Slashdot Mirror
To the Moon and Beyond
isorox writes "The BBC is reporting that 'Europe is considering sending humans to the Moon, Mars and beyond within the next few decades', although the UK government 'does not support human space flight and will not fund UK citizens to go through the official European astronaut training programme'. However while plans are made for the next 30 years, Rosetta is due to launch in 2 weeks time, ready to rendevous and land on a comet in 2011. Assuming it doesn't blow up on launch."
How does the ESA decide which projects to pursue, how much to spend, and who will contribute what or get which contract?
Give the political tussles that go on in the United States over such things, I can only think Europe with rivalries running back centuries would be quite challenging. On the other hand -- they seem to be doing quite well!
Can someone from the UK answer this please? Is it the people or just the government that is so opposed to doing anything that involves the European Union? I'm German and spent a good deal of my life there, and i still try to keep up to date with European politics. The UK didn't want the Euro, they don't agree with the EU when it comes to war.. What gives?
Carpe meam simiam!
It's good to see more interest in space travel and exploration. Doesn't anyone else think it's a bit stupid that nations spend so much money on weapons/military, just to cause that extra human suffering that makes life so grand... while we pass up the opportunity to explore what is undoubtedly the most fascinating and wonderful thing out there: space.
Holy crap, aren't we a dumb bunch of talking apes. There's probably some pretty neat stuff out there beyond Earth...
The UK is wary of the EU, because it wants to maintain it's excellent economic relations with the US. I don't believe that the UK wants to be embroiled in some of the trade disputes forming on the horizon between the EU and the US. I think the UK is being wise in choosing the role of middle-man/mediator.
As for not going along with the Euro, well that makes good sense to me. The UK is correct (IMHO) in wanting to be independant financially from the rest of Europe.
In closing, to prevent myself from being offtopic, let me just say, moontrip good. Go EU.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
I grew watching the all of the Mercury launches. Most of Gemini. I stayed up pass midnight for the first time in my life to wait for Armstrong and Aldin to take a walk on the moon. I was a True Believer in human spaceflight and a human presence in space.
But now that I am older and with our new computers, I just wonder. I see millions of homeless in America that we never tolerated before. My older friends are all in fear of not being able to afford healthcare. The American empire is ready to start preemptive wars to maintain the right to pollute the earth and to maintain the monolopy on weapons of mass destruction.
I am totally opposed to going to Mars. It is just too soon and too much else needs to be done. I would like to a program that works toward building O'Neil colonies but that type of planning and cooperation is just not going to happen. Any exploration can be done by robots. The resources for a human base on the moon or a trip to Mars is just misplaced resources.
Now, if you are going to build mass drivers and then build solar geneator transmitters in orbit, then I would dearly love to stop burning carbon. And if a few monarchies lose there billions in the process, that can only be a Good Thang.
Sigh. So true.
Britain has some serious talent that would be beneficial to the project. Rolls Royce has always been one of the world leaders in Aero Engines, and we have always had competent aviation technology. Not only that, but we have already invested a lot in the development of air breathing rocket engines until the Thatcher government canned the project.
This is not a cost, but an investment. The main benefits of an aggressive space programme are the progression of science. Just the materials science aspect of the Apollo programme must have added billions to the economy - Just how much velcro and teflon is sold each year? Then there are ideas such as cordless power tools, and freeze dried food. According to one report (admittedly from NASA, so therefore probably a little biased), the US economy has received $7 back for each dollar spent on the space programme.
Okay. I'll stop ranting now.
Actually, several practical methods of terraforming Mars have been proposed.
So far, 2 of them seem very pragmatic, one is the melting of the polar ice caps and creating a greenhouse effect of sorts, so that the planet is warmed. The melting can be done, if we really had the initiative to set up a series of high energy solar driven equipment to do the same.
The other is a little more trickier, and involves the introduction of certain genetically modified algae into Mars, which might help increase the percentage of oxygen and other gases there.
The trouble with these kinds of terraforming methodologies is that you will end up introducing foreign elements, I mean biological elements, which you may not want to.
In fact, I think Wolf Vishniac (am not too sure about the name) had ideas about introducing complex organic chemicals into the Martian soil to aid in terraforming at a very basic level. If my memory serves me right, he was also mentioned in Carl Sagan's Cosmos as the designer of soil based bio-detection equipment, for space missions.
I suspect that a manned Mars mission has always been 10-30 years out on every NASA timeline (or other space-exploration timeline) you could dig up. I have a little paperback from 1961 called First American Into Space that makes these predictions for what would happen:
Up to 1970, their timeline wasn't too far off the mark. Friendship 7 (the third Mercury flight) orbited the earth in 1962. The Ranger missions sent cameras to the moon's surface beginning in 1964. Gemini III put two astronauts in orbit in 1965. Apollo 8 orbited the moon in 1968. Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969.
After that, things started slipping. Skylab was launched into orbit in 1973, but it was used for less than a year before it was mothballed (and eventually allowed to burn up in 1979). They predicted manned missions to Mars (and Venus!) in ~15 years. It's been more than 40 years since that book was published, and the closest we've gotten to Mars is a handful of movies that try to guess at what it would be like.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Building a moon-base from which to do this would not be cheaper. Launching from space would be cheaper still for launches, but again building an asteroid-processing plant to achieve space industry would by frightfully expensive, even if we could lassoo a handy earth-crossing asteroid. The big launch-cost-saving move would be to plaster over that huge first step by building a space elevator.
This is a sad thing to say, since thay're about all the USA has right now, but the other big economic step would be to shoot NASA, being careful to preserve the history it carries. It has gone from a relatively small, tightly focussed team to a self-preserving institution. The meta-planners seem to have no idea, as project after project gets 3/4 built and then canned, Fred and way-obsolete Shuttles continue to get funded but more interesting and productive things like powersats and elevators are passed over. NASA personnel, the dudes who breathe life into ancient satellites and otherwise regularly pull NASA's cojones out of the fire, would then be available to the commercial replacements.
Commerce is no silver bullet either. Safety regs with real teeth would be needed, for example.
The underlying problems are mostly social. Very few people see any return from this kind of effort, it all looks like very expensive geek toys to them. The projects which are pretty much guaranteed a return, like powersats, colonies, moon/asteroid mining and so on are all priced to cause collective sticker shock. That elevator seems to be the only useful `next step' priced at under $1T (actually $10-20G, any one of a dozen billionaires could privately fund it alone).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The ESA Human spaceflight budget is a bit harder to pin down due to multi-year authorizations and various breakdowns, but appears to be about 1 billion euros for the four year period from 2002-2006, so roughly 250 million euros per year. Note from the link that the bulk of this figure is contributions to the ISS, not human spacecraft development.
Since the euro and dollar are roughly equivalent lately, at current levels the ESA would need to increase it's human spaceflight budget by 24X just to match NASA spending on the same. However, at that level, NASA isn't even vaguely contemplating a return to the Moon, much less going to Mars.
Given the current economic situation in Europe, I'd put the chance of any of this happening at just about zero.
When (if?) mankind finally returns to the moon, it will most likely be via a private company in some sort of for-profit venture. Unless there is some sort of new political goal to be gained, governments will not (and should not, IMHO) be part of the picture. Its just too damn expensive for taxpayers to stomach. - Necron69