How Many People Are In Space Right Now? | Hacker News Reader

How Many People Are In Space Right Now?

howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com

106 pointsjonmc1241 comments

According to an unsourced claim on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human), the largest value ever reached for this number was 13 (which is surprisingly low).

Here's a citation (http://www.universetoday.com/27924/soyuz-rockets-to-space-13...) it last happened in 2009. Three ISS, seven shuttle, and three Soyuz. It also happened in 1995 (Mir) and 1997.

Awesome, thanks! Wikipedia article updated.

This is a testament to how damned expensive it is to get into space. There is no subverting the laws of physics.

get out of earth's gravity well and you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system, energy wise.

I just got shivers as I pictured the changes that would occur on this site over the next three or four centuries were it kept up to date for all that time.

Hope the real change in that value doesn't disappoints us. If I travelled in time from 1970 to today and looked at this site I surely would be disappointed.

They make you autofollow once you visit the page and are signed into Tumblr, not cool.

Not for me. (Chrome, OS X)

More specifically, this is the number of live people in space. I'd be curious to know how many dead people are in space as well (the ones who had their body's launched upon passing).

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

Note that some of them only have sub-orbital "burials" and end up back home.

Personally I'd be cool with being buried on the moon. Preferably in a giant monolith. Perhaps through http://www.ironicsans.com/2011/01/idea_crowdfund_a_mission_t...

That's a really cool thought, that some of us "star dust" creatures went back out into the stars. They are 5 billion years ahead of the rest of us :)

The number may be larger than we know because of the undocumented disappearances of early Soviet cosmonauts. Although Yuri Gagarin is widely believed to be the first man in space, it is highly probable that he was only the first man to survive space travel.

This is a conspiracy theory with absolutely no solid evidence behind it.

This site may actually bankrupt NASA if they keep hotlinking that 1.7mb background image.

(that civilians know about :))

yea pretty sure there are another couple hundred people on the secret CIA space ship, conspiring in space about their evil plan to take over the world.

The SR71 was a secret for a long time. Now it's in museums. What secret aircraft/spacecraft do we have now? Beyond the x37? The military budget is orders of mag greater than NASAs. That's what I meant.

I would guess that the secret aircraft of today, likely as not don't have people in them.

I think the grandparent was referring to extraterrestrial life that we haven't discovered.

Extraterrestrial life = people?

Then who was soylent green?

Too many satellites. Too few people. Seems like space is infested with robots. Gentlemen machines are winning! And it will be my 1001th(in decimal) birthday before I go where no man has gone before. :(

On NPR this morning I heard that the total number who have ever been in space is about 550. That was a lot more than I thought it was.

I think they mean 'Not on Earth'. Being on Earth is same as being in Space. Earth is in Space.

No, they mean "in Space". Why attempt to subvert the obviously standard usage of the word? It's just silly.

Not enough.

I think it's kind of surprising how low the number is. Almost certainly because space exploration is underfunded.

Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of talk about the NASA budget, and there are a couple of things I think many people don't know. The total 2010 US Space budget was $64.6B. The entire rest of the world combined spent only $22.5B. NASA's 2010 budget was $18.7B, 83% of the spending for the rest of the world. It's more than a little ironic when those outside the United States criticize cuts to US space spending. Europeans, in particular, may want to consider the paltry $4.6B ESA budget before they criticize the United States. Space spending does need to increase; the rest of the worlds needs to start contributing.

>Almost certainly because space exploration is underfunded.

Or because there is currently no benefit in conducting exploration using humans instead of robots.

Because we can is almost always a poor reason to do something, but this may be an edge case.

I understand the desire for action, but we need to invent another task besides exploration to engage in. I.e. resource exploitation. Purely observational exploration of outer space is a task for which we are extremely maladapted (vacuum, long distances, etc.) that robots will probably always be better at.

I definitely agree with what you're saying at the beginning, but I'm not so sure about the end.

I think there is some value in putting humans in space. It certainly seems many scientific discoveries are made by a scientist observing or experiencing something, noticing that it is strange, then investigating. A perfect example of this is the development of microwaves, which came about because an engineer working on radar noticed that a candy bar started to melt when near the radar. Robots are certainly superior by almost every metric once you know what you're looking for, but I wouldn't be so sure that we actually know what we are looking for. Boots on the ground, so to speak, can offer insights that a robot simply cannot.

Exploring space with humans for the possibility of positive technological side effects does not seem a reliable, long term way to increase the number of people in space at any given time, if that is your primary goal. It seems like a way to temporarily boost the number by around 3.

If the goal is to increase the number of humans in space for the sake of increasing the number of humans in space, one would probably need to do research into a colonial business model sustainable enough to get investors and governments on board.

Don't confuse underfunded with badly managed. NASA has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on manned spaceflight in the last 5 decades, they went to the moon, they built two space stations, but ultimately they haven't done much to push the state of the art or to make spaceflight more accessible or affordable.

In contrast, a little company like SpaceX comes along and develops two new launch vehicles AND a crew capsule for about $300 million total, dramatically lowering launch costs in the process. This is how we'll increase that number. Not by pumping more money into yet another aerospace jobs program in key congressional districts, but by encouraging the open market and innovation.

I'd cut them a break on "badly managed", blazing the trail is much more expensive than following -- and I really don't see how you can say "they haven't done much to push the state of the art".

But it does seem that it's time to pass the torch to private companies for basic "get to orbit" flights. Would be nice to see NASA blazing the next trail, whatever that is.

Given the accounting and decisions that lead to Challenger plus the political directives from DC, I think "badly managed" is pretty mild to describe how screwed up NASA is.

I still believe if a certain President had said "Permanent Human Presence" instead of "land man on the moon" it would have made all the difference. We blew it all on a race instead of building infrastructure.

Is that the space exploration budget, or NASA's budget as a whole? Manned and unmanned space exploration is only part of NASA's mission. NASA also does a lot of Earth science.

It is possible to criticize the change, comparing that rather than the total. Foreign aid, and many other things are judged this way.

first, astronauts do not really explore space, they mostly operate light machinery. Frankly the mars rovers were the most active space explorers till now.

Secondly, why does humanity need to invest in space right now? I just dont think there's an incentive, people believe life sciences are more important at this time.

Isn't it closer to 4 billion? Probably more, that we don't know about yet?

Edit: Sorry, 6 billion. Didn't mean to make you think 2 bil. people died.

Why is horseshoes being downvoted? He's exactly right, there are about 6.79 billion[1] people in space[2] right now. There are 10 in outer space, but the domain isn't howmanypeopleareinouterspacerightnow.com

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+earth

[2] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Space

And this is why geeks are considered 'retarded'.

Do you really miss the point? No. Pedantic bullshit trolls. Wave to the camera!

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