somebody <x### [at] ycom> wrote:
> Except that, even in these movies, the only purpose those on board serve is
> to screw things up. How hard would it be for NASA to crash an unmanned craft
> into the sun? All you need is 1960's dumb technology for that, scaled up
> accordingly for the payload.

  I find it rather amusing how you are bashing a movie you haven't even seen.

  You *think* that it was just a question of "let's send a rocket to the
Sun... oh, it failed, well, we'll just send another... oh, it also failed,
well, we'll just keep sending them until one succeeds; heck, let's send ten
ships at the same time, at least one is going to succeed".

  Except that's not the case in the actual movie, which you would know if
you had actually seen it. The second ship was the absolutely last chance
humanity had. That's it. No more. If it fails, humanity is dead.

  The idea was that they packed *all* the fissive material they could find
into the two ships. There was no more after the second one. Finito. If the
two ships failed, humanity is dead.

  Thus it makes a lot of sense to send a manned ship. Even the smallest of
failures, something which could be trivially fixed by a crew, could mean the
mission would fail.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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