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So I reading about this yesterday and it made me pause and reflect on how awesome it is. This small bit of tech has traveled millions of km's and is now leaving our Solar system. It's batteries will last for another 15 years, but it will take about 10,000 years to get near to the star it's heading towards and even then it will only get to within 2 light years of it.

To me it's just mind blowing thinking about it.

However on the flip side it does make me wonder what has happened to space exploration. I remember seeing a CGI movie of the plans for the space station and how impressive it looked, but this has come to nothing. Although we have advanced leaps and bounds in other technology we seem to of ground to halt with getting a viable replacement for the shuttle and even if there is one, the method getting it into space has changed. Is it likely to? Or are we realistically 50 - 100 years away from any big change?

 Wolfstan wrote:

However on the flip side it does make me wonder what has happened to space exploration. I remember seeing a CGI movie of the plans for the space station and how impressive it looked, but this has come to nothing.

One fundamental thing, money...

NOTE: when I refer to any agencies/organisations below, I refer to the political or business aspects, not the actual scientific research parts of the organisations.
It just isn't in anyone's vested interests to bother exploring space. While it is of massive intellectual and scientific interest, it's just not going to make anyone enough money for the people who have the capital to spend on space exploration cut a few cheques.

Let's face it, most governmental space programs are nothing more than peacock-feathers, It's not about research or gathering data and solving mysteries, it's about giving politicians and military leaders something to puff up and preen to show off to other countries their the big boys in the yard, aside from putting satellites in orbit, there's not much else the government is interested in about space. From a business perspective, unless you can make a ton of money from it, then it's not worth the hassle, why would a business spend billions the effort of developing a space-station to go asteroid mining, when there's a bunch of natural resources on earth we haven't finished plundering yet for a fraction of the cost?

There is very little 'dollar value' in space exploration, and as the people with the money only care about that 'dollar value', then it will be largely ignored until it becomes profitable. It's a similar principle to 'green energy', the energy companies and governments will only invest massive R&D into eco-friendly energy, when it becomes profitable to do so (or, becomes unprofitable to carry on as we are currently).

On the other hand, I have got to agree with you that it's amazing that we've managed to get a washing machine to the edge of the solar system (or heliosphere at least)!

I think it's money right now more then anything, but we're making leaps and bounds on the tech side, hell NASA is seriously developing a freaking WARP DRIVE, and they've successfully tested a real world variant of another scifi term "Ion Drives".

I honestly can't and wouldn't want to make predictions! Humanity is going to the stars, it's a question of when, I hope it's in my life time of course, but we'll just have to see!

Assuming we don't manage to destroy ourselves of course.

First thing first. voyager has left the Solar System several times before.

The call out the Voyager has left the Solar system was made when it crossed the orbit of Neptune (at the time the further planet out), when it met the heliosheath and the heliopause.

The Solar System has no hard boundary, Voyager has been drifting through the threshold for decades and may yet for centuries to come. we really dont know where the Solar System ends, but the Oort cloud is dependent on it and it circles(I don't know if I can say orbits) at about 1 light year radius from the Sun. Perhaps the Solar system actually ends beyond there, after all how do you define a boundary in the middle of a vacuum except arbitrarily based on surrounding phenomena.

From what I was reading I think they class it as leaving our solar system when our sun fails to have any influence any more. Slight correction, I think they are saying that it will take 40,000 years to come within 2 light years of a star it's heading towards.

Whatever happened to the idea of refueling space craft via the ISS? Wouldn't that of meant that the Shuttle could of reached the moon and orbited it?

We could turn space exploration into a self-sustaining thing to do if we got permanantly inhabited bases, that arn't just run by a government agency. And get some sort of economy running.

Mining is one way you could make money.

Um... We haven't stopped these projects at all. We still have plenty of space exploration. Some highlights of more recent major projects

1990: Hubble
1996: NEAR Shoemaker
1997: Cassini-Huygens
2003: Hayabusa
2004: Mars opportunity rover
2004: Messenger
2007: Dawn
2009: Kepler
2011: Mars curiosity rover

This is just a selection of highlights. Kepler has basicly taken us from thinking planets were rare to realising there are millions of the buggers
Hubble has changed our view of the origions of the universe
The mars rovers have changed us from thinking mars was a cold dead world to seeing it as a place where life may have, and may still, exist.

We are still exploring space, probably more than ever before. What we are not doing, at the moment, is sending many people up. Mostly because people are big, heave, squishy and unreliable. Having said that there is talk of starting a mars mission soon.

As for leaving the solar system... Well, even the people at NASA can't agree. What they can agree on is that it looks like voyager may, possibly, have reached the edge of the heliopause, possibly, but they need more data to be sure. The other thing they know is that the solar system is much bigger than we thought.

 Wolfstan wrote:
So I reading about this yesterday and it made me pause and reflect on how awesome it is. This small bit of tech has traveled millions of km's and is now leaving our Solar system. It's batteries will last for another 15 years, but it will take about 10,000 years to get near to the star it's heading towards and even then it will only get to within 2 light years of it.

To me it's just mind blowing thinking about it.

However on the flip side it does make me wonder what has happened to space exploration. I remember seeing a CGI movie of the plans for the space station and how impressive it looked, but this has come to nothing. Although we have advanced leaps and bounds in other technology we seem to of ground to halt with getting a viable replacement for the shuttle and even if there is one, the method getting it into space has changed. Is it likely to? Or are we realistically 50 - 100 years away from any big change?

Thats because the next step costs a TRILLION dollars, and the cold war is over.

Going into the future, government space travel is going to be stuff like the rovers and probes. Cost efficient data gathering projects that the private sector isn't super interested in.

Human travel has huge potential for profit, though, even JUST from tourists. Imagine how much higher it will be once we have people living somewhere. You should absolutely expect the private sector to start putting more and more people up there.

Fortunately there are quite a few companies doing R&D on space travel right now.

One thing we might do would be make an orbital city. One that spins to create artificial gravity.

And a Space Elevator as well.

Vger wishes to communicate with the carbon units infesting USS Enterprise...

That episode was hilarious

That was a movie.

And it was the worst movie.

I distinctly remember an Episode with an old earth probe of some kind that had merged with an alien probe and become a homocidal killer.

I thought it was Voyager. Course its been a while.

 Rented Tritium wrote:
That was a movie.

And it was the worst movie.

Cool effects though. and far out vaguely hippie free love uniforms.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grey Templar wrote:
I distinctly remember an Episode with an old earth probe of some kind that had merged with an alien probe and become a homocidal killer.

I thought it was Voyager. Course its been a while.

No, that was a Star Trek episode. It thought James 'Interstellar love machine" Kirk was its daddy.

 Grey Templar wrote:
I distinctly remember an Episode with an old earth probe of some kind that had merged with an alien probe and become a homocidal killer.

You're probably thinking of Nomad.

Maybe,

You would think the river of rasberry rum would convince to private sector go out ther. But nope.
Im saddened that in all likely hood i will be a dead man before affordable space flight is attainable

In Branson We Trust.

Just because it's relevant:

 d-usa wrote:
Just because it's relevant:

To be fair d-usa, what is the boundry? There are many schools of thought on this... how do you define the boundary in the vacuum?

Well, since it is XKCD it is only fair to use their text as well as the picture :

So far Voyager 1 has 'left the Solar System' by passing through the termination shock three times, the heliopause twice, and once each through the heliosheath, heliosphere, heliodrome, auroral discontinuity, Heaviside layer, trans-Neptunian panic zone, magnetogap, US Census Bureau Solar System statistical boundary, Kuiper gauntlet, Oort void, and crystal sphere holding the fixed stars.

Although some of those might be made up, science is hard...