Voyager 1 has officially left the solar system

A Life Aloft said:
The spacecraft travels approximately 1 million miles per day.
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I think this is something that is so important to understand. 1 million miles/day makes most people go "wow! that's incredible!". In the grand scheme of things, it's an absolute SNAIL pace, and incredibly slow. It's taken nearly 40 years just for Voyager to escape our own solar system. I mean if you just think about that for a minute and let it settle in, we are just now leaving our own neighborhood after 4 decades.

Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to us after the sun at "only" a little over 4 light years away. If Voyager were heading for it (It's not), at it's current speed it would still take nearly 80,000 years for it to reach it. That's our nearest star to us, and there's 300 billion stars in the Milky Way alone. One of billions of galaxies. It's near impossible to understand how big space actually is.

Bandit_Driver said:
They both had less computing power than the average car today. @///AMG I'd agree the engineers of that era are a dying breed and really had to know their stuff. There was no computer to double check their calcs and guys put their lives in their hands.

Think about what Kelly Johnson did with the blackbird. A design that cutting edge that still kicks butt today and it was designed on paper.
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What they did was amazing back then! I love the story of Gordon Cooper in Faith 7. Massive technical failure while in orbit. Along with John Glenn on the ground helping with calculations, he used a star map, his eyes, his watch and sketches on his window to calculate the proper trajectory in order to re-enter the atmosphere.
 
///AMG said:
Prob wasn't built in China back then :)
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You mean Detroit.

Meet the 1975 Ford Pinto...

1971-1980-ford-pinto-1979.jpg
 
I agree with the above. I don't think we could put a man on the moon now. We would end up with a NASA equivalent to the 787, and it would be lucky to ever make it to testing, let alone live trials.
 
I just started reading "Failure is not an option" by Gene Kranz, a memoir of his career at mission control. Just from the first 100pages, the biggest thing that stuck out to me is the attitude of the people. He describes the early 60s as a time when young men were encouraged to study aerodynamics and engineering, and they were extremely excited to come out of college and work directly with NASA, and companies that supported them. He talks about the pride and patriotism that the young men had, knowing full well that even though space technology was a brand new and difficult venture to everyone, they gave 110% all the time because they would be aiding in the effort to beat the Russians to space, and the Moon.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson talks about this in his current speeches a lot. People aren't excited about space, and we need to get people excited because it really is the future.
 
Mark815 said:
I just started reading "Failure is not an option" by Gene Kranz, a memoir of his career at mission control. Just from the first 100pages, the biggest thing that stuck out to me is the attitude of the people. He describes the early 60s as a time when young men were encouraged to study aerodynamics and engineering, and they were extremely excited to come out of college and work directly with NASA, and companies that supported them. He talks about the pride and patriotism that the young men had, knowing full well that even though space technology was a brand new and difficult venture to everyone, they gave 110% all the time because they would be aiding in the effort to beat the Russians to space, and the Moon.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson talks about this in his current speeches a lot. People aren't excited about space, and we need to get people excited because it really is the future.
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Agreed. I have actually been looking for astronomy or astrophysics degree programs or anything to do with outer space in colleges around me, there is pretty much nothing. I'm stuck signing up for community education programs at the high school planetarium.
 
Mark815 said:
I think this is something that is so important to understand. 1 million miles/day makes most people go "wow! that's incredible!". In the grand scheme of things, it's an absolute SNAIL pace, and incredibly slow. It's taken nearly 40 years just for Voyager to escape our own solar system. I mean if you just think about that for a minute and let it settle in, we are just now leaving our own neighborhood after 4 decades.

Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to us after the sun at "only" a little over 4 light years away. If Voyager were heading for it (It's not), at it's current speed it would still take nearly 80,000 years for it to reach it. That's our nearest star to us, and there's 300 billion stars in the Milky Way alone. One of billions of galaxies. It's near impossible to understand how big space actually is.

.
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It's a pretty good source of motivation to figure out new forms of travel. Until we truly understand the building blocks of the physical and not so physical world we don't stand a chance of exploring the galaxy star trek style.

Still, Voyager is neat-o :)
 
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