"My dream in this area is that, someday, when we put human boots on the surface of Mars, I want there to be millions of people in attendance for that event," Jeff Norris, Mission Operations lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory told Ars in a recent interview. "I want them not just sitting in their living room watching a television screen; I want them standing on Mars in their own holodecks right there beside the astronauts."
SpaceX and Skylon are already obsolete before they even started.
Robotics and VR may very well eliminate the need for HSF altogether.
To me HSF has always been about eventual space settlement and exponential growth of the human race out into the universe.
Quote from: KelvinZero on 10/04/2013 12:13 amTo me HSF has always been about eventual space settlement and exponential growth of the human race out into the universe.That's an unrealistic point of view.
And no, we will never get disinterested in what actually exists in outer space
To some extend, the lack of public interest is already a factor that impacts space agencies budgets quite a bit, I guess.
Well at present its certainly a totally unrealistic point of view. But of course, if humanity discovers a nice planet in another solar system, you can expect humans to settle there (if environmental regulation does not forbid it )
Remember that Bruce Willis movie with the android avatars?
It is only bad sci-fi movies that suggest interstellar travel will become easy while life support and ISRU will remain hard.
Lets try to pull this back on topic. VR is totally relevant without suggesting HSF is just a spectacle, no pun intended.
It's not like there's been some revolutionary breakthrough in VR.. they're just attacking the latency problem.
If they succeed, I expect a few thousand units to ship before the hype wears off any everyone rediscovers that resolution is still king.