Reading about an upcoming auction of
drawings of an imagined Nazi bomber found in the Reich Chancellery at the end of World War II made me think about the inexorable progression of software and hardware.
It worked like this:
The glider would be released from a larger aircraft. Guided by a Luftwaffe pilot inside, the dart would dive towards the ground carrying its 1,000kg bomb.
At the last moment, the pilot would release the bomb and inflate a huge balloon attached to the craft.
So, it's basically a human-steered cruise missile. Now that we have hardware and software that, for this particular purpose, can steer a bomb to a target, we don't need to attempt to put pilots into contraptions like these.
Similarly, we now send
amazing robots to Mars, and
monitoring spacecraft around other planets. As long as our computer and robotic engineering continues to move forward, and our space travel fuel strategies (chemical rockets) stay the same, the likelihood of manned missions to Mars continues to shrink. We don't need to send people there. It would be really neat if we did, but the benefits in terms of knowledge gained would be outweighed by the costs of getting them there and back safely.
