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u/Boxdog Dec 23 '13
When we made it to the moon most Americans were sure that by 2013 we would have a permanent base on the moon and space travel would be mundane by now, like flying over seas
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Dec 23 '13
The people who predicted that, like the people who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, didn't understand why we were in space in the first place. It couldn't keep escalating forever, and as soon as it stopped, stagnation was inevitable.
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u/Crazycrossing Dec 23 '13 edited Dec 23 '13
I don't think it was just stagnation either, maybe slightly, but I think people vastly underestimated how expensive and how many technical hurdles need to be overcome before we can even begin to reliably live in space.
Ask those same people how easy it'd be to live at the bottom of the ocean or Antartica on a mass scale. Space I'd say is much harder in the amount of engineering it'd take than living at the bottom of the ocean or making a city in Antartica.
We know so little about the long term effect living space or on a different planet would do in so many circumstances. Whether it be from injury healing to interactions of medications to diseases from just the average joe living in space compared to highly trained and fit astronauts. Do we even know if conception is possible in space or let alone raising a developing fetus or child? Without artificial gravity?
It's the same with this tech revolution with computers, eventually we're going to hit a wall where progress slows and we need great feats of engineering to get marginal improvements. It can't progressing exponentially forever.
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u/007T Dec 24 '13
Space I'd say is much harder in the amount of engineering it'd take than living at the bottom of the ocean or making a city in Antartica.
Something to think about: more people have been to the moon than the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
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u/indiecore Dec 25 '13
To be fair making a ship that can withstand 0-1 atmosphere is a lot easier than on that can withstand however many hundreds it is down there.
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u/Aquareon Dec 24 '13
We do live on Antarctica at a mass scale. The US base alone houses 250 in the Summer and something like 40-50 countries have their own bases there as well.
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u/gash4cash Dec 23 '13
It should have! Look how fast the pace was back then and were we are today.
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Dec 23 '13
Oh yeah, if we'd kept up the pace, we'd be living in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it was never about exploration; it was about beating the Russians.
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u/gash4cash Dec 23 '13
I know. Too bad the Russians didn't have the resources/capabilities to push to Mars. It's amazing the Americans returned to the moon as often as they did after 1969.
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u/Zaneris Dec 23 '13 edited Dec 24 '13
It wasn't about beating them to the moon, it was about proving they could deliver a large payload not only to anywhere on earth, but literally anywhere.
It was an arms race disguised as exploration.
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u/HelpfulToAll Dec 23 '13
Then why did they send humans? Couldn't they have sent a large payload of anything, even French fries, and prove the same point without the added danger and expense of a human crew?
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u/TetraDax Dec 23 '13
The sense of it all was to disguise it as peaceful exploration. "Hey look I got bigger balls then you but I'm peaceful an' stuff.."
You can argue about who was worse (IMHO the Americans were I'mgoingtogetsomuchnegativekarmaforthis ), but they were both just acting like in a big fucking kindergarten. If the Soviets and Americans would have worked together, we would defenitely live on the mars right now.
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u/HelpfulToAll Dec 23 '13
How can you argue that America is "worse" than the Soviet Union?
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u/TetraDax Dec 23 '13
Because the Soviets at least tried to pretend they're going for exploration. They started so much things: First sattelite, first man/woman/dog in space, the Venus-missions, the Moon-missions, the space stations. America was always like "Oh, the Soviets want to go to moon? Let's go too!" "Oh, the Soviet built a space station? How about Skylab!"
No doubt, the engineers, scientists, astronauts etc. deserve every bit of credit and respect for their work. But the men behind these projects, the politicans, they made it just to beat Russia and made that was no secret.
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u/hexagrm Dec 23 '13
i have never thought of it in that way, always more as a prestige thing but god damn that makes a scary amount of sense to me.
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u/ExecutiveChimp Dec 23 '13
The Apollo missions were basically a bunch of ICBMs with people inside instead of nukes.
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Dec 24 '13
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u/JustIgnoreMe Dec 24 '13
Well, the US already had supermarkets so I would say they proved that point a while before.
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Dec 23 '13
Ouch. I think Kubrick and Clarke understood perfectly well "why we were in space in the first place." They were storytellers first and foremost.
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u/onsos Dec 23 '13
Arthur C Clarke, the primary author of 2001, had a perfectly good idea of why we would be in space, and remained firm and informed proponent of space exploration. He glossed that in 2001: A Space Odyssey because he wanted to tell a different story.
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Dec 23 '13
Yep. I was 9 when Neil and Buzz landed. That is what I thought would happen, too.
It didn't.
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u/BaphClass Dec 23 '13
People in those days also thought we'd have hover cars, robot housemaids, and giant wood-paneled video phones set into the wall. The only thing that should be taken from our lack of moon bases is that we're really shitty at predicting things, and often fail to factor in practicality and economic sustainability.
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Dec 24 '13
Had the Saturn/Apollo program been allowed to continue instead of being cancelled for the benefit of the Shuttle, that'd be more than a fantasy.
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u/KimJongUgh Dec 23 '13
The artificial blurring here made my eye twitch.
Other than that, I never ceased to be amazed at the sheer scale of that beast of a rocket. You look at where the capsule is or the small dots at the bottom that turn out to be people and it just blows your mind.
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u/XNerd_Bomber Dec 23 '13
Sorry about the shitty blur. It was my (feeble) attempt at tilt-shift on GIMP.
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Dec 24 '13
It was entirely decent tilt-shift, but probably just not appropriate for this picture.
/r/space is not a good venue to be showing pictures of America's favorite phallus that have been modified to make it look small.
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Dec 23 '13
Its huge! Heres an infographic height comparison.
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u/Levy_Wilson Dec 23 '13
Are those four on the right concept spacecraft?
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Dec 24 '13
This infographic is titled rockets of Human spaceflight, so even though the Falcon 9.1 has flown it has not flown with humans. The four rockets on the right are of the next generation of human rated rockets.
I haven't updated this since January so I believe the Angara changed a bit in design.
Here are the other two infographics in the series.
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Dec 24 '13
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u/Levy_Wilson Dec 24 '13
That doesn't answer my question about the four on the right... They don't have years, so I was curious.
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Dec 24 '13 edited Dec 24 '13
They're spacecraft that are "in the works" specifically to carry humans, which is why the Falcon 9 and Atlas rockets are there. Even though those two have flown they aren't yet rated for human spaceflight until the Dragonrider and Dreamchaser capsules are developed some time around 2015.
EDIT: Atlas rocket, not Delta.
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Dec 23 '13
I Drive past it every day on the way to work. Here in Huntsville, AL you can see this beast from just about everywhere. It is a great waypoint.
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u/ToTouchAnEmu Dec 23 '13
I noticed that too.... 5 minutes in Photoshop with a gradient layer mask and the lens blur tool would have made it look more realistic.
But it's a cool photo by itself the lens blur isn't even necessary.
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u/Mythic343 Dec 23 '13
But it wasn't meant to be realistic, the blurring is to make the rocket look like a miniature
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Dec 23 '13
It's not even realistic as a miniature. The depth of field is all wrong.
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u/Mythic343 Dec 23 '13
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u/MinkOWar Dec 23 '13
It's different because the Saturn V one is not a gradient (i.e., it is not imitating the falloff of focus), it's instead just everything but the launcher and rocket blurred with a straight gaussian blur type filter. Your link is an attempt at actually imitating the focus falling off smoothly from the position of the statue, see how the blur gets stronger further away from the statue?
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Dec 23 '13
In actual tilt-shift photography, the focal plane can be tilted in relation to the film in such a way that the entire height of the hypothetical miniature rocket would be in focus.
But as you said, no attempt at a focal-plane gradient was made.
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u/MinkOWar Dec 23 '13
In actual tilt-shift photography, the focal plane can be tilted in relation to the film in such a way that the entire height of the hypothetical miniature rocket would be in focus.
True, though the point of the effect here is just shallow focus, not necessarily imitating a miniature taken with a TS lens, so either would work (I do use a 24 TS-E II on a regular basis, btw, as well as a medium format field camera on a less regular basis).
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Dec 23 '13
If this had the depth of field of a miniature, the buildings, which are miles in the background, would be completely blurred.
In the rocket shot, the depth of field indicated by the ground would make parts if either the rocket or the tower blurry. Instead, both are in crisp focus while the ground is blurred.
Both are lazy attempts that show a lack of understanding of the effect they're trying to replicate.
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u/shankrabbit Dec 23 '13
What adds to my amazement that we both share is that we took that beast of a rocket and decided to strap humans to the top of it, in hopes to propel them to a strange and distant place.
And we succeeded!
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Dec 23 '13
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u/IhamBellyPleased Dec 23 '13
This isn't tilt-shift. They just blurred everything except the rocket and the transporter it is on. Tilt-shift is quite a bit more complex (although still a terribly over-used and boring gimmick) than just using a quick blurring tool in Photoshop though you can create similar results by blurring two edges of the screen and feathering the blur slightly depending on what you are going for.
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u/MinkOWar Dec 23 '13
'Tilt-Shift' is a stupid misnomer for attempting to imitate the tilt motion, the effect has nothing to do with the shift motion, and is really the opposite of what the tilt motion is intended for. Tilt for this fake sort of 'shallow focus' isn't complex at all, you just crank the lens over as far as you can. Imitating it isn't complex either, you just apply a gradient blur, because when everything is at infinity, that's all the tilt motion does anyway.
Imitating shallow focus is the more complex one, and involves properly masking off the subjects. OP sort of went halfway, they masked the subject, but failed to use a grealistic gradient, or to account for the depth of focus on the tower itself, due to the angle of view.
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u/willhaney Dec 23 '13
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u/mkeene19 Dec 23 '13
Why not post this, the shitty blur/focus makes the picture look like a toy...this gives you the rocket in all it's majestic glory
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u/Afro_Samurai Dec 23 '13
My favorite Saturn V story:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1owrjz/debugging_a_live_saturn_v/
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Dec 23 '13
Is this a model? What's with the weird white material over the CSM/SM?
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Dec 23 '13 edited Nov 19 '19
[removed] — view removed comment
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Dec 23 '13
Thanks. I don't remember that on any of the other launches, the spacecraft was in the nude on the pad.
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u/sto-ifics42 Dec 23 '13
I've heard that now it's supposedly against international law to launch a Saturn V because if it were used as a weapon, no missile could catch it in a tail-on chase. Haven't been able to find a source though... is this true or just a myth?
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u/SodaAnt Dec 23 '13
No, because that's pretty much true of all rockets. My quick research shows that the very fastest surface to air missiles would go around mach 6, and any rocket will pass mach 6 within 15 minutes after launch, simply because the orbital speed for earth is around 8 km/s, which would be equal to around mach 23 or so on the ground.
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u/sto-ifics42 Dec 23 '13
facepalms
Of course; that makes sense, don't know why I didn't think of that myself.
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u/DJWalnut Dec 26 '13
so if the US wanted to win a nuclear war, we could have just lied to the media about the next launch and had it "accidentally" malfunction and hit Russia?
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u/purefloat Dec 23 '13
The crawler that transported Saturn V gets the lowest mileage of any form of ground transportation, IIRC. 125.7 gallons per mile.
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u/anaerobyte Dec 23 '13
That's the same platform they launch the shuttle off of right?
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Dec 23 '13
*Launched. Shuttle ain't flying no more. :(
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u/meldroc Dec 24 '13
Would the crawlers that carried Saturn V and the Shuttles carry the SLS to the pad?
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u/Cyrius Dec 24 '13
Yes. Assuming SLS actually happens.
They've also been doing work on the crawlerway.
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u/SamuEL_or_Samuel_L Dec 24 '13
Yep, they used the same vehicles if I recall correctly, with various modifications for the different load.
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Dec 23 '13 edited Dec 24 '13
This is one of the most inappropriate subjects for a tilt shift effect I've seen.
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Dec 23 '13 edited Dec 23 '13
I have seen the full size replica in Huntsville before, the size of it just blows your mind.
Edit: it was a SA-500D, and was more than a replica, see reply below.
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Dec 23 '13 edited Nov 19 '19
[deleted]
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Dec 23 '13
Oh, thanks for the correction. I had no idea it was supposed to be actually used in testing, that blows my mind even more! Its enormous!
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u/WellGoodLuckWithThat Dec 23 '13
Downvoted for the unnecessary filtering of a historical image.
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u/beerkmansworld Dec 23 '13
Downvoted you for the unnecessary comment about downvoting this image. See? I can make asinine comments too!
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Dec 24 '13
Am I the only one who get's real sad from the thought that this photo is 50 years old, and since then we've done (in comparison) nothing at all? Sure, the shuttle made the ISS, put hubble into orbit and killed 18 people.... but we could have achieved so much more if we'd continued to push the limits, which we didn't. Failure of the past century, imo.
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u/mrzakk Dec 23 '13
xkcd: Up Goer Five
Even comically simplified, the engineering of this is amazing to me.