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Where Should Space Exploration Go From Here?
Since Congress has been steadily cutting back on support for NASA, Nick suggests this idea: "I'm sure there are many taxpayers out there like me that would love to see NASA's budget doubled. The problem is there isn't enough support to get congress to increase the budget by that amount, and I really don't want people to pay that don't care to. I propose an opt-in, one-time contribution box added to tax returns. I would require that my money be used only to advance the space program with either a shuttle replacement, an extra crew compartment for the space station, or a launch vehicle for a manned trip to Mars. Would you support a bill that would allow taxpayers to voluntarily contribute money to NASA? Are you ready to put your coin where your Dreams are?"
Well, space.
Banaaaana!
Mars is next!
It should go up.
Hard to make you say? Just ask our Iraqi friends - it is well known that they have weapons of mass distruction /end lame punchline
I am unique, just like you, and you, and you...
We will never get much farther unless we find a more efficient, less expensive way of building vessels and machinery. And you can blame congress and their love of pork for most of it.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
Where are my mod points for "bad taste"?
Science is not democracy. You can't get to the best decision if you let voters decide. The people at NASA are being paid to be experts, so my vote goes to letting them chart the course. Some mistakes will be made, but I'd rather that they make the decision rather than me and my neighbour, who both have been watching to much Star Trek and Star Wars.
oh well... it's /.
I am unique, just like you, and you, and you...
Exploring space and developing new ways of traveling through space is the only way we can ensure that the human race survives the coming centuries or millennia. Some day Earth is going to be devastated by a meteor. Some day our sun will run out of helium to burn and expand into a red giant, boiling away our oceans. If we have colonies in other solar systems, humanity will survive.
The only reason space isn't the top priority of all of the governments of the world today is because we humans as a majority don't really seem to care what happens to our great great great great (and so on) grandchildren. We only care about the here and now. The folks and NASA and the folks in other space programs across the world may be the only ones who care about the future of humanity.
We (the United States) need to stop wasting our money on our already most-powerful military for the purpose of revenge against the middle east and start backing NASA more. Start researching new ways to travel in space, and make a colony in Alpha Century a priority. If we really are the evolved species we claim to be, we'll start caring less about squabbles on this blue marble and more about exploring the universe in which we live.
But again, that's just my 2 cents (and a paper clip)
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
If the Pentagon can spend $200B on the next generation jet fighter, surely the U.S. can spend and additional $20B over the next ten years doing the R&D and prototyping our next spaceplane. Oh wait, we have to build a missle shield first....
The Russians were able to keep a space station in orbit for years, while only using 'capsule' technology. Until we get a new generation of reusable spaceship going, let's go back to that. It was good enough to get us to the moon and back 30+ years ago. Imagine what they could do now. Safer, cheaper, etc.
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Bless the crews of the Columbia and Challenger. From your sacrifices will come greatness.
they just built a stairway to heaven. Can the same technology not be re-used? I think the Japanese were working on something similar.
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
nasa will get the funding now to build that space shuttle that they have been talking about for the past 10 years that has the booster rockets built in that takes off more like a air craft then a rocket
In my state, you can buy special license plates for a bit more than normal, with a logo of the school, organization or recreation you want. The extra money is given to that organization, and you show your support.
Why not do this with NASA, as well? Especially since my state has a NASA research center. I'd be happy to spend an extra $10 for my license plate to show that I support our NASA research.
More info at http://www.oplates.com/
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
- Build a cheaper single-stage-to-orbit vehicle.
- ...
- Profit!
Proposal B:- Develop a self-replicating nanoscale device that eats air.
- Let its progeny digest the entire atmosphere and excrete it as solids.
- Ta-daaaaa, we're in space!
Of course, further study may be advisable.So we can study the effects of weightlessness on tiny screws. Ant1: Save the Queen Ant2: Who's the Queen? Ant1: I'm the Queen Ant2: No your not! Horrible Horrible Freedom..
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
Although some of his arguments are not convincing or even insulting ("Did Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon really have to be there to push a couple of buttons..."), the article makes several important points. Here's one of them:
I would like to find out more about Mars.
We don't need manned missions either, just some good robots.
I'd like to see a couple sample return missions. One of the most intriguing ideas recently is the suggestion that there may have been life on Mars at one point.
Finding out if there was (or wasn't) life on Mars could tell us a lot about how likely there is life on other planets. Let's get some probes on there, and roam around a bit, dig up some stuff, and bring it back!
Until launch costs get much cheaper (and that's a whole 'nother rant), let's just do some good, meaningful science. We have the technology. NASA's existing budget (if we weren't building the ISS) is good for a dozen missions per year to the rest of the solar system, plus another spiffy space telescope.
Now's the chance to take the money from something that isn't nearly as useful (the shuttle and ISS) and put it into answering some questions about life, the universe, and everything.
Let's do it!
"Would you support a bill that would allow taxpayers to voluntarily contribute money to NASA?"
Is this a joke? What would that accomplish? Does anyone really expect, come tax time, Americans to open their checkbooks and start shelling out the money for NASA, let alone at a rate which would add up to billions of dollars? You must be kidding me...
First, take half of NASA's budget, and make it totally devoted to unmanned missions exclusively. NASA suddenly gets 10x more research done for half the money.
Second, take the other half (billions of dollars, BTW) and make a series of prizes to be won by any group willing to take the risks. Prizes could include:
$200M prize for first profitable 100 megawatt power plant space.
$200M prize for first profitable factory that produces at least $1M in sales. $100M bonus if its a product that currently produces a lot of toxic waste.
$500M prize for agriculture pod that produces 1000 tons of food per year. $250M bonus if it's a forest pod that produces wood.
The key is that SPACE HAS TO PAY FOR ITSELF. Right now the risks are too high and expensive to get started.
Note by the way that this is the ideal way to sell space to people. "Think about all the bad, bad stuff that we can put in orbit instead of polluting the earth. Cheap power. Cheap products. Great for the economy.
Too bad this entirely logical, rational, practical and most importantly, extremely likely to succeed scenerio will never happen. NASA will never give up the control.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The moon has really been neglected in the past decades. I'm an engineer now, and like my fellow not-yet-30-years-old collegues, I wasn't even born the last time man has touched our natural satellite's ground. There is enormous potential for hi-tech research, science and even industrial exploitation on the moon, and it's not too far. The Earth-Moon system's Lagrange points have been largely unexploited also...
As for Mars, our (I speak as a human being) succes rate at going there isn't very good yet. Almost one spaceship out of two that tries to enter Mars orbit is lost. We need a "welcome" infrastructure: communication and meteo satellites around Mars so that the following probes (and crews!) can safely reach destination.
We also need something strong to cruise rapidly (I don't believe yet in 3-years-plus missions). Prometheus (nuclear propulsion) would facilitate the trip a lot...
Here in Barcelona, not long ago, a pacifist organization proposed adding a box in the tax forms that would disallow the government from spending your taxes on defense research or contracts.
A lot of people signed in the campaign, but the government, of course, did not change anything.
Now imagine if something like this could be done in the USofA, which spends on weapons as much as the 10 next most-spending countries put together!
(All this data is taken out of UN reports, which I'm now too lazy to find...)
With just one year of the DoD budget, famine could be erradicated forever in this planet, and you'd have enough spare change to build another shuttle and send a mission to Mars!
Of course now the important thing is bombing Iraq because the stupid dictator there tried to kill someone's daddy *and* has huge amounts if oil...
If I have posted far, it is because I replied to giants.
While I think the space program will on, I don't think that the shuttle program will go on for long. This is a program that has claimed 14 lives so far and the technology is a bit outmoded.
With the advances in robotics I wonder just how many of the experiments performed in space need a human presence. If half of the experiments could be done with robots, that would greatly reduce the number of manned flights. This would also result in a significant cost savings, since most of the cost of a manned spacecraft comes from the systems required to support human life.
WAY DOWN. Bad taste is an understatment!
President bush's budget has already mentioned an increase in spending for NASA (which I think was there before last weekend).
I think NASA should try and find the aliens referred to in that proposal.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Step 1. Build the basics for a permanent presence in space. The ISS might do the job. That's merely a place to hang on to for ...
...
Step 2. Build an ore processing space station so we can mine the asteriods. This will provide most of the raw materials needed for everything else, such as
Step 3. Large scale self-sufficient space station. This might not be a single station. There might be one station devoted to living quarters, recreation, etc. and another for manufacturing and science.
It would probably be decades before this system reaches the break even point, and a few more decades before it pays for itself (financially). But that gives you...
Step 4. Profit! (sorry, I couldn't help myself).
That's my amateur class analysis. Feel free to blow huge holes into it.
-- Will program for bandwidth
But the space shuttle has not lived up to promises, and there are no current technologies which will get space travel to a reasonable cost. Plus, there's really a lack of a mission. I'd say the hubble and other satellites are the only worthwhile things it's done. Given finite resources, what else could we do with those billions? A fusion manhattan project? Thousands more grants to scientists? The end of oil dependence? These are all more valuable things than going to space right now. I hate to say it, but rationally I believe we're better off shuttering nasa and diverting the money to other science endeavors. And if you consider all the possible uses for the money, it becomes more attractive to shutter nasa. Think of the millions in jeapordy from AIDS, and the horrors of Africa and parts of Asia.
While it's nice to think that we'll be pulling some cowboy bebop style shit and just pulling back the throttle on our Swordfish II and going orbital, we need at least an order of magnitude more efficient power generation, power storage, or drive technology, or some combination thereof. The bottom line is that it takes a huge load of energy to build an orbital craft, and it takes quite a bit to launch it. Piggyback designs have thus far not proved to be a solution though there is hope there, I will admit; Still, I don't think it's worth making craft capable of launching from a planet until materials technology improves considerably.
A space elevator would make it downright inexpensive to put things in orbit. If you reserve space, when it becomes cost-effective you can run a superconducting strip down its length (That's a long-ass strip of superconductor! But eventually it will become worth it) and plant nuclear power generation at the other end of the tether where you can simply eject the core if it fissions out of control. (Mount it on a rocket; If the pile goes bad, fire it at the sun.) You could also just put a gigantic solar array there; It should be affordable if it is cheap to put into orbit and has obvious advantages in terms of required maintenance.
In any case, the first step towards building a space elevator is building the massive structure which will have to sit at the other end. If we are going to accomplish this, we need to be working on ways to mine asteroids, smelt ore, form steel, and build structures in space. In other words, we need to be thinking about supporting mining engineers, steel workers, steel fabricators, and so on. It just doesn't make sense for us to be mucking around in space too much (more on this in a second) when it costs us so much, and it costs so much because of the fuel required to lift a given mass. Reduce the amount of mass you lift, this reduces the amount of fuel you have to spend, and the whole thing gets cheaper. Build a space elevator, and you don't even have to use fuel any more; The direct cost and the long-term environmental cost (Putting that much energy into a system always has some effect, and some of the stuff we're putting into the atmosphere is nasty) of a space elevator is essentially nothing when you consider how much traffic you will have if you make it cheaper, and how much less energy must be expended.
Here comes the later: It still makes sense for us to be sending out probes, and testing new technologies for space. But it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of money on that. We should be spending our money on technologies which will bring us the space elevator.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I can lift 175 pounds, but I only weigh 150 pounds. If NASA will just build me a ten pound 'space chair,' and I pull up on it as hard as I can, I should still be able to maintain a steady speed of 15 lbs.
Right?
I have ideas about how to steer also (thank god no one can smell space).
Are you ready to put your coin where your Dreams are?
Giddy up - I'm all for it. Maybe we can get a tax exempt charity status for NASA donations. Maybe one already exists, I dunno. If it was on my 1040 though I'd like that -- more people would see it at least. It'd put it on the forefront of my mind come Tax time.
Personally, I have two uses for the federal government. My military and my space exploration. Beyond that, they're pushing into things that I think my state should handle. I'll spare y'all that ramble though.
I like the idea of space exploration. I sure wasn't around in 1969 when man landed on the moon, but I still get a little lump in my throat when I see things about that era. It makes me proud, not only to be an American but just to be a human being. Hell, I'm filled with awe when I read little tidbits about the early Russian space program, and I was raised in the '80's when the Russians were "bad bad peopole."
I think it's about time we set a real goal for space exploration again, although I'm certainly no expert on this subject. It just seems like it's time to me. We need somebody to step up like JFK did and say "We're going to point X by date Y, and there's no stopping us."
What will we do when we get to Mars, or a station on the moon? I don't know. We'll get something out of the deal though as a society as a whole though I think. Necessity is the mother of all inventions, right?
As it sits, over 50% of my money goes away in taxes right now -- I'd much rather it go to things that I really had an interest in is all.
That's what this boils down to...they have a TON of possible plans they could be running right now, but hardly any of them get off the ground because their budget is only about 13 billion. Considering that the U.S. was ponying up 60% of the ISS, this leaves little room for much else. Citizens need to speak up and show that America still wants a robust space program, and that we'll be willing to foot a larger bill to accomplish that goal.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
All those laser equipped shuttles and space commandos are bound to get his cheque writing hand nice and warmed up :)
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Guess what... it doesn't require an act of congress for you to donate money. Instead of supporting a bill, just send your damn money to NASA.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
You know why the advanced alien races never landed on Earth? They decided to save billions of dollars, scrap the space program, and put the money into programs to eliminate poverty and hunger. Seriously, what do people expect to find up there? If you're just going to use the "exploration and adventure" argument, you might as well look to the oceans - they're closer and full of unknown life.
a carbon nanotube space elevator
Yeah just wait until terrorists detach the astroid it's anchored too and it flattens the equator and they start breaking all the tent cities and burning all the rebels to death and knock the moon out of the sky!!!
Sigh I'm getting into the Mars trilogy way too much...
I stole this Sig
You left out an "s"......
"If it walks from the refridgerator
Getting people into orbit is a fairly easy proposition, if you can keep the lifting hardware from exploding. Getting people back down again safely is the much harder engineering problem. I'm personally kind of amazed that the shuttle was able to make as many successful and safe re-entries and landings as it did. When you think about the forces involved in re-entry... well, it just boggles the mind.
It was at this point that I started thinking. Ever read Starship Troopers? In that book, Heinlein advanced the idea of mobile infantry troopers being dropped from orbit to ground in their own individual little re-entry pods. I started thinking about this.
Picture an astronaut in his spacesuit. He's enclosed in an egg-shaped structure made of aluminum and ablative materials, just barely big enough to hold him. Maybe the structure has a small solid-fuel booster attached that's sufficient to execute a de-orbit burn. With nothing more than the mass of the astronaut and the shell to push around, you wouldn't need much energy to execute such a manuver in low Earth orbit. After the burn, the spent booster falls away (to burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere) and the shell, with astronaut inside, descends through the upper atmosphere, shedding heat through ablation. (In other words, the heat shield boils away on the way down.) At a reasonable altitude, say 100,000 feet or so, the shell opens via explosive bolts and the astronaut free-falls, Kittinger-style. At a suitable altitude, the parachute opens automatically and the astronaut touches down safely.
The advantages of such an orbit-to-Earth system seem kinda obvious to me. We know all about ablative heat shields, having used them for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs as well as every ICBM ever built. A small, symmetrical re-entry structure would be relatively immune to the kind of atmospheric forces that may have destroyed Columbia. Finally, not to seem morbid, in the event of a failure, only one life would be lost instead of the lives of an entire crew.
I don't know. It's just an idea.
I write in my journal
Perhaps this is a little bit insulting, but he makes some good points about Space Shuttle Science. Particularly with regards to the types of experiment that can be performed in the short time-frame available to Shuttle astronauts, and also regarding the need for human involvement in many of these experiments.
Can anyone provide a convincing rebuttal to Mr. Easterbrook's contentions?
Werner von Braun had a series of articles and drawings that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post indicating the steps mankind should take in space. We have been following the steps which eventually lead to Mars. The only question is WHEN (during which generation) and who (U.S., China,...).
How about move the launch site to a less humid location so great bloody chunks of ice don't fall off all the time
If you look at current military spending trends, you will notice that the Pentagon's spending has shown linear growth, while the price of a fighter plane has shown exponential growth. If these trends continue, in the year 2200, the DoD will only be able to purchase one fighter.
Ahem, I point you to the most recent story on my website you will find this link with a pretty graph
So, enough with the "cuts" talk, the budget has risen $900 million in the past 2 years and is slotted for another $470 million. If you want to debate whether this is "enough" then fine, but it had been in decline for a while before Bush RAISED it two years i a row and proposed raising it again BEFORE the Columbia re-entry.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
http://www.uforc.com/research/page42.html
NASA has struck out more than once trying to design space vehicles. They go over budget and don't deliver then congress pulls funding. They need less beaurocracy and more risk taking, less obtuse human factors (etc) experiments and more direct application of ideas to manned missons. It's unfortunate but Space is dangerous and the price of safety is becomming inability to explore, not increased expenditure.
Their overheads and procedures cripple most efforts to do anything innovative.
I'd like to hear what NASA's goals are for the future first. Are we looking to colonize other planets ? Communicate with other beings ? Better understand the effects of zero gravity ? Most every shuttle mission so far has run a battery of scientific experiments, totalling hundreds over the years. What have we learned from these experiements ? Who have they benefitted ? What more do we have to learn ? We went to the moon a few times. We stopped going. Why ? Did we stop learning ? Will the same be true about orbitting the Earth ?
"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana." - Marx
True, NASA has a long history of being a money hog, but it wasn't an issue until they were proposed a budget that was outlandish for anything (The $400 Billion Mars budget proposed by Former President Bush). But the benefits that they have given our economy in the years that they have been around have been huge, not to mention the lift that they have given the research and scientific communities. Without them, there would be nothing like cell phones, satallite communications, large-scale stellar observation (think of the pictures of the hydrogen clouds that have been in every Sci-Fi movie since the Hubble ST took the picture).
Beyond that, the overall economic contribution that the space program contributes is not just in scientific advancement. People often overlook the fact that while NASA takes billions of dollars in tax revenue, they also provide thousands of jobs. Not just to astronaughts like the heroes (yes, heroes) we lost with the columbia, but people from console operators, to sysadmins, to ground keepers.
Nothing in the history of the US has been a symbol to peaceful cooperation like the space program has. At the height of the cold war, we were able to work with our biggest enemy on a joint Apollo-Soyuez (sp?) mission. It represents triumph and advancement against odds, from the story of Apollo 11 and 13, to the tragedies of Apollo 1 and Challenger. It's given kids something to dream about, and actually tells us more about the universe we live in.
The answer is not where it should go, but rather how it should go on. Personally, I would like to see some privatization in the Space Industry, because that would greatly lower the costs of development and space travel. We also need more exploration missions like the Galleleo and Pathfinder projects, which brought a great deal of positive public spotlight to NASA.
The Pathfinder mission showed that NASA could get something done using economic constraints. However, there is a legitimate need for money just to get some of the basic maintinence done (such as the housing facilities for our remaining shuttles). We need to press farther out than the distance that our shuttles and the space station hit.
As a personal recommendation, I'd like to suggest a little reading that I found years ago. The Case for Mars by Dr. Robert Zubrin is an excellent book that shows both the feasibility, need, and purpose on manned exploration beyond our local little planet. It shows, realistically, how we could get the project done without an outlandish budget. While the project talked about at the end is no longer around, the MarsDirect project still exists. http://www.nw.net/mars/ Give it a look.
Remember, NASA is not just about Space Shuttles, but also about exploration and education. Things like those great space picture backgrounds would not be possible without them.
Usually things that are mechanically simple are the ones to be the most reliable. Since space travel needs to become more reliable, I think the shuttle or other spaceplanes are not the answer since we currently have no engine technology to alow us to do it without creating some crazy mess of a solution. I mean, how crazy is strapping yourself to millions of pounds of liquid hydrogen and oxygen and two solid rocket boosters full of volatile chemicals? Just seems like a bit of a hack, albeit the best hack going for now.
So, step in space tethers. I first read about something like this in Arthur C. Clarke's novels. Quite a simple concept (although by no means simple to contruct). A super strong cable stretches from the Earth's surface out into space. Simple mechanical devices climb the cable to bring a payload into orbit. Hopefully they will make space travel reliable and affordable so that we can get a bigger space presence going. I think we need to sink money into this concept instead of how to more efficiently burn chemicals to rocket ourselfs into orbit.
1) Umanned missions should continue with a slight change. When sending satallites to a planet, do not send 1. Send several first that are used for support. These should provide computer speed, general planet view, GPS, and most importantly, communication.
2) W. needs to bring back the X-33 under the civilian umbrella. the X-33 was better than 90 % done. The engines were a great design with minimal moving parts. Likewise, they passed the stennis testing with flying color (yea, I know, they had more to go, but the preliminaries showed great results). The shell was reay for static drop tests. The only real issues were the tanks. The solutions was to use aluminum until the new composite tanks were better. The X-33 would have greatly lowered the cost of flying. Sadly, this was one of W's first action to kill the X-33.A total lack of foresight
3) We really need to do another "low-cost" shot at the moon or mars. While, I like going to mars, it may make political sense to start colinizeing the southern pole of the moon: water, 24x7 darkness and 24x7 sun. This makes possible life support, on-going energy, and on-going astronomy. Finally, if we do not start a realistic program now, then we will do a crash program when China shows that the current space craft is actually made for the moon (check the size, it was designed for the moon shot, not just orbiting).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I wonder how large a no-fly zone would be required to protect a space elevator from terrorists.
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2B1ASK1
First, let me say that I'm a big fan of space exploration, and there's nothing in my life that I'd want to see more than mankind spreading out to other planets.
I see some issues though.
Throughout the ages, the main power behind any exploration has been greed. Columbus or Magellan would never have got any funding if their superiors wouldn't have been hoping to get enormous profits from these enterprises. In spite of huge losses (Magellan lost ~90% of his men), the profits were even bigger, and the cost to benefit ratio was very low.
So it is important to observe that nothing significant will really happen unless there is profit involved, be it from mining or something else.
Now, to put this into a perspective - what can we find on other planets that we couldn't find in Antarctica or Sahara with a fraction of the cost? These two are incredibly more hospitable than Mars or Venus and the cost/benefit ratio of acquiring either materials, energy or any other resources would be thousands of times better.
But still nobody wants to create any permanent settlements or industry there.
So why would anybody be interested in going to other planets if we don't even want to get to every corner of the Earth?
Taking all this into account, I think that the only sensible thing we could do about space exploration is to research ways of terraforming other planets, bringing life to them, creating a more hospitable atmosphere etc. Without this the costs would always remain prohibitive.
And of course, this would be something that the mankind could actually be proud of - turning a dead rock into a live garden would be much more noble and noteworthy than anything humans have done during their existence so far.
When men used to be men
Actually, I'm willing to bet we will learn much more from those Jet fighters and that Missle Defense system than we will ever get out of the mostly political Internation Space Station. The F22 will be able to hit supersonic without afterburners. The Missle Defense system is pushing the limits in a bunch of different technologies, including advanced laser research.
Before you poo-poo Defense Spending remember that you have an Internet because of a certain DARPA project started in the late 60's. The Moon Walk was cool and all but how did it change your daily life? I would argue that the Internet has had a much greater impact on mankind than the moon walk.
Brian Ellenberger
Enough about the Columbia disaster... WTLW
The problem, IMHO, is wanting a fancy new revolutionary next-generation hi-tech design for the shuttle replacement - NASA's guilty of that several times in the past, including the original design of the Shuttle itself, the failed Venturestar project, etc...
The next step should be an evolutionary design - like the evolution from Mercury through to Apollo, or the whole Russian space program. The next Shuttle should be pretty much the same concept as the current Shuttle, but with every element redesigned to take advantage of current technology (not still-not-invented next-generation pushing-the-envelope technology) and lessons learned from the first shuttle, as well as Russian's Buran/Energiya system - for instance, by making the heavy-lift system separate from the person-carrying shuttle, so that large components (like space station components) can be lofted without lugging up the whole shuttle and crew as well.
It's not as glamorous to work on a new, improved design that'll end up looking largely the same as the current design, but it will be far more effective than trying to reinvent the wheel in a single go and ending up with a system as flawed as the current shuttle. Apollo was ambitious and it aimed for the moon before even sending up a man - but it still worked in an evolutionary fashion. They built Mercury and Gemini and several iterations of the Saturn rockets before they built the vessels that got us to the moon.
Haven't we already discussed here some of the shortfalls of NASA? It seems that the trouble isn't so much a case of money, or the Shuttle program, but a lack of institutional innovation. The Space Shuttle was hot back in the late 70's/early 80's, but what has transpired since then? Not one other lick of innovation as far as getting people into space. It reminds me of when America was working on a version of the SST (think Concorde here), which was pretty hot, then it fizzled. The Space Shuttle is like the American SST, only it got built and then fizzled. NASA earned its street cred, but I'm thinking they've been sitting on it too long. Too many cute inexpensive robots that make the cover of USA Today, with no thought to real plans for replacing the Shuttle. Hell, they made TANG, can't they think of something new in the 30 years since they designed the Shuttle?
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Before anything, the entire administration section of NASA should probably be gutted. Or, at the very least, the bozos at the top who have really screwed up things the last several years. The whole "cheaper, faster, better" thing has been a colossal failure. You know you've got serious problems when a simple measurement conversion problem loses an entire mission!
So, first step, fix the personnel problem at NASA.
Next, define the goals. Are we going to concentrate on a manned mission to Mars? More probes? More LEO (low Earth orbit) stuff like ISS, etc.? These all have vastly different requirements and budgets, and the manned stuff is much, much more expensive. Unless you can get funding for all of it (not gonna happen, especially with a Republican government and in this economy), then something's gonna hafta give. Until the priorities are set, it's silly to assign budgets, because you don't know what you need.
For my personal preferences, I'd say cut down on the probes for now and concentrate on a shuttle replacement (DC-X anyone? A craft that can have a fuel tank explode and still make a controlled landing is okay in my book!), and a manned Mars mission. An addition to the ISS to house astronauts until a rescue could be attempted would be nice. (I've been wondering lately - if they HAD been able to verify that there was tile damage done to the Columbia, could they have stayed on the ISS until a rescue craft could be sent?)
"Rather than a solution to the fulfillment of these needs, the shuttle has become an awkward legacy. It will never deliver the cheap access its proponents had promised, and after Columbia's loss, lingering doubts will remain regarding the system's reliability no matter what the result of the investigation may be."
"lingering doubts about reliability"?
Isn't NASA's lifetime record proof enough?
a scant 3 major space accidents over a 30-some odd year span.....how many people went up and back down safely in proportion to those lost?
How many vessels have gone up and back down safely in contrast to those lost?
"Reliability concerns" my ass.. this is just an excuse for the conservatives to tuck their tails in between their legs, run back into the caves and hide.
A space elevator is fast, cheap, affordable, can be created with technology avaible in the next two to there years, and will allow a huge bom in space exploration and be a giant bonus to the worldwide economy, and all for less than the price of developing a new fighter-jet fleet or space shuttle system ($16B each). NASA, make space exploration a reality! Booyah!
The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life- the terror of art. -Franz Kafka
We should double NASA's budget to at least the $30 billion level per year. Give NASA the mission of establishing a lunar base and a journey to Mars. Tell them to get both done within 10 years. Attract the very best scientists and engineers to NASA.
That provides the parameters. Only then can you decide what intermediate technology do you need to get there. The obvious missing link is a reliable, cheap replacement for the space shuttle. I personally think the space plane will be the superior alternative, but all the options should be studied. Then you look at whether the ISS would be useful.
China will put a man in space this year. If China is putting men into space while we're sitting on our hands, the USA will cease to be the only superpower. China will be in position to spread its influence, and thus totalitarianism, across the globe. This is about whether the world, and space, will be free, or will be dominated by ruthless dictators.
While many think this is a long way off, I believe teleportation will change how we view not only space exploration but everyday travel on Earth itself.
Those crazy physicists are trying a bottom up solution to teleportation - trying to create/destroy little bits of matter, the whole Alice-Bob deal. I say NOOOOOO! and suggest a top-down approach.
Lets figure out how an object moves in space - I bet the answer to teleportation is much simplier than many think.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21
http://slate.msn.com/id/2078104/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/035/oped/Rebuil
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/1
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/editorial/68231
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-56453
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/03/opinion/03ALDR.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/867640.asp?0cv=KB10
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Arti
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101030210/sctone
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial
http://www2.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/bev0
The smartest thing to do IMHO would be to just phase out the manned portion of space exploration for a while... it's *much* cheaper to send unmanned probes/sattelites rather than manned craft.
OTOH, we cannot forget about the space station, which currently needs constant human attention to keep up. What should be done in the lab down here is to design new systems or extend the current systems aboard the ISS, such that it can be extended soas to keep itself in a constant, usable or ready-to-use state without human intervention. The minimum requirements would be to keep the station automated and self sufficient when no crew was aboard. This could be extended to being automated while crew was aboard, but is not necessarily a requirement.
Once the ISS is fitted with these automated systems, manned spaceflight could be stopped or postponed at any time, leaving us to focus on unmanned exploration. Heck, why not work on building an unmanned lunar-station builder? Once the station is built, *then* we could send people up there.
Humans can do the things that robots cannot do. Humans can see the sights and be able to tell when a sight would take a good picture. Humans can make course corrections and such to avoid their craft crashing down. Humans can do science that is impossible for a robot to do. The shuttle needs to fly again and we cannot wait 2 years or more like we did when Challenger was destroyed. Remember, there are two American's and a Russian in space and a good chunk of American hardware up there. The Shuttle is needed because it's the only way the station has for maintaining a orbit. Boosts given by a docked shuttle using the OMS since the budget was cut to eliminate the module that would give the station inhabitants the ability to maintain the orbit on thier own. Single Stage to orbit and other alternatives need to be studied now. Not 10 years from now. The shuttle could make another 20 years, but in that 20 or before that 20 is up a alternative needs to be developed. Mars could be a destination for humans, but we need the station for this. Right now, I would be willing to increase my tax burden to make this possible if I had to. I would also rather there not be a stipulation that it would be used for the mars project. NASA Knows what they are doing. Safety concerns were raised recently due to the decreased budget NASA has. That tells me NASA knows that they were flying on a wing and a prayer, but could not do anything about it. Parking the shuttle in the interim for longer then about 6 months is not acceptable. Of course now it's ok, but sooner than later it will have to fly. Right now, there is no other alternative.
Gorkman
UP!
The first technological explosions in the aerospace industry were fueled by the space races against Russia. Since this doesn't hold water anymore, we (the U.S.) need to push the limits of our capabilities and set timelined goals. Specifically, a permanent base/colony on the moon by 2010. I see this as the only way to save the Aerospace industry within the next decade.
Orbiting cash cows do not cut it anymore. The upkeep to research ratio is not feasible for us to be using manmade orbiting bodies. The only way to get Space Exploration into the full swing it deserves is to get more people into space. The only way I see this happening is by putting something on the moon. Not building a gigantic steel structure over 10 years, relying on half of the structure from a bankrupt country. Although a permanent structure on the moon will take time, the fact that its in a fixed position will eliminate more problems than i think can be foreseen by most. Unfortunately, under our current political leadership, and their need to control international affairs, this can in no way become a reality for at least 6-8 years.
Change isn't as hard as it may seem.
Most anyone I know is of the opinion that manned space exploration should go on, and although my adventurous romantic side wants the same, my rational side begs to differ.
Most costs associated with space travel have to do with the fact that space ships are manned. Take humans away and all of a sudden the costs plummet.
A good accountant not familiar with the space industry would say that that's not the case, but once you realize that a huge amount of money actually goes to researchers and engineers whose sole purpose is to make the astronauts safe and to provide for all their needs (and space-taking) in space, you'd quickly realize that the money should go somewhere else.
But where should the money go? I suggest to better autonomous robots, to research in remote virtual environments, to better artificial intelligence. Research in these areas would lead to smaller vehicles (or the same size but with bigger payload, cheaper vehicles (since the human safety aspect could be discarded), longer missions (a robot can live in space for as long as we can supply an energy source to it), more complex missions (a robot-based mission to mars is way less complicated than a human one), and probably get more research done (a robot never needs sleep and can do several things simultaneously and with a low error percentage).
Of course, for the time being a robot will never get close to human intuition when it comes to improvising or noticing "funny but interesting things" that could be of crucial importance but that a robot would never notice. This is why we need to invest heavily on new and novel ways to think about artificial intelligence.
Who knows, maybe in the future once we have mastered the heavens with robots it'd be safer, cheaper, and more practical to flight humans again. But in any case, the long range future of space exploration belongs to intelligent machines who will be our direct descendants as they succeed us by the pure laws of evolution.
And on a side note, I'm pretty much certain that such machines will have feelings just as we do (or maybe even more so), and in a sense they truly will be humans, just not flesh-based, and they will be better than us in every way. I wish they could read this sometime in the future, so that they know there many of us alive who would feel very proud to be alive and experience the time when such events will happen.
Well, it seems to me that they knew about the orings before challenger, and they knew about the foam before columbia.
:
After challenger, it was supposed to be made easier to stop things and review what was happening when something wasn't right. It doesn't appear to be working.
I don't think the same agency should design, build and operate/manage projects like this. Don't tell me about USA--that's still the fox guarding the henhouse.
NASA should be more like DARPA, creating the new stuff and farming out the mundane. Idustry should implement it, and some external agency, possibly the USAF, should do operations. Where should they go next? Read this first
scathing rebuke of NASA
Now it's clear that goals are needed. It seems fine to me that NASA be funded to create a shuttle replacement. The shuttle just does not do the job properly. Heavier payloads to higher orbits is needed, and the system that does it needs to be more easily turned around between launches.
Finally, the whole "public relations" mandate of Columbia (and Challenger, for that matter) needs to be reevaluated. Look at the list of projects they were carrying...ant farms, bean sprouts, silk worms...all for various schools around the world. I'm all for public service, but this seems kind of ridiculous.
NASA should be tasked to design the next generation shuttle. They should NOT be allowed to test or operate it. They were warned about orings on challenger, they were warned about the external tank foam. They tried to fix the foam, but it's been getting worse over the last few flights and they did nothing. They forgot about the lessons of Challenger.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
1) Finish the ISS and follow the original plans to be a 7 man station. The amount of research from a permanent outpost in space is well worth the amount of money.
2) Replace the shuttle program. The shuttle has served its purpose as a reusable space vehicle. But it's design is 30 years old and needs to be replaced.
The upfront costs would be steep, but it will save you billions in the long run. A fleet of four (Now 3) 2 billion dollar shuttles that launch at max 6 times a year for 500 million a shot IS NOT the way to go. We need something that can launch us into space for less then 50 million, carry more cargo, and have a turn around of at least once a month. This is even worse then the shuttles initial promises, but it's something that could easily be obtainable with today's technology.
3) The private sector needs to get involved. Space elevators and the like would be a tremendous boom to really entering the next frontier. What if your University only had to pay 10k to send up into space their newest experiement? Think of the boon to technology then.
Cut the defense budget by half and give that money to NASA. That's an idea I would support. Though I seriously doubt my representatives would go for it at all.
Options for vehicles:
The "flying box-car" we have now.. either in current config, or structurally refigured to a more current design.. (this design was finalized in the seventies, remember). The Shuttle is a great idea.. but its _old_.
ram-driver/mass-lifter.. bung a ruddy great magnetic impulse tube up the side of Kilimonjaro or something, and use that to hurl crap into space. use small gadabouts to retrieve said stuff to the station/s. All we need then is a relatively small (read: 3 crew, small) craft to get people up there to service, position, etc.
Re-useable self launching vehicle.. Delta Clipper style. Though Buzz Aldrin seems to think it is a step backwards, the videos of the tests at White Sands are quite impressive. (Even if it _did_ fall over and blow up on the second test). Extremely "Flash Gordon" and evoked mental images of the "bounce rockets" that Heinlein usually had laying about.
I personally think a shuttle-type craft is the way to go. its not a bad idea, its just an old idea that could do with some updating.
As far as funding goes, let NASA patent its inventions, for a change, and let them charge for spaceflight. Citizens in space? No problem.. sign that fat juicy check and you can ride shotgun, Mr Billionaire! Just sign this D/D waiver.. have a nice trip!
Its time to stop treating NASA as the bastard stepchild of the US.GOV and begin viewing it as the scientific testbed it is. NASA's only vehicle, at the moment, is the Shuttle. All the other rockets (Titan, ESA stuff, etc) are owned by other countries or by the Armed Forces.
Unfortunately, NASA is the first one to get their budget slashed whenever belts get tightened, and five minutes after vehicle blows up people who control said budgets promise to "spend whatever it takes" for safety. Then they slash the budget some more. How else do you explain a 20+ year old spacecraft still flying routine missions?
(And no, ejection seats wouldnt have helped.. even if the pressure suits could have kept them alive at 40 miles up, I think the mach-18 or so speeds would have presented an issue the instant the canopy popped).
I love NASA, I love spaceflight.. im tired of it being viewed as a joke until something (experimental and dangerous) goes wrong, and then CNN is glowering at me, accusing me of not even knowing the orbiter was coming home today, or who was on it. (The press is 2/3 of the problem, I suspect. The minute a launch gets scrubbed, they get pissed, and 10 minutes after an accident, they are demanding accountability and raking up stories about "fired" directors (who actually just ended their tenure, according to o'keefe).
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
I am seriously beginning to believe that for any reasonable progress, NASA would have to be restructured, or dismantled so a new organization could be formed. (Simply go to google and look for 'NASA > corruption' to see what I'm talking about.) Any new paths in space exploration won't be fruitful without both affordable practicality of designs and something to get around the present bureaucratic nightmare. Otherwise we are just going to sit and do the same old tired thing.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
Why do we have dangerous manned-spaceshuttles? Because it impresses people! That's politics!
Why don't we just develop a good space ship? We have the resources! Because it costs money! And politicians (see problem 1) don't like losing money to practicality!
Yes, I know I sound cynical, but it IS that simple. Now if only a solution were present..
"I see Windows users..."
There's more than one reason NASA is in trouble. It looks like the current government might not be interested in spending so much on science and research (big surprise?). A foolish mistake for the short-sighted, IMHO.
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The following is quoted from IEEE Spectrum, January 2002. "New NASA Administrator is Bush Insider"
Appointment meets with cautious optimism
Sean O'Keefe, the deputy director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), was named the next NASA administrator by the White House on 14 November. The nomination has met with cautious optimism in Washington and, despite his lack of technical experience, in the aerospace community as well.
. . . A spokesperson for Senator Ron Wyden (D.-Ore.), chairman of the Senate Science, Technology, and Space committee, agreed, saying that the senator believed O'Keefe's background "will be very useful in solving some of NASA's long-term management problems." . .
O'Keefe's management history indicates not only great financial experience but also close ties with members of George W. Bush's government. During the previous Bush administration, he worked with Dick Cheney in the Department of Defense as comptroller and chief financial officer before being appointed Secretary of the Navy in 1992 . .
. . . while NASA employees "have an interest in having their credibility increased," surely they also feel some trepidation at the arrival of such a cost-conscious administrator. "They're frightened to death," agreed Christopher C. Kraft Jr., who was NASA's first flight directory an director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston from 1972 to 1982.
. . . Echoing a NASA task force report in his testimony, O'Keefe said that "technical excellence at any cost is not an acceptable approach." . .
O'Keefe said that NASA should be freed "from the burden of operating infrastructure," and recommended the "continued privatization of the space shuttle" and the creation of "a non-governmental organization to manage [space station] research."
. .
For what it's worth, I feel rather strongly that we need to solve the cost-to-orbit problem first - which will then make all the other science cheaper. The beanstalk idea is a good one, but I don't know if it will be viable in the next ten years, so one might also look at the old "National AeroSpace Plane" concept. The concept will work - if congress will fund it. Reducing the complexity of getting to orbit is the ONLY thing that will prevent another shuttle disaster. Its a 30 year old design now; we can do better.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
This discussion has been brought up before, (the opt-in tax option) and I still think it would be a good idea. I don't think that you could justify all of your tax dollars to go to space related R&D but you should definitely be able to push a fixed percentage and/or a portion of your refund into this type of fund.
Does Nasa currently have any facilities set up to accept donations??
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
Should the space program be replaced by interpretive dance?
I think that given the USA's clear lead in the arean a man capable Potato Cannon would be the best next step.
I'm sure that the military would love a bunch of these for their SDI initiative, and it would be a great way to get into the space industry for school children.
A huge issue with NASA and our space program at this point is the lack of a long term vision for space.
Yes we have accomplished a lot. We have a reusable (though not as reliable as one would like) orbiter, a space station that continues to grow. In fact, it has been a matter of years since there were no humans in space at some point. All of this is great and grand, and I appreciate all that we have accomplished. Looking at the achievments of humans in the past 50 years is astounding.
However, we are at a point (and in my opinion we have been here for quite some time!) where we have no unified aim within our space program. We don't have a goal. i.e. "Let's get to Mars within the next 15 years" or "Let's establish a livable habitat on the moon within the next decade", etc. We are doing great research in space, and learning a great many things because of that. But without a vision that people can be rallied behind we can expect nothing less than the stagnancy that we are currently experiencing.
The space station is a great stepping stone to greater things. Let's set a vision of what those greater things are and move in that direction. And pray for a President and NASA leadership willing to spend money on that vision.
That, and it really *is* silly that we send up so much oxygen and water with a lot of missions. Remote control is the future.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Screw it. Let's build the Nuclear Rocket we've been teased about lately and explore the solar system already. The annual cash involved can't be more than the rounding error for Medicaid or Social Security. Better than seeing the money wasted on new union concessions for federal workers or funding a new exit ramp in Mississippi... Besides, whose going to do it, Belize? Uganda? USA all the way, baby!
No, how do we sell this to 'W'?
The only thing the space programme lacks is new, better, cheaper ways of doing what they do, because they're stuck with their old tools to do the job with. Thats where the programme needs to go, the money people need to stop making get by using a screw driver to drill a hole and just let them spend the extra cash on a drill already.
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
1. give NASA a little more tax money
2. put a $1 deduction checkbox for NASA on the tax forms
3. build a tethered space elevator with carbon nanotubes or whatever
4. use the elevator to build a REAL space station like the one in 2001 with "gravity"
5. build ships at the station for Mars, Europa, etc..
6. start commercial operations for mining asteroids and collecting orbiting debris and stuff
7. use the ISS to store crap that won't fit on a real space station or deorbit it into the Pacific
Slightly more on-topic, that sort of mission might be enough to justify significantly more dollars for space exploration.
Like finding the planet Bush comes from and then taking him back ASAP.
But seriously like, in our instant gratification society, NASA needs to say "we're going to do 'this' which will provide 'this benefit' to YOU the taxpayer, and we're gonna do it in less than 3 years."
If they don't, NASA is screwed... hell, those SUV driving folks in the 'burbs can't even handle slight tax increases for the schools thier KIDS go to....
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
You don't just load a big tube with dynamite and barcaloungers and expect to land on the moon.
Money certainly is the problem. NASA, and space exploration needs to be a higher priority than some of the garbage we pour money into. Here's some numbers -
NASA's budget for 2003 - now $15.5 billion after the Columbia tragedy
Military budget for 2003 - $396 billion
Now of course I think the military needs a massive amount of money, but they spend it like water, and on things that we do not need.
Here's an example of new weapons we are buying that are included in the 2003 budget -
the Army's RAH-66 Comanche helicopter (Boeing and the Sikorsky Aircraft Division of United Technologies, $941 million); the Air Force's F-22 Raptor (Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and the Pratt and Whitney Division of United Technologies, $5.2 billion); the Navy's F-18E/F fighter plane (Boeing, General Electric, and Northrop Grumman, $3.3 billion); Joint Strike Fighter/F-35 (Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, $3.5 billion); the V-22 Osprey (Boeing Vertol and the Bell Helicopter Division of Textron, $2 billion) the DDG-51 destroyer (Bath Iron Works and the Ingalls Shipbuilding Division of Northrop Grumman, $2.7 billion); the Virginia class attack submarine (Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics and the Newport News Shipbuilding division of Northrop Grumman, $2.5 billion); the Trident II Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile (Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space, $626 million); and the Crusader artillery system (Carlyle Group/United Defense, $475 million).
Total - $21.2 billion
These are known as "cold-war relic" programs. In fact, many of these systems were mentioned as candidates for major reductions or cancellation during the Bush campaign and during the early months of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's defense review. In addition they have been criticized in the past by Bush advisors or independent advocates of military reform as being too heavy (the Crusader), redundant (the three new fighter plane programs), or otherwise out of step with our current situation.
If our space shuttles could bomb Iraq we would be getting new ones all the time.
Anti-social? My code is just platform-specific.
since there's no real concept of "up" or "out" in space, it doesn't make sense to travel in any of those directions.
The best thing for us to do is to sit perfectly still. The original designer of Space and Time wants us to do that. Otherwise, why would it have made Space so big?
If I had to design a universe for my inhabitants, I'd make it a couple light years across and put some fun easter eggs in each corner.
research at u of i for new enginee r=13190
http://www.newsgazette.com/story.cfm?Numb
Listen, it's this simple: you can throw a trillion dollars at the NASA budget, but it will never make space travel 100% safe. NASA knows that. Astronauts know that. I would venture to guess that the majority of /. readers know that as well. But Congress only appears to see NASA as either pass or fail. People live: pass. People die: fail.
// Personal note -- yes, moreMoney can be a negative value
if (!deadAstronauts)
nasaMoney += moreMoney;
else
nasaMoney = 0;
But, looking at the situation, it's about as logical as having Congress make air travel illegal after 9-11.
But no, instead Congress desides to throw gobs of money at national security to prevent terrorism, and yet they think that it's wise to pull funding from a program which does a much better job of uniting the word together.
What Congress should do is pay NASA $20 million dollars (I think their current budget is about that much) to paste a big warning sticker on the entrance door of each shuttle saying "You fly at your own risk." That way, they state their beliefs, the world has a chance to unite people from around the globe once again, and NASA gets extra funding. Problem solved.
They should've built the space station at the L1 point, so it could serve the dual purpose of being a mars/deep space lauch and prep point.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
um, a pound is a unit of force, not of speed.
As someone on Fox News pointed out the other day (paraphrasing here):
"It took man 66 years to go from Kitty Hawk to the moon, and in the 34 years since were have gone absolutely nowhere."
That was a pretty good summation of the problem with the Shuttle. It is a proof of concept, but hasn't expanded man's horizons.
I say that the tribute to Columbia's astronauts should be a man stepping on Mars.
First, as to the current Space Shuttle, the only trip it should make is atop the 747 on it's way to a museum. Any engineer (I'm one, BTW) can look at the Space Shuttle and tell that the thing is just an accident looking for a place to happen. The amazing thing is that they've managed to launch it 107 times and only have it self-destruct on two occasions. Anything that is dropping pieces off it, either intentionally or or accidently, is not something that defines the word "Reliable." And the fact that it takes $500M to launch it is way beyond the pale. Right now they keep throwing money at something new, only to decide it won't work for some reason, and then they go off on something else new. I think that the reason this keeps getting shot down is that it is getting rolled over by the Perpetual Pork Barrel of the current Space Shuttle contractors. After all, $500M/launch is nothing to sneeze at, unless you're paying the bill. If it were my decision I would stop all manned launching, mothball the Space Station and go balls to the wall developing the second generation space vehicle. The first criteria for it is that it not drop pieces along the way. And where is the real breakthrough propulsion system? Something totally revolutionary, something like the "impulse drive" of Star Trek? It's bound to be out there somewhere, so where is the money to spend on it? The stuff we're using now isn't any more advanced than a gunpowder rocket. And here's an interesting point: What if you invented the "impulse drive?" What happens when you go to patent it? Does it get classified "Top Secret" because of it's military applications? I wonder if someone has actually invented something revolutionary but is afraid to attempt to patent it? Considering the current climate in Washington it's something that I would seriously consider! And I suspect that I'd decide to just put my hands in my pockets and walk away.
To be* whoops, I need to use the preview button
NASA needs a good bitch slapping. Seriously. What ever happened to the X-"pick a number" cheaper/better re-usable replacement vehicles we've been reading about for so long? Every one of them was scrubbed. It is my belief that NASA's #1 priority should be safety at all costs, no matter if they think it something minor. (read: minor Columbia damages prior to takeoff) Everything should be treated as serious and life threating and should be checked out accordingly.
:) )
:)
The #2 priority should be finding a cheaper way of getting humans into space. As it stands, strapping a shuttle to a HUGE non-reusable rocket with tons of fuel is about as efficient as buying a car every time you go to the store. They need to stick to one shuttle replacement project and stick with it till completion. It doesn't make sense why congress would throw money at the previous X-33, etc shuttle replacements only to have nothing to show for it in the end. That's about as wasteful as the current means of getting a shuttle into space.
#3 priority should be more infomation given to taxpayers about how these projects in space could actually help us humans on earth. How do ants in space have anything to do with helping you as an human, a consumer, and a taxpayer? Granted some of the projects like robotic exploration obviously helps the robotics field, and studying astronauts in low gravity may help to understand certian illnesses here on earth. They've been doing an okay job with this, but it could be alot better, and it could help some people justify space exploration as well. (FYI, i know it's worth it
#4 prority should be to find ways in which they can get corperate sponsoring. Russia seems to have this idea. I don't mean necessarly letting civilians on paid trips to the ISS, but by other means. The more ways NASA can get funding, the more money they can invest in projects that benifit us as humans, the better.
#5: The goverment should crack the whip a bit and set guidelines on what NASA should accomplish outside of scientific projects and safety. Things like "Man on mars" or "base on moon" or something that sets our imaginations on fire a little. It'd be nice to see NASA inspire us the way it did with the moon landing. (Yeah, i think NASA did it.)
Can't think of anything else right now, but that'd be a decent start IMHO. YMMV however
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
ok.. personally, i'm all for space exploration. former (and still silently burning) ambitions were to be an astronaut. but for some reason, the ideas of creating biospheres on other planets and moons seems a lil wild. not impossible, not crazy, but wild to the extent that it reminds me of a quote from "The Matrix," about how we as humans are nothing but leeches, destroying all of our resources and moving on to the next. i mean seriously, we can't even get it right on one planet. we fight over stupidity, we destroy our precious planet because we want to advance ourselves. we've crippled tons of viable land because we wanted to make a buck or didn't feel like going through all of the safety precautions (Chernobyl ring a bell to anyone). and we're talking about creating civilizations elsewhere. what will we do there, rob those planets of every natural resource until we have to move farther and farther on? i'm not trying to be negative about this all, i'm just trying to point out the other point of view.
munky
No, the SUV drivers in the 'burbs typically support their schools. It's the urban schools that are so underfunded.
Suburbanites know that taxes are bad but ignorance is worse.
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
I agree, but your Jumping the gun on a few points. First, we're going to destroy the planet before nature does. Second, Mars should be our primary focus. Not only will Mars colonies soon be within our scientific grasp, but terraforming Mars is a distinct possibility. The Red Mars, Green, Blue, and Magenta Mars books provide a nice old school science fiction look into such a possibility.
For anyone interested in a fantastic space simulator (sorry windows based...but free) try this link.
Unless your already a rocket scientist, you are gaurunteed to learn a few things while having a great time.
As Mr. Pournelle states:
Seastead this.
This antigravity device looks like it holds some promise. We just need to solve the problem of shrinking that 20 Kilovolt power supply down to the size of a walnut, providing a means of lateral thrust (maybe some of those devices mounted as thrusters on each side?), and providing an insulated cabin (so the crew doesn't get electrocuted when they use the full scale ship) as well as a more powerful power supply to provide effective payload lift.
The nice thing about this system is the lack of complexity (zero moving parts), and the ability to cheaply provide redundancy in the propulsion system.
You can order all the parts you need to build and test one yourself including the power supply at the website...might be an interesting little weekend project - if I can just keep the cat, dog, and kids away from the high voltage power supply...(my wife won't let me buy one because she is afraid I will electrocute myself - or the kids...)
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Living on the moon for a while will give us a bit of know-how to live on Mars. From there, the sky's...er...the limit.
Mod me down for saying this, but the honest truth may be the best next step in space exploration is to drop the manned program entirely, and spent the money on better remote probes and satellites. Three billion a year would buy at least 10, probably 20 or 30 pathfinder probes (or an improved model) per year. That's a lot of mars exploration. This isn't a popular view, but there are some convincing arguments.
First, one of the stated goals for the space program is to develop new technology. But when are you more likely to use the latest and greatest bleeding edge experimental engine? On a manned spacecraft where loss is catastophic to the whole program, or a relatively cheap robot? Fact is, the pathfinder mission used some of the fastest processors and lots of new off the shelf technology. They had some bugs with it, which is why it can't be used with a manned mission. Sometimes this approach (known to the press as "better faster cheaper") fails, but the point is its SO much cheaper than a single manned mission a failure is not really that big an issue. For the price of one year of shuttle launches we could send dozens of probes to mars (as said before).
Be honest here. While its said that manned exploration is a precursor to manned colonization, the hard fact is that it takes too much energy to put people in orbit. For a very long, long time it will be easier to use advancing technology to support more people on this earth than move them to space. Besides that, humans aren't adapted to live in space. The basic plan has always been to go to the final frontier...then build a huge enclosed, sheltered colony that the human colonists huddle in 99% of the time. Its like going to the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone then huddling in your Winnebago all week.
A far more realistic plan is to create a life that can live there. I imagine "big clanking replicators" : a huge factory with fairly familar machinery, all of it automated and only requiring human supervision to perform repairs. Mining machines, robotic rock haulers, nuclear power plants, smelters, presses, lathes, ect...most of the robotic tech similar to what you would find in a general motors plant. This facility would be built on the moon, remotely operated by people on earth. It would be capable of constructing the parts to build another facility (and so on). While expensive, it would be a fraction of the cost of human missions, and after enough replications be able to produce useful products.
Unmanned boosters blow up 4% of the time, and its nothing but a finanical nuisance. I've just described a plan that would develop far more advanced, bleeding edge tech than anything that could be used in a manned mission. The technology developed (better industrial automation, better artificial intelligence, better remote telepresense) would be immediatly useful on earth. A manned trip to mars would involve mostly old, proven technology, with a few exotic exceptions necessary for the mission. (such as a nuclear propulsion system, something NOT usable on earth)
I understand why noone will listen to me : there's an incredible glamour about blasting off our heroes into orbit, sending a man out in space to get the job done. Hell, I want to go too. But the truth is, without all the overhead associated with minimizing the risks to said heroes a lot more could be accomplished with the same money. In addition, the new tech and perhaps even real products from space would eventually provide a real return on investment, enriching us on the ground.
We should go find Klingons, and destroy them before they get to us first!
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
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...but how would it make you feel if the Chinese would beat us to it?
-- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.
It's just barely possible to overcome this limitation. But the costs are enormous. Desperate efforts to reduce weight are needed to make it work at all. The result is spacecraft that are both incredibly expensive and fragile.
That's where it's been for thirty years. And it's not getting any better. In fact, it's getting worse. The Saturn V had the best cost per unit weight to orbit ever. The Shuttle costs far more, and this latest disaster runs up the cost per unit weight even more. All of NASA's attempts to design replacements for the Shuttle have been flops. (There have been three major attempts.)
Heavy-payload spaceflight is an ego trip for superpowers, not a useful technology. Commercial small boosters have been built and launched successfully, but that's the limit of commercial interest. Single stage to orbit remains a fantasy. (Roton looked promising, but a bit of weight growth made the thing; it was that marginal.) The spaceplane idea goes back to the USAF's Dyna-Soar in the 1960s, but still hasn't worked.
We either have to go to nuclear propulsion or give it up. Those are the options.
A space tether would be a huge structure. Yes, it would be thin. It would nevertheless be very tall. As a result, it would be easy to hit. A cruise missile, ICBM, or an airplane that struck the tether would break it. An explosive device, including either a conventional explosive or a nuclear device, would break it. If the tether were stationed at sea, a submarine could clip the tether, or shoot a torpedo at it.
There would be no way to defend the tether from terrorists. You would have to create a large no-fly zone and a no-sail zone around the perimeter. This would create a humongous, circular no-commerce zone that would harm the global economy.
Natural events are also dangerous. A lightning strike could break it. An earthquake or volcanic activity could result in enough stress on the tether to break it. A tornado, with winds in excess of 400 mph, could damage the tether.
If a tether ever became damaged or underperformed its design specs, there would be no way to repair it. It must always remain in place.
Should we ever decide to remove the tether, there would be no way to take it down without it causing a catastrophe on the ground. Thus, there would be no way to ever upgrade the tether.
What comes up must come down. A good engineer builds something so not only does it perform well, but when it breaks it won't cause major problems.
Any breakage of the tether would result in catastrophe. First, there would be damage to the ground. Anything that big (about as long as the circumference of the Earth) is not going to totally burn up in the atmosphere.
The tether has the advantage of allowing many trips into space. That is also one of its biggest disadvantages. If we could take 50+ trips into space every year, we would become highly dependent on space. Our economic security and probably our military security and national security would come to depend on this tether.
The big problem is that once the tether is destroyed, you're probably looking at years before a replacement tether could be erected. If the first tether were brought down by terrorists or a wartime enemy, then military conflict would have to subside before the reconstruction project could begin. As a result, many of the tether-dependent assets we would have in space would be stranded for many years. Eventually the assets would die off from lack of oxygen, fuel, and supplies.
Advantages of space planes
The advantages of space planes are significant. First, you would have more than one space plane. Thus, if one were destroyed, you could still reach your assets in space with your other space planes.
A space plane is less vulnerable to terrorism because it is (1) smaller and (2) mobile. That makes it a lot harder to hit.
If a space plane comes down, it poses almost no risk to the ground. A good example is Columbia. Even if the fears about radioactive or toxic debris prove true, the area of effect will be minimal, relative to the area of effect of the tether breaking.
Space planes could go into space much more often the shuttle. That would be the whole point of building them. If that is not technologically achievable, then we would just stick with the shuttle. But even today, the space shuttle is based on 30-50 year old technology. If we commit financial resources behind something, we can build it. That's what we've always done.
The real failing of NASA was when US (Congress mostly) stopped thinking big.
The grand plan after Apollo was going to Mars. This needed a couple of key things:
1) Reusable vehicle to ferry cargo and personnel to
2) Space Station that could be used to house personnel and behind a vehicle to go to
3) Mars
After Apollo (during the end actually) funding was cut back and each of the steps listed had to stand on its own.
So instead of building a reusable vehicle to ferry personnel and some cargo to orbit we got the Shuttle. So it was beefed up to spend 2 weeks in orbit, self contained, and big enough to carry ridiculous amounts of cargo and satellites.
We then got a re-re-re-redesigned space station with a primary mission for science instead of a place to build an interplanetary vehicle.
The Mars mission you ask? Well that's just a pipe dream since each of the parts necessary to get there were meant to stand on their own instead of working together for the big payoff.
Dear world,
In 1985, the same question was probably asked after the Challenger explosion. NASA needs to do exactly what NASA did then.
The Columbia tragedy was unfortunate side-effect of life, and life is full of risk. People will not suddenly stop wanting to be astronauts. NASA is a lot more than trips in to space.
They need to not forget those who have given their life to the cause and then continue on in their name.
Later,
The still shocked Slashdot Junky
.
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Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
* RANT * Astronauts know the dangers they are getting them self's into. This was a disaster not a tragedy. A tragedy is when a 5-year-old child dies from a drive by shooting stray bullet. Not when a Scientist/ Astronaut dies doing something they love. Think about that!! As for the future of space travel, the big problem here is that space travel is still government funded. We need private sector corporations involved in space development! Think of all the natural resources in space ready for the taking! All is needed is government support of the privatization of space. Until then we will have to deal with pork barrel politics and over priced bureaucratic space programs.
To avoid further wasted resources and loss of human life, we should wait until we have better software for simulation and automation of spaceflight, better sensors to detect component failure and structural fatique, and an appropriate data infrastructure to connect all of this together. NASA doesn't have to be there to invent all this -- it will come from the commercial aerospace, medical device and automotive industries.
As we well know, more powerful propulsion systems are required before we can send humans futher out into space and this will become easier with each passing year. New scientific discoveries will certainly happen and faster computers will make it easier to model the complex chemical and force field interactions involved.
There are many good reasons why we didn't go back to the moon. In a few decades it will be as easy as travelling to Antarctica is today. Until then, just use your imagination!
It was really reading Robert Forward that made me realize how attainable space really is, if only we'd gather the collective will to go there. Of course, preaching to the /. crowd about heading into space is classic preaching to the choir.
Some of his ideas (or ideas he put forward) are things that mankind should be and could be doing now. Orbital microwave power transmitters, the StarWisp, fountain towers, rotovators, sky hooks etc are all essentially doable and doable with current technology.
However, in the modern world and with people possessing modern sensibilities - space exploration will have to give a return on investment that people (investors) can realize in lifetimes before it will really take off. It would be a hundred times easier to sell a scheme to launch a solar powered orbital microwave power transmitter satellite that could generate X megawatts of power than it would to sell a Mars mission. Why? Because the people putting up the cash want their money back.
As much as I would the truth be otherwise, space exploration cannot in the short term rely on philanthropy and "man's quest for knowledge" if we want the gains that are achievable. Sigh. Why can't just this one thing not be about money?
As we all know, Science fiction always has the best ideas for new innovations for new technology/breakthroughs. I mean, space elevators came from sci fi, as did many of the things for granted. Though i'm sure someone has probably already mentioned the same thing, I think we should keep looking to sci fi. Who knows what NASA could come up with next. Or if it will even be nasa who does it. Just keep an open mind about anything, who know's how big the next idea will be. -Chris
"Gharbad no Hurt!" -Gharbad
I think Homers inanimate carbon rod would help NASA
Rockets are too complex. I mean, you have to be a rocket scientist to understand them.
I think a better way to reach space is to have a catapult which launches a catapult which launches a catapult which launches...a shark.
The final frontier!
What's the point if we have the tech and ability to spawn our human selves in another solar system? I mean, take out earth, put humans on another earth-like planet with a sun, and what you do you get? More of the same. We as humans need to socially evolve more before we can think about leaving earth for a new planetary home. In time, I think we can achieve that, but it's going to be a LONG while.
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
Yep, the interest payments each year are a little bit bigger than the budget deficits that we will be having for the next few years. if there were no debt, there would be no deficit now.
Let NASA make what decision? In whose benefit? They've done a mediocra job so far, except in self-promotion -- except for the occasional shuttle accident of roughly 2 in 100.
Neither science nor democracy nor human safety will benefit from giving NASA free reign. We who pay the bills have to decide what the goals our and then work with the engineers to realize them. NASA has focused on self-promotion for too long, though it does a good job of it; its contractors do the work. I am astonished to hear insinuations that NASA budget cuts were behind Challenger, because they didn't have enough money to do it safely. Well, if true, they shouldn't have done it at all.
Frankly, I think watching too much Star Trek and Star Wars is what perpetuates the manned space program. There is very little real science that can only be accomplished with manned flight, except perhaps research to support manned flight, and the circularity of that argument is obvious. The ISS practically exists to justify the shuttle program. We are squandering the opportunity to accomplish more in space and on the ground by funding an extravagantly expensive program based on the assumptions of 70's technology. The capabilities of robotics and automation, and our understanding of science, has advanced far since then.
If decionmaking were placed in the hands of scientists (not NASA) instead of voters, if anything manned spaceflight would suffer the most. Many scientists have been furious for decades at the Shuttle for siphoning money off from useful research, especially interplanetary probes like the ones that brought us so much, Pioneer and Voyager and Mariner and Viking and so on.
The shuttle is not financially justified, especially given its incredibly poor return, when they are many other projects in health, research, and education threatened with cuts because the U.S. faces a record budget deficit. It is hard to shrug off NASA's budget as "only" $14 billion (plus billions in cost overruns) when programs like Head Start that cost "only" $2 billion are criticized as too expensive. Certainly there are a lot of roads that could be built, too; a billion buys a lot unless it's unnecessary space travel.
Absolutely, manned space travel is neat stuff, and I love it. As a kid I paid rapt attention to the shuttle's development, toured a mock-up at Rockwell, and trekked out to the desert to see Columbia land after its very first mission. I am shocked to see it destroyed in 2003, possibly for some the same reasons of mismanagement as Challenger (if it proves relevant, similar but nonlethal tile damage had occurred before, just as known O-ring malfunctions predated Challenger). But we can not let this tragedy spur us into the totally illogical course of wasting even more money on a program that will inevitably lead to more deaths for no reason better than "space is neat stuff."
Is our goal manned space flight for its own sake? *That* is the kind of bad decision democracy can make.
I figure a space elevator is definitely the best long-term solution. Probably several spaced around the equator.
That's a massive undertaking though, so some kind of spaceplane would probably be necessary for the short term.
With the USSR out of the way, I would think (in a perfect world) that the US Government could get the Air Force to donate some of its advanced technology to the project. If they had the SR-71 decades ago, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they've got something now that could at least be modified into a single-stage-to-orbit vehicle.
Emperor Dubyah (as much as I dislike most of his other policies) does seem pretty big on space, and even if the details of the technology remained classified it would definitely make a nice "peace dividend" impression, as well as showing off some advanced technology like when the stealth aircraft were revealed.
Bah, wishful thinking, I know.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I think this is similar to what concorde went through a few years ago. So they'll re-evaluate and discover what went wrong and send up a few more shuttles. There is no job in the world that is more dangerous so what's the big deal - the monetary terms of the disaster and number of experiments lost? The space program will bounce back with when the mission to Mars goes into full swing.
Where Should Space Exploration Go From Here?
Er....... up?
BTW, the F22 can already supercruise, as it's been out for a while now.
/. poll isn't an option (I drink my coffee black, you insensitive clod!) because we've been diligent in defending it.
Looks like it can supercruise at mach 1.5. While it tops out around 1.8, that doesn't really matter. Top speed in fighters is virtually worthless because of the amount of gas you're going through. The ability to sustain mach 1.5 over long distances is VERY impressive. linkage
I agree with the original poster about how these technologies will help build better space vehicles of tomorrow, while providing immediate benefits to us now.
I'd like to point out that we're in a situation where we can spend $20 billion on space exploration BECAUSE we've spent so much money on defense. I'm not saying it's ALL necessary, or that the current use of it is good, but I would like people to remember that living in a world where your biggest concern is that optimal choice in the latest
Consider though a lunar base. Getting there is something we have done with proven success. Launch vehicles would be far less complicated than a shuttle-on-a-booster rocket, i.e. safer. Once a team is there in a medium-sized complex, NASA could just launch regular, unmanned rockets to them. These supply shipments would just settle down in a general drop area and the lunanauts could get in their buggy or tractor to retrieve them. No complicated docking maneuvers necessary.
The structure would probably be safer than a space station. No worries about collisions with Russian spacecraft. The ISS has all sides exposed to potential space debris. A land-based, horizontal structure obviously only has it's upper surface exposed, and has much greater design strength being built on a solid foundation.
I'm sure the amount of scientific research on the moon would be just as good as in earth orbit. Again IANARS, but there may even may usable resources in that moon rock.
The shuttle has limited safety options due to its nature -- not really, actually its perception -- as a re-usable (read: disposable) vehicle. Because a lunar base is long-term project, contingency plans for evacuation would be practical, and expected.
The public would go for it. We haven't been to the moon in 30 years. People hardly ever knew that a shuttle was in orbit at a given time, but with a moon base on a cloudless night you'd be hard pressed not to look up and think, "Huh. There are actually people up there." Paranoid foreign dictators might get even more twitchy, but you can't have a better reminder of your technological superiority than that.
I think a complete and usable space station needs to be the first major priority.
The first short-term priority should be a cheap efficient way to launch materials into space. If it costs a small fraction what it does now to get material into space, the space station will get built much faster and using far less expensive materials and designs. Humans can still ride the space shuttles or some similar thing, but materials can survive a much more violent (and one-way) trip to space. Perhaps the shell of the launch vehicles could double as space station modules.
Once the space station can support a fairly large crew, how about adding an assembly facility, so that long-range space craft can be sent into orbit in pieces, then launched from the space station. Additions to the station will also become easier to complete.
The basis of all exploration beyond Earth orbits seems to me to lie in a functional space station. Without it, space will continue to be wildly expensive and insanely dangerous.
Then, explore, baby!!! With the problem of re-entry gone for long range space vehicles, long range missions should be much cheaper and safer. So let's start by exploring the moon a bit more, some asteroids (and see if money can be made mining those suckers), and then Mars.
Long-term goal? Space station in Mars orbit and at least a minimal surface base.
It is not really so off topic, because power generation is important to everything. If NASA could generate cheap and renewable power, after the rush of the power companies trying to stop it, NASA could make enough to support the space program. But more importantly, the problem with space travel far away is power. Once you get too far from the sun, solar energy is no longer feasible. Also without carrying around explosive fuel, space shuttles would be much safer not to mention cheaper. Fuel weight makes the shuttle heavier and so it needs even more fuel to fly. A nice lightweight energy source such as a laser beam from a satellite or a solar battery in the shuttle itself would be much more efficient and cheap.
And what is it that put America in the forefront of the nuclear nations? And
what is it that will make it possible to spend 20 billion dollars of your
money to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old American know-how,
that's what. As provided by good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun.
Unfortunately science isn't something we can leave up to the people. Too often, the public can't see the immediate advantages of research. The benefits of Space Travel are particularly important to all of society, though. Limited resources will always be the primary cause of poverty. Eventually, space travel will decrease the resource deficiency as other sciences have by allowing humans to bring resources in from outside of our planet. Asteroid mining is a possibility. One day, we're going to blow this Earth of ours up. Destructive capabilities are only increasing. Not only is Mars (among other non-Earth locations) a distinct colonial possibility, terraforming Mars might be the destiny of our race. Continual human space exploration may not currently be as productive as robotic missions, but these missions provide inspiration and an immediate goal (exploration, human destiny, blawblaw Columbus blawblaw) to the public. A Mars mission would be a wonderful way to focus the people on something more important than Iraq. The next step might, though, be the design and construction of a new spaceship. Soon enough, there will be no one left in NASA with shuttle designing experience. The time to act is now. This does not mean we should discontinue Shuttle trips, though. NASA will look into the Columbia disaster and discover a number of possible reasons for the disaster. These errors will be eliminated and future missions will be that much safer. The importance of space exploration and increased NASA funding is not something that should be left to a check box on your tax form. Its something that requires immediate and massive attention as it is important to all of society, all of Earth. Bush seems to be in favor of increased funding. I'm just afraid he's going to go all JFK on us and give me something positive to remember him for. In any case, I hope those in Congress that hate the man as much I do don't make this a partisan issue. Hopefully Democrats can begin championing research issues more than they have in the past. -Sorry 'bout the rant, Ben
I personally think the US should buy the remaining Buran space shuttles that the Russians made in the late 70s throughout the 80s. Although they were never used, in tests they proved to be more efficient and in someways safer than the U.S. space shuttles.
Unless you subscribe to trickle down economics. If you do, then please go drink a nice warm glass of reality.
If that 20 billion dollars that's being spent JUST to develop one plane were given to NASA, we'd end up with a lot more scientific advances than blown up camel stables.
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
I don't know much about the way politics work, but I, for one, think that an opt-in list would be a great idea. Because the true problem is: when money is needed for -everything-, regardless of the nature of that thing which is being acquired, and money is limited (which it is), then increasing spending in one field necessitates decreasing spending in another, often wholly unrelated field.
When money is the issue, the question is not "Moon, or Mars?" The question is not "Shuttle, or new spaceplane?" The question isn't even "International Space Station: fly or scrap?" It becomes, "fly a shuttle... or feed the hungry?" "Space research... or cancer research?" Yes, of course I know there's corruption, and dollars don't go where they're supposed to go, but I'm talking about the principle of the matter. The principle of the matter is that there are more immediate issues here on earth, and those should be tackled first.
I don't know what NASA's future is, given such drastic budget cuts. Perhaps NASA will -ultimately- lose out to smaller start-up companies that are doing independent work to get sattelites, and humans into space (consider John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace). Or maybe ultimately, it's another engineering problem: better materials for less money, faster and smaller computers, and complex systems that lend themselves to easy maintenance and repair. Only time will tell.
NASA has and always will be a big political game. Politicans want to look good to the public, so they throw money into something the public will (hopefully) like.. Why did we (America) go to the moon? Because Russia put something in orbit, and we wanted to prove to the world that we're the cool elite superpower that no one else can beat...
:)
.. Well, except for micrometors, and other assorted space junk.. (insert the obligatory alien/UFO reference here)
:)
:)
If it was all about the advancement of mankind, NASA shouldn't be contracting out the jobs to select companies who can never disclose their work.
Space travel should be handled by corporations looking to make money off it.. They'll make their money, they just need a little "encouragement".
Take automobiles for example. If the gov't had said "These are for government use only, and will only be built by our select contractors, who will work under top-secret clearance, and can never share or disclose any information about the project", there would be only a few select types of cars on the road, and they'd each cost 10 billion dollars. And, no individuals would have cars in their garage.
If the government turned around tommorrow and said, "We'll give a 100 billion dollar grant to each company who successfully prototypes a reusable space vehicle for regular commercially viable use, and has it ready for production", I'd bet we'd have 5 to 10 working reusable space vehicles within 10 years. Not only that, but you'd see airlines picking up a few of them for use too..
But, space is the government's monopoly. Normal humans don't go to space. Anything about say 40,000 feet is unreachable, and no one is traveling there. The government has a nice safe place to keep their communications and spy satellites. They can put almost anything they want up there, and know it will remain relatively undisturbed
I'd *LOVE* to see a few of the aircraft manufacturers making working spacecraft, using the information that the government has researched on aerospace science over the last 60+ years. But they'll never let it all out, so aircraft manufacturers are starting with what they've learned about aeronautical science.
{sigh}
We need to adjust our government a bit..
When I'm president............
Vote for me, JWSmythe, on the Slashdot party, on election day! WhooHoo
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
If we wanted to get into space in a big way, we'd do it the American way -- via private enterprise, rather than the centrally-planned, tax-funded socialist way. How about not making private spaceflight illegal? There's plenty of people ready and willing to fund spaceflight. Look at what John Carmack has done.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
...involved Mag-Lev and a Ramp-like runway.
Basically, it could run down the runway, building up momentum and use the ramp to help direct the ship upward. It's hard to explain, and I don't have a link, but the ideas been around in Japan for a while, even though they have yet to implement it themselves, as it would be a fairly large construction project, and not necessary to them, when the US does all the experiments they need done.
Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
Given the fact that the Dept of Defense budget is 25 times what NASA's is, shouldn't we be a tad more worried about why we're paying all this money for Defense? Cut the Defense budget just 4% and give that money to NASA and you just doubled NASA's budget.
As for people worring about saftey, I think the astronauts are well aware of the risks, and that rocketing into space is no where near the same as flying an airplane. It's a whole different beast altogether. To me, astonauts are no different from military soldiers. They know they are putting their lives on the line, they know the risks and accept them. If they're ok with it, I think the general public should be as well.
If the Chinese beat us to Mars I would still be proud. Proud to be a member of a species capable of such a feat. The idea of space travel is an endeavor for humanity's sake, not the sake of a nationality. Besides, if the Chinese beat us to Mars, we'd have more incentive to one up them on human travel outside the solar system.
Why not return to the Moon to perfect the skills needed to set up a mission to Mars? Exercises and missions launched from the Moon would be much more efficient than on Earth, and although not as efficient as space, would yield the complimentary research study of living and conducting space missions on another world.
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
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What made the space program work back in the sixties is that the U.S. had a real tangible goal: to land a man on the moon before the Russians did. Kenedy added the goal of doing it before the decade was out.
Right now, U.S. manned space exploration has no goal. Sure we have the shuttle for experiments and transporting stuff, and we have the space station for more experiments... but to what end? I think if manned space flight is continue, we need to establish a solid new goal to achieve, and we need to challenge ourselves with a deadline for completing it.
The tougher question is: what should that goal be, and by when should we accomplish it? Well, I can think of a couple for starters:
1. Just as exploration of the West by people like Lewis and Clark paved the way for later settlement, maybe NASA should work towards the settlement of space. Maybe begin with affordable space tourism in low Earth orbit. Follow up with a scientific base on the moon, and then lunar tourism. Then work our way to Mars. What time-frame? How about affordable orbital tourism (at around $20K or less per individual) by 2015. How about a permanent lunar base by 2020, and lunar tourism by 2030?
2. I think the biggest threat to our existence on this earth (other than blowing ourselves up), is an impact from a near earth asteroid collision. And yet we hardly devote any resources to the problem. How about we work towards a manned observatory on the far side of the moon to better detect threatening objects. Follow that up with missions to nearby non-threatening asteroids to experiment with techniques for altering their orbits. Then equip the lunar base to deal with real threats when they are discovered, using the techniques that were successful in the tests. Also, travelling to asteroids beyond lunar orbit would be a great stepping stone to getting to Mars... Timeframes? Lunar base: 2012... asteroid rendezvous: 2015. Mars? Maybe 2025...
3. Human beings have always been driven to explore. I mean, other than the glory of being first, what reasons did adventurers really have to trek to the top of Everest, or to the north or south poles? None really; the value of science in Antarctica for example really has only come to fruition in the decades after Amundsen and reached the pole.
But how did those adventurers afford to go to those remote places just for the sake of being first? Well, Sir Edmund Hillary had the backing of various organizations including the Royal Geographic Society, while Amundsen quietly used private backing beat Scott to the south pole. And so I say, hey Bill Gates, hey Dean Kamen, hey (insert your name here if you're really rich)... what are you really going to do with all that money anyway? How about backing some private expeditions to be the first to plant a flag on the lunar poles, or on an asteroid, or on Mars? Imagine the satisfaction of being able to pull it off before NASA or the government? Hey National Geographic, how about you do the same? think of all the magazines you could sell by covering the development of your own space craft and the progress of your own expedition?
Anyway, there's lots of possibilities, we just have to want one of them enough to make it real. Truthfully, I think that the potential profits of space tourism will make the first suggestion happen more quickly than the other two, because people like to plan for vacations more than for their own possible demise, and rich people don't like to part with their money (how do you think they got rich?) In any case, you get my drift.
P.
For space exploration purposes, people suck. They have two advantages- local decision making ability, and propaganda value. That's it.
By all other standards human beings are horrible astronauts. They need to be pampered with reasonable temperatures and pressures, a comfortable oxygen environment, water, food, toilets, thick heavy shielding from cosmic rays, and worst of all, a return trip! The rockets carrying them need to conform to tighter specifications and when they inevitably crash we have to sit through another God Bless America orgy. Humans get unexpected disorders and diseases and require elaborate medical care. Even in pedestrian frontiers like Antarctica we've been treated to spectacles like a doctor performing a biopsy on herself and administering herself chemotherapy using medical supplies dropped from a plane. Can you imagine someone developing cancer, appendicitis, or schizophrenia halfway to Mars? Although it would save a great deal of money and actually make some missions practical to carry out, we would never ask a volunteer to go to the surface of Mars or Europa and then take a cyanide pill. But that's because we're a bunch of hypocrites. This is practically what we are doing when we send people into space.
This is all a high price to pay for local decision making ability, especially when you consider that humans are likely to travel no more than a few light-minutes away anyway, in regions of the solar system that are easily accessible by radio with relatively short ping times. And there is NO reason to send people to low earth orbit. What the hell is the point of that? LOW EARTH ORBIT IS NOT SPACE EXPLORATION.
Robots make much better astronauts than people do. When they're in accidents, nobody cares. In fact, the French crashed an unmanned rocket last month and it was a one day "ha ha" story. Our robots have visited several planets and have even landed on the surface of a few of them. Despite the small amounts of funding they get, their track record is much more impressive. And there are many more things we would be doing with robots within the solar system, if it weren't for the crowd-pleasing money pits known as the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.
And what the hell is the point of these programs? Critics usually counter with some dumb argument involving the Wright brothers. But air travel has obvious benefits. You can get from point A to point B really fast in an airplane. What is the point of cramming people into garbage cans in low earth orbit? Except to suck money away from more deserving programs? In a few years our launch window for Pluto will have expired. It is receding into the further part of its orbit. By the time a probe arrives, its atmosphere will have frozen onto its surface where it will remain for centuries. You could fund a dozen of these programs with the money wasted on a single shuttle launch.
If you feel strongly that we should fund the shuttle because "the future of mankind is in space", you're fooling yourself. The most the Space Shuttle will do is scatter mankind across Texas and parts of Louisiana.
SRBs and other dangerous (yet powerful) equipment should be used to launch the "stuff" to perform experiments and build human habitats.
A next generation expendable capsule should be built in cooperation with the Russians (for the practical experience) and others (to bring in modern updates to this time tested design).
Let's face it: The shuttle was built because it comported with our notions of how space travel ought to be. It would work great if we had duratanium and antimatter propulsion, but we don't.
Under an efficient system we could man the space station, establish a *permanent* presence on the moon using a combination of automation and human presence, and travel to Mars.
Separate the danger from the humans whenever possible. For example--lunar habitat module lands with no occupants. Occupants arrive in smaller, lighter, more easy to design LEM, board the module (assuming it landed properly) and then use the module's drive system to align it with other modules on the Lunar surface.
Once the Lunar presence is established, it can be the staging area for Mars and beyond. The knowledge that we gain building these systems might lead to duratanium and antimatter drive, making the shuttle practical again someday.
Until then, the mantra should be Powerful, Cheap and Dangerous (PCD) for the inanimate objects. Small Expensive and Safe(SES) for the humans. The shuttle is Powerful Expensive and Dangerous--not the way we should choose to merge those two acronyms (of course they didn't know that when the thing was on the drawing board--at least not the dangerous part).
I think that if the turning point comes *now* then we can undo the damage that was done post-Apollo. That means we hit Mars in 30 years. I'll be 64 years old. If I play my cards right, I'll be able to let the grandkids stay up late and watch history being made.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Don't worry about NASA's funding...once the Chinese reach the moon in about a decade, and they start building their space station, NASA will get all the funding they need. The U.S. would not have rushed to reach the moon as quickly without the threat of Soviet domination of space. I suspect that the serious prospect of another nuclear power gaining superiority in the 'high ground' of space will get more money to NASA fast. Maybe if we're lucky, this new space race will lead to the permanent settlement of space, and not just another arena for conflict between the U.S. and China. Maybe.
Meanwhile, I just hope the Cassini-Huygens probe makes it to Titan in fewer than a million pieces.
What NASA needs to do to stay alive is show progress. We managed to fly to the moon in a few short years, yet here we are flying the same trips in the shuttle over and over again for 20 years plus, and gaining little that the public can sink their teeth in to ('fraid to say Hubble doesn't interest most people).
What is needed is for goals to be set, then those goals to be met. NASA needs to pick something that can be done inexpensively, and start doing it. As they show success, public confidence will build, and so will the funding. This is the nature of our economy, and NASA isnt exempt from the rules.
Personally I like the idea to start a base on the moon, which we can later use as a waypoint for future space missions. Use the less expensive launch systems of today, and simply start dropping off the parts to do it with unmanned flights. After a few years or even less, we send up a set of astronauts to put it all together. Then we can start using that as a base. Sending off flight to Mars from the moon is much more economical.
What this type of thing does is give the public 'goals' that NASA can work on and achieve, and actually show some progress for the money spent.
Back to the topic at hand though. Offering a check box on a tax return? You can't get 14.5 billion (2002 NASA budget) that way... It's just too much money.
Onward.
Take a look at this chart of the 2003 Bush Budget proposal increases, which is going to put our economy in the shitter for a long time. The defense budget is getting a $379 billion dollar increase. That's right, in order to fight terrorism we need to invest in the latest defense technologies since we all know 9-11 wouldn't of happened if we had better tanks, fighter jets, and my favorite project looking for an enemy, the missle defense system. I love how the government uses an incident which could only have been prevented by quality intelligence work, immigration procedures, and airport security, as an excuse to feed already bloated defense budgets.
My rocket beats all - it uses the JXR gravity drive
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^I^
III
III
^ ^
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The only problem I see with your plan is this: what gets these pods up in space? If we launch rockets up, what do we do? Leave them there? Seems like a bit of a waste. As an emergency re-entry system for the ISS though, this does make some sense.
Time for the Pope to start panicking? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
NASA has done a ton of research, and the results of that will allow companies to open it up further.
Compare NASA's costs to the Russian costs (Russian equipment is atleast 20x cheaper, but their wages are no less than 1/10 of the US wages), so it looks like the Space Shuttle is atleast twice as expensive as it strictly ought to be, and you start to see what can be achieved in making Space more cost effective.
Truthfully, the frontier has moved on; NASA needs to explore the new frontiers, and leave launching to other organisations; and that's not because of Challenger nor Columbia, it's just the way it is.
I think George W. Bush's move to go for nuclear interplanetary propulsion is a smart one; NASA need to look at tethers, Mars, lunar and asteroid exploration.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"From the other end of the political spectrum, Paul Krugman says pretty much the same thing in yesterday's NYT. I'm surprised he said it so soom after the tragedy, but then Tuesday is his column day and people are actually listening. This is when we can get people thinking.
BTW, both Paul and Gregg can get pretty snitty when they think everyone else is an idiot (usually). But they both have some great insights.
The timing here is eerie for me, becuase I've been hashing out in my own mind whether manned spaceflight is worthwhile, specifically the shuttle. Just a few weeks ago I was figuring the odds of 100 successful shuttle missions in a row with NASA's own predicted failure rate of 1-in-500 (about 70%, not great). Then a week ago the teacher-in-space thing reappeared, which to me is the pinnacle of unnecessary threats to human life. Then I looked at NASA's deficit out of a $14 billion budget.
Now is the time to reform our expectations. Manned space flight has for so long been held out as the way things would be done, but most of the reason for it -- any actual need to have humans in space to manipulate things -- has largely disappeared. The Hubble telescope repair might be one exception, but that's a big exception and we could have just sent up another for the cost of an orbiter (indeed, the next-gen NGST has been in the works for several years and if anything is delayed by Hubble).
Unlike the 70's, when a glacially slow personal computer was exotic stuff, machines can do most of the astronaut tasks now, and that's cause for celebration. The most honest consensus that there is nearly no valid scientific reason to pursue manned spaceflight except the circular desire to pursue manned spaceflight. Much as I like manned spaceflight, I scads of data from unmanned probes is a lot sexier. I have trouble thinking of many accomplishments that are uniquely thanks to the shuttle.
The past leaves an impression on us. The older generation remembers Apollo 11 as a defining moment. I was 2. For me, it was the wildly successful twin Viking landings in 1977. Mind you, I was there in person for the first Columbia landing, and I still think Viking was more memorable -- those pictures! The deep red cover of National Geographic!
Robots are cool (think of the advances in robotics if we emphasized them for spaceflight?) and relatively cheap; they accept one-way missions with alacrity; and if we lose a shuttle full of robots it's not a moral quandary but a pocketbook issue and maybe a spectator sport. We can always come back to manned flight later.
Let's study space for now, conquer it later, if we even feel it needs conquering in person at that time. That we have learned is a just way to honor those whom we have lost.
The point is our tax system is already complicated enough as is and the 1040 I file every year is already 4 pages long. Do we really want to clutter up the tax code more?
1) Send a robot to Mars with empty tanks, a reactor, a pump, and telemetry. Let it mine the Martian atmosphere for a year or so to extract oxygen from C02 in the thin air, and H2 from the water vapor in the thin air. Check on it to make sure there are plenty of both before sending the people, and then you don't have to carry your return fuel and oxygen all the way there. The savings are astounding! Here is one plan.
2)Put a base on the north pole of the Moon. There 's water there (as ice) so with energy from a reactor you can make a livable place much cheaper than at a space station. It lots easer to get rocks to protect your living quarters too! Melt the rocks down to make the equivalent of fiber glass, concrete, etc. It's very much cheaper to take off from the Moon, (even at its north pole) than it is from the Earth at its equator.
3)Talk to Burt Rutan about making an airbreather plane that converts to a rocket after it leaves the atmophere. Most of the weight of a rocket now is oxidant.
The X-series (discounting the dumb X-33/34, and I use dumb lightly) were a smashing formula for success, and they were the blueprint for the process of getting man on the moon. Pournelle says we need a similar project to focus on building a space ship. Haven't you always wanted a space ship? :)
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
Seriously. I, like many Slashdotter's, was not around when the Apollo missions took place. I can only imagine the the feeling of watching folks romp around off the planet. Sure it's been done before, but a long time ago, and with similarly old technology (and knowledge!). Why not send another mission out, maybe land on the dark side (correct me, if they already have), take some new high res. photos and videos, set up a long-term, unmanned monitoring station. I'm sure with 20 years of research, there must be a LOT of new questions that need answering. It would also make for a great warm up for something bigger (i.e. Mars). But most of all, like I said earlier, it's all about capturing the imaginations of humanity. Rekindle the support that NASA had in the past. LC
People forget all of the other things that we have gained from space flight. IE that nice advanced fighter that you cream over would be nothing but a pipe dream without some of the technology invented or co-funded by the space industry. Then there are the everyday things like better plastics, ceramics, laser tech, computer tech, environmental systems, fire retardents, etc. As far as I know no single reporter discussed the experiments that Columbia took up with her... the focus was entirely on the "first isreali"... Of course nothing much got said about the first native american or the first palistinian or the first Indian. Or how about discussing the cancer and drug experiments that have direct effect on real illnesses way down here.
They do more than just fly around in a multibillion dollar death trap. Those people risk their lives for the sake of increasing our knowledge (how do things grow, why do they grow wrong, how does gravity effect it vs. no gravity, osteoperosis, how do tumors form, etc, etc.)
Wow won't it be great and help us so much when grandma can fly supersonic without after burners and laser people she doesn't like. Oh that would be great, except grandma died of cancer last year because we still don't have a FUCKING CURE FOR CANCER.
And how the hell do you define "impact on mankind" are we talking paveway bombs? Or making little ashy sillouettes of people from afar?
So while flying around in a billion dollar jet might sound really "cool" and "groovy" to some geek on the internet, there are hundreds of pilots out there willing to give up their left nut/boob and that jet to become a shuttle crewman.
Not the Global Surveyor, I was thinking about the weather module of the same project. It was the one that was lost half-way between here and there.
Sorry, wrong name on my part
I think democratizing the entire government budget would allow people to literally "vote with their dollars". I get pissed off when state bond measures are floated to support "extra stuff" that I feel should be paid with the tax money I already forfeited. Change the 1040 tax forms to allow the taxpayer to specify how much of their tax dollars should fund their favorite programs. The government's actions (driven by the available budget) would be directly guided by the hand of the people.
Sure, some people will give 100% to environmental cleanup or 100% to defense spending. I imagine the first few years would be bumpy when certain programs 0% of their previous budget, but I think this budget system would soon become self-correcting as people realize the direct consequences of their budget choices.
cpeterso
..in space? Don't they go outside and spacewalk once in a while? If they knew the dibris from the external tank may have contacted the underside why didn't they get someone to go out there and look?
it depends on how they got there.
Conventional way (current or a little better tech)?
like laughing at the fools (the ones who spent the money, not the astronauts) you could get 10x the scientific and commercial gain with 1/10 the cost researching deep sea exploration.
the only way I would feel the least bit sorry about the Chinese beating us to mars is if they developed a cheap and easy interplanetary spacecraft/propulsion system.(think 1/1000th or better price performance to current conventional means)
In the interest of excruciating accuracy, 2 techs were also killed during the shuttle program when they were accidentally caught in a nitrogen atmosphere. They weren't trying to get in space, but they were in service of it. I think the on-ground safety record of the program is said to be fairly good.
The Challenger was a big shock because we were quite proud never to have lost anyone in flight. The "in flight" qualifier I think had more to do with distinguishing ourselves from the Soviets than any real logic. If we are desperate, and I hope we are not, we will fall back on the claim we have lost no one in space.
Here's a Q: how many people have died in the unmanned space program?
Space exploration? To be an advanced forward thinking society we must send humans into space to play with slinkys at all costs. Actually the shuttle is a gigantic waste of money. I won't bore you with the details on how the money could be better spent... How much terrestrial infrastructure could be improved with each $500 million shuttle launch? As this article points out, NASA has to make up useless science experiments:
Was the space shuttle useful? Not really.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2078104/
Shuttle is pure pork barrel, see how the politicians are positioning this issue right now. And pros and cons aside its really a cleverly marketed space militarization project, regardless of how many slinky experiments they advertise.
"NASA needs to do exactly what NASA did then."
definition of insanity - doing the same thing over again and expecting different results.
there are only three more shuttles left -- three more strikes and you're out!
As long as our space efforts are funded by the government, they will always be politicized. People on Slashdot always say "we should give NASA more money," or "we should let NASA be more independent," but you just can't alter the fundamentally political way in which they're run. It's one of the bugs in democracy. Actually, it's present in other political systems as well ("In Soviet Russia, politicians assasinate YOU!"), but that's not important, because I don't think anyone here thinks we should give up democracy for the sake of greater efficiency in NASA. But look at the government programs that surround you every day. Look at the bitter controversies over what age sex education ought to be taught in the public schools (if at all, and should the subject of condoms be raised?). Look at the way the post office raises the price of stamps a penny every year, instead of a nickel every 5. So long as the entire county has to live under only one government, governmental programs are always going to be inefficent, as they must satisfy at least 50% of the population, and a few rich interest groups. The essence of democracy is what they say about a good compromise: "everyone's a little bit upset."
NASA probably was useful in its day. They did get the ball rolling after all. But today, with corporations sending up satellites as part of routine business, expecting a govenrment program to do all of America's space exploration is just not a good idea. We need sustainable space efforts, we need people who have an interest in bringing the cost of getting into space down, and who can take risks without having to think about what it'll mean next November.
Well, this has been a bit of a rant, but that's alright.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
First of all, educate the public. Nobody wants to see people die, and of course it's a terrible tragedy... but you know if I had the chance to go up in space, I'd gladly do it without hesitation. Those people died doing something most of can only dream of, and the odds that they faced were probably not that much worse than when you and I drive to work in the morning. The knew the risks, and accepted them. Is this how we choose to honor their sacrifice? By putting an end to the very ideals they died trying to advance? Did it never occur to anyone that maybe if NASA had a budget that was more than a joke, they might have been able to research more reliable materials?
That said, it is difficult for me to imagine what goes through the minds of people trying to stop NASA at every mishap. Do they really believe that we'll magically fix all the problems we have here on Earth before the population density grows so high that real-estate in Antarctica starts looking attractive to management? I believe our future lies in space, spreading out from the Earth is the only way to ensure the long-term survival of the species, and Mars is the second step in that goal.
For those of you with less lofty ideas, might I remind you of the HUGE number of technological advances that came out of the well-funded space program of the 1960's? Anyone here use plastic? How about microwave ovens? Miniaturized computers (aka laptops)? Batteries to run them? All of these are available to us now, because they were developed for use in the space program, and then refined by the military.
Imagine what kinds of new technology we'd see if Congress would toss the same $2 billion dollars at NASA that they're tossing to AIDS resarch. Isn't our long-term survival and quality-of-life worth just as much as our short-term survival? Probably not. Most politicians can't see beyond the next election, so having things like an actual Goal for the nation is a concept that died with the Soviet Union.
I think if the public knew (or remembered) all the good that CAN come from a well-funded space program, they'd be screaming at Congress to fund them, knowing that in 5 years they'd get it all back in lower-priced consumer goods.
Manned space flight is exciting, thrilling, high adventure stuff. It makes great photos. It appeals to something in every science fiction fan, every adventure fan, every person who is an explorer at heart. It really is our last untamed and unknown frontier. Watching the incredibly majestic ballet of a space station docking or recalling men walking on the surface of the moon stirs something powerful within us.
It's also really, really expensive compared to sending up rockets and manipulating robots. Virtually all the experimentation people are interested in could be performed by automated mechanisms and various forms of telepresence. Manned space flight also kills people.
Unless there is some really compelling reason to have men in space, I think it's inevitable that the US and the world in general will back away from the risks and costs. Maybe no one will explicitly say 'That's it, we're done', but it will probably happen. Unless there's a reason for us to be up there. Unless it pays for itself. Unless it's worth the risk.
What could we be doing in near-earth orbit that would be so valuable? Not a lot. Sure, make arguments about micro-gravity science, but really, machines can do the work. Nope, the value isn't in near-earth orbit. It's a bit farther out.
If I recall correctly, a surface to orbit elevator on the moon would be a tiny fraction of the cost of an earth-lift elevator. What could we produce from mining the moon? What could we do with a stable mining colony there?
I think that if we're going to go to space, lets *GO* and make it pay. Otherwise, humans have no business up there. Too risky, too costly. Add the no-kidding reality of making money and it'll happen.
The Australians did it for about six seconds
Isn't that because they flew it into the ground?
Most of the risks you list for a tether turn out to not be as serious as you paint them, or to have far less drastic consequences than you seem to be assuming.
A space tether would be a huge structure. Yes, it would be thin. It would nevertheless be very tall. As a result, it would be easy to hit. A cruise missile, ICBM, or an airplane that struck the tether would break it. An explosive device, including either a conventional explosive or a nuclear device, would break it. If the tether were stationed at sea, a submarine could clip the tether, or shoot a torpedo at it.
Clipping the bottom of the tether, or firing a missile at it, would do next to nothing. The single-ended tether (with counterweight) is 40,000 km long; the double-ended one is twice that. Low earth orbit - which is the maximum practical range for things like ICBMs, unless they're built specifically to be anti-geostationary missiles - is in the 200-300km regime. Lose the bottom of the tether? Just send down a replacement segment from the hub, and you're back in business.
There would be no way to defend the tether from terrorists. You would have to create a large no-fly zone and a no-sail zone around the perimeter. This would create a humongous, circular no-commerce zone that would harm the global economy.
Not really. What is the maximum distance a hostile craft could travel from detection to interception? That's the radius of your no-fly zone. This is tens of kilometres at most if you're dealing with civilian craft. Antimissile interception range is left as an exercise for people with more military background than I have. Either way, impact on trade is next to nil. Commercial flights fly *thousands* of kilometres - why would a 10-km detour have any effect at all?
Natural events are also dangerous. A lightning strike could break it. An earthquake or volcanic activity could result in enough stress on the tether to break it. A tornado, with winds in excess of 400 mph, could damage the tether.
Extreme weather only exists in the lowest 10km or so of the atmosphere. 99.97% of your tether is above this level. If you see the storm coming, pull up the bottom 20km or so until it passes. If you get blindsided, send down another small segment as a replacement.
I'd worry more about space junk, myself. More of the tether could fall.
If a tether ever became damaged or underperformed its design specs, there would be no way to repair it. Should we ever decide to remove the tether, there would be no way to take it down without it causing a catastrophe on the ground.
How do you figure this? You can just spool the darn thing back up to the counterweight/hub in geostationary orbit! That's where its center of mass is.
As for repair - how do you think the cable would be built in the first place? You aren't going to lift a full-thickness cable on chemical rockets - you'll lift a very thin leader cable, and send crawlers up it with extra strands/ribbons to thicken it with.
To repair a damaged (but still holding) cable, send down a patch, connect above and below the damaged section, and remove the damaged section. Or, if multistranded, remove the damaged strands and send down replacement strands. You've overspecced the cable strength, so the undamaged strands will hold. Any given strand breaking isn't a big deal with a multistranded design.
Even if you're foolish enough to build a difficult-to-repair elevator, there's nothing to stop you from lifting materials for a new one up ahead of time. Keep a backup elevator - spooled up - in geostationary orbit for use as a replacement if anything happens to one of the elevators currently in service. Only the first elevator will be expensive to build - cost of lifting matter goes down drastically once that one's done.
In summary, I find your claim that an elevator would be fragile or impossible to repair puzzling.
Any breakage of the tether would result in catastrophe. First, there would be damage to the ground. Anything that big (about as long as the circumference of the Earth) is not going to totally burn up in the atmosphere.
Firstly, since it'll wrap around like twine as it orbits (speeding up tangentially as it falls to conserve angular momentum), it could easily burn up - it's impacting over a very large area.
Secondly, there's a strong upper limit on the amount of damage it can do - that limit being the gravitational potential energy of the cable. Potential energy per unit mass for something most of the way outside the gravity well is on the order of 10 times its equivalent weight in TNT or other high explosive. Declare a maximum acceptable explosive yield for the whole cable coming down, and that gives you the maximum weight of the cable. Simple enough.
Any real disaster would be far _less_ severe, as a) it's unlikely the whole cable would come down; most logical point of breakage is within easy reach of the surface, and b) even if the whole cable from geosynch onwards came down, it would impact over a large and mostly-uninhabited area (if you've placed your cable with any sense at all). Only the fraction that hits populated areas matters.
Our economic security and probably our military security and national security would come to depend on this tether.
The big problem is that once the tether is destroyed, you're probably looking at years before a replacement tether could be erected.
If the tether's that important to the economy, you'd a) have more than one in service at any given time, and b) have replacements stashed in geosynch, ready to unspool. If space travel is that widespread, then you also have the manufacturing facilities off-planet to produce a new one. Build it, send it to geosynch from wherever else it's built, and spool it down.
In summary, all of the risks you've pointed out have easy workarounds.
Lastly, there's a very compelling argument for a tether being much better in the long run than a space plane. An *ideal* space plane would have a specific impulse of perhaps three times that of chemical rockets. Lifting cargo is still expensive with such a beast - on the order of thousands of dollars per kilo even under ideal conditions (and likely much more, given the industry's track record with other launch vehicles). Lifting cargo with a space elevator is orders of magnitude cheaper, if you have high volume. The theoretical limit (cost of the gravitational potential energy paid in electricity) is absurdly low (on the order of $1/kg). The practical limit is determined by how fast you can haul cargo up the cable (no more than, say, an amount equal to the cable's weight can be in transit at any given time, and it has 40,000 km to travel before being unloaded). Haul fast enough, and you can make the cost per unit weight as low as you please. All of your hauled weight is cargo, because your fuel can either be burned on the ground with electricity sent up the cable, or (more likely) produced at the counterweight by solar or nuclear generation, and sent down.
The long-term rationale for building a tether is clear.
Remember the incredible sales of the Hotwheels Mars Rover? This was licensed through NASA. If they just did better marketing of toy versions of their non-exploding spacecrafts they could start bringing in more dough. Sure it wouldn't double their budget, but look what toys have done for Hollywood. And it would give all us geeks the ability to directly contiubute to their budget, and have more toys.
The shuttle worked, and worked very well...so I see no reason why NASA shouldn't simply either improve the existing design or design a "better shuttle" and continue, business as usual. A grand total of two shuttle crashes doesn't undo the world's greatest space program.
Factor in inflation. The budgets are at best flat, and I believe actually DO drop over the years in the graph.
...and nuclear rockets. No nukes in earth orbit and earth orbit (the ISS, etc) is were the focus need to be for manned spaceflight. Save Mars for the robots.
Why can't the problems with VentureStar be fixed? We need a SSTO craft. Stop throwing away so much.
Did yo know that the damn SRB's are never reused? They were supposed to be but it proved to expensive.
That phrase just gives me shivers for some reason (the good kind).
I really do believe that the future of space exploration lies in the hands of companies like Armadillo Aerospace. The US government is to clumsy and inflated to handle something like space exploration.
Can one of you Uber-geeks explain why craft like the shuttle need to take off vertically? Couldn't we take a really powerful jet, take it up to a rediculously high altitude, and then switch to rocket power for the last leg of the trip? The shuttle just doesn't seem like the most convenient/economical solution.
The answer has been staring us in the face for decades - Price. If we make space access cheap, the rest will follow. What we have done up to this point, is basic feasability testing. Enough already! We know its feasible. There are thousands upon thousands of amzing engineering papers that have been published that will revolutionize space travel and habitation. The one thing, the ONLY thing keeping it from happening, is the cost per pound to orbit.
And the sad part is, there are hundreds of designs that could and would reduce the cost to orbit from its exorbitant $10,000/lb to less than $100/lb. But you know what? All of the aerospace contractors have lobbied for years for these advances to be underfunded, never considered, or just plain cancelled.
I agree with the Cliff, I'm pinning all of my space dreams and hopes on the advent of mass-produced carbon nanotubes. Once they become available, the entire economics of space will change radically. Finally, it will make economic sense for even the most conservative corporations to invest in space industrialization.
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.
www.enthea.org
There are a lot of comments in this thread regarding the feasability and riskiness of new replacement technologies. This is really sad. There was a time in this country (USA) when we didn't fret about whether some new technology was possible or completely safe. We just went and invented it. This attitude made us the economic and scientific powerhouse we are today. Now that we've become rich and soft, all we do is whine and try to minimize risks. I weep for the USA's future.
What do you mean bad taste, did you lick is testes?
Where no man has gone before?
Ah well, Tang is cooler than Teflon anyway.
Go NASA-Glenn! [nt]
The USA is not the only country with a Space Agency, yet from the tone of the questioning, once again USAcentric /. forgets about the rest of the world !
:-
quote:
<i>"About what's next for human space exploration. Most of the punditry agrees that extending the shuttle program for many more years is a bad idea. So what are the practical alternatives?"</i>
I love that "so what's next for human Space exploration" heh - so basically, what your saying, is that you've totally forgot something
The Chinese are agressively persuing Space Exploration and it's entirely possible they'll have a man on the moon within a decade.
Wakey Wakey.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Perhaps they should have priced it in terms of Shuttle missions. The shuttle has launched over 100 times, at a typical cost of about $500M per launch equals roughly $50G, so their elevator would be priced at 80 shuttle missions or under 4/5 of the money spent so far running the Shuttles.
Speaking of which: in terms of fatalities per passenger mile, they're much safer than jetliners, orders of magnitude better than your car. OTOH, you car doesn't cost billions of dollars to replace if you write it off. OT3H, I'd be really happy if I got that many miles out of any car, ever. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
and then concentrate on bailing out and try to colonize and rape another. Take the entire space budget and use it to save this planet, if it is still at all possible. Most likely it isn't but we owe it to the Earth to try at least.
We all know of the american astronaut deaths:
3 - Apollo 1 fire
7 - Challenger
7 - Columbia
What about Russian deaths? I've heard it mentioned that they lost 3 cosmonauts on the return from orbit in the '70s, but haven't seen any evidence to back it up. How many russians died in the quest for space? (IMHO, they were more succesful than the americans in terms of leaping the first hurdles)
Also, another poster mentioned scientists who died in the service of the space program. I'd like to know and remember every man who gave his life for what I believe to be humanity's final frontier.
Your arguments are even less convincing. I'm sure you could come up with equally dramatic descriptions of the environment in which early airplanes operated, and they killed people, too. Airliners are a bit safer than they were in 1910. The early sailing craft were dangerous.
The technology has improved quite a bit since the 1970s. Perhaps we do know enough now to build a shuttle craft with safety comparable to that of an airliner.
We've been putting people into space since the 1960s. Surely something has been learned since then about getting to orbit and back safely.
Every man and woman who's died in space did it with the full knowledge this was one of the most dangerous jobs they could have picked. I see no reason to insult their sacrifice by scurrying under rocks, pretending like it's only a matter of time before a 100% safe route into space evolves.
Don't insult the ability of our engineers and scientists, either. 100% safety is impossible. You can get killed on a trip to the mailbox. Humans have paid for the right to explore every new domain we have taken with their lives, and there are a few of those people buried or lying around within a few miles (kilometers) of every reader of this post. However, as a result of those sacrifices, most of us can walk safely to the mailbox without a gun and without watching our backs.
When do we get out of the human sacrifice stage with respect to the kind of trip that should have become routine with the second generation shuttle and something you buy tickets from your travel agent for the third generation available Real Soon Now? We've been putting people into orbit for 40 years. I think it's time to find out whether or not we can do it right now.
It's time to honor our pioneers and move on to the future. It's time to get out of the status quo. You know as well as I do that if we keep flying a shuttle that's been kept running longer than the average city runs a public transit bus that more and more of these vehicles are going to fall out of the sky. Will the public support NASA if one of these deathtraps hits a public building full of people?
It's time to either start putting real money into the manned space program or shut it down. It's wrong to ask people to give their lives to solve problems that should be solved with money and engineering skill no matter how dedicated or brave they are. If America doesn't have the will to do this right, we don't deserve to keep our technological leadership and we won't be allowed to.
Your argument in favor of the status quo is pointless at best.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Just a little math for the curious:
Apollo Missions 19, Lost Pilots 3
Ratio: ~16%
Shuttle Missions 128, Lost Pilots 14
Ratio: ~11%
Given the percieved "success" of the Apollo missions, I think that the Shuttle missions have been pretty successful. As far as the usefulness of the more recent Shuttle missions, I have to think that EVERY mission should be to add something to the IIS, and make it a *REAL* space station, where actual stuff gets done that is realavant to SPACE EXPLORATION. What we know about space now (2003) is due mostly in part to only ONE shuttle mission (Hubble Space Telescope), and possibly two missions to fix the Hubble. The Mars Sojourner mission was a lwo budget project that did more for exploration than ALL of the shuttle missions, in my opinion. And they did THAT for 100th of the price of a single Shuttle mission.
I guess it's time to dredge up my old post
...and yes I know the dark side of the moon isn't always dark, but we'd want to cut down on earthshine too probably.
I'll just reprint it here too:
The greatest question of all time is: "Are we alone?"
That's really the other ultimate goal of space exploration, isn't it? (The first goal is to find us a new place to live after the earth is used up).
But there is such a simple way to answer the question: Take all the cash we are using on rediculous stuff like the ISS and:
BUILD A GIANT TELESCOPE IN SPACE OR ON THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON.
And I mean BIG.
One so Hugeomegagigantic that it can actually SEE the surface of extra solar earth sized planets in detail to pick out cities, roads, and lights.
And then, if we saw with our own eyes that there was another civilization -- imagine the space program we'd start to have then.
(OK - I know there's no up or down in space. Bah humbug!)
A little planning goes a long way...
Quick thought here -- if we can build a space elevator with mass-produced nanotubes, then we can essentially build a tall platform, as high as we like.
That being the case, why shoot for the moon? Instead, build a nanotube launch platform that is designed to grow. Start it out in a geologically stable location at the equator, and start getting fuel savings immediately. Eventually, it will *be* a space elevator, but meanwhile, it becomes commercially feasible.
This, then, would not be a "top down" design such as caused the shuttle accidents. It would rather be a "current technology" and slow-growth design that would allow us to understand our technologies and thus avoid disasters.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
You really are George Bush!
I'm putting my bets on a new discovery in the UK (Cambridge area), which purports to have invented a high performance antigravity device (currently on model number 163), easily having the ratings required for NASA's use.
There is talk of a public televised demonstration talking place on Feb 14/15/16? in the UK, with a number of well-known UK celebrities present. There are even plans to make an attempt at the X-Prize, in a much more leisurely fashion than would be possible with a conventional rocket (hours up there hovering!).
There are good reasons to believe that this is NOT the usual scam. We shall see.
i hate to be a cynical bastard, but i can't get past the fact that the columbia tragedy is little more than a glorified car accident. i don't want to belittle these deaths--because death is an awful thing--but people die everyday by much more inhumane and unnecessary means. the columbia explosion is sad, yes, but these astronauts are no more saints than the hungry children dying of malnutrition in africa everyday. and we sure as shit don't memorialize them, the thousands that die because instead of buying them bread and milk we use our billions to research why our flying tower of babel got too hot and caught fire on reentry. instead of creatively finding ways to get AZT and other retrovirus drugs across the atlantic, we perfect an unmanned plane capable of launching smart missiles from a few hundred feet at whoever it is we feel like assassinating.
maybe--just maybe--we rally around national tragedies± because we need to create a pain to counter balance the numbness of our mundane life necessary to keep from hating ourselves. or maybe we really are the navel-gazing, imperialistic gluttons that the world thinks we are, incapable of imaging a world beyond Must See TV and the Cosmo sex quiz, too callused to even give a damn. how did we get here? where are we going? where have we been?
boy, this generation needs a hero.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Lovejoy asks: "I have done extensive reading since the Columbia tragedy..."
You've done extensive reading in three days?
Yeah, right!
Next please.
The same number that died in the manned space program, since they are the same program. A vehicle that carries stuff into space is the same technology whether the "stuff" is humans or cargo or a mix of both. When technology learned to make Apollo 1 is also used today to launch an unmanned satellite, those three astronauts in Apollo 1 were, in effect, dygin for both the unmanned and manned space programs (since they are one in the same.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The events of this past week were certainly a tragedy, however make no mistake that the space program as well as the current shuttle program will continue, at least for the short term. It is unfortunate that it takes an event like the one we saw on Saturday to initiate a public dicussion on the direction of the space program. Dispite the naysayers most people involved in the space program would relish such a publish debate. Most of the members of the NASA family share a sense of civic duty, and believe that our primary goal is to serve the American public. NASA, like any other human endevour has it's flaws, but we are always looking for ways to improve. So what changes if any should be made to improve the space program? Some say we should develop a new launch vehical to replace the shuttle fleet. NASA has been trying to develop additional human and cargo launch capability, however each proposal has been canceled right before the development of an operational prototype. The reasons for this are complex, but they include a general engineering tendancy to choose proven sub-optimal technology over unproven technology, and the fact that the prototype phase is the most risky part of space craft development. Development of an operational prototype involves investment of a significant amount of money at a higher risk of failure. In addition, there really is no large public or political will to replace the current shuttle system. Therefore it becomes very hard for NASA Administrators to justify such programs. Some have suggested getting rid of the human element in spaceflight. In my opinion this would also be a serious mistake. Once we eliminate human flights, we lose precious knowledge and experiance that would allow us to eventually establish profitable space industries, outposts, and colonies. While, these ideas certainly sound like science fiction, NASA still considers such human endevours as the long term goals of the space program. As for the commercialization of space flight, I know of no conspiracy to retain a NASA monopoly. In fact many NASA employies would welcome such development of the comercial space industry. While NASA employies do hold the belief that no one can do spaceflight safer or more reliably then NASA, this is merely a reflection of the pride they have in their work, and not (as is often said) a commentary on the disadvantages of space commercialization. The real reason for the lack of commercial investment in space comes from the inherent high risk of working in space. Space flight is a exceptionally high cost, high risk, and low tolerance endevour: not the kind of thing you want to base profittable a bussiness around. Every day NASA and other space agencies are developing new technology to make space flight cheaper, safer, and more error free, so that it will become easier to comercialize space. Experiance shows us that knowledge gained in space today, will translate into commercialization tommorow. To see a practical example of this we need only look at the colonization of the America's. The first few steps were taken by government funded expiditions. It wasn't until more 100 years after Columbus landed, that the comercialization of the new world by private industry took place. Why did this occur? Originally, getting to the Americas was a costly and risky bussiness. Commercialization wasn't possible, and indeed did not take place, until the Europeans had gained enoough experiance and knowledge about the new world to make it commercially feasible to go there. Similarly, once we have gained significant knowledge and experiance about space, commercialization will occur. So what direction should NASA take? That really should be up to you, the people NASA is chartered to serve. Do you want to see efforts dedicated to a perminately manned space station? Do you want a mission to mars? Increased manned or cargo launch capability? Development of next generation propulsion technology? None of these things will happen without signifigant political and public will. Most importantly, be excited about the space program. Find out all of the great stuff NASA does for you. You'd be supprised to learn that NASA plays a role in everything from yout daily weather report, to the produce you buy at your local market, to the velcro you use to fasten your shoes. Right yout congressman, your senator, your president. Tell them what you think NASA should be doing. Don't wait for an event like this recent tragedy to focus on the space program.
To get space profitable fast: Build a moonbase.
The cost of space is getting out of our gravity well, as most here point out. So let's build a moonbase instead.
Once there and operational, the rest of the solar system is open. The cost of getting from Earth to the Moon is actually higher than getting from the Moon to say Mars, or the asteroid belt.
Then refine the minerals on the moon and drop them down the gravity well for use on the earth.
In the long run it will probably be less expensive to produce minerals down here on earth. So why go into space at all? Mainly for the technological returns. An active space program generates technology for humans everywhere. And we are suckers for tech. Not only geeks and hackers, but the entire global economy are fueled by thechnology. If we don't want do go Amish we go to space. And we will. Eventually.
There's no question that the moon will get a base on her face sometime in the future. What language they will use in the command centre is uncertain though. It might be chinese, or hindu.
The question occures whether there is anything we can do in space in the foreseeable future that cannot be done using robotic instruments. This is probably much cheaper, financially, and certaily cheaper w/regard to costs on human life. Then there is the fact that for a long long long time, perhaps the only other interesting place humans can be able to visit (other than our now boring orbit) is Mars, where they have already sent a robotic instrument. What, the question arises, in Mars (for the foreseeable future) can we do that the Pathfinder cannot? Its likely to be much cheaper and easier in a hundred years. Perhaps its time we shelved Manned Space flight for a while?
Wasn't teflon developed to protect tubes used to process uranium?
Why, I'm so glad you asked. Teflon was first created by mistake by a researcher studying flourocarbon variants. The goal was fluids for refrigeration systems, not teflon. After a series of tests he found a strange waxy mass in the chamber. That was teflon.
It is worth noting that this is a perfect example of the sort of free-form experimentation allowed to proceed in an unplanned direction that NASA has proven so very bad at pursuing.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
1) NASA is the DMV of space travel. Go visit the DMV. You'll see what I mean.
We don't need a huge bureaucracy that makes more money from its failures than from its successes. We don't need a huge bureaucracy.
2) Complexity isn't why we need thousands of cross-checking engineers, thousands of cross-checking engineers is why we need complexity.
We don't need hundreds of tons of crap to get into orbit. We do need hundreds of tons of crap to make the job so big that only NASA can do it. I honestly believe that if NASA disappeared overnight (let's get those other astronauts down first, however), someone would be making money doing it faster, better, and cheaper within two years. A lot of people want to do it now, but when it's a government game, there's only one game in town.
And you have to know what the game is if you want to win. And we should want to win, since the prize is survival.
3) As to the "falling from orbit in an ablading pod" idea, that is way cool.
I'm on for that one, when do we leave?
as terrible as the event is, i can't help but be thankful that we have something to talk about besides war for a little while.
hrm....if we can just solve the loss of life problem, maybe we can distract Bush from the idea of war until he forgets about it.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
i'd be much more interested in the laser if the aliens are anything like the movie
A few years back, I was getting chemo and radiation treatment for cancer. I remember seeing some of the really bad cases (you know, radiation burns on their faces, lost teeth from the radiation, et al) and thinking, "Medicine is so barbaric."
I imagine we'll be saying the same thing about space exploration in 10-20 years. While our technology today is immeasurably more advanced than it was a century ago, I think it will look nothing short of barbaric to us in the not-so-distant future.
Sony ha
Mars Climate Orbiter is not part of Mars Global Surveyor!!! MGS is a separate, extremely successful mission.
The next stage should be putting an mashine on the moon that could produce more mashines. Once you have enough mashines, they could start producing usefull stuff like a moon base. Once we have the infrastructure on the moon, space exploration would be easy. The advanced electronics and people would come from the earth, propellant and other usefull things would be sent from the moon.
our advances are being thwarted by monopolizing corporations bent on slowing our progress for the sake of profits... humaniry is going no where, our space programs will be nothing more than concepts and wishful thinking.
Do we actually have something that is strong enough? Is it physically even possible that materials are that strong?
Have you heard of Chandra? HETE-2? MAP? SOHO? Mars Global Surveyor? Mars Odyssey? The Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer? I bet you haven't heard of some of them. I bet you didn't know that they were all successful. And, I bet you didn't know that I am leaving out a lot of missions!!!!
NASA has flown many extremely successful missions since Pathfinder. The press often doesn't bother to report on the successes, so you hear very little about them.
Slashdot's self-professed "experts" on spaceflight are really piss me off. People who have only gotten they're news about NASA from CNN coverage of Pathfinder and the loss of MPL and MCO act like they have a deep understanding of space exploration.
You don't. Go read up on this stuff in detail. There is a hell of a lot of information on this stuff on the web. Learn what you are talking about before you spew crap into the comment box.
"Space exploration" as we know it is done by astronomers and astro-phycisists who look up into the night sky and analyze composition of star-systems and their ages and distances and so forth. Sending 7 guys up in orbit in a tin-can is not gonna get us any closer to actually being able to go there, wherever "there" might be. It's too darn far away, it'll take too long.
I was so pissed off I didn't even reread my post. :) Sorry. :)
This would be a great way to use up all those old nukes from the cold war, would massively advance space exploration, and would fire peoples imaginations for generations.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
I'm sick and tired of my tax dollars going to a bunch of coyboys who manage to fanangle their way into a spacesuit for a free ride off the planet.
Space exploration currently provides me with little or no benefit and NASA is doing nothing to change that.
Spending some money for national defense and scientific experimentation is all well and fine, but blowing billions on some fucking idiotic space hotel that can be used by a handfull of space cowboy assholes is disgusting.
Columbus was bankrolled by the Queen of Spain because he was going after something of value - gold! What the hell does the American taxpayer get out of keeping some lackeys in a space station? Where's the return on the investment?????
Let private enterprises put up the money if they think there's a good reason for it, otherwise, let me keep my dime and spend it my way.
According to who?
It seems to me that humanity has managed to get through six thousand odd years of recorded history without being annihilated by a big rock. Mega-extinction class impacts happen on a timescale of tens to hundreds of millions of years. Smaller city- or country-busters can be expected on a timescale of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. While I do think that programs such as Spacewatch are an excellent return on measly investment, I also think that people who declare that the cockroaches' day of dominance will happen next week are resorting to hyperbole because they really, really want to holiday on the Moon. By all means let's have a robust space exploration program, but try not to bruise the truth too much while lobbying for it. The genuine desire to explore is a better and more honest motivator than Chicken Little-driven overstatement.
..Free Live Free...
Quite a few reasons, but the biggest one can be summed up in 2 words: SERIAL CONNECTION.
You'd only be able to lift one batch of cargo at at time. Yes, you could pipeline many of them, but they'd still all have to start at one point on the earth, and all go to a single destination. And any hiccup in one would stop all of them.
How would one lift these cargo loads, anyways? Well, electromagnetic techniques seem reasonable, but what if you took the resources it would require to build that 100,000-kilometer-long EM lift and split it into one thousand 100-km-long rail guns? They'd be able to shoot loads into space, in a variety of directions, each at the same rate as the single elevator. Which means you'd be able to put 1000 times as much stuff into space in the same amount of time. i.e. do it in PARALLEL.
Of course, you'd need a lot more power for each of these rail guns as the equivalent-length section of the elevator. But you know, they probably don't each need to be 100km. Maybe 10km? Also, maybe you don't need a thousand of them. Try 100. So probably for the same power expenditure, and 1/100th the construction materials, you'd be able to deliver freight/passengers into space at 100 times the rate.
One other thing people seem to forget about a space elevator: rotational inertia. As you raise cargo up, you're going to have to accelerate it laterally as well, or your elevator will get pushed backwards. So you'd either have to constantly be using thrusters on the base station at the top, or each load would need a rocket. Which negates the supposed "no dangerous fuel" advantage.
Something else to think about: why are automobiles so much more popular than trains?
Ok. Done ranting for now.
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
A flag on mars is a booster to all american/ world citizins. It shows what science can accomplish, something positive, and in the end, that is all that is going to matter.
What a sorry-ass comment. What does it matter if we launch a flag to mars or not. It's all about EGO - memememememeME FIRST. "Look daddy, I planted a flag on mars!" It's the same feeling as you get when your team scores in football. "WE scored! Yeeehaaw! (YOU suck)". One team steals energy from the other team. You might as well brag about being able to defend against another country (as you mentioned).
It's primitive and utterly meaningless. Basically nothing really matters, but you can make a big difference in the world by doing service to others. Not thinking of ME-ME-ME or US-US-US all the time. You'll be happier too.
... until we achieve practical nanotechnology or large-scale robotic assembly (both here and in orbit), that making space travel practical will simply be too expensive.
However, that having been said, making expensive incremental advances is the best we can do until then -- so we must keep plodding along.
But what I want to know is WHY haven't important advances like the linear aerospike engine developed for the X-33 been put to use? I thought NASA's job was to push technology forward, not to bury it. For those unaware of what a linear aerospike engine is, here's one small tidbit that helps explain its value: conventional rocket engines lose effectiveness as the ambient air pressure changes and must use expensive and complex nozzle geometry changes to minimize this. The linear aerospike maintains a near-constant efficiency from surface to orbit.
Before the X-33 program was folded amidst cries of bug-ridden technology and cost overruns (ostensibly due to a single fuel tank failure during testing -- remember the early problems with shuttle tiles? the Apollo 100% oxygen atmosphere that resulted in 3 deaths before everything was redesigned to become more flame-retardant? The X-33 fuel tank problems were a stalking horse designed to let the military take it over.), the linear aerospike performed flawlessly. And where is it now? Check the url above to see in what part of Boeing it resides.
And with the inherent weaknesses of the decades-old shuttle fresh in your mind, check out this link (originally from www.milnet.com, but now only available via the google cache) for the advantages the X-33 presented over the shuttle. The VentureStar might not have made as good a truck as the shuttle, but unmanned cargo rockets (like those the Russians do so well) are better vehicles to boost freight into orbit.
Perhaps when we have a Chinese space station passing over the US every ninety minutes the government will figure out that NASA has a role other than a place to take funding from to backfill budgets that cannot be supported on their own merits.
Eventually, when large scale robotic manufacturing and practical nanotechnology drive the cost of making things through the floor (assuming it doesn't bury us in grey goo), we'll be able to grow space elevators and put hotels and shopping centers in orbit (not to mention nanotech development facilities, zero-G hospitals and organ farms). Until that time, access to space will continue to be controlled/blocked by that servant of the people, the gummint.
While obviously you're kidding, you've actually got a valid point.
Look at the numbers in that potato cannon story. The velocities show that these days things we're used to thinking of as heavy duty are actually doable for as little as a thousandth the cost our government tells us it will take.
For example, as Jerry Pournelle keeps pointing out, our space suit designs are absurd and vastly better options are available for far less.
Hooo boy! Vacuum! Think again; don't call it vacuum, call it one atmosphere of pressure. A good pair of bike shorts handles that sort of differential just fine, including the famously troublesome issue of what to do at joints. Oh, no! Radiation! Yeah, whatever. Any good lab supply catalog sells gear able to handle that too.
The same can be said for piles of the stuff we're doing in space.
I've loved space travel since I was a wee lad, used to belong to L5, all that stuff. And one of the worst moments of my life was going down to Cape Canaveral and seeing a mothballed Saturn sitting out in the tropical wet and sun, reduced to a paperweight. All I could think of was how far we had declined.
What do I think? F*ck NASA. They've blown the whole deal of manned space flight. I say increase the X-Prize series and match it to the various rewards tied to milestones mentioned here and elsewhere.
Pay the Russians to boost the ISS for a few more years, push as much useful mass up beyond LEO to stable orbits as we can, hope that somebody creates a new Beal Aerospace and this time actually gets funding, and allow the shuttle system to swiftly decline into irrelevancy.
The shuttle is our modern Pony Express. Huge amounts of money and support structure supporting a tiny number of brave, dedicated folks running a breathtakingly inefficient transport system that was outdated on the day they had their first trip.
NASA does great pure science. They deserve every kind of credit for Pathfinder, Hubble, and all the rest. But they're not competent to run a high-volume transport system. It's like putting geologists in charge of Greyhound.
Let's move on. Only then will we move up.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
We spend all of this money as taxpayers to get Astronauts into space yet what is the point? I know we have space to thank for life changing discoveries like Velcro and juice in a fucking box but what else? I know there's more but the after we walked on the moon how have we raised the bar? Look how old the technology is that we are using. It's like sending Columbus to America on a home made Haitian raft. If we are going to do this and mean it then the technology has to be recent and not from around 30 years ago. It's amazing we haven't had more fatalities. NASA should have been researching and developing serious alternatives in propulsion along with a newer shuttle design and integrated this into something that should have already been tested. All I know is astronauts are a brave bunch. To risk dying just to get into space is ballsy to say the least.
This weekend I thought about the last few minutes of their lives and the gamut of emotions that ran through their bodies. Think about it. You're 16 minutes from a worldwide home coming and you can't wait to share all of your experiences with your loved ones and the world. You are ecstatic and your veins are pumping like they are filled with magma. In the blink of an eye you sense a disturbance and it doesn't feel right but you try to tell yourself that it's normal. After all with the flames wiping across the nose of the shuttle as you enter earth's atmosphere are anything but normal but it is expected. The shuttle starts to shimmy and shriek and your stomach drops. You tell yourself this isn't right. Your scared shitless. You hope you're dreaming but your not. The shuttle starts to rip apart and you can see through the cracks and stare at the dead space out of it. At this point you're not coming home, you're not going to get to say goodbye to your family, and you know you're going to die. You cannot believe what is happening and there's nothing you can do about it.
In an instant the cabin has depressurized and the inner workings and guts of the ship fly around at light speed. This is it. There's no changing the course of events and you have to admit to yourself that you are going to die. It's over right then and there. When you're going 12,500 mph and 200,000 feet up there isn't a miracle in the world that could save you. I hate to even think about the violence of the moment because it's nothing any of us can imagine for a second. This post isn't meant to offend, annoy, or disturb anyone. I am merely articulating what I envisioned when I saw it happen. It looked so nice a peaceful from 40 miles below but in all actuality there are things that happened up there that none of us could have imagined. My only hope is when they died that it was over quick. People with this type of bravery don't deserve to suffer. I just hope that this didn't happen from some pencil pusher's oversight on the damage to the wing.
My last thought on this subject is do you really think they believe that it would happen to them? You know the "it won't happen to me" way of thinking? They are in my thoughts, as well as their families, so the next time we go let's get it right. No more tiny experiments and orbiting at ad nauseam. If we have people willing to risk their lives and believe in this way of life so deeply then we need to raise our goals and go to places we have never been.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
-The Sun is in the middle of its life. That means it will not expand and die for another 4 or 5 billion years. Plenty of time if you ask me.
-Any asteroids or comets that are big enough to wipe out human life on Earth and that may one day collide with our planet will be discovered by the improving telescopes. To divert such a threat should probe relatively easy (and we don't need to send Bruce Willis to do the work, that is why we have unmanned spaceships that could put in position small rockets to divert any asteroid or comet).
If humanity still exists in lets say 2999990000 years they would still have at least 10000 years to solve the problem of the Sun expanding, which may be imperative by then.
To worry about that now is frankly childish.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
With all the sexiness RAID and Beowolf, why not apply the same reasoning to spacecraft?
Manned spaceflight is too expensive (in dollars and in lives) with current technology. Perfect unmanned technology first. Make it cheap and plentiful, so that one failure (or ten) would just be a percentage increase in cost instead of a major setback.
And since it's to be cheap, private industry should take the lead. How about some tax incentives?
The right thing would be to drop manned space exploration for the forseeable future, and put all the money on sondes and robotic crafts. This will give far more science for the money, and the spin-off techonolgy is also likely to be more valuable.
I know there is a lot of semtiments involved with manned space exploration, but I believe we need to put these aside, and consentrate on the science.
When the technology is cheap enough, or rich people are rich enough, a self-sufficient space turist industry may put back men in space, but until then, let the robots take over.
Let us pour our funds into NASA so that we may find our true lord, Xenu!
"The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as long as we live." - M.J. A
You're right. As much as loved reading about the Shuttle in "Popular Science" as a kid, I just can't imagine why we need orbiting humans at this particular point. Exactly what experiments do we need to do that require an on-site human operator? Can anyone think of something done on the Shuttle that has more scientific value than the probes sent Mars? Did Hubble require a Shuttle for delivery? I just don't see how any form of Earth-to-Space human transport can be scientifically worthwhile until said vehicle is as cheap and reliable as the automobile.
1. Remove G.W. Bush and vote someone who won't take away tons of money from (among other things) the space program to feed the militarys.
2. Educate people. More people should know why space related discoveries can affect positively their lives.
3. Make newer and safer vehicles. If the X-Series vehicle development stops now, it will be a huge waste of money.
And finally, let the space exploration be a way to make money too. How much would a company pay to have its name painted on something that goes into space?
I hate annoying and stupid advertising, but if putting a Nike or Adidas logo on a space boot during next Moon (or even Mars) human mission is the only way to save the underfunded space program -thanks again GWB-, well, I'd go for it.
There once was a town on the shore of a small harbor. Outside the harbor jetty were tremendous waves, but beyond the harbor entrance the sea was calm all the way to the distant islands on the horizon.
The townspeople wanted to explore those islands, and at one time they sent small, fast boats out past the waves to one of the islands, and discovered many great things. Amazingly, it only took them ten years of research to reach that distant island.
The waves were a problem though. Once they got past the waves, they could go anywhere they wanted, but coming back through the waves destroyed the boats. So the town's leaders decided that if they just built a fleet of large ships, they could go out and back through the waves many times easily. So the town used up all of their money to build these wonderful large boats.
The problem was, once past the waves...that was as far as the boat could go! It would motor around for a while, staying close to the entrance, then come back through the waves. It was a wonderful boat, to be sure, but the huge cost of building and sailing her left almost no money to build anything else! The large boat sailed for nearly 35 years, and never went anywhere. It just went outside the harbor and then back.
Over time, the concept of going to those far islands soon faded from everyone's mind because they had convinced themselves that this was "exploration", when they actually explored nothing more then the harbor entrance.
Occasionally the large ship would sink, and the townspeople would grieve for the loss of the crew. Sadly though, they were so blinded by large boat's wonderful technology, and so forgetful of what true exploration is, that they could think of nothing better then building another boat to sail around the harbor entrance. After all, it was all they knew how to do!
The distant islands were still there, filled with wondrous treasure, but the townspeople couldn't see them anymore, because the large boat was in the way.
It was sad, you know.....
If they had only lifted their eyes a little bit higher, the could have seen past the large boats to the islands beyond. They would have seen the treasure sparkling in the distance. They might have remembered what exploration really means. They might have populated those bright specks, they might have lived in heaven.
Listen, this is a tradgedy on par with the Challenger. But, I don't think we should suspend shuttle missions based on this new accident. Accidents happen... HORRIBLE accidents will happen... NASA will be sued for negligence and the plaintifs will win. But the win is a consequence of our sue happy socitey who believes if man is fallible, well, the least he can do is pay out. If we sacrifice the furtherment of knowledge we sacrifice our future.
Gentlemen,
This is so simple it's a wonder nobody thought of this sooner. We simply doctor up a report that indicates that Mars and a number of the more interesting objects further out in the solar system have unlimited amounts of oil, and that the nation which claims these resources first, will be able to dole them out to an oil hungry world with impunity.
I figure Dubyah and his cronies would start dumping money into NASA so fast, they'd need to hire an army of bean counters just to keep the finances straight.
Just an idea...
"To make an apple pie, you first need to create a universe..." -- Carl Sagan
"I will not exclude the option of using nuclear weapons in the Middle East..." -- Someone slightly less intelligent than an apple pie...
As pretty much everyone has commented, price is important. But safety I'd say is even more critical than price. What I would love to see is a new vehichle thats cheaper per launch as well as safer. I'd like to think our technological abilities since the 80s have improved enough where this can be pulled off to some degree.
An extended stay on the moon seems like it would be a good test prior to taking a trip to Mars. I think its been too long since we've gone there.
I wouldnt mind us paying for this by doing sattelite launches for comercial purposes etc, (ala Russia). The only requirement I'd put on this is that it should not impact scientific research or become NASAs priority.
But anyways ya, I'd give to space exploration if I knew it wouldnt be going to administrators paychecks but rather to new developments / research.
As a space buff I think NASA is an incompetent bureaucracy in its "manned" spaceflight area. I definitely would NOT give it a red cent for manned spaceflight.
The shuttle is actually 30 years old - it was signed off on in 1972, and finally flew in 1981 after several years of design and testing.
The best thing NASA could do now is shut down the shuttle program, splash the space station, and spend all its money on a "next generation" space plane which would be commercially viable to support tourism.
THEN space exploration and eploitation would really take off as market forces kick in and commercial dollars start flowing.
Until then, it's just a bunch of pig politicians and bureaucrats blowing our money on a program that's gone nowhere in 30 years.
Doesn't anyone believe in knowledge for knowledge's sake anymore. Any bit of knowledge learned is a step further for us.
Bush (or the next president) should announce a goal like Kennedy did. We need to send people into space cause we can. I think we should im for mars as well as build a moon base. If america doesn't then china or even india should. I am sure there were people saying the same sorts of things to Columbus before he left. Magellan died on his trip round the world but people kept going.
Everyone should read the book 'Case for Mars', its a great book outlining the ways we could get to Mars. Call me a geek but I think space is a great place for us to aim towards.
My thoughts are all jumbled but you get the idea. Don't give up on space or manned missions. NASA should definately have the Enterprise slogan as their own. To Boldy Go Where No man Has Gone Before! Beautiful. I would go to mars tomorrow if asked.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
To the stars Jim, to the stars
Have I been waiting for this day on Slashdot!
I know that this won't get modded up. First it is an anti-space exploration post (i.e. flamebait). Second, there are over 700 other posts out there - good luck moderators.
Anyway...
Here is the next direction NASA should take into space: they shouldn't send humans into it!
It is expensive.
It is dangerous.
It achieves little but inspiration for powerless/low social status techno-geeks.
Instead, our country should explore alternatives that advance science and technology as much as NASA uplifts our geeky spirits. There is, to my mind, only one true alternative to the wasteful, and hardly economically viable model of space exploration we currently have. That alternative is to explore and study the OCEAN.
Obviously, satellites, and mechanized thingamajigs belong in our country's arsenal of neato-exploration-based stuff. Their practical benefit is a widely heralded success.
However, the economic reality of sending people hurtling into the upper atmosphere and beyond, for a dubious "scientific" cause of "jus' cuz we can" is one that our country (and that no country on earth) can accept.
An intensive study of the ocean, based on the same sorts of ideas that NASA uses to explore space would yield inumerable direct benefits to commerce, defense, and concomitant scientific progress. Further, in terms of inspiring geeks, I can think only of the CS majors at my coastal university who I see walking alone on the beach, looking out to sea for answers. If we as a nation decide that our tax money ought to be spent in beneficial research and exploration into new frontiers, then, lone geeks on the beach everywhere, the ocean has the answers waiting for you.
Sorry, the space program didn't bring us everything that came after the wheel.
I'm not saying that there hasn't been much innovation or research, but it isn't ALL NASA.
Plastic was invented in the 1860's
Fully Synthetic in the early 1900's
Microwave ovens were "invented" in the 40's
Batteries were invented back in the 1600's
If Congress gave NASA $2 billion, that would be more then 10 billion less then their current budget of 12-15 billion annually over the last few years, not including the plan to double it.
I think that the space program should continue as it is, they will be a bit more careful, hopefully this won't happen that much more.
Realistically manned Space travel is dangerous, but there are thousands of people who would qualify, and who take the chances to keep going despite the risks.
People dying today is more important then cold temperature velcro performance. It is more important to the average voter, politician and to me.
So the failure rate of the first 113 flights was a little under 2 percent for the shuttle...
What do you think the failure rate was for the FIRST hundred or so manned atmospheric flights?
Manned space flight is still young, and you can call me a dreamer if you will, but I think it will get safer, and safer as time goes by and we gain experience, and we will continue to do so, it is human nature to want to explore. Accidents are unavoidable, no amount of preparation can prevent all accidents. Astronouts know this, and go up anyway, that is why you have to be brave to be one. Ultimatly sending people into space is the only way to get good at sending people into space.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
$600bn over 10 years.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
A google search for spaceplane turns up lots of articles. Another slashdot reader already recommended Gregg Easterbrook's 1980 article on Columbia's first launch. I guess one lesson from looking back on it is to take the claims of the designers with considerable skepticism. Fity or more launches per year? Cost a third or less per ton of the cost of single shot rockets? Ha.
Yet, I would guess that the general public was seeing the American shuttle as being a big success. I expect people will see it as a success again.
I like the idea of putting aerospace workers from the former Soviet Union to work. I like the idea of putting them to useful, peaceful, dignified work. I don't like the idea of them being owed six months of paltry back-pay. Not when some of them have skills developing WoMD.
I like Dennis Tito's answer to one of the questions he was asked when he returned from being the world's first space tourist. He was asked whether it was frivilous to spend $20,000,000 on a vacation, when the world faced terrible problems, like grinding poverty. He said something like:
I read an article some time ago, by a tourist, who knew something about aerospace, who dropped by the Buran that was being turned into a cafe, in Gorky Park, while it was still being converted. The security guard who stopped him, was quite knowledgeable -- because he was a former aerospace worker who had worked on Buran. This seemed like a terrible coincidence at first, a terribly ironic one.But then it turned out that the Buran cafe project was a project of the former Buran workers. They were all involved.
I couldn't help really feeling for these men and women. I imagined they had traded back-pay they were never likely to see for the Buran mockup they were turning in to a cafe. (Cafe patrons were going to get to order real cosmonaut space rations.) But they hadn't given up. They hadn't given up on aerospace. They hadn't given up their dignity. They hadn't given up on peace. They hadn't given up on their country.
The Soviet Union had a space program any former citizen could be proud of. I'd like to see their talents put to use. This isn't charity. They were talented.
Plus, there is the peace factor. Everyone is worried that "rogue states" are going to acquire weapons of mass destruction by subverting penniless former defense workers from the former Scviet Union. Well, why don't we address this issue by making sure they weren't left penniless?
Yes, I know organized crime is (was?) a terrible problem throughout the former Soviet Union.
Still, would the dollars, yen, euros of the international community be better spent in the former Soviet Union, where paying an aerospace worker $1000 a month would be a ten-fold pay increase, then in, let's say, the USA.
The USA, or more precisely, the US aerospace industry, is the land of the $1000 spanner. Let's be honest. That too, is a kind of corruption.
The US's milltary-industrial complex built many weaspons systems over the years. Do you know which one provided the greatest invulnerability?
That would have to be the one with a sub-contractor in every congressional district.
Everyone in the country you plan to passively attack with a really nasty(but not fatal) common cold, significantly reducing the life cost of war.
Held up for contravening BIO weapons agreements.
Why can't we develop low cost (life and money) disabling BIO weapons?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Cut NASA/lockheed/boeing budget and send the money to another company that can figure out better ways to get into space instead of being focus on better ways to obtain space funding.
An Apollo-style program could build a launch pierr .htm l
that extends out of the atmosphere but avoids the problems of an elevator; see details at
http://discuss.foresight.org/~josh/tower/towe
The shuttles work, they are proven. They are paid for. Yes they cost to maintain.. but so will *any* replacement.
Sure look for alternatives for the future, but don't act stupid now because of this.
Considering what they do they are safe. *Accidents* happen, it wasn't a fundamental design flaw, it was a damned ACCIDENT
Now the program will be on hold for years, and people will complain about safety, cost, bla bla and delay even longer.
Space travel is NOT safe.. Yes its sad this happened but its space travel things do happen.. geez get a grip.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One of NASA'a takes on why this may be technically feasible but impractical in reality hinges on the component of the ET that seems to have led to the recent tragedy: the foam insulation. It is rather fragile, and would be likely to shed lots of high-speed bits in orbit, creating a debris cloud that could make approaching it hazardous in the extreme. Even if you account for the fact that craft rendezvousing with it would approach the cloud at a small relative velocity, it's still a rather inconsiderate thing to do the the LEO environment. One suggested workaround would be to put the whole tank in a big sock to minimise such debris, but getting it over the outside of the tank would likely be orders of magnitude more difficult than any of the on-orbit construction that has taken place to date.
Also, the intenal pressure vessels are not equipped with human-sized ingress holes, so airlocks etc would have to be cut and welded to the structure whilst in orbit. This would be even more difficult than fitting the giant condom.
As for mining it for materials, to break it up would be hazardous as outlined in point 1, and there is currently no means of refining it into anything usable. To build an orbital facility able to process the thing would likely be so expensive that it would defeat the whole point of the exercise.
If these single-stage-to-orbit planes are so cheap, why has no one built them?
ESA has rockets, launches heavy sattelites and participates in the ISS. China is planning manned missions within 2003. Recently India nearly got a sattelite in Clarke orbit. Russia was a main factor in the space race for a long time. All these agencies would just love to surpass the US in space.
I doubt that NASA is merely a bureaucratic pork barrel, but even if it was, somebody else should have taken the chance on such a thing before. Why haven't they? Perhaps it's not that easy after all?
All that money can be better spent elsewhere.
Nah. When they're reading history books on Mars,
you can damn well bet that "How the nuclear bomb
changed history" will be somewhere between
"Invention of the stirrup" (Incredibly important,
but oft forgotten), "Black Plague wipes out much
of the European population", and "Second World
War". Lasers may or may not be important; they'll
probably show up in Boring Science 101. The moon
walk will probably get as much attention as
Hitler's invasion of Luxemborgue does now. If
it's lucky, as much attention as the Dutch colony
of New Amsterdam gets.
(Side note: When you say "The Moon Walk", which
one do you mean? There were more than one..)
Now that the shock of the Columbia's loss has set in and we are starting to put together what exactly happened, I was thinking to myself what NASA should do to increase mankind's presence in orbit and how to go about it. It is apparent to me that the current Space Transportation System (STS) is in need of replacement. The last time we tried to do that was under the Space Launch Initiative (SLI) under the Clinton administration. That program was a failure, not because of Clintons people, but because there were technological and monetary hurdles that couldn't be properly addressed. However there is a way to do this. Right now the STS fleet is grounded, so the immediate concern is how to keep the ISS in orbit and fully manned. Russian President Putin has promised to build more Soyuz space craft to insure ISS is manned and supplied. From what I've found, it cost Russian anywhere from 25 to 50 million bucks to launch a manned Soyuz and a little less for a Progress supply ship. I would propose that the US discontinue any crew transport missions for the Shuttle to ISS and pay a significant portion of the money needed to keep Soyuz ships flying to ISS instead. If these ships cost 50 million bucks then there is a savings of 450 million bucks for each transport (the Shuttle cost 500 million to fly). When the Shuttle is back on it's feet, it should ONLY fly construction missions to finish the ISS. The the STS should be retired. That begs the question, what do we do with 450 mil for each flight that doesn't go? Since there are typically 6 or 7 flights by the Shuttle per year, about half of them are for significant construction of ISS. So we are looking at a savings of nearly 1.5 billion per fiscal year. THAT money should be invested in a completely new Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) space shuttle like the X-33 was meant to be. But that's not all. In order for space travel to become affordable, space vehicles must become more affordable. Building 5 space shuttles cost the taxpayers between 3 and 5 billion for each one (the Endeavor cost 3 billion because it was built from spare parts). If we could build say 20 or 30 space shuttles, the cost could possibly be cut in half or perhaps more. NASA doesn't need 20 or 30 shuttles, however, if we could get the European Space Agency (ESA), the Russians, the Japanese, Aussies, and even the Koreans to join up with the promise of owning their own shuttles, the cost could be easily be spread out. You see, the Europeans would get out from under NASA's shadow which they have for so long hated. They wanted to build a ship back in the 80's called the Sanger but they didn't have the money for it. The Europeans don't have the experience of space travel that we or the Russians do but they do have a lot of technology and engineering that they can bring to the table. The Russians are obvious additions because of their experience. What they can't bring to the table in money, they can definitly bring in know how. The Japanese have always wanted a manned space program but they too don't have the money to foot the bill all the way. In addition, their rocket program has suffered many setbacks. The Koreans would look on this as national pride IMO and rightly so. We of course know more about Shuttles than anyone and of course can bring more money to the table. America would still have it's leadership role in the project but would still have to work with members of the coalition. You see, I no longer see space exploration as an American dream. This is a HUMAN endeavor. We as Americans (or Russians) just happen to be better at it than anyone else. If we build a shuttle or two that can haul cargo and personnel to low Earth orbit in a cost effective manner, we will see more and more people going and that is the goal. Get more up there so we can do more. NASA has already learned that it needs to get out of the space launching business and get into the Space Exploration and Space Science business. NASA was essentially going to sell the Shuttles to the United Space Alliance and lease them back. The USA was going to maintain the Shuttles and NASA pilots were going to fly them. NASA needs to get away from the space monopoly that it has created so that competition can be built. The same thing happened when NASA got out of the satelite launching business after the Challenger disaster. Getting people to compete and getting a new reliable shuttle with the world behind it will establish a firm foothold in space for the human race. Right now we have had our foot in the door for too long and last Saturday it got jammed. Now it's time to kick open the door and step inside. Once we have a firm foundation in orbit and on the moon, then we can procede to the Planets and the stars.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
yeah, what a great idea. Lets fix humanity, and then just hope humanity doesn't self destruct.
*that was sarcasm*
no, really, the only way we are going to propogate ourselves as a species is to start moving to other planets. If we don't spread, any little jackass with a few nukes can ruin it for all of us.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
They used clusters of a very simple rocket to hoist very big loads. But they ultimately fell under pressure from the soviet-union and the united-states...
No wonder the clunky shuttle and the wasty coho3 are the only game in town...
Want to get costs down and start using the latest technology in space travel? Open space to private investment.
It is already clear from Russia's work that people will spend big bucks to get into space. Those people also want safe flights with good technology. Let them develop the tools, and it will make space cheaper for all of us.
Kelso(reading a magazine): "Man, chicks must love Astronauts, it says here they get all the tang they want."
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Listen, I don't mean to sound intelligent or anything, but I when you say you've done "extensive reading" since the Columbia blew up, keep in mind that your "extensive reading" has taken all of two days. There are people out there in The World (i.e. not sitting at their computers reading Slashdot) who have been following the U.S. space program for decades. Call me skeptical, but I think that in order to qualify as "extensive", your reading had better go on for a bit longer.
Do you need twice as big military buddget?
Does Russia need twice as big military budget?
Does Iraq need twice as big military budget?
Who actualy needs all this military junk?
Are you serious about military suffering?
Wha...
Much as I would love to see a space elevator, I shudder by the thought of how bad it will go if it does: Let's say the anchor asteroid gets disconnected at the top end. The elevator will fall down and wrap itself around the whole of Earth's equator! Can you imagine the consequences?
I'm sure many won't like this, but what about civilian travel. The Russians got $20 mil a pop for a ride in a noisy capsule. Imagine what you could get for a ride in the Shuttle. Hell, take out all of the science, build a passenger compartment in the payload bay and put 20 people in it. 20x20 mil = 400 million. If I recall, it currently costs $500 million per launch the shuttle, including astronaut training and maintenance. If you're payload has no science, you'll save the money on developing the experiments and you won't have to train as many astronauts. The "passenger" compartment can be isolated from the cabin so you don't have to train the "dumb civilians".
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Perhaps what you meant to say is 'away from the center of the earth'.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
It's not an idea that appeals to me intuitively, but maybe the thing to do is back off from manned flight for a decade or so. This frees up a huge amount of money for unmanned projects, in orbit, on the moon, on Mars and beyond. Those projects will need launchers, and it would not be hard to nudge things a little so that some of the projects needed largish launchers and some needed reentry vehicles for relatively fragile and large cargo.
With a much bigger market and modest encouragement, new launchers will be developed that are cheaper, more reliable, easier to manage and so on. They might be wholly or partly reusable, they might not. They might use exciting new technologies, they might just refine existing ones.
Once this has happened we can pick the most reliable, proven heavy-lift and reentry systems and essentially put a passenger capsule inside them. The vehicle would already have a track record before we put people in it. Then we can go back into space in a saner fashion.
Given this blueprint for the next 20-30 years (and a lot of exciting science and commercial activity from the unmanned space program) a moderate amount of money could also go into a longer-term research program developing new concepts and materials for the 30-100 year timescale.
Steve
One of the reasons that many of the military projects continue is that we are afraid of losing the experienced people who build these projects.
The SeaWolf submarine is an excellent expample. We don't really need the new subs but if we don't build at least a couple of them, all of the engineers and craftsmen that build them will be out of a job and more on. Some of the needed skills will be lost forever.
It seems to me that we could use the space program to help to keep the people employed and the skills up to date. Keep bright minds and talented hands busy while getting the benefits of science and exploration.
I'm sure that I am making it sound simpler than it is but we could divert some of the money that is being used for unneeded military projects and maybe get something more useful out of it while still preserving the high tech skill sets that we need.
20 launches of the shuttle at $250 a pop would pay all of the R&D for retrofitting an existing rocket design to fly manned missions. (The Gemini spacecraft was launched on a modified ICBM btw.)
In the meantime, all efforts should be made to find some other way of getting crap into space. The shuttle is, and has been for it's entire existance, a sucking sound for American taxpayer money.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The X-38 provides a blend of some proven methods, along with newer technologies. It takes advantages of the materials science, aviation, and computer imporvements over the last thirty years. It can act as a real-world demonstrator for these technologies, that can later be rolled into the next vehical. Plus, some of the burden could be taken off the shuttle for crew transfers and basic science.
Speaking of science, the ISS should be expanded to allow a full crew of seven. One common critique of the station is that there is not enough crew to do meaningful science. This seams plausible: if a diverse skill set is required for some of the experiements, a larger crew would be the logical fix. By having the crew and capability to perform experiments, launching shuttles, with large cargo bays for space labaratories, will not be required for pure science.
Gradually, as the station is built, the dependence on the older shuttle is reduced, the newer vehicals (starting with the X-38) can take up most of the work of transfering crews and experiments. Progress can do the initial work for providing supplies. As other demonstration systems (X-43, other runway-to-space type of sytems) become more viable, unmanned versions can take on supply delivery roles. Grandually, as experience with these grows, manned versions can take over for the X-38.
Truethfully, this is the way it should have been all along. An evolution of systems is how both technological improvments and economical capabilities are realized. Unfortunately, the entire history of manned has been one of fits and starts. Since the first shuttle launch, it's replacement has been proposed, funded for a while, then cut. A year or two later, we start again. A commitment is going to have to be realized.
A historical note: it has always been this way. Way back when, we were going to create a spaceplane known as the X-20 DynaSoar. It would have launched on a conventional rocket, and landed like an airplane. However, the space race forced us to use Mercury capsles first. Then, JFK decided we should go to the moon. Rather than creating a sustainable space capability, we created Apollo. What if we had stuck with the X-20?
Who are these things going to be used to protect the US against ? When was the last major sea battle the US was involved in.
These are classic cold war elements, saying that you HAVE to have X when you aren't saying why is just stupid. The US has the largest of everything, why continue with these convential programmes over intelligence funding. The US is building an armed force to fight the USSR. Sadam is NOT going to come CLOSE to stretching this technology.
So bollocks that this stuff is "required" its subsidising the defence contractors who support Bush....
Oh but then increasing funding to NASA would also go mainly to the companies mentioned above.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
To replace the one damaged in the crash.
Apparently the writers of The Simpsons are designing the experimental payloads.
Syntax error: loose != lose, affect != effect, then!=than
I truly believe that we should stop the space program for aleast 20 years. by then technology should be advanced enough and cheap enough for all to go on a vacation to the sunny side of the moon.
I'd say what we should do is get a mile long (Or 3 mile long, or 5 mile long, or however long it takes to get up to speed) linear acceleartor. We use it to launch material capsules into space for essentially nothing after the cost of construction. Then we make some remote controlled robots designed for constructing things in space. We launch them up the same way in big shock resistant containers that burst open and are then also used as building materials. Then we set the robots to work building us a superlight craft in space. Once the construction is complete we launch its payload via the L.A., the payload consistes of all of the equipment we can think of that would be useful for terraforming a small chunk of the moon or mars. Then we send the ship there, also remote controlled. Land it, remotely control the construction of a habitat, populate the habitat, continue to build ships with this method. Once we have 3 or 4 of them they can pretty much ferry back and forth between levels of earth orbit carrying supplies to the moon base. The moon base people work on finding water or raw materials on the moon. If we find water they set up a slow but steady method of converting it into fuel (hydrogen) if we find raw materials then we boost the water or hydrogen and they start setting up manufactoring facilities to create the materials for more ships. At some point we dismantle most of the freight carrying ships and rebuild them into one much larger ship designed to hold 200 or so people. We get those 200 or so people. In the meantime though we are now launching freighters out to mars to drop supplies down to the planet as well as robots, solar factories, anything we can think of that will help make a small piece of mars habitable. Once we've got a couple hundred people, a mars that is covered in supplies, and a very lage ship we set out for Mars establish a colony there and begin the research to make larger sections of it habitable as well as searching it for water/raw materials to use in constructing that habitat.
Now we build a few booster heavy tugs in orbit, find a convenient asteroid and pull it into orbit around Mars (or just land some miners on one of the Moons of mars) and start extracting raw materials from that to continue habitat constructions. This plan puts us well on our way to permanent residency on Mars, and I'd say it will take about 75 years to complete. If I were lucky I could see us land on Mars and establish that colony base before I die...
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Okay, I'll simplify everything I'm going to say right now. Learn the actual economics and physics of the situation, because your ideas are wrong.
It takes about a week to launch something via a space elevator, so pipelining means you can launch as many payloads as you have climbers, basically. This puts you FAR above the capabilities of rocket-type launchers.
Also, the reason people "forget" about rotational inertia is that it doesn't apply. You're stealing rotational inertia from the Earth to speed things up. Gravity keeps it from slowing down.
Let NASA experts decide?? Example: 2 proto types were built for the Joint Strike Fighter 1-lightweight on time under budget only a couple minor design issues 2-heavy slightly over budget overly complex disign Which one wins: Answer: the one with factories in the most congressional districts. (#2 lockheed martin)
Would one or possibly two B2 bombers buy a space shuttle?
Not that I advocate that we should actually buy another shuttle. I'm just trying to put the cost into a certian perspective.
After the Challenger was destroyed, and Regan signed the bill to build another shuttle, I seem to remember the cost as being about $2.4 Billion (probably in some late 1980's dollars). Since we spend about $2 billion on a B2, I was just wondering if two B2's more than buy a shuttle vehicle?
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
Wait...been there, done that...or have we?
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
For starters, I'd like to see the X-33/VentureStar program get back on track. The Aerospike engine was a phenomenal success, IIRC, and the only problem they had was that of the composite fuel tanks. (If they go with standard aluminum tanks, they lose like 90% of their payload.) I'd like to see that program reactivated and the composite fuel tank problem solved.
:-)
Also, a "from orbit" escape system wouldn't be a bad idea. Set up a "mini" space station that orbits in the same general area as the new shuttle system. Said mini station would merely be a truss (similar to what they've been putting on the ISS), with two Apollo-style capsules attached, a solar panel system to keep the capsule systems warm and the batteries charged, and a small set of OMS thrusters to automatically maintain the station's orbit. This way, if an orbiter is ever damaged on the way up again, and it's uncertain whether or not it will survive re-entry, it can dock with this, the crew can return to Earth in capsules, and a later servicing flight can come up to repair the orbiter and replace the capsules.
I'm not sure we can cease shuttle flights altogether, and I also think it's important to remember that Columbia was the oldest in the fleet and on the verge of being retired. I think we have to keep flying Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavour for the time being. Along those same lines, I'm also an advocate of "Big Can" construction projects in orbit. It's a clever hack.
I also think it would be dangerously stupid to build just a reusable launch system again. The Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) are extraordinarily powerful and extremely reliable, and we're in need of a good heavy-lift booster system...especially if we're going to do what NASA needs to do in the near future -- the Moon and Mars. A system similar to what Robert Zubrin proposed in A Case for Mars would be great: basically, a space shuttle launch stack without the space shuttle, and the primary tank fueling four SSMEs. I believe this would allow you to throw ~200 tons into LEO, but I don't have the book in front of me.
Once a new reusable launch system and heavy-launch system are in place, I'd give the last three shuttles a final flight into orbit, with return capsules for the crews. Once in orbit, they ought to be stripped down and overhauled for use as orbital "tugboats"...
And lastly, start going somewhere again...first the Moon, then Mars and the asteroids...then...who knows?
blog |
Just looking at how things work.com. The article on the space elevator says they could build it for $10 Billion. What a small amount of money. Espcially when the US military gets some thing like $380 billion. Come on US gov. priorities!!!
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
The Apollo Luner Module development was the driving force behind development of the integrated circuit. At one time, 90% of all integrated circuits in the _world_ were in its landing computers. And we all know how important integrated circuits are in our modern PCs...
On a slightly different vein, I applied for a job after graduation with the company that is/was developing the Crusader artillary system. I asked several different people in their organization if there was any way that their work could have civilian application. The answer was always "No" and I never worked there.
I didn't (and still don't) wan't to work for a company that _only_ provided new means of destruction--even if it was to "defend" my country. IMO, we get a higher return on money spent by NASA's than money spent by the defense department when you measure by bennefits to society (I don't count new ways of killing people as a bennefit).
science is a religion
Any ideas for a not-for-profit space exploration engineering group?
Funding and donations would go into protecting the research and making it publicly available. I'm sure there are a number of difficulties in making something like this work.
What do you think?
Since the Columbia tragedy, I have also wondered which direction NASA should take with future missions. In the course of my investigation, I found this paper, commissioned by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts in 2000, that claims that a space elevator is not only technologically feasible, but is possible to build within the next 15-20 years at a cost of approximately $40 billion US dollars. This would be a tremendous project, but on the same scale as other large American engineering feats.
It seems that such a promising technology, which would not only decrease launch costs by orders of magnitude but also result in many 'spin-off' technologies, would be at the top of NASA's list of research topics. However, I can find no evidence that NASA has pursued the idea since. I am not advocating that we start building a space elevator tomorrow; however, I think it would be horrible for NASA to shelve a radical but potentially remarkable invention for another 50 years. How can we encourage NASA to, at the very least, begin a second round of research to independently and skeptically study the results of the first team and put together a plan to actually build this, if possible? Or is the American space program doomed to another 50 years of risky and minimally rewarding shuttle flights?
And if nobody else said so, thanks.
Well, we're finally getting to the point where we probably COULD fake video images of people in space, on Mars, etc. Let's put together some fake "manned" missions to Mars, the moon, etc. for TV, and spend the exorbitant budget on actually doing science using relatively low cost and low risk methods. Better yet, let's do a "Wag the Dog" Iraq war as well, and maybe we could actually balance the budget, not to mention keeping animators working.
is there any truth to such things as wormholes like you see in star trek all the time? If we could find one of those, we could easily explore the galaxy, and beyond.
I have my doubts on it, but is there anything physically holding us back?
I agree, why are so many contributors here so pesamistic when it comes to NASA's space program. I think two accidents (not deliberate I might add), out of 88 missions is a formidable statistic considering all cosmonauts and astronauts agree that space travel inherently comes with these types of dangers and risks.
Consider what percentage of fatal accidents occur with traveling in an automobile which most people agree should be inherently safer but is apparently not.
I hope at least that all these people that are arguing that the NASA STS program should be shut down are consistant and oppose stem cell and cloning research programs.
reassign null to be the tape device - it's so much more economical on my time as I don't have to change tapes_BOFH
Yeah, really!
"Reach low orbit and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System."
-Robert A. Heinlein
Instead of OT3H shouldn't it be OTGH? Let's see all of those "The Mote in God's Eye" readers chime in with the decipherment. :-D
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
The elevator would be the cheapest and most flexible option once constructed. But more importantly, developing the elevator is really contingent on only one new technology - the material the ribbon is made of. And that can be conducted down here on the ground. Even if it fails to meet the requirements the basic materials research should still be viable and useful here on earth - like velcro, except with major industrial applications.
Of course you shouldn't put your eggs all in one basket.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Scrap manned space exploration entirely for the next half century and use the money to build lots and lots of unmanned probes instead. For work in earth orbit, build better telepresence systems.
And we aim to keep it that way. The only way to stay ahead is to keep moving forward.
Yet, when people deviate the tiniest bit from conventional war you are entirely helpless. It took a few men armed with boxcutters to take down your biggest buildings. With all your military power and those hundreds of billions of $, after a year and a half you still haven't been able to locate the people who ordered that. Your people is subjected to irrational fears and obnoxious harrassment daily. Why would the enemy fight and lose a conventional war when they can fight and win using unconventional means?
And the real way to waste money on the military is to do it half assed.
Wrong. The real way to waste money on the military is to give it to them. Or do you have any idea on how giving more money to the military could have averted 9/11 or help capture the Al Qaeda leadership?
In four days?
We wouldn't have to worry about rocket ships ruining the nice blue sky. :-D
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
From the 1980 Washington Monthly article referenced above...Outlines the myriad of technical challenges inherent in the Shuttle concept
Some suspect the tile mounting is the least of Columbia's difficulties. "I don't think anybody appreciates the depths of the problems," Kapryan says. The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as "safe life." That means there is no back-up for them. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry. If enough fall off, the shuttle may become unstable during landing, and thus un-pilotable. The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space. (Verdict: Can't be done. You can hardly do it on the ground.)
According to the computers, as long as you can bring the shuttle back into the atmosphere, you can fly it to the airfield even if the tiles are damaged. Former Apollo astronaut Richard Cooper doubts the computers know what they're meeping about. Many of the projections are based on the magnificent accuracy of the Apollo landings. Apollo went to the moon, came back, and dropped all its little manned modules into a target area about the size of Los Angeles International Airport. But Apollo modules were ballistic projectiles. They were slightly asymmetrical and thus had a little lift for control, but basically they fell like well-aimed stones. The science of ballistics is much more precise and predictable than the art of flying. To assume that experience with one is the same as experience with the other is to confuse a slingshot with a seagull. The only way to find out about something as big and balky as Columbia, Cooper says, is to launch the thing and see what happens. Computers have never flown with the unpredictable combination of damaged tiles that a shuttle may experience. They've never been whacked by a sudden, nonprogrammed gust of jetstream wind. They've never flounced like a twig on the crazy rapids of "bias"--the bland physics term for unexplained variations in the earth's gravitational and magnetic fields. These are the wild, uncharted rivers of space. Unknown; unknowable; beyond programming. To find out if your ship can cope with them, you have to take it up there.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. - HST
because the O-rings in its solid-fuel boosters leaked
because the boosters are made in two pieces
because the boosters have to be transported by rail and barge
because the boosters are manufactured in Utah
because the money to run the Shuttle has to be sprinkled across as many Congressional districts as possible (see here and here, especially the list of subcontractors at the bottom of the second one).
Before Challenger, the Air Force was planning to have a Shuttle fleet of its own, operating out of Vandenberg AFB. The Air Force Shuttle's boosters were going to be made all in one piece, on site, and would have been stronger and lighter than the reusable Shuttle SRBs, allowing more payload to orbit. They wouldn't have been reusable, but I doubt they would have been a lot more expensive when you factor in the costs of recycling SRBs (recovery, transport to and from Utah and refurbishing).
As usual, when you show Congress an engineering versus safety decision, it will choose the option that spends the most money in the most districts.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Did you even read the article you linked to?
The chart on that page clearly shows that Buran was approx. exactly the same size as the Shuttle, with an additional 5k pounts of lifting capacity (25,000 pounds vs 30,000 pounds), presumeably due to not having to lug the main engines everywhere it goes.
Not to mention the heavy lifting capacity of the Energiya system. It could do a Skylab, a Mars vehicle, most of the IIS in one go without risking human life. How are we supposed to send up a Mars vehicle currently? Titans? Stick it in the Shuttle bay?
To build any replacement for the Shuttle will take at least 10 years.That is pretty much a fact. Look how long it took to make the B-2, F-22 or the shuttle.We should not stop flying in space for the next ten years or longer. We need to find the cause and fix the problem and keep flying.Plans for a follow up shuttle should have been made the day the first shuttle flew.Plans for a next generation suttle should have been started in 91. If we are going to be space then we need to treat it as a long term project.
I will bet you that Intel is working on several generations of future CPUs right now. Do not belive the evil lieing pundents when they tell you it is too risky. More people die drilling for oil, mineing coal, building buildings, and driving to get a quart of milk every year than ever died in space travel. The do not care about lives it is ALL about the money.
For god's sake. We have to set up a moon base, with a semi-permanent population, much like the Antarctic. There would be just enough gravity to make life bearable yet not a significant gravity well for take-off. A unit set up on either pole would have good sunlight for energy and clear line comms with earth. We could learn a vast amount there for future colonists to take to Mars etc. Junk that stupid space station!
The federal government owned all of the railroads. They subsidized the laying of track and paid for the construction of majority of the rail infrastructure. And they then turned it over to private industries. They regular the locomotives, but they don't own them.
They built the road system but turned its use over to private industry. They don't own or operate the majority of the vehicles on the roads.
They built airports and runways but the government's planes rarely use the public airports and most of the planes in the sky belong to private industry.
When then, after 50 years, is the government nearly the only entity pushing into space? They ought to set up public spaceports for private industry to use for satellites. Sure, sure, private organizations can get permits to put stuff in orbit, using their own rockets, even. But what about manned flight? What about a private company that may want to let customers purchase rocket rides to the upper atmosphere for a photo-op?
The time has come for the privitization of space travel. The problem with letting people check a box to contribute taxes towards the space program is that we have to then install an entire new financial infrastructure to facilitate that. You know how bad the government is at that kind of thing. It'll cost you 80 cents of every dollar you contribute to get it to NASA.
NASA has an opportunity to capitalize upon an aging generation of baby boomers who all grew up wanting to be astronauts. "Kids these days" don't have that same romanticism with the space program. It's always been there. There's always been a shuttle or some contraption orbiting the planet. There've always been satellites, it's always been easy, and it's rarely cost anybody their lives. "Kids these days" were born 5 to 10 years AFTER Challenger. They don't remember it. They read about it in school and approach it with the same distance that we do when we were told about the myriad failures of early manned rocketry, and the men who died trying to advance the science.
But the people who grew up watching Armstrong walk on the moon are now approaching retirement and have money to burn. Why is NASA not auctioning off old pieces and parts to the boomers? How many men with dashed dreams of space flight are in their 50's and would love to have a spac e sovenier (sp)? Lots.
Could the private sector launch a business based upon sending daring citizens on a trip around the planet in a small capsule - orbit a few times, snap some pictures, splashdown? The government could require the purchasing of a license for this sort of activity with the monies earned going towards the space program.
NASA seems to have become stagnant. They've had some impressive missions lately, extending the use and life of some of their craft (landing that probe on the asteroid was awesome). Where's the creative thinking? There's a lot of good scientific and theoretical work going on in the private sector, it's time for the government to unlock some of NASA's responsibilities, redefine the role of the space agency, and turn over some of these duties to the private sector.
It's no mystery that the private sector can handle almost any task at a much, much lower cost than the government.
The shuttle needs to be relegated to cargo hauler duty. It has the capacity for it. It was designed to fill too many roles and the only one it's really good at is hauling heavy stuff. Use it as a personell transport to the space station. Dock one up there to replace the Soyez as the escape vehicle. There's only 3 left. Keep one on the ground, one at the station, and one active. It's a shame we had to lose the Columbia, it had just undergone a nearly complete overhaul - new computers, new wiring, new everything. Anyway, outfit one for escape transport, one for cargo, and leave the other open for science and repair missions.
And then focus NASA on implementing technologies to establish jump-points for moving further away. Step 1: get to the space station, refuel, resupply. Step 2: get to a smaller station orbitting the moon, refuel, resupply. Step 3: move to a further station in far orbit, and then on to Mars. Or whatever. I'm no scientist. Governments sponsor exploration. We've already explored the area where the space station lives. It's time for the government to turn it over to private industry and focus on exploring further out. Sending probes to Europa is NASA's job. Ferrying food and water back and forth to the ISS should not be. The private sector can do it, and cheaply.
I know the general public finds thrills in both robotic and human missions; the real problem has been the ultra-cautious and pork-laced patterns in which NASA has been forced to play by congress for the last few decades.
Energy: time to change the picture.
I'm surprised no one mentioned using
a combination of balloons and our
current tech to achieve a higher performance
launch platform.
Essentially, several massive balloons ( 1-2
miles in diameter ) would be anchored
above a fixed location at an altitude of
150,000 feet. Smaller, tethered, balloons,
would be used to lift loads to the platform.
To offset the weight imbalance (a shuttle
weighs a bit), there would also be an assist
from the stable platform (think of it as
a very high crane with the loads weight partially
offset by smaller balloons).
Launching from 150,000 feet would allow you
to use much less fuel.
Also, this platform could be used as an
endpoint for a space elevator.
In theory, a sufficient large balloon or
balloons could be constructed to float
to the very edge of space ( 55 miles).
These large balloons ( 15-20 miles in diameter)
would use heated hydrogen to encourage the
very slight bouyancy needed to 'float' to
the top of the wispy atmosphere).
The sole purpose of these balloons would be to
act as endpoints for NEO type activities.
They'd be barely capable of holding a 30 mile
cable and a small transport module to get
human passengers from the 25 mile high platform
to the 55 mile high platform.
Use a railgun to boost real cargo into orbit.
Eventually, the balloon platforms provide the
basis for the space elevator.
I think it'll be a long time before we can film Clarke's _The Fountains of Paradise_ entirely on location. Even if we have lab. samples of the materials, there's a whole lot of engineering to do. We already know how to build a shuttle, and after two decades we probably know how to do it a lot better, either from scratch or by evolving the existing design.
As for voluntary contributions to support NASA, why bother with tax checkoffs? Just send them money. Maybe gather a few volunteers and set up a foundation to aggregate contributions and send a few large checks instead of a zillion small ones. It would be an interesting way to find out how much value people really place on space exploration and exploitation.
Personally, I think the Russians had it right with Buran. Decouple the launch mechanism from the orbiter. Putting the SSME's in the shuttle increases vehicle complexity, and makes development of a replacement launcher prohibitively expensive. Could we have rebuilt the Shuttle launcher around an Atlas V rocket stack? Or revive Energiya or something like it?
The problem is that we have no vigourous leadership, no vision of where we ought to go or what we ought to do. Apollo succeeded not only because of cold-war pressures, but because there was a goal and a deadline.
We need a national or world leader to step in and challenge us to achieve the impossible.
I know this is way at the end of the discussion, but it doesn't look like anyone's saying it. To my mind, the problem with re-engaging human exploration of the solar system is that it all needs to be done a little bit at a time: we can't just say "build the Mars transit vehicle, here's the money" and expect it to be done directly.
I think a case can be made that the most interesting activities of the current space program are the Hubble space telescope, followed by the Voyager missions. And when I think that they launched the Voyager craft 30 years ago, with only planetary objectives, I just feel lucky that they're out there.
So what I think should be done is to re-fund something along the lines of the Pluto Kuiper Express mission, but equip the craft for some serious extra-solar science. And an energy source and transmission capabilities appropriate for a very long distance/time. Shoot, screw Pluto, maybe just send it out of here as fast and direct as possible.
Honestly, I want to send something up that makes my son say in 2040, gee, dad, I'm so happy your generation decided to launch that, we're getting such cool data and it's so far away...
NASA does fine at exploration. Exploration is the sort of blue-sky project that governments are best at (think how much the Lewis and Clark expedition cost in 2003 dollars).
Speaking as a Rocket Scientist who used to work at NASA, however, I can tell you first hand they SUCK at being a bus company. There's too much politics, too much money to be scarfed up by unscrupulous contractors, and too many bureaucrats feeding at the trough.
I say let NASA continue to oversee science and do exploration, but find a way to bring private enterprise into to the bus business. There are a lot of possiblities here. Some of the most serious roadblocks to private enterprise are things that the government can fix: insurance, loan guarantees, launch permits and facilities and so on. NO SUBSIDIES! Let the markets work. Just help private enterprise crack open new markets and give them a chance to embark on projects that don't have to be profitable in the first five years.
It's pretty simple, really, but it's going to take serious, undistracted leadership and I don't see it coming soon.
where should space exploration go? SPACE! duh!
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
So what has happened to all these great ideas? Stifled (so far) for lack of public support! Write your senators and representatives - tell them you believe NASA needs a clear new mission! It doesn't require much or any increased funding - it just needs to get NASA up out of the pork-barrel mire it's been stuck in by Congress for the past 30 years!
Energy: time to change the picture.
My father-in-law used to work for Lockheed Martin, a major government contractor. The company competes in the free market only in theory. It's fat from government subsidies, and he's got dozens of stories of wasting millions of dollars like water.
This is exactly what we don't need. The plant where he worked switched locations (constructed entirely new buildings) 3 times in ten years. If my employer tried to do that, we'd be out of business in an eyeblink - and we have record profit.
The cost, both financial and human, of keeping people alive in space is too high. NASA should work on the technology, but improve it substantially before using public monies to keep even a few individuals alive in space, spending most of their time idle, sick, or both. Robotics have long offered an underfunded alternative to Buck Rogers. Lighter in weight and not requiring life support, robots can do more to bring the space experience home to the public, by providing superior visual and environmental data. It is simply not a responsible use of the technology at our disposal to proceed with the status quo. We must soberly face the limitations of that technology and embrace its strengths. Robotics.
Why is it short sighted to do only robotic exploration?
I'll try to list some reasons below:
There is so much more, but I think this is a good start to a whole bunch of arguments that need to be made regarding a robotic-only push.
Don't get me wrong, I think that robotic missions are useful, and to use robots as scouts for eventual human exploration are going to a permanent part of space exploration, and have been from the beginning with Sputnik.
However, I want to be able to give my children and (future) grandchildren the opportunity to live and work in space, and I genuinely want to see some of my posterity to even be born somewhere that does not have an address on this Earth. When children are born on the moon and refuse to go back to the Earth (you mean that disgusting polluted place where you feel so heavy), I will feel that the dream of having people spread out among the start will be fulfilled. I'll take that frontier with my kids and spread out, and you can keep the Earth. Just don't go crying to me or my kids if the Earth gets destroyed.
We've pretty much ruined the ecology of this planet, racing to deplete and exploit any natural resources w/o serious concern for long-term effects and implications for our own survival here. Western "civilization" has done more to destroy this planet in the past two hundred years than ever imagined possible. So, do we, as citizens of this planet, continue to put faith in "technology" such as the space program w/o really understanding the implications of what it really is about, and continue the destruction of our own species (through destruction of our environments)? When we can't even strike a balance on this planet, is there any hope for the ideal that Christian Capitalists can do anything different on Mars or Venus or a floating tin city?
Wake up people! Wake up geeks! You stop viruses from spreading unchecked on your servers and on the Internet. Step it up a notch and ask yourselves whether or not we shouldn't be working to stop the spread of far nastier viruses into realms that have cosmic ramifications... The space program can also be seen the vehicle that injects a most dangerous agent into a virgin body. Once it gets contaminated, there truly is no hope... of course, there seems to be, inherent in the western mindset, the ideal that we are riding on the leading edge of evolution and intelligence, and that ideologies and empirical science are rational searches for "answers", and that more technology is needed to solve the problems created by technology... the paradoxes should be apparent to logical creatures... perhaps we can use this "setback" in the conquest of space to start asking some more realisitic and pertinent questions. Disregard them at the risk of your offsprings future... gaging from the other posts in this thread, not many are able to make the connection
Okay, contrary to many here, I am not a rocket scientist. I am a lawyer, which means the last time I had physics was ... well, far too long ago. But watching the space shuttles was one of the great thrills of my life, so I try to read and understand and spread the gospel.
Why not take a plane and just fly it really high?
I'm not trying to be flip here -- take something like a cargo jet and use conventional technology to get off the ground. One in flight at 40k-60k feet, it seems like it would require far less thrust to acheive orbit. As I understand it, both gravity and friction would be dramatically reduced at that point.
Obviously, the details are where it's at -- but is this even a sound theory? I'm guessing that fuel weight would be the biggest problem?
The ironic thing of course, is that the shuttle still has to come down, no matter how we get it up there. And of course, the fundamental technology underlying Columbia's mission is well tested -- it seems to have been an accident in the true sense of the word and not a design flaw that brought her down. If the tiles really are to blame, then any future space vehicle is likely to have similar problems. So this brings me to my second question -- do we know what the Russians did to get around this?
First, fix the funding issue: cancel all government funding, except perhaps for military applications. Most of it should be done privately.
That doesn't necessarily mean it needs to be all commercial and profit-generating. There's no reason philanthropists and "regular people" like you and me can't make voluntary donations like we do for PBS, etc. Money is already being taken out of your pocket, whether you like it or not, and being spent in a manner that you don't have any control over. That is the primary thing that needs to change. If someone else has a plan that you think is better or more valuable than what NASA does, then you should be able to send your money there instead of to NASA.
I'm sure NASA is full of a lot of bright people, and if they were spun off and had to be accountable, those people would still be able to attract a lot of interest.
As for where I would put my money, if I had a choice: Biosphere type stuff. It is ludicrous to even think about permanent lunar bases or trips to Mars, right now. Show me you can live in a closed system, and then I'll maybe believe that you can handle space. Show me you can live in Antarctica without periodic supply drops. This kind of practical research is dirt cheap and low-risk, compared to anything involving a spaceship. I don't even want to hear about long manned missions until these techniques are proven.
Until we have the capability to have people up there long-term, I am sceptical that there is much value in having people up there at all. I can see a case for some medical research (e.g. what happens to a person who lives in low-grav for a long time), but that's about it. The "science" that the shuttle currently does can be done cheaper on spaceships that don't need to worry about life-support. More importantly, it needs to be not a huge paralyzing catastrophe when some sort of technical problem causes a spaceship to be lost. The fact that some people are even considering dropping the shuttle, shows what is wrong with it. If space exploration is going to happen, then spaceships are going to keep blowing up; we need this to not be a big deal.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The US military budget is way over-bloated.
That said, wouldn't it make sense for the Defense Department and NASA to work together on building efficient and reliable space vehicles? I'm sure there is some collaboration between NASA and branches of the military (used to work for NASA, so I know at least they share military bases and the personell work well together) -- they may not have a common goal, but they share common technological needs. R&D results from the military would probably (and maybe already do, not sure) benefit NASA, and vice-versa.
I guess what I'm saying is -- we all know the military budget is not going to be reduced in favor of the Space Program (or any other program, for that matter). Why not share information between agencies, so at least some of the benefits (whatever those may be) we get from spending billions and billions of dollars on a massive and bloated military are extended to others who could also use the information/technology/whatever.
Wait, would this be an open source gov't??
And, also, I would absolutely be o.k. with a checkbox on my tax form to give money to NASA -- instead of my current option to give to the Demoplican party.
We can learn to chart the unknown space of the landing pad. And the reentry path...
It's funny that I wrote this from a realistic point of view and it's viewed as flamebait by a mod. I even stated that it wasn't writtent o offend. Those who cannot accept the truth need a serious dose of reality.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Sure, it is a relatively horrible track record to be sure, but if you look at the entire history of US space flight thus far, it seems to be getting better...maybe?
28 Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions: 1.5 disasters: 5.3% disaster rate
113 Shuttle missions: 2 disasters: 1.7% disaster rate
Even 1.5% is far to great a disaster rate, but history usually shows great improvements precisely because of the things learned from disasters. Considering that in the Shuttle alone we had 24 flights followed by a disaster. Then we learned about and fixed the problem and had 88 more successful flights in a row before the Columbia disaster. And let's not forget that no one knows at this point what caused it. Possibilities still include things like being struck by a small meteor or other space derbis during the reentry itself...
(Stolen sig) Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus", a "Microsoft worm", not a "computer worm
Here's another old sci-fi idea that I haven't seen mentioned recently.
Basically, the notion is to build a long Mach N (2 < N < 6) linear motor along the slope of a mountain to give a smallish space plane a running start.
The benefits are twofold: 1) external propulsion to take a couple steps outside the weight-fuel-weight vicious circle, and 2) release at 8000 ft or so to reduce somewhat the energy required to pass through the atmosphere.
I don't know how big a deal (2) is in the grander scheme of getting into LEO. The bigger deal by far is to stop having to build rockets that are so huge because of the small margin chemical reaction energy has over the gravity well we live in.
Fireball XL5 here we come!
Ok, so far we're talking about either Charles Perrow-type normal accidents here, or we're trying to build a high reliability system and failing. However, since large, catastrophic events in unusual areas (such as space travel) draw a lot of attention, public risk perception may be higher than the actual risk. I don't know. Personally, even a catastrophic 2% "normal accident" rate is too high for my taste when it comes to space travel.
Unfortunately, as everyone who works in occupational health and safety (as I do) knows, good safety practice is expensive, and requires a lot of good safety theory and research behind it, which is also expensive. NASA has a history of having funding taken away from it, and according to recent press statements, NASA has been having trouble (of one variety or other) retaining safety personnel.
The upshot is, of course, that unless anyone doing space is willing to pay the extraordinary overhead costs of space safety, people, both on the ground and in the air, are going to keep dying.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
heh. I like this part:
;)
Did Hubble require a Shuttle for delivery?
Maybe not so much for the delivery, but it sure as hell did for the up2date rpm so it could see straight.
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
"We're not mercenaries...USA doesn't go to war with profit in mind; not officially anyways. Well, at least we didn't before we got a CEO President with an oil addiction."
Are you kidding? Economics often plays a big part in war? Take the Civil War... it was a battle between two different economies, or the Revolutionary against high taxes, or the Gulf War, or even Bosnia... yes Bosnia... making friends in the Balkans is a good long-term investment for American business. As long as capitalism is at the heart of our nation, many of our actions are shrouded in the political, but are really the will of corporate America. It's an extension of the military industrial complex. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against it... it's a lesser evil, really.
"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson."
-Franklin D. Roosevelt
1) Get rid of those damn rockets.
Rockets = suck for space transportation.
No, in fact let me go one step further and say rockets = Newtons 1st law of gravity = sucks for space transportation.
There is a better way.
Invest money into understanding the nature of gravity and over come the basic force using Geometrodynamic theory.
in 1000 years, at current budget levels we could do that...
Rockets suck.
2) Increase the budget, by 1000 times, and get #1 solved in about 10-20 years.
No more riding very large chemical bombs into outer space.
We would overcome gravity using variation on magnetic and or gravitational (gravitons) propulsion.
Not only that, but with this propulsion system, the entire solar system would be open to us, ready to pull large asteroids into areas for mining, expand to Mars or the Moon.
How about going to Mars in 60 days, max, regardless of having to wait for it to be in some dumb special orbit like we do with chemical or atomic rockets.
How about lifting huge materials into low earth orbit in a practical manner? Right now it isn't practical.
How about reentering the earths atmosphere without having to turn the space craft into a fireball?
All can be done with a new drive system that doesn't use rockets, but uses gravity/eletricity.
Rockets suck.
3) Finally how about a system that practically allows civilians and old or young to get into space, even if you have a life threatening illness?
Right now you have to be very fit to get into space and pull the G's required for liftoff.
How about letting the very old or the young, or just plain sick people into space?
Perhaps even treating thier disease form there?
Rockets suck.
-hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Do you really want to tell me that this fabled peer review process has delivered us highly efficient research in academia? Well there exists no such process for the actual studies themselves, only for the results, but even the results themselves have problems. MOST academic research is unproductive, wasteful, and even stupid. What are you comparing NASA's supposed wastefulness to? NASAs mission does not lend itself to peer review. Sicking a bunch of academics at a problem, who have no practical experience building machines that really work, who have not even studied space travel, rocketry, or whatever is just plain stupid. NASA has expertise today that practically no one else has. Yes, NASA has to cater, to some extend, to the whims of voters, tax payers, and politicians and that creates some problems, but that is nothing in comparison to engineering and scientific study by committee.
Furthermore, I think you're being a bit too dismissive of the commercial angle. I'm normally very pro-privatization, but this is just not an area that is practical just yet to privatize. There are certain fixed costs and risks that only a government agency can incur, that industry cannot. Yet industry, as a group, can serve a function for NASA in helping to deflect some of the costs. Strapping sattelites to rockets may be the most cost effective method if your sole objective is to haul stuff into orbit, but that does not mean that it is cheaper on the aggregate if you assume greater goals for NASA (e.g., manned space flight, safe landings w/ humans, and the ultimate objective of regular and cost effective space flight). Rockets offer no such path.
I dispise the garbage which goes on just outside of public view in corporations, and the consolidation and crushing of creativity they inevitably lead to, but I think they will be the driving factor in space as time goes on. It's certainly not an original idea and is slowly starting to happen (see shooting average people into space for cash). Only they can make it affordable and cost effective though.
Whereas the US Government will tack on all kinds of crap and forces the taxpayer to pony up for it whether they like it or not, corps have to answer to money hungry shareholders who will demand it be cheap and fast and cost efficient. It's basically a trade between paying for pork to being subjected to more advertising and corporate greed, but at least you can ignore advertising.
I agree, the X-33 was our best hope for a shuttle replacement in the near future. Advanced composites like carbon fiber offer incredible strength-to-weight ratios. The only problem with thermoplastic carbon fiber is that it would very expensive to create a manufacturing process for such large tanks.
:)
Another approach could possibly be making a number of smaller fuel tanks that can fit tightly together. The smaller tanks will not require the same wall thickness as the large tanks, but would still be a reall pain in the butt to mold with a resin treated carbon or aramid fiber.
I'm no where near an expert on materials processing, but thats my $0.02
Think of the people killed and the billions of dollars spent. I couldn't give a shit about space. I'd rather see the money spent on art, which doesn't kill anybody, except in cases like Van Gogh, who kill themselves for lack of money. Better yet, spend the money on better living conditions for people.
put those mitsubishi robots in space, then if the oxygen supply runs out it won't matter.
Its in our nature to want to go farther, its in the government's nature to try to get there first, but to spend as little money as possible. I'd also like to say that I think if the government had even the slightest idea that the shuttle would explode, they would have spent whatever was necessary to prevent it. As for the design of the space shuttle's, I think NASA should combine with some corporations with mass advertising experience (AOL, Microsoft, Disney, etc.). Not only could that rack in support on the whole financial end, but it would also get more people involved in something that should effect all of humanity.
:-D
The astronauts, though tragic, knew what they were getting into, and given the opportunity, I would go up right now. Sorry to sound like an after school special, or whatnot, but if we stop now, would we be doing them justice? Ok, the first Israeli astronaut was on the flight, well lets send up the second and the third, we should carry on, learning what we can from the mistakes made.
As for commercializing the space program, I say definitely. It will lead to more research done on space travel, it will lead to more funding, and greater frontiers. One thread I've read said something about if planes had the same accident ratio as did space flights (approx. 2 out of 113) we would lose tens or hundreds of planes a day, but think of when air flight was still in its infancy. Shoot, all together air flight is less risky, because you can test it lower to the ground. Commercialization could lead to the creation of self-contained ejection modules designed for either space or atmospheric conditions (ie an hour of oxygen, with a parachute module, and minimal thrusters). You know the Jetson's are starting to look like a good idea right about now
"And The Geek Shall Inherit The Earth" --Jeff Darlington
Yeah, funny about that. I've wondered about the same thing. Frankly, while it seems odd to me that the makers of the various unmanned craft say they haven't figured out how to automate landing when Buran pulled it off, all that I can conclude is that a.) Buran did it in "demo mode", working vehicle don't get such controlled conditions, b.) Buran is bigger and more stable somehow, c.) an awful lot of different projects have agreed on the "robotics need work" conclusion, and d.) the Russians have lied before. So for now I'm going with "still needs work".
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
"We are aiming to reach the edge of space in an attempt to break the world record for the highest manned balloon flight"
Oddly enough, I have an opinion on this.
First, to understand where I'm coming from, you should peruse my report and video on the DC-X project, currently graciously hosted by John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace site.
The Aerospace industry has collapsed, leaned down, merged and consolidated since the end of the cold war. We now have Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and a few small fish. All the big fish merged together into these two big fish.
NASA has proven that it is a Government agency in the classic sense of the word, and does not have the proper motivations to perform its tasks quickly and efficiently. No offense to anyone at NASA. Most everyone I know there understands this as well as I do. Government agencies, and their funding and operations process are generally not conducive to fast efficient development. In addition, NASA has to live in fear of budget and political cuts from year to year. This is not conducive to good planning and development.
The Space Shuttle is still the most complex machine ever built by mankind. It is large, powerful, flexible and high-maintenance. We use the shuttle for a lot of missions that it is overkill for. We need a wider variety of launch vehicles that can take off some of the load of the shuttle. At a current catastrophic failure rate of 1.7% (2 failures in 113 launches), we need to reserve shuttle capability for only those missions that really require its capabilities. For most launches we should be relying on Atlas, Arianne, Proton or Pegasus (or the like) vehicles, and developing additional non-shuttle launch vehicles to assume any possible additional roles the shuttle currently can deliver that other existing systems cannot. Very promising systems such as DC-X and Roton have floundered when we most need them. Either one of these systems could have most likely been finished and flying using the budget NASA allocated to the failed and now cancelled VentureStar project.
For the most part, a lot of the ISS missions could probably be fulfilled by these less complex systems. Missions such as the Hubble servicing missions are what the shuttle was designed for. We should be able to use the ISS to its full manned capacity -- doing so would reduce the need for the shuttle itself to carry research missions up just to let them float around in zero-G space. This is what the ISS was built for. We aren't using it to full capability because we can't man it to capacity. We can't man it to capacity because it currently only has a 3-person escape vehicle, therefore only three staff can remain on ISS when the shuttle leaves. We only have a 3-person Soyuz escape craft because the development project for the ISS escape pod vehicle was cancelled by NASA due to technological problems and cost overruns.
The private sector seems to have a better record at taking risks in R&D, especially space R&D. This is rocket science, but it's now a science, not voodoo. We have companies capable of designing, building, testing and flying safe reliable launch vehicles. The reason they're failing is NASA. NASA holds the keys to space -- they determine who is certified to launch using criteria known to no-one but NASA. NASA has no motivation to endorse private-sector solutions -- these are seen as detrimental to NASA and of course will not be ruled in favor of.
Now, some research in space will only be possible with government support and funding. I believe NASA's role should shift from being a research/development and logistics operation, to a mostly research operation, leaving development and operations logistics more to the private sector, who will bid competitively to build and launch vehicles and research/craft and systems for NASA. NASA already has many of their systems built by subcontractors. They need to shed the day-to-day operations and drudgery of space launch and focus on the real research.
The one-of-a-kind facilities that NASA already owns/operates (Deep Space Network, launch sites, Mission Control) should be leased to a private contractor to operate. NASA (and others!) can then lease time, space and delivered capability from this contractor, with a contractual guarantee of a desired level of quality, reliability and availability. This should be done at market cost, no subsidies or discounts. Level the playing field. If then, another supplier can provide the desired level of quality, etc to a customer (NASA or otherwise), then the customer can seek out the supplier of the proper level of cost/benefit required for each individual mission. Not all missions require the massive support infrastructure of Kennedy Space Center and Mission Control. Even today a lot of missions are not launched from Kennedy -- we need to expand this. Outsource launches to Baikonaur, or to SeaLaunch or Pegasus if practical.
The last thing we should do is build another shuttle to replace Columbia. It will be over-budget, delayed and just as complex and risky as today's shuttles. We need to allow private ventures to flourish, and ensure they have a fair competitive stake in future space business. Only then will we be able to start bringing the cost per pound of orbital launch down to levels that actually encourage new research and commercialization of space, yes, even Tourism. Space travel need not be Rocket Science anymore.
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
"NASA is the only agency that lies" that is a direct quotation from one of the many reports on the Challenger disaster. Now they have lost Columbia, and they still lie. They lied about what the shuttle could do and they lied about what it would cost. They even lied about how long it would take to build it. Since they built the shuttles they have lied about every new spacecraft project they have started. They gave specific costs and capability estimates for everyone and then failed to deliver EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM. And they used their lies to destroy every commercial attempt to build a competing system.
In the '60 when IBM took actions like that back in destroy their competition they were sued for antitrust violations and forced to change their behavior. But, NASA is a government agency that is hugely popular, even though it has wasted 100 of billions of dollars and lied about the waste.
When the US federal government wanted to help develop the aviation industry in the US they did two things. They create NACA, the forerunner of NASA to do research that private companies couldn't afford to do. The research was in part guided by the companies and the results of the research were made available to all companies equally. They also started offering competitive contracts to deliver mail by air. So, they created a way to research aeronautical problems so we could build better aircraft and they created an economic motivation for developing better and better aircraft. They did NOT develop their own air transport system. They build experimental planes, never production aircraft.
NASA was supposed to do research, they do some, but mostly they have built and jealously guard, a space transport monopoly. They actively work to create an economic disincentive to private space craft development. And, they guide their own research. They no long take guidance from industry on the problems that need to be solved because they have destroyed the industry they were meant to serve.
If we want space travel the first thing to do is shut down NASA now. Or, at least get them out of the business of building and operating a space transport system. I tell you this, they will use this disaster to try to take back the partial privatization that has already occurred. That must be stopped.
After NASA is out of the business then go back to using private companies to build and operate space ships. Put out a set of specs and let companies compete to meet the specs. You want a safe reliable way to get to and from the space station? Offer a transport contract and buy from whomever can fill the contract. The price will drop and the reliability will improve.
The X-prize is another model to follow. It has created more useful activity in a few years than we have seen from NASA since 1975. If we want to go to Mars, offer a Mars prize. Offer a billion dollar prize to the first group who reaches Mars with a crewed space ship and returns safely to earth. It might take 20 years, but someone will collect that prize.
If you are in favor of space travel, then NASA is not your friend NASA is your worst enemy. The saddest part is that they people at NASA are good well meaning well intentioned people who have no idea that they have as a group destroyed space travel. But, then "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". The road to space is over around or through NASA, not with NASA.
No one will ever commit the money to a space elevator, regardless of its relative TCO, because there is no way to defend something that large with a fixed location from terrorists who fly Boeings into things--and they would aim for such an attractive target. It could never be insured, so no investor would consider that an acceptable level of risk. Save the space elevator idea for Martian colonization. (Or send all terrorists to Mars without one.)
Despite carbon nanotubes suddenly making the space elevator more than a pipe dream, many still feel that it's still at least 50 years away. Not everyone though. In this article, physicist Bradley C. Edwards, who left the Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory to work on the elevator design for a private company, Eureka Scientific, says that the elevator could be a reality in just 15 years. And once it's been running for a few years, a round ticket might cost as little as $20,000, thus enabling space tourism.
More importantly though, it would totally change the face of space exploration. Not only would it be cheaper to get vehicles into space (as well as not harming our upper atmosphere) but it would allow for the assembly of much larger space stations and spacecraft. And the huge centrifugal force at the end of the ribbon could be use to inexpensively fling spacecraft to planets such as Venus and Mars. And then we could build an elevator on Mars.
I find this endeavour to be incredibly exciting. It just feels achievable. And according to Edwards' estimates, it could be done for under $10 billion. Considering the potential return on investment for this project, and how feasible it's become, I'm very surprised that they've found it so difficult to find the funding. I expect that in the wake of the Columbia tragedy, that won't be the case.
More info on space elevators can be found here.
Drog
Looking for political forums? Check out "The World Forum".
The US desperatly needs to develop a next generation of heavy unmanned launch vehicles. Or hell, they could just ressurect the Saturn V. (For which i've seen cost estimates ranging between $6 and $10 billion.) The Saturn V could deliver 129,300 kg to orbit and 48,500 kg to the moon. The shuttle can deliver 25,000 kg to LEO, and, well, absolutly nothing to the moon. I'm not even sure if they're counting the shuttle itself and the crew and life-support in that figure or not. The ISS would be _done_ by now if we'd just kept building Saturn Vs in addition to the space shuttle.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I think the key word is GO. Station is nice but we stripped the design of anything even remotely allowing it to serve as a stepping stone to GO anywhere else.
Perhaps this will jolt us out of the LEO rut we have been in since giving up Apollo. We need LEO access and there is microgravity research that may proove important. But we need more than that to keep the fire lit on the program. Lets go somwhere... lets reintroduce ourselves to The Moon, its probably forgoten it ever had visitors in the first place. How about a space station in LLO instead of LEO ( low lunar orbit instead of low earth orbit )?? Getting to LEO is the hard part. Dark side astronomical observation would be very valuable and communcations would be improoved over LEO operations. LLO is closer to LEO than the ground is the LEO from an energy needed to get there standpoint. It would be a better microgravity environment and would provide us a chance to study the moon more in depth and just possibly provide a staging point for landings and creating a lunar outpost.
Mars of course... heck people the biggest problem of space travel has been solved as far as mars goes. WATER. There is water on mars. WATER. The stuff of life. With access to water we can create a long term sustainable environment.. with enough effort we can create a self sufficient habitat.
I truly think as the reality of water on Mars sinks in we will see momentum building to mounst a mission to get there. Possibilities for Microbial life aside if water is there we can live there if we want to bad enough. As for why go ?? Hell its there and we havn't been there yet. There are alot of places we have yet to go.. the whole rest of the universe. Right now man kind is living on earth, it has never left it to go anywhere but just outside and to our nearest neighbor... we havn't even been everywhere in our neighborhood and we have been here for Thousands upon Thousands of years if not millions. Just like that 30 year old living in Moms basement its past time to start looking for other options.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
... you support terrorism. The more money that goes into these other programs, the less money there is for Homeland Security. Thus, you support terrorists.
I suppose you don't have a car--waiting for antimatter drive on that. And no gun of course--gotta wait for the phaser.
From this page:
Military spending makes up more than half of the entire discretionary budget, the money that Congress and the administration can control. For FY 2003, military spending comprises 53% of all discretionary spending ($755 billion). This is an increase from the FY 2001 proportion of 48%. More money will be spent on the military next year than on all discretionary social programs combined
From that page, only 3% of that $755 is spent on "General Science, Space and Technology".
From this dandy page we learn that US Military spending ($396B) is almost 4X more than the #2 spender Russia ($60B). If you reel in your military spending youll have TONNES of money for NASA...
I would dare say that the time is {SHOUT}_NOW_{/SHOUT} rather than some time in the future to be engaged in human spaceflight.
First of all, we've already done it. With the Chinese and Indians getting into the game with their own indiginous spacecraft, and a resonalble assumption that the Europeans could do it (technically) if they didn't find it easier simply to use American or Russian technology, the simple capabilities for doing human spaceflight are spreading to other countries, and eventually _SOMEBODY_ will finally get out in space and discover just how rich the resources are for those willing to get out there and do it.
Second, I can't imagine any other human endeavor that has been studied to death. Well, possibly military armaments, but in terms of pure scientific research as to what it takes to get to Mars and the rest of the Solar System, the propulsion systems, the shielding, the habitats, life support systems, and more either are already being done or have been done.
I mean if a nuclear submarine can stay underwater for 3-6 months without even surfacing, and we can maintain a year-round research base on the South Pole, this is really no different than living on the Moon or Mars. Yes, there are going to be some differences, and some new technolgies that will have to be developed, but it won't be developed until people are actually out there and creating the need for these technologies to be developed.
Also, there is a famous statement that Low-earth orbit is half-way to the rest of the Solar System. I would have to agree with this statement, which is why in particular the Low-Earth orbit needs to be fully developed and manned. I believe that a major push should happen to get orbiting hotels, playgrounds, real space stations (not the ISS), factories, and other things that we now know how to do, and get people up there doing stuff we already know how to do. By having this kind of infrastructure, including orbiting research labs where probes are built in orbit, it will have a much bigger payoff in the future.
I would have to say though, that I am not quite sure that NASA activity towards manned spaceflight should continue. To continue to use existing shuttles may have to continue due to international agreements, but I think a gradual phasing out of the current shuttle system should be done... and sooner rather than later. Not only is the shuttle a 40 year old technology (its origin was in the 1960s), but there are numerous examples why it is sucking the lifeblood out of NASA. I think having NASA be a research agency instead of a (tax subsidized) trash hauling company would be tax dollars well spent. Scientific research and coming up with wild and crazy ideas are some of the things that NASA has done very well with in the past.
What should replace NASA's manned spaceflight program? There are a number of different options, including letting private industry take over, including the launching of all unmanned rockets to Low-Earth Orbit. There isn't really new technologies that need to be done there, or if there are, there needs to be financial incentives to get them developed rather than relying on a government monopoly to get them done. NASA certainly won't pay for the development of a $100 per pound to Low-Earth Orbit launch system.
I think a proposal by Jerry Pournell is a fantastic way of getting into space that doesn't compromise scientific research. Indeed, it will make robotic space probes much cheaper to prep and launch, and allow ordinary science professors at state univeristies that don't have huge budgets the opportunity to get their projects into space. I'd rather have a hundred space probes go to Mars and study the geology or possibility of life than one huge expensive mission like we are currently doing. And getting lots of people into Low-earth orbit is going to get that done.
the russians lost over 90 in one accident and over 50 in another, for the biggest space vehicle accident in history look up Nedelin launch deaths on google.
Those people weren't trying to get into space. They were either A) building a ballistic missle, or B) building a rocket for a space probe.
By the way, the official count is 16 Americans, 1 Isreali and 4 Russians.
The original intent of the shuttle program was to have a single vehicle
c k.jpg3 /Small/ EC96-43631-5.jpg
for civilian and military space transport. Military requirements
included the ability for the shuttle to land +/- 500 miles away from
the ground track of the orbit, i.e. file left or right on decent. This
is why the shuttle has such large wings, which add significant amounts
of weight. This leads to a design with strap on boosters and a big
oddly placed external fuel tank, instead of a system with stacked
boosters like other rockets. It now seems that the layout of the
boosters and fuel tanks lead to both the shuttle disasters.
If you want to see what the shuttle could have been with smaller wings,
look at the Rockwell proposal for the canceled X-33 project. It was
based on the existing shuttle design, but was a single stage to orbit
vehicle. Another design, the VentureStar, was selected but later
the entire X-33 program was canceled.
For poictures of the Rockwell X-33 see:
http://www.astronautix.com/graphics/x/x33ro
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/gallery/photo/X-3
The sad part is that the military withdrew from the program after the
flawed design was in place, leaving a very inefficient and dangerous
system. If the military had also used shuttles, costs would have been
lower because of efficiency of scale and more launches. Also the
shuttle would had many more upgrades and a successor program would have
been in place, as is the case in military aircraft. Note that this is
NOT a NASA problem, but a US government problem. NASA was stuck with a
bad design and insufficient long term funding.
Richard Feynman (who so deftly demostrated the brittle nature of frozen o-rings after Challenger and the father of nano-technology) isn't here to tell us what went wrong this time. As a doff-of-the-hat I say advance our nano technology, shoot the little buggers to the moon and build our space elevator use lunar raw materials. A goal like that would focus NASA, spur research, and evolve us to a spacefaring species.
A combination of a Big Gun and a Space Tower would provide a transportation system vastly superior to what we have now.
First - why is the current system not working well? It comes down to two fixed numbers: the energy in rocket fuel (15 MJ/kg for the best
fuel we have now - LOX-Hydrogen) and the energy
to reach earth orbit, which is a function of
the mass of the Earth (31 MJ/kg). As you can see, the fuel has barely half the energy required to get itself into orbit, much less any payload. Therefore rockets use most of their fuel to get some of their fuel plus the cargo to the halfway point, in energy terms, from which point the rest of the fuel can do the job. In fact, you have to have 88% of your takeoff weight in fuel. Now a vehicle that has decent safety margins weighs 15% or more of the takeoff weight, so you can see you are already in a less than zero payload situation. To get something to orbit, you have to resort to expedients like dropping part of your vehicle when the fuel in that part is gone, or using very thin margins or very expensive lightweight materials. Until we have bulk carbon nanotubes (100x stronger than steel), where we can drop the vehicle weight drastically and
still have some safety margins, we need to change the fuel energy, the mission energy, or both.
The Jules Verne approach, that of a big gun, gives the vehicle a substantial push, so the mission energy is reduced. There is a big gun not far from where I work (at the NASA center in Huntsville, AL) that uses the powder charge from a battleship gun to fire ~1 lb projectiles at orbital speed. The gun has been used almost daily for 30 years, and it's main job has been to test heat shield materials. An even bigger gun was built about 10 years ago at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory that could fire ~10 lb projectiles at half of orbital speed. The livermore gun cost $3 million to build, which is peanuts by aerospace standards. One big enough to
throw a couple of hundred pounds at half of orbital speed would cost in the tens of millions, and could deliver useful payloads to orbit (~20 lb at a time).
Because this type of gun could be fired several times a day, even if the payloads are small individually, they add up over the course of a year. This type of launch system is best for launching bulk items - food (frozen), water, fuel, and structural components.
The Eiffel approach, a space tower, is related to the space elevator, but not as all-encompassing. A conventional rocket uses a lot of it's fuel just climbing above the atmosphere. For the Shuttle, it has used up two thirds of it's takeoff weight by the time the solid boosters separate at an altiude of 28 miles. A full space elevator requires materials beyond what we have
available in quantity. A tower tens of miles high can be built with today's graphite-epoxy. For example, a typical graphite-epoxy has a strength of 300,000 psi and a density of 0.066 lb/cubic inch. Therefore it can support a column of itself that is 4.55 million inches (72 miles) tall.
In a well designed tower, the structure would taper similar to the Eiffel Tower,since only the bottom has to support the entire weight. Higher parts only have to support what's above them.
A rocket starting from the top of the tower can therefore have more of a safety margin, or carry much less fuel and therefore much more payload.
Towers less than 17 miles tall do not need to be considered, since strapping on fighter jet engines as boosters will do an equivalent job below this height. Jet engine boosters are much cheaper and more reliable than solid rocket boosters. Their only limitation is that they have smaller thrust (~30,000 lb each) than big solid rockets (Shuttle is 3 million lb thrust each), so they can only be used for smaller vehicles. But they are perfectly adequate for launching, say a crew of 3 into orbit, or a couple of tons of delicate cargo the big gun would pulverise.
Dani
A space elevator can't be built from the ground up, it hangs from a geo-stationary orbiting mass. As the elevator hangs down a correspondingly large mass must be added ABOVE the orbiting platform. When it is done you have something that is an elevator from gound to its midpoint and a large empty scaffold reflecting the bottom mass.
Build a straight track 300 km long and put it 100 km above the ground, above almost all of the atmosphere. Make the track a linear motor. Use an elevator to get your ship up to one end of the track. Accelerate at 10 Gs for about 10 seconds. Poof, you're in orbit. Now it's relatively easy and cheap to leave orbit and go elsewhere.
When JoSH wrote up the idea in March 2000, he estimated that the price to put a kilogram in orbit would be 42 cents, once all the costs had been amortized. And the cost of working spacecraft probably shrinks a lot.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
The actual budget? What I posted WAS the actual budget. Bush and the Senate just upped it to $15.5 billion, so your numbers are a bit off. Wow NASA's budget is going UP you say?! At this rate we'll be on Mars in no time... The administration of is requesting $396.1 billion for the military in fiscal year 2003. This is $45.5 billion above current levels, an increase of 13 percent. It is also 15 percent above the Cold War average, to fund a force structure that is one-third smaller than it was a decade ago. Watch out military, NASA's on your ass!
Anti-social? My code is just platform-specific.
Take a look at these: http://www.civilianspace.com/default.asp http://www.gsreport.com/articles/art000091.html http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/designing_user_ friendly_civilian_spacecraft.shtml
http://www.planetary.org/solarsail/
http://www.wws.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/byteserv.prl/ ~ota/disk1/1989/8904/890404.PDF
http://www.spacefuture.com/directory.shtml
and last but not least, your library for the last 40 years in hard science fiction
Yes, the Islamist holy army has launched more attacks against our military, but our "homeland" has been secure. After 9/11, I expected more hits every few months. I mean, why plan such a massive attack without follow-ons.
However, we have done a good job of showing that it won't work. We haven't stopped projecting power in the middle east, we've increased it. We haven't abbandoned israel. We've done a good job of keeping the pressure on them as well as take away any benefits from their attack.
While there are plenty of angry teens in Muslim countries, they can't point to 9/11 as a "success" by any measurable results, and that is critical.
Alex
The space elevator would certainly have to be an international project. I think it also presents the most interesting challenges. For instance we were talking about failures in a space elevator system in a class I had on Tuesday... The kinetic energy of the system would pose a HUGE problem if the cable should ever fail.
The example we discussed was a steel cable linking barges. When those cables snap they can cut through 2 inch thick steel plates. Imagine the space elevator cable snapping and cutting a continent in half.
It was mentioned a sci-fi book was written about a space elevator that destroyed a planet. Anybody know what it's called? I'd like to read that.
Um, no?
Shuttle has racked up (at 100 missions, week each, figures worth checking), 16800 hours per average passenger, Jumbo racks up only 168 hours per average passenger per week, assuming it flew constantly (it does not, so call it 100 hours), so would have to fly for roughly three years to tot up as many miles.
Every shuttle down is 7 deaths, every Jumbo down is roughly 400 deaths (depends on model), some of the bigger airbuses will be 800 or more deaths, perhaps plus innocent bystanders (very unlikely that a falling Shuttle part would kill anyone), assuming that very few people survive hitting a hillside at over 500km/h, the typical scenario. So the passenger miles even out.
If you drove your car for an hour every single day, you would have to drive for 48 years to knock up as many hours.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yes, but much harder than a building to hit and destroy, and fairly easy to mount defense ordinance on.
Also likely to have space-based lasers mounted at top end which could be brought on line in seconds, plus the ground-based propulsion lasers could be borrowed, ganged and focussed for the very brief occasion (a safer option IMESHO).
Near ground level, something like a bazooka shell would be easy to isolate automatically due to its trajectory, and a perfectly ordinary Vulcan Phalanx (50x20mm shells/second) would take care of those as it does for ships. Even if you completely flubbed that, and assuming that you could build enough brains into a bazooka shell to hit a terribly skinny target, and scored a direct hit on a ribbon, you won't necessarily have achieved anything. Firstly, each ribbon would be a wonderful shock-absorber, secondly, there would be many ribbons, so even if you got two or three of them, the results are unlikely to be catastrophic, thirdly, the elevator is in orbit, so severing it low down wouldn't achieve much (in fact, the plans include winding it up a few miles if a really nasty storm arrives).
You really should go read the site, they've obviously thought of this stuff.
Something that large will get hit by meteors and junk regularly, so facilities for repair would be routine. The ribbons are arranged in a semicircle (there's not really any such thing as an `edge on' hit) so anything hitting it would have to be seriously sizeable to cut more than one strand, in which case the lasers would get it. In fact, said lasers would become important and useful for cleaning up LEO.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
For space exploration to reach the masses, the technology has to be cheap, monopolies don't do cheap. There is no incentive for NASA to create a cheap method of space travel.
NASA's purpose has to change. They shouldn't be building rockets, shouldn't be flying rockets. That's what the commercial organisations are for.
The stagnation, in fact, regression in space travel over the last 30 years is down to the governmental monopoly.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I predicted back before the first launch of the shuttle...that Columbia would fall apart on re-entry because of the thermal tiles failing.
So I was off by 23 years and 113 missions...
LOL! "Extraordinary breakthrough in technology" indeed! Like the spread of satellite tv, more intercontinental telephone calls, and large-scale domestic and commercial internet use maybe? Isn't it odd that hardly anybody back in those days saw the comms revolution coming ...I don't know how many comsat launches there are per year now but I'm betting those figures no longer seem quite so far-fetched.
I've always been told that there is a surprisingly large amount of space between electrons and their nucleii. So If we could just remove all the electrons of whatever we wanted to ship to space and then reconstitute them after reaching space...
I guess I need another beer.
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
Everyone talks about tethers, looking at the space-elevator notion. However, there's a reasonable (with simulations in applets) site promoting the notion of a rotating, orbiting tether that could be used either as a fuel-saving "last mile" (well, last 300 mile) trip to space, or alternately as an sling-shot that grabs the exiting craft in mid-flight and launches it balistically, like a trebuchet. Interesting, and they make a reasonable case, at least to one without the physics background to criticize. ;)
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Before man will settle space, either it will have to get a LOT more crowded on earth, or there will be some way to make a buck. Look to the previous age of exploration - all the parallels are there. Until it becomes profitable to mine the moon or put tourists in LEO, it won't happen. And that is good, because otherwise we are throwing our money away to do it.
Until that time, we have to keep developing our technology. NASA should focus itself on being a R&D driver, like the NSF and DARPA. Fund and coordinate research into stronger/lighter materials, more efficient propulsion, etc.
As for manned flight, I wonder why the Orbital Space Plane was cancelled. Seemed perfect for those infrequent times when person is actually needed up there.
NASA is not the future. NASA has trivialized themselves for 20+ years. They have degraded into typical bureaucrats. It sickens me every time they come up with some new stunt. "Hey, let's send a teacher into space!", "Hey, let's send a senator into space!", "Hey, let's send a really old astronaut into space!", "Hey, let's send a bunch of ants into space!", "It's for "Research".", etc.
;-)
Then when some guy comes up with $20M and wants a ride they accuse him of being "Un-American". Again, when Radio Shack wants to pay to have a commercial shot in space they again balk. They don't want success, they want their cut of the tax dollars for being a perk for military pilots. Why again is it that you damn near HAVE to be a military pilot or ex-military pilot to be an astronaut? It's not like they have to do barrel rolls in the thing, you RIDE in the shuttle, you don't DRIVE the shuttle.
Commercialization IS the future of space. Hell, if the CocaCola company wanted to carve an ad into the side of the moon it's fine with me as long as it gets us a permanent base there. There is a doctored picture of the shuttle that shows it covered with ads like a race car. It is generally titled with some cutsey title that implies that would be how it would be if NASA was commercial. You know what? Fine, put the ads on the shuttle, I'd be happy for that $15B to be coming from corporate sponsorship and not taxation. Someone always points out tech spinoffs or potential medicines being created in space. Let me answer that. Throw $15B at a bunch of universities and see what kind of spin offs you get, I'd bet that it would be a damn site better then a pen that writes upside down and a bed that contours to your back. Second, I don't care if they come up with a cure for idiocy, if you have to create it in space, then no one could afford it anyway (well maybe in Canada they could.
As for military spending, that is the job of our government, one of the few assigned to it by our constitution. With the kind of taxes I am paying I certainly expect that they will do it well and ~~$400B doesn't seem excessive if they do.
As for AIDS aid in Africa, that is just a waste. Now I suppose I am a bit sorry that they are suffering (mostly for the women and kids), but first, I am not responsible for their affliction, second, it is largely a problem that stems from their own actions and attitudes. Believe me, since the 80's we have had to change the way we did alot of things to get it kinda under control here (the 70's were ALOT more fun then the 80's and 90's). The time has come for them to step up and fix their own cultures, $15B isn't the answer, responsible governments in Africa are.
Dan
Stresses will be approximately the same. In reality, if you want to minimize the stresses, you'd build one in space as you describe, and another mounting out from the Earth, and join them like the TransContinental Railroad, but with a diamond spike, not a gold spike.
That being the case, it's probably better to start on the ground, and get some benefit immediately.
Plus construction costs for that part will be a lot lower, because you don't have to lift materials by rocket up there. So you build the platform first, get it as high as you can, and then use that to launch rockets to put a nanotube factory [and material supply industry] into space from that.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Hooray for that! Great series of books, by the way. Well, maybe it got drug out a little, but what the heck? At least there aren't a bunch of songs in Elvish...
But Flynn's idea of the Planck (his name for the SSTO craft) is on the drawing boards of several aerospace engineering companies. It's based on the DC-X (Delta Clipper) series, which, immediately after proving its feasability, had an accident. Politics scrubbed the program. The accident in question? One of the landing struts failed after a test flight (unmanned) and the thing tipped over and blew up. They scrubbed the program instead of rebuilding with a better strut.
You might not be right when you say that the dream will never come true, but it's going to be a long time coming.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
AFAIK, putting a launch facility on the back side of the moon only has one benefit: Centrepital force helps the launch (barely).
The downsides include more asteroid hits, lack of radio contact with Earth (without a lunar polar relay or something), lack of visibliity from Earth, etc.
Some would question why you'd want to put a launch facility on the moon, anyway. It's just another gravity well, albeit a more shallow one. Personally, I think that the availability of resources, such oxygen, which is bound up in oxides in the soil, iron, aluminum, and possibly some water are reasons to put a facilty there. Even the gravity can be an advantage, because we terrestrial creatures really seem to prefer having a "down" to work with, something you don't get in space.
I'm sure it's neat working in space when you can let go of a wrench and have it float nearby until you need it. What happens when it floats out of reach, or floats into what you're working on? Furthermore, when I go to the can, I want to know that whatever I'm getting rid of is actually accelerating away from my body at some useful rate. Gravity helps with all problems like this.
From a strictly resource-economic point of view, launching from orbit (L-5, for instance) is way better than launching from a gravity well of any sort.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Where should space travel go?
MARS!
I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it!
Hey y'all. I am currently working on production techniques of single wall carbon nanotubes. I know for sure that we should never place all of our hopes on one breakthrough. Not only that but the nanotube may not be an answer soon enough to save NASA. The key is educating the public and getting young adults interested in the amazing possibilities of space. May sound corny but I think the power of the people has not yet totally faded. Interesting note: NASA is funding my current project and I hope it funds my next one. At least there may be a chance for nanotubes to save us all. If not we die drowning in our own garbage and choking on our own excrement. Yum!