Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
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.
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.
--
Bless the crews of the Columbia and Challenger. From your sacrifices will come greatness.
- 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.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:
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.'"
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Well, I can't, since most of his points are absolutely accurate.
/manned/ space exploration. I think it feeds the human soul and imagination. You don't have to look much past the story of Dr. Kalpana Chawla (an alumnus of the UTA, where i'm graduating in May) to see how the challenge of space can motivate and inspire people.
Exceptions:
Buran was a 3/4 scale duplicate of Shuttle, not the same size. It also never carried a crew...its one mission was unmanned. Read more here.
A crew escape section (a jettisonable cockpit, for instance) is a good idea for launch related problems. Howevet, on reentry, it would be absolutely impossible to get the capsule a) protected from the reentry heat and b) away from the Mach 20 reentering shuttle. It would also be absurdly heavy as a retrofit. I do believe that it should be considered for next-generation reusable spacecraft.
The reason that the Challenger problems were left up to the "old boy" network is the same reason the same engineers that crashed Mars Pathfinder builts its successors: There just aren't a hell of a lot of people who know how to do this stuff. It's horrifically complicated, and the stakes are impossibly high. You don't just let a recent graduate (like I will be soon! Yay!) design a new Shuttle. Or even a system on the shuttle. You use experienced, seasoned engineers, checking and cross-checking each other. And you still have fatal mistakes.
He's also wrong about his (rhetorical) contention that throttling up Challenger's engines was fatal. The solid rocket boosters were already burning (fatally), and they are not throttled. As soon as those things were lit (that is, before it left the ground), the fix was in. That ship was going to die.
I do disagree with a lot of his conclusions. This fellow doesn't seem to be committed to manned space exploration. His discussions about going to the Moon (which is a dead end: Been there, done that) are red herring arguments.
My personal feelings on the future of the space program are very ambiguous. I use that word in the sense that I have very strong, opposing opinions on the topic.
I believe passionately in
However, I think NASA is doing a very bad job of stewarding our resources. They're given a budget (although I certainly wouldn't call it lavish), with the understanding that that budget will be returned to the communities around major NASA installations, and the contractors that supply them. Good engineering or no, that is the only way you can get any sort of large-scale project done in this country: Spread the wealth to as many congresscritters' pork barrels as possible. I don't like it either, but I don't know how to change it.
So, I want people in space. But I don't think that going over and over to LEO accomplishes anything. If I thought it would be possible to say "OK, we're not going to fly any people for five years, but then by God we'll start flight testing our Mars hardware!" I'd be a happy guy. However, I believe that if we don't keep in the habit (if you will) of putting people in space, we will lose the political will to do it. I think that would be Bad, because we (America and its partners) would cede to somebody else (China?) primacy in solar exploration. I think that's a Baad Idea.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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.
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.
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
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