Landing on the moon and supersonic passenger flight in the 60’s.
And since then…
We really should be holidaying on Mars by now!
I demand to see pictures of JB on Olympus Mons!
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19 year old lad at work said recently that he thought we should have supersonic passenger flight within the next 20 years. He refused to believe we had already had it. He had never heard of Concord and thought we were taking the piss.
He wasn’t too convinced by Google but accepted it the next day because he had asked his Dad 
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Dad over Google…fake news.
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Haha, understandable though.
We have got used and expect things to always advance.
Technology has clearly done so, super computers and carbon fibre instead of the pocket calculator and bacofoil we went to the moon with.
So it’s not that we can’t do it, we just won’t, and that is the truly disappointing part. 
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Missed dad opportunity there. I told my lad this old slag heap near Midsomer Norton was an extinct volcano, that worked for a year 
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I tried to explain to my god son and his brother this there used to be a plane that could fly faster than a bullet. They just looked at me as if I was mad and said no way. 
Oh, and it’s ‘Concorde’. 
Time is being spent developing robot replacements.
The ISS data shows that blindness is a probable consequence of long term zero gravity.
I bet they would look blankly & disbelieving at you if you told them there was a car manufacturer which deliberately put the engine in the wrong place as well !
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I think you’re right, realistically robots will have a big part to play but a human setting foot on another planet would mean so much more.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/1038.html
We’ll have to be content with camera images I suspect.
It’s about the only place the fucker hasn’t been…
Yet. 
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Just booked for August 
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If you need a car you do know you can only rent Tesla milk floats there.
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Yep, you’re well overdue a holiday John - must be at least three minutes since your last one 
No Jim, nothing planned until March 
This should work, but the numbers aren’t quite trivial. To replicate gravity the product of the rotation rate (revolutions per second) squared and the distance of the astronaut from the central hub (roughly the radius of the spacecraft) has to be equal to the acceleration due to gravity divided by 4 pi-squared, which comes to about 0.25m/s^2. So if the spacecraft radius was, say, 6m then the rotation rate would have to be about 0.2 rev/s or 1 rev every 5 seconds. For a thing that large that’s quite a fast rotation rate, but certainly not impossible. Down here on the ground they built centrifuges for astronauts that could create up to 20g.
VB
A large tube with thrusters on the outside to rotate it catherine wheel stylee?
Just don’t get Jim to build it or it will have a superfluous counter rotating flywheel…
Yes, that’s the way to do it. In space, and once it was away from the traces of the earth’s atmosphere, it would stay spinning without needing much extra help.
If you had a counter-rotating ring then you could spin one up against the other, which means you could do it using a solar-powered electric motor rather than having to eject thruster gas. I don’t know what the trade-off between the need for a rotating seal and the extra mass of the second ring and motor versus the mass of thruster fuel is though. I’d guess for the shortish hop to Mars you’d use thrusters. For a longer journey two rings might be better. Isn’t that the way it was shown in Passengers ?
A problem might arise when you got to Mars. The gravity there is less than 40% of what it is here. I don’t know if that’s enough to preserve eyesight indefinitely. A rotational solution could still work (ring with a vertical axis and a floor tilted at the angle needed to add Mars’ gravity to the ring’s centripetal force). But drag and frictional losses would be much worse there and substantial power might be needed to keep it spinning.
VB
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