Do you believe in aliens?

[samoth]

Look up project daedalus and project orion those are interesting reads. If it wasnt for the ridicilous anti nuclear stuff going on we would be on mars and beyond. Project orion's goal was to reach saturn by 1970 if I remember correctly.

Will do! The latter sounds familiar.

The U.S. space program is pathetic. The public doesn't care. Little immediate chance for big business profits means little funding. One small problem and a couple lives lost, and bam! The program is down for ten years, and 95% of the budget is partitioned off for safety crap. Seriously, I'd be bloody ecstatic if offered a chance to give my life for space exploration, and I know I'm not the only one. Morn the lives lost, and move foward instead of backwards, dammit.

We have a bloody SPACE STATION! But it seems like no one cares. Nothing much gets done up there (compared to what we could be doing). If it's lucky enough to make the news, it's for ten seconds.

NASA = Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

[Kärnfysikern]

Will do! The latter sounds familiar.

The U.S. space program is pathetic. The public doesn't care. Little immediate chance for big business profits means little funding. One small problem and a couple lives lost, and bam! The program is down for ten years, and 95% of the budget is partitioned off for safety crap. Seriously, I'd be bloody ecstatic if offered a chance to give my life for space exploration, and I know I'm not the only one. Morn the lives lost, and move foward instead of backwards, dammit.

We have a bloody SPACE STATION! But it seems like no one cares. Nothing much gets done up there (compared to what we could be doing). If it's lucky enough to make the news, it's for ten seconds.

NASA = Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

Project Orion is one of those proposals so mad that its wonderfull. The idea is to use nuclear weapons as propulsion. Blow a nuke behind the spacecraft and spray some fluid on it. The fluid will become a superheated plasma that slams into the back end of the spacecraft and propells it forward. At the back end is a large plate connected to the rest of the craft through shock absorbers.

It might sound completely mad. But the scientists and engineers that worked on it(guys like Freeman Dyson and Ted Taylor) solved all problems and demonstrated the idea with a miniature driven by conventional explosives. They also calculated that the cost of putting a kg of mass into orbit with such a thing would just be cents!!! With the pathetic chemical rockets we have today the cost is I think thousands of dollars per kg. The orion spacecraft would have been fantasticly huge, more like a ocean liner than a airplane. One single mission could have placed a big permanent base on mars.

Offcourse when the states and russia signed the agreement not to test nukes in the atmosphere anymore the whole program was killed instantly.

If you think NASA is pathetic then you would be depressed about the mess called ESA Im seriously putting all my hope on China nowdays. They might not have a large space program yet. But they are not burdened with all the political crap and they will have the cash soon. Europe and America has become to lazy and scared for serious space exploration.