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NASA Will Have To Wait For Mars
mattg writes, "Auntie is covering NASA's timetable for recent explorations of Mars has been called "wildly optimistic". Dr. Carl Pilcher, leader of NASA's planetary exploration program (whose sweater at the time said "Obey gravity: it's the law") has admitted that they do not know if they have the technology to bring rocks back yet.
The report into the loss of the Polar Lander is due out at the end of the month.
"
Sometimes when I'm out throwing back a few beers with my buddies, one of us will tell a "nigger joke" or a joke involving dead babies. While some might argue that jokes like that are useless, I would submit that these jokes are funny for their sheer offensiveness. (Jim Griffith, moderator of rec.humor.funny, agrees that such jokes can be funny.)
Now, having said that, I cannot even begin to speculate about the purpose of the tripe written above. It is frightening for its sheer offensiveness, not funny. It is the work of a seriously disturbed individual. The thought that my children might be playing in the same neighborhood where this anonymous monster lives will haunt me for the rest of the night.
LANDMINE..
has taken my sight
taken my speech
taken my hearing
taken my arms
taken my legs
taken my soul
leave me with life in heeellllllllllll!
*insert lars ulrich drumming here*
re: stolen stuff (piracy, etc.)
Some recent press said china's nasa is going to run on unix/linux. I don't believe it. They are far too smart to follow "nobody needs rich text email, stick with ASCII" Scott Mcnealy's ("english should be good enough for everyone's") advice. i.e. for the lack of email that displays spreadsheet with units and formula we blithely did a CFImarsT last year. Way to go Nasa.
Our Nasa folks and their contractors need to upgrade to systems at least as good as what my 4 year old daughter uses and then come ask for money. Or better yet, get out of the way (at least with the Internet the government had the sense to let it go commercial and stopped competing with it). Imagine what it would look like today if they had not..
Ari
Holy shit, you are an angry man. I tend to agree with you though. Also, private computer companies have scholarships for women only. For example Microsoft and Intel (intel has ones for minorities as well). So it's not limited to NASA, but at least private companies won't make those women managers or anything unless they really deserve it.
I think that going to Mars may be worth losing a few lives. People die every day for even more stupid reasons (like getting run over by a bus). Even Apollo involved some loss of life - right on the launchpad, but that didn't stop the Apollo program. IMO some people who don't support going to Mars try to justify their stance by saying that it's too risky for astronauts. There's always some risk and if we are not willing to accept that, we may never go to Mars. The problem is that in the US people have grown accustomed to not losing American lives. Like in Kosovo they made extraordinary precautions to avoid loss of American soldiers. And it would be very bad for the reelection chances of the politicians in power if a Mars mission ended in disaster...
This is *truly* how to troll. Planning, Tireless preperation, and the execution of the troll. Two thumbs way up. Good Nazi fun.
Just do it or NASA is dead; yes, easy; just complain and expect others to do the job.
Yes, having to read all those smart comments from all those smart people so much smarter than NASA experts who had had to study some years to get their physics degree ...
For the money which should not be wasted for that human trash ... mind that one of the greatest mathematicans was an Indian, grown up in a very poor family. Quiet possible that right now the one genius, which could have brought us ahead is dying somewhere as finally we do care so much more about cheap oil and the next bigger, faster, louder gameboy.
You want to get out of here ? Okay, then do not sit there and complain, do something.
Who, I ?
Exactly.
... for a Beowulf cluster!
grits!
Tony the Tiger says "They're Gr-r-reat!®"
I ain't waiting on shit. I'm heading to Mars this weekend. Got my cooler packed and everything. I'll email you when I get there.
oh well..i got to see some moon rocks one daY at the houston musuem...
'tis a shame i cant see mars rocks for a while =(
but hey, i can wait....like the dr. said "The jury is out on whether we have the technological capability." i wouldnt try and re-kompile my cernel on my 486 at home when i have a k62 at work, so no sense in wasting resurces now for mars.
The original Mars Bar was sold in 1932 for two old pence.
Mars is a big issue... privacy is a big issue... What do the canidates talk about? Nothing... This country is run by corperations, not the individuals... Democracy is about controling public choice by controling information...
that from a known troll. ooh!
"where are our Hoover Dams, interstate systems, etc...." your 'hoover dam' is SITTING IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE. it's called the internet, genius.
Amen! I could not agree with you more!
I cannot even begin to speculate about the purpose of the tripe written above. It is frightening for its sheer offensiveness, not funny. It is the work of a seriously disturbed individual.
:)
Well you have heard the saing "There is always a bigger fish." I guess there is always a bigger troll too.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest - Diderot
.sig!
Cool
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Duh...women are from Venus. Why would they want to go to Mars?
how long it will take NASA to moderate this post down to a -1. Hope they use the right O-rings on the moderation
Land on Jupiter? HAHA! Yeah, we'll send *you* first.
Nothing like being baked by those radiation belts before you even come close to the atmosphere. And even if you wear your lead underwear, the pressure in the gas giants atmosphere would crush yer ship like a ripe grape.
Heh, well I'm glad that somebody read this who is able to accept the truth without having to have it sugar-coated for political correctness. Yes, Mars is a gay planet, and obviously we should not be spending taxpayer money exploring it, if the city council of san francisco or something wants to go there then FINE, let them, but don't spend our money on it. Same goes for other gay planets such as the obviously gay Uranus. Gimme a break, guy!
NASA's budget should concentrate on the planets that are unambiguously straight, such as jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. These are planets that dont leave any room open for interpratation. The yare STRAIGHT planets and they are worthy of our exploration and the rest can just be left behind so that the poofs can settle them when they get space travel capability
the mars-jupiter asteroid belt contains litrally millions of times more resources than planet earth.
This may be true in theory, but it won't be true in practice.
The fact of the matter is that most of the asteroids are simply too small to be of any use to mining operations. When you're only talking about an object that is a couple of kilometers in diameter, the mechanics of "moving in" mining equipment get a bit tricky. For objects that are that small, you might have mining equipment with a mass of several billion kilograms, but it only weighs a tiny fraction of what it would on Earth! Unfortunately, the laws of gravity and inertia still apply, so you're left with a delicate situation where the slightest misstep could result in disaster.
In reality, we would have to restrict mining to the larger asteroids, such as Ceres and Eros. Either that, or we would have to develop a method to go after the smaller asteroids without having to deal with some of the stickier logistical problems.
At any rate, I think you're missing the original point, which is that Mars is by far the gayest fucking planet in the entire fucking Solar System, and it would be prudent for us as a species to ignore it totally.
Cut funding here cut funding there. Well hell people What can you expect. The gov. prefers to donate our money to war,killing people in a country no one ever heard of,lawyers,mega-billionaires and such instead of doing actually something worth-while. As long as politicians hold NASA by the balls expect NASA to just be a pawn that is USED by politicians whenever it suits them. How can you trust people who live off lies anyways? Well "taxpayer this" Taxpayer that , and taxpayers like that, but still all these people who are thinking of the good old mortal taxpayer's are wasting taxpayer's money to send taxpayer's children off to die in a country no one even heard off. Instead of using the taxpayer's money to build something FOR the people they waste em on lawyers drafting up bills designed to SCREW the people (UCITA anyone ?),and you guys complain about NASA not getting funding? Get real pleae
Calm down guy, all I'm saying is that Mars is not probably the best place to be sending probes in the solar system right now, especially since we don't have much luck sending them there. I know that jupiter is made out of gas but why should that stop us from exploring the upper atmosphere? Yeah we can't land there and drill or anything but just because it isn't rock doesn't mean there's no reason to explore it. And no we don't know everything about Mars but until there is an easier way to go there why should we risk it? We know enough for now. And Im sirry if the subject line offended you, it's just a common phrase, I don't mean anything about people by saying it, just calm down guy.
The Internet was government funded you fucking moron! Learn your fucking history ya goddamn punk!
This week Dr Carl Pilcher, (a NASA scientist) said a recent study into the loss of the Mars Polar Lander, due to be published at the end of the month "makes sober reading".
/ 041899nasa-women.html
3 /part4
I have some sobering info on the failures for you to read before the report comes out.
Vital FACT! Nasa switched to forced female hiring
For the first time ever ONLY WOMEN called the shots on the mars missions that failed. read :
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science
for the first time ever all three KEY positions were female :
Sarah A. Gavit = the mars project manager
Suzanne E. Smrekar, 37, the lead mars scientist
Kari A. Lewis= the mars project's chief engineer
Current hiring rules from the new top level NASA female administration dictate this new female forced hiring policy.
NASA has hiring policies that try to hire women DESPITE IQ or experience. In fact they now PREVENT job related award honors and bonuses based on how many females you hire and how many females and black contractors you hire!!! This is a fact!
NASA publicly has stated this from the woman in charge. I can't tell you about my own memos.
NASA is proud to boast 2% female active engineers minimum and that is WAY out of wack with societies norms.
The mars missions are even more than 2% female.
The average IQ of a Caucasian US Male holding a medical degree is IQ 124, but as the front page of the San Jose Mercury proclaimed in huge block letter headlines, and millions of IQ scores show (see the Bell Curve book data), the chance of a FEMALE obtaining a test score of 124 is EIGHT TIMES LESS LIKELY than an equivalent male. EIGHT TIMES LESS LIKELY. Conversely very low IQ people are almost always males. The average IQ is the same for both genders 100, but the IQ distribution bell curves are dramatically different shapes.
NASA boasts a female-minority web site documenting how not only are contractors hired by whether or not they are female or black but what state their small companies reside in! NASA apparently requires all 50 states to have minority participation in parts design and supply for the mars missions! REGARDLESS of competence! Sex and race are the prime criteria for 1999. Check out NASA own detailed list of female and minority small contractors at : http://sbir.nasa.gov. SBIR is a euphemistic acronym for small business innovation research, but as you can easily see it is actually a gender and race quota based system spearheaded by the new women helping to run NASA now.
from the female mars leader :
"Women have really added to the workplace because we do come at things from a different angle," she said.
"For the same reason that cultural diversity works, gender diversity is wonderful, too, especially when you're trying to do something creative."
Also from the female mars leader Gavit:
"The fact that we're women hasn't made a difference," she said. "It's not an issue here. But it's good that young girls see that engineering and technical fields are wide open to women. That's the good thing about saying it's a woman-led team."
The report in The Guardian (British) December 7th included the following comment: "The total launch and development costs of NASA's lost Mars spacecraft is put at $320 million.
Forced hiring of women disregarding IQ score or talent created this staggering $320 million loss and many more female related losses are already in the works.
Kennedy Space Center rents out IMAX II theaters for a wizbang "Take Our Daughters To Work Day" the theme this year is about how the shuttle is now COMMANDED by a female and this years motto was "The Future is Me".
Even study grants awarded from NASA are targeted to females now at expense of males : refer to Federal Register: September 16, 1999 (Volume 64, Number 179)] NASA Grants and Cooperative Agreements; Proposed Rule.
And if you get a study grant you are actively promoted to put the forwarded funds in women controlled banks! Really : gov/us/fed/nara/fed-register/1999/sep/16/64FR5033
Posting-number: Volume 64, Issue 179, Page 50333, Part 1.
Affirmative action (quota-based hiring) is being used to hire less qualified personel in NASA and its in their own many public documents.
I cannot get a good pay promotion in 1999 unless I DOCUMENT how I activly promoted females in my department and tried to hire them. I am not making this up!
No matter how good a job managers do, unless they hire lower IQ non-whites and non-females at expense of higher qualified white male or asian engineers I get no promotions.
Blacks and female engineers are actually hired to not engineer, but somtimes to help recruit more females in engineering : for example
Dr. Aprille Ericsson-Jackson, Janis Davis-Street, Tony Bruins System Engineer/Integrator,Jennifer Murray, Biomedical Engineer, Janice Everett, and Ruth Simmons, were paid tax dollars to periodically
talk about how NASA needs even MORE females and black engineers : http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/ltc/special/mlk99/
Other females to blame :
Lori B. Garver = Associate Administrator for NASA's Office of Policy and Plans, Executive Secretary of Advisory Council (She does not have an engineering degree!)
I think male rage-envy sabotage (yes sabotage) is to blame for the many Mars mission losses. If it was not the fact that the women screwed it all up on their own this time.
Or perhaps we forgot to put any heaters on the explosive bolts preventing cruise stage separation causing the DS2 and lander to burn up in the atmosphere.
signed,
Intelligent White Male
see what I wrote to the other guy, we would have to build radiation suits, yes, but I didn't say that we wouldn't.
Guy, you're talking about mining the fscking asteroid belts and I'm just talking about what we can do now, geez, there is going to be a long time coming before we can mine the asteroid belts and sure maybe we need a mars presence but we don't need one now. Besides we have seen that we have no luck with Mars right now, maybe it would be better to go with saturn or Jupiter until we get better at this. And I know they are a lot further away but why let that stand in front of us? If we had that attitude all the time we would still all be in the garden of eden. :)
Great. Diderot and Bertrand Russell are "Flamebait." Meanwhile, the troll assault on Jon Katz's name and Natalie Portman's virtue continues unabated.
Gotta love Slashdot.
Goddammit, look fellas, just think about it: The whole damn planet is pink. PINK! And did you ever see that gay symbol, with the two linked circles with arrows pointing off them? Do you know that's the symbol for Mars, repeated twice? Well, it is.
So much for the PC idiots who get all whiny and resentful when somebody states the obvious: Mars is a gay goddamn planet. Gay, gay, gay. Queer. Swishy. Lavender. Efuckingfeminate, okay? Got that? MARS IS A FRIEND OF DOROTHY, DO YOU HEAR ME?
We don't need to waste billions of dollars of the taxpayers' money granting special privileges to a goddamn gay planet. Just get that liberal bullshit right out of your soft, pointy little effete East-Coast "intellectual" heads.
On the cost: around 10-20 billion to send 4-5 people to Mars.
As to the fuel cost, the Mars Direct plan has been around for some time, and beats the pants off the Battlestar Galactica NASA mission before it was revised to more resemble Mars Direct. Send an ERV (Earth Return Vehicle) to Mars, unmanned. The ERV brings with it in-situ fuel producing equipment that has been proven workable. By the time the astronauts arrive on planet, theres enough fuel produced for the return trip and to power the rovers. After approx 1 year, the astronauts return in the ERV, passing another ERV arriving to prepare the way for the next batch of astronauts.
www.marssociety.org
A Caltech group of students are preparing a business plan for the purpose of privately funding such a mission. Lost the link, sorry.
Derek L
Oh, poor little weak helpless you, did the bad man say something that wasn't PC?
Tough shit. Mars is gay. Deal with it. If you can't face reality, you're too weak to live. There's no room for momma's boys and (yes, I WILL say it!) homosexual goddamn perverts in a nation of Free Men.
Get out. Leave. Go to goddamn Canada, they're all a bunch of swishy Frenchies up there. You'll fit right in. You can all get together and flap your limp little wrists and whine when somebody calls you "faggots".
Man you are a fool. Can you answer this question: Where is the profit? And further; it had better be more profitable and less risky than investing in 'dot com' stocks. And that profit should be realizable in less time too. There is no way any private investor would put his money on so risky effort as space expoloration wich needs decades of development and offers no return for investment.
Hee haw hee haw hee haw!
Osakis football rules.
The Christian religion is the last bastion of true morals left in this sick, sick world. I think the problem you have is with the Catholics and the hypocrites who go around doing really stupid things in the name of Christianity.
You need help, serious help.
> Let those of us who are interested and believe in this stuff invest in it and reap any profits (or losses).
Hey.. We can get that precious 'first to market' advantage!
Unfortunately there is also that horrible 'premature-technology thus low-cost-effectiveness' thing that slaughters those who run too far ahead.
All kidding aside, just a week or two ago there was a news-clip on one of the news/space channels up here in Canada which announced a Canadian mining company's joint venture with some US firm to mine an astoroid, IN A FEW YEARS.
Yeah yeah, hold on a sec. They're not planning on any orbital changes for the roid nor space-smelting :) The idea is to probe the roid in a few years, and if they find what they want, then they'll send the 'miner' sat/probe to extract the product and bring it back to earth orbit, where they'll sell it for hundreds to thousands of dollars per pound. (I forget the exact figure, but that range...).
They're goingn to sell it to NASA. In orbit.
Figured out what they're mining yet?
Yup, H20. Sure, on earth it's cheap, but in orbit, it's worth a lot more. And easy to mine from a snowy ball in space too! Just melt/vaporize in-situ and condense at the storage point, then ship.
The vid-clip showed a 3-d animation illustrating what is proposed. Both the initial probe and the subseequent miner bot looked smallish. I think the perceived cost was on the order of 2-500 million, and the payoff a couple hundred million, or was it 2-300% profit... Gosh I forget. It definitely wasn't $1-5 billion dollar range.
Yes yes, I immediately thought "aha! Slashdot fodder! Finally I get to submit a story", but un-fortunately I was completely unable to find any web based record of the 'story' or 'announcement'. And based on what I saw behind the guy being intervewed (it looked like he was at a booth or display at a trade show), I now think that they still might be looking for a backer, although that doesn't explain why it thus ended up being a 'joint-venture announced' type story...
So anyways, it might only be "one person or small company or research arm of a company with an animation of an idea looking for Mr Angel", akin to all the 'serious' Japanese/other corporate interest/'plans' to open up space and moon hotels :)
Anyone else see the clip I'm talking about? I think it might have been on the Canadain Discovery channel, or Cable Pulse 24, or the 'Space' channel. I never saw it repeated. Anyone know of a secondary source?
The really neat little tidbit from that story: Eros contains more raw mineral tonnage than has been mined from the earth to this point, and more than ever could be mined from the earth's crust.
Screw Mars! Let's go get that other rock!
I'm hoping the private launch firms can push reduced costs, and make a Mars trip possible, but so far the only one that looks like it has funding is Beal.
Regarding NASA, I don't know. They've been waiting for the second coming of Apollo for so long they can't conceive of doing business any other way. Thus were the gains of Apollo squandered and the funds going to the shuttle's massive operations budget more or less wasted.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
That 112 billion dollars in today's money was however spread out over ten years or so. Roughly 11 billion a year, if you want to put it that way.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Robert Forward's "Rocheworld" dealt with this issue, though it was a one-way trip to Barnard's star rather than to Mars.
>You know, film an entirely bogus Mars Mission in some warehouse in the desert SW and show it on the nightly news and news specials as 'real'.
Like the 1978 movie Capricorn One?
The US government should just stop wasting money. Throwing good money after bad. Close down NASA and open up the space industry to anyone that wants to take part.
Deleted
With such a system the cost of sending a probe drops incredibly. You don't need to design earth contacting hardware from the surface of Mars. Instead the hardware need be little more powerful than a headset and still have good data rates.
Instead we send a spattering of probes which we must get full scientific data out which serve communications only as a second purpose. The loss of these communication satellites wouldn't bee a big deal as we can always send other to take its place.
--Karl
How dare you sully the good name of Clarence Carter by quoting him in your obnoxious post? Have you no shame?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Another country or private entity will take the ideas that Nasa has and rework them to achieve the this mission to mars. If Nasa wants to stay a leader it needs to regroup and make it work.
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
You can only expect mistake like the lost of the probes will happen you don't really know what is out there. What would by very interesting if some little tiny country beats the United States to mars. I think in my life time I will see a manned mission to mars. Hopefully I will get to a least go into outer space in my lifetime.
http://theotherside.com/dvd/
The idea that we don't have the technology to get to Mars is utter pap. We had the technology in 1970, for Pete's sake!!!
What we lack is the national will to do it. Fine. I've been saying for years now, that if our government offered a $1.5 billion bounty (I started with $1 bil five years ago) to the first commercial entity that successfully landed humans on Mars and settled them there for, say, one month, would get the money. No enough of an incentive? Ok, how about if we say that the first company to do it gets to run the planet for ten years, no questions asked. That means that ALL revenues, entertainment-related and otherwise, go to this company.
Sheesh, there's enough investor money running around in the economy now that if we pulled together a company called 'Mars or Bust', and IPO'd it as an entertainment outfit, we'd probably attract $4 billion in capitalization.
This talk of lacking technology to get to Mars is crap. Here is a whiny NASA-crat who is forced to live in a dwindling NASA budget.
I suspect that there would be a certain amount of political opposition to this kind of a "solution." Although, it's not all that different to the kinds of decisions made when exploring distant lands ~300 years ago.
mod this down! i tried --
instead, hit "underrated" --
not used to mouse wheels
(clicked "troll" on the menu,
kept my pointer over it,
wheeled down -- voila!)
the true point of this
is to post a message that
clears my errant mod
--
..!!in an intastella burst i am back to save the universe!!
I'd love to see them mine that.. Maybe we'd figure out just how fucking useless trading gold around is. Yeah, a gold standard made sense at one point. Now, all that precious metals acomplishes is being an unstable market.
On the other hand, if there's a lot of titanium, that's a metal with some use.
Two words:
asteroid belt
the mars-jupiter asteroid belt contains litrally millions of times more resources than planet earth.
Eventually, we will need a mars presence, even if its only for a mining colony with some kind of docking station in low orbit.
And anyway, those moons your on about are alot further away than mars.. lets do one thing at a time
Mars Direct is amazing. But even more amazing is NASA's inability to grasp a program like this that, to most experts, is posible within a fraction of NASA's budget, most which are lost in programs that will end nowhere... as you post. Very nice post indeed. :)
Duh...women are from Venus. Why would they want to go to Mars?
To get laid, of course.
"Though it may take a thousand years, we shall be FREE."
There's an easy solution to this. Send people but don't bring them home. Shielding them during the trip wouldn't be as important, because cancer 20 years later wouldn't be an issue. Damage due to long-term 0 G space travel would be minimized, since you don't have a trip back to Earth.
I'm sure we could find more than enough volunteers to goto Mars on a one-way trip. I would almost consider it myself.
"Though it may take a thousand years, we shall be FREE."
Everyone interested can invest in a private space development company, SpaceDev. SPDV is its stock symbol. It's not quite big enough to be on the NASDAQ, and there's almost no liquidity (like, 0 shares traded most days). But, they're only $2 a pop last I checked. Actually, they may be massively overvalued, since the $2 price gives them a market cap in the ~5 billion range. (Around AMD, as a comparison for all us nerds)
"Though it may take a thousand years, we shall be FREE."
Use that link, tell him what you think, and put the pipe down.
--
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
+&x
Just goes to show how much I know!
we're just seeing its remnants thrash about cluelessly. when does anyone ever recall NASA saying "we dont have the technical means"...hell..if we dont have them - go ahead and invent them dammit. unfortunately the drive is lost and the budgets going down the tube - anyone else wanna volunteer to replace nasa ?
You're right. We do need to educate people as to why the space program is a good thing. You know what I think would be the easiest, quickest way to shoot ourselves in the foot though? Start calling people 'sheeple'. Frankly, nothing is going to make people stop listening to anyone faster than being condescended to. Its not just you, I see the attitude here way to often that people who have other interests other than the posters are 'sheeple' or 'sheep' or 'morons' or 'induhviduals'. And I really think that we're doing nothing more than shooting ourselves in the foot with that attitude.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Pretty far off topic, but something that /.ers would probably like to know... Jerry Doyle, who played Garibaldi on Babylon 5, is running for congress as a Republican in California's 24th district. As most geeks already know, when it comes to realistic depictions of space exploration, Babylon 5 made Mission to Mars look like... well, Mission to Mars. NASA folks loved it. Doyle, who has a degree in Aeronautics, is a huge booster of both fictional and real space technology.
Details about the campaign are sketchy. (www.jerrydoyleforcongress.com is a placeholder right now.) My guess is, he doesn't have a chance. But it's a pretty safe bet that he'd be one of NASA's loudest supporters if he made it.
MSK
The problem with trying to get that drive back is the total lack of a "THEM" to beat. There's no one out there to make the US look (and feel) bad enough for the whole country to get behind the massive push to achieve. On top of this, I don't think the public is cohesive enough to ever get solidly behind a new space race, or even to really accept any new menace that absolutely must be beaten for "the american way of life" to survive.
Intolerant people should be shot.
Greens would probably be afraid that rocket exhaust was damaging the atmosphere...
Well, they are. The shuttles' boosters do rather large amounts of damage to the ozone, and I'd think (anyone got numbers/data?) that the air quality around Canaveral's probably not well balanced for the area's population.
Intolerant people should be shot.
I don't think China could work. The Americans had (have?) a belief in the inherant superiority of all things American, with little good reason for it beyond the belief itself. With propaganda running rampant about the "red menace" giving the impression that something as un-American as Communism (not that most people understood what it meant) was capable of being a critical threat to everything American, it had to lead to doubt and uncertainty. Can't have the commies beating us to the moon! After all, we're better than they are!
Intolerant people should be shot.
Hmmm. I guess I forgot about my original point about why China's no good...
"Them" has to be mysterious, barely known beyond "not like us" to really work the same way as communism did. There's too much basic knowledge in America today for basic propaganda campaigns about an unknown enemy to really work. Some mysterious alien menace might do it, but I don't think anything terrestrial will. Even then, the propaganda's going to have to be a lot more sophisticated. I suspect 12 year olds would just point and laugh at the idea of hiding under a desk or newspaper to protect oneself from nuclear destruction...
Intolerant people should be shot.
I meant "conquer the stars" as a figure of speech, you stupid dumbass. Jeez, people like you--who flame at the drop of a hat and have nothing intelligent to say--are the reason I abandond USENET. And *this* get's a Score: 1?! Guess I'll have to raise my threshold to 2. . .
Well, now, I wouldn't go *that* far. ^_^ Besides, just because we're not interested in space *now* doesn't mean that future generations won't have different ideas on the subject, especially if the private companies or other nations really start making a profit out there. Besides, I've noticed that historically for Americans it's usually a crisis (Slavery, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor) that provides the pin in the bum necessary to get us going.
I agree. Can't go to Mars and bring back a few rocks in an entire decade? That is abysmal. It is time to privatize. Let those of us who are interested and believe in this stuff invest in it and reap any profits (or losses). Just get government out of the way.
Haven't there been studies that talked about war being the source of most major technological booms and accomplishments? Directly or indirectly.
I get so sick of these dollar values used in place of weight or volume. Gee, let's see if when you bring back that much ore, if it's still worth 20 f'n TRILLION dollars now that there's so much, the value has dropped.
we're just seeing its remnants thrash about cluelessly. when does anyone ever recall zurk saying anything usefull in his posts. unfortunately the drive is lost and the budgets going down the tube - anyone else wanna volunteer to replace zurk?
_________________________
I remember when I was a kid I went to the Smithsonian Air & Space museum in DC and they had a display with a small sliver of a moon rock you could actually touch. What a thrill for me! If only enthusiasm could be built up for the space program again. It seems we could get to Mars in my lifetime (I'm 31) if the desire was there. I bet if China sends a mission to Mars we'd be there in a minute.
I for one would like to applaud the priorities set and decisions made by NASA. The scientists at NASA have consistantly demonstrated that their commitment is to science, and not to publicity or electioneering.
The space program put people on the moon in the 60s. Today, NASA has satellites in orbit which are providing us with fascinating insight into the nature of the universe.
Sure, if everyone really wanted to, NASA probably could send people to mars in the next few decades... but if they did so, they would have that much less money to spend on real science.
I for one consider the Hubble space telescope and the Chandra X-ray observatory to be far greater achievements than placing a few people on the moon was, or placing a few people on mars would be.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
According to this Nasa Document, the cost ,at the time, amounted to around $25 Billion -- or around $95 Billion in 1990 dollars.
According to this link, $95 is around $112 in 1998 dollars. Assuming 2% inflation for the last two years, that would put the cost around $116 Billion dollars.
Point of comparison, the Defense Department budget for 2000 is around $290 Billion.
The little guy just ain't getting it, is he?
Why the hell is it flamebait just because someone dares to have a right-wing point of view? I didn't realize that Slashdot was so incredibly left-wing that a moderator felt he had to warn the rest of the site when someone posted a right-wing comment.
Or maybe the moderator was just an idiot.
- In Capitalist America, law violates YOU!
However, I can tell you that even with the exponential advance in technology and computing power the cost to go to Mars is surely much greater. It isn't so much new technology that is required to go to Mars, but the vast amount of resources. Mars is a similar size to the Earth. We've all seen what it takes to escape earth's gravity. Imagine having to transport the equivalent of a Saturn V to Mars.(The space shuttle wouldn't be practicle as it only reaches low orbits.) It isn't that I high level of technology would be required to get it there, it's just that it would take a lot of rocket fuel. That rocket fuel translates into money. That would be the real cost in going to Mars.
Wigs
--I just got skylights put in my place. The people who live above me are furious.
One problem for NASA is the current demand for it to launch satellites. It's rocket science, which makes it a difficult and expensive mission. Currently NASA's manned vehicle program includes the Space Shuttle. For interplanetary space travel, NASA needs a new vehicle. Unfortunately this just isn't included in the current budgets. The demand for NASA to assist in sattelite launches and other earth bound tasks with the Space Shuttle is big. This costs NASA money, movey that could be spent elsewhere.
Hopefully some of the other companies that have been mentioned(Cerulean, Pioneer, Kistler) will help lift this burden. The other company mentioned, Kelly, is one that I think has the greatest chance for success. Their website demonstrates their towing concept. This has many great advantages over traditional launch methods. For one, the craft can carry a payload approximately 7 times greater than one carried in a rocket. The cost to get that same payload up in the air with the 747 isn't that expensive either. Kelly has realistic goals to be flying their first craft in a few years.(There are three crafts, each becoming progressivly larger.) I only glanced at the website, but I believe it fails to mention that this is a proven concept. They successfully modeled a test and then actually had several test flights. A C-141 towed an F-106. I was fortunate enough to see a video of this. It was pretty impressive.
Wigs
--Why do you press harder on a remote-control when you know the battery is dead?
"Private industry couldn't fund the rail system in the 19th century, it took tax dollars to do that in the form of land grabbing from farmers and massive infusion of money into the rail monopolies."
Nonsense. Government funding of railroad construction amounted to 10% of total cost. What's more, those railroads that recieved federal funding were the most likely to go bankrupt. Three continental railroads that were built with government assistance went bankrupt within 20 years. James Jerome Hill built the Great Northern from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound without a single penny of government money and the railroad didnt go belly up.
Most of the original stretches of roadway in the US were built with private funds, collected by members of car clubs, like the AAA. The problem with privately funded highways is that there is no means of collecting a return on the investment without exacting tolls. Besides, as Adam Smith wrote in Wealth of Nations, there are some projects that are worthy of great nations in encouraging development. The building of roads, airports, public utilities, etc are direct benefits to everyone, and contribute to even more indirect benefits.
Public expense to support private profits is bad? Do you live in a major city? Ever think how that milk got to you? Ever thought how much you'd be paying for it if it wasnt for the highway system? Have you ever gotten a package from UPS or the USPS? Ever consider how long it would have taken that package to reach you if it wasnt for the highway system or federally subsidized airports? What anti-capitalist flamers like yourself always seem to forget is that companies get their profits from individuals forking over their cash for products they want. Greedy evil companies provide a service, if they dont provide a service that someone is willing to pay for, they arent in business anymore.
Derek
After watching "Mission to Mars" it makes you wonder if its all worth it. I mean there are so many things that can go wrong. I hate to be pessimistic but it will take a few tragedies I'm sure before we get it right. I mean look how many airplane tragedies there are a year and yet we all still fly. I guess we will have to accept some losses when it comes to space travel and exploration otherwise it will probably never get off of the ground.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
Opinion : 1. NASA projects often fail, that's to be expected given the difficulties. The real issue is that their political vulnerability and economic dependencies translate the lost missions into further failures of strategic leadership and vision. 2. NASA is simply not set up to be a risk taking/entrepenurial venture, which, is what we, the people, of earth, need. 3. I believe the evidence supports reasonable concern that our species, is at significant risk of extinction, while we remain isolated on an unguided oblate spheroid, trusting to blind chance to let us avoid Earth crossing asteroids. 4. Space has effectively infinite natural resources available for exploitation, with low/zero pollution impact. Take a look at the recent results from NEAR Shoemaker, from Eros. 5. I am not aware of any credible plan or program, from NASA, or anyone else, for the incremental economic buildout and exploitation of space. As a species, we need a business plan. I sincerely believe that the engineers, technologists, scientists, et-al, of Earth have the capability to exploit space. To discover, assess, access, colonize and make use of the abundant material resources. Oh and along the way, learn how to expand humanity into space as necessary and desirable. The game then changes from deciding who gets blamed for the next firework display over mars, to filling out the expense voucher for the next mars shuttle, Spacemiles (tm) ;-). What we clearly don't have, is the required leadership and economic incentives to make that happen. The dinosaurs never saw Chixculub coming, we may end up just as extinct, and a whole lot dumber, because we let a leadership failure defeat our intelligence. Suggestions : 1. NASA apparently can't, or won't, cut it, so lets relieve them of the problem, politically, ethically, legally, as nicely as possible, give em a useful role, make em feel good, but out of the way. Sometime yesterday would be good. 2. It's time to get some serious players get into the game, the best incentive is a clear potential to make obscene quantities of money. Vast uncountable wealth. Whatever the moral implications, it's worked in the past, so it should work again. Space has that incentive, so lets cut the profit factor loose and go get it. Yep there's some serious risk, many good people will probably die trying. Yet, many of us die for a lot less strategic reasons every day. As a species it's not a zero sum game, the upside potential for our race is effectively infinite. Think about that, the upside is unlimited resources, unimaginable technological leaps and survival, any of which are quite literally, priceless. It's not about who gets rich along the way, it's about whether or not humans get to go to the stars. I'm a human, I'm for us, I'm in!. IMHO the stars are the best possible gift, for our children. So, were all geeks, rumour has it we are marginally, smarter than most dinosaurs. How about we start using a few of those smarts to lead a little, obtain the necessary political influence, bend policy, so that there is a credible, incremental buildout, driving economic, exploitation of space. The goal, is the stars. Sound good?
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
Here's where we get the funding. First off we make the mission GPL. Then we take all the command protocols and run them from Linux. We'll use a whole bunch of Alphas and just stack them together and then we'll get RedHat to be a sponsor for it. So now we've got Compaq and RedHat as sponsors. Now let's get AT&T to provide the communications for it. Hmmm then we need to televise it. And who better to televise something that is "out of this world" than Fox networks. Then of course we could have people pay $10K to have their name engraved on the side in extremely small letters. So now we have the whole Linux community behind it. Simpsons fans behind it. Long distance callers behind it. Simple computer users. And rich people with way too much money. And what's best ... NASA. Then of course we'd have to make sure NASA promised not to intentionally crash it so we could see how big of a cloud it would make. (though we all know the scientists had a poll going).
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
and how will you get to the stars in real time? warp drives or screwing 7 of 9...? so what if the commies had beat the us to the moom? how much did the us spend and what was the cost-benfit? china and india are going to mine the moon and asteroids for what exactly, that could not be mined here on earth far cheaper? russian will re-assemble the soviet union and do what? are you on drugs or just stupid?
"...can you imagine a BEOWULF CLUSTER of these? That'd be some serious power!"
it seems like there should be something that a resonably motivated and technologically competent group of people could do to push, even if only a little, for further program for mars? i'm thinking something like open source mars mission design. if you take what the Society for Mars is doing with its initial mission specs and open it up to the public. first start with small steps. design hardware and software using something like open source, open design philosophy, you'd have specialists all over the world looking it over, contributing and bug fixing, writing simulators and contributing ideas. here needs to be some money behind this, perhaps from corporate sponsors. and some thing more organized than an internet opensource project. but it doesn't have to be a corporate entity, or a government agency.
"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." - H.L. Mencken
It's a bit like the aftermath of Challenger, where they went nuts on the hardware instead of looking at the fundamental problem, which was the prostitution of the program for political reasons. The outcome of that is that we now have a NASA which is completely paranoid about public opinion and afraid of its own shadow when it comes to safety, but which still won't look at the whole picture, and still twitches to the political beat.
You are absolutely correct. Much of the rank and file of NASA is highly competent, particularly the folks at JPL and others behind the unmanned exploration probes. But the middle and upper management do things for truly bizzare reasons.
My favorite example: Back before they got bought, Macdonald-Douglas put together a small team who did an absolutely crack job on the DC-X program. It was fast, it was cheap, and it did what it was designed to do and built hardware that worked. So when it came time to select the contactor for the next phase of the program, NASA in its infinite wisdom ignored the proposal from the MacDonald-Douglas team (which would have built on the things they had learned and done already) and selected the X-33/VentureStar program proposed by Lockheed. Why? Because the Lockheed proposal provided the greatest technical challenge and involved developing the most new technology.
Last time I checked, the X-33 was grossly overweight (including 5000 lbs of lead ballast in the nose, to balance out the engines, which were too heavy), has had its speed envelope reduced by nearly half, was way behind schedule and over budget (of course), and was having a host of fabrication problems (primarily with their "revolutionary" new tank technology).
Sigh. It's things like this that have convinced me that NASA is not the place to look for cheap space access, or much of anything else except the occasional really cool spaceprobe.
As an aside: if your interested in cheap space access, check out the Rotary Rocket Company to see how it might of happened (if they hadn't run out of cash). And then check out X-Cor Aerospace, which is all that's left of Rotary Rocket that's actually doing anything.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Man, with the *high* quality of the post so far in this article, it must be friday night. Looks like somepeople just can't wait to let loose after work, course they haven't been moderated yet, cause all the moderators are getting drunk. (some things never change). Anyway who cares, I need a beer. (_a beer_? HA), well maybe one or two more.
"I think it would be more interesting to land on Jupiter or Saturn anyway..." could you be anymore stupid? you cannot 'land' on jupiter or saturn. they are made of gas! you would just keep falling in untill you were crushed by the pressure and incenerated by the heat. "Really we learned about all there is to learn about mars" heh, yeah and everything thats going to be invented has been invented already, right? and whats with equating homosexuality with undesireable things your topic title 'mars is gay'? grow up, loser.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
It would be way too easy to say the U.S. is "in a period of sloth and introspection". Let's face it - when the bottom drops out of the current stock market we're in for a bad time. This country is finished - doomed.
well, as another libertarian (in thinking; not in party) I *would* say "privatize it" - the same response I'd give to 90% of government. (other than military and judicial functions, there's not much else that the government should be doing, IMO) But I'd happily toss my own money at a Mars rocket. Or a space station. Or a Lunar base. Which, after all, is how I think it should be - I spend my money where I want progress. Btw, my wife and I saw Mission to Mars last night. It was better (more fun) than I expected - she felt the same way. It was like a "more fun" 2001, A Space Odyssey. (less thinking, just enjoy) Recommended. - Al -
Not to call you stupid, but just to point it out...
The RTG's that are used in spacecraft aren't nuclear reactors, those would be much too heavy.
What they use is the energy released from decaying radioactive elements.
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Are you talking about the same privately-funded internet I'm thinking of? ok.
What he's talking about are great government-funded projects to give everyone 'go fever' towards a specific challenging task.
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
One word... Tang (!)
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Don't forget that the alien race had the power to excrete large crystalline tears!
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
I am a techno geek. Computers are great but my real true love is technology and physics. NASA says that they may not have the technology available to get to mars and bring back rocks. I can't believe it. About ten years ago I remember reading an article in an life, compilation of science and technology book that there where plans for teraforming Mars, and that advance propulsion systems had already be designed and tested. These include nuclear rockets, matter anti-matter, and neutron propulsion. These have been semi proven ten years ago. With the advances of technology I am absolutely certian we have better now. As for the teraforming of Mars, it is a simply a matter of seeding the planet with algae. Not regular algae mind you. This type of algae eats the Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. Then within 20 to 30 years you are left with a living breathing planet. Come on NASA, stop relying on the government for support. Get your ass in gear and get commercial support. Companies should be interested in getting into space so use them.
Hmm. Give five astronauts a map of the Martian surface, a few supplies and a couple of cameras - "The Cydonia Martian Project", anyone..?
Bughunter, you have presented the picture in exquisitely painful detail.
Fifteen years ago, when I first got into aerospace engineering, I remember my boss (the VP of Engineering) telling me that the most important words I could learn were, "Out of scope." He bid the contracts low, just as you describe, and then looked for the minor (but inevitable) changes to the contract that allowed him to go back and ask for more, arguing that they changed the scope of the contract. (I once saw him bundle the monthly progress reports together, write a two-paragraph intro page, and call it the final report -- and in the end, he forced the customer to ante up more money for a real final report.)
Clearly, things have gotten worse since then. The "out of scope" work never gets done, the engineering has holes in it, and there are new, expensive craters on Mars.
I can't deny that there were abuses which led to the present system, but I don't think any rational person could claim that the problem has been solved with the new way. What's been generated is a system guaranteed to generate "surprises" with operating hardware -- not successfully get probes to Mars.
And the outcome: the engineers are labeled "arrogant," because they "overextended their reach." Ironic... and sad.
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
This isn't really engineering, this is politics. I think the world of the NASA engineers, who are damned good, and extremely motivated. My opinion of NASA management, however, is pretty much unprintable.
Unfortunately, they have a very tight grip on the money -- GPLing them is a grand idea, and might even work (if you could avoid the everpresent danger of overworking the problem -- which release do you actually launch?), but it'll never happen.
What we need is some very rich man *cough*Gates*cough* to fund this sort of thing... but that'll probably never happen, either.
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
Its time to really put some time and money into exploring our solar system and beyond... We waste billions of dollars a year on people who cant take care of themselves and people who cant plan for their own future, but we know next to nothing about the universe around us.
Its time to devote some resources to expanding the home of the human race. Big deal we screwed up a billion dollar mission, that shouldnt slow us down! Mistakes are common in new, complex fields!
If we took all the money we waste on "save the lazy people" programs and spent it on space exploration, not only would we have a ton of new jobs but the technological impact would be stagering. I know I'm offending all the bleading hearts out there, space is our greatest untapped resource, but the cup of idiots and gold diggers doth overflow. The only way to help those less fortunate is to grow the human race... create more niches and less people will suffer with what we have.
No one was unemployed when the mayflower landed on plymouth rock!
be gental,
chowda
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www.chowda.net -- Home of the FREE COOKIES!
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YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
Don't Forget china. They're planning their first manned space flight soon. They've successful completed their first unmanned space flight. With all those US secret documents they've stolen over the years, it won't be long before they will have to stop repeating other feats and develop some of their own.
I'm still waiting on the so-called "energy of Capitalism" to push into space. Hasn't happened yet and it won't because private industry needs the government and public funds to set things up for them. Private industry couldn't fund the rail system in the 19th century, it took tax dollars to do that in the form of land grabbing from farmers and massive infusion of money into the rail monopolies. Private industry couldn't build the Hoover Dam or the highway system, again it had to come from Uncle Sam and your tax money. And don't think your going to get any return on these investments. Oh no, that's Communism! Remember, it's public expense to support private profits that defines Capitalism!
The Soviets also put the 1st man into Earth orbit. This was also a major bummer as far as the US was concerned. How do you top this? Kennedy promised a man on the moon, and NASA was more than willing to comply. Take that back, the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about was more than willing to comply. Flashforward to today. International Space Station? Money to Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and their subcontractors. Money for science? Here's a dime kid, go buy a candybar.
The amount of money that was spent to win the Cold War is difficult to comprehend. As Sagan used to say, billions and billions. But to me at least, the Cold War came to an end as the US bankrupted the Soviet Union. I have no idea how historians will view this, but to me the Cold War probably was unique in it being more of an economic war instead of a major blood thirsting conflict. Note: I'm not saying that economic sanctions will win a battle. No, I'm talking about no holds barred, spend, spend, spend.
Some ppl have said that the proposed SDI (Star Wars missile defense) was the straw that broke the camel's back. I don't necessarily agree with this, but I can't disprove it.
Back on topic. When space exploration returned to the realm of science, the funding level dropped to a level commensurate closer to other scientific projects. If funding for space exploration increases, then you have to suspect lobbying efforts by the prime contractors will be of some significance.
Zero Gs is really harsh on the human body (bone loss, and worse), there are little if any plans to deal with a medical 'situation' in space (how do you perform even basic medicine when blood turns to aerosol?)
Easily solved, don't do the trip in zero G. Get the upper stage of your booster, tether it to the habitation with a piece of cord, and set it spinning. Artificial gravity.
and the problem of background radiation is even worse given that shielding is heavy and fuel is scarce.
It's just not that bad - the maximum probable dose is about 50 rem over a two year period. This is not lethal over the short term, and poses only a slight additional cancer risk in the long term. Robert Zubrin, a vociferous and convincing advocate of Mars exploration, suggests using smokers for the crew, but keep tobacco out of their cargo. Quitting smoking would reduce their cancer risk far more than the radiation dose!
Check out The Mars Society or read Dr. Zubrin's book The Case For Mars for more information.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
You know, film an entirely bogus Mars Mission in some warehouse in the desert SW and show it on the nightly news and news specials as 'real'. A lot of folks would probably fall for it and be a real ratings boost too - heck, even some controversy over whether it was real or not would just attract more attention.
I'm wondering if even the recent March MM (that's 2000 in arabic) issue of Scientific American's article on MM (that's Mission to Mars) was also tied into the M&M movie (sponsored by the 'Mars' candy company) in an attempt to drum up taypayer interest, ala Sputnik in '57 CE. Even the first photo says, "FIRST WALK on Mars would be even more dramatic if dust storms were swirling nearby", which to me sounds dangerous, like saying, "FIRST WALK on the moon would be even more dramatic if Neil Armstrong stepped out and got pelted to death in a meteor shower".
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
When I talked to some of the old timers who worked on Apollo, they always mentioned that the budget was much higher in those days. There was enough money to design and build high-quality equipment, and to document and test it thoroughly. There were also many more people. More than enough people to get the job done in a complete and professional manner. It also allowed for specialization. You could be the expert on left-handed widgets, after having worked with them for years. There were many more permanently funded positions that didn't disappear as soon as a task was completed. In later years this would be called "fat" and "overhead", which was true to a certain extent, but cutting the fat also cut quality and reliability. Later budget cuts put most of the people out on the street and slashed the wages of those who remained. Television news stories on aerospace engineers driving cabs served to scare away many bright students. Today's NASA is just a thin shell of civil service contract monitors overseeing an unstable, shrinking and underfunded collection of contractors.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I read in the New Yorker, in an article on long-term space travel, that one of the big problems that NASA has with human travel to destinations like Mars is that they don't have any idea how to deal with human physiology and space travel. Zero Gs is really harsh on the human body (bone loss, and worse), there are little if any plans to deal with a medical 'situation' in space (how do you perform even basic medicine when blood turns to aerosol?), and the problem of background radiation is even worse given that shielding is heavy and fuel is scarce.
The people this article interviewed, including a NASA human physiology expert, said that they were actually less put off by the 'hard' technology obstacles of a mission to Mars (not that they're trivial) than they were the human physiology obstacles.
If the current snail's pace is considered reasonable, then I want to see us get "wildly optimistic". Maybe we'll see put a woman on Mars before my grandchildren are dead of old age. I'm 27.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
How much (in todays terms) did it cost to get to the Moon? How about an estimate of the cost to reach Mars now? Surely with the exponential advance in technology and computing power the costs must be at least equal?
Ah, yes, good, old-fashioned Capitalism.
Isn't there a company that was trying to buy Mir so that it could be used for tourism? This might be the way to go with Mars -- get a bunch of long-sighted VC firms and invest in a large scale tourism plan for Mars. There are many countries on Earth who exist solely on tourism revenues; there is no reason that missions to Mars can't be funded in the same way.
I'm only half kidding, by the way.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
I can't think it is my party, the Libertarians, because NASA is part of the government. (Incidentally, NASA is one of the few things I like about our government, but I expect other Libertarians to say "privatize it!")
Republicans won't want it because they never want to increase the budget for government programs. (Unless it was turned into part of the military or law enforcement.)
Democrats probably want to take the money out of NASA and put it into social programs.
Greens would probably be afraid that rocket exhaust was damaging the atmosphere, and environmentalists would certainly object if a nuclear reactor was used to power the craft.
Socialists would probably be similar to Democrats in their thinking.
So, I was wondering if anyone, in any party has said, "Mars before 2035!" or something similar.
We need a pro-tech lobby in Washington.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Actually, it was the commies who started the space race with Sputnik. (In Danse Macabre Stephen King pointed out that that was a pretty scary that the Russians had gotten to space first when he was a kid.) So maybe we don't need a war or a cold war, just someone to show NASA up and really rub our faces in it.
Of course, I'd rather it didn't take national humiliation to get us to Mars...
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
According to one of my professors, when we landed on the moon, we actually had the capability to land on mars. he was part of a project that built and tested nuclear powered rockets that were capable of sending humans to mars. of course this was all stopped because the government thought that the moon was good enough.
I didn't say it made sense.
For crying out loud, there are people that admit to using their Palm pilot while they're on the toilet.
And as an aside - if we did send people to Mars, it could get pretty boring on the trip - better get a couple of those IBM drives stacked up with MP3s
"Oh, I got me a helmet - I got a beauty!"
"Oh, I got me a helmet - I got a beauty!"
Jack Nicholson, Easy Rider
You might expect that Gore might say some pro-Mars stuff, given the VP's involvement for the space program (or has that changed now?) as well as his supposedly tech-friendly record. I guess Bush Sr. did this after becoming President, trying to drum up enthusiasm for a manned Mars mission in 1989, but nobody much cared ...
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
If a clear winner of all the different single-stage-to-orbit designs is ever made, it would really help the space program by making it efficient to haul lots of materials to build future in-space launch facilities. This would make the actual long-distance space veichles much more efficient (not having to deal with great stresses taking off from earth). What we need is an efficient, large-capacity workhorse of a SSTO craft.
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Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
I just saw Dr Robert Zubrin give a talk last night (he's in Australia at the moment) about his Mars Direct proposal. With regards the recent loss of two Mars probes, he mentioned that previously, duplicate probes were always sent, acknowledging the fact that accidents happen and things can often go wrong. Redundancy was previously built into the mission design. Expecting near perfection, every single time, from mechanical devices operating at relatively great distances from earth in harsh environments is ridiculous. The same people who believe that probably never back up their hard drives. On a side note, I recently saw a documentary on the International Space Station (Real cost: ~$100 billion and rising). For the cost of the station, we could have literally flooded the solar system with thousands of redundant probes. But I'd hate to see the world (or at least the US) give up its manned space program.
I fear we don't; like a Mars landing, we've had the technology for decades but the political obstacles are insurmountable.
If you believe the most die-hard grassroots space advocates, the controversial question is no longer "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than money going directly to tax breaks on orbital R&D and industry?" the controversial question is "Are expenditures on NASA programs more beneficial for space development than setting money on fire?"
It's horrifying that we're spending billions of dollars per year on Space Shuttle "operations", and a billion dollars on the worst submission (currently falling behind schedule, over weight, and over budget as you read this) for the X-33 project, while companies like Kistler Aerospace and Rotary Rocket are stalling on creating the world's first truely reusable orbital rockets because they can't raise a fraction of that money in investments.
It's shameful that they never bothered to even build a second DC-X rocket after NASA took over the program and crashed the first one.
On the one hand, NASA keeps lots of aerospace engineers employed doing something; on the other hand that something is arguably much less efficient than what they would be doing in more dynamic private companies.
On the one hand, NASA is a nice customer for the big commercial aerospace companies' rockets; on the other hand, the government is a hell of a competitor to explain to potential investors in aerospace start-up companies.
And now NASA says we don't have the technology to put an Earth Return Vehicle on Mars capable of lifting a few pounds of rocks, less than a month after Scientific American spent an article detailing plans (specifically Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct Plan outlined in The Case For Mars and NASA's Mars Semi-Direct modification) which would put humans on Mars (and leave infrastructure there, unlike Apollo) in this decade for less money than we spend on the Shuttle and ISS.
I say GPL NASA. Can't hurt.
-davek
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Of course, this is the exact opposite of a desire to economize, people will try to come up with anything they can think of to use up their budget to use it up. I won't say they waste money, exactly, but let's just say they always have enough office supplies.
I think, therefore, that the reason why NASA has been economizing is the fact that the axe had already fallen on the budget, the people at NASA knew it, and they wanted to put the best face on it. So, my question is, do you think the desire to do thing on the cheap is coming from within NASA or primarily from forces outside NASA who are putting the screws on it?
I figure its the latter, because i can't imagine anyone in any government department wanting to have budgets which shrink every year.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Consider:
Day after tomorrow, the 20th of March, every nation on earth receives the following message, clearly origonating from the moon: Now, let's suppose that the message is confirmed absolutely genuine. No doubt about it. My point is, that even under these circumstances, with the entire world pulling behind the mission, we couldn't get a man to the moon in one year. We just don't have the infrastructure to build a launch vehicle and landing craft that could get to the moon. I assert that even if we were willing to sacrifice the man we sent - give him a one-way ticket and a pat on the back - we couldn't get him to the lunar surface in one piece and keep him alive long enough to do anything of value. Let alone Mars.Now, I know I am preaching to the choir here, but most sheeple think that the Space Program is a huge waste of money, even while they are talking on their cell phone in their car with radial tires and checking their stress level with their pulse-detecting watch. What we in the pro-space community must do is tirelessly try to educate these downers (read Larry Niven's Sprials for the reference) about why spending money on the Space Program is A Good Thing.
www.eFax.com are spammers
... had the same drive that got us to the moon. We would already hava landed on mars and had a research station on the moon. Sending robots to mars is a great way to learn about the planet, but the only way people are going to get excited about mars missions is when a person is on his/her way to Mars.
The way our country and society is heading I would volonteer to be the first to go. Let the MPAA try to serve me with a warrent on the moon.
The interplanatery lag would suck but I wouldn't have much competition for bandwidth.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
Our space agency has become an outdated dinosaur, capable only of ponderous movement, when it isn't mired in the swamp of bureaucracy. A number of up and coming private companies (including, but not limited to Cerulean, Pioneer, Kistler, and Kelly) are working on inexpensive launch systems. One or more is certain to manage it in the next few years.
Once we have this cheap access to space, there are any number of Entrepeneurs waiting to exploit it. Most well known is Bigelow, but there are others.
Space, and our activities therein are popular with a lot of people. The growth of such private organizations as Permanent, The Mars Society, and Artemis is strong evidence of this.
NASA may not be prepared to go fetch some rocks from Mars anytime soon, but they may find others already there when they do.
Gonzo
is voting for the most "pro mars"
candidate, I think it is important
to note that Mars is a very big
issue in the geek community. I would say
it's probably number two right now,
with crypto legislation being number
one.
This is an election year, folks. Who is
the most "pro mars", anyway? I can picture
the dirty campaign ads -- accusing Al Gore
of inventing the Iridium system.
Three cheers for earth!
Amazing magic tricks
most people give them credit for - IMNSHO - these guys have, arguably, one of the toughest jobs on the planet - and while they certainly aren't the epitome of efficiency, they pull off some impressive stuff. Think about all the stumbling blocks in their way - CONSTANT media scrutiny, government beurocracy (ok, i totally spelled that wrong), budget constantly getting jacked around by congress. I'm certainly not implying that there's not considerable room for improvement, but given the fact that the deck is TOTALLY stacked against them, I think they do a better job than most people give them credit....
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
It was great. The first mission had some problems. They lost contact for a while. But finally the decision was made to go on a second mission in the back-up Mars Transport Vehicle©(tm). And thank God they did. Not only did we make contact with an alien race (who had mastered holographic recording techniques), but we rescued the poor chap WHO HAD BEEN LIVING ON THE SURFACE FOR A YEAR IN A CANVAS TENT!!!!!!!
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ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
+&x
But the U.S.A. isn't the whole world. Even if we over here remain too fat and lazy to get out there and conquer the stars, other nations may not. China and India are just getting their space programs off the ground, for example, and later they may decide that mining Luna and the asteroids for their minerals or building a solar power satellite to beam solar energy to earth would not be a waste of money at all. Also the Russians could always put themselves back together down the road--never count Ivan out for long! And of course there's Japan, the European Space Agency with their Ariane (sp?) booster, and last but certainly not least, all of the privately run space organizations that an above poster mentioned (Rotary Rocket, XCOR, etc). So I'm not giving up hope just yet--you'd be surprised how fast things can change.
There was a time when we did things like this "Not because it is easy, but because it is hard."
The only way to acquire the technology to bring rocks back from Mars, is to stop talking about it and actually try to bring rocks back from Mars.
The year after I was born, we walked on the moon. Now, 31 years later, it's considered an impressive feat of science to grow tomatoes in low Earth orbit.
It may be about time for us to disband NASA entirely. If we aren't going to give them the money, resources, people, and most important of all, the popular mandate to do the job right, there's no sense in pretending to do the job at all.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
When NASA issues a request for proposal (RFP), the bidders have a good idea of what the proposed cost should be in order to have a competitive proposal.
In the old days, programs were "cost plus fixed fee" (CPFF). In other words, whatever the cost of the project in the end, the customer (NASA) would pick up the cost, and the contractor would get an additional fee on top of that (gotta make a profit, of course). But there were a lot of abuses of CPFF proposals, so there are few left (mostly DOE nowadays - check out the Savannah River operating contract). I never had the leisure of working on such a program, but I have heard some "war stories" from the older engineers, and some of the abuses were astonishing.
So nowadays, programs are fixed cost. The original idea was to force the contractor to agree to a fixed payment for the program, and that price would have to include any profit that the contractor hoped to make. That lead to problems not with overbidding, as one might think, but to "no bids" and failed contracts due to cost overruns. So it was tweaked and the current policy is a fixed price contract, plus performance awards based on the programmatic, technical, and financial performance of the contractor. The cost of performing the work is agreed upon, and then NASA establishes another amount as a "carrot" to induce the contractor to perform well. If NASA doesn't like the contract performance, they can withhold part (or all) of the carrot.
It works pretty well for NASA, so far, so they haven't changed it in the past 6 years or so... but on the contractor end, it leads to two things: underbidding on contracts to insure some profit, and overworking the engineers to maintain performance.
The underbidding almost always comes in the labor category. In the task estimation process of the proposal, one "chunks" the project into small tasks like "design dunselhickey firmware," "design dunselhickey electronics," "design dunselhickey mechanical and packaging," "integrate and test dunselhickey," where the dunselhickey is an attitude control subsystem, or a sensor instrument, or something. (And I'm ignoring the contractor/subcontractor/vendor hierarchy to keep this somewhat short.) For even the simpler systems like Deep Space 2, these task estimates are huge efforts, and whole forests are sacrificed to them. Anyway, the point is that the contractor management knows ahead of time how much they want to quote for cost, so if the estimators (the engineers) don't come up with a small enough number, the managers (accountants, lawyers, and engineers with 30-year-old training) take a chainsaw to the estimate to trim it down to their target cost. When it comes time to perform the contract, the engineers find that there's not anywhere near enough money budgeted to perform the labor that needs to be done.
Which leads to the next problem: overworked engineers. The contractor who wins the project faces a dilemma as work begins to fall behind schedule. Contingency was never a part of the budget, so any delays or technical problems, even in the early phases, directly impact the bottom line/delivery date. And in almost every contract, there are several areas where the budgeted money to perform the work is grossly inadequate. In order to avoid cost overruns and keep their performance award, management puts more and more demand on the engineers to take shortcuts and work overtime. Unpaid overtime, of course. Which leads to fatigue and the resulting errors and oversights, as tesserae described. And of course, they're always the engineers' fault. (As I like to say, "parts are derated; engineers are berated.")
Faster, Better, Cheaper has only made this problem worse. There's less money budgeted for any given doowidget, but more performance demands. The leadership is out of touch with the technical demands of the performance requirements, and promise more for less. The technology only does what we tell it to do; if we take shortcuts in design and testing, we don't know what we're telling it to do. Engineers want to do things right, and know they can do things right the first time, but the available time (e.g. money) has been shrinking steadily.
But at times like this, when I'm feeling most cynical, I can still take solace in the fact that I'm not working in a competitive commercial environment (like application software) where the situation is even worse. When I see that Win2000 shipped with 64,000 "issues," I know exactly what's going on... the politics and jargon may be a bit different, but it's still management's fault for promising more than they can deliver.
I can see the fnords!
At this rate an entertainment company will be the first to get a manned mission to Mars. The mission will be paid for by a 24 hour, cable/satelite channel that broadcasts the entire mission complete with space sex (pay per view for that tho) after the audience has developed close personal relationships with each of the characters on the mission (a bunch of photogenic 20 something astronauts) we will all get to watch them crash into Mars..live..in the greatest rating event ever. Given the extreme financial success of this mission, the sequel show will be launched immediately, this one lands and then everyone starves to death in a gripping drama lasting months with a strange plot reminiscent of Lord of the Flies.
At least we would have landed humans on Mars.
no sig.
The Climate Orbiter was lost because two people (one NASA, one from the contractor) were handling the entire trajectory; they were completely overworked (to the point failing to implement the backup planning which was already on the timeline, and which by itself might have saved the mission), with no one to even do basic sanity checks on their work -- and they missed not only the critical units conversion, but also the fact that their trajectory corrections weren't having the desired results. A college kid on a work-study internship, working ten hours a week, could have saved the mission. But it was faster-better- cheaper , so they didn't hire the kid...
The Polar Lander appears to have been lost over communications failure between two test groups: when the lander legs were dropped, they apparently rebounded and triggered a ground-contact sensor in each leg; this set a bit in the computer, so that it "thought" the vehicle had already touched the ground, and it killed the engine as soon as it took control. The rebound happened regularly during testing, but the group testing the leg deployment didn't look at the bit's value at the end of the test (after all, it wasn't on the ground yet, so it wasn't their job...); and the group testing the final powered descent didn't bother to look at the contents of the register before they started the test -- they just reset the bit, so they'd have a clean test. All it required was some warm body to look at the test sequence as a whole, but no one had the time. Again, that single college kid might have saved the mission... but NASA was too cheap.
What concerns me is this: they're going to spend their time and money worrying over the hardware issues:
rather than pay attention to managing what they've already developed. It's a bit like the aftermath of Challenger, where they went nuts on the hardware instead of looking at the fundamental problem, which was the prostitution of the program for political reasons. The outcome of that is that we now have a NASA which is completely paranoid about public opinion and afraid of its own shadow when it comes to safety, but which still won't look at the whole picture, and still twitches to the political beat.
It just really pisses me off! Pathfinder worked beautifully (despite a scary airbag system, which was what I figured would fail), and probably did so because of the long hours and very hard work everyone did; I know I did my share of 14-18 hour days on the little piece of it I had. It was so successful that NASA said, "Wow! That was really cheap! Let's see how much more we can cut out of the budget..."
So here we are: decent, low-cost hardware, and crappy, low-budget management. But guess which one is going to get the tarbrush?
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
I think we should first mine Eros (that's a near earth asteroid.) Estimates indicate that it has 20 TRILLION dollars of ore on it- its 3% metal! It has everything, gold, plutonium, platinum...
There's nothing wrong with money. Money makes the satellites go around, and the sort of capabilities that you need to mine Eros will help get to mars- and probably pay for it.
And besides we need need to be able to stop the next dinosaur killer asteroid... living on Mars won't help much with that. Chucking around lumps of asteroid will.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"