I’m so glad society has teams allocated to identifying these hard-hitting issues. It’s true - we don’t have enough consumer protections in place for space tourists. A poor innocent space tourist could “go to space” without fully understanding that “space can be dangerous”. Thankfully, these analysts discovered this issue before too many people were “at risk”. Future space tourists will have to sign a waver, or watch a presentation, or something.
The interesting question here is who paid for this “study”, and who from the register accepted the bribes to get this dogshit published.
A half dozen years ago, or thereabouts, I entered the Canadian version of this competition, just to see how I’d fare, and to look at the process. Made it through the first couple levels of screening (from 3200 applicants, I was still in the hunt at 300 remaining) but then got filtered.
Some interesting bullet points if you’re thinking of applying, assuming the NASA questions are similar to the CSA ones:
(1) ham radio, morse code, or other amateur radio operator experience is an asset.
(2) Anything aviation or amateur rocketry is an asset, but in particular a pilot’s license. Anything aviation adjacent is still useful.
(3) Russian language (this might be changing in the current political environment)
(4) Experience in an “operational environment” – I suspect this is military jargon, but if you’d don’t field research as a scientist out of wilderness camps, or anything like that where you’re in a small group for work/adventure might apply here.
(5) Medical degrees, or advanced science degrees.
(6) Physical fitness and perfect vision
When I applied, my Russian sucked, my aviation experience was tangential (but copious), and I was a grad school dropout (from a planetary science program), so I didn’t float to the top. But it was enough to make it through the first layers.
There person who ended up winning was a medical-degree air force pilot. Hard to compete haha.
It’s amazing that 10 years after launch, Elite Dangerous is still running (online only, but has solo mode) and still has an active community. We can argue about how shallow the gameplay is, but for some of us, it ticks the right boxes. It’s just like the point made in the article - sometimes you have to use your imagination. It’s not a story game, it’s just open and you do your own things, same as it always was. And the sound design, that’s the real treat.
But it could be so much more. People were so hyped for Horizons when we learned we’d finally be getting space legs but it just fell so flat on release.
FPS isn’t big for me so I just bop around looking for bio signatures. I feel the FPS portion parallels the flight portion the same way. It is flat, it is vast, it is a grind. That’s part of why I don’t do any FPS combat. I do wish it had better immersion, more features to FPS at least on some core planets and of course giving depth to the stations (since it’s copy and past) but I do also wonder if that’d really be worth it. The game takes long enough to travel as it is, so do I really want to also have reason to walk through a place for hours? My headcanon for not having any depth on planets is because the depth would all be located on terraformed planets. We’re barred from that so it works well enough for me (with suspension of belief). But they have such smooth transitions between instances that it doesn’t seem like an integration problem, just an effort problem for a waning game.
Not sure what brings back more nostalgia in that picture to be honest. The feeling of the vastness of a game that had no right to feel so big given it’s constraints, or the GLC’s lyric “I made love to a BBC Micro”.
theregister.com
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