The dream is far away today

Space the last border
With this phrase start all the episodes of a low budges series called Star Trek that will slim three seasons, but forty years later it has generated one cartoon series, four spinoff, twelve films and more of eight video game; without to think about the millions dollars wined with its merchandising. In fact it was a science fiction series born at the culmination of the space race; and like others of that time has an improvement technology respect to the 50 years but the approach was the same: new worlds, monsters, dangers and final victory of dominant specie what is humans (of course). However, its success will be in place all its action in a new and different context. Enterprise is a spacecraft that belongs to an interplanetary fleet, Earth is a planet confederate with others planets which have other smart life forms with biology independent of us; the relationship between humans and aliens is on equal terms, with alliances and enemies these can change according to the political dynamics interplanetary, in short the world is no longer the land as to be the galaxy. Star Trek imagines a future world without the premises of the present and consequent with its context that is life in a world extended in the galaxy with interaction of other cultures without connection with humans, inner a tech environment. A dream situated in a far future that hasn’t any correlation with depressing present of late twentieth century.
 

Since the seventies science fiction was divided into two groups: which shows the world derived from contemporary, which wasn’t the fantasy world of spaceships or way still life of The Jetsons, but real hells where humanity had fallen; or temporal far away worlds, like Star Trek, with people live their life with normality according with world that they live, tech world and psychological borders higher than a planet. Current adults grew up dreaming of these worlds which contrasts with the deaf world of late century crisis.
In this context it does not really help anything. The spatial expansion plans were thwarted just reach the moon. Mars was the next target but was stopped sine die, and we never return to the Moon. The excuse of no return has been the economic and current people seem that space exploration is idling, but this isn’t true. Space exploration has continued with estimates similar to the time of travel to the Moon, that is the continued colonization (which never started), and it doesn’t transported physically human in space. Occasionally leaves a world leader promises budget for a hypothetical trip to Marts or return to the Moon, but they are nothing more than words because they aren’t space agency (except the Chinese) have any plan in motion to do any of these things. The generation that grew up imagining interplanetary cultures, surely he will die seeing the unique human trip to another world as a history of past.
Some of these dreamers have revealed. They try to make up for that public institutions not doing. It has started a sort of private space race, where one of the examples is the use of space tourism, as the spacecraft SpaceShipOne and others involved in the AnsariX Prize contest. However there are those who go beyond the commercial. These new adventurers look beyond targets like the Moon or Mars.
There are several initiatives but one of the most interesting is to make a Reality about trip that finances it as shown in this article for the NY Times. The project is named MarsOne and it attempts to carry a little colony to Mars which is financed by a TV-show about life of astronauts. It is already looking for candidates and the project is spectacularly advanced who want to implement the 2023. In the same vein we have a private foundation Inspiration Mars Foundation, who is scheduled to fly over the planet with a manned space craft in 2018, as write SEN, they already have to the design of the spacecraft and they are running to recruit crew.
 

This is all very nice but really that hasn’t done government agencies can do the private sector. The answer is no unfortunately, and less on the terms imposed. The problem is not financing. The real obstacle is the knowledge that we have of space. As I said before, budget in space research hasn’t decreased in recent years but this has led to progress toward human colonization of this. The answer to this contradiction is when started the race they had completely unknown of space. Currently robotic research is allowing us to acquire knowledge necessary to achieve the in situ exploration by humans.
At the beginning of the space race we had premises that now are obsolete. The arrival of humans on the moon showed a series of insurmountable dangers and obstacles, even today, that only luck was that the adventure should come with success and it didn’t end with a painful failure as happened in the USSR. The premises used in the beginning of the race are largely used by the stories of science fiction, and another literary license or invention to make a better agility, as to run over light velocity (nothing can run faster than light) or have inexhaustible energy; among many things that are not physically possible, but without them the world described by these narratives is unsustainable.
Moon is too far away to us, we must cross a hostile region where are among of objects fly a very high speed (several times faster than bullets), and completely outdoors cosmic ray and solar wind. In the same way the amount baggage (food and energy) that can be carried is very small and consequently limited maneuverability, a small setback could mean the death of the entire crew. However the trip to the moon is very close compared to Mars, the trip to Mars involves two years of flight without comeback in the middle path, more time compared at two weeks of travel Moon. We might think that getting to Mars at least we're on a planet and there can survive somehow, but the answer is that we only survive with the provisions brought from Earth; Mars under current conditions is not possible the life of a mammal like us, so we don’t get much solves the problem, to understand Mars isn’t an island in the middle of the space as Earth.
Although the dream is at the heart of these intrepid entrepreneurs, this is still a dream. Behind the intrepid adventures usually there is a lot of ignorance where they go in, and I’m sure that in private space exploration has amount of ignorance. If at present we don’t leave the shelter of the Earth's magnetic field isn’t due to financial problems but security. At present neither the human presence in the planets or satellites give us any added value that justify the risk. Surely humanity attains sufficient knowledge to be able to leave the earth and even the solar system but at the present, and possibly during the current century, we have to make when traveling around our planet.

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