Open Your Window
by xaosseed
I see cut price everything for sale these days – and some of them are frankly amazing – buy a space shuttle! Buy a missile silo! Buy all the cold war surplus modules that you need to build your own bond supervillains lair. Not that you’d want to, frankly the HR issues those Bond villains must have had would be enough on their own to put me off. But – you could have your own Tracy Island type base full of toys and I don’t know do good things? Build some sort of giant relic to confuse people who come afterwards?
But seriously – a shuttle, for sale. How many movies have told us that some day we’re going to need to be able to use it in a hurry to save the earth from [insert problem here] so at least one of them should be properly mothballed somewhere. Though if its in the hangar next to the USAF’s 3rd Space Interceptor Squadron then I gets its not such a priority…
I am very glad though that Shuttle isn’t pulling a Concorde and being a big chunky evolutionary dead end. Its a damn shame we’ve no Concorde equivalent any more – have we passed Peak Supersonic Airliners? I do like Spaceship One and its various halfbrothers and cousins – they’re worthy successors to shuttle whereas Aires and Ariane are … just missing the point. One use rockets are not how we want to be tackling the gravity well. I’d far prefer we had a space elevator or zeppelin-mothership or some sort of magnetic launcher so we didn’t have to burn so much fuel getting fuel up the well but I’ll settle for whats there for now.
Comments
The failure of concorde is interesting. It seems like it was just too inefficient, and the time saved in crossing the atlantic so fast probably wasn’t compensated by the cost and the time you spend in airports before the flight. It always appeared to be an extreme extravagance.
I wonder about our journey to space: is it really affordable? There are lots of somewhat-distant imperatives for space exploration, but I wonder is the whole idea, like concorde, just too extravagant to be practical?
The thing about old shuttles is that they need a lot of care and attention. You must build rockets for them, and if you want to bring it back you will need to have a look at the heat shield.
As for the cost of the space race, my guess is that it’s like many other cutting edge things — it will eventually become cheap enough, once we become clever enough to deal with it cheaply. And what does it need to be in order to be practical? Return trips? One-way colonization? Interstellar communication and data collection via relay satellites?