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."

Comments

Question

[MacAndrew]

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!

Re:Question

[KjetilK]

ESA has a Science Programme Committee that has the main say in which projects to pursue. The members are scientists from each of the member countries.

To some extent, everything is politics, but the scientists of the ESA-SPC have generally been well focused on scientific merits, and on consensus within the scientific community.

Who gets what contracts is on a different level, and I have no idea how that happens.

What is up with the UK

[lowtekneq]

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?

Nice to see

[bigberk]

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...

Re:Nasa/Space Timeline

[metlin]

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.

Re:So Why The Hell Aren't WE Going?

[leonbrooks]

Launching to Mars from the Moon would be cheaper, since the force needed to break the moon's gravity is a[]lot less.

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).