25 Years Later.....

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I was in 4th grade, we had just gone into the 'gifted' class for the day and our teacher was not there... so we sat around then started being kids... about 15 minutes later the teacher showed up and freaked out on us for misbehaving while he was watching the disaster live on television.

[Don Coyote]

Fucking Moonbase Now Motherfuckers.


Also, Fuck Mars. (manned missions, anyway)

Why bother going into a gravity well?

Asteroid belt.  No shit.  There's everything you need, and you don't have to spend a fortune to get around.

Ya just go out there, mine shit, build some shit, mine some more or just attach fucking rockets to asteroids and send them back to high Eart orbit for easier processing.

There's even a cheap, safe way to drop millions of tons of ore, etc, to Earth.

I was thinking of that too.
And if we ever build shit on the Moon just mnor detour to the Moon.

Meh.  There's no reason to go to the moon.  There's nothing there worth having.

Ya I guess.

What about Mars? It does have water.

Or should we just skip the inner planets and use the Belt as a jumping point for the outer planets and their moons?
Looking at this from the point of more places to stick people and resources.

[Suu]

Suu, sorry that this is also tied to some personal tragedy for you and your folks.  That must've been awful.

It's all declassified now anyway.

Anyways, long story short, my dad never approved certain replacement parts for Challenger that he was inspecting while working for Grumman in New York. Something was wrong with them, obviously, so he basically said no.

Someone, who has now been caught and incarcerated for a very long time, decided to forge my dad's signature and send the parts to NASA anyway in time for the launch.

It took them the better part of about 12 years to fully clear my dad's name, but he said that they always treated him quite fairly and nicely, considering, and every time someone from the FBI would come over, I never got the vibe that they were going to arrest my dad. (of course now he would be treated like a terrorist.) He did have to undergo lie detector tests and all sorts of what he called "kinda cool" handwriting analysis.  The forged signature was done pretty poorly, and they were able to identify the forger relatively quickly through process of elimination.

Right before the last leg of the trial before he was proven innocent is when that big chunk of the Challenger washed up in 1996.

That's all I know. He won't talk about it anymore.



...and he had nothing to do with any part that was attached to the Columbia.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Fucking Moonbase Now Motherfuckers.


Also, Fuck Mars. (manned missions, anyway)

Why bother going into a gravity well?

Asteroid belt.  No shit.  There's everything you need, and you don't have to spend a fortune to get around.

Ya just go out there, mine shit, build some shit, mine some more or just attach fucking rockets to asteroids and send them back to high Eart orbit for easier processing.

There's even a cheap, safe way to drop millions of tons of ore, etc, to Earth.

I was thinking of that too.
And if we ever build shit on the Moon just mnor detour to the Moon.

Meh.  There's no reason to go to the moon.  There's nothing there worth having.

Ya I guess.

What about Mars? It does have water.

Or should we just skip the inner planets and use the Belt as a jumping point for the outer planets and their moons?
Looking at this from the point of more places to stick people and resources.

The Moon would be good for telescope arrays and solar power (long days, long nights), if you could get that energy back to Earth somehow.

As far as a base it would be good for some sort of stop off point because it has a low escape velocity.

Mars is a good place to stick people to a degree, since it seems like a significant amount of gravity is needed to keep people in good health. However, it would no be a particularly good place to use as a jumping off point (though, Phobos and Deimos would) due to a bad combination of larger escape velocity as well as an atmosphere too thin for space air flight. You could design a type of shuttle that flies both like a plane and a rocket for travel to and from Earth. Use Bernoulli's principle to get to a high altitude, then kick on the rockets. With Mars, you'd have to rely on rockets. Unless you could manage to start flooding Mars with a heavy and thick gas like methane, which I can't even begin to think how it would be feasible, other than to genetically engineer cows to breathe argon and eat sand.


Also, I have no clear memory of the Challenger accident.

ETA: fixed a mistake.

[Requia ☣]

Forget a million tons of ore from the belt, if we can find the right rare earth (gallanium?  I forget) metal deposits just a few thousand tons of ore could give us cheap efficient and durable solar panels.

[BadBeast]

Forget a million tons of ore from the belt, if we can find the right rare earth (gallanium?  I forget) metal deposits just a few thousand tons of ore could give us cheap efficient and durable solar panels.

We could have cheap and efficient wind / sea generated power right now if the greedy bastards weren't so determined to sell us every fucking drop of oil on the planet first.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Forget a million tons of ore from the belt, if we can find the right rare earth (gallanium?  I forget) metal deposits just a few thousand tons of ore could give us cheap efficient and durable solar panels.

We could have cheap and efficient wind / sea generated power right now if the greedy bastards weren't so determined to sell us every fucking drop of oil on the planet first.

And stir us up against ruining picturesque ocean views.

/Masshole. Put them damn things on the Cape.

[Suu]

Forget a million tons of ore from the belt, if we can find the right rare earth (gallanium?  I forget) metal deposits just a few thousand tons of ore could give us cheap efficient and durable solar panels.

We could have cheap and efficient wind / sea generated power right now if the greedy bastards weren't so determined to sell us every fucking drop of oil on the planet first.

And stir us up against ruining picturesque ocean views.

/Masshole. Put them damn things on the Cape.

We're getting them off the Block, I mean... Get with the times already, Mass.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Forget a million tons of ore from the belt, if we can find the right rare earth (gallanium?  I forget) metal deposits just a few thousand tons of ore could give us cheap efficient and durable solar panels.

We could have cheap and efficient wind / sea generated power right now if the greedy bastards weren't so determined to sell us every fucking drop of oil on the planet first.

And stir us up against ruining picturesque ocean views.

/Masshole. Put them damn things on the Cape.

We're getting them off the Block, I mean... Get with the times already, Mass.

Rich assholes. What can I say?