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Public Survey For NASA's Planetary Research Priorities
StephenMesser writes: "At the request of NASA, the National Research Council is conducting a planetary science community assessment of the priorities for the U.S. planetary research programs for the next 10 years. The Planetary Society has been asked to assist this "decadal survey" by seeking input from the general public about planetary exploration. Data must be input by January 31, 2002 to be counted on the survey.
CNN has a story
on the survey."
Not just planets, but some moons too.
Do you like German cars?
My vote is that we spend more time researching, and eventually travelling to the Jovan moons. The different moons all have different properties, such as minerals or interesting conditions, that might make them useful to humanity. Europa in particular might either contain its own sea-life or be a possible sanctuary for terran sea-life.
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Not that I mind getting a little input, but aren't the guys at Nasa better suited to be making this kind of decision or is this all about PR?
In other words, if you ask a question like that to the public you'll get 25% say Mission to Mars, 25% say base on the Moon, 25% say explore other Solar systems, and 25% vote for Britney Spears. Most normal people don't understand how difficult or how beneficial the missions they would suggest would actually be. It's like asking the guy that bags your groceries for help with Differential Equations.
If you are out to study the evolution of the solar system you're probably going to want to look at the planets we haven't really examined in any detail yet (i.e. the distant outer ones), or do some comet fly-bys. If you want to look for life, then Europa's probably you're best bet right now. If you want to understand the Earth's environment in the context of other planets then it's off to Venus or Mars (the "most" Earth-like planets). If you're hot for colonization, then you probably want to take a really close and detailed look at Mars. If space resources are your thing then near Earth asteroids are the place to be.
The big question that is missing from the survey is: how well does our present budget match up with our intended purpose (whatever that may be), and if there is a mismatch should we increase the budget or reduce the magnitude of our goals. Personally, I lean towards increasing the budget (which has been happening, but it's all been funneled into ISS), but I'd be interested to see the general public's response to that question (although NASA might not like the answer).
Of course manned spaceflight's not feasible, it costs more than it's weight in gold to put something in orbit. As you said, when we have cheap launch costs then we can talk. Except NASA isn't interested in cheap launches. I noticed that 'improve launch technology beyond ancient rocket levels' isn't on the survey anywhere. They have zero interest in expanding our presence in space. Left to them, we'll have the finest satellite system in the world and nothing else.
Dyolf Knip
The basic theories behind nanotech have been subject to scrutiny for decades now, and despite many attempts, nobody has successfully disputed the core claims. Yes, there are critics, but look closer and you'll see that the claims are either unsupported, or they do not attack the core claim that is relevant here: the safest bet, by far, is that we will soon have a very large jump in our abilities to send stuff into space.
That jump point is close enough now that it doesn't make sense to spend our resources on conventional technologies. The planets will still be pretty much the same 5 to 25 years from now, and whatever we learn from doing things the old-fashioned way isn't going to be nearly as beneficial as getting the good stuff up and running sooner.
Put the money into making nanotech work. Now.
--willdye
Possibly more economical would be to build one that launches a plane at mach 7 (a mere 2.3 kps), whereupon the scramjet kicks in and takes it up to the mach 26 or so needed for orbit. There's bunches of optimizations you can use, but suffice to say it works best in a vacuum.
Dyolf Knip
For instance, how much would you pay to spend a week-long vacation in orbit? Or move to a retirement home in Luna's 1/6th gravity? Did you know there's more metals, a lot of them quite valuable, sitting in that hunk o' junk Eros than the human race has mined from the ground in it's entire existence? Any idea the kind of stuff manufacturing could do with abundant vacuum, near Zero K temperatures, and microgravity? How big you can make a space habitat when you're not limited to earth-made materials?
Again, none of this exists today because it's insanely expensive just to get off the ground.
Dyolf Knip