50 years in space

.blitz

It's 50 years today since Gagarin climbed into a capsule on top of a giant firework and said 'Let's go'.

Can't really see this pioneering spirit ever being repeated. The moonshots cost 25 billion and the shuttle was flying by the seat of its pants and now it seems our exploration of space will be limited to paying customers on Virgin Galactic.

Sad times it was just amazing seeing people set off for the Moon.

supersonic

Russians did so much first - probably the moon too with a bit of luck.

Sadly also 25 years this month since Chernobyl.

Northwind

I met a shuttle crewmember the other day, was pretty cool... Though they never let her drive the thing so that's points off.

Agree it's sad, watching things being run down as well, the experienced crew and operators aren't going to get any younger. And when you think of the total crap they used to fly the early missions, even the shuttles are stone-aged, a new Airbus is more advanced in a lot of ways... I want to put on a spacesuit and freeride down olympus mons! Get it done!

supersonic

I hear my Nokia N95 has more computing power than the first space missions. That is bloody scary lol. 'The application has run of memory. Please land in the nearest sea'.

Thewaylander

Currently America/NASA are starting work on projects for manned space flights to some asteroids which is interesting, there are some interesting projects out there long term.

But there are alot more automated space projects on the go at the moment which are automated all though the latest one which was going to a bunch of things on mars again i believe has hit some nasty cuts.

I hold out hope asteroids are a brilliant source of resources for us

joshtp

Jake151 wrote:

The rocket that sent them to the moon had if I remember rightly a program on the memory of a floppy disk, that's a program of about 256kb controlling the craft.

They had balls.

my phone could fly that thing... in fact pretty much anything could.

Raymondavalon

I recall watching a program on the Beeb about space missions. The old Apollo mission computers were hard wired and this delicate task was entrusted to a team of women who would painstakingly wire the memory matrixes together

I worked with an ex NASA engineer at Intel when I lived in the Joo Ess of Aye
Columbia used the old 8 inch FDD drives, he told me that each shuttle had unique electronics that improved as technology did
They never upgraded this part of working shuttles due to the vast amount of changes and downtime this would cause.
He told me the electronic between Columbia and Endeavor were night and day, even though they all shared basically the same outer shell.

Space flight has certainly pushed the boundaries in humans, engineering and electronics

Rich9

I met Bob Springer last year. Flew 2 shuttle missions in early 90's. Told some amazing stories, and some of the pictures.. :shock: