At least it's enough time for us to start panicking.

And dont forget the designs. I still think the Lumia 1520 is one of the best looking phones ever made.

Well, it's not like there's much people to cause network congestion there.

Hey! I liked my Lumia 1320...

Yes, but sad as it is, right now there's no alternative to the SLS, maybe Starship and who knows when that will be operational.

Meanwhile Starliner is just another one of many space capsules.

Having alternatives is good, but damn, how long has this thing been in development now?

I do, and I know that without funding and a powerful entity with an interest to see something happen you won't achieve much when there's no direct economic gain.

You yourself mentioned SpaceX and their rockets as the "greatest hope for space travel", and yet back in the 90s you had things like the Delta Clipper that, with proper funding and time, could have delivered decades ago what Starship has yet to achieve.

Or what about the VentureStar, an SSTO spaceplane that was, according to Lockheed's engineers, 95% complete, and it was a spacecraft that would have achieved what Falcon 9 does but even cheaper and only needed a few years more of research to solve it's final issues, and yet it got cancelled because the government has no idea of what they are doing.

Or what about nuclear rockets, something that NASA is working on and says will have one ready to test in 2027, even though NASA had been doing some very promising work on this back in the 70s, and got cancelled because the government told them to focus on the Space Shuttles instead.

Absolutely nothing of what we use right now for space travel is cutting edge technology, we just have what the government is willing to afford, which isn't much, and when it is willing to spend money they completely waste it anyway.

Just look at the SLS, 10 years of development and dozens of billions spent to end up with a rocket no more powerful than the more than half a century old Saturn V and powered by 40 year old engines, which launches the Orion spacecraft, yet another capsule that isn't much more advanced than the Apollo CSM.

If we don't have the tech to achieve all of this is because the government doesn't have a legitimate interest, and because they are just too damn incompetent to fund the right people and let them work. And that's how you end up with a company owned by a mentally unstable conman leading the charge in space travel, because everyone else is too busy feasting on their own snot.

>Do they only sell gravity generators at the fancy store?

No, but we can research and develop it, the only thing preventing tech from existing is lack of political will and money.

When there's both, you can do things like landing on the Moon when only 20 years before your most advanced aircraft still used propellers.

If the government wanted it we could have even landed on Mars back in the 70s, NASA in fact had a plan for it completely laid out by the late 60s, and even other things like a crewed Venus flyby, all before the Moon landing, but achieving this would have required not slashing their budget into a fraction of what it was during the Apollo program.

There's going to be both, like it or not. But no, Artemis is not about getting water for the rich.

That depends on how advanced we can make those robots, even the most advanced robots today are very clunky, and this base could be built within a decade.

Look at Mars rovers, it takes them months to do what a human could do in 20 minutes with a shovel and a microscope.

Plus there's the fact that if we can mantain a crewed base on the Moon we would gain invaluable experience on just how to mantain people in other worlds. Mars itself isnt fit for practice given that its a 9 month trip with current tech.

The ISS could have also been a crew less station, and yet we put people there to not just make everything way smoother than machines can do, but also to learn about the effect space has on the human body.

Also, this is specifically go to nearby planets. Launching from the Moon would make a Mars landing far more feasible since you are going to need the rocket itself to leave Mars, plus help shorten a trip thats already uncomfortably long.

The outer Solar system is going to requiere newer tech, but launching from the Moon will help.

And utilitarian, the Moon is a gateway to the rest of the Solar system. Even the Apollo LM descent stage reached orbit on its own in one stage. Now imagine rockets launched from the Moon, how far they could go without having to be completely spent just on getting a spacecraft into orbit like when launched from Earth. We wouldnt even need rockets even aside from the ones taking people to the Moon in the first place.

Living on the Moon wouldnt exactly be a vacation by all means, it would be just like the astronauts on the ISS, people living a strange and at times uncomfortable life for the sake of human progress.

Yes, reddit, the Artemis program is made to get water for the rich people.

Maybe not in our lifetimes, but expansion into space is inevitable, all that's stopping us is costs, and those have been going down for a long while now.

That wasn't a choice, it was forced. Congress forced the SLS to be an ultra expensive zombie of the Saturn V to let the people who worked on the Space Shuttle mantain their job. I don't think people understand how much of a ridiculous waste of money it is to use RS-25 engines on a rocket. Those engines are VERY expensive, but that's because they are meant to be reused.

Least they could have done is figure out a way to, at least, recover the first stage of the SLS.

It depends on how much dust there is nearby and the time of day, but sometimes it can kinda look blueish. Normally it ranges around white, grey and brown.

https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-439f6d2ff0d3ec015a5ab5b184fef365

Nothing controlled remotely in space is operated via direct input like if it was an RC car.

In this case they introduce commands that basically tell it "fly up X meters, go forward X meters, land, shut down engine".

Spacecraft function in a similar way, and in certain situations they can also act automatically.

Nowhere. The universe's expansion is the 3D equivalent of the surface of a balloon that's getting filled with air. It's not a sphere that's getting bigger either, you could say space is "growing" from everywhere at the same time, it's why the expansion of the universe is making galaxies be pulled apart from one another.

The strange part of it isn't the acceleration, but the fact that it's not moving at all in regards to the rest of the galaxy.

I still want the nuclear reactor-powered cars I was promised.

Too much, its thrusters arent designed for that, just to avoid collissions with other satellites, you'd need to essentially strap a rocket onto it.

It would if there wasn't the risk of a dead satellite crashing into the ISS and turning it into a massive cloud of space trash.

Its travelling at almost 30.000 km/h and at a height of 400km.

If you reduce its speed, it just falls to the ground, if you just reduce height, it burns up.

So unless you have some sci fi anti-gravity tech, its just impossible to bring it back.

And if its kept in space there's the risk of it crashing with something and becoming a huge swarm of junk.

Its sad to see it go, but deorbiting it is the safest thing.

No matter, the next one will be bigger and better.

Nah, thats just going to be used in conjuction with Lunar missions.

Besides, it would be a huge waste of money to put our "main" space station orbiting the Moon since the requirements to get people there would go from a medium sized rocket like the Falcon 9 to a super heavy lift one like the SLS.

Each crew transfer would cost 2-3 billion dollars, which is absurd.

This sub as a whole has the extremely naive idea that war can't happen in space and that Earth must become a utopia or we won't go anywhere.

Yes, but launching a nuke on top of a satellite would be way more complex and expensive, plus you'd be violating a few treaties.

Not to mention you dont want to screw around the kind of asteroid that wouldnt just get obliterated by the nuke. The point was analyzing how much of an effect a kinetic impactor would have on an asteroid.

I hope it all goes well to them, competition is needed to get NASA and ESA off their ass.