Space Regrets

[MC.STEEL]

I regret being born on a planet with underdeveloped bipedal lifeforms that I (and a few other) happen to share the same genome with.(Most of you who are reading this are not the useless biomass that i just described and deserve a free interstelar space ship ).As far as i am concerned the first type, or homosapiens stupidicus can rot on this planet until they either get smacked by an asteroid that they could have avoided or they nuke themselves.

[mdatspace]

Well, I think we shouldn't colonise the Moon so much as we should exploit it. Have large robotic mining operations, perhaps a manned radiotelescope station on the far side, and some solar power plants with microwave power transmitters on the poles. But I don't think it's a body we should live on, since it's a dead, radiation-bathed wasteland full of ressources. I equate the Moon with a desert. There's no good reason to live there, but it's awesome for solar power, and as a source of silicon.

Mars in turn, has an atmosphere, and can concievably be terraformed. It also recieves less radiation than the Moon.

Exploit it but put a colony there. That is my idea.

[rkman]

Both Korolev and Von Braun dreamed of sending men to Mars.

We never even started on that road...

Never? We ain't done yet. We also never started on the road to the Moon until we did...

[theend3r]

Never? We ain't done yet. We also never started on the road to the Moon until we did...

We obviously never did anything until we did it. His point was that we should've.

[SargeRho]

Maybe we should have waited with landing on the moon. Our space programs seem to be ass-backwards. We went to low earth orbit, then the moon, and then stuck to low earth orbit for almost half a century now...Shouldn't we have it more gradually, going to the moon somewhere in the 80s?

[NASAFanboy]

Maybe we should have waited with landing on the moon. Our space programs seem to be ass-backwards. We went to low earth orbit, then the moon, and then stuck to low earth orbit for almost half a century now...Shouldn't we have it more gradually, going to the moon somewhere in the 80s?

Now this is true.

I sometimes even regret Project Apollo, because it makes us look like a backwards species.

[Brotoro]

I regret that we never committed to the Mars Direct plan to land humans on Mars over a decade ago. So I did Duna Direct with my kerbals.

In general, I am sad when I see how little progress we have made in space compared to what the promise was when I was a kid.

[SargeRho]

Yeah, I remember that. 2008 would be the year Humans take on the trip to Mars finally.

Not.

[Kialar]

Don't worry. The NASA will take the challenge, when al-qa'ida declares Mars a place to reach ahead of the disbelievers.

And then the US will prevail.

I regret, that china didn't call out a race for Mars (or Venus, or Jupipter, or, or, or) 10 years ago, we mankind would have landed a human (most likely an US astronaut) there 2 years later.

[AngelLestat]

I regret that we never committed to the Mars Direct plan to land humans on Mars over a decade ago. So I did Duna Direct with my kerbals.

In general, I am sad when I see how little progress we have made in space compared to what the promise was when I was a kid.

I also try to copy mars direct, but I found many problems trying to produce an stable artificial gravity of 0,5g.

Congrats to you, it looks great all the image secuence.

[mdatspace]

I agree with you all. NASA cannot leave LEO with humans on board. We have gone backwards after Apollo ended.

[Duxwing]

I control not NASA and therefore lack regrets; whereas I am disappointed that the Apollo missions seem politically rather than scientifically motivated.

-Duxwing

[Moar Boosters]

I guess my biggest regret would be that most of the biggest space projects were funded due to political or military reasons, and the actual science often came second.

Of the 12 men who walked on the moon only one, Harrison Schmitt, was an actual scientist.

After the Soviet union collapsed NASA was so far ahead of everybody else, no other country could compete against the US in terms of pure scientific prestige. Nobody else could build long range probes, mars rovers or space telescopes.

Now that countries like China are catching up with their moon landers and probes to mars, Nasa won't be able to rest on their laurels for much longer if they want to stay on top.

[The Jedi Master]

We were supposed to land on Mars in the Eighties. 2014 now, still not there. That is my biggest disappointment--the knowledge that we could have gone to Mars before I was even born, but we didn't.

[kBob]

we already had plenty of data about global warming, is time to take measures, not gather more data.

Did you not notice the time frame...back in the 80's when collecting more data might have sped up the global awareness of the problem and maybe, just maybe, we might be doing more about it now.

[KASASpace]

My regrets?

A fairly long list.

1. Got rid of Gemini. No examples for future use, either. With only a few improvements over the course from 1966 to 1969 it would have been greater than Soyuz is now.

2. Not enough funding. Seriously, why does Congress do that?

3. Gov controlled space programs. These are inspired by the need to beat everyone else, not exploration.

4. No modular rockets in use today. Saturn 1 was a great example. Jupiter tank and redstone tanks on the first stage. Beautiful. And OTRAG would've been amazing.

5. Not using Orion. Even for upper stages! It would've brought us to MARS in 1970.

6. Actually trying to go and build SLS. Really, NASA? Build a modular rocket and build the ships in LEO.

7. No continued presence on the Moon after 1972. Relates to Problem number 3.

8. Too many meetings.

That's about half of them.

[Camacha]

Personally I feel mankind has been cheated out of results for the past decades. We had a short race with people arbitrarily declaring victory and that was pretty much it. Sprints are fun, but mankind needs a steady marathon. In the long run we - or our descendent species - belong between the stars. Sending probes is a smart and necessary step, but only a step. We should have been experimenting with manned interplanetary travel for a while now.

And, if only:

On September 20, 1963, in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, President Kennedy proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union join forces in their efforts to reach the moon. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev initially rejected Kennedy's proposal; however, during the next few weeks he concluded that both nations might realize cost benefits and technological gains from a joint venture. Khrushchev was poised to accept Kennedy's proposal at the time of Kennedy's assassination in November 1963.[65]

Khrushchev and Kennedy had developed a measure of rapport during their years as leaders of the world's two superpowers, especially during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. That trust was lacking with Vice President Johnson; when Johnson assumed the Presidency after Kennedy's assassination, Khrushchev dropped the idea of a joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. moon program.[65]

Source.

The moon landings would not have been the end point it has been now, but possibly only the start of a long and fruitful relation.

A fairly long list.

[...]

That's about half of them.

The other half being Soviet?

[KASASpace]

The other half being Soviet?

Well, a few of them, not counting private ventures, and us not planning for shuttle's cancellation since the 80s (we should have, we(USA) would actually be in space!)

Russia wasted time a lot while NASA was driving forward in a sprint.

[Phoenix Aerospace]

1- Not going ahead with Orion. Whatever happened to "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970?".

2- Failing to recognize the scientific benefits while allocating funding.

3- Cancelling Dyna-Soar, Blue Gemini, and MOL, therefore forcing the Air Force into the Shuttle program. I'm against militarization of space, but sometimes it's a case of too many cooks ruining the soup...

4- Getting rid of Big Gemini. That thing was basically the Orion capsule, but in 1960.

5- Cancelling the original Apollo mission plans (whatever happened to the plans for a permanent moonbase?).

6- Not going ahead with NERVA/NTRs in general.

7- Cancellation of the Saturn Applications Program. I want my manned Venus flyby, dammit.

8- Cancelling Saturn all together, turning the Shuttle into a jack-of-all-trades instead of a pure crew transfer/station resupply vehicle and using saturn for HLLV.

9- Slashing the Shuttle's budget, forcing NASA to knowingly follow an intrinsically unsafe design.

10- Using the Shuttle as a replacement for expendable rockets and therefore skipping safety precautions before launch in risky conditions (Challenger. 'Nuff said.).

11- Giving the responsibility of direction to bureaucrats with unrealistic expectations of funding and even more unrealistic expectations of scheduling, not to mention very little knowledge of how space travel actually works.

12- Giving said half-baked ideas to the professionals, having them tell you that they'll need a little more money and/or time, and then being pissed off when the mission doesn't go through (Bush/Obama administration and Constellation, I'm looking at you. You too, Nixon.).

13- Bureaucrats using NASA as a bargaining chip to make themselves seem "tough on taxes" while coddling the 632.8 billion dollar baby that is the military.

14- The public at large being in no way bothered by this or willing to act.