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The news have been about manned space flight lately.
On 2021-07-11 Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) has flown to 50 miles (85 km) altitude from New Mexico. The flight included approximately 3 minutes of weightlessness.
On 2021-07-19 Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) has flown to 107 km altitude from Texas. The flight lasted a bit over 10 minutes.
Elon Musk is expected to fly as well.
I am not a fan of manned space flight. Allthough I have to accept, that homo sapiens is going to try it anyway. While I do not mind to fly a few folks to the International Space Station once in a while, the list of reservations which Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have announced, just blows my mind.
I found this piece of information (German news site) to set these flight into perspective. Such a flight produces the equivalent of roughly 400 to 600 commercial transatlantic flights in CO2 emission. While I suspect the details are a bit more involved, physics will tell you, that it takes an amazing amount of energy in a similarly amazing short time intervall "to put some clown on the moon" (stolen from Tom Lehrer).
So it looks like the old game: almost everyone on the planet, who can never afford a suborbital flight for the views, are asked to use less of anything (fuel and other CO2 producing items), while watching a totally insignificant fraction of homo saps wasting unbelievable amounts of precious and finite resources. Unbelievable. Isn't this the kind of constellation that sparks revolutions?
This makes me mad.
~ew
PS: Even if we believe that space flight might some day save humanity by sending a handful of selected folks to extra solar colonies, they probably wont get anywhere. "A canticle for Leibowitz" ends at the liftoff of said escape flight.
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