Since the dawn of Interstellar days, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) said human race was a race of pioneer and somehow implicitly said as survivalist. We someway somehow will understand and know how to re-flip the table around when the environment going bananas. Either we fight the environment and the Earth, or we leave it like a passengers abandoned a sinking ship.
Looking for another "Earth" was a pain in the ass, and it was interpreted on the movie itself. It may need some sacrificing and of course a lot of money. But little did we know, or maybe it started to become a public knowledge, several people around the world found, nay made their own way just in order to give us a glimpse of the futuristic future that we always dream of.
What Happened On Space Above Our Head
Or maybe not on space, yet. There were a lot of news and rumors that spread among us, either it was distributed by local TV news or even a simple 140-characters tweet from someone we followed on a social media. Some of them were mainly amazing, astonishing and beyond imagination, and some of them were, sadly followed by sad news - failures, crashes, rejections, etc. Some were only focusing on broaden our point of view on life and universe, some were wanted to make Star Wars and its Galactic Empire to be real.
Space Elevator
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| Source: wikipedia [1] |
The main idea of this hyperspace elevator took a long way back to 1895 by a Russian scientist who got the inspiration by the Eiffel Tower. That might be a mere concept, but as time goes by a lot of another scientists refined the concept, to be more plausible, to be more realistic. From the ground concept on how it would operate to what material they should use in order to make it from impossible to possible.
In 2012, a Japanese corporation which focusing on architectural and engineering said it was possible to made it by carbon nanotube technology as its base material. The following year, the improvement towards the tether or the cable was placed on the discussion table. And in 2014 Google X' R&D begin to designing the elevator itself.
The project Space Elevator has been halt or been cyro-ed due to findings on no manufacture industries that successfully and perfectly made carbon nanotube longer than a meter. [1]
Virgin Galactic
Virgin Galactic is a Virgin Group's company that focusing on spaceflights and beyond, where they developing commercial spacecraft - just like an ordinary commercial airplane, but for intergalactic travels and so on - providing suborbital spaceflights for space-lover tourist and also suborbital launches for small satellites and space science missions. [2]
On 31st October 2014, one of their Spacecraft, VSS Enterprise broke up in mid-air, spreading its parts falling straight towards Mojave desert, California. The co-pilot was dead and the pilot was injured. Based on NTSB there were several factors that may caused the accident: inadequate design safeguards, poor pilot training, lack of FAA oversight, and potentially anxious co-pilot without recent flight experiences. [2]
On February 20, 2016, they announced by their twitter account that they have a new spacecraft, named after old 2014-deceased VSS Enterprise original name "SpaceShipTwo", with several new improvements and more safety features, learning by their unfortunate experience. [3]
Russian's Space Weapons
Russian is rad. And its never ceased me to gawked and shake my head in either amuse or confusion. This time, they planned on making some sort of DeathStar, or even cooler and update: StarKiller. According to Moscow-based News Agency TASS, deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin said that they (Russian) tried to 'creating a completely new generation of armaments and military hardware for air and space defense" in order to secure their country from a sudden enemy's attack. The deputy also stated that the world entered a new epoch: space-based armament. [4] An epoch that plausible for things we saw from Star Wars or Star Trek franchise would realized in just a matter of time. Jet fighters, huge motherspaceship, escape pods, etc..
NASA's Grand Tour Campaign and A Quest of Finding Neo-Earth
This is what they had as a plot on Interstellar: finding a new planet, populate it, and turn it into Earth Mk. II. And yes, NASA already found a candidate or two.
The Grand Tour program originated back then at 1969, with focusing on deploying two probes into two different courses: one estimated launch on 1977 will go to Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto while the other one which estimated to launch on 1979 will go to Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. Sadly on December 1971 the program was canceled, possibly due to highly operation costs and an internal competition from a recently approved Space Shuttle Program. [5]
The first successful probe visit was The Mariner Jupiter-Saturn project (1972) which covered Jupiter, Saturn and its moon - Titan. Then followed by two Voyager spacecrafts (1977) which using the alignment of the planets and its own gravity as a trajectory or a path in order to move beyond those planets. Right now they exploring the field beyond the heliosphere. [5] [6]
These programs - Mariner and Voyager - gave NASA a big deal of data regarding the condition of the visited planets and its satellites. Giving them a source of juices in cracking the secret of universe, how vast our galaxy really is, gathered evidences about another galaxy, NAY, another plausible, habitable exo-planets that we might visit and stay on. A journey of expanding mind and maybe, just maybe, setting it for a great mind blowing data and discoveries in not so far distance future.
But before all of our heads blown in awesomeness, before the internet got hype because of some unexplained images and videos from beyond our galaxy posted by NASA on their website and went viral, before we said the last goodbye to our brick-and-stone house on Earth because our job needed us to be settled in Kepler-186f, they teased us with something unique and nostalgic in some way.
Recently NASA uploaded a list of high quality 50s-influenced sci-fi hype posters of several planets from our galaxy like Mars, Venus and Jupiter and also several exo-planets like Kepler-186f and Kepler-16b, HD "Super Earth" 40307g and 51 Pegasi b. Not only the graphics looks so beautiful and had some intention-builder for space traveling and visiting them, each posters had its own descriptions and facts based from data they retrieved from Mariner and Voyager. Setting up some expectations and hopes inside our heads, preparing us for anything beyond what we've dream off: interstellar travels, journey between space, planets and maybe galaxy. Picnic on Saturn? Lunch at Kepler-16b and diner on Ceres? Everything might possible in the distance future. And it's probably just waiting for us on the corner of the street.
You can download the full-size image poster of your favorite planet or satellite or maybe download all the posters NASA made here.
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