“I can see so many sick and impoverished children from up here!”
—Jeff Bezos, probably
As though he cares to look.
They were obstructing the view.
“eurgh… i can see so many sick and impoverished children from up here! quick, get rid of them.”
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Travel to where exactly?
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To do what when you arrive at this novel location? Leave Edison’s electrocution of an elephant out of this.
Look at the earliest airplanes. Little things made out of cotton and balsa that couldn’t outrace a strong horse.
Look at the earliest video games.
edit = I’m not a Bezos fanboy, but if we’re going to have space travel there are going to be stunts, just like there were back in barnstormer days.
Space travel is not the same.
Strictly considering low earth orbit, one needs to accelerate a payload to 25,000 km/h and like 500km above the ground. This is not computation or atmospheric flight. There’s no shortcut, no engineering to work out, the physics dictates this is a hard problem. Solutions:
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You go up with a chemical rocket, where almost all the launch mass is fuel. To get the ratio in your head, think the liquid in a coke can vs the can that holds it… that’s the mass/fuel ratio we’re dealing with, and tricks like hybrid engines or booster returns barely soften the MASSIVE cost for even the tiniest things you send up.
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You assist it from the ground. “Gun” launches, as some are developing (and that I’m quite enthusiastic about), can’t launch humans. Stratolaunches (from planes) only get you partway there, more like a booster.
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You go nuclear. This is the only way to increase energy density vs. chemical rockets enough to make a difference. Needless to say, there are significant environmental/safety concerns when doing this on the ground, and I’m as pro-nuclear as anyone you’ll find. Check out Atomic Rockets for more on this, with concrete theoretical designs that are still batshit crazy: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/engineintro.php
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You develop a space elevator or some analogue. No commercial launch research is even pretending to develop this, and it would require massive materials science breakthroughs.
…That’s it. That’s how you get to space. This isn’t a “Wright Brothers vs modern jets” thing, that kind of cost optimization is just not physically possible. And whenever Musk lies through his teeth about practically colonizing Mars, people need to understand that…
I’m going to approach this from the perspective of someone playing Kerbal Space Program. Early on in the career mode, you need money to build new rockets, gather science, and develop new designs that take you further into space. Without early on tourists, you’re sunk. They provide a lot of the hype and money so you can research/get to that next phase.
Real life is different, I get it. I doubt these celebrities paid much if anything. It’s just rich people doing rich people stuff.
Yeah, low volume space tourism is fine. Bezos and such are funding quite a bit.
What I was getting at is the meme that “mass” space flight (much less interplanetary colonization) is in any way practical. It is not. It will not be, at least not until civilization is more along the lines of Orion’s Arm or similar sci-fi. KSP is a fantastic illustration of that, as (even with a much smaller planet than Earth) one pays for every ounce that has to move in space.
Play Kerbal Space Program Realism Overhaul if you want a … much closer to ‘real’ taste of how much more complicated and difficult an orbital flight is than a subortial flight, a lunar flight is than an orbital flight, an extraplanetary flight is than a lunar flight.
I’m not sure if it is still the unofficial motto of the mod… but it used to be ‘if you cannot figure out how to install this mod, you will not be capable of playing it anyway’, or something to that effect.
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Planes now: a huge waste of resources because people believe they’re entitled to traveling around the globe
How about we don’t repeat the same mistake with space travel?
Edit: always funny to see that progressives aren’t ready to question their first world privilege to travel around the globe to go meet people that will never be able to afford to do the same thing
I think there’s a solution in taxing the heavy users while not punishing people who only fly every 1~3 years. This specifically needs to start with the abuse of private planes with ridiculously high carbon use per capita.
In the end those heavy users represent nothing compared to the planes used by regular tourists. On an individual basis then sure, they’re worse, but that’s like saying African countries need to stop using old cars because they don’t have modern emission equipment while you’re stuck in traffic in LA in your 2020 Honda Civic.
Traveling thousands of miles for a few days of vacation isn’t a right, it’s a privilege that people are abusing. People act like they can’t live without it but it’s a small minority of people who will take a plane in their lifetime.
Emissions at altitude are worse than the same emissions at ground level and planes don’t have any filtering equipment.
Their fuel economy per passenger isn’t that great either, two passengers in a small car burn less gas per km than if they were using the biggest plane full of passengers to travel the same distance. Four passengers in a V8 SUV are more fuel efficient than an A380 filled with passengers.
Planes have a fucking destination and are designed to move volumes of people from A to B, and still can’t compete with rail over 1000km distances (see: France).
Video games were designed to be replayable and accessible to the masses, running on the common hardware at the time.
The Wright brothers didn’t have a fucking destination they were just trying to fly.
They were trying to invent a device of practical utility that could carry passengers and payloads, not to empower the eccentric elite
I don’t think there’s really any evidence of that.
I’m sure they were mindful of the potential applications, in the same way that we’re mindful of the potential for orbital solar arrays and asteroid mining.
