What I'm getting this from? Reading the news for the last 40 years or so. Watching the new generation and their education levels. Seeing how science is now 'the enemy' rather than the future.
> SpaceX alone has launched almost 100 times this year, Starship testing is proceeding well, we're reasonably on track for a long term human presence on the Moon, we're gradually preparing for Mars, China is managing to maintain its own space station, India is closing in on its own crewed spaceflight capability, South Korea achieved orbit last year and so on.
Yes, we had all that and then some. Somewhere between the 60's and the 80's we took a detour and since then we've been losing momentum ever faster. I'm not one of the believers in Elon Musk, his Mars Colony is just a way to get people to do what he wants them to do. China has so many internal issues that I highly doubt they will be able to sustain any long term efforts and India may well be the future, though it would have to deal with a lot of internal problems as well if it is to happen. South Korea 'achieved orbit' on a SpaceX rocket, not by their own power.
You can label all of this as progress and in terms of volume launched into space it is impressive, but it doesn't move the needle in terms of actual progress towards anything much larger. It's like the software people with 30 times one year of experience, we're getting really good at redoing the years between 1939 and 1969. But we haven't progressed to 1990 even once. 1977: peak humanity.
We never had the launch rate in the 1960s that we do today. It really doesn’t matter if you believe Musk or not, NASA is contracting with SpaceX to use Starship (and others) for lunar surface missions of far greater capability than Apollo. Our missions to Mars also far exceed what we did in the 60s and 70s, both the US and China are funding and planning sample return missions, in addition to lunar surface bases. And Starship is so capable, it’s launching more for a single Artemis mission than all Apollo combined or all the mass needed for NASA’s Crewed Mars Design Reference Architecture 5.0. And Starship is just one of half a dozen RLVs being developed as we speak (with metal bent, engines test firing). We will soon leave the high water mark of Apollo far behind.
> What I'm getting this from? Reading the news for the last 40 years or so. Watching the new generation and their education levels. Seeing how science is now 'the enemy' rather than the future.
You're in a pit, friend. Yes, there is some backsliding in a few spots, but overall education levels are higher than ever and amazing science is happening right freakin' now (JWST, asteroid sample return missions, a real shot at putting humans on the moon again, MRNA vaccines, CRISPR...). Nothing is ever perfect and it's good to recognize that fact, but don't focus only on the bad things or you'll miss all the good things that are happening all around you.
You don't have to go that narrow to refute this nonsense. Pretty much nothing was better back then. Many countries experienced regular famines. Much higher infant mortality. Much lower literacy rates. Wanna get surgery in the 70s or now? Medicine might as well be from another planet today. Even just looking at the US many of these statistics are worse and the "a single income could get you a house for a family of four"-BS is also not covered by fact, but by thinking the 70s were accurately depicted by tv shows. Much smaller houses and lower home ownership rates and families statistically had one car, not two as today. On top of that we have people fuming now because we are giving a few billion USD worth of equipment to Ukraine instead of paying for the expensive disposal off that hardware. Back then we paid enormous amounts on preparing for a war to end all wars against the Soviet Union. Things are so much better, it's insane!
> I'm not one of the believers in Elon Musk, his Mars Colony is just a way to get people to do what he wants them to do.
I'm sceptical Musk will actually succeed in establishing a genuine "Mars Colony" in his lifetime.
However, I think it is very likely SpaceX will succeed in landing an uncrewed Starship on Mars-likely within the next 10 years. Even if that's all they achieve, that would represent a massive increase in our robotic exploration abilities, simply in terms of the significantly greater mass - we could land dozens of Mars rovers in a single mission.
And I think a crewed Mars mission eventually happening is likely too. It is likely to take a lot longer than Musk thinks, but he's only 52; he probably will still be around in another 30 years, and it is not impossible he'll still be around in another 40, so I think the odds he'll live to see a crewed mission to Mars are decent.
But there is a big gap between "small-scale crewed scientific research station" and "interplanetary colonisation", and I'm sceptical Musk will live to see that gap traversed. Although he'll probably handwave away the distinction, and claim the first as the start of the second.
It actually does move the needle because the key feature of many upcoming vehicles is significant private investment, focus on higher cadences, lower costs and in some cases, partial or full reusability. All of which are factors indicative of increasing expansion into space as it starts increasingly becoming commercialized. That isn't just "getting really good at redoing 1939 to 1969", that's taking the latest in materials science, electronics and so on to push the line in what we are capable of doing in space. These capabilities were simply not realistic even in the 90s. Both American lunar landers under development are near scifi in terms of their capabilities, a far cry from the Apollo era's closet sized tin can.
Saying we're only redoing things is like saying that the latest x86 CPUs are just redoing what the original 8086 did.
Ah sorry for being out of the loop on that one, thanks for the correction. But: it's nothing that hasn't been done many times before, it isn't a space program so much as it is an arms race between NK and SK.
I'm fine with SK getting some satellites into orbit to keep an eye on their neighbor but at the same time I don't see it as a breakthrough of sorts. Starship, if and when it works and if and when it is used to get stuff out of the Earth-Moon system would be a step. For now I don't see that happening any time soon, if at all. But I'm prepared to be amazed, and Gwynne Shotwell has a history of delivering the goods.
No, indeed, I'm not a believer. When I see someone that lies with abandon and who regularly behaves in absolutely horrible ways towards others and that person happens to want to establish a colony on another planet my first thought is 'nutcase' not 'savior of humanity'.
I marked Musk very early (long before his name became a household item) as someone with a ton of potential and he has definitely realized some of it. But along the way he's become a horrible human being who will now potentially undo any good that he's done and then some. If you are a believer than I'm perfectly ok with that and I hope that you will be strengthened in your belief and that you are right.
In the meantime I'll just take what I see and extrapolate from there and it doesn't look good.
> SpaceX alone has launched almost 100 times this year, Starship testing is proceeding well, we're reasonably on track for a long term human presence on the Moon, we're gradually preparing for Mars, China is managing to maintain its own space station, India is closing in on its own crewed spaceflight capability, South Korea achieved orbit last year and so on.
Yes, we had all that and then some. Somewhere between the 60's and the 80's we took a detour and since then we've been losing momentum ever faster. I'm not one of the believers in Elon Musk, his Mars Colony is just a way to get people to do what he wants them to do. China has so many internal issues that I highly doubt they will be able to sustain any long term efforts and India may well be the future, though it would have to deal with a lot of internal problems as well if it is to happen. South Korea 'achieved orbit' on a SpaceX rocket, not by their own power.
You can label all of this as progress and in terms of volume launched into space it is impressive, but it doesn't move the needle in terms of actual progress towards anything much larger. It's like the software people with 30 times one year of experience, we're getting really good at redoing the years between 1939 and 1969. But we haven't progressed to 1990 even once. 1977: peak humanity.