Progress?? Really??

Sad as I am,

I had the Discovery Channel on in the background in my study today. Subject The SR-71 Blackbird spy-plane. Serving from 1964 until 1998 it was capable of maintained speeds in excess of 2,200 mph. It has not flown for 13 years or so and certainly will never again as all tooling was destroyed as a security measure. It was designed by slide rule, pencil, paper and human ingenuity, not a computer in sight.

It go me thinking about how in technology and engineering terms has the human race really progressed and in other areas regressed with no real vision of reaching such achievements again. You can cite Telecommunications and Computing as areas of progress, however the technology hasn't fundamentally changed, it has just become smaller, lighter, faster and more open to development. Bandwidth and connectivity are constantly increasing with demand but the underlying technologies and infrastructures are developments not blue sky thinking.

However in some areas we have actually regressed. Man last stood on the moon on December 14th 1972 nearly 39 years ago! We are further away from being able to land a man there now than we were in the 1960's and chances are we will not visit there again. There is no viable launch, delivery or landing system in place or in significant development.

In 1976 you could take a scheduled flight from London to New York that took only 3.5 hours on Concorde, no-one has been able to do that for the past 8 years.

Man was able to pilot a re-useable spacecraft into orbit, deliver supplies, instrumentation, build space stations, transport people, position satellites, recover them and repair faulty equipment from 1981 until this year, no viable heavy lift re-useable system is in place to carry on this work.

The land speed record has not been broken for 14 years and the previous record lasted for 14 years too.

I appreciate the reasons that all the technological marvels I have listed are no longer with us and in the interests of progress and development they shouldn't be. My point is, where is the the way forward? Where is the newer, safer, faster, more efficient and all round better Shuttle, Concorde etc.. We seem to have built 'one offs' but not looked further than our noses.

Human beings can now travel slower, visit fewer places in our solar system and worst of all have limits on ambition and engineering knowledge that insure slower if any progression and fewer benefits for mankind as a whole.