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The Space Topic

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With the successful arrive of New Horizons at Pluto I was thinking about how much of a big accomplishment is it.
It was launched almost 10 years ago, 19th January 2006. It has traveled almost 3 billion, yes billion, miles at about 31,000 MPH! As Douglas Adams wrote, space is big. Really big...

10 Years ago I was 22 and living at home, I had only really just started dating Carla who I later married.

10 Years ago I did not own a smart phone because it had not really been invented for the mass market. There were also no tablets! I had a computer and was on the internet but it was very different back then. A lot slower and less graphics. The worlds depository of cat videos (youtube) had only been up and running for about a year.
Facebook had been invented a couple of years before but it was still small as it has not been opened up to everyone. That would come later in 2006. I am not sure when I first signed up to this forum. It was a while ago. In those 10 years I have managed to make it to one meet! Not the greatest attendee am I?

10 years later we are about to move out of our flat in to a house. We will have a garden and everything! We adopted our lovely cat Daisy and she is still happily living with us, even if she is currently hiding under the bed, it will be interesting to see how she takes to a new house. I have published a book which I never would have imagined I would have done 10 years ago!

I don't remember hearing anything about the launch of new horizons at the time. It depends if any media found it interesting enough to talk about. A 10 year mission to Pluto does not sound like the most exciting thing to talk about really.
Now we have amazing detailed photos of a planet at the edge of our Solar system. It is the last planet we needed to visit to have seen them all.
The photos are amazing and well worth looking at.
http://www.nasa.gov/…/pluto-image-sent-to-earth-on-july-14-…

The maddest thing about all this is that 10 years ago there were no smart phones, no tablets and nowhere near as many people on the internet as there is now. Now I could sit almost anywhere in my city and I could use a frigging watch to look at photos sent from a probe orbiting a planet almost 3 billion miles away. Bring on the next 10 years of technological development. As long as the machines have not risen up and are trying to crush us all.
 
It's an incredible age for unmanned space exploration. In the last ten years alone we've sent probes to the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Vesta, Ceres, (plus a couple of other, un named asteroids), Jupiter, Saturn, Titan, several comets, and now the Pluto system. Oh yeah, and the freakin' Sun! Some of these have been visited by more than one probe.
It's really just the remaining moons of Jupiter and Saturn left to explore now. (Well, sending some better cameras to Uranus and Neptune would be nice, the images from Pioneer 10 and the Voyagers were pretty terrible quality even for their day.)

Plus, There are currently almost 30 telescopes floating around in orbit up there, looking at pretty much the entire electromagnetic spectrum between them.

And yet... Manned space exploration seems to have died. The ISS orbits so low you almost could hit it with a stick if you leant out the window of an airliner. And the only manned spacecraft still in service to ferry humans to and from it is Soyuz, which may be a tried and tested workhorse, but it's 50 years old for crying out loud!
The only project that seems to have any future potential for manned flight is the X-37B... but that's a US military project and highly classified. Doesn't sound like a peaceful exploration craft to me :(
 
the X-37 project was a NASA / Boeing project. X-37A was not classified, the use of 37B is classified.
The X-37C (Crewed version) is publicly acknowledged as a future sub project. To be honest the way the relationship between the USA and Russia, I would not be surprised if the building of the X-37C is well underway.
Since retirement of the SR-71 the next generation on SR aircraft was always on the books.
 
Bring it on! I hope that it does prove to work properly as I know that has been a lot of people beveling that the results to any tests have just been mistakes in the testing equipment.
 
DiogoJ42 said:
Looks like we may now have an "impulse" drive that could get us to Mars in just 70 days! (Maths is not my strong point, but taking the average distance between Earth and Mars to be 225,000,000 KM, isn't that something like 133,900KPH?)
Click to expand...

there will be speeding up and slowing down that needs to be factored into the 70 days. So the top speed may be higher than 133.9 thousand Kph.
 
A very good point. It also said Pluto in 18 months, so I'm guessing it's one of those engines that can just keep on accelerating. :D
 
I like how the mirror posted that and a reader commentated saying ''Well we should have looked after our earth better and reduce carbon emissions etc''

I know that's important but I don't really think it'll stop our universe dying :p
 
And anyway, when the universe does eventually implode into a single speck of matter, it's not for another few billions years away.

There'll probably be no such thing as the Human Race anyway, so there's no reason for alarm.

As a wise man (or woman) once said - "All good things must come to an end."
 
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