Sergey: In Soviet Russia, Rocket Detonates You! 146
theodp writes "'We were all foolish enough to go on this adventure,' Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the assembled Brainiacs at Google's Solve for X event last week, recalling the time he and Google co-founder Larry Page took their Gulfstream on a $100K journey to watch a 2008 Soyuz launch in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. 'If the rocket blows up, we're all dead,' Sergey overheard a Russian guard say. 'It was incredibly close,' Sergey continued. 'We drove in toward this rocket and there were hundreds of people all going the other way. It was really an astonishing sight. If you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend it. It's really not at all comparable to the American launches that I've seen...because those are like five miles away behind a mountain, and the Russians are not as concerned with safety.' Sergey received film credit for the recently-opened Man on a Mission, a documentary on the Russian Soyuz mission that wound up putting Ultima creator Richard Garriott into orbit (for $30 million) instead of changing the course of Google history."
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to go with yes, Mr. Emissions Police.
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not Necessarily Dead (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, not all casualties had to be reported in 1983 in USSR, after all, when Chernobyl blew up they covered it up for days and days, people came out to the 1st of May parade (International labour day was always celebrated with big parades then), nobody stopped them coming out even in the surrounding cities and it was very dangerous for people in Kiev for example because of the wind pattern.
However Brin says they came too close to the rocket, and people don't have to be that close during launch, there is always a command bunker near the launch site.
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is unlikely to change, because rockets are a mature technology, like ships and aircraft. Ships haven't gotten all that much faster over the years; modern container ships are only about twice as fast as the last clipper ships, not ten or a hundred or a thousand times as fast. Similarly, a modern commercial airliner isn't radically faster than the first jetliners that flew in the late 1940s, maximum cruise speed of a 777 is about 600 mph, versus around 500 for the first jetliners. And rockets are the same way: the economics of rockets haven't changed radically since WWII when von Braun was lobbing V2s at London. Back then you were throwing away a lot of fuel and metal to launch a small payload, almost 70 years later we're still doing the same, just with bigger rockets. In short, a mature technology. It was extraordinarily expensive to launch stuff on a rocket 70 years ago, and it's still extraordinarily expensive, which suggests it will be extraordinarily expensive 70 years from now. To make space colonization or resource extraction practical, you'd need to increase the efficiency of space travel by multiple orders of magnitude. That's probably impossible with anything that remotely resembles existing rockets; instead if humans ever leave the planet it will require some completely new kind of technology.
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
The aircraft analogy doesn't work. 100 years ago, the idea that high volume air travel was possible wouldn't be that fantastic given what was happening in 1912. The airplane had gone from a short flight of 120 feet at Kitty Hawk in 1903 to the French flying across the English Channel in 1909, a span of only 7 years. And look at what was happening in 1912 according to Wikipedia: you had the founding of major aircraft corporations like Sopwith and Fokker, seaplanes, carrier tests conducted by the U.S. Navy, the first use of aircraft as bombers. On the engineering end of things, they had gone from the Wright Brother's first use of the wind tunnel to the development of Prandtl's lifting-line theory and theories of supersonic flow. In short, in 1912, aircraft were nowhere near a mature technology. Over the past 50 years, however, the pace of change has slowed dramatically. Rockets show the same pattern: an initial rapid rate of change in the technology's capabilities and efficiency, followed by a longer period of much slower change as the technology runs up against basic limits imposed by materials and physics.
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude, it isn't cheap easy pessimism. Travelling around the planet, like we've done for thousands of years, but faster isn't nearly as big a deal as going into space, where everything is hostile to human life and there is no deserted jungle island out there that you can survive on if your plane crashes. The problems of space travel are considerably larger than anything we've faced before and will take considerably more resources and a concerted, well-thought out planning step. We can't just throw some men on a boat and have them survive when they arrive and along the way. We have to plan every detail, plan for every conceivable error and failure step and build very precise machinery using the best technology of the day. Sure, we can do it, but it'll be extremely expensive, very dangerous and unlikely to yield anything more useful than bragging rights.
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are not worried about anthropogenic CO2, then increasing the gas tax to stop the increase is a really dumb thing, because it would hurt the economy and poor people for no good reason.
Premises determine conclusions.