A view that many of us thought we would experience someday, but never will.

[onehandle]

For a brief moment we thought that science was making a comeback.

'Hell no it isn't!



Explanation: There's no place like home. Peering out of the windows of the International Space Station (ISS), astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson takes in the planet on which we were all born, and to which she would soon return. About 350 kilometers up, the ISS is high enough so that the Earth's horizon appears clearly curved. Astronaut Dyson's windows show some of Earth's complex clouds, in white, and life giving atmosphere and oceans, in blue. The space station orbits the Earth about once every 90 minutes. It is not difficult for people living below to look back toward the ISS. The ISS can frequently be seen as a bright point of light drifting overhead just after sunset. Telescopes can even resolve the overall structure of the space station. The above image was taken in late September from the ISS's Cupola window bay. Dr. Dyson is a lead vocalist in the band Max Q.


http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap101115.html

[DFab420]

1. ??? Huh ??

Sooooo


Where in all of this is science not making a comeback?

Link to particular story??

[The Wielding Truth]

2. If you have enough cash the guy from Virgin Airlines is planning

commercial flights to space.

[onehandle]

3. Not the same. It's barely to the edge and it's for the elite. nt

[Atypical Liberal]

4. To be fair...

To be fair, the amount of energy required to do a sub-orbital flight and an orbital flight are quite different.

And many commonplace items were once the purview of the rich. Computers. Refrigeration. Air conditioning.

Commercial interests are making progress. SpaceX made it to orbit on their fourth try. Bigelow Aerospace is making great strides with their inflatable space station components.

What it is going to take is for some huge financial interest to be discovered in space. Industry will follow. For good and ill, nothing motivates like profit.

[A HERETIC I AM]

5. The "huge financial interest" already exists, and the knowledge of how to exploit it has been known

for decades.

http://www.nss.org/settlement/L5news/L5history.htm

There has just been no willingness so far to go forward with such a scheme.

But sooner or later, we will.

Humankind will find ourselves with no other choice.

Edited to add this link and a pic or 2;

http://mike-combs.com/space/TCoS.html

30 years ago, I was convinced I would either be able to look up in the sky and clearly be able to see something like this or that I would be working up there on something like this;





The fact that we are no where nearer to even starting such a project than we were when it was the cover story of the July, 1976 National Geographic Magazine is troubling, to say the least.

[onehandle]

6. In the 80s I saw a talk presented by an ex-Nasa guy.

He told us that high-tech industry would move into space within a couple of decades, because the zero-gravity conditions made for better microchips and technology in general.

I was convinced he was right.

Not right.