Carried Away

2001 -- Where Are The Fluffy Spaceships?

After having rented 2001:  A Space Odyssey several times, I decided to buy the DVD.  This is a great near future technology imagination, but sometimes I get a little disappointed by the things that were imagined by Kubrick and Clarke that have not yet come to pass, such as routine human spaceflight and substantial structures on orbit.

One interesting difference between the imagined and what has been learned in the meantime to be the best way to do things is the absence in 2001 of "fluffy" spaceships and space stations.  Here is a screenshot of the space shuttle in the movie that would need either to be fluffier or to have more advanced materials capable of taking the heat of reentry to the Earth's atmosphere.  It's not easy to see in this screenshot, but there is a Pan American logo.  I think that's funny.

 

And here's a space station to which the space station travels.  NASA and Bigelow Aerospace have figured out that the best way to build space station modules is to make them inflatable.  All of the spaceships and space stations in 2001 have hard shells.

If we remade the movie nowadays, what would it look like?

Don't Call or Write Your Congressman

What actions can I take as an individual to help our nation expand its space exploration activities?

This is the most common question that I hear among space enthusiasts.  Last night while listening to The Space Show, the guest, Ed Buckbee, repeated the most common answer:  Call or write your congressman to let him know that you support funding for a strong space program.  To my mind, that's precisely the wrong thing to do.  Instead, I would call or write my congressman to tell him (or her, in my case) that the space program -- especially the manned program -- as currently configured is a waste of money and that much of NASA's funding should be refunded to the American taxpayer.

A space enthusiast should save his refunds and other money so that at some period in the future, he can spend money to go to space too.  Spend $3,000 for a zero-g flight available now.  Spend $200,000 for a suborbital flight available in a couple of years.  Spend $20 million for a flight into Low Earth Orbit available now.  These actions will demonstrate to potential investors that we care about spacefaring and are willing to put our money in the  pot to encourage it.