Watching live on TV they're back home
They're back home. Astronauts return
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
Yay!!!! 
They're still broadcasting, people around the now open hatch.
They are helping them out of the capsule. It's been an exciting morning
They are helping them out of the capsule. It's been an exciting morning
Seems to me that right now, Boeing needs to get its act together. I'm very uncomfortable with Russia and Musk being the gatekeepers for Earth orbit.
Yes there has to be an alternative to Elon but well, there is Bezos but he's just as bad isn't he?
Love how a school of dolphins showed up to ‘supervise’ the humans… 
Cheers & Welcome Home!
-CM-
Cheers & Welcome Home!
-CM-
So glad these two are finally back home!
It was really quite exciting watching it this morning and taking the pics off the TV as if I was living through something historical, well in fact it was I would say.
Bezos hasn't yet put anyone into orbit. China can put astronauts into LEO and India might do so in the next few years.
I'd like to hope that Starliner could salvaged at this point. I understand that there could be buyers for the craft and since significant R&D has already gone into it, it could be a worthwhile investment. A re-branding may be necessary to wash off the recent stink.
SNC's Dreamchaser "Tenacity" is due to launch to the ISS this year. Cargo-only at this point, but a crewed variant is in development.
The more options, the better.
I find that rather sad, actually. I had that experience over 50 years ago when I watched the last Apollo mission or two land on the Moon, when I was barely old enough to understand it. Back then, everyone expected that people half a century in their future would find space travel routine, no more historic than watching a passenger plane take off or land. Instead, we've actually regressed to the point that simply coming back from low orbit is considered a historic feat.
But the space race was mostly political. Once the US beat the Russians to the Moon interest seemed to wax and wane.
Everything has to be financial these days or so it seems. Would discovering gobs and gobs of rare earth metals on the Moon get that interest back?
This could help.
Total estimated value of all the He-3 vary from $1 quadrillion to $4 quadrillion, but it's a viable return on investment.
Helium-3 mining on the lunar surface
The idea of harvesting a clean and efficient form of energy from the Moon has stimulated science fiction and fact in recent decades. Unlike Earth, which is protected by its magnetic field, the Moon has been bombarded with large quantities of Helium-3 by the solar wind. It is thought that this...
www.esa.int
Total estimated value of all the He-3 vary from $1 quadrillion to $4 quadrillion, but it's a viable return on investment.
In retrospect, that's become clear, but it didn't feel that way to us at the time. When I rewatched some of The Six Million Dollar Man some years back, I was struck by the reminder of the great sense of optimism we had in the '70s about human progress in space exploration in the near future, and how far reality has fallen short of that. And of course there's Star Trek assuming we'd have interplanetary sleeper ships by the 1990s, Space: 1999 assuming a big active Moonbase by that year, Doctor Who assuming we'd have a Moon colony and interplanetary space stations by the early 2000s, etc.
Probably, yes. One thing I learned in my Frontiers in World History course in college is that the colonization or exploitation of frontiers doesn't take off in earnest until a government partners with a private enterprise that makes it profitable, subsidising the risk and sharing in the reward -- e.g. the fur traders in North America, the Cossacks that opened up Siberia, or the East India Companies. You're right that the US and USSR governments pulled back on space exploration when there was no longer something in it for them, but I've long believed that once profitable enterprises like space mining, tourism, or microgravity pharmaceutical and material manufacturing take off, government will have an incentive to partner with business and subsidise their development of space in exchange for a share of the returns, just like it's happened on other frontiers in the past.
We still haven't implemented long term Rotational Habitats to maintain Simulated Gravity.
And we still need to improve Radiation Shielding as well, not just for human health, but for being able to move onto more newer Process Node IC's.
Most Space Tech is on MUCH older nodes due to Radiation being very bad for IC's and we haven't found good ways to shield Computer Hardware of the latest generation Process Nodes yet.
So random radiation could do ALOT of damage to modern circuitry due to how small transistors have become.
Which is kind of the point. The incentive to solve those problems will be much greater once space travel starts turning a profit.
The question is what is going to get harvested to jump start that new "Space Race"?
A lot of SF authors, including myself and the authors of The Expanse, have portrayed asteroid mining as a major driver of space settlement. I already mentioned microgravity materials and pharmaceuticals and space tourism, and solar power satellites could be a major industry.
In my universe, there's also something called the Belt Homestead Act, paralleling the Homestead Act from American history, where the Earth government provides financial incentives for people to emigrate to space. (I originally saw it as a population-control measure, although I no longer think overpopulation is the threat to the Earth that we were always taught it was when I was younger.)
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