Space travel turned out not to be very fun. The rollicking exploration of pulp stories where you see new worlds and new creatures every week or every book was replaced by a reality of cold, dead, empty planets/moons. You need to travel weeks or months or years to get anywhere, and spaceships, instead of being comfortably elegant or adorably ramshackle with smuggling compartments are cramped, crowded, and require you to shit in a tube.
If/when space travel becomes a place for the very rich to vacation, such as on spacious air-filled moon-bases or on large space stations with artificial gravity, I think it might become exciting again.
How about large stations with artificial gravity and zero-G? We were launching 747 sized hulls 97% of the way into orbit, only to dispose of them about once or twice a year for many, many years. (Shuttle main tank.) Large trampoline-sided spaces would result in really cool new sports and forms of art.
Space travel turned out not to be very fun. The rollicking exploration of pulp stories where you see new worlds and new creatures every week or every book was replaced by a reality of cold, dead, empty planets/moons. You need to travel weeks or months or years to get anywhere, and spaceships, instead of being comfortably elegant or adorably ramshackle with smuggling compartments are cramped, crowded, and require you to shit in a tube.
If/when space travel becomes a place for the very rich to vacation, such as on spacious air-filled moon-bases or on large space stations with artificial gravity, I think it might become exciting again.
How about large stations with artificial gravity and zero-G? We were launching 747 sized hulls 97% of the way into orbit, only to dispose of them about once or twice a year for many, many years. (Shuttle main tank.) Large trampoline-sided spaces would result in really cool new sports and forms of art.