Space, the final frontier

[Potamoi]

Amazing how these event are less newsworthy after a couple of successes:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63147956

I am always awestruck when these rockets launch and can rendezvous/dock with the ISS. These ladies and gents have the coolest jobs ever.

Exciting times. Glad to see the ISS transport rides are less political and more about the science. God knows there is enough negative shitte in other news.

[Sport]

I still watch Star Trek, amazing series. Also keen to watch these rockets taking off and brave people jumping into a tin can zooming off into the heavens.

[Udon Map]

Glad to see the ISS transport rides are less political and more about the science.

If only. Why is this news? Will it be news every time the first [insert characteristic here] person goes into space? Or does something else?

Religion -- First person of the Baháʼí faith?
Sexual Orientation -- First LGBTQ person?
Occupation -- First electrician?
Disability -- First person who is missing a limb?
Ethnic background -- First Native Hawaiian?

The fact that this is news shows that it is still way too political. IMO what will be nice is when things like this will be unremarkable.

[stattointhailand]

Space, the biggest waste of f******* money imaginable

[tamada]

First Udonmapper?

[Drunk Monkey]

Space indeed awesome .. a little known fact ..there is a Scunthorpe United FC supporters club based at the ISS and more so speculation that as well as life on other planets the Iron have fans there too.

DM

[stattointhailand]

There is no way anyone can condone spending even 10% of the money wasted on Space whilst there is so much suffering and poverty on earth

[Laan Yaa Mo]

It's knowledge and it's worth it.

No-one should condone the spending of so much money on soccer players when there is poverty and suffering on this planet.

[stattointhailand]

It's knowledge and it's worth it.

No-one should condone the spending of so much money on soccer players when there is poverty and suffering on this planet.

Have you not heard of "trickle down economics" Uncle ....... oh errr

[Bandung_Dero]

There is no way anyone can condone spending even 10% of the money wasted on Space whilst there is so much suffering and poverty on earth

Oh, spare me days, all we need is another social engineer/hand wringer polluting our bandwidth with unfounded morals.
How about you shut down your access to the internet/mobile phone and donate the monies spent to charity. How the fu##k do you think your comfortable life style was engineered if it wasn't for communications satellites and other expensive research?
= Hypocrite!

[stattointhailand]

Not by paying a bl**dy fortune sending a heap of metal to the f****** moon

[Bandung_Dero]

Wot sort of lame response was that. Cat's gotcha toung/keyboard. Ya can't have it both ways like a swinging dick. Either ditch the keyboard or accept progress in what ever form it comes in.

[Potamoi]

Glad to see the ISS transport rides are less political and more about the science.

If only. Why is this news? Will it be news every time the first [insert characteristic here] person goes into space? Or does something else?

Religion -- First person of the Baháʼí faith?
Sexual Orientation -- First LGBTQ person?
Occupation -- First electrician?
Disability -- First person who is missing a limb?
Ethnic background -- First Native Hawaiian?

The fact that this is news shows that it is still way too political. IMO what will be nice is when things like this will be unremarkable.

Well actually the part I thought was still newsworthy is another ship launched from a private company to send people to the ISS. The less political and more about science part was that one of the people is a cosmonaut. I don't have the stomach for politically correctness. I just think we can gain a wealth of knowledge from space exploration and experiments in long term zero gravity. Not sure if I made that clear in my post so let's do that now, shall we?

Sorry, but you misinterpreted my intention, Paul. To make amends here is a bonus link to watch the Dragon Crew-5 dock at 20:57 GMT:

There is no way anyone can condone spending even 10% of the money wasted on Space whilst there is so much suffering and poverty on earth

As for this obviously passionate comment about budget spending I would add to the 40 billion world hunger spending with spending a little extra on items former CIA ops officer Mike Baker's recommends:
(1) Replace the Huawei and Zytel cellular infrastructure components on the US I-25 corridor near all of those ICBM sites hoovering up all the data for the area including military personnel's private data among the other critical data. You know the ones, the small regional mobile companies bought at pennies on the dollar through a very generous supplier?
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/ste ... 280,c_fill
(2) Another good item on the budget would be toward creating a viable >1000 qubit quantum computers before the bad guys render all encryption useless.
https://www.digicert.com/blog/the-impac ... ll%20fail.
I wouldn't take it away from the space exploration budget but rather take it from areas like the couple of billion the IRS will spend in 2022 to ensure the citizens pay tax on the trillion odd sent out as 2020 and 2021 stimulus cheques among other poorly managed and oversight-free programs.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/ ... 80x575.png
Would you like to see more of my shopping list? I mean, nobody could have predicted printing several trillion would lead to any kind of inflation, right?

Sorry I digress. The last bit about budgets should have been posted in a spending thread.

[jackspratt]

I mean, nobody could have predicted printing several trillion would lead to any kind of inflation, right?

To the contrary, many people did. But not all saw a bit of inflation as necessarily a bad thing - particularly under the circumstances that existed during the pandemic.

(In the absence of a spending thread.)

[Udon Map]

Well actually the part I thought was still newsworthy is another ship launched from a private company to send people to the ISS.

Agreed, newsworthy.

The less political and more about science part was that one of the people is a cosmonaut. I don't have the stomach for politically correctness. I just think we can gain a wealth of knowledge from space exploration and experiments in long term zero gravity. Not sure if I made that clear in my post so let's do that now, shall we?

Done.

Sorry, but you misinterpreted my intention, Paul.

Apparently. I apologize.

To make amends here is a bonus link to watch the Dragon Crew-5 dock at 20:57 GMT:

Love this stuff! Thank you!!

[noosard]

Waterman, oh I mean rocketman

[tamada]

Here's an opinion from one old man who's been there, done that, got the space suit.

"... I looked down and I could see the hole that our spaceship had punched in the thin, blue-tinged layer of oxygen around Earth. It was as if there was a wake trailing behind where we had just been, and just as soon as I’d noticed it, it disappeared.

I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.

I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.

Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.

I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral. ..."

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/willia ... 235395113/