You do realize, dont you, that the saturn V plans were destroyed in an agreement NASA made with congress in order to aquire funding for the shuttle? I think that the USA is more than capable to design a rocket capable of reaching the moon and back. If the USA could design the saturn in less than 2.5 years I think 10 years will be more than enough to design one capable of doing the job.

Frankly, I wouldn't trust NASA to build a bottle rocket.

The problem with "organized" space travel is that there is no vision. Hasn't been since the early days of Apollo. We have the technology to build a ship that could travel to Mars in weeks, not a year and a half.

A ship... That won't blow up en-route, or cause severe injury for those onboard? I haven't heard about this.

liberator wrote:Frankly, I wouldn't trust NASA to build a bottle rocket.

The problem with "organized" space travel is that there is no vision. Hasn't been since the early days of Apollo. We have the technology to build a ship that could travel to Mars in weeks, not a year and a half.

Care to elucidate on that?

Liberator, if you have said technology, I'd like to learn more about it. Until we develop something like jump drives, or even ion drives, we're stuck with plain old chemical rockets.

I didn't say we have the designs, I said we have the engineering capability, if it weren't for the politics.

Not to mention the Federal Defecit

liberator wrote:I didn't say we have the designs, I said we have the engineering capability, if it weren't for the politics.

That's not really an elucidation. what technology can we build that would allow us to travel to Mars in weeks? All I can think of is a nuclear (bomb) powered ship ala Project Orion/Daedelus/Longshot, but I'm not entirely sure that's not been proven as technologically feasible.

ok, maybe not weeks, but certainly much less time than the 18 months current estimates suggest.

The thing about Space is that if your ship prings a leak, you can't simply jump in a raft and trust to luck. Theres no second chances, and the odds of another ship coming by and picking you up are zero. The pioneers odds were low, but not as low as that,

The next, and most vital step, in my mind is to construct some kind of strato-elevator that will lift the vehicle to almost orbital height. 85% of the Saturn 5 was designed to make it travel 6% of the journey to the Moon. That 6% was the distance from the ground to Space. Until we can launch things without having to claw our way out of the Gravity well, we are never going to get very far into space.

Flipside wrote:The next, and most vital step, in my mind is to construct some kind of strato-elevator that will lift the vehicle to almost orbital height. .

I read an actual elevator is possible but would need to be constructed from diamond as nothing else is tough enough.

Carbon nanofibres'd do the job nicely actually.

I hear about that stuff (I'm pretty sure). It has a Chemical formula of like C20... or was it C100000.. Something like that.

I'd hate to be part of that construction crew, I'm scared of being 30ft off the ground much less than 5 miles