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Benford on Space Exploration
gid-goo writes "Gregory Benford looks at what we should do in the aftermath of the Columbia accident. Is the shuttle, or the International Space Station for that matter, useful? Or just payola to aerospace interests and a means for keeping Russian rocket scientists employed?" Benford's comments about the necessity of a closed biosphere and of some way for astronauts to stop muscle and bone loss are far more insightful than the usual discussions about where our space exploration priorities should lie.
That the failures are not repeated. I am from India and the first 4-5 attempts by my country to put a so-called 'whistler rocket' failed. But ISRO learnt from the mistakes and successfully launched multiple rockets and are now into commercial launch of satellites. The moral? Never give up, and if you commit mistkaes, find the reasons and learn from them.
But if they sit on their steak I'm going to follow the Indian and Chinese space programs instead and cheer with them when they launch something.
From the article:
"the [current space] station recycles only urine... it is camping in space, not truly living there".
Last time I checked, my crap got recycled in the great outdoors.
"This [going to Mars] is what we should be doing. Such an adventure would resonate with a world beset by wars and woes. It has a grandeur appropriate to the advanced nations, who should do it together."
I disagree. At the risk of sounding jingoistic, I believe that nations should compete with another to explore. This competition is the only way to foster space exploration until space becomes commercially viable.
Last point. What was something on Iraq doing in a space article?
We must revive efforts to design the next generation space shuttle. The current design is far behing what current technology is capable of producing. With enough research, we can build a launch vehicle capable of fulfilling the promises made by the shuttle program.
We must not, under any circumstances, abandon human space flight. We as humans are explorer by our very nature. We cannot allow tragedy to sway us from our neverending quest for knowledge.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_246696.html Scientists say they've discovered that cats purr to help them get better when they're injured. The researchers at the Fauna Communications Research Institute in North Carolina call the purr a natural healing mechanism. They say the purr helps their bones and organs to heal and grow. It works in a similar way to ultrasound on humans. Exposure to similar sound frequencies are known to improve bone density. Dr Elizabeth von Muggenthaler, the president of the institute, said: "Old wives' tales usually have a grain of truth behind them and cats do heal very quickly. The healing power of purring seems to explain their 'nine lives'." She told The Sunday Telegraph: "We are starting to solve a 3,000-year-old mystery as to why cats purr. The next phase will be to explain the mechanics of the process." Story filed: 15:49 Sunday 18th March 2001
That reminds me of an old Popular Mechanics I found asking the question "should we be going to the moon?" There were lots of "fix things on earth before going to space" arguments...but, what if we tried that? Would things be better on earth? Don't we all benifit from the technology developed during the space race? There will always be homeless...there will always be poor. If we wait to fix every problem we will never make progress.
"The shuttle and the International Space Station are not helping us. They do remarkably little science--and, as far as I can see, next to none that could not be done by unmanned missions. Like vampires, they suck NASA's entire budget dry."
People who want robots to do the work in space and see no need for humans miss the point - we have no need for humans because of our lack of ambition.
We need to put a foundry and a small biome on the moon. From those, we can build from those supplies.
A new spaceplane, designed for crew. See the Orbital Space Plane.
A new technology, reusable launch vehicle. See the Space Launch Initiative.
Continuing with the Prometheus Project. We fucked up when we stopped persuing NERVA/Rover.
Mars. Need I say more?
I'd also like to see a space elevator persued, but I don't know that we have the tech yet. Then again, I haven't looked into it that much either.
Yeah, so that's my wishlist. Only a few hundreds of billions of dollars in imaginary cash NASA doesn't have...
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
[quote]
Benford's comments about the necessity of a closed biosphere and of some way for astronauts to stop muscle and bone loss are far more insightful than the usual discussions about where our space exploration priorities should lie.
[/quote]
and at least we're unbiased.
There were lots of "fix things on earth before going to space" arguments...
Just fixing the misspellings and the mod system would be a good start.
I only disagree with the bit about Bush being good at disasters. He may prove good at causing them...
It's tragic to watch the current fallout of the Columbia disaster. Certainly NASA, relevant manufacturers, and the United States Government will be asked to answer for any negligence which may have caused the loss of the shuttle and her seven crew. But I would implore anyone reading this not to conclude that the loss of the Columbia should mean the end of human spaceflight.
If anything, our commitment to space should be radically expanded. The current problems in the space program are the result of all power and authority over the development of space exploration being held in a single decision-making body. NASA, which is a marvelous organization and which certainly provided the basis for the early successes in space, is simply not equipped to move space exploration ahead. It is a government entity, unbound by market considerations, and weighed down by bureaucratic inefficiencies which make radical changes - such as the introduction of new technologies in a cost-effective manner - impossible.
The question, however, must be posed whether space exploration in itself is valuable enough to transfer to the private sector. This question is analogous to the gradual shift in the control of earthbound exploration schemes from sovereign control to chartered corporations. To answer the question, however, without respect to the analogy, no, space exploration in itself is not particularly valuable. It is another medium, another vehicle for transporting humans and their commerce, as well as seeing what's out there. I doubt any private venture at this point would find this to be a profitable scheme without, to be circular, some way to make profits from it.
Thus the analogy: space travel is valuable only insofar as it brings benefit to the people of this planet, or, more specifically, to the shareholders of any corporations which undertake it. In near space, the profits are easy to identify. The GPS system which allows boaters to find their way to fishing spots provided the "spiritual" basis for private venture such as XM Radio. Government-financed spy satellites showed private corporations that money could be made selling space-based imagery of the planet.
But none of these requires human space flight. In order for there to be profit in the human expansion into space, there must be some market for the products which can be produced exclusively or most efficiently in space, whether directly in the case of manufactured goods or indirectly in the case of products developed using experimental data acquired in space. As one discussion group poster noted in response to a question on the necessity of humans to supervise space-based experiments, "It's hard to count ants from 140 miles down."
The International Space Station is a fiasco, and so is the space shuttle. Given the radical developments in materials sciences and knowledge of the effects of space on human bodies, it is as unlikely that the shuttles would have remained in private service for twenty years as to consider that Boeing might continue to build aircraft using the processes and materials perfected during the development of, say, the now-obsolete 727. Even a plane that has had a 30-year lifespan such as the 737 is today not the same plane except in the most superficial way as the first model that flew out of Everett Field.
My plan for space would include the following broad steps. First, ground the shuttle fleet only as long as is necessary to conduct materials review of the launch equipment (fuel tank and rockets), the cooling tile system, and any particularly vulnerable areas of the shuttle's structure (particularly any structural elements on the bottom of the spacecraft). Second, apply any changes rapidly - within no more than two years - with a national commitment to redeploy the shuttle as a stopgap measure in the interests of national security and commerce (as well as prestige). Third, set a hard deadline to retire the shuttles by 2014 at the absolute latest - perhaps 2012 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of American spaceflight. Fourth, provide incentives to corporations to begin manned space flight outside the scope of NASA oversight. Fifth, turn NASA into a regulatory agency for the purposes of establishing safety guidelines; and a science agency which would fund and oversee pure science activities in space. Sixth, provide ongoing incentives for the next two or three decades to promote human exploitation of space by private corporations.
The money for such incentives could probably be found in the monies freed up by the unfortunate loss of Columbia. I would name two incentive packages: the Challenger Fund for the rapid commercialization of space exploration, and the Columbia Fund for the ongoing support of pure science exploration by government or commercial entities. A third package, the Apollo Fund - deriving its name from America's other fatal space mission, Apollo I - would subsidize development of safety mechanisms and alternative propulsion schemes for space exploration.
Our planet is small. Our resources are limited. Only a hundred miles above our heads is the gateway to, literally, a universe of options. There are planets packed with natural resources and room for human habitation. There are asteroids which at once pose a direct threat to our planet and could be a staggeringly rich source of raw materials for the improvement of human civilization. And, as always in a new realm, there is a near infinite space which will provide further insights into this incredible and complex universe in which we are such small but special players.
Now is not the time to draw back from our commitment to space. If anything, we should conclude that the loss of Columbia means that we have reached the limits - after 40 years of remarkable successes - of government monopoly over rich space exploration.
I suspect that the crew of Columbia and their families would agree. After all, they were drawn to the space program because of the opportunity to do something revolutionary, brave, and necessary for our world, not because they wanted to get rich. They would - I hope - support any initiative which would have given them more opportunity to do the work they loved. If we could demonstrate that private control of the space program would, in fact, radically expand that space program - in the same way that private corporations increased and improved the reach of the automobile, the airplane, telecommunications networks, and the Internet - I believe that those astronauts and the astronauts who remain would support us.
Don't give up on space. It is not only our future, but also our present. Make it better, do not declare it dead with those men and women who have died in their ongoing quest to expand the reach and the value of our lives.
That's funny. The word "Iraq" seems to be mentioned only once in the third paragraph. And it does have relevance: a major war would both shift public attention away from NASA and could cause budget constraints.
the space shuttle IS over-rated.
and personally i hope to see a space-elevator someday. a much cheaper and perhaps a much more environmentally friendly way to escape this gravity well
Logic, macros, and more
Tonight on Studio2, a 3-member panel debated the virtues of the manned space program from a cost-benefit stance, from the human-wonder-fulfillment stance and the most interesting, from the "all of humanity's eggs in one basket stance".
SciFi author Robert J. Sawyer [link] explained that the space program is more than just about vanity, or the desire to prove worth. If it weren't for curiosity, none of us would have left Africa some 6-7 million years ago.
I believe the space program is necessary, because it allows us to test new technologies to their limits. Like pens that can write upside down...
I would also like to point out that NASA seems to be ignoring the first A. That's a great error in my eyes. Atmospheric transportation will always be more common than interstellar imo.
The final thing I have to add, is the fact that humanity will reach a population impasse. Even if (hopefully when) all of the world develops, and rates of population increase drop, consumption of natural resources will eventually deplete reserves. I believe space exploration is but one link in the chain that will lead us away from Earth, and towards a new home. Maybe one with track lighting?
The payoff for continuing involvement in the expensive field of space exploration lie not in the development of a commercially viable model from the exploration itself. Rather, our incentive is a contribution to the great body of knowledge known as basic research.
While I won't deny that it's great to gain knowledge for its own sake, that's really not the point. Governments for years has understood the value in making significant contributions to basic research so that private firms can capitalize on those findings and bolster the economy of the nation making the investment. Whether or not that model is viable in today's global, instantaneous information-sharing age is debatable, but to continue in that mentality, we must look beyond such tragic, yet short-term disasters such as Columbia and understand where we would and would not be without our ventures into space experimentation if we were to cease. Leadership demands sacrifice.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
Just out of curiosity, but if we send people to Mars, how in the hell are they supposed to get back? I mean, are they going to set up a launch pad themselves, or will they send a space limo over to pick them up? Is the atmosphere of Mars similar to Earth's?
I have never really heard a good explanation, why we need the ISS and Shuttle, and how exactly are they supposed to help us achieve bigger goals like spreading life elsewhere in the Universe or making spaceflight commercially viable.
Going to the Moon was a good example of the opposite - we picked a real high target, of which we weren't really sure how to achieve it, and set it as a clear goal. And when working toward the goal, we made tremendous advances in science, creating many new practical technologies and materials.
ISS, on the other hand, has never been a grand target, we have always played it safe, always known how it is would be achieved, so basically it is just an expensive toy, there is nothing fundamentally new to be discovered by building it.
If we concentrated our efforts on something bigger, like flying to Mars or creating a Moon base then we might not get immediate gratification. But working towards these tough but clear goals would create a motivation for making all kinds of smaller advances that would all support the main goal, just like they did in the sixties. For example, we could solve the closed ecosphere problem, the technologies from this advance alone would have the potential to significantly improve everyday life.
But instead no one is willing to take risks any more, and we are stuck with doing the same stuff over and over again, putting all sorts of junk in low Earth orbit, something that we have known how to do for ages, and trying to convince ourselves that we are making great progress while actually being stuck in an Escher house.
When men used to be men
The space station provides an excellent oppertunity to inspire and motivate others into science fields. So even if it costs billions of dollars or even trillions, if it means that some kid is motivated into science so that they perhaps discover something like a way to stop ageing or a new metal type, it would be worth it. Plus there is the moral issue, if we can put a man on the moon, and launch people into space and have them live there, doesn't it just show how much we have progressed? I mean if it means more girls end up like the ones at Digital Teenz then perhaps it is worth the risk and expense. But judge for yourself, and remember its your tax dollars at work!
According to this article mentioned earlier on Slashdot:
I code, therefore I am.
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.
It wasn't ever living.
The main part of the Benford's article is that the primary problem of space travel is dealing with the lack of gravity to maintain human bone and organ health.
Cats spend up to 20 hours a day sleeping and yet still manage to stay fitter than most human gymnasts.
Purring creates vibrations through the cat's body helping to maintain muscle and bone density.
Transducers in an astronaut's suit could produce similar resonant vibrations. These vibrations could simulate the stresses of g-forces by rapidly moving the astronaut a very small distance back and forth.
Sorry I didn't connect the dots for you in the original post.
Remember when we sent people to the moon? We had a landing vehicle? I'd suspect we'd do something similar.
I think that this is an excellent point. Having grown up in the 1980s and 90s, I watched NASA's budget drastically shrink relative to the GDP and I watched NASA stumble along at a terribly slow pace with minimal public support. One can't help but think how great it must have been in the 60s and early 70s when the public was jazzed and scientists were having fun. But this is a frightening point...
Can it really get worse? I personally feel there might be something to this: what happens when a large part of the population suddenly retires, the nation goes broke? Can interest shift further away from space exploration? Is this our last chance to get people interested in NASA before we see an even greater decline in public support?
What do you think?
Die Menschen verhoehnen was sie nicht verstehen. -- Goethe.
Benford apparently isn't aware that centrifuge experiments *have* been conducted on the space shuttle. Or that Columbia was carrying a physiology experiment that would have done a lot for revealing just why exposure to zero-G causes orthostatic intolerance [inability to stand or remain standing].
Specifically, the 1998 STS-90 mission [Neurolab], among other things, studied how humans perceived centrifugal motion in the absence of an existing 1G gravity vector. This mission was designed to study the vestibular system, but others have looked at cardiovascular effects.
The long and the short is that it helps some, but the inertial problem is still sticky. Worse, it tends to make the astronauts sick. Losing track of your vertical tends to make your body do bad things.
A simple review of Pubmed/Medline would have showed all of this. But then, Benford's strength always was was fiction, wasn't it?
Actually, I've read his work. I don't think fiction's really a strong-point, either.
This article on spacefuture.com has a pretty good analysis of what centripetal forces we should be looking for in deciding to build a rotating space station. It takes into account not only the physics, but also the effects of this artificial gravity on humans (since there is a significant effect due to Coriolis forces that make it behave differently from natural gravity).
One thing I have noticed on looking at information about the space programs for various country's
I have asked many people lately who was the first woman in space. Invariably the answer is either "I don't know" or "Sally Ride". This is such a pity
The world is amazingly ignorant of the history of space exploration. This is saddening. Considering the absolute minor number of injuries and deaths involved in space exploration compared to what has actually been happening, it is all rather amazing.
I have to say that I agree with you, I think it's important to continue space exploration at all costs. I doubt we'll live to see the discovery of alien life form or interplanetary travel, but that doesn't mean there aren't quite a few reasons to keep humans in space if not other "objects".
For one, how many technological advances have been created from our desire to reach into space? How many products have reached the basic consumer market because people at NASA (or wherever) thought them up.
Second, there are too many unknowns. Money aside, there are many reasons to continue space exploration (including the space station) and almost no reasons to stop it.
Third, we have no need to stop exploration. When the gov. runs out of money then maybe I'll concede, but for now, we're all fine and there's no need to stop the programs. If it's not broken, then don't fix it.
So, I don't feel that the Shuttle accident should have any negative impact on any countries space programs. Astronauts know the risk they take, and certainly they understand far better then me how insanely difficult it is to fly into space and back. Frankly, I'm amazed we can do it at all, but hell, the internal combustion engine boggles me sometimes.
I feel that in this situation, it's better to learn from the mistakes that were made instead of refusing to take any more risks.
The problem at the moment is that space is too expensive; even the Russians charge thousands of dollars per pound, and they've got the cheapest launchers going.
The reason for the high cost? We don't launch enough. The point is that if you look at the technologies out there, this one might save you 20%, that one 10% etc. But each doubling of the number of launches typically saves you 15%; and it's a gift that carries on giving. The minimum cost for launching into space appears to be very low; comparable to the cost of a Concorde flight, the amount of fuel used per person is somewhat comparable.
Therefore we need a purpose for space that requires launching a lot. Space Tourism is likely to meet that niche.
Reliability is of course the second question after price. However, take the Shuttle; it's extremely likely that both crashes are caused by design flaws in the Shuttle; and that the number of flaws that remain undiscovered will decrease over time. Therefore the reliability of the Shuttle should increase, and there's no known limit to how reliable launch vehicles can be.
It seems from surveys that many people would like to go into space, so the interest is certainly there. If the low cost vehicles are available, then it permits travel to low earth orbit. Mars, the moon, the asteroids would then be possible, and it seems that LEO is more than halfway to these places.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Especially in the space program, you can not, never in a million years, expect any launch vehicle to have a 100% safety record. Fine, how about 99%? Well for every 100 missions, you'll have another Challenger/Columbia. You figure it out. Disasters like this will happen because in order to get out there, get where we want, do the research we desire, advance ourselves as a species that (sadly too little of ourselves) desire, the risk will have to be taken to get out there.
The internal combustion engine... wonderful invention, and how many people went on to die from trains, cars, and planes. Numbers by now in the *taking a stab in the dark* hundreds of thousands, but look at the benefits, how much more quickly goods and people can be moved from point A to point B. Took a lot of suffering, a lot of checks and rechecks, a lot of "well person x was killed so kill project x" noise from people who can't accept change and their mouthpieces in the media.
My largest hope from all of this is that the end result that is achieved is better, faster, safer, cheaper, more technologically advanced space vehicles will be spawned, and the exploration shall continue.
Read your alternate history... there should have been a story on slashdot sometime in 2000 with a title like "Man Lands On Mars".
We can do a heck of a lot more than we currently do. Somebody just needs the balls to get the ball rolling.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
I say we should turn the asteroid Eros into a space colony. Drill into one end and hollow out a burrow. Add an airlock. Power it with power sats. Then you have a space station. Over time you can build a larger alcove to house hundreds of people. Spin it up to one G. Strap some nuke drive on it and you have a real spaceship.
Having been born in the mid-60's, I really don't have any memory of the golden era of space travel. For my generation it seems that NASA has always been struggling to keep it's budget and to find some purpose worthy of its original mission to get to the moon in one decade. The planetary missions of the late 70's and 80's were exciting to people like me who were interested in astronomy and space, but even these missions seem to be a fading memory.
Now that I have young children, I would truly love to see this nation embark on a bold adventure that will ignite and challenge their imagination. Even if NASA started planning a Mars mission tomorrow it would be at least a decade or more before the first landing. I would relish being able to raise my children against the backdrop of having such a mission planned and follow with them each step necessary to take the next giant leap for mankind. From such an ambitious mission perhaps my children and their generation will learn by example that with planning, courage and commitment this nation can continue to achieve great things. Perhaps, just perhaps, their generation would then be inspired to take the next leap beyond the inner solar system, and so on, and so on.
As I see it, we pay so much in taxes for things that are mundane and temporary. I would not object to a small sliver of my taxes going towards something that is not so much for us, but for the generations to come. Just as our generation does not lament the money and resources spent by our parents four decades ago to reach the moon, our children will not lament the money and resources it will take to reach Mars. They will only lament if our generation fails to have the vision and courage to take the next steps beyond those taken by our parent's generation.
Let's take a holiday from crewed space exploration and put the $ and effort into developing cheaper and more reliable launch and recovery technology, and continue our robotic missions in the meantime. Shuttle launches at $300-$500+ million each are a ticket to bankruptcy for NASA, not a stairway to space. Money matters - ask the folks who used to run the Soviet Union.
We've learned a lot in the third of a century since the Shuttle was designed - new refractory materials, thermal flux reduction by better aero boundary layer control, simpler and more reliable boost propulsion systems (hybrids), aero control through surface plasma generation, orbital reboost using solar electric magnetic thrusters, autonomous robotics, etc. We can build a far better launch system today than we could in the 1970s.
The Shuttle is old stuff. It's neither as good as we need, nor as good as we can do. Whenever we launch one, we loft about 180,000 pounds of mass into orbit that we have to bring back, after delivering a payload of around 55,000 lbs. If the Shuttle were operated as an expendable vehicle, we could put nearly a quarter of a milliion pounds into low earth orbit every time we push the button. Wouldn't you rather put the ISS up with 10 launches than 50 launches?
Rethinking the Shuttle doesn't mean scrubbing human presence in space. It simply means thinking for the long haul, considering how best to get the "stuff" (infrastructure) up there (expendible launch) and add human presence for assembly, test, and operation only as really needed (Shuttle follow-on systems). Expendible launch systems operated in intelligent balance with crewed systems will give us routine access to space lots sooner than "manned every time" systems.
However our nation decides to go forward, we owe a debt of gratitude to our fellow Americans who are willing to hazard their lives in going to space. They are among our best and bravest. For the Challenger and Columbia crews, I hope within the next couple of decades, somebody writes your names on a cliff on Mars in remembrance. With any luck, it will be one of your sons or daughters who does it.
So, als long as there are Communists, manned space flight is safe...
I have never really heard a good explanation, why we need the ISS and Shuttle, and how exactly are they supposed to help us achieve bigger goals like spreading life elsewhere in the Universe or making spaceflight commercially viable.
I'll take a wack at this.
The ISS will allow the space based construction of larger space craft. One of the biggest problems for long range exploration is the cost of sending up large crafts. If instead we can blast small crafts up to the space station with components and build the "Enterprise" in space, it will cost much less.
The Shuttle and its Human payloads are a means for us to learn about the dangers and physical consequences of space on us. Not to mention, that the shuttle is necessary to supply the ISS with the supplies it needs to expand and preform research.
Both the Shuttle and ISS have been used for space based research. It used to be the case that the standards of measurement were based on earth. These were imprecise due to gravity and other constraints. Thanks to research in space (where there is no gravity) certain new measuring standards are being used in scientific study on earth.
The two together work as baby steps on our quest to tame the wilds of space, something that we're approaching responsibly.
...but there's no money to be made in giving someone free fish. What you are SUPPOSED to do is teach them how to fish, and then sell them fishing poles. You don't better a nation by giving it freebies. You better a nation by getting it sober, standing it up, and giving it a push in the right direction. If we just give them food, they will just continue to beg for food from us. Besides, if they're so hungry over there, where do they get the energy to keep fucking and making new mouths to feed? There's not enough food for them, so how are they going to feed their children? What a bunch of fucking retards. They should do the world a favor and drown themselves. Then again, if they were living in America, they would be rewarded with welfare checks. These people are a disgrace to the human race.
My prediction is that it will happen.
They failed 6 times before succeeding in stringing the first telegraph line under the Atlantic Ocean.
They barely had steam engines running and they were already linking Europe to American across an OCEAN. THat is the power of human innovation and drive.
Now everytime we lay down wire across the Atlantic it can hold more bandwidth than all of the other wire previously put down.
I believe that the commercial exploitation of solar power via power satellites is the most likely conduit for space access. Power satellites are the first high profit use of space I have seen.
Once in place, the maintanence costs for these power generators will make space travel seem quite cheap for the cost incurred.
One thing we must not do (and I'm quite glad I haven't seen a post on it yet, if only everyone could be as smart as /.ers) is let the Columbia disaster set us back, or even stop us for going into space at all. A common thing I here when I talk to most people about space is, "We should solve our problems here before we waste all kinds of money on space." I think this has to be the worst outlook people could have on space. NASA barely gets any money anyway, and part of our problems on Earth are that we're over crowded, going to space will probably only help. Our big goal should be to get to the stars. Not just Mars, an asteroid, or even Pluto, which are all important steps along the way, but to get out among the galaxy and then the Universe. Granted, we probably have several billion years before we must leave, but we will have to someday. And this isn't just something we can put of for our great great great grand children to deal with, by then it might be to late. It's important that whatever we do, we always push forward the boundries of technology and of ourselves and into the great unknown. Onward!
Request: ECM unit, 1000 km fullerene cable, 1 tactical nuclear weapon. Reason: Birthday party for foreign dignitary.
This sort of incentives-based policy is in the tradition of American values. It should be no surprise that such values are being eroded as the 'nation of immigrants' changes from pioneering independence to bureaucratic dependence. The use of a socialist bureaucracy to explore space is a fundamentally different experiment that other proven American approaches to expanding the resource base available to humanity.
In 1989 I was working on grassroots legislation to reform NASA's launch services policies. This led to the passage of P. L. 101-611, The Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990which required NASA to procure launch services from private vendors whenever possible. This is common sense if proper boundaries between public and private functions are to be maintained. As radical as this may sound to many who see NASA as a space transportation company, it was, in fact, Presidential policy at the time and the legislation was therefore, in fact, redundant, but bureaucratic inertia demanded separate acts by the Legislative branch to reinforce the Executive's own command structure. This legislative effort started out as an attempt to passsomething along the lines of the Kelly Act of 1925 (which formed the basis for Jerry Pournelle's recommendations first put forth by his Citizen's Advisory Council for Space Policyin 1980), but compromised when it became clear that resistance from NASA, and its contractors, to citizen involvement in space policy was so intense that serious reform would be impractical. My testimony before Congress legislative follow-up to P.L. 101-611 made recommendations for a focus onincentives for commercial investment, rather than plans or "programs". An example of incentives-based legislation, applied to fusion energy policy, was recommended for passage by Bussard, R. W., one of the founders of the US fusion program in a letter confessing some of the subterfuge to which technical leaders resorted. It is still quite relevant today given the reliance on Middle Eastern oil and problems with fission energy. The point here is that incentives are more effective in general than governmental programs.
The first settlers in America experienced enormous causalities their first years they were in America. Entire colonies were lost. The original colonies included a substantial variety of fundamentally differing approaches to settling North America. America's frontier wasn't built by a centrally controlled bureaucracy -- and there is no reason to expect such a bureaucracy will take Americans to their next frontier.
Space policy is a touchstone of American values since Americans are spiritually a pioneering culture. Let's not forget who settled the frontier, how those "immigrants" differed from later immigrants, and what sort of "program" they had to settle the new frontier.
Seastead this.
I couldn't understand at first why the Columbia crash was such a tragedy when so many people are suffering all over the world.
But if you look at the lives of any one of the astronauts you'll see that every day of their lives they worked hard to be the best that they could be. They reached for the stars and sacrificed the comforts of earth to help all mankind in our pursuit of a higher goal. They knew the high risks of space travel and went anyway...to help all of us. I don't mourn their loss, but appreciate their lives for how they lived them. Each of them was a hero.
Wherever you have people you'll have conflict and corruption and evil. The space program gives us some hope of getting away from all of that. Colonizing new places and having new beginnings where just maybe the world won't turn out the way the Earth has.
It'll be a cold day in Hell before we solve ALL of mankind's problems. Giving people hope and a sense of wonder may just help that cause more than throwing money at all our other problems.
I think NASA's current paralysis can be explained in part by their attitude towards money. What I have in mind is the famous space pen story - the Americans spend millions of dollars developing a space-pen, the Russians use a pencil. The article makes some interesting comparisons between the two programs, and it seems that the very budgetary constraints that are causing the Russian program to decay were the driving force behind some of its better/safer innovations. The Russians have always done clever things on a shoe-string, whereas the Americans have tended to go for the white elephants. Perhaps NASA should employ some of those Russian rocket scientists? IN SOVIET RUSSIA.... naah.
I agree with having a long term goal of going to Mars. If it takes 100 years to solve the problems, so be it. However, if we're ever going to do anything noteworthy in space after going to the moon, we need to start getting today's kids excited about space again. I remember how much I was wrapped up in all things space as I was growing up in the 60's and 70's, but I don't see any kids today being engaged the same way.
We need as many as possible to buy a telescope and use it, show what's there to our kids. Share it with the local elementary school (I did this last year and 99% of those attending we're just astounded with seeing what's up there). Attend local astronomy star parties. We need to buy rockets from the hobby shop and launch those things with our kids. Take them to see real rocket launches (like we did recently at Vandenberg) and show them what's happening when they go into orbit (via a space sim like Celestia). Go to see IMAX 3D space shows. If you're in Southern California at the right time, take the kids to JPL's open house or to Vandenberg's open house. Launch ballons with a camera on it and take pictures from the edge of space!
Just do something to get more and more people excited about space and going to Mars. Don't let kids think that Star Wars is the true model of space flight. Don't let people think we know everything there is to know about space. Just do something. Everyone who gives a crap about space should do something, and not just sit there.
This is so lame...
What is the point of NASA and the Space Administration;
1. Military space support
2. Space-based business
3. Learning about the nature and evolution of the universe.
4. Getting a significant number of human beings off the planet before the sun get's too toasty to support life on the third rock.
The first three items need a cheap and reliable facility for getting hardware up as often as possible. The shuttle was never designed for this duty. The next generation human transport won't be either. There has to be two tracks for getting stuff up there. One track for hardware, flown by wire and robots, managed with a minimum risk to human life.
The next track needs to be a safe, effective, relatively inexpensive way to get large numbers of people off the planet and back again safely. By separating the tasks intelligently we should be able to cut costs and design time, and build optomized systems for the appropriate tasks at hand.
Next we need to stop pissing billions away on pointless millitary spending designed to blast little brown people into giving us their natural resources. There're plenty of resources circling the sun, and the first ones to begin mining them are going to get filthy rich (that includes enough hydrocarbons to float the Iraqi's in an ocean of oil.) We need to stop playing footsies with our neighbors and get the heck off the planet. If we diverted 25% of the millitary budget to space exploration, development, and utilization, we'd be visiting substantial cities at L5, the Moon, and on Mars within all our lifetimes. Things on the big happy checklist of skills to develop include;
1. Protecting people from hard/solar radiation outside the earths magnetosphere.
2. Creating a sustainable, portable biosphere (3 feet of water surrounding a living enclosure would stop virtually all of the hard radiation, as well as insure sufficient water for living in sustained trips into space, and providing a barrier to high velocity microparticles.)
3. Providing artificial gravity, the problems of bone loss are the tip of the iceberg for long term exposure to zero-G. We are optomized for 1 G living and less will causes serious long term problems. We already have the research to indicate the long list of problems associated with zero and low G living. We may even need to build rotating structures on mars and the moon to provide suitable gravity (building structures on rotating arms like a centrifuge, to provide additional artificial gravity.
4. Isolating or biology from their biology. Until we actually begin the serious process of teraforming a planet... we need to make sure their bug don't infect us, and our bugs don't infect them. This is going to be a solid gold bitch. We don't even have a clue how to do this (bacterial sporse can survive vacuum, high temp, hard radiation, and deep cold. In short, we don't even know how to sterilize our tools and ourselves to the degree necessary to indure the saftey of our people and any rare ecologies we may contact.
5. We have to improve our ability to move through space... we have to move so much faster. Chemical rockets are just not going to feed the bulldog, we need to do so much better.
6 We need to come up with a sane means to explore space, in such a way that the entire world receives a share of all the benefits, while those who put up the big wagers, receive a fair portion of the rewards. As it stands, international law, UN conventions, and a variety of treatise, make truly rewarding exploration of space virtually impossible.
7. We need to have a 5, 20, 20, and 50 year plan that suggests we haven't somehow lost our Father's testicles somewhere in the haze of Lunar exploration. Our parents and their parents, had more testicular fortitude in their little fingers that the entire damn nation has in it's 50 states. What kinds of stories of hardship did the persevere through to get to this country and to succeed here, ultimately planting human foot step on the moon. How many of them died striving for something better for themselves and the children's children. We run out of steamed milk for our lattes and life ends are we know it...
I feel for the men and women that died so bravely. I especially feel for their families... now suck it up, don;t make their sacrafice a popcorn fart in the wind, and let's get on with the business of advancing the entire species.
The answers my darlings are out their waving at us...
Genda B.
P.S. If it comes out that this was another avoidable tragedy resulting frmo the cutting of cost and cutting corners by greedy contractors... I suggest the next shuttle be tiled with high level managers from both the guilty corporation and NASA as an indication that we are not amused.
You know, another great thing about the Moon over Mars is the decorating possibilities. No, seriously, it's all grey, so you can match that with any colours you want in your habitat. But Mars, all that orangey-red, you know _that's_ gotta reduce your available colour choices something awful!
Plus, check out the view from the Moon versus the one from Mars. The Sun is a spec in the sky from Mars, but the Moon not only has the same view of the Sun as from Earth, it's also got the Earth in the sky - how fantastic is *that*?!
And for the "This Old Habitat" crowd - all that Moon dust should make for some schweet mooncrete mix for making places to live. I dunno about the Mars dirt...
And that's not even _talking_ about all the free green cheese...
Disclaimer: I haven't read the article. This is about a newspaper article I read yesterday, that I think fits in this discussion.
In the Dutch paper "Volkskrant", there was an opinion piece by a biologist yesterday. He explained that currently, the experiments done in the Shuttle are nowhere near worth their money. The experiments done (like what's the effect of zero-gravity on species x) test no important hypotheses and the outcome is usually not published in high profile magazines.
Once in a while, every scientist working in a field that could possibly have something to do with zero gravity research gets a request for ideas for experiments. They're basically begging for things to add to shuttle science missions. He doesn't really take these things seriously, since these experiments never test anything important. The important stuff (what's the effect of long term zero grav on humans) has been pretty much covered by now.
Also, a Shuttle flight costs $500 million. You can run his institute on that for a hundred years.
So his proposal is to give the $500M to the scientific community instead, to be used for pure science, and see if the scientists themselves spend it on experiments in Shuttles. "Of course they wouldn't".
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
just my $0.02
You said:
In 1989 I was working on grassroots legislation to reform NASA's launch services policies. This led to the passage of P. L. 101-611, The Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 [google.com]which required NASA to procure launch services from private vendors whenever possible.
You're admitting to this?!?
You must be be asking for a beating. Either that or confessing your sins.
The biggest problem in our corrupt government is that our agencies are forced to farm out to the lowest bidder instead of building the parts that they need themselves for one tenth the price.
If Government agencies were allowed to run their own factories for essential military and space exploration equipment we wouldn't have half of the failures that we do from shoddy equipment in our military. _AND_ it would cost less (in the long run).
But I guess greasing the palms of politicians and getting your buddy or your district a lucrative government contract at the expense of space exploration and US tax dollars is worth it.
I'd like to see them build a few simple bridge cables before trying a space elevator. Those would be a good proof-of-concept before tackling the much harder job. And Catch-22 is that in order to build a space elevator, we'd need fairly good conventional space capability. (Fetching and positioning the counter-weight, etc.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It may be feasible, but it's also insane.
- It would be a money sink that would never pay back its construction costs - a tax money sink, because no commercial firm could ever get investment funding (not this side of AD 3000 anyhow).
- It would be the worst sort of governmental monopoly, a choke point where everyone must bow and scrape to the groundbound owners, in order to get a lift.
- It would be The Definitive Terrorist Target - and the bad guys only have to get lucky once. It would be utterly indefensible from a simple kamikaze attack, being so long that no weapons installation could keep cover over its whole length without weighing it down.
- It would be a murphys-law magnet, untested technology carrying staggering tension loads in atmospheric, vacuum, radiation and electromagnetic conditions that would be experimental at best. And that's even before an orbiting piece of space junk slams into it.
- And it would be a catastrophe waiting to happen, when (not if) it snaps and rains megatons of carbon cable down upon the ground below.
Bleh.
Who cares that this scientist is Dutch. The exact same argument also goes for American scientists. Give them the chance to spend that $500M on whatever research they think is important, instead of giving it to NASA to desperately find something slightly scientific to do with it.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
You're a sicko, but what the hey, I'll volunteer as a test subject.
I normally wouldn't bother to respond to such drivel, but since it's apparently been modded up to a (4) I think it needs some sort of reply.
The astronauts are heroes because they choose to face risks known and unknown to advance scientific knowledge. We can debate over the value of the science that NASA pursued on Columbia's mission, but there is a big difference between the absurdity of a random car wreck and the pursuit of knowledge. There is also a big difference between the astronauts and those who engage in perilous and essentially selfish and useless pursuits such as (fill in the blank with ego-driven sport of choice). If nothing else, I imagine that the Columbia failure will lead us to better knowledge of space flight (perhaps we will devote more resources to hypersonic research, ionosphere research, plasma physics and so on).
As to African children, bread and milk, I suggest that you consider the possibility that the US is not the 'great satan' responsible for all evil on the planet. Do African leaders bear any responsibility for the problems in their countries? I guess in your world view they do not, but somehow the US is the party responsible for fixing these problems while leaders like Mobutu lined their pockets with the proceeds of their nations' treasuries. Check out Michaela Wrong's book "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz" for a recent and easily accessible account of Mobutu's misrule. The book by no means excuses the US or Belgium (former colonial power of Congo), but come on! At some point these places have to take *some* responsibility for their own welfare. The worst leader in Africa today seems to be Mugabe, though it's so hard to choose from such an ill-esteemed array of kleptocrats. I suppose somehow Americans are the reason for his misrule.
What's next on the hit list -- Oh it's the evil of our creating weapons to kill terrorists. I guess you're right, we should wait for terrorists to come here and kill us. I guess we should sit down with them and discuss how we feel about terrorism, and try to find some common ground, because after all, everyone is basically a good person, right? And we're all basically alike, right? Please. The inhumanity of individuals like those who commit mass murder by hijacking planes is obvious to me -- is it not obvious to you?
As to the issue of self-hate -- well, speak for yourself. If must-C-TV bothers you, don't watch it, and find something better to occupy your mind than fulminating on the habits of the majority of stupid people.
It's really a given to science.
We simply just need better vehicles.
Perhaps a goal is that of Spaceship of Ezekiel
Go ahead and take a look at the patent for a wheel within a wheel. How obvious it is once seen, how foolish one feels thinging someing more complicated.
The simplicity/safty needs to be improved on what we have.
I normally wouldn't bother to respond to such drivel, but since it's apparently been modded up to a (4) I think it needs some sort of reply.
The astronauts are heroes because they choose to face risks known and unknown to advance scientific knowledge. We can debate over the value of the science that NASA pursued on Columbia's mission, but there is a big difference between the absurdity of a random car wreck and the pursuit of knowledge. There is also a big difference between the astronauts and those who engage in perilous and essentially selfish and useless pursuits such as (fill in the blank with ego-driven sport of choice). If nothing else, I imagine that the Columbia failure will lead us to better knowledge of space flight (perhaps we will devote more resources to hypersonic research, ionosphere research, plasma physics and so on).
As to African children, bread and milk, I suggest that you consider the possibility that the US is not the 'great satan' responsible for all evil on the planet. Do African leaders bear any responsibility for the problems in their countries? I guess in your world view they do not, but somehow the US is the party responsible for fixing these problems while leaders like Mobutu lined their pockets with the proceeds of their nations' treasuries. Check out Michaela Wrong's book "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz" for a recent and easily accessible account of Mobutu's misrule. The book by no means excuses the US or Belgium (former colonial power of Congo), but come on! At some point these places have to take *some* responsibility for their own welfare. The worst leader in Africa today seems to be Mugabe, though it's so hard to choose from such an ill-esteemed array of kleptocrats. I suppose somehow Americans are the reason for his misrule.
What's next on the hit list -- Oh it's the evil of our creating weapons to kill terrorists. I guess you're right, we should wait for terrorists to come here and kill us. I guess we should sit down with them and discuss how we feel about terrorism, and try to find some common ground, because after all, everyone is basically a good person, right? And we're all basically alike, right? Please. The inhumanity of individuals like those who commit mass murder by hijacking planes is obvious to me -- is it not obvious to you?
As to the issue of self-hate -- well, speak for yourself. If must-C-TV bothers you, don't watch it, and find something better to occupy your mind than fulminating on the habits of the majority of stupid people.
The primary assumption of the cited article is that robots wouldn't be useful on Mars. Why is this so easily dismissed? Each of Benford's arguments about the difficulty of putting humans on Mars is a vote for trying to make it work with robots. It certainly seems easier to me, and not at all something to be dismissed out of hand. After all, if robots can go cave hunting in Afghanistan, why can't they do the same on Mars. Sure you need some AI and some autonomous decision making, but still, it doesn't seem more difficult that getting human up there. Especially now.
Kuro5hin is hosting a story on the topic of response to tragedies like this now -- A Heartbreaking National Tragedy.
Well worth a read.
As a South African I am extremely grateful to the USA, and other nations who can afford it, for their continued exploration of space, near and far.
I cannot help but believe that there will no alternative but to find alternative accommodation for a large portion of the human race within the next few generations. Without exploration that will never be possible.
The article says:
The big question that NASA never talks about is: what are we doing dinking about with humans--instead of teleoperated robots--in near earth orbit anyway? What can people do in near-earth orbit that is worth doing that unmanned remote-controlled craft cannot? It never talks about it because it is a question that has no answer.
If NASA has no answer (which is hard to believe) then how about this: there is still a LOT we have to learn about how the human body has to adapt to make life in space possible. Surely each mission outside earth's atmosphere completes another tiny piece of the puzzle?
I salute the astronauts who are prepared to risk their lives to ensure the long term survival and growth of the human race. Thanks, guys.
1) You can't really compare the race to human powered flight with the race to space when it comes to private enterprise. It's a lot harder, more expensive and a heck of a lot more dangerous to get into orbit than it is to do a powered glide down a beach.
Also, NASA and similar goverment bodies can allocate billions of dollars into researching new materials and methods... hundreds of independent contractors cannot manage those levels of funding. Finally, you're assuming space travel is economic for private enterprise -- aside from the occasional tourist there is as yet no valid business reason to develop space facilities (look at how little use the ISS is being put to by private enterprises). While I'd like to see more space exploration as much as anyone, I think large manned missions will remain in the domain of "because we can" type Government policy in the near future at least.
2) Likewise, your comparison to the American settlers ("entire colonies were lost...") doesn't stand up in today's CNN-ised world. Back then, if a disaster befell the other side of your continent, you heard about it months later and its impact was diluted; the culture accepted these kind of losses as it came with the territory, so to speak. These days, a single tragedy like the Space Shuttle gathers instantaneous, international media cover, and a disaster of colony-sized proportions would probably break the entire space programme, due to a public unwilling to accept those kinds of risks and casualty rates.
The real tragedy of the space shuttle is that, as Benford says, they were up there doing trivial stuff that we likely could have had machines doing at this point.
His article is spot on. He calls for an era of space exploration akin to that of the late 60's. People died. We had a GOAL. They were heroes. Yet we kept going and we made that goal.
Not only does he call for a return to space exploration, but he points the way - centrifugal gravity and long term stand alone bio-support, aka a biosphere.
So what does it take to overcome this tragedy? I dunno, would a million people sending copies of Benford's article to @whitehouse.gov addresses be a start?
Are we just going to putter around for years and turn this into a double tragedy?
Please let's not.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
No, this is not a joke. The solution to the problem of the loss of bone and muscle mass may be something low-tech that already exists. If you've seen how astronauts exercise in space, it is generally some type of stationary bicycle work or other types of exercise that do not work the muscles and bones intensely enough.
What they really need is something that provides a variety of resistance exercises without relying on weights, such as Bowflex or spring-based machines, and they need to train heavy like a bodybuilder when using them in space. They should probably even train harder and more often than bodybuilders would, since they have the rest of the time when their muscles can get near-complete relaxation in the weightlessness of space.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
because 7 people died in what is granted a tragic way to go put? I don't think so. I think that NASA should learn from this, fix the issue, and move on. Maybe some small thing they discover in the wake of this will be of great benefit to further deep space exploration. I for one want to see human beings living in orbital colonies, but I don't think I'll live that long. I for one wouldn't mind getting off this rock, and if there is a risk that I might die, then at least I'm gone.
I think we need to first focus on humanity.
Humanity has to become better at fulfilling our ideals as a species. We need to be hardier, capable of extended periods in micro-gravity without any drugs to keep us from pissing out our bones.
We need NASA to help big energy companies safely deploy technologies which will enable a hydrogen economy, not just for the seven wealthiest nations, but for everyone, because there's no prize for half-assing global technology like automobiles and power-plants. We need to get that stuff out there.
We should park the ISS at L4 and take a decade to scour all our rubbish out of low-earth orbit. Wouldn't it suck if the shuttle was struck by something someone accidentally dropped while working on the ISS months before?
The cool thing about all that "cleanning up LEO" would be that while a bunch of flyboys are playing RPV with radar and massive glad-bags, we could still be doing all the bullshit science that's made NASA and graduate students slaving away at research colleges happy for years.
Maybe we could take a good thirty years to finish that clean-up job, and by that time we'll have the kind of genetics technology which permits us to endure complete weightlessness, and maybe even allow us to hibernate just like bears so we don't need as much food, air, or have to worry about all that pesky psychology and some reality-tv producer buying all the NASA footage and making a tv series out of it.
And everyone here knows that there's absolutely no reason why we can't engineer perfectly good stuctures at the bottom of the well, develop the technologies to sustatin life in them. We could wrap up that knowledge, send it into orbit and create a civilization.
What stops us?
We do. We let clerics and technologists tell us fairy tales and we wet ourselves. Some of us have been trained from birth to entertain them.
We let politicians and their day-to-day pissing contests and in-fighting hamstring us in everything from feeding ourselves to enabling us to justify stepping on someone's face.
We let merchants push our buttons, control what we do with things we own, and we enjoy being controlled in so many different ways that it's become woven into the very culture...what we wear, what we play, and what we drive, what we want to wank to.
Our biggest problem is us.
And since we're quite happy being dipshits, until something happens to change that, solving any of these other little problems isn't going to matter.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
If we give a thank you for everything that came out of the US in the last 100 years, will you give a thank you for everything that came out of europe the last 1000 years or so?
The way to corrupt a youth is to teach him to hold in higher value them who think alike than those who think differently
I'm one of the people who's become disillusioned with manned spaceflight, and I'll tell you why.
It started with sending humanity to the stars, now it's just NASA maintaining it's budget. Space is no longer a province of all of humanity, but rather a small group of elitists who jealously guard what they think it their province alone; look at the shameful way US astronauts treated Dennis Tito when he want up there ("You shouldn't be here! You're not in our clique!").
If NASA decides to start creating a genuine space infrastructure, more power to them. Until then don't expect the kind of enthusiasm you saw with Neil Armstrong.
Maybe. I actually have more confidence in robotic probes. In any case, even if we need human presence, the "lightspeed lag" only means that we need to get people into orbit. Sensible human exploration of Mars would mean to send people into Mars orbit and have the planet explored by tele-operated robots. There is absolutely no reason to land people on any of the planets. In fact, the risk of contamination from human presence would be a very good reason not to even if we could afford it.
In general, it would be good if the homeless had homes, cancer and AIDS were cured, etc. While it is not clear that the federal government can solve these problems by throwing a few gigabucks around, for the moment assume it will.
The federal budget for science (NSF) and the space program is small. Wouldn't it be better to get the money by reducing the DoD funding by 2% rather than slashing NASA's funding by 50%?
In a big way. Well put, my feelings exactly (spelling errors and all
As for the article, pure rubbish. Unrelentless ranting. Science fiction.
Space is about as safe as a highway of drunk drivers, always has been, always will be. How can you say for one minute NASA should make it look easy to go 100km up at 17,580mph, in 394 degrees K tempatures, sustain it, and then accurately drop back to the planet and hit a runway in Florida, startng the decent as far back as the Pacific?
NASA and all the others who have worked on the Shuttle have worked miracles over the years. I for one am glad they went ahead at whatever the cost, because wasteful or not, we're further ahead of where we were.
Perhaps then, along the articles lines of thinking, we should ban cars, because they have failed more than once, and the auto industry is just pissing awaay our hard earned dollars. I suspect the author uses a computer with Windows? Better not save any data on it, as "Microsoft wants us to believe our hard drives are safe, when in fact they are not. Once is an accident, twice is a defect."
(OK Maybe he'd be right on the last one.)
My point is: Shit happens. There will be accidents. Build a new space plane, it will crash at least once. So will the next one. And the one after. Let us not forget, launching a rocket into space that comes back down safely is the most dangerous, costly, complex thing mankind has ever done. And with good reason: It is the greatest thing mankind has ever done.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
We have in the US an urgent need
to spend on things useless.
We spend billions of dollars on military,
defense and yes the , the space program.
We spend zero on national healthcare
or educating our masses (student loans are
at an all time high)
Why not first educate and build a healthy
population instead ?
> Is the shuttle, or the International Space Station
> for that matter, useful? Or just payola to aerospace
> interests and a means for keeping Russian rocket
> scientists employed?"
Even if it's true, what's wrong with that?
If you are making a list of Pros and Cons about the space program, "keeping qualified but unemployed people from working for the bad guys" definitely belongs on the Pro list. Access to space, just like nuclear weapons, is something that not all countries have. And it's something that we don't want our enemies to have.
The "payola" thing is just plain stupid. It's a blatantly loaded word that doesn't even describe what he is trying to say. (Payola is a bribe, or an extorted payment. How does that apply here?)
If the aerospace industry is important to national security -- which it unquestionably is -- then so what if the space program is a "subsidy"? It's part of a much larger, overall equation that Congress has to keep in balance. That belongs on the Pro list too.
People who argue that the space program is "too expensive" and "not paying off" don't understand basic economics. The race to the moon didn't really pay off when we landed in 1969. It paid off in the 90s when microchips changed everything.
from this:
Back in mission control engineers scanned monitors looking for the problems. Suddenly all the dials and gauges went crazy. A voice shouted "fire". It was the voice of one of the astronauts. The controllers looked at the screen that should be showing the interior of the Apollo capsule, all they could see was a fireball. Gus Grissom's voice came over the comms, "I've got a fire in the cockpit". There were more shouts , a scream and then silence. The interior of Apollo I had become a blowtorch and in eight seconds Grissom, White and Chaffee were dead. Everybody's worst nightmare had just become a reality.
The Apollo program had become a mess. Complacency and incompetance was abound and in the wake of the Apollo I disaster a drive to improve things wholesale saw a lot of heads roll. With the Vietnam war and civil rights concerning the public, people were asking if the space program was worth it.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
While I agree with the need of a biosphere and gravity for astronauts I disagree with the rest.
Turning back to rockets? I don't think so. Rockets can fail too. Ariane 5 is the best example.
Dusting off Saturn; I don't know how many flights the Saturn system had, but I wager that over hundred flights will certainly show a (fatal?) weakness in every system. All we can do is respond to that.
Then his argument for manned spaceflight and against robots: Scientific experiments can only be conducted by human beings. I beg to differ. Certainly, robots are not as versatile as human beings, but for experiments they're enough. Heck, the whole spacecraft could be just a big robot. Let's face it: the shuttle crew is there to study humans in space. For the only benefit that is: bring humans into space. And maybe to other planets. That's it. Everything else could be done by robots.
So, do we really need humans in space? Apparently this leads to only one conclusion: to colonialize space. This is the sole reason for this gigantic effort. I could argue that we do not need humans in space. We cannot cope with our problems here on our homeworld. How are we supposed to deal with more problems in outer space? Carry war and depletion there? First we should do our homework here before setting sights for other horizons.
However I admit that I like human spaceflight like the next geek. I have the books by Asimov, Cherryh, etc. to prove it. Even a Benford. But ditching the shuttle because it failed twice in over a hundred flights is not the right answer, in my opinion. It has to be revised that's clear. And there has to be research for alternatives. Supersonic planes, etc.
If cost is the only argument, then drop human spaceflight altogether.
Charity vehicles are stolen (by both sides) for use as soldier transports in some parts of Africa. Which do they need most: food and shelter, or another war?
And yes, heterosexuality (or for that matter lesbianism) doesn't spread AIDS anywhere near as fast as male homosexual practice, but the only real blocker is the kind of social arrangement practiced by Christianity or Judiasm. Horrors! We'd much rather die slowly and painfully, taking others with us, than learn from the bigots!
Jews survived the black plague singularly well because they adhered to the `silly' rules in the books of Deuteronomy and Numbers, while their Catholic neighbours didn't. Those rules have reasons behind them. There's a lot that the ancients knew well, but we refuse to learn. At our cost.
Common sense isn't, is it?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The worst religion of the lot is materialism. More deaths directly attributable to that throughout history than any other single belief group (except possibly people who believe that smoking won't give them cancer).
Even the Cattleticks fall short, they only (directly) got somewhere between 60 and 100 million, not counting starting or provoking numerous world and `civil' wars. Materialism is evil, convert someone away from it today.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Human feces needs to be composted in order to be particularly useful for growing plants. So it's part of the solution, but just a starting point. And "soil" is an incredibly subtle and complex mixture which is extremely hard to "put together" from its separate ingredients. I guess that's an area where humble soil scientists can contribute to the space program. Still, you're right about the value of that much orbiting biomass. It seems stupid to just throw it away.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Quote, The space elevator would essentially allow the world to participate, time to found the Open Space Institute? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The US is so powerful, so big and so rich, it has a responsibility to be setting the agenda for big missions, like perhaps Mars.
In 1,000 years, when it's the Russo-Chinese confederation or whoever running the world, what do you want your legacy to have been? The great civilisations always leave their mark, things they are remembered for. Egypt, Rome, Greece. The US's legacy so far is Apollo and the atomic bomb. Is that where you want to leave it?
Robert Zubrin puts forward a credible scheme in his (rather biased but scientifically thorough) book "The Case for Mars". You send an unmanned return vehicle ahead, with a fuel generator to make fuel from the Martian atmosphere (yes, it's possible). The crew only goes once there's a ticket home already there. For added safety, you send two return vehicles. The crew has a rover so they can drive to the nearest ascent vehicle when their time is up, and everything's cool. Meanwhile, there's a habitat left behind which you can use to start a persistent presence there.
Freedom: "I won't!"
As another comment here says, the shuttle centrifuge experiments use very small radii. The human body does get disoriented when the head and feet have very different gravitational environments! You need a larger radius to avoid this. Think of the rotating ship section in "2001" - it was about 10 metres across. That would be much better. Of course the way NASA works, if it doesn't fit on the ISS or in the shuttle cargo bay, it doesn't happen...
Freedom: "I won't!"
ok, apparently we've gone to the moon, and thats great, but what is the preoccupation with getting away from, quite possibly the most naturally harmonic, and stunningly beautiful place in the universe. Here the plan guys, lets explore a few barron space rocks, so that we have somewhere to go when we're done wrecking this one!
The US has killed millions of innocent people in several large-scale conflicts of dubious merit over the past 50 years. The US routinely strongarms other countries to protect its own interests. The US was a racially segregated country for most of the past century. US protectionism prevents cheap medicine from getting to the people who needs it most. Most people have little reason to be grateful.
Meanwhile, the US owes over 6 trillion dollars in debt. Where did that money come from? Exactly. So as long as you're spending our money you'd better heed the day of reckoning.
Mars exploration is a thought, at least it's dramatic enough that it might grab people's attention. I submit that we would be better off pursuing a goal in space with some obvious practical benefit, e.g. this scheme of Robert Kennedy of the Ultimax Group:
Apparently NASA "studied" the SPSS idea again a few years back. They said it looked good, but they needed to reduce launch costs "a problem which is being addressed" (by the space shuttle?):Mirrors & Smoke: Ameliorating Climate Change with Giant Solar Sails;
Topic: Mirrors & Smoke, and Other Shady Schemes
Bright Future for Solar Power Satellites
A lot of people see it this way: we could hugely improve conditions for the poor and homeless using the money which is wasted by inefficient and corrupt government, or squandered on stupid pointless weapons systems. It's not an either/or proposition. We *should* be able to both explore space and look after people on Earth, but our leaders (I'm Canadian but believe me our gov't is just as bad) choose to waste our tax money making themselves and their supporters/friends richer and more powerful. Also, I think a lot of things are done backwards - there should be no place for corporate profits in health care or prisons for example, but the X-prize (which seems to be going nowhere) seems to have really stimulated the idea that innovative, economical launch systems can be created by private concerns. As it is now of course, HMO's run health care, and NASA struggles to get into space, underfunded by government and overcharged by pork-barreling defense/areospace contractors.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Complete bollocks. Specficially, if it cost $20G to build (they say $10G), it need only make $2G/a to handily beat bank loans and stuff as a payback means. So double the $100/kg lift costs to $200/kg, big deal in the face of the $10,000-$30,000/kg it is now. $2G / $100/kg extra profit == 20Mt/a, 55,000t/day, 2300t/hr, a 400t load every 10 minutes.
Need to halve that load? Triple the price instead of doubling it. Or use the elevator to build more, and amortise the costs between them.
And we don't have one now? Go ahead, build your own Saturn V or Energia-Groza, be my guest.
Once they have half a dozen of these up, owned by 3 or 4 countries or consortia (I'd guess USA, EU, China, Russia, India, Brasil), that starts to break down anyway. If Australia wanted to build the first one, that would cost us $10,000 a head. If it built the 8th one, maybe $500 a head and every Australian gets their first 2kg hauled to space for free. If the people living in Perth pooled their gree kilograms, we could loft a 3000 tonne satellite.
Ever tried to hit something a meter wide from 10 km away? With defenses on the elevator shooting back at you and at your shells?
Clearing a corridor 10km wide around this would be no problem, and keeping it clear with SDI technology (near the ground, a perfectly ordinary Vulcan radar-guided cannon would do the job) relatively simple. Can you outfly a laser? Could your aircraft or missile survive several hundred unexpected megawatts of microwaves tuned to some vital dimension? How about a smart remote-targeted crowbar dropping in on you from LEO at mach 20?
Any concievable replacement would be worse.
It would have to be a clever piece of space-junk, smaller than a peanut and yet more destructive than a nuke. You haven't had a look at the design, have you?
If they were kind enough to put the elevator up on the Equator (not necessary, but it helps), it (or more specifically the defenses on it) would actually make a pretty good street-sweeper for the space industry.
That statement just betrayed your complete ignorance of how the elevator would work.
Of the 100,000km length, less than 100km would be in atmosphere. Take what is presumably the worst case: the cable snaps about 50km up. 50km of cable fall to earth, the top 30km or so burning up on re-entry, the balance stays in orbit. That's right, losing 0.05% of the cable makes very little difference to its orbit. Soon the lost 50km is replaced by shipping it out along another cable and unreeling it off the next segment above the damaged one.
But what about the bottom 20km? Even if it were heavy (did you read the line saying `paper-thin?'), it would fall into the ocean. Even if they anchored it at, say, Kununurra (in the far north of Western Australia) and it were heavy, you'd still only lose a stripe of desert a few m wide and 20km long. Big deal.
Now, important step, visit High Lift Systems and RTFM. Then come whinging back here.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The Problems with the shuttles:
1. They cost inordinate amounts of money
2. They provide no significant gain (If your goal is to study stuff to save human lives, the money is better spent researching stuff on Earth)
3. They're obselete(going to space in the shuttle is like going online with a PDP-11)
The Gains from the shuttle:
1. Nearly meaningless science that has very little, if any, practical value.
2. Vast numbers of jobs.
3. The ability to say, "Hey, we're in low Earth orbit!"
The problems with going to Mars:
1. Radiation
2. Physical effects of prolonged zero gravity.
3. Actually getting there and getting back alive.
The gains of going to Mars:
1. The ability to say, "We're on a whole nother fricking planet!"
2. Entry in every history book
3. Vast numbers of jobs
4. Science that is actually worth doing and justifies the cost.
5. Knowing that we have taken a step forward and not a step back
Which would you pick?(rehetorical Question)
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Interplanetary Vehicle: 50 billion dollars
Research to make a trip to mars possible: 1 trillion dollars
Being able to say we just landed on a whole nother fricking planet: priceless
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
If that antenna's for bouncing energy from an ordinary (well, high-power but otherwise unremarkable) microwave horn, you could build it out of hardware-store bird mesh tensioned with fencing wire. I kid you not, it's quite different from building Parkes-in-space: you need naff-all structure for something like that.
You could even omit the fencing wire and just spin the reflector. It's not as if there's anything in space to slow it down. Or rust it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The website of the Fauna Communications Research Institute says that this is just a hypothesis, not a "discovery" as the Ananova article suggests.
http://www.animalvoice.com/catpurrP.htm
It showed in his choice of reward from the North Korean delegate.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm sorry, but it was a bullshit article. I stopped reading at the line...
.. because we have been told all week in the tech briefings not to purport conjecture or assumption of what happened yet because we do not know. As this ass demonstrates, he has no grasp on that simple concept and thus failed any such integrety test.
Early results from the telemetry and the huge debris field suggest that the thermal tiles failed.
-'fester
When I was about 6 years of age, I used to live in Houston, Texas, with the
Johnson Space Center around the corner. I remember my parents used to take
visitors from back home (The Netherlands) to the center so they could marvel at
all the huge rockets and such which they keep around there. I have a fotograph
of me sitting in one of the seats used in the Apollo craft. And after every
visit we made, I remember thinking "When I grow up, I want to sit in one of
those chairs again. Go out there. See the Earth from orbit!" - Basically, become an astronaut.
Then, one morning as I and my mom were watching TV in the kitchen,
the program got interrupted.
"We interrupt this program for a special news bulletin: The Space Shuttle Challenger has just exploded during take-off."
From that moment onward, I never wanted to be an astronaut no more.
Now, being grown up and all, I realise that the only way to go is up.
Everything we as humans do on this world is messing around in the margins.
As some poster before me loosely stated, exploring is embedded in our genes.
NOT going up there would be a grave mistake.
And all those people saying that we should try to fix up stuff here on Earth first, well,
I'm sorry to have to be the one to point out that every time humans have explored
outside their "set" boundries, their own "world" was pretty messed up.
Still they went forward, with a vision that what they were doing might just change their world.
And hasn't the Space Program, even though it's been underfunded for most of it's life,
given us a lot of benefits? Think about medical applications, literal wonders have been worked
in that field just by the Space Program alone. Almost in every field of science has the
Space Program made a contribution. The list of applications directly or indirectly derived from
space development is a very very long one. A lot of common household articles are derived from
the very Space Program that some of the users of these articles attack so fiercly.
If I really thought I could make a difference, I would love to try and convince people of these facts.
Sadly, I know that can never happen. Some people believe so firm in their idea that Man should
not go to space same as some people believe so firm in the Church, or other affiliated mind numbing
programs.
My final point, and one that seems to be forgetten every now and then:
Before everyone starts talking technical stuff, we should be trying to change
the global populations view about space. Things would be a lot easier if large partions of
the world's population could share our firm belief in space and it's benefits.
Sorry if this post seems kind of a mess, I'm not a gifted writer.
Veni, Vidi, Velcro!
Over-reactors suck. Last I heard the most dangerous job in America was still those lobster (or something) fisherman in Maine or whatever. I dont have any statistics, but I would venture to guess working for NASA is still wayyyy down on the list of moste dangerous jobs. Last I checked as well, everyone employed at NASA and setting foot into a space shuttle was aware of the risks and chose to accept them. So what's the problem? Who cares what you or I think anyway, it's a legal job with pretty low risks, and those doing it want to do it. Doesn't death come as one of the risks for Indy car driver, Military officer, powerline repairer, volcano explorer, and millions of other jobs? I know of someone who was killed by a giant press machine at a water heater plant (ugh), so should we all re-evaluate our need to continue water-heater development? Whatever. Make it safer when you can, but don't over-react and start thinking it should be dismanteled just because there are accidents.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
What about those space spores that drop in off the tails of comets? Isn't that supposedly how all life on this planet may have started?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
that Michael Moore should make a movie called "Bowling for Columbia" exposing the ridiculous amounts of money wasted on the bunk science of the Shuttle and ISS, using the Feynman report on the Challenger disaster as a starting point.
its' absurdly cheap at the price. missile technology like WMD needs to be kept under wraps. Analyises have shown that missile envy spreads like a bad cold. thay is the moment one country gets a 300 mile mislie that overlaps his neighbor, then poof all the neighbors want it, and it grows quadratically.
building good missiles is supposedly hard (i would not know), but if so its a genie we should try to keep in the bottle.
plus its a good model for the other areas of the fomer soviet union we care about like bio weaponeers and nuclear scientists. the world would be well advise to emoply these people weel. or just buy them a retirement villa. wahtever. getting these people off line is CHEAP compared to cleaning up after the possible damage one of them could do.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I keep saying this, hoping to convince others and thus to start us moving in the right direction.
/.'ser and K5'ers.
A reusable orbital delivery system makes about as much sense as reusable toilet paper - yes it is possible, but the cost to make it reusable far exceeds the savings. Every kilo you boost to orbit costs about ten kilos in fuel. Therefore, adding any weight that is not payload is extremely wasteful. If you add one kilo to make something "reusable", that is a kilo of payload you give up.
The rocket engines on the shuttle are very complex - turbopumps, combustion chambers, cyrogenic fuels. The solid rocket boosters are MUCH simpler - why did NASA not use just them? Simple - solid rockets are not throttleable - one lit off, they make as much thrust as they want to, and while you can to an extent control that thrust by how you design them, there will be unavoidable variations in thrust from unit to unit. You cannot get several of them balanced out - in the shuttle, the main engines are used to balance the load out by shifting their thrust to make up for variances.
However, we have for some time known how to build hybrid rocket - solid fuel, liquid oxidizer. These rockets are throttleable and can be made restartable.
Imagine this: We start making hybrid rockets, roughly the size of the shuttle's SRB's. They are NOT designed for reuse (if they can be made reuseable without weight penalty great, but otherwise fugetaboutit).
For normal, unmanned payloads, you use 1 or more of these rockets (one for smaller payloads like a comsat, up to five or more for big chunks of the ISS). If they go foom on launch it is unfortunate but not catastrophic.
For manned missions, we launch a MUCH SMALLER vehicle, big enough for the (astro|cosmo)nauts and not much else (if they need a big experiment, you launch it as an ummanned launch). Because the launch vehicle is much smaller, you don't need as many of these boosters. You can therefore inspect the HELL out of the ones you use.
Since you are making the boosters by the truckload, you can quickly get the economies of scale to bring the cost down. This argument was also used for the shuttle, but since the shuttle is such a complicated bird this promise never materialized. I assert that BDB's (big dumb boosters) would be able to achive this goal.
Also, since these boosters are standard parts, you could farm them out to several companies (hell, GPL the damn design!) This would allow for competition, as well as innovation. We could even allow them to be build in other countries (e.g. Russia). How about getting a degree of commonality between the Russian space program and the US?
Finally, given the fact that you could use a non-cryogenic oxidizer, you could relatively safely ship these things into orbit, thus allowing (lunar|Mars) missions to use them to provide the delta-V to leave orbit.
NASA keeps focusing on "sexy" technologies like SCRAMjets and such, and those are find as research projects. But for workhorse applications, why not K.I.S.S.?
Big Dumb Boosters. Beat that into NASA, beat that into your Congresscritter, beat that into the National Space Society and the Planetary Society, beat that into your fellow
www.eFax.com are spammers
--just as a side issue, I think the tech already exists for a better shuttle-like design. The reason why it isn't being used is that it's a military secret used in whatever prototype or low production planes the air force has that have replaced the sr-71, like the reported aurora and brilliant buzzard alleged models.
NASA is another kettle of fish. Try reading The National Science Trust white paper or read the paper linked to by the phrase you used as your title. These provide the proper role of a scientific agency. If guys like James Van Allen could support the legislation (which he did) you have to think twice about why you are demanding that he launch his scientific satellites with government-owned and operated transportation services.
Seastead this.
Nope, Exclusive lesbianism is statistically much safer again. By your logic, all women should therefore become lesbians and use artificial insemination from HIV-negative men to become pregnant.
Alternatively, we could all become celibate. That'd solve the problem!
Grow up. The ancients didn't practice what they preach. Neither do contemporary Christians or Jews, as a group. There's a lot of fornication goin' on, and there always will be, and any public health campaigns that aren't designed around this simple fact will fail.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The moon is a day or two away by chemical rocket. Mars is somewhere between a few weeks (if we build something really futuristic like an Orion drive) and eight months (if we do a minimum-energy Hohmann orbit) away. Mars has an atmosphere, so you can do aerobraking and make propellant out of it, neither of which you can do on the Moon. Mars has a nice diurnal cycle, the Moon doesn't. The temperatures are totally different. The science you want to do on each place is totally different.
If you want a less challenging target for your initial mission, try a near-Earth asteroid. Much more science return - and learning more about NEOs might give us the chance to figure out how best to deflect them.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Nuclear fission rockets are probably dead in the water for operation in Earth's atmosphere. However, I'm not particularly concerned about a bit of uranium being dumped in the sea. Thousands of tons of it have been dissolved in the ocean since long before we were here.
As for the need, electricity generation would enable heaps of stuff we can't do now - decent data transmission rates from outer solar system probes, active radar, nuclear rockets allowing bigger probes carrying more equipment launched with the same boosters we have now...the list goes on.
Have you any idea how limited remote-controlled robots are? Send me to Mars with a digital camera, a chemistry set, a microscope, a shovel, and a hammer, and I can learn more about Mars in five minutes than Pathfinder could in months.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Why not just drop a big ass rope off the space station?
I think most people are forgetting about China's quickly evolving space program. While the Russians are totally screwed I have a feeling once China drops a man on the moon someone in America is going to wake up and smell the coffee. At least I hope so. We need to start looking at where we can go when we screw up this rock we are on...
Tethers ( 1, 2, 3 ) attached to counterweights can be used to transfer spacecraft from one orbit to another. The first tether has an orbit that skims the atmosphere, where a craft catches and connects to the end of the tether. The craft is lifted into low earth orbit and subsequent tethers help it to reach escape velocity. Using the tethers takes energy out of the orbits of the counterweights, some of which can be put back by using the tethers for descent as well as launch.
J. Storrs-Hall (once moderator of sci.nanotech) envisioned a space dock, a linear motor suspended 100 km above the ground that accelerates spacecraft to an elliptical orbit. He computes an amortized cost of reaching low earth orbit of 42 cents per kilogram. From the elliptical orbit, it's a relatively small safe step to escape velocity.
A space elevator ( 1, 2 ) is an excellent long-term solution. A cable is hung from a weight in geosynchronous orbit, reaching down to the Earth's surface. The elevator climbs the cable, carrying a craft. When it reaches GEO, the craft detaches and spends only a little fuel getting to escape velocity.
Tethers and the space elevator require novel materials for strong cables, probably using carbon nanotubes. The frame to hold up the space dock is in compression, and something we could build with little or no advance in material science. Any of these alternatives would be vastly cheaper and vastly safer than putting human lives on the noses of fuel tanks subjected to unreasonable speeds and stresses.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
I'd suggest that you, and anyone else interested in the question of why Mars is a better target for a base and eventual colonization, should read Robert Zubrin's book The Case for Mars. He advances in it a number of arguments as to why Mars is better, but the one I found the most interesting was the suggestion that Mars is the best place in the solar system for farming, aside from the Earth (see pages 185-199).
We know that Mars has lots of water relatively accessible in its polar ice caps, as well as likely underground deposits all over the planet. By contrast, the only known water on the Moon is the recently discovered ice lurking in shadowy craters at the south pole. And based on the results of Viking and analysis of Martian meteorites, we know that its soil has all of the necessary nutrients for growing plants in.
The other key to agriculture is a source of energy for growing crops. To use natural sunlight for growing crops on the Moon or a space habitat would require huge greenhouses. To shield the crops from radiation, the glass would have to be 10cm thick! Mars has enough of an atmosphere to filter out most of the radiation, so farms on Mars would simply require a pressurized tent. Artificial lighting is also a possibility, but the energy costs become prohibitive, particularly when free energy from the Sun is available.
Most of the above factors apply, less generally, to human habitation. The Martian atmosphere will be easier for humans to get around, and it'll mean that settlements require less shielding against radiation. The Martian day is close in length to that of Earth. The surface gravity of Mars is higher than that of the Moon, so adapting to it will be easier. And so on.
Mars is the best place for human habitation outside of the Earth. That makes it the most desirable colonization target, but even for temporary outposts, the same factors will make those bases cheaper and easier to sustain.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I do. I don't want 40% of my $500 million going to cheap cigars and funny boots.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
She was sent to her death (an unpleasant one, slow suffocation, dehydration, or burning up) and they knew they had no way to get her down.
Heh, then you'll hate to hear that the dog they sent up before her got cooked on launch (insufficient insulation on the casule, drag heating). Anyway, Laika was actually euthanized before reentry with drug-laced food - the Russians weren't THAT bad.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
The biggest problem in our corrupt government is that our agencies are forced to farm out to the lowest bidder instead of building the parts that they need themselves for one tenth the price.
I'm clearly missing out on a huge opportunity to sell these parts for 80% profit at half the price.
Last I heard the most dangerous job in America was still those lobster (or something) fisherman in Maine or whatever.
It's king crab fishing in the Bering Sea - the height of crab season just happens to be the middle of winter on one of the roughest bodies of water on the planet. I can't find the numbers in a two-minute google search, but IIRC out of a fleet of ~300 men, 2 to 6 don't come back each season - and that's assuming no boats sink. The blood sweat and tears of hard-working men must be a hell of a seasoning, king crab is what, $20/lb?
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
--I was aware of the various space plane designs. I was more thinking of the *alleged* advanced craft that are flying. I am really speculating now, no actual data of course, but the web has various references* that can be found. It could be that for the public & civilian spaceplane concepts they are limited in using only technology that is up to a certain publically acknowledged threshold of advancement, which would require them to re-invent the wheel in an inefficient (but still functional, obviously) manner in order to protect the better quality designs in the secret prototype craft.
r oo m_projects.html
*google search, random selection reference url
http://www.dreamlandresort.com/black_projects/g
remove slashdot-inserted space in "groom" part of url
The second of two research projects on Bone Loss in Space, called OSTEO-2 ((Osteoporosis Experiments in Orbit-2), were performed on the STS-107 mission.
The project, a research mission of the Canadian Space Agency, was to follow up on results of OSTEO-1 from STS-95, experiments which were performed by Astronaut John Glenn aboard Discovery.
Preliminary results from the tests were very positive; some media reports used the term "breakthrough" to describe the results.
All data was lost upon re-entry.
Suggested moderation: (-1, Stoned)
here is a better url for this topic
http://www.fas.org/irp/mystery/index.html
* This was a letter I wrote to Mr. Bush 3 weeks before the Columbia disaster.
/costs.
Dear Mr. President,
I am writing to you about my disappointment with the stateof affairs in America today. While the media is constantlychurning up images of our faltering economy, corporate CEOs being led away in handcuffs and the constant spectre of additional terrorist attacks. There remains little focus or attention on what made the United States the greatest country in the world.
America's spirit has always been great ideas...ideas that unite the nation and provide a rallying point to focus ourskills, determination and ideals. It began with the Declaration of Independence from Mother England, a bold and audacious move against the Superpower of that era. Later the expansion west and claiming of a continent drove the American dream. World War II and the universal struggle against the Axis forces pushed this country yet futher in greatness. And then in the sixties and seventies it was the Race tothe Moon. It galvanized a generation...I remember as a young boy, being called to the TV by my parents one hot July evening to see live pictures of the first steps on themoon. That moment and the steps that led up to it made me so proud to be an American.
No other nation can or could have done this...yet. While we have forsaken the Moon for other 'scientific pursuits in space', China recently anounced that they intend to put men in space by the end of 2003 AND set up a moon prescence by the end of this decade to in their own words, "exploit its resources" . The thought of that is at best an affront toour astronauts and engineers that made the original journey possible, and at worst a possible threat to our future inspace and our security here on Earth.
NASA's priorities need to be radically re-organized...theyshould be doing great things again, making heros that our kids can look up to , not spending valuable research dollars on hair-brained anti-gravity research, not launching repeatedly the 'Space Truck'(Shuttle) to do heavens knows what and building this so-called International Space Station, that us U.S. taxpayers are paying the lion's share of over $10 billion dollars at last count.(and called by a recent article in New Scientist magazine, "the aimless, cash-guzzling International Space Station" )
Not only has this space station been hideously expensive,and fraught with numerous cost overruns, but what will it really accomplish? What are thy really doing that we really didn't learn or do with SkyLab back in the 1970's, exceptmaybe planning to host pop-stars and other super-rich tourists..?
This nation's destiny is to return to the Moon , and live there...establishing a research station like MacMurdo Station in the Antarctica. The first step in learning how to 'homestead' in space's hostile environment. Mining minerals and water ice for fuel, building materials and life enabling oxygen. Somewhere from which we can properly explore the Moon's history and hidden riches. And re-ignite the American people's imagination of going to the stars. I havea one year old son now, and I want him to imagine and dreamof going beyond earth's problems someday to a bold new frontier and destiny for mankind.
Currently NASA's manned space program is focused only on Mars....a destination we are not ready for nor as economoical as going back to the Moon first. NASA's own people have said the following..
"NASA is misdirected by setting its sights too firmlyon Mars and the search for life on the red planet, said lunar scientist Paul Spudis. NASA's own Office of Space Science, as well as former space agency chief,Daniel Goldin, have "suppressed this [ lunar science ]community in favor of Mars," he said.
"I don't think you can conduct a human mission to Mars for less than a $100 billion in any time shorter than ten years," Spudis said. "The technology base will only marginally support a human Mars mission. It's justa bridge too far. I contend that NASA doesn't have a politically viable mission."
Spudis said that buried within NASA is a progressive plan for placing humans back onto the Moon. NASA Exploration Team (NExT) members at the Johnson Space Center, he said, have scripted a breakthrough strategy.
There is a plan already started, what we need is the will to in these troubled times think of a loftier and bolder goal, that of retruning to the Moon - to stay. Are we too distracted and busy with the war on terrorism and other ills at home? I think not, as we did it the first time through the heyday of the height of the Cold War and its stresses
To summarize, here are the key points I'd like you to consider:
1. Make returning to the Moon a new national goal , to stay this time...to explore , learn its secrets and pave the path to eventually living in space.
2. Immediately re-organize NASAs management, expendituresand focus to pursue this task.
3. Halt the run-away spending on the International Space Station. I don't really think we are getting our money's worth.
What NASA needs a is grand vision in order to survive. "Right now, NASA is just one big accounting problem," saysJohn Pike of the Global Security think tank in Washington DC. "Unless there is some other reason for its existence, some other goal, the easiest way of solving this problem isto shut down NASA."
By setting a new direction and bold agaenda to return to the Moon we can turnaround NASA's flailing , and re-chart its mission as a great quest, one that will capture the imaginations of all Americans, youg and old, to renew the pioneering spirit of America. Additionally, the technologyand lessons learned about living of the Moon will be directly applicable to the next logical goal of a Mars mission.
Thanks for your time, I hope you give this some thought.
Sincerely,
a citizen
Just like the elitists hereabouts who shout "If you're not an expert, you shouldn't use linux!" ;) But there is something to what you say -- some people act as if "commercialization of space travel" were in some way evil. There =are= people who want such programs to be hero-driven and out of reach of the common man. But if the *ultimate* object isn't to make life in space a viable option *for the common man*, then why are we bothering at all??
You'll know we've *truly* succeeded when riding the shuttle to Mars, or better yet Alpha Centauri, is no more exciting than taking the bus from Phoenix to Tucson is today.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
And eventually there will be poor and homeless on space stations and other planets, just as poverty and homelessness didn't go away because people explored, then settled and ultimately civilized Earth's frontiers. It's the nature of humanity. "Wherever you go, there you are," while completely true, is NOT a good reason to never go anywhere.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The SLI has not been cancelled. Some of its funding has been redirected, though, to the OSP and ISS.
I find it amazing that NASA has had the fantastic track record that they've had. I am a scientist and know about little peculiarities and set-backs you can encounter in an experiment setup and execution. When lives are involved, you try everything a million times before the "run that counts" - but probability dictates something obscure will come up every so often. When you're blasting through the atmosphere with your nose on fire, there is enough opportunity to eventually get those odd situations.
I completely agree though, learn from your mistakes, make the possibilities the least and get out there and learn something amazing.
Sanity is the playground of the unimaginative
One of Benford's positions is that the space station does not allow for partial-G experiments prior to a trip to Mars. Maybe I'm missing something but it seems uniquely qualified... Astronaut's spend 6 months on the station simulating the trip to Mars. Then a fresh crew from Earth takes them to the Moon, which at quarter-G is a fair approximation of Mars gravity. Person's with celebrity need to be careful how they use it. Its easy to get attention now, because it invokes the image of dead astronauts.
The Brits got a _lot_ more people into the New World than did the Spanish. Britain remained a significant world power much longer than did Spain.
Only simpler, yet more powerfull tech will get us anywhere. We need to learn how to control gravity. We need to lear how to move from point A to point B without spending tons of fuels to accelerate and then just as much to decellerate. Frankly as far as space reaserach goes, more sense would be to put more money into basic reasearch.
More shuttle flights will never lead us to other galacies, a better nuclear acelerator might. I trully belive that conventional engnines (checmical, plasma, or nuclear) will never be able to propel (living) humans beyond solar system.
Vic
Marx and those socialists were right, there are too many capitalist pigs. How can I justify going to College for science and engineering when pretty much they tell us you are the smartest people in our country but you will have to work harder, longer, and get paid less for being an engineer which is a high paying science type job, while having some moron with a business degree bossing you around generally negatively affecting your objective. Face it people just do not care, we have wishy washy politicians who have there own agendas, and only a small minority really cares. The moon race was unique in that we had hard competition, Kennedy was a charismatic leader who died and this was one of his dreams, it was this that really pushed america to do this. Not to mention this was a sign of our ability to land missiles anywhere and everywhere making this a worthwhile goal. I have an idea, why do we not make it clear that the 60 billion dollar war that will kill Iraqis and americans a like be canceled and we could use that money to advance space or get us off our dependence on foreign oil. Or our highly regarded tax cuts, would I rather see us feed starving children or do something useful with that money? You tell me, I do not support any of our nations leadership because they lack basic understanding of economics and how we could make a better situation for everyone while helping ourselves, it can be done. So the key here is do not vote for BUSH in 2004 and make it clear that america is dissatisfied with the options in politics. We need a candidate who is very intelligent, pragmatic, and understands science. Bush simply is not our man, he barely knows what NASA is he had planned budget cuts, and if anything is to blame for a space shuttle falling out of the sky it is budget cuts. Clinton and Bush #1 can also share the blame but he was only doing what he had to do to get our government out of hock because of the Reagan administration which was responsible for accelerating economic growth too fast and causing us to enter a recession because of an artificial growth based on 6 trillion dollars of borrowed money across 8 years. Keynesian economics gone awry is how I would describe that period. Now is the time, it is the time not to cut taxes but spending the trillions of dollars for the good of the world, not individuals. You tell me what is more effective give away money to people who will use it to buy foreign goods or Giving many americans jobs creating new technology and rebuilding aging american infrastructure. So remember this when we go to the polls.
-An anonymous concerned American
We went to the moon in the 60's, and didn't go back. My thoughts (that just hit me) "Competition is Good." Russia never went to the moon, so why should we one-up ourselves? Hopefully, With China (and others) finally persuing space flight(can you believe it took them 30 years to start and catch up?) America will be pushed to step up and show that they are still one step ahead.
What I'm proposing is a relatively safe science mission that uses know technologies and proven capabilities that could capture the imagination of the public. Asteroids. While we know a great deal about the meteorites that strike out earth, we do not know as much about the large asteroids that inhabit our solar system. This mission would investigate these asteroids.
/. crowd?
Phase one would be completely unmanned. A vehicle, perhaps prepared in orbit by the ISS, would travel to the asteroid belt or some nearby asteroid, capture the asteroid, and return with it to earth orbit. The the requirements for this would really push the envelope of what our current technologies are capable of, and would expand and improve our familiarity with the mechanics of space operation.
Phase two involves the process that occurs after the asteroid has been returned to earth orbit. I envision the ISS becoming a central base for a team of geologists and other scientists who routinely make EVA spacewalks to the asteroid, performing numerous science experiments and taking samples that are returned to the ISS or earth for analysis. This phase would also be very succesful in the media's eyes as it has the potential to produce excellent pictures and videos of humans at work in space. Though you might not think that the media should not be our primary purpose in space, it will be absolutely neccesary to capture the public's imagination and to build a feeling of adventure.
The final, third phase depends on the size of the asteroid. There are numerous possibilities for it after the science has been conducted on it in orbit. It could either be completely dissasembled in orbit, put on a trajectory to burn up in earth's atmosphere, or left in orbit. However, it could also be put on a trajectory to impact with the moon in a known location, allowing us to for the first time in history to study an asteroid impact in great depth. This could also provide justification for another moon mission to set up equipment beforehand and study the impact crate afterwards.
The key to the success of this mission lies in its modularity. If, after phase 1 conditions here on earth have changed, one need not appropriate enourmous amounts of $$$ from congress for phase two. Same goes for phase three. This will make the mission a much more attractive proposition to the financiers.
I would love to see this happen. Any comments on it from the rest of the
I am not a fan of human space travel. The symbolism of going out into space never really excited me much, since I tend to think I wouldn't like it, and I never really understood why someone would want to go up.
:-)
:-) )
Now that even chip design is being offshored, the only real
engineering work in the US is soon going to be NASA and the defence
industry? Great! (Well it'd be greater for me if I were an American
citizen!) In a way, perhaps that explains why some many science/tech
types are so pro-space. Look where the money is, as they say.
Would any of you? Like at least a few other slashdot readers, I lead a sedentary existence, sometime emerging into the outdoors for a few hours here and there(so few I am pasty faced and open to jibes from my dark-toned girlfriend) . But I wouldn't want to give those few hours up. I don't want to wear space suits, or work on a space station on mars which would be like a small claustrophobic village, though less fun since there are no outdoors. As for orwellian nightmares...well, forget about privacy in any of these places, or even freedom. Ultimately, who has the freedom to do as s/he pleases when you could kill everyone around you just by opening the wrong door. The pioneers who go out will be, well visionary, but then that's often just another word for stupid and deluded.
As to whether I should pay as a taxpayer for people to go up into space, well, then my opinion is quite clear: no. The arguments for human space exploration are 1) all the eggs in one basket theory. Well, aphorism-based policy is tricky, since there are quite a few aphorisms around. Rather than go through an exhaustive list against foolhardiness, let me quote/paraphrase two: A bird on earth is worth two on Mars. Put all your eggs in the one basket and--watch that basket! Does anyone seriously believe that building a station on Mars has a better survivability than building a deep biodome bomb shelter in Colorado? The latter is significantly cheaper, and no need to worry about bone density loss, just the usual pastiness factor for white folk.
As an aside, I don't want to give up on Earth. And I don't want anyone else to have that option either. ie. if the elite of the world decide merely living in America isn't safe enough from the teeming hordes anymore, and go off into space, can you imagine the consequences for those of us still leaving down here? Absentee ownership will take on a whole new meaning. ie. I like having all the eggs in one basket. Perhaps we've already doomed the earth with our profligate ways. It's still cheaper to build shelters on Earth. It's much easier to make a go of it in apocalyptic earth than to survive on a mars colony with earth in collapse.
2) Encouraging young people into science. Or is it encouraging young people into space science that will then think that going into space is a worthy goal. I seem to have always thought going into space was foolish. Why not colonize the undersea while you're at it! oh not sexy enough.
Well science doesn't need the sex. America's society is pretty sick now, more concerned with getting a hit single or becoming a parasitic business contract lawyer who does IPOs (or whatever they do when they aren't sucking the life juices of positive life force) than with understanding how the world works... Science is not about going to mars. It's about understanding new things. Try understanding how the human brain works or how life works or countless other things....now that's science.
Encourage people into engineering...well engineering is always about balancing the forces of nature against the forces of man, including his/her pocketbook. Figure out how to store energy efficiently so that one can ride out power demand surges when everyone turns on the dishwasher....now that's a challenging science and engineering problem. Figure out how to REDUCE the amount of fertilizer while still obtaining good growth results (aside: what kind of agricultural engineering policy is it to develop plants that resist fertilizer and pesticide excess rather than finding ways to reduce susceptibility to pests and encourage growth? agricultural engineering run by pesticide companies, obviously.)
Encourage people into the sciences and engineering domain? well in a way, sure. It creates jobs for high tech types. (well like me.
As detailed further in the next point, the human space race is expensive. Why be indirect about it? You want to encourage people in engineering and sciences? Encourage those kind of businesses, those kind of schools. Discourage complicated tax codes (rich accountants); highly skewed medical staff market (very expensive to become a doctor in the US. You obviously are way too tight on the supply since you need to import from all over the world. Tight supply of doctors = rich doctors); winner-take-all business climate, focus on financial dealings, CEO glorification (What does a CEO do of real value? talk to rich investors? Golf? attend board meetings of other companies where they hike up one another's salaries.), entire derivatives markets (Go into money: it's way easier to understand than the effect of Maxwell's Equations at the nanoscale chip level, and once you learn, you're done! money's money. Derivatives are new but they're a joke, a very lucrative joke, so the joke's on me for becoming an engineer.) crazy tort and criminal system (rich lawyers). I repeat: the joke's on me for becoming an engineer. Sure engineering is hard work, when you try to do it right. But hell, stockboy at costco is hard work too--I know. And McDonald's is hard, and ad writing can be hard (though sometimes you have to wonder whether hard work goes on for some of these ads!) and brain surgery is hard. Heart surgery is also hard, but is better paid than brain surgery. More clogged arteries around than clogged brains...I find that hard to believe. Oh right, people don't mind having clogged brains (I know I know, brain surgeons don't deal with intelligence, even less with clear, honest thinking. Damn shame.) . ie. what you get paid only indirectly depends on how hard you work. And it's not just education...some smart hardworking PhDs in biosciences aren't raking in the dough either. Our society just values certain things more than others, and actually doing stuff ranks at the bottom of the barrel these days.
Perhaps some engineers feel it's just right that some money come their way finally. I'd prefer to have a business climate where making a 20% profit on a gidjet sounds like a good project. Oh sure, in today's climate, investors claim they'd be happy with that...but they're just biding their time for the next speculative bubble to make the real dough.
So after all this meandering let me summarize this point: the human space race is a poor means to encourage young people into science. For it confuses the goal of science, understanding, with sexy and symbolic gestures. Perhaps the money does encourage some engineering and science by creating a reserve of government employees and subcontractors, but better means of encouraging engineering and science as professions exist, and the money could be used for other tasks, which brings me to the next point.
3) Better than spending it down here on earth! A previous poster on slashdot said there would always be poor and hungry people, and one shouldn't stop doing things because of this. Furthermore, he states that the symbolism of searching and the research spinoffs are essential. Well, how much research could Africa churn out, if people could eat and live comfortably? And wasn't the eradication of smallpox one of the greatest real achievements of the human race? Would the elimination of hunger and abject poverty not be THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT EVER, engineering and otherwise. I apologize for the allcaps, but come on! Going to mars is nothing! We get there and SO WHAT! spinoffs!? Why wait for spinoffs!? how about we research smaller sources of power right now? Better solar panels! So NASA came up with miniaturization. That was years ago. And the non-spacefaring among us would have come up with that one sometime along the way. ie. if there had been no NASA there would have been no research? ridiculous. If that had genuinely been true, the US would have deserved its fate, but seeing the size of the American defence research commitment, one does tend to think that the US research field would have done all right. And perhaps without the fat high margin government contracts for space, America's researchers could have focussed on efficient manufacturing techniques.
4) The nature of pioneering is to lose a few lives. Let us consider the expansion of America into the west. The first pioneers had it pretty rough. Still, it wasn't really that rough to decide to pioneer. Life in the east was pretty miserable, and those that found pioneering too rough probably didn't last long enough to... get onto CNN to tell those back east they should stay home. Oh right no CNN! Well, relative to those early pioneers, we are better informed about the risks of space travel. And even if we were as uninformed, we can just up and go (otherwise you know some people would be looking for gold on mars! just on the offchance right!). Well, if the west of the US was completely uninhabited today, it would take very little time to settle. Our tech is just so much better now. Cars that can drive across the country, trains, planes, speedboats, (wagons=minivans?). What's the rush to do it now? in 60 years, when america finally recovers from the babyboom generation, well things will be different.
5) What about our parents' cojones! A slashdot poster pointed out that we have to do this for our parents and our children. Well, I hope my grandchildren will actually have a world to live in, not a bomb shelter nor a mars colony.
But what about our parents? According to the poster, his parents had the balls to dream of the moon...well my parents are in the baby boom generation...their parents paid for this space business. well, to be frank, my grandparents had pretty miserable lives back then. During the 50-60s, they were true corporate slaves and they were fighting for union rights. Not because they wanted to particularly, since they didn't want to rock the boat. They had no choice in the matter. Corporations were just so plain evil there was no choice really. Most of this kind of stuff is offshore now, so it's not in our faces but that wasn't a world very tolerant of people expressing their opinions. Yet, when we read about that time, we hear of great economic prosperity. Of course, old people died then. Now they linger, and the baby boom is going to linger for decades. They had it pretty good...creating pension plans, medicare (Canada), welfare (Canada) but now is the time to pay for that. They were too busy paying for space to pay for their own expenses so now I'll pay. Great.
As for their moral courage...the employer was always right. The government was nearly allpowerful. Cops could beat anyone. Parents could beat their children. Well, people in that time did what they were told. We're going to the moon. Great! let's do it! Only when confronted with many thousands of bodybags did Americans question their view of Vietnam. Sure there are exceptions but if it weren't for truly egregious conditions, the common man wouldn't have gone on strike. Now, we've gone to the other extreme. Well, I like this extreme, having rights and and wanting my money spent as I see fit.
So finally, the notion of a space-race was a bit odd at its origin, but at least, we didn't know any better. Now, we know its tough and lethal. It should emphasize to reasonable people the importance of life down here on earth.
When we don't have continents of sick, starving people, and when our technology has advanced sufficiently, perhaps we, the government and private companies, can then go into space. When all of earth is well-fed and we've figured out how to make our industry into closed systems, well, then we'll need new frontiers and probably have the means to achieve them, though even then, with difficulty. For now, we've got more work down here than any reasonable person could possibly want to think about. I would like to focus on that.
HighLift Systems has a design of a 100,000 km long cable that has a density of 7.5 kg/km. That is 750,000 kg total for the cable. Consider the enormous amount of tension that such a cable must withstand. There would be very little difference between a cable that can only support itself and a cable that can support a payload.
I suggest you read the HighLift Systems website. They have a lot of really good information:
http://www.highliftsystems.com/
There's no soil on mars. Soil is biomass.
What you mean is "small bits of rock and mineral"
Hands in my pocket
Umm, only 750 metric tonnes? That sounds kind of light, actually. Regardless, the whole cable will have to be lofted into orbit before it can be installed. For that, we need working conventional space capability, and lots of it.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I've been avidly following all the editorials, stories, commentaries, and blogs since Columbia was destroyed last week, and I have yet to see any writer to put their finger on the basic problem with manned spaceflight.
I'll put it in words for you: Humans don't belong in outer space. Lest I be accused of some sort of retro Luddite philosophy, let me clarify the foundation of that statement. Humans evolved on the African plains millions of years ago, and have admirable survival traits for all sorts of circumstances that can be found on this planet. But we don't live (normally) in Antarctica, nor do we live in the ocean. It's the wrong environment. Trying to export an earthlike environment to the rest of the solar system is not only stupid, it's doomed to failure.
So what's the answer? Let's think of it in terms of ecological niches, shall we? What sort of animal can you design to survive and flourish in the Oort cloud? First of all, normal body temperature should be only a few degrees above ambient (4.7K). Secondly, you need the ability to gather energy from the environment (solar radiation, fusion, etc...). Finally, and most importantly, you need the ability to survive the constant bombardment of hard radiation, high energy elementary particles, micrometeorites, and other random junk. This implies redundancy and regeneration on a nanoscale that is as yet unknown to our technology.
So what should we do? We should expand our unmanned space program dramatically (in particular, we *must* map all the potential "dinosaur-killer" near-earth asteroids), kill the manned space program, and concentrate on developing nanoscale technologies that will permit machine based AI's to survive the natural space environment. If you want to visit outer space, you'll have to upload yourself to a machine that's already there!
To recap, there is no point in trying to populate the galaxy with humans. It's the wrong ecological niche! On the other hand, there's nothing wrong in uploading human intelligences into machines that will explore the galaxy. Now that is a project that sounds interesting! But I can't help but wonder, has it been done already?
Yes, it is a sad event when people die. All forms of transport
//+, remember it?). Computers
involve risk but space flight is very spectacular when it goes
wrong. Seven people died in the shuttle and the entire world
knows about it. Seven people died the same day in an avalanche
in western Canada that swept over a group of teenage skiers from
south of Calgary. A crowded passenger train collided with a
freight train in northwestern Zimbabwe... 42 people were killed
and another 60 injured. Transportation of any form involves
risk and people will continue to die in train, car, airplane,
and spacecraft mishaps. Society will not stop moving people
about in spite of the risk, therefore it makes sense to take all
reasonable precautions and then "just do it". The question the
American taxpayers need to ask is are shuttles the best way of
moving people and cargo to orbit?
The shuttles are 1970's technology. My palm pilot has more
memory than the shuttle's main computers (they were designed
about 5 years before the Apple
are easy to upgrade, but what about the structure of the
vehicle? The airframes of the shuttles undergo much harsher
treatment than your typical military jet... airframe fatigue
caused Canada has retired 25% of the CF-18s they bought in the
early 1980's. Columbia was planned for retirement sometime
after 2010 making it a rather geriatric craft.
Aside: Canada can be proud that our Sea King helicopters may
still be operating in 2010 and thus continue to hold the 'old
age award' for military aircraft. There is still no sign that
the federal government is going to award the replacement
contract for these choppers.
The US shuttles are old and still serviceable but they are risky
to run. The old Soviet method of launching 'Soyuz' module is
arguably more expensive, but you don't worry about fatigue (each
module is used once and discarded). The Soyuz sit on top of an
industrial launch vehicle (the Proton rocket) that has one of
the best launch records in the world. The Protons are 1960s
design, but each is, again, built brand new for each launch.
The vehicles wear out but the design doesn't. Nasa abandoned
the disposable launcher concept when they moved into shuttles
and now the US space program is completely dependent upon the
shuttles for moving humans back and forth from space. Nasa will
likely ground the shuttle fleet until the investigations are
done, so the Russians and the Soyuz vehicles are the only
passage back and forth to the ISS. Now ask the question: who
has the better design? The Chinese are in the process of
building a manned space program -- their manned module looks
more like a Soyuz capsule than anything in the US inventory.
So why is the loss of a US space shuttle important? Because
space flight is vital to the survival of our species. Humans
are vulnerable to extinction so long as we are bottled up on
this one planet. Any of a number of events can kill us off: a
large asteroid impact, instability in our Sun, or local cosmic
radiation bursts. Items one and two would not spell the end of
our species if humans had a sustainable society operating, for
example, in the asteroid belt. The shuttle has focused people's
attention on the dangers of space flight and may result in even
more conservative designs in US space vehicles to mitigate the
danger. The cost of this diminished return for safety will be
delay and fewer missions flown. Fewer missions means it will
take longer to achieve the interplanetary 'sustainable society'
that will protect humanity from disaster.
And that would be the biggest disaster of all. Humans need to
break free of the Earth and our species is at risk until we do.
Individual people will be at risk during the journey. People
will continue to die in space the same as they die on motorways
and in railroad mishaps. Don't think for a moment that the
journey into space is not worth the risk. It is the only way to
ensure our survival.
Yep, only 750 metric tonnes.
Nanotubes are some seriously cool shit.
I just freaked myself out.
I saw the Shuttle failure on BBC as it was happening, and at the time, sketched out what I thought should be the "replacement".
It's essentially the same design as the Orbital one, although slightly sleeker, and without the tail fin.
Wierd.
Having said that, I can't find the article that laid out the particulars. I'll keep looking, and post something if I find it.
The basics behind the statement are twofold: first, the shuttle ET has between 5 and 20 tons of fuel left when it gets ejected from the orbiter. Second, the shuttle has to make a specialized maneuver right before it ejects the ET that ensures that the ET is headed down the correct insertion path for its death descent into the atmosphere. If it continued along a ballistic launch trajectory, not ejecting the residual fuel, extra cargo capacity could be achieved.
While you're waiting for me to get back to you, check out Chris Fitch's excellent ET page at this link.
Regards,
JD
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Wow! this article appeared on Google news. I was at first curious about gid-goo. with a name like that I wondered what nationality he could be? but after linking and finding slashdot I was like, oh, he's just a geek.
Really, why don't they have a centerfuge in space yet? 2001 came and went, but no centrifical rooms on our space missions to jupiter... come to think of it no mission to jupiter...or for that matter no gigantic black rectangle either (though we shouldn't need to build that, it should just be there).
I mean, I could see how the constant 1g stress could result in some serious questions of durability for a spinning spacecraft, but aren't our structural engineers pretty good at building structures in 1g by now? I mean the've had like, what, 100,000 years of building structures in 1g to practice.
Would we even need propellent to keep it spinning? could we not have large, one sided, reflective solar panels arranged around a cylinder like some kind of windmill or propeller?
What I say is, Can it with the anti-nuke sentiment and lets get ourselves a damn nuclear powered engine!! we've had this enourmously powerful technology for so long now and we have barely even tapped into nuclear powers true potential!
After all, most of the rest of the matter in the universe seems to think that nuclear reactions out in space are fine and dandy, in fact just downright expected.
Also, build a shipyard on the moon. The moon is perfect! Low grav means that moving large pieces of anything would be a snap. Also, though very little, the gravity of the moon gives us that great convenience of leverage. Also it's the damn moon and it's been asking for a moon base for some time now, also it's just rad.
But I digress, how I digress. as arthur c clarke said.
"If men cease to dream, if they turn their backs upon the wonder of the universe, the story of our race will be coming to an end."
If our race is going to end I want it to end in some galactic war.
Not while watching "the bachelor", or "american idol".
Hell, I'll even settle for Vogons.
Firstly while the thicker the atmosphere the better, Mars has only around 1% of our sea level pressure. Although its further removed from Sol, radiation on the surface will still be a significant problem even under tents.
Ambient energy sources from light and thermal gradients are stronger on the moon, and it is cheaper to get heavy things, like mining and plant equipment and nuclear reactors to the Moon than to Mars.
There is probably more ice water on the Moon than we can currently detect, and anyway lunar rock is typically about 30% by weight hydrogen and oxygen, you just have to cook the rock to release it. The 10cm thick glass for (underground) greenhouses can be made on location.
Because the journey there is short, keeping humans healthy and happy enough in transit is almost a no-brainer. Missions can be shorter, cheaper and escape back to Earth is similarly easier.
For the forseeable future, human habitation of other spheres will primarily occur underground; its easy to make a mine airtight and it affords natural protection from solar radiation, not to mention tailings to process for useful things like air and steel. You just need a "space mole", energy to run it, a few airlocks, a suitable sealant, atmosphere, and you soon have as big a habitat as you want, from lifting the minimum weight out of Earth's gravity. This dovetails neatly with the automated mining that will be the primary economic motivation for space development in the mid to long term. Also the lower gravity and greater availability of energy is a boon for mining, making it much cheaper to return the products either to Earth or just to a lagrangian collection point - where a suitably massive Mars colony ship might be built.
Sure lunar gravity is not healthy, but because the moon is closer and cheaper to get to, some of the money saved could be used for underground centrifugally complemented living quarters.
I'm not advocating lunar bases as a population solution, but I think it is a natural stepping stone to start developing before people even set foot on Mars.
Did I say 30% by weight? Not sure about the weight part, maybe just by molar ratio. *shrugs*
Point is, you can make air and water there if you have energy.
1. The martian atmosphere has about 1% of Earth's pressure, and does almost nothing to protect from radiation. It is also pure CO2 so your flying craft has to carry its full reaction mass just like a rocket - there is a possibility of aerodynamic lift if your craft has really, really big wings (and is really, really light) but in truth the atmosphere on Mars is a lot closer to the vacuum of the Moon than to Earth's atmosphere.
2. In any case, much of Earth's radiation protection comes from its magnetic field. Mars' magnetic field, however, is only 1/800 the strength of Earth's - so not much help there.
3. Mars is a lot farther from the Sun than the Earth, however, so radiation from the Sun is reduced (about a factor of 2). However, that also means solar energy is a factor of 2 lower - which means you need twice as many solar cells on Mars as on the Moon or near Earth orbit for the same energy use level. In any case, solar radiation (including from flares) is a lot easier to shield against than the 1000x higher energy cosmic rays - which are the same, or slightly worse, at Mars' orbit (less shielding from the Sun's magnetic field).
4. Colonization is not going to happen anytime soon without closing economic cylces - the settlers will not be able to produce everything themselves, and to balance their imports from Earth they will need to have some exchange in reverse. Whatever that economic exchange is, the proximity of the Moon makes for much shorter cycles, and therefore much faster payback on investment and growth, so even if the Moon has to rely more on Earth for food and materials than Mars would, the economic payback from developing the Moon will be far greater for at least the first few decades of development.
But really, we should work for both - our goal should be human development of the entire solar system. I've met Zubrin, and while he's a great Mars advocate, he is ready to acknowledge it's not the only destination out there!
Energy: time to change the picture.
The trick is to do it in stages, first a rocket takes off with a thin cable trailing it. Yes the exhaust would have to be angled away on all sides, and I think this is the hardest part of the idea. The last rocket stage becomes the first counterweight. A climber then ascends, either powered electrically through the cable or by microwave beam, and dragging a thicker cable up. When the climber gets to the top, its mass is added to the counterweight. Iterate a few times and you have a decent cable and counterweight. No need to capture a near earth object and steer it into position.
Or maybe we could teach those spider silk secreting goats some transcendental meditation, they can levitate up there while spinning the threads of the cable...
Paul Spudis is one of my heros too (getting so much out of Clementine)...
I wish I knew more about the people behind this "NExT" strategy - anyway, I do think it could work, but there seems to be within-NASA competition of several proposals on ways to go forward. Somebody at a high level needs to take one of these and say "Yes, this is what we will do in the next 10 years"; starting at the President isn't bad, but actually I think Congress needs to know we care - write your senators and representatives, go meet with them, and let them know you think space exploration and development is important!
Energy: time to change the picture.
I can't see doing it that way. You'd have to be feeding cable at 11 KPS or so. And your rocket isn't just going to go straight up to GeoSync and hang there, it's going to take a "circle the earth" or few relative to your ground station before you could stablize it relative to the ground.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
...as with most things, but he is a hoot to read and makes a great deal more sense than mainstream prognosticators. If you want a wilder read, try Karl Bunday, and if you want more content-focussed stuff, try John Holt.
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Against which thousands of visits have been logged...?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You're just being a prejudiced bigot, didn't even read what I had to say. I'm blaming stupid practices for AIDS, not gays. Now wake up and use your brain instead of your programming.
Having said that, stats typically show that gays are between three and seven times as likely to die of AIDS as heterosexuals. I believe that the real figures are even worse, because a number of those "heterosexuals" would actually be bisexual but unwilling (or ashamed) to admit it for a variety of reasons including overwhelming prejudice.
If you go back and read my post again, you'll see that I'm advocating whatever is proven to work and chaste heterosexual marriage works most effectively against AIDS.
You'll note that I didn't advocate Islamic (polygynous) marriage, because although that works for the individuals actually married, it forces a large population surplus of single males, with consequent pressure toward homosexuality, which is an unadmitted pandemic in many Islamic countries. If Mohammed had been born female, I think the outcome might have been quite different.
Other prejudice that you might be carrying around include the idea of `genetic' or pre-programmed homosexuality. I've seen this idea espoused by many gay websites and other literature, but never with any real proof, and many of the sites which do advocate it often (to their credit) never make a direct claim, just copious implications, I presume because they really want it to be so, but can't see any firm evidence for it and can't bring themselves to lie directly. I've dealt with a lot of gays, had deep-and-meaningful story-of-my-life conversations with many, and the sum of what I find is that they have all had some significant personal experiences which set them up for being gay (mum dressing them up in girly clothes etc). Consequently, I flatly refuse to believe that a significant number of gays are `born that way'.
Another finesse indulged in by gay sites is the claim that some ministry or other failed to `heal' any of their gay clients. I've not seen the ministry named, but let's say for debate's sake that it is. I know of other ministries that have permanently and gently `healed' gays. And yes, it is indeed real, they're not just burying it to please their peers.
Back at the Christophobia, your prejudice does have a real basis in fact: there are at least as many self-righteous dickheads travelling under the `Christian' banner as anywhere else. There are also large numbers of organisations claiming to be Christian (or, more often, `The Christian Church'), and evidently without reasonable cause. However, this doesn't prevent the basic premises of `primitive' Christianity from being demonstrable and effective in everyday life. You can go to Moses' crossing and dive on the drowned Egyptian army (friends of mine have done this), touch the rock that split and fountained, it's not myth and fantasy.
On the other hand, materialism is indeed myth and fantasy. It's dead easy to shoot materialists with their own weapons, so to speak. Take, for example, quantum physics. There are not enough atoms (and not enough quantum ticks) in the universe to have formed even one copy of the DNA of a painfully simple organism by random juggling of atoms, no matter how rosy-hued a view of chemistry you take. We're talking tens of thousands of orders of magnitude impossible here. And if you add any structure to that, in an effort to find "useful" intermediate stages, the odds go down.
There are, of course, a myriad other falsifications to hand to take down materialism, the main point is you're assuming that it's true and working from there. That's not wise. Indulge in a bit more metaphysics before trying to diss Christianity, and don't lump everything labelled `Christian' together as if all Chrsitians were mental clones.
What about the topic? Yes, it's a wordplay. The aircraft that levelled Hiroshima long after the Japanese surrender offers was named Enola Gay, but homosexuality has killed many more people than her.
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You chose the word `deviant', I did not.
For the record, homosexuality (and it even differentiates between being an effeminate homosexual or a butch one, and condemns both) and heterosexual sodomy are not permitted by the NT, either.
In answer to a post below, the OT does indeed condemn homosexuality, very specifically. Read Genesis chapter 19 and tell me if you don't know what it is on about, Leviticus 18:22 against lesbianism, Leviticus 20:13 commands stoning to death of practicing male homosexuals (same penalty for incest or bestiality in the verses round about).
Having got that off our chests, I claim that the problem is dangerous behaviour, and that the remedy long predates AIDS as we know it. What you call that dangerous behaviour is, as always, your choice.
Quite a few people that I know, and many more friend-of-friends, have died of AIDS, although the official cause of death was sometimes different. The original poster (dbrutus, grandparent of your post?) does indeed have a point, and we should mod him up. Oh, I see he has been.
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Biosphere? BIOSPHERE?!
We need fucking construction capability in space and we need it now. Forget fucking biospheres, forget fucking boneloss. I want one real fucking orbital CONSTRUCTION SITE. A place where satillites can be made, a place that had a fucking purpose other then to let some fucking astronauts jerk off about how lucky they are that they are IN SPACE. The shuttle has been in service for 20 years and space travel has not progressed one inch because of it.
The ISS is the same as Mir is the same as SkyLab. A fucking lump of metal that serves next to no purpose and chews up money. SkyLab's time is over. It is time for orbiting platforms; it is time for earth/moon travel; it is time to find what use we can put the moon to. Then MAYBE there will be a point to going to mars, or even to launching the shuttle.
Those 7 astronauts died for no fucking reason whatsoever. And that pisses me off.
Guess what, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction ... Research work done in conjunction with the University of Maryland Aerospace Engineering Department on the potential use of biomass resistojet thrusters for Space Station reboost in the early eighties (Barnhard, Pellerito, Snyder, et.al.) showed that the cross-over point for using solid waste from astronauts to feed a biomass methane digester was approximately five astronauts. However, the problem is actually more complex than just having the necessary feed stock and a viable digestion process. As it would happen you need at least a more few things ... For example engines that could actually use the fuel ... (opps, been there done that ... McDonald Douglas tested resistojets in the early seventies which worked quite nicely). The brave souls doing this research work by no means solved all the engineering challenges, they merely showed that the waste could become a resource and that there appeared to be a pretty darn good case for making it one.
Gary P. Barnhard
Robotic Space Systems Engineer
>Anyway, Laika was actually euthanized before >reentry with drug-laced food - the >Russians weren't THAT bad. You're wrong. Lately the Russians admitted on a space congress in the USA that Laika died of overheating after about 2-3 orbits. The news appeared also some time ago on Slashdot too: "Russians Reveal Early Death of Laika" http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/2 9/1754233&mode=thread
Bye
Read that article at:
http://www.alexlightman.com/ - 16 Minutes from Earth
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
We really need anti-gravity to get anywhere into space. Some form of repelling-force-producing field, be it anti-grav, or electro-gravitic propulsion, i believe thats what will truely expedite our journey to the stars.
Dont ask me...Im just the bass player.
Actually, because jewish people didn't get sick, their bigotted neighbors assumed they were somehow connected with the Black Death, and killed them. In greater numbers than plauge would have.
True.
Not true, to the best of my knowledge.
That's an ironic use of the word `bigot', too. Bigot is a contraction of `by God', as in `no, by God', famous last words for many Protestants, Aryans and other `heretics' on being asked to recant before being burned to death at the stake by said neighbours. The phrase came to mean `stubbornly ignorant' but IRL originated with stubborn enlightenment...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Who owns the tooling required to build a space shuttle? Who decided that the space shuttle had to have a 1500 mile cross range hypersonic glide capability? Who decided the space shuttle had to have a 30 ton payload capacity? The answer will surprise most of you. It is the US Department of Defense. The space shuttle as built is a military space plane, it is not and never was designed to civilian specifications. Don't beleive me, go back and look at the history.
The history of the shuttle design is a long one. The last shuttle that NASA designed had a 10 ton payload and didn't start gliding until it had slowed to sub-sonic speeds. It didn't need complex ceramic tiles for heat protection because it was designed to shed the head in the shockwave in front of the ship and could have used high temperature metal alloys for heat protection just like the X-15 and SR-71 use.
But, there was no political support for a small, practical, civilian shuttle. The sentiment in congress was that the Apollo space craft and the Saturn rockets could do everything that NASA wanted to do, so why bother with building a shuttle? So, NASA made a deal with the DOD for support. But, to do what the DOD wanted the Shuttle had to be a very different vehicle. A vehicle that pushed the limits of technology way beyond anything we had at the time.
The result was the Enterprise class space shuttles that we have now. The truth is that every one of them should be considered an experimental aircraft. They never met their goals for payload or cost. To get such a large ship flying with the technology available at the time required too many compromises. Solid fuel boosters that killed the Challenger and an astonishinly complex thermal protection system that killed the Columbia. Good politics, bad engineering.
Then there is the question of the cost of the shuttles. You can count on NASA to ask for a few billion to build a replacement for Columbia. Why in the world does it cost billions to build a Shuttle, but only a few hundred millions for a 747? (Under the tiles a Shuttle isn't that much different from a small airliner.)
The answer is that there is a production line for the 747, but each shuttle is hand built. When congress was deciding to build the shuttles they looked at the cost of building a production line for space shuttles versus the cost of building the minimal amount of tooling and doing the work by hand. The numbers showed that if they had build a production line the incremental cost of building a shuttle would be around $450 million. About twice the cost of a 747, and well withing the price range of the Air Force and many commercial companies. In fact, it was stated that space shuttles would be sold to commercial operators.
For some reason congress decided to cap the number of space shuttles that could legally be built at a number one less than the number needed to justify building a production line. So, there are only 4 shuttles and no production facility to make spare parts or build new vehicles. No production facility to create commercial versions of the vehicle. And, no follow on improved vehicles. While the 747 has continued to evolve and improve over the last 20 years, the space shuttles have gone on nearly unchanged and unimproved.
The history of the shuttle is recorded in places like Aviation Week and the AIAA journal. Find a good library and read the coverage from the late '60s and early '70s while these decisions were being made.
Stonewolf
Add: "small bits of rock and mineral" with nasty, caustic chemicals. Think of trying to grow plants in sterile, dusty sand that has been soaking in Clorox for a few million years.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
Benford's comments about the necessity of a closed biosphere and of some way for astronauts to stop muscle and bone loss
Oh for criminy's sake! Robert Zubrin (ex-NASA) has so thoroughly debunked this problem it's not even funny. This problem keeps getting mentioned by manned space/Mars program naysayers, I'm *so sick* of hearing it. Just spin the frigging craft at a few rpm to create artificial gravity! WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP CARPING ABOUT BONE LOSS DUE TO WEIGHTLESSNESS!?!?!?! ARRRRRRRRGH.
Acccually ISS only recyles water vapor in the atmosphere at this momet which is where 90% of the water lost by the human body ends up. The urine recycling was one of the sugestions but has not been implamented yet one it requires a flash vaporizer or a pasturizure and some plants to implament safely either of wehich would require more space than is in the base modules but is planned to be added in a new US service modules.
Accually using the waste as a propellent how ever gross that might seem would be a good ideal to use on a fast muclear interplanetary mission. Esp if it's propeled by an electric arcjet or linear accelerators. If the waste is propellent then carrying extra food would not be a huge weight penalty since it's going to end up being extra propellent in the end. On a mars or moon base waste could used in a bio digestor to make methane the left overs could be burned in a solar furnace and then used as a safe fertilizer or just be thrown in a dual loop biomass recycling system which nasa has demonstriated allready. In dual loop first said waste fecus and urine are used to fertilize reeds and other swamp type plants which will produce H2O vapor and O2 these can be composted giving methane a good rocket fuel and whats left could be used as a safe growing medium for vegtables. There are many dangers to having your tomatos and melons growing in raw fecus the dual loop system or burning it first adviods this danger. You wouldn't want your astronuats to end up getting colera or worms space travel is danerous enough as it is.