Quote:
Since British telly ended before midight in those days, I was safely tucked up in bed when it actually happened! But ISTR it was shown 12 hours later and the whole school watched it (on 3 or 4 specially imported tellies) in the gym! I was actually quite excited about, being 15 at the time and very into flight and sci-fi.
I just find it sad now, that those guys, who surely had cojones of solid steel, made that trip in that glorified baked bean tin, effectively for nothing! They went there, they did that, and then everybody gave up!
Whatever happened to the glorious future of man expanding through the galaxy that sci-fi predicted? Like almost every other good idea on earth, the accountants killed it!
Steve
Unless there are vital rare minerals to be mined on the Earth's moon, it's questionable whether it would be worthwhile establishing a colony there and it would be too expensive simply to use as a prison colony.
The accountants would
NOT have helped matters, but the limitations of physics and human physiology (e.g. tolerance of acceleration g-forces), make manned exploration of even our solar system rather impractical, unless we can assemble very large spaceships which can accommodate a sufficiently large, genetically viable, self-contained community, with all the support services of a small town), that can harness solar or nuclear power for several decades. Even assuming one could accelerate close to the speed of light, it would take a very long time, even at an acceleration rate of 5g.
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Regards.
Nigel A. Skeet
Independent tutor of mathematics, physics, technology & engineering, for secondary, tertiary, further & higher education.
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