PakledHostage

Mansions (real estate) and football teams are assets and businesses that one can reasonably expect to make money off of. Yachts and supercars, not so much, but what right does anyone have to judge what someone else spends their fun and recreation budget on? Proportionally, yachts and supercars are probably a smaller portion of truly wealthy people's net worth than most people's yearly vacation expenses.

Why is a simple abundance of scientific caution so often interpreted as a conspiracy? Planetary protection protocols and policies apply to all missions that we send out into the solar system.

I realize it is off topic but I thought I'd mention that I just watched Europa Report this evening. I had wanted to see it when it was first released but it didn't make it into any theaters in my area. Now that I've seen it I'd say that it was better than I expected. I was actually kind of impressed. In my humble opinion, it was better than both Gravity and Interstellar.

We're all human and our emotions/passions get the better of us sometimes. Sometimes you just have to cut people some slack. Especially people for whom English isn't their first language because, as you point out, emotion isn't easy to communicate in written language. And if someone really is a [diminutive of Richard], it is usually pretty obvious to everyone else too. We'll inevitability see things your way if you stay polite and refuse to stoop to their level.

No kidding, eh? Odd how every time there's a story about the Indian Space Program achieving some new milestone, all the racists come out of the woodwork to denigrate it. Take a look at what can be achieved when a culture values higher education! No country is perfect and India has plenty of warts, but that doesn't mean it is as backward as some might believe.

I'm sorry to hear that. People forget that funerals are for the living.

Interestingly, in KSP's physics you can even be on an elliptical trajectory that has its Ap outside the body that you're orbiting's SOI. That's almost certainly also true in real-world orbital mechanics because you don't need to reach a point infinitely far from one celestial body before another celestial body's gravity dominates. A couple of years ago, I hosted a challenge to reach the Mun's surface from a 100 km orbit about Kerbin using the minimum delta-V possible. I recall that Stochasty won by building a lander that could make a roll-on landing at high speed (one restriction of the challenge was that you had to land in one piece). I got close to Stochasty's result by using multiple munar gravitational assists to match orbits with the Mun before making my final approach. On my best attempt, I entered the Mun's SOI on an elliptical orbit. Unfortunately, the thread was lost during the great forum derp in April 2013, so I can't link to it here.

Sounds like a noble objective. I'm not sure I'd go as far as donating my entire body for medical research and teaching, but I told my family that I want to be an organ donor. I want what's left to be cremated and the ashes strewn in a favorite place.

@Slam Jones: Another way to think about Jonboy's response is by the analogy shown in the image below: The train transfers momentum in the collision with the ball such that, relative to the Sun at "Solar Junction", the ball has been accelerated. Because the train is much more massive than the ball, it is only slowed by a miniscule amount. Relative observers on the train, the ball approaches and recedes at the same speed (80 mph). From the perspective of an observer on the train, only the ball's direction changes when the ball bounces off the front of the locomotive. However, from the perspective of the Sun sitting at Solar Junction, the ball has been accelerated from 30 mph to 130 mph.

As an aside, someone once pointed out to me that pessimists are always on time while optimists are always late... So it seems that there are at least some advantages to being a pessimist.

Just for the record, "Rome wasn't built in a day" is an English (and French, it seems) idiom. To quote the Wikipedia article I linked to, it is an "adage attesting to the need for time to create great things".

Please re-read my post. Where did I say anything about NASA? I talked about laying the technological foundations for, among other things, cheaper access to space. I have said over and over again on these forums that I think SpaceX is doing some excellent work in this regard. You may have a jaded view of government funded space agencies, but that doesn't mean that they aren't contributing significantly to the eventual goals that we all dream of achieving. My point is and has always been that Rome wasn't built in a day. It took the efforts of generations of talented people to make it what it is. Space technology is much the same. It may be disappointing for some that progress isn't quicker, but a lot of those people are probably naive to the true magnitude of the challenges involved.

The idea that space exploration/travel is hard and expensive and that we need to be practical about it is only a "letdown attitude" if you yourself interpret it that way. One can be realistic about the pace of progress while doing what one can to ensure that development continues, so that one day we can achieve our dreams. Even if all one can offer is voting for/encouraging your parents to vote for politicians that support funding for big science. As engineers and professionals in related fields, some of us may wave our hands and guess that it will take many many years before we manage to lay the technological foundations required for spaceflight to be economical enough for some of the missions that have been envisioned to actually happen. That doesn't mean we aren't busting our butts working toward that ultimate goal today, and it certainly doesn't mean that we're pessimistic or have a "letdown attitude".

I don't think I misunderstood your question. I chose not to answer it and focus instead on what I consider to be an absurdity in your question. Thanks for clearing that up.

So you don't believe humans are causing climate change here on Earth but you believe we could teraform Mars? Am I the only one who finds this odd?

OK. You first. You voted 'Yes' in the pole. What scientific evidence do you have that global warming is exaggerated or non existent? We're all ears. Please enlighten us.

But maybe if more of those "monkeys" (we're more closely related to apes than monkeys, BTW) appreciated how extremely precious this blue ball is and that we're not going to be able to live anywhere but its surface for many generations to come, we wouldn't treat it so poorly. The idea that we could teraform another planet and live there after this one is trashed is nothing more than science fiction at this point.

My cat has one of those!

I am afraid I don't understand your point? We may or may not have had the technology to go to Mars since the '80s but we haven't gone because it was too expensive to justify the effort, given the relatively limited benefits relative to the magnitude of the cost. SpaceX is working to decrease the cost of reaching orbit, and if they are successful, it will be a great incremental improvement to rocket technology. It may ultimately make it economically viable to send people to Mars, but there are many many other pieces to the puzzle that must also be solved before we can do it. Any such effort has to make financial and technological sense. Bankrupting a nation and/or unnecessarily risking the lives of astronauts just so we can look up in the sky and say "tick" is short sighted. It will happen eventually, but it isn't some collosal failure of human ambition if it doesnt happen in our lifetimes. Real life is not a sci-fi book or a space simulator game.

What I find so difficult to understand is why people think "it" isn't happening right now in this day and age? Technological progress isn't linear. We ran steam locomotives for about 150 years. The last of them overlapped with transonic airliners. We've been operating transonic airliners for almost 60 years now. Rocket technology isn't too different in so far as how it has evolved over the past 50 - 75 years. It may seem like some technologies have stagnated, but that doesn't mean refinements aren't being made that are laying the foundation for the next paradigm. Bit by bit we are developing the tools we'll need to live off the Earth for extended periods of time. It may be disappointing to some that it won't happen in the next decade or possibly even in the next century, but real life isn't KSP. Real world space flight is much more complex than KSP may lead some to believe, real world progress isn't as quick, but that doesn't mean it isn't happening. And that doesn't mean nobody cares enough to keep pushing the limits, little bit by little bit.

I have written this so many times now that my phone's keyboard correctly anticipates the words already: Rome wasn't built in a day... Lots over very talented people contributed to the endeavor over the course of centuries. The day will almost certainly come when people will live in colonies and outposts throughout the solar system. That doesnt mean it will happen soon though. SpaceX may have a noble mission statement to improve access to space so that living in space becomes a possibility, but there are many many other pieces to the puzzle. To use another cliche, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

I imagine, after the initial elation, reality will sink in and then the reaction will probably be something like this:

I don't think anyone here is saying that Elon Musk is a nut. I certainly am not. But he is human. Like all of us, he might sometimes blather on about stuff that doesn't make sense in the light of day. Antarctica is warmer and wetter than Mars. You can breath the air when you go outside and you don't need to wear a pressure suit to do so. That and we've had the ability to travel there for all of the roughly 150 years since it was discovered. Still, the only people who currently live there for extended periods are researchers and support staff. Some tourists visit from time to time (most of them on cruise ships) but there are no colonies of 80 000 people and no plans to build them either. Things might be different if resource extraction wasn't banned by international treaty, but we also don't see large colonies of people living in equally harsh environments in the high arctic where resource extraction is allowed. While scientific outposts, space mining colonies and even tourist destinations may come to exist some day, it won't be any time soon. To suggest otherwise severely underestimates the technical challenges, distances and costs involved. It probably also overestimates the near term (i.e. 50 to 100 plus years) financial benefits of going to those places. Elon Musk has done some amazing things in his career. He deserves his reputation as someone who makes the impossible possible. That said, don't make the mistake of deifying him.

You seem to be describing a hobby. If, as you say, Musk intends to spend his fortune flying a handful of people on a one-way trip to Mars then I wish him luck. There isn't currently any money to be made doing it though so there isn't going to be any "return on Musk's investment". Selling seats for a one way trip isn't going to cover the cost because there aren't enough people who would want to go who could afford one. You can't get to orbit for $100k let alone to Mars. That isn't going to change any time soon.

You can track its position in real time on this site: http://www.satflare.com/track.asp?q=40619#TOP I am not sure where they get their tracking data from though...