bookers555 t1_je972dq wrote
Reply to comment by CaypoH in We Need to Get Back to the Moon by Guy_PCS
>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.
CaypoH t1_je97yba wrote
Sure. And holodeck with replicators are right around the corner. Do you know how science works? Do you think it's just throwing money at people in lab coats until they give you what you want?
Having a plan is very different from being able to even test its viability, let alone execute it. Right now delivering relatively small inanimate objects to Mars intact is a gamble. And it's telling that the often cited greatest hope of human endeavor in space is a company owned by a mentally unstable conman.
bookers555 t1_je99uty wrote
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.
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