First Commercial Space Walk

Sky Captain

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Oct 13, 2018
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Thanks for the post! Great moment!

In hindsight, I found it surprising that this was a first civilian spacewalk, given the technical capabilities of some of our aerospace companies.

This has been a long time coming.
 

Shadow Reaper

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Jun 3, 2016
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Yes well, when Apollo ended, the will to spend collapsed as it was built upon Cold War space penis envy, rather than a sincere yearning for exploration. The human space flight program was cut down to 1/10 what it had been and its goals pruned back to building large structures in Low Earth Orbit (Syklab, MIR and the International Space Station), and investigating the commercial aspects of LEO. There are pharmaceutical processes, super optical fiber production, space tourism and an I’ll fated attempt or two at space mining that came from that, but really there was no one pushing a single vision for human exploration between Werner Von Braun an Elon Musk.

Now Musk says he’ll take us back to the Moon but our real destination needs to be Mars, and our goal needs to be self-supporting colonies. So he’s got civilians doing space walks.

Astonishing times we live in. Nothing for half century and now we tail land rockets regularly. Propulsive landings NASA was too afraid to manage with the sole exception of Apollo.

Let’s hope Musk gets to inspire real change in the NASA subculture. It’s been very sick for a half century.
 
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