Back to the Future

NASA announced today it wants to return to the moon in 2018 and then onwards to Mars. The sad thing is the replacement for the Space Shuttle will be a conventional rocket that looks at behaves like the Apollo rocket that sent Neil Armstrong to the moon. So much for the future.

I understand the logic here. Standard rockets are simple, cheap and known technology. In short it's not rocket science....Ahem.. well... Even the landing module they unveiled in a computer generated image is a slightly bulked up version of the original lunar Lander from 1969. The plan is to send astronauts to the moon, stay there for several months and then blast off on a trip to Mars from there.

It seems our futuristic fantasies have been grounded by economics. Mass supersonic transport turned into the technologically limited Concorde flying only the most wealthy of us across the Atlantic in 3-4 hours....today the same trip is 7-8 hours in a conventional plane. That flying car I was suppose to have by 2000 turned into a 4 wheeled Honda that is praised for it's ergonomics and gas mileage not a futuristic power source and ultra violet bubble cockpit. The magnetic trains of the future are only on limited test tracks of today. Ships go no faster these days than they did 50 years ago. In fact the Titanic was probably more luxurious than today's high capacity cruise liners. The video-telephone we were assured to have became the camera cell phone. Even the vision of space travel itself pretty much sputtered out once the Russians abandonned their competitive missions. Only computers, digital camera, Plasma TVs, instant bank machines and faxes kinda fit where futurists were predicting we'd be heading. Blah.... I guess the world of Star Wars and Minority Report, minus all the bad stuff, if still a long way off..

A Tropical storm that will become hurricane Rita is about to hit the Florida Keays this evening. It's predicted that when it moves on to the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico it will turn into a powerful hurricane that could hit land anywhere from Mexico and Texas to Louisianna... Right now there's a 10% chance New Orleans could be hit again so they are preparing to evacuate in case it does. The weakened levees could fail again reflooding the city. Everyone is watching this storm closely.

I uploaded more pics on MyAviation.net... here's some for anyone interested... still uploading my trip through Zurich;



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Photographer © Doug Bull



MyAviation.net:




Photographer © Doug Bull



MyAviation.net:




Photographer © Doug Bull



MyAviation.net:




Photographer © Doug Bull