Tuesday, 15 December 2015

Tim Peake

537th man in space. Also happens to come from Britain. Big whoop.

My latest blogpost: Tim PeakeTweet this! Posted by Tim Almond at 10:44

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7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was thinking this earlier. We are getting massive hype about a Brit going round in circles in space. we've been doing this for several decades now. I distinctly remember my father telling me how his father was amazed at the efforts to put a man in space and then on the moon. The joke is, what my grandpa got excited about is something we can't do today!(albeit for pretty mundane reasons). We've hit a bit of a wall really. Technology needs to advance by some order of magnitude that might allow us to confidently send humans to Mars or further still in order to generate the same kind of excitement U.Gagarin and N.Armstrong once elicited.

15 December 2015 at 11:49
mombers said...

Ba humbug!

15 December 2015 at 13:56
DBC Reed said...

A routine triumph for international co-operation especially with Russia who otherwise cannot be trusted with anything and whose planes can be shot down on scant pretext while the West does not recognise e Communist China's right to protect its airspace over the South China seas.

15 December 2015 at 15:54
Tim Almond said...

paulc156,
Mars is a huge problem. I've read a load of stuff about it and people who've taken a good look at manned missions and it's a nightmare with current technology. You're looking at around a 400 day round trip. So, let's say someone finds a lump 10 days out? How are you going to run a biopsy? Do you get the situation like in The Martian of astronauts finding that they fancy each other? You're going to expect them not to do anything about it for a year. The moon vs Mars is like skimming a stone over a lake vs spinning a stone over the English Channel.

mombers,
I'll give credit for real achievement, but a person going from one bit of rock on the earth after 500 others is about a big a deal as "Tipton Man Climbs Everest".

15 December 2015 at 18:18
DBC Reed said...

The News yesterday was North Korean as an authoritarian onslaught.Not only Tim Peake's routine trip, seen as a British triumph, though he was in a Russian crewed rocket and had to learn Russian to take part, but the news was full of Star Wars on the premise "that everybody goes mad over Star Wars". Well I don't; always been bored silly by it.If you want a vision of future civilisation you would be better reading up on LVT and letting your own imagination free. The film of "Things to come" at least started in the present day and showed how the future might evolve from it.(HG Wells was eloquent about LVT in the book "The Shape of Things to Come"). The point of fiction of the future is to reflect on existing trends.

16 December 2015 at 10:05
Tim Almond said...

DBC Reed,

Yes. The thing with all the stuff about manned space travel is that it's mostly a form of state propaganda (for any state) with the astronauts/cosmonauts replacing old legends of knights quests. Even more today than in the past, most of the people up on the ISS are about propaganda for more space programmes with public money, which is just a self-feeding cycle.

Star Wars really isn't sci-fi, though. It's fantasy. "A long time ago in a galaxy far far away" is pretty similar to "Once upon a time". And what's the story? A princess in the black villain's (black as in clothed) stronghold, a pure knight, a pirate, a wizard, they fight with swords, rescue the princess and destroy the villain's stronghold. OK, it has a few interesting twists, is really well executed, and in its time had groundbreaking visuals and sound, but it is essentially a fairy tale.

16 December 2015 at 14:07
jonnytepp said...

"The dismal science (economics) talks about opportunity cost. In a world of budget constraints, a choice to spend billions on space exploration means giving up the opportunity to have more hospitals, schools, social services and so on. My suggestion for a balanced TV coverage of the space flight would be a split screen with a shot of the rocket on one side and a list of all the hospitals etc. that could have been provided on the other. As the rocket ascends further into space, more and more projects drop off the list. Want a hip replacement? Cheaper care homes? More child care? Forget it."
http://peteromilly.com/ground-control-to-major-tim/

20 December 2015 at 10:36

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