Where are our current space missions?

[rightwinger]

This stunning infographic shows where our 25 active space missions are - The Week

We have satellites orbiting Mercury, Venus, The Moon, Mars and Saturn. We have rovers exploring the surface of Mars and Voyager probes 11 Billion miles away

 

[TheOldSchool]

New Horizons is a little over 1 year away from pluto

 

[TheOldSchool]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_(spacecraft)

^ Really interesting if you've never heard of it. When we landed on Titan the larget of Saturn's moons.

^ The only image from the surface of a planetary body from the outer solar system

 

[ScienceRocks]

Need to terra-form or make plans to do so to Venus. We're discovering ways to turn co2 to different elements...This can be a start.

Mars is way to small to be effective as the atmosphere wouldn't hold,

Invest more into extrasolar planet telescopes and maybe a mission to Europa.

 

[TheOldSchool]

The vehicle that will take us to Mars:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)

^ It's existence was put into jeopardy when Obama completely neutered NASA early in his Presidency but he's made good strides in redeeming himself.

 

[william the wie]

I like the idea of orbital braking of chunks of ice with Venus to reduce the oversupply of gases. That would speed up terraforming by a lot.

 

[SmedlyButler]

Voyager is so far away it takes over 10 hrs for it's signals to reach Earth. Mindblowing. Opportunity was scheduled as a 90 day mission. 10 yrs later it's still producing valuable data, that's getting your moneys worth.

 

[SmedlyButler]

This stunning infographic shows where our 25 active space missions are - The Week

We have satellites orbiting Mercury, Venus, The Moon, Mars and Saturn. We have rovers exploring the surface of Mars and Voyager probes 11 Billion miles away

Nasa's budget is around $17 Billion. Pentagon's budget is around $700 Billion. Just imagine if you took 100B from "Defense" (that's actually the capability to act as the World's police force) and put it into Nasa. I think you'd really get compound interest back. Mining asteroids, terra-forming Mars, who knows? benefits beyond what we can even imagine. Our ancestors had to invent Gods to explain the Universe. Now we're glimpsing secrets inside of exploding stars and even peeling back the layers of super-massive black holes. Man, what you could do with even another $10B.

 

[SmedlyButler]

Need to terra-form or make plans to do so to Venus. We're discovering ways to turn co2 to different elements...This can be a start.

Mars is way to small to be effective as the atmosphere wouldn't hold,

Invest more into extrasolar planet telescopes and maybe a mission to Europa.

"NASA scientists believe that it is technologically possible at the present time to create considerable global climate changes, allowing humans to live on Mars. But this will not be by any means an easy task. Raising the atmospheric pressure and surface temperature alone could be achieved in a few decades."

A Venetian "day" is about 117 Earth days. This is very problematic. The existing atmosphere is highly toxic (Sulpherous) I believe starting from almost zero on Mars is a lot more realistic.

And is Venus even in the "Goldilocks Zone"? LINK:It doesn't appear so "About 4 billion years ago, Venus was located near the inner edge of the habitable zone; today it lies closer to the Sun than the inner edge of the habitable zone".

 

[SmedlyButler]

The vehicle that will take us to Mars:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)

^ It's existence was put into jeopardy when Obama completely neutered NASA early in his Presidency but he's made good strides in redeeming himself.

I'm a broken record on this. The money America spends on defense makes every other budget decision so hard.

Damn, if you put $100B a year into NASA you could rule the world, if that's what you really wanted.

 

[ScienceRocks]

The vehicle that will take us to Mars:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)

^ It's existence was put into jeopardy when Obama completely neutered NASA early in his Presidency but he's made good strides in redeeming himself.

I'm a broken record on this. The money America spends on defense makes every other budget decision so hard.

Damn, if you put $100B a year into NASA you could rule the world, if that's what you really wanted.

The resources within our own solar system would do more to bring humanity up then anything. What are you going to do conservatives??? Destroy the planet, pollute our rivers and strip mine the mountains to get at what we could get from our solar system. WITHOUT effect on our planet.

50 billion would assure humanity never has to worry about extinction as we'd have humans on the moon and mars. Unimaginable innovation!

 

[Rozman]

VGer wants to join with the creator....Still waiting for an answer to it's transmission.

 

[TheOldSchool]

It saddens me that there is such little interest in this topic. The sense of "wonderment" is almost completely lost to the human race

 

[ScienceRocks]

It saddens me that there is such little interest in this topic. The sense of "wonderment" is almost completely lost to the human race

Very sad,

99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of everything with possibly tens of billions of earth like planets within our galaxy. This country is going backwards and don't want to find planets, civilizations and investment within its own advancement. Doesn't act like a great power anymore.

 

[william the wie]

It saddens me that there is such little interest in this topic. The sense of "wonderment" is almost completely lost to the human race

You are ignoring the commercialization of space. No one puts money into exploration just for Ss & Gs.

 

[ScienceRocks]

It saddens me that there is such little interest in this topic. The sense of "wonderment" is almost completely lost to the human race

You are ignoring the commercialization of space. No one puts money into exploration just for Ss & Gs.

Commercialization good...BUT the survival and exploration of our species shouldn't be about profit.

 

[william the wie]

Sorry but the survival of out species is 100% about turning a profit and converting cash into genetic income.

 

[TheOldSchool]

Sorry but the survival of out species is 100% about turning a profit and converting cash into genetic income.

Some of the greatest scientific achievements of mankind were driven by profit and income. But the ABSOLUTE GREATEST scientific achievements of mankind had NOTHING to do with profit and income.

Science for the sake of science is AT THE LEAST as important as science for the sake of profit. And I feel that I greatly insulted the former with that sentence.

 

[william the wie]

We're not talking pure science we are talking engineering. Even applied science is slowing way down as time goes on. An oldie but goodie on the subject would be "The Third Industrial Revolution" by G. Harry Stine 1975. We out ran the technologies constraint in the 1960s and no pure and very few applied scientific breakthroughs have happened since the 1960s usually the anti-virals are the usual example cited for recent breakthroughs in applied science. No new principles of pure hard science outside of neurology have been uncovered in the past 40 years. And most applied science such as the God particle were predicted long ago.

 

[rdean]

The vehicle that will take us to Mars:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(spacecraft)

^ It's existence was put into jeopardy when Obama completely neutered NASA early in his Presidency but he's made good strides in redeeming himself.

Obama was given a policy of "let's go the to moon again". Since then, he has gotten private industry involved and helped turn space into a money making venture.
Good policies aren't "instant". They take time to develop. And that's just the plan. Then you have to develop the strategy to run the plan. And that takes time. And you have to put together the right team. Remember all the flack Obama got early in his administration? That he ruined NASA? He will leave a long lasting legacy. The right wing will finally admit it when they admit they had nothing to do with taking out Bin Laden and Iraq was a fiasco and the Bush Tax Cuts didn't work.