India is (or has) launching a space program. They hope to be in space by 2008. It was either this or nuke Pakistan.

I'm sure the hard working yet largely poverty-stricken
masses of India are tickled pink by that choice of expenditure... stupid:

LMFAO@eight ace

...erm, actually, that ones not meant to be a joke.

India's space program was born on Nov. 21, 1963.

They've sent payloads and satellites into space, but never a man. Perhaps they are looking to make manned missions by that time.

[quote="The Gay Blade!":c711e]First, I'm not Simo or whoever. I laugh at interweb detectives.

Second, inertia defined by Newtons Laws is the property of an object to resist channge in its motion. In laymans terms, you get something moving, its going to keep moving until something acts against it. In most cases, that thing is friction. All this isnt important though when we're looking at a ship in space moving at obscene speeds. Your body, is still moving at the ridiculous amount of speed, and without gravity (such as that on Earth) you're fucked. Now even if we did have artificial gravity, we'd still have things to worry about. What an inertial dampner would so is cut the mass of this huge object so that itd be like you driving in a fast car (low inertia) compared to a megaton shutle (high inertia).

And if we built a train in a a vacuum and let it go, just pushing on it would set it off thered be no gradual built up and you WOULDNT be able to slow it down unless you wanted to get on the other side of it.

Oh, and an object in orbit is still affected by the pull of gravity. Youll notice when shuttles break out of orbit, they slow down, since their INERTIA is such that they dont need thrusters. So yes right now we are spinning at an incredible speed, but gravity hooks us up there.

Theres an incredibly longer answer I could give but I'd have to break out the old physics book from highschool but the simple answer is this - to achieve and maintain high speeds, you would need both something to reduce the inertia of the object you are traveling in, and some artificial gravity to make that ride smooth.[/quote:c711e]

you obviously flunked Gen-phys 1 biggrin:
ACCELERATION is what causes you to be pushed back or forward in your seat, not speed. You can drive a spaceship up to obscene speeds and once the speed is constant you won't feel anything. Of course it is necessary to turn slowly because the change in direction essentially imitates an acceleration (this is what G-forces in a plane are).

[quote="The Gay Blade!":6b0d6]Omg I've been owned. No but seriously nowhere In my post did I make an assertion about accerlerationaton. As clearly said in my last post non-linear space flight at high speeds would not be feasible. This says nothing of the state of mass approaching speeds even close to the speed of light.

But hey keep going you're doing fine. Snark.[/quote:6b0d6]

But doesnt the warp field buffer us from the ravages of near light speed travel?

who cares about whats out there...what has landing on the moon done for earth?

Its very important , in my opinion anyway.

They are small steps towards the dicsovery of life on other planets. Which has enormous benifits.

Also we only have somewhere in the area of 5 million years before the sun goes super nova. We will have to be out of the solar system before then.

We'll all be long dead before the sun explodes.

[quote=pest]But doesnt the warp field buffer us from the ravages of near light speed travel?[/quote:fb102]

I believe thats what it does in Star Trek, but the device is actually utilized to bend the laws of physics - oOo: - so I suppose anything would be possible in it.

ownage ninty biggrin: