"'We need to exceed where we were with the Apollo program,' says Musk, whose company, SpaceX, plans its first orbital launch next year. 'We have to go to Mars with people. A lot of people take for granted that that's the direction we're heading in, but unless there's a dramatic reduction in cost, there won't be anything like that. Somebody has to try to step in and try to save the day.'"
I really hope this headline is mistaken in calling Project Paperclip scientists the "last rocketeers"; hopefully they'll eventually be counted among the very first.
Or, just possibly, chemical rockets as we know them might be phased out by relatively cheap, clean electrogravitic technology -- in which case Musk and his friends just might be among the last after all. The "flying triangles" suggest a radical propulsion system that could make Apollo-style rockets laughably primitive by comparison . . . but are they ours?
(I recommend that any science fiction readers perusing this blog read Ken MacLeod's "Engines of Light" trilogy; the first book, "Cosmonaut Keep," presents an ingenious flying saucer back-engineering scenario that's so plausible in might, in fact, have already happened.)
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