Easy? compared to how it was in 1997
Posted on 04/23/2012 5:42:46 PM PDT by KevinDavis
In an interview with a reporter from the Associated Press, Scott Pace, the current director of the Space Policy Institute at The George Washington University and a former NASA associate administrator, was asked to comment on the April 12th failure of the North Korean rocket launch. He noted that sending a vehicle into space is still a significant technical challenge, and added, “In many ways, the worst enemy of NASA is Star Trek… Captain Picard says ‘engage’ and the ship moves. And people think ‘How hard can this be?’” Filmmaker James Cameron supposedly made a similar comment about Star Trek’s depiction of space travel several years ago. This, so the argument goes, leads to unrealistic expectations in the public mind about where we should be these days on the Final Frontier. Reality has fallen far short of the galaxy-hopping future envisioned by Star Trek, and NASA takes the blame.
(Excerpt) Read more at thespacereview.com ...
Yes. But the programs are set far enough in the future that it should be okay.
Easy? compared to how it was in 1997
What idiot’s idea was it in the newer Star Trek movie to build the thing on the surface?
It’s impossible to break the light barrier now, with the current technology we have. I absolutely believe humans will travel faster than light in the future; how far into the future it will be, I don’t know. But how boring would it be to only achieve say, 30% of the speed of light the way we’re going?
“It can’t be done. It can never be done.”
Seems pretty depressing considering how far we’ve come in a hundred years.
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Reality has fallen far short of the galaxy-hopping future envisioned by Star Trek, and Politics takes the blame.
Had politics not been present, the Air Force's shuttle design would have prevailed and none of the politially correct shuttle accidents would have happened; had politics not been present, the shuttles would not have used eco-friendly foam and not been destroyed; had politics not been present, nuclear powered engines would be common; had politics not been present, Orion might have flown in 1965 to Mars and to Venus in 1974 ... and so on.
As long as Earth politics are present, Picard will never say engage, nor will Enterprise fly.
Of course, StarTrek ships are tiny compared to Culture ships which are measured in kilometers - the largest StarTrek ship could be displaced into just one bay of a General Service Vehicle ... StarTrek ships are also much slower using ancient warp tech. Then again, StarTrek ships use obsolete computers to run them, while Culture ships use a self-aware Mind(s).
People lost interest when Apollo was canceled and replaced with the shuttle which was designed to go nowhere.
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Only if you think like Einstein, James Clerk Maxwell had other ideas but Heavyside threw them out since they were field equations which he said were impossible ... the four Heavyside kept and converted to vector equations gave us the electromagnetic spectrum and, incidentally, Einstein ...
Maxwell's equations posited instantaneous travel from anyplace to anywhere, energy without end, communications without radio ... which is likely why SETI is a vain search - the “aliens” do not use it.
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