Traveling in Space The space program is very exciting, but has not been handled very well, after all it was subverted by the military after we landed on the moon. They insisted the space shuttle be much larger so it could haul secret projects and this led to less reliability as evidenced by the deaths of so many. We should have continued our rocket development program, but something was going on, as evidenced by their weak excuse for not doing that, which was the citizens of the United States, us, were no longer interested in moon landings so they were discontinuing them. Did they do this so they could throw every resource into shuttle development or was there some other reason? Right now, we do not have an answer, but I am sure someone who was involved does. As I think of where we could have been now in the space race, I so regret their decision. NASA has spent billions on a new old rocket. What I mean is it is not much more advanced than the original Saturn 5 rockets which went to the moon. If we would have continued to develop more advanced rockets, we might have already figured out how to create faster propulsion. I find it hard to believe NASA is going with a rocket which costs such an incredible amount of money and suffered so many setbacks they seem to be throwing all sorts of roadblocks at Elon Musk so he doesn’t launch his Starship first and embarrass them further. His Starship is far more advanced than NASA’s Artemis rocket, way cheaper to build, and launch. It also is able to lift far more weight and can hold up to 100 passengers and crew. I know many of you have heard me complain about the slow speed of flights to other planets. I am sorry for that, but I am impatient to see us land on Mars before I die of old age. For this reason, I ask you to forgive my complaining about that. The 3tarship can do things the Artemis rocket from NASA cannot. It can land vertically and has a turnaround rate much quicker than Artemis since it was designed for less maintenance. It seems to me, since Mars is relatively close to earth in the scheme of things, we should be using solar sails to reach it. A solar sail craft would make the trip a lot shorter. Some say we could reach Mars this way in about one month, according to New Scientist. Scientists say the maximum speed for a craft using a solar sail is 10 percent the speed of light or 18,600 miles per second. That is a lot faster than a rocket engine. Our fastest one traveled 4 miles per second. When rockets get caught by the gravity of an object like the sun, the speed can increase tremendously. Take the Parker Solar Probe for example. It got up to 6,077 miles a minute as it was slung around the sun. That is a little over 101 miles per second. If we are going to get anywhere in space and become a space faring race, we need to go faster, a lot faster. As I have said solar sails are only practical up to about Jupiter as the solar wind gets weaker the further away from the sun you get. The truth is we seem to need an unknown technology to be invented which we haven’t thought of yet. A lot of people are saying we need to reach light speed, but that is still far too slow. Once we get out of the solar system, that speed is not practical, but it would be fine for inter-solar system travel. We could reach Pluto in about 5 hours. We also need much quicker communication. It might turn out we could figure out how to get tremendous energy from stars we could use or even from black holes. We could spend a hundred years easily exploring our solar system with the hundreds of moons and thousands of asteroids. Why was it NASA was content to build a new Saturn 5 like rocket instead of pursuing better technology. Are the relations with the old legacy aerospace companies too close? So far, they don’t seem to be advancing technology very much. It seems to me the newer companies are more prone to try and advance technology than they are and I am not only talking about SpaceX. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency which is known as DARPA, gave the go ahead to three aerospace companies to try and develop nuclear fission rockets. While I don’t think this is a good idea, they would be somewhat faster than the rockets we use today. They have a maximum speed of rocket ejection of 7,500 miles per second. This is only a measurement of the thrust. It would take about 3 months to reach Mars, still 3 times longer than a solar sail. When we talk about going to Mars today, the trip would take about 9 months. We do not know everything that might exist in space. Because of this, we do not know what we might learn as we travel through it. We got our ideas about flying because people watched the birds and wished we could do that. We might have gotten our idea for early boats from watching sticks float on the water. Who knows what we might see that is natural in space which we could adapt to our needs, such as propulsion? If we could adapt a way a large body generates gravity, it might create a means of propulsion where we could repel off of the gravity or even the magnetism of large bodies in space. We know there are some very strange things in nature which might be able to teach us a lesson or two. For example, how do fish become electrified? This could have been the inspiration for the Bagdad battery. We might find some body in space traveling far faster than light. Yes, I know Einstein said this was impossible, but I still hold out hope. There is one thing about us and that is we never stop trying to advance technology in every way. I believe we will never give up in trying to break the lightspeed barrier. Much as we did with the sound barrier years ago. The human race is very persistent and as a whole, never quits. That is why I feel there will come a time in the future, if we are still around, where we will be whizzing around in space at fantastic faster than light speeds.
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