perhaps...yet unlike the businesses that have helped create poverty to create profits, govenrments can be (hypothetically) formed that are interested in eliminating poverty. We haven't had one of those even pay lip service in over 30 years though.
I'm willing to bet that if we took the average lead time for the three great space powers (four if you want to include China) then the EU would have by far the longest average lead time for missions simply because of the bureaucracy and political infighting inherent to a multination federation.
It's a hold over from the 1950's through 1970's when the US (and several other nations) still maintained the farce that the Chinese Nationalist Government (now only in charge of Taiwan) was the official "Chinese" government while the Communist Chinese government were not recognized. You had to call them something but you couldn't call them the Chinese government as we were attempting to maintain the fiction that was in Taipei so Chinese Communists is what they were called. Still, that term should have gone out 40 years ago when the US recognized mainland China.
There is a cold war going on with the Chinese and the rest of the world right now. In particular the countries near it and with the US.
The ChiComs won't be planting their flag anywhere if they get into a stupid war with Japan over those islands, the thing escalates until they end up nuking Japan, the USA then nukes China in revenge, and after that with China in a state of ruin the USA goes back to being the world #1.
The funny thing is that to get shitter probes you need more money. If they had a budget to launch a probe every few months then you could "slap that shit together". If something goes wrong, well that sucks but at least there is the next one coming up soon. Not sure what instruments to put on it? It's ok, it will take a few months wait but all the competing parties can have their instrumentation on board. Lower budget, then slapping things together becomes a bad idea. The thing doesn't function properly, you've just ruined your once in a working lifetime shot at sending something there. You aren't as careful with choosing instrumentation and realise 30 seconds after launch that there is a change you can make to get much more important data? Tough shit, it's gone now, and you get much worse data for the next few years. People dying is a fair thing to fret about. Even ignoring the "let's try not to kill people" aspect, the political reality is that when people die programs come under fire. After Challenger there was a time without launches while things were investigated. After Columbia the entire shuttle program nearly got shut down due to the political and civilian reaction. A "shit happens" attitude will lead to their being no manned space program.
Well how about trying to mass produce and ultra-refine space launch systems and space travel vehicles to the same level of reliability as airliners? I dunno, it seems to me that space rockets and spacecraft fail much much more than airliners. Even when built by multi billion dollar agencies like NASA, with decades of doing this stuff under their belt. I can think of three possibilities: 1 - Spacecraft aren't produced and used in enough numbers for every component to become, through trial and error modding, as reliable as those of long- serving airliners. 2 - The physics of how spacecraft work, as compared to how airliners work, and/or the conditions spacecraft are subjected to in flight, make spacecraft fundamentally much more prone to suffering faults and failures. 3 - The chance of faults and failures is about the same, but airliners are more tolerant / redundant. In spacecraft, faults are more likely to be catastrophic for the spacecraft as a whole. I'm not sure which of those it is, but it does intrigue me.
All three. Space in an absolutely unforgiving environment. Very little of our current generation of launch vehicles are reusable, so every component is an over-engineered one shot. And space is freakin' big. Eighteen months to Mars, three to five years out to Jupiter, and like that.
The Soviets were never known for being overly concerned with individual deaths in their high technology military and space programs. Yet despite that, the Soviets only lost 4 cosmonauts in space flight as opposed to 14 Americans. And that is despite a vast number MORE individual launches and the Soviets spending more than twice as many days in spaceflight as Americans.
Actually it is about 6 months to Mars and 2 years and two months to Jupiter using regular chemical propulsion.
Nonsense. The problem is the probes are all single item custom made. You get a probe that works then you build more of it. Overtime you upgrade the probe or replace it with a new probe. Sure you will still have individual items for specific missions but a standard probe can be built and mass produced that gives good results. And it doesn't take 20 years. Spare me the soap opera drama You act as if each probe would be the last one ever. [/quote] Of course it's a fair thing to fret about. We don't want to kill everyone. But neither do we want a single death or two to bring things to a halt for years if not decades. Space is fucking dangerous and if we are going to go back to the moon and past the moon then eventually people are going to die out there on the moon and Mars and out in the solar system. You mourn the dead, learn what went wrong, and then send more people out there. If we get stuck into the whole "no one can die" mentality we are going to be stuck in low Earth orbit forever. The politicians are going to have to grow a pair of balls and tell people, "look space is fucking dangerous, people are going to die, we are still going because it's the right thing to do." Contrary to your implication otherwise the majority of civilians understand that space is dangerous and their not going to want to shut down the programs. It's the politicians that are the cowards.
I am convinced that NASAs desire with the shuttle to make space travel "routine" was a hideous public relations mistake. Why do you want stuff that is supposed to be dangerous and exciting to become "routine". I think people LIKE having space travel be dangerous. And I think trying to make it routine simply killed public interest in the space program. People enjoy the appearance at least of danger. They watch NASCAR for the wrecks in large part though people are very rarely killed and rarely hurt severely. Same with bull riding (which coincidentally are called "wrecks")
NASA lied about the Space Shuttle. They can make all the claims they want otherwise but NASA stood in front of the government and the whole country and lied about the costs of each shuttle mission and they lied about the actual capabilities of the Space Shuttle. We should have never stopped using Saturn V rockets.
Well, if you read the T.A. Heppenheimer books about "The Shuttle Decision" you understand why. In the early 1970s, several members of Congress, mainly prominent Democrats such as Senator Walter Mondale were actually calling on NASA to be shut down entirely. Why? They felt it was part of the military industrial complex that everyone had turned against during the Vietnam War. And, the U.S. had achieved the goal of getting men to the moon and back not once but SIX times so what was the point any more of a manned space program. NASA was facing a genuine possibility of extinction. So with the Apollo program winding down they took part of their large scale proposed space program, the shuttle, and marketed it as a way for "cheap and routine" access to space. In reality, the original shuttle proposal was not meant to make space travel cheap or safe. It was meant to allow large scale orbital assembly for large space stations and spacecraft capable of traveling to Mars, Venus and beyond. Basically the NASA argument was "if you let us build the shuttle, we can save everyone money in the long run". Then of course it backfired dramatically as the Nixon admin. gave NASA enough money to develop a space shuttle ORBITER. But NOT the space shuttle BOOSTER. And it all went down hill from there.
I actually happen to work on a project that is related to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. Here's a cool video about the system: The science behind LISA is fascinating: when completed, the system will be able to measure the distance between the three spacecraft with an accuracy of 20 picometers (one-eighth of the diameter of a lead atom). That's amazing, when you consider that the spacecraft are separated by 5 million kilometers, or about four times the diameter of the sun.
I'm inclined to believe them on this. 1) A deadly in space accident is something that is hard to keep secret and it would rebound to hurt them more when the cover up was exposed. 2) The Soviets tended to heavily promote their cosmonauts as media stars and heroes of the Soviet Union. So I think they would welcome an opportunity to publicly commend the "heroic sacrifice" of dead cosmonauts for the Rodina and use them as examples for everyone else to work harder.
