We just got a different future. Different advancements were made.
Colonies on the moon might sound cool, but there's no real economic benefit, and the cost is astronomical.
Colonies on the moon might sound cool, but there's no real economic benefit, and the cost is astronomical.
Humans are attuned to survival not coordinating millions of people to a common goal.
Give us a break!
Von Braun was the first to make a guided rocket (developments like the de Laval nozzle and rocket equation had just been discovered). The US poached him and sent him to West Texas, then Alabama, without a whole lot to do. Probably to keep him out of enemy hands. The US government had their money and "intelligence communities" lined up behind the Vanguard rocket. It was only because the Vanguard rocket failed so embarassingly while the Soviets won the space race that Eisenhower started NASA and gave Von Braun some funding. So Von Braun wrote a letter to Kennedy, and he got his childhood wish to go to the moon. And he did it. The greatest engineering and technological achievement in history. All the politics (like cost-plus suppliers) still hurt the program, but they really made a lot of progress. So then the new NASA bureaucracy pushed him out and went on to do bureaucratic things like build the ridiculously badly conceived STS (they proposed ideas and Nixon picked it), and crash it even when NASA engineers told them before hand that a foam strike was going to happen as was the case with the Challenger Groupthink disaster.
The Soviets also had plenty of childish and embarassing dramas and politics of their own going on as well.
It's all a shame, really. People can do amazing things, but I'm not willing to pretend our shortcomings aren't because of moral failings.
There is no legitimately good reason for the Challenger disaster, or having to rely on Russians for their superior rocket tech to get into orbit.
The upside of this is that if we can maintain this cocktail of traits while curbing the more obviously dangerous ones, we may be able to surpass greatly what we've accomplished so far. I hope anyway.
Ultimately what seems to drive us forward (IMHO), is finding new ways to kill each other.
Tom Lehrer's take strikes me about right: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5V7me25aNtI
However, during the end of WWII he intentionally surrendered himself, his team and capital into our hands -- the Americans. He came to America, assimilated and oversaw the greatest engineering feat in history when we were losing the space race to Russia, and would have continued to lose without him.
I would also consider, what should he or could he have done in his time? OK, how about what have I or you done to stop the genocide in Darfur? Nobody in the Western world did much, and we didn't do anything at all about the Cambodian genocide. The American Government has also never officially acknowledged the Native American genocide, or paid reparations for it--these would be crimes in Germany today.
In my mind it is important to address these moral questions, which are indeed difficult, but if we are not honest about them then we find can at times be the pot calling the kettle black.
(Has this ever been explored in fiction, a very determined and patient civilization digging themselves out of an unrocketably deep gravity well?)
Yes, spacecraft are more fragile than pellets, and canned primates even more so, but a ludicrously long acceleration track is still going to cost peanuts compared to the kind of planetary liposuction you're talking about.
Maybe you could launch materials and construction robots for an elevator using a mass driver then use the elevator for passengers, I dunno. Still need some non-rocket way to get things up there.
So are we getting fatter or slimmer? By a quick Google survey it depends which estimates one trusts, but probably losing a bit.
Everything is economically viable when you can employ fantasy magic technology to make it happen.
Are you familiar with the companies that are being set up to do this, and that are backed by Eric Schmidt et al?