h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, if it would make that big a mess falling down. that would be a good reason not to have it surely?

Also, as much as I like us to expand into space, I don't think we should do it with our current political situation. I don't imagine it will be long anyway before America breaks the Nukes In Orbit agreement anyway.

Oh, and everybody knows it was Al Gore that first came up with the idea of space elevators

f*cken politics. sod all that. it makes me furious when we don't do something because of the current political situation. And why not? The cold war was much more tense a situation than the one we have at present, and as a result the greatest advances in space travel were made.

I have to say I disagree. The Cold War did NOT motivate the greatest advances in space travel. The Cold War motivated a stunt mission which within a little over two years of it's initial success was dead in the water and has never been repeated. Very little of the technology or expertise gained in that pointless p**sing contest was of any long term scientific or engineering use.

The USSR had the right idea but not enough money - get guys into space and KEEP them there for a LONG time. ing about with an incredibly expensive flatbed truck is not a sustainable model for space exploitation. Research into the long term effects of weightlessness are.

The ISS might have been the right idea, but now post Columbia, its future looks in doubt, because it existed to give the shuttles something to do, and the shuttles were only kept to service the ISS. Neither can stand alone.

The current political situation is that the US can already do pretty much anything it wants, to anyone it wants, whenever it wants. It sees space technology as a way of enforcing that. As long as there's nobody else trying to horn in on that territory, that dominance, they're actually better off NOT doing anything - it's cheaper. And if anyone (say, the EU or China, or both?) DID start to look like they might have a useful presence in space, the US is better off sabotaging or otherwise destroying their launch capability rather than actually competing fairly.

Unfortunate, but true. At least during the Cold War the Americans had to actually compete - they couldn't just bomb the Russian launch sites and say "you lose, so therefore we win". Does anyone doubt that they would have done that if they thought they could have got away with it?

H.

Not worth its own thread but

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2880845.stm

Britain is apparently going back into space.....with a little gold coloured box with blue bits on the side that will measure how shiney the earth is. I'm sorry, but after whatsisface came up with HOTOL which would have cornered the space launch market and been far far cheaper to run than the shuttle and we did NOTHING with it, this is a bit of let down really.

Well, China want a man in space by the end of the year, and seem to have ambitions towards establishing a base on the , so this could get very interesting...