edit: also, apologies for being a smart ass. My internet-fu has been weak lately.

My Gob is officially smacked.

Space colonization, or lunar or Mars colonization, would be fantastic. But any such colonies would have to be largely self-sufficient to be meaningful, and the technologies needed for this (1) are currently lacking and (2) will be developed here on the ground. I love unmanned spaceflight, and I’ll celebrate manned spaceflight when it has something to do – whereas you appear to be ready to celebrate it merely for existing. That development awaits better heavy lifting capabilities and better biosphere technologies, at the very least; possibly also robotic mining of water and mineral resources to support the colonies.

I’d be delighted if it were true, if we’d learned something significant from putting Meat In Space (since the end of the moon missions). We’ve learned a huge amount from putting robots in space, after all. But it simply isn’t so. The science done on the international space station would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic, and so damnably expensive, and very occasionally lethal to the participants.

The only real excuses I’ve seen are propaganda for spaceflight (i.e. the attention given to manned spaceflight makes it possible to get funding for real space exploration, with robots; in practice, within any given year manned spaceflight tends to steal funding away from unmanned spaceflight – but the total made available might have been smaller or even zero without manned spaceflight), propaganda for science generally (the attention given to manned spaceflight makes scientific endeavors more generally seem more exciting and romantic), or that if manned spaceflight were interrupted we wouldn’t return to manned spaceflight once technical developments made it actually worthwhile. All of these arguments have some merit, or might have, but none are testable.

But I invite you to point me to some of this “knowledge” you claim we’ve gained from manned spaceflight – in an era when unmanned spaceflight has given use immense leaps forward in our understanding of our solar system and the universe.

I *d0* look forward to the day when a satellite can fly that is designed to also take art pictures of the earth in addition to its primary mission. Until then, it’s going to take a human to aim and fire the camera.

There, that was easy.

Although, there is nothing about the taking of this picture that actually required a human component …

Edit: It’s lightning, I found the answer on Pettit’s blog at http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/index.php?option=com_myrssreader&view=rss&category=24&Itemid=120

Additionally, with multiple images (which can be stacked very easily with a per-pixel add or max operation) you have flexibility in post-processing to decide how many exposures to combine for longer or shorter trails.

 ;-)

coop

… not like its rocket science or anything.