[quote]by Stoo
An orbiting staging area would be a better bet, outside the gravitational pull, you wouldnt need as much heavy equipment etc to get the payloads there.. Oh, the ISS? how convienient [quote]

Solves a few problems, but far from all -- you still need to heavy lift to orbit, plus you have the additional hassle of constructing the orbiting staging area (I presume you mean some form of construction facility so that the flight vehicle/orbiter dosn't need building under gravity). The ISS would be completely unsuitable for this.

Yeah, but you can construct in orbit, and only transport bits up. Yeah, it'd be long-term, but then from there it makes other projects a lot easier (I was joking about the ISS btw), I believe one mooted theory was a moonbase type construction for launching deep-space projects at a much lower cost. Yeah, it's in the distant future, but that's what makes it fun to look forward to

NASA and all the other various space agencies know that the biggest hurdle is getting off this planet, that's where virtually all the fuel/expense etc goes. If you can avoid that part you're going to save a hell of a lot longer-term

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by Stoo
the biggest hurdle is getting off this planet,

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Yeah, gravity sucks

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by Stoo
NASA and all the other various space agencies know that the biggest hurdle is getting off this planet, that's where virtually all the fuel/expense etc goes. If you can avoid that part you're going to save a hell of a lot longer-term

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I guess that they've been there, done that and got the "my mate went to the moon and all i got was this lousy T-Shirt" You know what the Americans are like

And as for conspirisy theories in general... who do you think put them out there in the first place? My favourite thory is about the Roswell landings. If aliens really had landed we would know zip all about it. The US government has enough money and power to cover up absolutely everything it doesn't want Joe Bloggs to know about. The Roswell stories were deliberately 'leaked' by the government to cover up something else (probably some kind of nuclear/military testing or similar). Lets face it, conspirisy theories never seem to be about boring stuff do they

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by Sydney
Lets face it, conspirisy theories never seem to be about boring stuff do they

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Yeah, but that's called "Politics"

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by Stoo
(quotes)
Yeah, but that's called "Politics"

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But politics is boring

Almost forgot about this, and it's on now

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/strawpoll.shtml

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by Jango
Almost forgot about this, and it's on now

www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/strawpoll.shtml

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Interestingly worded motion, they've explicitly avoided it being anti-manned spaceflight in general, targetting only exploration. However because of the vague wording I'd be worried about first prop putting too clever a spin on the motion, though the ambiguity would then work in first opp's favour if he rejects the definition.

Given that the motion is "is and always has been" it could be torn appart on technical grounds because it focuses solely on the political motivations behind the Apollo moon landings. Pity, because a debate on the viability of future manned space exploration would have been far more interesting; however inspite of the motion wording being biased in favour of the prop I suspect it'll go to the opposition.

(Edited by Callum 24/08/2002 04:05)

Shrewd, the oppos won out by just two percent. Mind you, after what that last opposer said about supporting manned (and hideously expensive) exploration because little kiddies dreamed of going to Mars some day, I just *had* to phone in to agree with the motion. Don't know if that will make much difference in the long run, but we'll see after the final result, announced after the repeat and talkback section early this afternoon...