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chasing

That's amazing.

The photo of Charon might be the most straight-up gorgeous of the lot so far:

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/charon-s-surprising-youth...

At least to my eye. It's just such a classic shot of a world.

Anyway: USA! USA! (I kid!) Go humanity!

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USA! USA!

I've seem comments on here that it's not OK to say that, but if you are a US citizen then I think you damn well should be proud of this and I'll applaud anyone who makes space work. It's frikkin' hard.

When I see a Soyuz launch I think "Go, Russia" and I felt similar things when India, China or Japan launch rockets. Just today Ariane put a satellite in space. Go, Europe!

Hell, as a Brit I'm proud of Prospero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospero_(satellite)

> I've seem comments on here that it's not OK to say that,

Oh man. My kingdom for this thread not starting again.

Absolutely. We're proud of our football teams, why not be proud of our space teams? I only wish we could stir the general public to equal levels of excitement for space as we can for sport.

> We're proud of our football teams, why not be proud of our space teams?

Because at some point we realized that we can only be proud of our own achievements.

Sadly most people never realize that and so they root for nations, sport teams and so on as a supplement. Mostly to identify with and also (in this process) to put others down.

We (or most of us) need an identity and most of us never develop one for ourselves, that does not need an outside entity to feel strong/good/important/validated enough.

Nations should die and not exist. Shouting nations names with pride is shameful and dumb. Nationalism kills. It’s an awful, toxic ideology.

Death to all nations. May no nations exist in the future.

(If you get to spew your ideological bullshit I get to spew my own deeply held and utterly impractical ideological bullshit believes. No, seriously, I want nations to not exist eventually. I think the world would be vastly better without them.)

I'm curious if, as an alternative, you'd rather see decentralization (smaller population units), some kind of global superstate, or something else entirely?

We've all seen the poisons of nationalism, but I wonder if what one might call "tribalist" tendencies are so easy to vanquish - assuming one even wants to.

Better than shouting would be to actually push legislators to fund space programs better. Most of these programs are run on less than 1% of overall government budgets.

Or.. Both?

Because realy, it is an exclusive either-or choice between shouting or pushing for better funding?

Shouting seems like a good way to do that. Political machine in western countries is focused on pandering to the public, so if public (shows that it) wants space, space they'll get.

Minor correction: Ariane -> ESA (European Space Agency). Ariane is the name of the rocket (and 'Arianespace' the name of the company that does the actual launching for ESA, but that's just part of ESA with a different name).

BTW, I saw they have a Soyuz manual on their website: http://www.arianespace.com/launch-services-soyuz/Soyuz-Users... [pdf]

> Anyway: USA! USA! (I kid!) Go humanity!

Well it was a grand old dick-waving contest in the 60s. Why not now as well.

But think of how it drove progress!

Seriously, would we have expended even a tenth of as much energy into building the rocket technology to go to space, without the nationalistic prestige race in the 60s? Or the idea that we could use them to lob nuclear holocaust at each other if shit hit the fan?

I'll take Nationalism + Badass space exploration over Kim Kardashian + Autotune any day of the millennium.

I just wish we'd have dropped a US flag onto Pluto. Nothing like envy to make someone else achieve something great!

> I'll take Nationalism + Badass space exploration over Kim Kardashian + Autotune any day

Kim doesn't have a long track record of leading to war and genocide. Nor do autotune and badass space exploration (yet).

Maybe humanity needs to live under a threat of annihilation in order to get its collective shit together? It's a thought that comes to my mind every time I open a news site.

Not visiting websites that you don't like has the effect of making you less cynical IME.

Dropping a US flag onto Pluto, at 14 Km/s, would have had the effect of a small nuke. :)

What about, dropping Christopher Walken onto Pluto?

it wasn't the dick waving bits that drove progress. it actually postponed it in many areas... that apollo program was damned expensive relative to the technology that came out of it. a gigantic vanity project.

that whole man on the moon business is really quite dumb (although impressive) compared to the robotic probes we use today, which are what the soviet union was pioneering at the time... all that dick waving stopped them from doing it sooner.

Probes are good for exploration, but colonies are useful too, and it's a shame that we stopped putting in nearly any effort along those lines.

but the problem was that we reversed the order. We should have gone to moon in the late 80s rather than build the shuttle, after having built a ton robotic probes and having much better automation. Imagine where we would be if we'd had a sustained 10-50 Billion /year increase in AI and robotics over the past 50 years. But because we pushed manned systems first, we both became disillusioned at the cost/benefit ratio and made that ratio worse by becoming very concerned about human life risk. And thus we lost momentum - budgetary, career-wise in engineering, public sentiment, political support ... On the other hand - I am a big supporter of the Goldin era "Faster, Better, Cheaper" approach. We got more done even with a 50% failure rate, and at half the cost - just by flat out doing more.

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