12-April-2006, 07:19 PM
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Established Member
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: Springfield, Illinois, USA
Posts: 749
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What We Could do if we had the will:
- Colonies/regular flights to the Moon with real science and comercial efforts.
- Multiple visits to mars heading toward a goal of permanent colonization.
- Orbiters/landers/atmospheric probes for all planets and interesting moons out to Neptune.
- More "grand tour" flybys to the KBOs, Oort cloud and beyond.
- Much bigger/more capable versions of the various space telescopes.
- Develop much more powerful/efficient propulsion capable of achieving a small percentage of the speed of light along with at least designs for the first true (capable of functioning when it gets there and sending back data) interstellar probe.
- Manned visit to the asteroid belt.
- Plans for manned visit of Jovian moon(s).
What we will likely have:
- See Romanus' post (Item 2).
- Ibid (Item 1).
- Maybe one or two probes to Jovian moon(s). Possibly a Neptune orbiter. Possibly a new Jovian orbiter.
- At most 1 or two of these grand tour missions beyond New Horizons.
- If we are lucky, Hubble will have been repaired, but will be defunct with no replacement in sight by the 45 year mark. The other deep space scopes will be long forgotten.
- Chemical fuel, Baby!
- Maybe, Dawn will have gotten funding.
- Yeah. Right.
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