Where are we?

[cjackson]

In human spaceflight, where are we? Not that space is an ocean, but man has been through oar power, sailing ships, steam ships, all the way up to today's ships equipped with azipods that run on diesel. So where is humanity in space? What technology would bring us into the steam age?

[korjik]

A guy thinking that if one log helps keep him afloat, two would be even better.

Unfortunately, even tho that is a joke, I dont think we are too much past that. Even in ancient times sea trade was a big issue, and there is no real analogous 'space trade'. I would call it open-topped rowing vessel stage.

[astromark]

Surf Ski... Oh, I long for the warp driven NCC 1701 D .... The coastal frigate stage maybe..

Where are we ? We have only tested the waters. Thats how slow progress has been.

Humanity has ventured to the Moon. Which is just there, orbiting Earth.. We have hardly begun.

Liken it to a surf patrol vessel.. compared to a cruise liner.. We have a lot of learning yet to do..

[swampyankee]

My opinion? We're roughly at the stage aviation was in 1905 or 1906. Do remember that two very big boosts to aviation involved vast amounts of government spending -- ww1 and ww2 -- all of the airlines that predated the late 1970s were created under various levels of government subsidies, almost all of the enabling technologies were the result of government-funded developments, and there were existing commercial demands for mail (the delivery route for many airlines' operating subsidies) and passenger travel.

[LookingSkyward]

We can paddle out into the lagoon, and a bit beyond, riding the tide back to shore. We can't (haven't) yet get to the next island and back.

[NEOWatcher]

We can paddle out into the lagoon, and a bit beyond, riding the tide back to shore. We can't (haven't) yet get to the next island and back.

At least we have a lot of messages in a bottle out past the closer islands.

[LookingSkyward]

I thought about adding the bottles, but didn't want to type that much!

[ravens_cry]

And a few to farther continents. We have no idea if they will reach anyone, much less if we'll get a reply, but it's a thought, maybe even a hope.

[Click Ticker]

I disagree with most of the sentiment here. I'd say we're doing quite well. We have the know how to do much more (which was lacking in the stages mentioned above with sea travel). We just lack the resources, or rather the will to allocate resources accordingly (or a little of both). Also - we've got some pretty neat propulsion ideas that could be produced, but we lack the willingness to accept the associated risks (nuclear for example) and commit resources to produce them. We can get to the moon and back. Pretty impressive, I think.

We could also get much farther, but again we'd need the willingness to commit resources and the willingness of several individuals to give up the better part of their lives for scientific research. The latter is probably easier to find than the former.

Cost/benefit is always going to be a huge issue with space just because of the energy requirements to cover the distances in a timely fashion to make raw materials acquisition worthwhile.

With sea travel, at the very least, you knew you could breath if things went wrong and you weren't able to return. Space is different. You have to be able to make a round trip - or have to be able to send sufficient resources to allow all travelers to live a long and reasonably healthy life and not starve, die of thirst, or suffocate a short way in.

Of course, we could always send death row inmates - but the quality of research might not be the same. Plus, a bunch of crazy astronomy nuts might end up committing death row worthy crimes just for the chance to go. Joking, of course.

ETA - Sure, in terms of relative distance we've only tapped the water with our toe. But that's only because the "ocean" is so much bigger. In terms of actual technology - we're a lot farther than row boats or logs.

[Paul Beardsley]

I think the analogy is wrong.

Many years ago, I read nearly all of Arthur C. Clarke's books, and I was swept away by the idea that space travel would more closely resemble sea travel than air travel. Various other authors would write books with titles like Across The Sea of Suns, reinforcing that romantic, evocative and optimistic vision.

But it's one of those analogies that doesn't really hold up - a bit like the one about atoms being like little solar systems. If there is a suitable watery analogy for space travel, it's that we're at the bottom of a very deep well. The well has smooth sides. We once pooled all our resources and managed to get 12 men on the first ledge, but most people had lost interest before we were halfway through. The second ledge is much, much higher than the first.

We have the know how to do much more (which was lacking in the stages mentioned above with sea travel). We just lack the resources, or rather the will to allocate resources accordingly (or a little of both).

That is such a big "just"!

If something is possible but the will is not there, it might as well be impossible.

[aquitaine]

I disagree with most of the sentiment here. I'd say we're doing quite well. We have the know how to do much more (which was lacking in the stages mentioned above with sea travel). We just lack the resources, or rather the will to allocate resources accordingly (or a little of both). Also - we've got some pretty neat propulsion ideas that could be produced, but we lack the willingness to accept the associated risks (nuclear for example) and commit resources to produce them. We can get to the moon and back. Pretty impressive, I think.

But it's one of those analogies that doesn't really hold up - a bit like the one about atoms being like little solar systems. If there is a suitable watery analogy for space travel, it's that we're at the bottom of a very deep well. The well has smooth sides. We once pooled all our resources and managed to get 12 men on the first ledge, but most people had lost interest before we were halfway through. The second ledge is much, much higher than the first.

The problem has not been a lack of resources or lack of technology, the problem has been until very recently a lack of free enterprise in space. Fortunately private space companies like SpaceX are on the rise. The FAA for example is not an airline carrier, so why treat NASA like it is a spaceline carrier?

With sea travel, at the very least, you knew you could breath if things went wrong and you weren't able to return.

But you couldn't drink any of the water and unless you were somehow able to go fishing you couldn't eat anything more than what you brought with you. In those early days if you were shipwrecked you were pretty much dead, unless you were lucky enough to be stranded near land with food. Even then the odds weren't good.

all of the airlines that predated the late 1970s were created under various levels of government subsidies,

As I recall the airlines routinely went through many boom and bust cycles in the 1920's, what stabalized it was the heavy regulation and price controls between the 1930's until the late 1970's permitting those cycles to return. But you are right about the wars driving the development of the technology that the airlines took advantage of.

[Paul Beardsley]

The problem has not been a lack of resources or lack of technology,

Not my argument. IMO the problem is lack of will.

the problem has been until very recently a lack of free enterprise in space. Fortunately private space companies like SpaceX are on the rise. The FAA for example is not an airline carrier, so why treat NASA like it is a spaceline carrier?

But what are they planning on doing? Flying to Mars, Europa, Titan? Or just doing stuff in low Earth orbit? Make no mistake, low Earth orbit is amazing, but it's not crossing the ocean of night.

But you couldn't drink any of the water

What about rain?

and unless you were somehow able to go fishing you couldn't eat anything more than what you brought with you.

It depends on your journey. The Kon-Tiki crew didn't even have to worry about fishing as the flying fish simply threw themselves onto the raft. The propulsion unit was basically the sea itself.

Columbus' legendary first voyage into the unknown took a bit more than a month. (They didn't return home to find that centuries had passed.)

In those early days if you were shipwrecked you were pretty much dead, unless you were lucky enough to be stranded near land with food. Even then the odds weren't good.

In those days you stood to gain if you weren't shipwrecked. In those days life was cheap. In those days they were building ships anyway - it's not as if Saturn V rockets are being built for non-space missions.

[Romanus]

My op of where space travel is today is similar to Swampyankee's aviation analogy, though I'm not quite as pessimistic; I'd say MSF now is about where aviation was in the immediate post-WW I period, or at worst where it was on the first eve of the Great War.

[slang]

In human spaceflight, where are we? Not that space is an ocean, but man has been through oar power, sailing ships, steam ships, all the way up to today's ships equipped with azipods that run on diesel. So where is humanity in space?

How could we tell? Maybe we're already close to the maximum achievable technology. Maybe there's one more big step to be made.. maybe several. Maybe none.

[kamaz]

In human spaceflight, where are we? Not that space is an ocean, but man has been through oar power, sailing ships, steam ships, all the way up to today's ships equipped with azipods that run on diesel. So where is humanity in space?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravel

Initially, up to the 15th century, Europeans were limited to coastal cabotage navigation using the barge (barca) or the balinger (barinel), ancient cargo vessels used in the Mediterranean of around 50 to 200 tons. These boats were fragile, with only one mast with a fixed square sails that could not overcome the navigational difficulties of Southward oceanic exploration, as the strong winds, shoals and strong ocean currents easily overwhelmed their abilities.

That's where we are.

The caravel was developed in about 1450, based on existing fishing boats under the sponsorship of Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal and soon became the preferred vessel for Portuguese explorers. Its name may derive from an ancient boat type known as carabus in Latin and καραβος in Greek, later Arabized to qārib, indicating some continuity of its carvel build through the ages.[2] They were agile and easier to navigate, with a tonnage of 50 to 160 tons and 1 to 3 masts, with lateen triangular sails allowing beating.

Being smaller and having a shallow keel, the caravel could sail upriver in shallow coastal waters. With the lateen sails attached, it was highly maneuverable and could sail much nearer the wind, while with the square Atlantic-type sails attached, it was very fast. Its economy, speed, agility, and power made it esteemed as the best sailing vessel of its time. The limited capacity for cargo and crew were their main drawbacks, but did not hinder its success.

That's what we should build. Something which is economical (cheap), reasonably fast (enough delta-v budget to go to any object in the Inner Solar System and back) and flexible (can execute a vast array of missions with minor modifications).

The technology is there. We need Henry the Navigator.

What technology would bring us into the steam age?

Well, first of all, we need a cheap way for getting stuff into Low Earth Orbit. Once you are there, you are halfway to anywhere else. And we need some kind of infrastructure in LEO to stage missions further out. This is because spacecrafts going between Earth surface and LEO need aerodynamics, ablative coatings, wings etc., while spacecrafts which move in vacuum of space do not. So one needs a waypoint in LEO where the two kinds of ships can meet and people and cargo can be moved both ways.

But once we are there... Take a look at the delta-v nomogram from the Atomic Rockets site. There are three parts to the equation: mass fraction, delta-v and engine Isp.

Mass fraction dictates economy of the spacecraft. The nomogram says that the limit for an economical cargo ship is 4 (25% mass being the craft plus payload, the rest being propellant). So let's stick to this value. Then you have the delta-v. Delta-v is dictated by mission requirements. You can see that around 6km/s of delta-v is enough to take you to the Moon, Venus and Mars via a Hohmann transfer. A LOX/LH2 rocket (Isp=450) with a mass fraction of 4 has a delta-v budget of 6.2km/s, which is just enough for moving around the neighborhood. So provided that the rocket is cheap enough and we can refuel at the destination, we could be fine using only chemical rockets. At least in the beginning. If you can't refuel at the destination, then you need twice the delta-v budget, or 12 km/s, or 900s Isp. That can be provided by using a solid-core NTRs (Nuclear Thermal Rockets). These are known to work, because we have build them in the 1960s. Or, with NTRs and refueling you can double the payload and cut costs. So the bottom line is that we could colonize the immediate neighborhood using just the 1960s technology -- if we can make it cheap enough so you and I could afford the ticket. That's our caravel.

The caravel (in a nuclear variant with 12km/s delta-v budget) would also allow us to reach Ceres, which means that we could go mining the Main Belt asteroids, securing a practically inexhaustible supply of cheap raw materials.

Now, on to the steamship. The problem with Hohmann transfer is that it takes 9 months to get to Mars. Acceptable for cargo, bearable for desperate colonists, but completely unacceptable for a merchant involved in interplanetary trade. The merchant would prefer to go to Mars in one month. Such mode of travel would employ a fast two-impulse trajectory, requiring a delta-v of about 100km/s. That needs Isp between 5'000 and 10'000 seconds, depending on how much we want to compromise our payload fraction. Incidentally, there are several nuclear rocket designs which could do that, at least in theory. Such rockets could also get to Saturn in 2 years (as opposed to 12 years for a Hohmann transfer).

[Gomar]

My opinion? We're roughly at the stage aviation was in 1905 or 1906.

Not true. Humans are the single most advanced space faring beings in the entire galaxy. No one is more advanced. No other life form has sent space ships, or landed on other worlds, or sent probes to explore the solar system, etc. When humans land on Mars, and colonize it, it would be the first time anyone in the galaxy has done so.
If anyone has evidence to prove otherwise, please present it.
If you are waiting for aliens to show up with tales of whizzing across worlds and planets, as in Star Wars or Star Trek, you are in for a long wait.

[ravens_cry]

Well, we don't know that. I don't expect aliens to show up all Close Encounters of the Third Kind style, but we can't look closely enough at other worlds to know whether we do or not.
It'd be like some First Nation guy a few years before western contact with a canoe saying they had the most advanced navy on the planet. Sure, he doesn't have any evidence otherwise, but he also doesn't have the capability to find out one way or the other.

[aquitaine]

Not my argument. IMO the problem is lack of will.

The lack of will in the private sector has been mostly because NASA was selling itself as THE future spaceline carrier. One of the Space Shuttle's main selling points was that it would allow the common citizen access to space, and with that promise they hoodwinked everyone including me into thinking that, some day, we too would go to space. The reality, as we have recently discovered, was that it was all just a political shell game.

But what are they planning on doing? Flying to Mars, Europa, Titan? Or just doing stuff in low Earth orbit? Make no mistake, low Earth orbit is amazing, but it's not crossing the ocean of night.

Firstly the advent of private spaceline companies is probably the most important part of the whole process. Booting NASA and its bloated contractors out of the drivers seat lowers the costs of getting into space by one or two orders of magnitude. While those spaceliners probably have goals, short term and long term, of ferrying passengers to those places and developing the capabilities to do so, the dramatic lowering of the costs paves the way for other companies to use their services to establish permanent facilities, whether it be in orbit or on the moon or where ever. That is why it's important.

What about rain?

Only happens during certain times of the year in the tropics. Actually if you're clinging to a piece of debris from your ship, just being out in the sun will dehydrate you very quickly.

It depends on your journey. The Kon-Tiki crew didn't even have to worry about fishing as the flying fish simply threw themselves onto the raft. The propulsion unit was basically the sea itself.

Surviving in that manner was rare. On Magellen's voyage more than 200 sailors died, in part because only one ship made it back.

Columbus' legendary first voyage into the unknown took a bit more than a month. (They didn't return home to find that centuries had passed.)

No one knew how long that voyage would take.

In those days you stood to gain if you weren't shipwrecked. In those days life was cheap. In those days they were building ships anyway - it's not as if Saturn V rockets are being built for non-space missions.

Everyone stood to gain from not being shipwrecked, the sailors might have been expendable but the ships were not.

[Paul Beardsley]

The lack of will in the private sector has been mostly because NASA was selling itself as THE future spaceline carrier. One of the Space Shuttle's main selling points was that it would allow the common citizen access to space, and with that promise they hoodwinked everyone including me into thinking that, some day, we too would go to space. The reality, as we have recently discovered, was that it was all just a political shell game.

As I see it, the lack of will is species-wide. I would love to be proved wrong on this.

Firstly the advent of private spaceline companies is probably the most important part of the whole process. Booting NASA and its bloated contractors out of the drivers seat lowers the costs of getting into space by one or two orders of magnitude. While those spaceliners probably have goals, short term and long term, of ferrying passengers to those places and developing the capabilities to do so, the dramatic lowering of the costs paves the way for other companies to use their services to establish permanent facilities, whether it be in orbit or on the moon or where ever. That is why it's important.

Wow. 103 words to not answer my question.

Only happens during certain times of the year in the tropics. Actually if you're clinging to a piece of debris from your ship, just being out in the sun will dehydrate you very quickly.

Rain doesn't happen at all in deep space. Clinging to debris probably never happens.

Survival mid-ocean is hard, but it's a day at the beach compared to survival in deep space.

Surviving in that manner was rare. On Magellen's voyage more than 200 sailors died, in part because only one ship made it back.

In an environment vastly - I mean vastly - more benign than outer space.

No one knew how long that voyage would take.

The most educated guess available to the crew was based on an assumption that the Earth was much smaller and that they should have been arriving in Cathay.

Everyone stood to gain from not being shipwrecked, the sailors might have been expendable but the ships were not.

I'm not for a single moment suggesting that crossing the oceans was an easy matter. However, it becomes necessary to vastly overplay the difficulty of doing this, whilst vastly underplaying the difficulty of crossing the interstellar gulfs, if one is to draw parallels between the two.

In post 15, Kamaz says, "That's where we are." Kamaz is absolutely wrong. We're not there. We're not even close to being close to being there. We're looking up at the stars and telling ourselves that travel across the interstellar gulf is comparable to travelling to India or Cathay five centuries ago, and we are utterly deluding ourselves.

The human race will die on Earth. We might get another half dozen more men (or women) on the Moon, we might even get a token team on Mars. But that will be it. Once the public has come to terms with the fact that there are no animals on Mars, let alone cities, they won't want to know. Space enthusiasts will eventually come to terms with the fact that exploration depends on public interest. And public interest is increasingly thin on the ground.

I would give anything to be wrong about this. But I don't think I am.

[Paul Beardsley]

Further to my previous answers, here, in brief, is why crossing space is not at all like crossing an ocean:

To cross space, you first of all have to lift your crew, your propulsion system and all your other technology out of Earth's gravity well.

You have to take everything with you - not just food and water (which you have no prospect of stocking up along the way) but also oxygen and some form of sunlight.

Oceans can be crossed in weeks or months in low-tech vessels not much different to existing vessels that keep to the coastline. The interstellar gulf is far more vast. Crossing it either takes more than a lifetime (which nobody is going to want to do) or it has to be done at great speed which a) is hugely expensive, b) carries its own risks such as being smashed to pieces by interstellar dust and c) still takes many years to get there, so that the young people involved at the start of the project will be old or dead at the end.

If we're ever to travel to other stars, we're going to need some magic technology such as a means of uploading our consciousnesses onto computers (in the manner of Greg Egan's Diaspora), or a new kind of propulsion that takes spaceships from 0 to near lightspeed in a short time whilst simultaneously repelling anything that might collide with us, or a means of unravelling higher dimensions so that we can take short cuts through hyperspace.

It might be that we never obtain any suitable magical technology. But until we do, we're not even standing at the docks.

[mike alexander]

One reason the sailing analogy is the wrong one (except for those ex-Navy men writing the space romances long ago) is that water movement is normal to the gravitational gradient. A closer analogy (though not very close at all) would be an expedition up Everest. You carry your food, your fuel, and for most people your oxygen. In this there hasn't been a qualitative change since Mallory.

[danscope]

Science fiction romanticizes space travel far beyond any possible gain or outcome to benefit those who pay for the task. We can utilize our intellect and extend our influence in space by employing robots to go where man is not suitable
and thus further our curiousity about our local group. But going and not coming back ....yea , not even being able to communicate with home is a fool's errand owing to the fact that you are pouring your hard earned money into a
balloon which you will never see or hear from again. Seeking a home on a system 25 light years from here is a decidedly
impossible task , of which only a well built robot 'might' live ...."Might live" long enough to reach it's destination , but have no means of communicating it's success or failure. So, the mission and quest is moot. There is money to be made selling books and stories about it in the way of science fiction. We, each of us enjoy that venue in entertainment.
No question. Imagination and scientific curiousity drives us as a race to improve our station and life "for all of us".
But shall we spend $500 Billion dollars on a one-way balloon , as opposed to a college education for the thousands upon thousands of students who will be tasked with the rebuilding and maintenance of our world here? Really ?
The answer is that we have bigger fish to fry here which includes the feeding, clothing, caring for, education and housing of the human race. That question trumps the esoteric question of boots on Alfa Centari, how ever fried from cosmic radiation those boots may be. What ever is going there is not comming back.Even if you are Jack Armstrong,
the All-American Boy. Ultimately, there are some things we can do in space, and some things machines can do in space.
But I wouldn't bankrupt my country just to try to prove that we can imitate a television show , and help a few select corporations make a good profit in the bargain. It doesn't put food on our tables , heal our babies or push our cars or heat our homes nor educate our children . We must be about earth's business. The gossamer thread of communication with robots at such incredible distances offers us the vision of worlds far beyond the wildest dreams of avarice.
Our inventions pay much less a penalty for interfering with space than flesh and blood and for a much , much ,much longer duration. Their single-mindedness serves us and our scientific inquiry as we intend,all with the hope of some measure of communication back to earth , however faint and slim that may be. It remains no place for flesh and blood.
Sacking our treasure and mortgaging our children in a fruitless enterprise with no gain , save time, in the local system
seems to be less pressing than the more mundane tasks of medicine, housing,education and feeding our babies.
That is why we invented robots. They serve us well, as we serve each other.They have their job, and we have ours.
Time to read stories to my grandchild. She wants to hear the one about some guy and the magic beans.

Best regards,
Dan

[MaDeR]

The answer is that we have bigger fish to fry here which includes the feeding, clothing, caring for, education and housing of the human race.

Oooh, old and tired argument "we have to fix things here before doing anything else". Of course, this mean we never will go to space, because Earth will always have problems. In fact, space exploration can and will help with these very issues.
By the way, did you wrap up every one issue, every one problem before you move out of parents home?

It doesn't put food on our tables, heal our babies or push our cars or heat our homes nor educate our children. We must be about earth's business.

You are talking like... like... we cannot do both. Like we cannot tak care of Earth AND explore universe. Aren't you blindfolded. I will take aside little issue that space exploration, in fact, "does put food on our tables" or "educate our children", and spinoffs that does all that you mentioned and more.

Their single-mindedness

How ironic, charge of single-mindedness coming from you. Pot calling kettle and all of that.

That is why we invented robots. They serve us well, as we serve each other.

Why? According to your argument, these robots are waste of resources and money that should be spent here on Earth for Earth issues.

[Paul Beardsley]

Oooh, old and tired argument "we have to fix things here before doing anything else". Of course, this mean we never will go to space, because Earth will always have problems. In fact, space exploration can and will help with these very issues.

There are undoubted benefits to low Earth orbit - meteorology, detecting resources etc - and I've seen arguments for asteroid mining by the likes of Jerry Pournelle, but none of these apply to interstellar space.

Incidentally, from many years ago I recall a load of anticipated benefits of working in a microgravity environment, such as perfect ball bearings, extra pure medicines. I haven't heard anything about these things recently. Is there a thread or a recommended site where these things are discussed?

By the way, did you wrap up every one issue, every one problem before you move out of parents home?

Fail.

When people leave home, they have usually become independent from their parents. They have a job. They possibly even send money home to their parents, perhaps from a richer country. They do their own laundry, cook their own meals. They visit their parents from time to time, or call them on the telephone. The parents' grocery and phone bills probably go down.

Obviously not all offspring fit this ideal, but some do.

Sending out an interstellar spaceship is the equivalent of parents giving their child so much money that they have to cut down on eating and heating, and they know they will never hear from their child again.

[swampyankee]

I've gotten rather tired of the "if only government went away, free enterprise would make the Solar System our puddle." There's nothing -- absolutely nothing -- past geosynchronous orbit that could interest a rational investor, at least within my great-grand children's lifetimes.

Analogies to trans-oceanic travel are just plain wrong -- these were all performed using existing technology. Many of the early trips, like de Gama's circumnavigation of Africa or Columbus' attempted eastward route to Asia were attempts to bypass existing trade routes under the control of other countries. There were an established trades with China and India; after Columbus' accidentally running into the Americas, gold fever was ignited because of the indigenes having a few gold ornaments, and 15th Century Europeans behaved about as rationally at the prospect of gold as does a heroin addict at the prospect of his next fix. Heck, there were even people to do the work.

Similarly, analogies to the development of commercial aviation are wrong: airliners were subsidized (largely by mail contracts) until quite recently (actually, many routes still are subsidized as there is not enough traffic) and regulated in a way that largely precluded competition on price (it was much nicer to fly, even coach, forty years ago). Also airlines did not pay for the development of the required infrastructure, like airports and navigation aids, although that's a form of subsidy shared by road and inland waterway transport.

[ravens_cry]

One reason the sailing analogy is the wrong one (except for those ex-Navy men writing the space romances long ago) is that water movement is normal to the gravitational gradient. A closer analogy (though not very close at all) would be an expedition up Everest. You carry your food, your fuel, and for most people your oxygen. In this there hasn't been a qualitative change since Mallory.

This could change if we willing to spend the money, and I admit it would be a lot of money, to build infrastructure. Roads and railroads cost a lot of money, as does maintaining them.
But imagine how much transportation would cost without them, what paralysing effect it would have on society if the only way to get across country was air and natural waterways.
For space, a good beginning is ISRU, in-situ resource utilization. A little water freed from the lunar soil as well as some oxygen and you got a large chunk of the mass of what is sent up to the ISS.
For a long term outpost, if the mass of the machinery to do so (plus any spares and parts) is less than the mass of the oxygen and water it creates over the lifetime of the machine, you have a net win.
Given the present costs of getting things out of Earths gravity well, those savings quickly add up.
Sure, there is the R&D costs, but it only has to be invented once. And that's but a small beginning, something that, while likely not easy, it sounds, at least to me, feasible.
We are already seen the beginnings in the water reclamation on the ISS. Sure, it's cranky and cantankerous technology now, but so is every new technology.
The first computers were fragile and prone to failure and impossible for any lay person to use.
Now even I can use one to talk to people all over the world
The first airplanes were fragile creatures of wood and fabric, barely holding their single occupant aloft.
Now hundreds at a time cross the planet in them.
No, we're not going to get Buck Roger swoopy spaceships of daring due and, barring a huge change in the known laws of physics, Star Trek is just not going to happen, but if we are willing to build the infrastructure to get us to at least the rest of the solar system, we can become a space fairing civilisation.
Let's build roads.

[danscope]

To Mader , "By the way, did you wrap up every one issue, every one problem before you move out of parents home?" .
Sir, I am 63 years old , I designed and built my own home after 6 years of service in the US Navy and put my Child through university. And I can beat you silly on the golf course with half a bag of clubs. But that is a different thread.
My thoughts on manned deep space stand on logical merit. But.... you are free to spend the wealth of your country
going to pluto and beyond if you like that sort of thing. In my country, we have work to do. And we shall press on with the James Webb ST and some other things we can do with practicality.

[Garrison]

And we shall press on with the James Webb ST and some other things we can do with practicality.

You used the JWST and practicality in the same sentence? Did you see the last budget estimate for completion of the JWST? $8.7 Billion. As for the general argument that 'we have problems right here on Earth' the entire NASA budget is still less than 0.5% 0f the Federal budget, and by and large goes right back into the US economy creating jobs and promoting R&D, so exactly what problems does anyone imagine could be fixed by cutting it?
Could NASA spend it more efficiently? Yes but that's another issue.

[danscope]

Garrison, if you don't appreciate the Webb ST,
why should anyone listen to you and your concept of manned space missions to Nibiru and beyond?
We will actually get something scientific out of the Webb ST . Launching untold billions with no return? Shrug.

[kamaz]

As I see it, the lack of will is species-wide. I would love to be proved wrong on this.

You wrongly believe that the U.S. gov't is representative of humanity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewSpace#Active_Companies
U.S. gov't is not even representative of the governmental side of things worldwide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese...ration_Program

Survival mid-ocean is hard, but it's a day at the beach compared to survival in deep space.

Straw man. Humans have survived going to the Moon and back; humans have survived in zero gravity long enough to go to Mars and back, not to mention that humans know how to generate spin gravity to offset that effect. One real problem with Mars is GCRs, but first, we are not sure how much of a problem that really is, second, it boils down to shielding -- a purely technical and economical issue. The point is that, AD 2012, humans can reach two other planetary surfaces in the Solar System. Survival on these surfaces is not trivial, but we have already learned that they both have abundant basic resources, such as water (ice), oxygen (albeit trapped in other compounds) and energy -- again, a purely engineering problem.

I also feel compelled to add, that for some reason, different groups of humans have independently commited resources to obtaining very precise remote sensing data about these planetary surfaces. The data being collected is exactly of the kind required for planning surface operations. That fact makes no sense considering that humans are officially unwilling to conduct surface operations... but if it were so, why fund the reconnaissance missions in the first place?

In post 15, Kamaz says, "That's where we are." Kamaz is absolutely wrong. We're not there. We're not even close to being close to being there. We're looking up at the stars and telling ourselves that travel across the interstellar gulf is comparable to travelling to India or Cathay five centuries ago, and we are utterly deluding ourselves.

You may want to re-read my post. It is about interplanetary travel, not interstellar travel. Are you asserting that interplanetary travel is fundamentally infeasible?