaid of course but they can't wait for the first
romance or indeed 'bonk' in space ... how was it for you ? What their
experts don't challenge of course is the NASA pronouncement that,
despite our 'present problems' it's good to be back in space after the
2.5 years grounding' ....
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SPACE ....!!???? ....they call that space a few score miles above earth
..... ridiculous .. and no one challenges the stupid statement said in
all po faced seriousness. I cracked open a bad egg today ... it had a
few blood spots in the egg white. Then I thought of the blood spotted
egg not as an egg but as a metaphor for our solar system ... with the
shell as Pluto's elliptical orbit with the yellow Sun sat there in the
middle. The 3rd blood spot out from the yolk is Earth with Mars the
fourth one a little beyond. The moon ? well let's not be pedantic, on
this scale let's consider it part of the earth, for the paltry 200,000
odd miles involved. Let's assume Bush has already been there (only to
find the Chinese already ensconced, like rabbits in their burrow) and is
now on an ego boosting 2 years round trip to plant the American flag on
Mars. We, outside the egg, are busy putting it all in context. First
we plonked the egg down slap bang in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
Then, in order to roughly duplicate our Galaxy, we found another billion
or so Saharas in which to similarly accommodate another billion such
eggs - some with a 'solar system', some not. Now we are sitting back
watching our particular egg ; waiting to see if Bush will ever break
out of his box (well, egg in this case) .... to see what he (and NASA)
will do when faced with REAL SPACE stretching for infinity before him.
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Earth's future should be predicated on KNOWING not GOING .... knowing
there is nowhere to escape to should make us make the most of what we
have on earth and help save it from becoming the ****ty climate-changing
energy-depleted place it is fast becoming. Maybe in the far distant
future there will be some kind of 'proper space' travel .... but it
can only be of a vicarious sort, experienced 2nd hand thro' some kind of
ROBOTIC enterprise .... far in advance of the sort of 'hardware centred'
robots we presently send out to the planets.
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A science fiction buff, which I am not, would probably end this rant
thus :-
Finally we had the sense to channel the little money left in the right
direction. Quite soon now we will be able to ride these newly invented
beamed light waves we are already projecting into the near regions of
the Galaxy. Or rather it'll be our well trained mass less robots
riding them on our behalf. Mass less systems which we have imbued with
our space zeal and our quest for the final knowledge and answers ;
equipped with the ability to self assemble themselves and their
equipment at the end of their one way journeys.
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A future commentator might also add :-
"Perhaps then, AND ONLY THEN, can we start to plan and then fulfil man's
final questing goal. The 40/50 million light years investigative
journeys to our now large inventory of neighbouring 'solar-systems' in
the nearer parts of the Galaxy. Inspired by the latest in near Galaxy
mapping provided by a belated, but ultimately successful, return to a
regime of new Super 'Multi Hubbles' and improved earth based
observatories ... all made possible by the latest dramatic CERN
discoveries in particle physics. Now, with our 'little massless
servants' beamed out simultaneously to every likely planetary grouping
in our Galactic neighbourhood, we will perhaps be able to at last verify
with a degree of certainty the final question - is there anybody out
there .... ? Perhaps we will have the answer within a mere 40/50 years
of these 'shots in the dark' !?"
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The PESSIMIST will then say :-
Ah but man won't have been there so that's no good ..!?
The OPTIMIST (well the realistic ones) will then say :-
Well, you'd better get used to it !! there is no real NEED TO GO ...
JUST MAN'S NEED TO KNOW ! Man is going nowhere in the REAL SPACE
outside our solar system - that is not in the real time that we are used
to ..... and what would be the point of coming back a 1000 years later
? Yes, it's in the 'nearby' vast arena, our own galactic
neighbourhood, where the REAL enigmas and answers to WHY and HOW ? can
and will be resolved ... Yes, our space doggies will be able to sniff
out 'the facts on the ground' and, hopefully, relay all of it back to
us. We'll just have to train them very well because out there they
will not be able to hear our whistle calling them to heel.
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As good RANTS go too long and too boring .... but at least they are my
thoughts on the matter on paper ...for posterity and for what they are
worth !
keep happy
alec



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