Retrograde Steps in Human Technology

[///M-Spec]

Trust us to get off onto a marginally related tangent as soon as someone mentions fighter jets. Sorry for the mild hijack, Fam.

Re: Global Hawk. I think UAVs like the Hawk and Predator have limitations compared to something like a satallite or a possible SR-71 successor. For one, they aren't very fast. If called upon to observe time sensative targets in remote areas, they would perform poorly compared to traditional strategic reconassience aircraft. One of the beautiful things about the Blackbird (and any successor) was it could be practically anywhere in the world within a few hours of a call from the commander in chief. I doubt the Air Force would give up such capability.

Plus, UAVs, due to their typical operating altitudes and slow speeds cannot survive in an area with modern air defenses. One reason they succeed in areas like Iraq and Afganistan is because there's not much shooting at them. Send a Global Hawk inside a place like... say.. North Korea, and it's a front page headline within a few hours.

Ironically, there is a school of thought that belives Blackbird's successor is, in fact, a UAV as well.


M

 

[Famine]

Aerospace is an interesting field (all of your examples come from that field). It's a field where the problems are fundmental and quite challenging. Get an aircraft to go faster than the SR-71 is a really tough problem, and then there's the old question... why would you want to?

Really the bottom line in all of these events is motivation.

We don't need to go faster than the SR-71.
People weren't willing to pay enough to fly to london as fast as the concorde would go.
The shuttle didn't do a whole hell of a lot in Low Earth Orbit and it was really expensive, so why risk astronauts (although the shuttle hangup is largely due to government overreaction).
Sending men to the moon just isn't that important from a science point of view. So why should we go to the expense - we already did it.

... and then there's one more major motivation that doesn't push these things.

No Cold War anymore. Competition is good.


At the same time, we're still making huge progress in space exploration, possibly more now than ever before in human history. It's just that we're doing it with a low profile and in a super efficient way (ie: no people on board).

I have to agree - although I was specifically talking about technology where humans were involved...

If we were to launch a probe in the direction of Voyager 2 with current engine technologies (and Voyager 2 has been going for a little under 28 years now), it would catch and pass it inside 7 years. Or we're currently making interplanetary engines five times faster than the ones we made 30 years ago. But we're only able to hit Mars one time every five - without a human at the controls with a bit of imagination (and lacking the 8 second delay to ground control), would we stand a better chance of landing on Mars successfully?


The Moon's composition is still just as much a mystery as it always was. It still may contain water ice and in the four missions sent there - using technology eclipsed by today's mobile phones - we barely scratched the surface to bring back 2.5kg of crust rock. There's still a scientific reason to send things to the Moon (although we've not managed to crack our OWN crust yet) and possibly reasons to send people there.

 

[Danoff]

There's still a scientific reason to send things to the Moon (although we've not managed to crack our OWN crust yet) and possibly reasons to send people there.

Sure, there's science to be done, but I think people won't be important unless we found some sort of water source or if we start colonizing or something. So at the moment I don't think manned missions offer serious benefit - only huge cost.

 

[Famine]

And the fact NASA would go "Hey! Guess what? We sent a man to the moon!", and nearly everyone would say "So?", or be too busy sending a text message.

 

[Ev0]

On the topic of UAV's , this is certainly the future of aviation. It has been said by many that this current generation of fighters will be the last generation to have pilots actually inside the aircraft. In the future (as in as little as 15-20 years from now perhaps), fighter pilots could very well live and work exclusively at a central base, and be able to fly missions all over the world without ever moving from their base. This would also be very convinient for long range missions, where multiple pilots could take turns at the stick.

But, I doubt we will see large airliners flown completely remotely (or exclusively by computer) any time soon. The public will not have enough confidence to cimb aboard a pilotless plane anytime soon.

And on a separate note, airpower is still very important in modern warfare. But now, war has evolved so that good intelligence is the best possible weapon you can be armed with. Crippling airpower is useless without adequate intelligence regarding targets (as opposed to WWII, where you just needed a general taget area, after which you would send bombers to obliterate anything even remotely close to the target area).