"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:4adb6cf3@news.povray.org...
> 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.

<g>

>   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 *first* ship would have been unmanned in reality.

And *if* the second unmanned ship failed, *then* they'd send a manned rescue
and repair mission, which would make for a more beliavable premise.

>   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.

I'm afraid manned crafts still don't make sense. Trying to accomodate humans
badly compromises such missions. Not just due to life support issues, but
mainly due to the need to return them back to earth. Maybe one reasonable
scenario (stealing even more heavily from 2001) would be to have one or two
sacrificial humans in suspended animation, to be awakened for a limited time
only in case of emergency. Alternatively, you send a trailing rescue/steward
mission. But really, there's next to nil that can go wrong on an impact
mission to the sun if you do your homework, and there's next to nil that on
board humans can do should something go wrong, as Columbia and Challenger
showed us. Yes, astronauts fixed the Hubble, but that took months of intense
ground preparation.

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