Where's The Beef?

All bun, no beef. Big words, big ideas and big nothing. That's what I call all of our space project programs.

Its not our governments fault and its not NASA's fault. They are taking giant strides in accomplishing little. Maybe they are missing the point.

"For the greater good of science and humankind."

Don't get me wrong. I would love to travel the great void that envelopes us all. I find it sometimes frightening that we all live in a small pocket of air, water and magnetic gravity. We are trapped here as long as "the money" is being spent incorrectly. I'm guessing that I'm talking about this because I got CV and I just finished an Aliens marathon. In those movies they ride in oversized spaceships, they talk about mining ore on other planets outside our solar system, they have ongoing taraforming projects, they freeze themselves for hypersleep and they even have artificial gravity on those ships. Most of what those movies speak of can be accomplished with current technology. Unlike Star Wars and Star Trek where most of their technologies are made up fantasies where they bend a lot of scientific laws.


Creating such an infrastructure would take a huge "mankind" effort and would cost trillions of dollars. To create profitable and safe space travel will have to be a legacy of our planet before it can ever transform. The worst thing that could happen would be to create political boundaries beyond our atmosphere. So, the more civilized acting countries are going to have to have to work together. The world will have to be mainly at peace. The first thing that will have to be built is a low orbiting space station. One that can handle housing hundreds of people and be able to easily handle constant space traffic. It would probably be big enough to see the outline of it in a clear sky. Therefore, we can't have any nutball countries trying to blow it out of the sky.


Creating that first space station will probably be the hardest accomplishment. No, not that hunk of crap up there now. That "International Space Station" will only be in service for another decade or two. Even the current one was hard to make for one reason. Gravity. Launching anything off of our planet is a huge pain in the ass because gravity. Its the reason why space flight is so expensive and dangerous. All the fuel and energy it takes to launch 7 people with experiments off of our ground is extremely wasteful. The space station will act as a go-between from earth to the station. Longer flights could be launched from the station without blowing out a majority of the fuel and power within the first couple minutes. Also, spacecraft launching from the space station does not need to be aerodynamic. Launch vehicles that send people and supplies to the station and vehicles that never hit Earth's atmosphere will be two totally different concepts.

Once you have that initial space station in place, you can now begin true exploration. This is where large corporations and governments will blow a ton of money. Sending unmanned and manned flights to every edge of our solar system will take an extreme amount of time and patience. My suggestion would be to revisit the moon and stop fucking around. With the moon's low gravity, it makes it the most logical step. Another idea would be to throw gobs of scientists on the moon to fully explore what its profitable potential could be. If enough elements could be mined from the moon, we could easily start production of products to be sent back to earth and products that could further our exploration of our universe. Finding and producing fuel and metals could make exploration of our surroundings extremely cheap.

My current feeling of space exploration is that there is no real plan. Sure, we have satellites mapping other planets, rovers crawling around Mars, shuttles conducting experiments and JPL finding new ways to defeat gravity and time. Some companies report they are trying to get flight and hotel tourism going to the moon and Mars within the next 20 years. Other enterprising individuals are patiently waiting to tap elements from other planets so that they can start production. They are held back because there is not enough of the certain element is here and its too expensive and wasteful. If I had it my way, we would pull all the resources of all the countries and corporations into one cooperative entity that would govern itself outside of political boundaries. With our own government hanging a noose around NASA everytime they hit a snag, real exploration and accomplishments get stifled. The technology that NASA is using for manned space flight is almost 30 years old. Yeah, before the VCR and home computer.

Infrastructure and Standards. Our Interstate highway system is based off of a military strategy. The internet is based off of our current phone lines, television cables and was also based off of military protocols. In these two examples, it took years, money and cooperative efforts to complete. In fact, it took 10 whole years for the VCR to saturate only 60% of US households. These examples show that creating a standard and a base to where any true exploration can begin, there would have to be a single entity governing policy. A "Brand X" space craft (with "Brand Xs" approved docking lock) docking onto the spacestation with "Brand Y" docking capabilities would be disastrous with out a standards committee in place. We would want all people to be able to dock safely. The Wal-Mart docking lock would have to be the same size, shape and quality as the Sony docking lock.

Our education system also needs to be rehauled. Just scrap the whole system. With information practically doubling itself every couple years its becoming impossible to teach everything in depth. I could start ranting about how schools are funded and how politics and religion are screwing over a whole generation. These are valid points, but I want to focus on that fact that you can't teach everybody everything. Children should be taught the basics and then given time to go into their own research. Inspiring people to think on their own should be the new education. Do your own research. Screw gym class, lunch time and recess. What a waste of time and resources. I think specialty schools are in order. You see some of them around now but a majority of schools are just general everything. Based on you IQ, learning style and interests will put you into a certain school. Someone that cannot understand math and science at a certain level should not be forced to learn it in the state sponsored general way. I believe many geniuses have been wrongly dubbed as dumb or ignorant. Our greatest asset to space exploration is finding those strange backward thinking people that can solve problems thinking differently than someone with a general science degree.

Bravery. This will also play as a factor into how much can be done in exploration. In the activities I state above, I am guessing injuries and death will be part of daily life in space. Personally, I would find it more honorable to die for exploration than to die for bad politics. I will never sign myself into the military but I would be the first in line to endanger my life for outer space. I think people are generally weak and have little or no stamina for even the most basic tasks. Maybe in our new education system we could teach people personal attributes, tolerance and consideration for others is their own barrier between defeat and success. I think our current collective state of mind is defeatist.


I don't expect to see any of this happen. Fanaticism with religion and self indulgence currently rules our world. I still keep a hope in mind that maybe someday we will have someone that is influential enough to change the minds of the voting majority. You may have heard,"Humans, since the beginning of time, have had a yearning to explore and learn new things. Its a part of their basic instinct." I hope we get back on track again.