Erstellt am: 14. 5. 2012 - 12:14 Uhr
Today's Webtip: BTE
The space race is over, and humanity has lost. For now.
The age of massive national space programs is just a memory, and we are still waiting for the private gold-rush to begin. But there are still a lot of people who want to think big; from the private pioneers at SpaceX who are currently preparing the first private cargo transport to the ISS to the ambitious crew behind Planetary Resources who recently announced their plans to survey and mine near earth objects.
And then their are the armchair engineers. The people who want to think even bigger, sexier, or just more exciting. People like BTE Dan. He is convinced that it would be possible to build an Enterprise like spaceship right now, with technology that's currently available. He is so convinced that he even put up a website detailing his plans and reasoning. And despite the fact that it's pretty obvious that trying to make a functioning ship that looks like the Enterprise isn't the best way to achieve interplanetary flight, his site has sparked enough interest to have herds of other wish-they-were rocket scientists to slow the site to a crawl and light up discussion forums across the intertubes.
It might not actually help us get off the rock, but it's a bit more fun than thinking about taking the proper precuations to make sure I can survive retirement...
Please have patience. The site is still up, but it's really slow.