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This is an exceedingly old image. Altough dated 1977, that was simply when I picked it up out of a sketch pile and inked it. The original pencil is likely to have been drawn in 1971 or 1972.
"Charon" is the name of the space capsule illustrated. I didn't design it as a re-entry vehicle, like an Apollo capsule. The Charon craft is only meant for space to space trips, such as from a space station to lunar orbit, or ship to ship. There's room inside for several couches, and on the lower deck a small living space. (Naturally, I drew schematics of all this.)
"Charon" is the name of the space capsule illustrated. I didn't design it as a re-entry vehicle, like an Apollo capsule. The Charon craft is only meant for space to space trips, such as from a space station to lunar orbit, or ship to ship. There's room inside for several couches, and on the lower deck a small living space. (Naturally, I drew schematics of all this.)
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File Size 137.8 kB
I think there's a future for us in space via "telepresence". The cost and danger of sending someone in the flesh is so great, I don't actually think it worth while in the foreseeable future, though we may do it just to show it can be done. (Or to plant a flag and say "Mars belongs to America" or "Mars belongs to China", alas.)
What I think is in our best interest is to use virtual reality type links with robot probes. You'd put on your sensoria head set and it would virtually be like sitting on a go-cart on the moon or Titan. When men do get to Mars it may be that they will spend most of their time on one of the low gravity moons, operating remotes on the surface. Getting mass up and down from the surface will remain expensive, so why bother except when really necessary?
Live on Mars? Terraform it? Not this century. Not unless someone finally invents the Magic Drive that makes it cost less than thousands of dollars a pound just to reach low earth orbit.
What I think is in our best interest is to use virtual reality type links with robot probes. You'd put on your sensoria head set and it would virtually be like sitting on a go-cart on the moon or Titan. When men do get to Mars it may be that they will spend most of their time on one of the low gravity moons, operating remotes on the surface. Getting mass up and down from the surface will remain expensive, so why bother except when really necessary?
Live on Mars? Terraform it? Not this century. Not unless someone finally invents the Magic Drive that makes it cost less than thousands of dollars a pound just to reach low earth orbit.
Yeah, well, these schemes always sound keen providing the technology comes through in the next 50 years and we have several trillion dollars sitting around that we don't need to invade Iraq or something... There's whole books about supposedly near-future, practical space technologies, all urging us to write to our congressmen to demand funding now. But I'm a skeptic from long experience. These ideas have been around since Gemini.
I've seen plans to rebuild an atmosphere, but I'd be as worried about the extremely acidic and likely corrosive nature of the soil. Apparenlty its about as hospitable to terrestrial lifeforms as iron filings soaked in bleach, kept under a UV lamp.
I suppose people could live there, under domes, the way we also live at the South Pole and in the middle of the Sahara. But I can't think of any attraction that would make it worth about a billion dollars a head to send colonists there. Again, we'd need some sort of "magic" drive that isn't really on anyone's drawing board.
I suppose people could live there, under domes, the way we also live at the South Pole and in the middle of the Sahara. But I can't think of any attraction that would make it worth about a billion dollars a head to send colonists there. Again, we'd need some sort of "magic" drive that isn't really on anyone's drawing board.
It's interesting you chose the name Charon, though I know it wasn't named after Pluto's moon, which wasn't discovered until 1978. Was it named after the god, or one of the other pop-culture references?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon
It was named after the boatman who rowed the ferry from the land of the living to the Elysian fields, in Greek myth. It seemed a reasonable name for a spacecraft mainly used for moving astronauts from one ship to another, or from a ship to some small object like an asteroid.
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