Is the Space Age over?

Other than for national pride and keeping engineers employed, has the promise of space that many of us grew up with evaporated?
Fiber optics seem to have provided a better solution for world-wide communications than satellites, no environment outside earth seems practical for human habitability beyond a few months, and the cheap energy promised by Helium-3 on the moon or orbiting solar arrays look to be unfeasable.
Is it time to shut down NASA?

www.astronautix.com...

Originally posted by Realist05
Other than for national pride and keeping engineers employed, has the promise of space that many of us grew up with evaporated?
Fiber optics seem to have provided a better solution for world-wide communications than satellites, no environment outside earth seems practical for human habitability beyond a few months, and the cheap energy promised by Helium-3 on the moon or orbiting solar arrays look to be unfeasable.
Is it time to shut down NASA?

www.astronautix.com...

Yep. Who likes GPS, Sattelite TV, Sattelite Radio, accurate weather/environmental data, or reliable high-bandwitch communications anywhere in the world anyway.

Seriously, although people have come back to reality with respect to space not being the fix for all of the worlds woes (at least not in the immediate future), space assets provide more and more to users all over the world every day. In a sense, it's amazing that people now use space based systems and never even think about. Just imagine if 20 years ago your car came with a system that could communicate with an array of sattelites and pinpoint it's position anywhere on the globe? Would that be cool or what - now it's expected in an car over $45,000. And for urban/western users, it's easy to forget that for rural/underveloped areas sattelites still provide the only reliable high-bandwith communication systems available.

[edit on 23-1-2005 by Starwars51]

Good points all, but as launch rates and the number of on station satillites continue to collapse, it seems the 60's vision of human occupation of the solar system is an increasingly absurd prospect.

Nope.

The Space Age begins when it goes private.

Welcome to the beginning, my son.

As soon as the space elavators built, or any other cheap launch/entry system is developed, you can bet your ass it'l be flying like you've never seen a sector before, companies are dying to get their hands on all the rare metals and other goodies in astroids etc. Also space tourism is just about to kick off, Bransons having two of those spaceship ones built with 14,000 odd tickets already sold, if the air industry is anything to go by, that means in 30 years time (maximum) everybody will be flying to a hotel on the moon.

As Viendin the Space Age has truely begun. Basically everything we've seen in the last 40-50 years was just a pre-quill to the real thing, and that is PRIVATE Space Flight. Virgin Galactic ring a bell? How bout Scaled Composites or Bigalow Aerospace? It's all up from here(pun intended)

Yeah, the Space Age is just beginning. Hopefully nothing will extinguish this flame to return man to the moon and beyond. I won't say the Space Age is fully in gear though until private companies have the capabilities for heavy lifting as the major space agencies do.

On the contrary, the Space RACE is what began in the 50s, and ended around the time the Shuttle missions started and Spacelab crashed. That was for all intensive purposes political only. Sure, a lot has come to benefit from those things, but on the whole it was just politics.

O.K., but the private ventures are sub-orbital jaunts, and the Bigilow inflatable has yet to fly, the up-front capitol of Branson and computer moguls still won't yield a profit in space.
The space elevator could change the balance, but that project seems to have more potential development problems than the fusion energy system we were all supposed to be using by now.

I have two things to say. 1. Americas Space Prize sponsored and run by Bigalow Aerospace 2. SpaceX and thier Falcon Boosters

www.spacex.com...

Here are the launch dates for this private booster that will one day be used in an attempt to launch 5 people to LEO. The prize expires in 2010.

ustomer Launch Date Vehicle Departure Point
US Defense Dept (OSD/NRL) Q1 2005 Falcon I Vandenberg
US Defense Dept (DARPA) Q2 2005 Falcon I Marshall Islands
Malaysia (ATSB) Q4 2005 Falcon I Marshall Islands
Bigelow Aerospace Q2 2006 Falcon V Vandenberg

O.K., but these private pleasure cruises don't advance the frontier, now, do they? The fact remains that these effort will not possibly lead to a new space age. In spite of Bush's announced new vision for space, a well funded Constellation program seems to be dead on arrival.