all of that is pretty much just general statements that answer nothing. there isn't a final design and even if it was capable of hauling 40 tons i really doubt the higher ups would allow it to get close to its "limit". without a final design we won't know if even 1 ton of goods is viable since we have no idea how much its going to cost per pound to use it.

well according to what he said tho. it would use solar power because the generators would be located on the upper level near or in space.

I was shocked when I noticed who posted this thread

but I highly agree they walked like maybe 20km on the moon and said its only filled with rocks
we need to get back out there and explore way more
even other planets
could be trillions of dollars in gold up there on mars or some shit
technology advanced so much..government…not so much

solar power is still a general statement. solar panels aren't all the same and technology will change to higher efficiency down the line. using general statements for something like this is completely useless because there are far too many factors to cover before calling it viable.

saying its all hinging on 1 piece is kind of absurd since its a completely untested technology that will almost assuredly have many problems in the beginning.

Because come on bro. What would you rather have? An honest attempt to put a man on Mars, or for the top 2% of wage earners to have a 0.3% income tax cut?

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2010/08/12/173456/jct-tax-report/

Keep in mind when you see the 1-year cost of that tax extension that the overall cost to put Curiosity on Mars is $1.5 billion.

lots of the calculations were done by hand

Honestly a lot of them were probably done by punched card, just like the calculations done to create the atom bomb in WW2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_programming_in_the_punched_card_era

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" is an autobiography by Richard Feynman, one of the physicists that helped develop the atom bomb, and he discussed the process briefly in that book.

this

they also had analouge integrators and fortran implementations were already quite advanced in academia

Hell yeah. Analog calculations are the shit. We really have to give credit to just how creative and ingenious the previous generations were when it came to figuring things out.

its nice they were able to do all that with that old school stuff but we are way beyond those days

I'm sure if Einstein were alive today he would wonder why we haven't been venturing further into space and colonizing other planets. And by we I mean HUMANS not robots

Imagine if I designed the first wheel today.
It was wooden. it rolled and it was decent.

I put 4 of these wood wheels on the wagon. had my horse pull me across the world and when the trip was over.
I took my wagon. chopped it up into firewood and never improved it.


That is essentially what we've done.

We had a nice wooden wheel. It could have been improved into a steel belted radial tyre on a aluminum rim but instead we decided to burn it.

The probes we send up are nice. but nobody is getting excited about seeing yet another satellite put into space.

We NEED to be exploring.
Humans have been exploring since the dawn of time. We found continents. new islands. tons of new stuff here on earth.

and we went to the moon one single time? and it wasn't even well recorded and documented because of limitations.

I want to know why as a group of humans we arent focused on exploring anymore.
It is basically human nature to explore.