A Sense of Proportion

Building a scale model of the planets and their orbits is harder than you’d think.
*raises hand* What if you don’t have 7 miles of desert and a nearby mountain?

Congrats on the Instalanche for the “Agonies of the Left” post.
Oh bugger. We need more chairs.

What happened to Pluto? Damn it, when I grew up there were nine planets!

What if you don’t have 7 miles of desert and a nearby mountain?
I believe you can rent a bulldozer.

Wonderful, except they left Pluto out. To be fair, they’d have had to level a lot of desert. Oooh, SJW sez, “Look at them, wrecking the ecosystem of the beautiful mudflats!”

I have a friend whose grandmother took a horse drawn carriage west across the US in the early 1900’s and lived to see Armstrong take his fateful step. Sending 24 people to the moon is impressive enough on its own, but considering the technology they had then, versus what we have now, versus what they had prior (say in the early 1900’s) makes your head spin.
We went a long time as a species before this sudden explosion in accomplishments. It almost makes one optimistic about the future.

Damn, in seven years I’ll be as old as he was at the time and why don’t we have science stations on the Moon and Mars?
Because there is no science that can be done on the moon that can’t be done in inner orbit. And there’s basically no science that can’t be done better by machine robot than be people.
The scientific case for manned space flight is close to non-existent. Manned space flight is all about national prestige.
You’re looking in the wrong places for your sense of wonder. Think of the deep sea diving systems that are now ubiquitous, that explore a system just as dangerous as the moon but far more interesting. Or all the science stations in the Antarctic, also working in deadly conditions. Or all the high-speed and microscopic video work that explore situations previously inaccessible to mankind.
Mars is different. People who go to Mars won’t be coming back, and the supply of suitably suicidal scientists is low.

I’m with Chester on this one. If you’ve ever seen the tremendous time and energy that is put into any government project, let alone one where some of the best and brightest of human life and national prestige are on the line in sending humans out in even low earth orbit for extended periods of time, the costs are astronomical and the waste exponentially so. Pun intended or not. The impact to time and schedule, the excessively large payload required, the complicating factors of such necessary to keep humans alive in an environment enormously more dangerous than anything any living form of life was designed for actually limit the possibilities of human achievement. If Elon Musk (see dicentra’s link from other post here: https://twitter.com/BoredElonMusk) wants to spend his own money on such, more power to him. But I’m not sure that’s how he really rolls.

The issue is not whether or not to put a body up there, the repeatedly proven issue is the spinoffs when we do put a body up there.
Not to definitively answer the question one way or another, but one must admit the possible, though I would say quite probable, opportunity costs involved. The wealth had to come from somewhere. In order to build a $100,000,000,000 (or insert your own appropriate number of zeros) rocket ship, the equivalent value of stuff must be taken from the rest of society. The ingenuity of those designers and engineers presumably would have been occupied by some alternate purpose that consequently went unserved. Emotional/intangible benefits of national pride, inspiration, etc. significantly complicate the equation.

It’s only putting people in rockets on carracks that leaves me cold.
/King John II of Portugal

Faster, please

The British architects behind Apple’s new ‘spaceship’ campus have revealed their next project – a manned base for Mars.
It will be built by 3D printing robots on the Martian surface, giving man its first permanent base on another planet.
Foster + Partners New York’s design for a modular habitat on Mars has even been shortlisted amongst 30 finalists for the 3D Printed Habitat Challenge organised by America Makes and NASA, the firm revealed today.