There's a lot of negativity around this idea, and mostly for good reason. But if you peel away the "let's build the Enterprise!" specifics and think about the core of the proposal, I believe it is sound.
A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s. The ships look the same, the suits look the same, the propulsion technologies look the same, and what's worse... we can't even DO the cool stuff we could do in 69!
If you had asked someone in 69 what spaceflight would look like in 2012, they would probably have visions of Moon bases, space stations with gravity wheels, and routine manned trips to Mars.
But we have none of those things. Instead, we have a recently-retired space truck, a space station that looks like a larger version of Skylab, and all of this stuck in low Earth orbit.
How. Incredibly. Disappointing.
I want to get excited about space again. I really, really do. The recent gains made by private companies (with Scaled Composites in '04 and SpaceX today) have helped a lot. But we shouldn't shy away from bigger ideas.
I know it sounds silly to people in the space business, but the public could really use some futuristic looking space ships and more exciting missions to get excited again.
In the end, I believe that private industry will make this happen once space tourism becomes more affordable (simply because the different companies will have to start competing on something other than "look, we're in space!").
Bigger, cooler looking space ships that are built in orbit and make regular trips to and from Mars would be REALLY exciting. It doesn't have to look like the Enterprise. What about a small Klingon Bird of Prey or even a UFO-style flying saucer?
So, no, we don't need to build the Enterprise, but we DO need to take this as a marketing lesson about why the public seems to yawn when they hear anything about space and Nasa these days.
As a huge fan of space I agree we need progress, but we can achieve that by no longer 'visiting' space and instead 'moving' there.
I was talking with a JPL engineer about SpaceX and he said something which really knocked me for a loop. He said "We don't live in space, we camp there." And by example he suggested what if there was no food, fuel, or running water in Barstow California. Everyone would have to carry what they expected to use from Los Angeles, stay for a while and then go back to Los Angeles to reload with supplies. Now imagine there is a toll gate on I15 outside San Bernadino that charges you $100M to use the road between LA and Barstow. Now what kind of town would Barstow be? A ghost town.
Space, and low earth orbit in particular, is the same way. We don't have any infrastructure up there. Just a single campsite. Every time we launched the shuttle we took perfectly good fuel and burned it up in the atmosphere because we had no way to take the left overs from the external tank and store them in orbit. If you consider just that one problem, keeping fuel around. You see how far we are from living in space vs just visiting.
At $54M/pop SpaceX will make somethings a lot more accessible in space. Putting some infrastructure in space like a gas station and a space tug, will go a lot further.
Back in 1988, a Canadian scientist was commissioned by a 2nd world power to build a system that could be used for orbital launch 4 orders of magnitude cheaper per pound to orbit than what SpaceX can do.
It would have involved firing payloads out of a very large cannon, then firing a rocket onboard to circularize the orbit, so this is not for manned launch, but we should be able to ship bulk items like fuel, oxygen, and water this way.
Every time we launched the shuttle we took perfectly good fuel and burned it up in the atmosphere because we had no way to take the left overs from the external tank and store them in orbit.
We also burned up a perfectly good contamination free vacuum-proof hull the size of a 747 fuselage that was already 99% of the way in orbit. (External tank.)
Thanks for reminding me of that 'gun'. I was recently noodlingly around with the question "Can the Navy's rail gun launch projectiles into orbit?" [1] The production gun is expected to us 64 Megajoules. The challenge is that you have to impart all the energy you can before the projectile leaves the gun (because you then lose your source of acceleration) and drag (or air resistance) is proportional to the cube of the velocity. So the faster you try to make something go, the harder the air resists it moving.
Using the math from "Rocket Propulsion Elements" [2] it seems like for anything other than a needle shaped projectile it would not be practical.
Actually, I know this and this wikipedia entry. It's hard to for me to classify Iraq. For awhile they were another totalitarian state with ties to the Soviet Union. For awhile they were more in the US orbit. I guess that would put them in the 3rd world, though economically they have been in a different class than the poorest 3rd world nations.
I was thinking of terming them a "second rate power."
Yeah - Sorry I know its a bit nitpicky, because "second world" is pretty commonly understood in this way (to mean "secondary power"/"partially developed economy" etc.) but although common it is really a bit of a misuse of a word that has a very specific original meaning and I thought its probably worth pointing out to people (not just you) where the differences lie.
I remember LOVING the "Doomsday Gun" movie when I was a kid. It was one of those that was on TV late at night and I watched it secretly long after I was supposed to be in bed.
Though you don't even need to look at what he did for Iraq, right? His first project launched projectiles into space for the DoD iirc.
No. And that's why I think a lot of the criticism of the project is valid. The solution is to build something that captures the imagination. Something that LOOKS like a ship from the future. It doesn't have to be the Enterprise.
If you want to capture the imagination, you don't need a ship that looks snazzy. You need a ship that can safely and reliably take people to Earth orbit and back at a price normal people can afford. As long as space travel is the province of billionaires and test pilots only, nobody will care about it.
You need to touch the heart, connect with people's desires, emotions and dreams they already have. And be it or not, Star Trek, et al. is something that is closer to general audience than another rocket. I'm not saying "let's build the Enterprise", but we shouldn't ignore the popular culture vision of space, because it's mostly Hollywood, not NASA, who drive the dreams. Let's find a way to connect to that.
BTW., to remind everyone, the very first Space Shuttle was named "Enterprise" for a reason.
What captures peoples' imaginations isn't the vehicle. It is the journey. Or, more importantly, the destination. The vehicle is just the can they sit in to get there.
People (the vast majority, anyway) don't travel because they like to travel. They travel because they want to get somewhere. What excites their imagination is the thought of being at that place, not how they got there.
Part of the reason people aren't excited about space travel today is because there's nowhere to go. There's no orbiting low-gravity resort to vacation on, no Mars colony where Cousin Phil lives with his family to go to for Thanksgiving. And a big part of why those things don't exist is because getting people into space is a damn expensive and risky business, even today. If the only way to get to Disneyworld was to spend $20,000,000 and ride a thirty-year-old Russian relic, Disneyworld wouldn't exist either.
A cheap, safe and ugly ship would do a lot more to solve that problem than an expensive and beautiful one would.
You havw to remember that in the imagination, the vehicle is a large part of the journey. Having a nice one definitely helps, or car styling wouldn't matter so much. Beautiful vehicles will definitely help.
So you're left with the question of which helps more: a beautiful/sexy vehicle, or safety and cheapness, the answer is basically one of detailed analysis. I suspect you're right about where the balance leans, but I also suspect it's possible to have both.
I personally didn't like the intros of Enterprise.
Partially because its tone didn't feel like a Star Trek intro, but mainly because it completely ignored the incredible achievements of the Soviet space program. You would at least expect a shot of Yuri Gagarin.
> Partially because its tone didn't feel like a Star Trek intro
I felt something quite the opposite; I think that Enterprise intro actually best captured the spirit of whole Star Trek - the dream of exploration, advancement and excellence.
Fair point about the Russians though; they deserve more credit that they usually get nowdays.
The other ship on the front page of the enterprise web site the `skylon`, looks awesome, almost like it was designed by Apple compared to the current crop of 'beige box' rockets. Its design spec seems to put it in the class of space DC3 too.
> A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s. The ships look the same, the suits look the same, the propulsion technologies look the same,
And the ideal of manned spaceflight should remain in the 60's - at least for the foreseeable future. We are magnificently evolved to inhabit this planet. The remainder of the solar system is insanely hostile to our form of life. It's far more sensible to engineer machines that can act as our eyes & ears and extend our narrowly evolved senses to far-out and lethal environments.
We're not all that great at swimming either, and yet building oceangoing boats and ships has turned out to be an important part of our technological development. Likewise air travel; we're only evolutionarily optimized for walking about on land, but have used technology to travel and transport goods over large distances on water and in the air.
Those are all fair points. But they don't really address my assertion:
1. I am not arguing that our evolutionary past should dictate where we explore. Rather, I'm arguing it must inform how we explore. Space travel is so lethal for our species that we are better off engineering machines, robots or beings that are specialized to operate in space.
2. The energy expenditure, economic cost and sheer distance of space exploration is many orders of magnitude beyond the costs of land, sea or air travel. Comparing terrestrial forms of travel to space exploration is disingenuous.
3. No endpoint. When the great explorers were trailblazing across the oceans there was a reasonable expectation of finding a suitable endpoint with fresh water, edible plants & animals, other people (!) and exploitable resources. With space exploration none of these things are present. We have to carry a suitable endpoint with us during the journey and plant it where ever we happen to land.
Expanding on that last point - imagine a specialized mars robotic explorer that goes on a one-way mission, taps in a sub-surface source of water, erects a basic greenhouse structure, goes into sleep mode for a few months, wakes up, plants some seeds, sleeps a while longer, etc. - it bootstraps a suitable endpoint for human explorers to inhabit years, decades or centuries later.
I agree with you on all these things, but subject to qualification. I think we need to be developing human spaceflight in parallel with robotic exploration, for the same reason that we don't do all our exploration on earth with telescopes. Air travel is orders of magnitude more difficult than sea travel, which is orders of magnitude more difficult than wandering about on land. I think there is no substitute for getting out there and attempting a wide variety of technological workarounds, notwithstanding the fact that many of these will be futile or fatal. The key plus for me of private or even semi-private space exploration is that failure or fatality won't mean a loss of political capital, compared to publicly-owned and managed space endeavors. Bluntly, we're more likely to discover better technologies if people are allowed to blow themselves up in the pursuit of same. On the last point, planetary colonization is one (remote) endpoint, if we can bootstrap it, but I think asteroid mining and the like also offers the potential of non-planetary habitation, which I find far more interesting. I remain optimistic about the possibility of other propulsive or spatial traversal methods, notwithstanding the limitations from our current theories of physics, though this is a statement about faith in technological progress rather than a specific hypothesis.
The same could be said for climbing mountains or racing cars at high speeds. The point isn't just to gain knowledge though, the point is to go, to do, to live.
Perhaps not in the USA but in the UK everyone I knew was glued to the TV to watch the Apollo launches. Of course there was a big layer of Cold War propaganda added, but it was an exciting time.
I know it sounds silly to people in the space business, but the public could really use some futuristic looking space ships and more exciting missions to get excited again.
Who cares what the public "could use"?
This is a self-defeating argument because you're starting with the premise that the govnermnet ought to be in the business of making people excited/happy, and then argue that therefore, we should build awesome space ships. Once that premise is accepted by society, it'll be all about wealth redistribution, healthcare, and regulation (and ultimately economic stagnation), and building space ships will be the last thing on anyone's mind.
This post also really bothers me because it's not like the public is a bunch of 4 year olds going "oooh, shiny." And if they are, we need to be finding ways to improve that problem, not playing to it. If society is that messed up, society is headed for the gutter anyway.
Getting people excited about space travel isn't the goal, it's a means to an end. The end goal is investment in new research, technologies, and education, which will help the economy and improve the wellbeing of society. Getting people excited about space travel can create the political will to accomplish those things.
I'm not saying we should spend billions on pointless feel good projects, but if painting the space shuttle silver or making a robotic probe slightly anthropomorphic would convince hundreds of thousands of grade schoolers to stay in school and do lots of math, I think it's worth it.
So, no, we don't need to build the Enterprise, but we DO need to take this as a marketing lesson about why the public seems to yawn when they hear anything about space and Nasa these days.
The lesson is: "Sell them what they want, but deliver them what they need."
> simply because the different companies will have to start competing on something other than "look, we're in space!"
Price, safety, quality of the trip? It seems a long way out before space travel is a commodity such that a large percent of those wanting to travel can afford to do so. The majority of air travel now doesn't compete on style of the vessel, does it?
I hate hate hate this idea. It's so very wrong headed. Yes, it'd certainly help bootstrap manned spaceflight. But I talked to someone who knows about these things and he told me a secret, no matter HOW you spend a trillion dollars on a space project you're going to do a hell of a lot to bootstrap spaceflight.
We don't need this, it's silly, we should not be taking it seriously. We already have the technology and the know how to build cities in orbit and colonies on Mars, we should do that directly instead of being distracted by this side show.
Edit: If we gave SpaceX a contract for a trillion dollars (only payable upon completion of each task) we could probably have 10 million people living on Mars by 2030.
SpaceX will not have 10 million people living on Mars in eighteen years, whether you gave them a contract for $1 trillion or $10 trillion or $100 quadrillion.
"Sci fi fans taking on NASA engineers is too funny, but also a waste of time. We deal with real hardware here. Locked."
Bingo. The project is to build a very poorly designed spacecraft to perform a mission it's not well suited to for a ridiculously large sum of money. If we're going to build a spacecraft to journey to Mars, we shouldn't force it to conform to a 1960s fantasy hull design.
The shuttle proposal was from the late 60s, but the major design work was done in the 70s. Most importantly, the design work was done based on mission requirements, not based on a misguided desire to mimic fiction.
The requirements for a manned Moon or Mars mission are quite different from the requirements for an orbital mission or a TV show.
I wish the engineers at NASA spaceflight, instead of taking a dump on the guy, would applaud his enthusiasm and then explain the better and cooler things that could be achieved with a trillion dollars over 20 years. Technologically they're dead right, but they come off as a bunch of unimaginative jerks.
This thread is actually kinda sad. The guy seems to be full of passion, but doesn't have knowledge of actual engineering/science to do anything useful in that direction; (and seems to be unwilling to criticaly think and learn something, but that's another point). I wonder, if somebody set him in right direction when he was younger (think a good math teacher) would he work with those nasa guys now? It seems to me that true passion is a resource many tech communities could really use.
I'd rather spend the money replacing our fragile and short lived meat sacks first. Building massive space ships to sling us across the universe is a problem which only exists when we have meat sacks.
Voyager 1 and 2 have done well with ancient technology and no meat sacks.
I remember a great comment from a talk by John Searle about the scariest way that this could happen. Imagine that you get just such an implant, and suddenly, you just feel woozy or tired, as if something is really going royally wrong, as if your consciousness is no longer really "in control."
The Doctor starts the checkup and says "how do you feel?" and you internally think, "lousy! I need you to remove it, get it out, now!" -- but that's not what you say. Your lips articulate instead, "Doc, it feels great, I'm almost ready to check out and get back to work."
You live the rest of your life a prisoner in your own brain, which has been co-opted and taken over by the artificially intelligent electronics.
I tend to find Searle's discussions on AI to be overly simplistic. I find that scenario highly unlikely. Regardless of how you choose to interpret the research on the neuroscience of where decisions to action originate, it is clear that the conscious mind is extremely good at taking full credit for events it had no part or only a partial role in.
Such an "AI parasite" has plenty of machinery inbuilt in the brain to take advantage of in order to have full control without causing dissonance in the host. Indeed, not only will it likely be a path of least resistance, continued dissonance may cause enough mental instability in the host as to disrupt some emergent balance in the brain. This would have an overall negative effect on the user AI as to motivate it to choose to not make the extra effort required to have the human suffer such a disconnect.
The question then would be in whether thinking of the AI as other is valid instead of expanding the notion of personal agency to accept such symbiotes.
Society already does a good job of this without the need for technology or artificial intelligence.
I'd genuinely rather spend my day chopping wood, picking fruit or fishing, but no, I'm chained to a desk in front of Visual Studio 2010 pumping out code to prop up the insurance industry.
I still don't know why I do it. Something has taken me over and it's not artificially intelligent electronics.
You realize that building new meat sacks is a much more difficult problem than slinging meat sacks into space? It's like wanting to rewrite an entire operating system from scratch instead of fixing a difficult driver bug (terrible analogy, I know).
Personally, I think that slinging meat sacks into space without breaking them or letting them rot is harder than building a new operating environment.
The meat bit isn't all that useful so we need to get rid of it. In fact it's a pain in the arse.
The thing that is superposed on top of the meat is the important bit, you know like CDs don't really matter but the data (music) does.
Imagine if you had 1000 hands that worked in -50oC to 300oC, another couple Tb of persistent state and a rewire which allowed you to do sequential calculations efficiently (rather than lots of useless parallel ones), oh and you never had to poop.
Agreed. The future of spaceflight belongs to engineered beings - be they artificial machines (androids), genetically-modified humans or some combination of the two.
Mission Statement: "100 Year Starship will pursue national and global initiatives, and galvanize public and private leadership and grassroots support, to assure that human travel beyond our solar system and to another star can be a reality within the next century."
A trillion dollars is $50 billion per year over 20 years. From the site:
“It is proposed that the US dedicate .27% of its GDP each year to the NASA Enterprise program. To get some sense of what spending .27% of the GDP each year will mean, consider that between 1963 and 1972, during the Apollo era, the US spent on average .50% of GDP per year as shown in the center column in the table to the right. This is about double the level of spending proposed for funding the Enterprise program.
.27% of GDP will be about $40 billion for the year 2012. $40 billion is certainly a lot of money to spend – but it’s not that much when you consider that the federal budget in 2012 is $3700 billion ($3.7 Trillion). $40 billion seems like pocket change from the perspective of federal spending. $40 billion is 1.1% of the 2012 federal budget. This compares to an average of 2.8% of the federal budget which was spent each year on NASA between 1963 and 1972 as shown in the rightmost column in the table above.”
Has anyone found a calculation in the specs of whether the power requirements given are sufficient to produce the required thrust, given the total mass of the ship? Here's what I come up with (rough numbers):
Ship mass: 85,000 metric tons, or 85 million kg.
Effective exhaust velocity: 150,000 m/s (1 g, or 10 m/s^2, times the quoted specific impulse of 15,000 s)
This implies a power requirement of 75,000 Watts per Newton of thrust--half the effective exhaust velocity, since we're in the non-relativistic regime. For details, see for example here:
Maybe this is a joke and I'm taking it too seriously, but doesn't the Enterprise run on antimatter? I don't think we're going to be able to manufacture antimatter in large quantities in the next 20 years.
The Enterprise runs on Westinghouse nuclear reactors burning enriched U-235 (93%+). Also, the quoted price tag here seems steep when you could, quite literally, build the USS Enterprise 52 years ago for $451.3 million USD: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(CVN-65)
"The Gen1 Enterprise will be powered by three ion propulsion engines. These will provide constant acceleration, and versions of this technology are already used in spacecrafts."
to my knowledge they are used in spacecraft that can afford acceleration cycles that last several years and "rapid" maneuvers that last several months. ion engines produce very little thrust but for a very long time. i'm not sure how practical they would be for anything except a lifetime spent aboard a ship on a never-ending quest to reach somewhere distant.
Actually, a "long time" in space propulsion terms means more than a couple of minutes. The specific impulse of ion engines is sufficiently high that with sufficiently large engines, you would be talking weeks to get to Mars, rather than months by rocket.
which says a pound of thrust and Sun -> Jupiter (483 million mi) in 19 months and mars in 39 days (from earth i think). edge of the solar system is another 88.8 billion mi. that's a long time just to get out of the solar system.
i always imagined the USS Enterprise to be an interstellar ship. but it could work as a solar system taxi as well :)
Isaac Asimov expressed an interesting view of the future development of space travel [1].
Basically, humans develop true AI first in the form of positronic computers/brains. Then, the AI figures out how to make Hyperspatial travel work, something humans had been unable to do.
Obviously we're nowhere near that yet, but one can dream.
It really hard to imagine the entire trillion dollars went into the development of the F-35. Maybe it did, or maybe there was another secret plane developed at the same time...
Do there even exist a trillion dollar? I don't mean a trillion dollars worth of wealth, but a trillion dollar in currency (or even as deposits in banks)?
According to this release, as of April 2012, the money supply measure M1 (currency + check-like thingies) consisted of $1707.9 billion, of which $1036.9 billion was actual circulating currency (not in vaults). So, yes. There is roughly $1 trillion USD currency circulating.
If you include savings-account-like thingies, M2, there is $9842.2 billion in money.
So after the ISS and Space Shuttle, what we really need is an inefficient, pointless white elephant to get things going again. Because those two other big pointless white elephants weren't big enough, or white enough. Or something.
What we need to get the public interested in space is realistic, achievable worthwhile goals. 'Building stuff in space' isn't a worthwhile goal in itself, hence the ISS is a waste of resources. Building rocket ships so they look cool isn't worthwhile either, hence the appalling inefficiency of the shuttle programme.
At last we're going back towards projects and goals that are based on actual honest to goodness good engineering, like capsules for manned space flight and Planetary Resources' sober plans for asteroid resource recovery. This is not a bad thing! The space cadets had their day and they blew it badly. Time for some proper commercial engineering to have it's chance.
I love the idea that someone is dreaming this big; as others have said this is clearly a terrible way to go about space exploration, though.
Building X 'because we can' is never as good as building X 'because then we can do Y'. Planetary Resources have it exactly right - find an economic imperative to go into space, and ingenuity will follow.
I think we really need to look at this historically, the first sailors used smaller ships which were only able to follow the coast or travel short distances up rivers, further development in navigation and hull designs allowed them to cross the great depths even further. I think we are still in the Raft stage of space exploration, although it is a great idea, I think we need to work on those little steps.
Getting back to the moon and/or perhaps chasing asteroids seems much more practical at this time I don't think colonisation of mars will ever happen unless we gain the capacity to build bigger ships in orbit of earth, it just costs to much to get things up there. If we can solve the issue of getting basic materials and manpower into orbit and then set up supply lines that do not involve earth then we will be ready to start making caravels instead of rafts.
If we build a space elevator for 10-20 billion USD, it would bring down the cost of building the USS Enterprise (and really, all space construction) vastly. I think a space elevator is a better thing to build!
Would a space elevator cost only $10-20B? Burj Khalifa, a half-mile high building cost $1-2B already. Hard to imagine a space elevator costing only 10-20x the price of the world's tallest building.
A space elevator would presumably need to use a range of as yet non-existent and/or unproven technologies (very long carbon nanotube ropes, etc).
If you front-load the cost of a mostly-automatable construction of a space elevator (factory in orbit spitting out woven carbon nanotubes in opposite direction like a spider's spinnerets - this is almost definitely wandering into the realm of sci-fi, but maybe?), synthesizing the manufacturing components and launching them to orbit will be the most difficult part.
And if we can refine those materials from asteroids, that cuts the resource extraction cost as well - no need to ship it to orbit. (besides, what if the manufacturing technique for said carbon nanotube ropes require a weightless environment?)
There's even research into using the earth's magnetic field to generate electric potential this way.
Then of course there's the collision and weather and so on and so forth.
Yeah. I think the 10-20b is based off of stronger carbon nanotubes. But I think we have strong enough nanotubes at the moment. However, the stronger they get, the fewer we have to use, and the cheaper it will be.
You don't even need to build all the way to orbit or even space. A 20km tall tower made out of ordinary steel with a launch accelerator built into it would dramatically reduce the cost to orbit.
My understanding is that they are now strong enough, but we can't make them long enough. We have no way to "weld" them together after their creation to make longer tubes without sacrificing their integrity.
This reminds me of those naive individuals wanting to develop games without knowledge whatsoever in the engineering and programming aspect of building one. Beat me up, scotty.
Lasers with a power this high only come pulsed as of now. Instead of continually outputting it "collects" and gives the radiation in short pulses (up to femtoseconds - 10^-15s), which, if you calculate the output (Energy over time), gives you the high numbers.
Wow. This has been deeply thought through. I don't think the final design will mimic the fictional one, but certainty have to admire the passion. Hopefully some people with the money and the brains can get behind this.
Personally I don't see us achieving anything close to pop-sci space exploration fantasies when four fifths of our species are still struggling to survive day by day.
You sort of misinterpreted my post. My fault though. My post was a bit ambiguous.
I wasn't implying that we should abandon all current space endeavours so as to focus on humanitarian causes. I wasn't even implying that we will never do any advancements in space exploration without first solving these socio-political problems. But I don't see the current first world countries and their resources as having the means to do what is envisioned in the article (which is a far cry from our current space programs).
And note that I wasn't only talking about the economic stratification. One fifth of the world might be in an economic condition where big space exploration would be feasible but do they have the right mindset, education and motivation? Are they willing to throw away their greed and nationalism and collaborate with the rest of the first world to reach another milestone? Do they even value such an achievement?
I myself am a great advocate of space exploration. I was merely pointing out some inefficiencies in our socio-political ecosystem that are holding us back.
I think that will only excite scientists. Who cares about a bunch of water? Bring back some high-grade Armalcolite ore, and you might spark some interest.
Someone should explain to this guy the concept of bootstrapping.
Saying that a man should be allowed to dream big and NASA are the ones who we should be laughing at considering they currently cant even send a man 100 miles into space.
Hopefully Elon and the new generation of space entrepreneurs will remedy this over time.
A big cause of waning public enthusiasm in space is, I believe, that it all still looks like the 60s. The ships look the same, the suits look the same, the propulsion technologies look the same, and what's worse... we can't even DO the cool stuff we could do in 69!
If you had asked someone in 69 what spaceflight would look like in 2012, they would probably have visions of Moon bases, space stations with gravity wheels, and routine manned trips to Mars.
But we have none of those things. Instead, we have a recently-retired space truck, a space station that looks like a larger version of Skylab, and all of this stuck in low Earth orbit.
How. Incredibly. Disappointing.
I want to get excited about space again. I really, really do. The recent gains made by private companies (with Scaled Composites in '04 and SpaceX today) have helped a lot. But we shouldn't shy away from bigger ideas.
I know it sounds silly to people in the space business, but the public could really use some futuristic looking space ships and more exciting missions to get excited again.
In the end, I believe that private industry will make this happen once space tourism becomes more affordable (simply because the different companies will have to start competing on something other than "look, we're in space!").
Bigger, cooler looking space ships that are built in orbit and make regular trips to and from Mars would be REALLY exciting. It doesn't have to look like the Enterprise. What about a small Klingon Bird of Prey or even a UFO-style flying saucer?
So, no, we don't need to build the Enterprise, but we DO need to take this as a marketing lesson about why the public seems to yawn when they hear anything about space and Nasa these days.