Skip to main content

It turns out space travel is too hard

With the launch of Artemis 1 it looks like human space travel is definitely going to be a thing again. When I was a kid I thought space travel would become something that lots of us would be able to do. I read enough SF stories about it which treated it as normal. As I've grown older I've realised that a) it's expensive and b) it's hard. Current missions only work because there are vast teams of people on the ground helping out. So only a few people are going to be able to travel in space. The idea of a plucky little vessel touring the solar system seems impossible when there's so much that could go wrong that they couldn't fix themselves.

The idea of hyperspace travel doesn't look feasible through any technology we can foresee at the moment. So we're not even getting out of the solar system.

Here's some more reading on the subject:

How hard it is to get off the surface of Mars


Update 29 Nov 2022. Whilst reasearching another post I came across this:

Update 17 Jan 2023 Pointers to other articles, including that rant mentioned above from Adactio - Mars distracts.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

20 years of blogging: fourth post

4/1/2000 Things are moving   We've had the letter from Wycliffe about "raising support".  They want us to aim that 25% of our income comes from other people by the end of a year, and 50% by the end of two years.  Other news: I've officially asked for voluntary redundancy Spoiler: after 4 years of trying I didn't even get to 20%, so I was paid a salary after all.

Follow up to Matt's "Three feelings" post

This is in response to Matt 's post Three feelings I don't have a word for .  (A blog post in response to a blog post. How quaint.) "Imagined vastness" sounds like a very specific instance of the more general "sense of wonder" or sensawunda . For me I get that feeling of imagined vastness when reading Iain M Banks' Culture series. I don't get the Stack Overflow vertigo he talks about, but I do have a feeling of holding something almost physical when I've got something on the clipboard and I haven't pasted it yet. It's similar to the feeling that I (maybe it is just me) get when I know there's a bit of coffee left at the bottom of the cup. Atemporal hotel lobbies is something I can't really relate to. I do have my own unnamed feeling though: Cycling to work It's that moment when I whizz down our sloped drive and start pedalling up to the road. Because I WFH I go out at lunchtime these days, and the feeling just isn't the sa

20 years of blogging: First post

Back in 1999 it mostly cost money to run a blog (from what I can remember). You had to sort out your own hosting. Then Dave Winer  made on offer on his blogging platform editthispage.com  for a 60 day free trial , so I was away. So what was my very first post? What words did I choose to post for all on the internet to see?  23 December 1999 I'm stil trying to decide what to do with this. Click on the skull to add your suggestion. Oh, that's not very good is it. A typo in the second word too. The URL was morrissfamily.editthispage.com. (I think. Everything I say could be unreliable, because it was a while ago.) I also created an FAQ page that day: Who are the Morriss family? We are just a normal family with a dad who likes exploring the internet. Why don't you have more information? Because I'm not sure want I want to do with this site. I think there are no typos there. The idea was that I would share family news. Come back in January to see what my next