[ExI] Stephen Baxter's Titan

samantha sjatkins at mac.com
Thu Apr 29 20:37:20 UTC 2010


spike wrote:
>  
>
>   
>> ...On Behalf Of Emlyn
>>     
> ...
>   
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Stephen_Baxter_novel)
>>
>> Has anyone here read this? If you're a space nut and you 
>> haven't, then you should, the obsessive detail on the innards 
>> of the US space program is really something...
>>     
>
> Emlyn, from the wiki discription, it almost sounds like a humorless satire.
> I recognized some of the allusions, a disease that attacks only Han Chinese
> would be a sly reference to HIV, fundamentalist christian president a poke
> at Reagan or Carter for instance.
>   

Carter may have belonged to a fairly fundamentalist sect but he was 
pretty liberal.  Even Reagan was liberal in his religious remarks 
compared to GW Bush and to some degree Bush senior as well.  The latter 
claimed that atheists were not really Americans, for instance.
>   
>> ... And if you've 
>> ever thought an old Saturn V should be refurbished and flown 
>> now, it's a book for you :-)...
>>     
>
> In some important ways, humanity was more advanced in space travel fifty
> years ago than today.  We had the industrial base engaged in building that
> kind of stuff, we had the top minds in engineering emplyed in it, we had the
> attention and the dreams of the populace.  Almost all of that is gone now.  
>
> What has improved?  Control systems, digital processing equipment,
> communications gear has improved vastly.  Metallurgy, some.  Lightweight
> structures, a little.  Propulsion, no.  Almost nada in real advances in
> propulsion technology since the Saturn V days, and I see little on the
> horizon in the foreseeable.
>   

Lots in minituarization, computation and communication though.

> If we had a way to build the Saturn V today it would be a hellll of a leap
> forward from where we are.  Even the commies aren't producing their biggies
> these days.
>   

Is this technically particularly challenging or really big $$$ even?  
Why can't a private group / corp take this on?

>   
>> But, it bugs the crap out of me for a lot of reasons, 
>> particularly the one-eyed glorification of the old days (the 
>> 60s pretty much)... Emlyn
>>     
>
> The 60s were good days for the rocket biz.  We must be ready to recognize
> that technology isn't always forward in all fields.  Almost all and almost
> always, but some technologies do rot on the vine.  Plenty of our reference
> material generated in that decade is still in use today.  Pretty soon the US
> will have no manned access to LEO, after landing guys on the moon over 4
> decades ago.
>   

The more I dig into old tech the more I amazed at how much was dreamed 
up and studied way back then.

> Emlyn if you get a chance, try to talk one on one with some of the rocket
> guys who were in their 20s in about 1960.  There were some things that were
> just fundamentally different back then, and better in a lot of ways for the
> space biz.
>   

I had more than a few friends who did heavy science, especially physics 
majors when space was HOT and there was that push to not be left behind 
in science and math.  In the 70s most of them ended up moving to 
software or in some cases, pumping gas.  It was pretty sad.

- samantha

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