Rest in peace, Neil Armstrong

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 14:01:15 GMT

There may never be a headline better than "Man takes first steps on moon". It's hard for any event to be as simultaneously (a) positive (b) sudden and surprising, and (c) incontrovertible.

In honour of the event, I wondered, is there anything where the current state of space exploration is going surprisingly well by the standards of early space SF speculation?

1. US, Japan, Russia and Europe collaborate on major space station, without having to suffer a worldwide disaster first.
2. Robot explorer lowered onto Mars by skyhook from hovering rocket.
3. Private company building efficient space vehicles.
4. 500 satellites in orbit, many used to provide real-time position and communication almost anywhere on the globe.
5. Despite a lot of tricky politics and scary moments, zero nuclear wars since the first two nuclear bombs.
6. Automated ship which goes to Mars and explores, with only human control back on Earth -- seriously, how many futurists predicted that robots would do that on their own, even Asimov stories about robots without humans are very rare.

comments

jack

Rest in peace, Neil Armstrong