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Europe Heads for the Moon in July
Orlando writes "The BBC are reporting that Arianespace are all set for sending Smart1 to the Moon in July. The mission's primary objectives are testing planetary exploration technologies. This is particularly good news after the recent Arianne rocket explosion." China's also planning a moon mission. The U.S. is planning to sit around and watch.
We've been there. We're going to Mars with 2 rovers in May and July.
That's not sitting and watching.
In all honesty, a manned mission to the moon by another country would be great. It would finally shut up all of these conspiracy theories about how the manned missions to the moon by the U.S. were elaborate hoaxes.
Not that anyone should continue to believe any of that trash considering the huge amount of evidence that we did land on the moon.
I see nothing wrong with human progress, even if it's not my own country. I suppose we should have flying cars right now because those darned Chinese are starting to get more and more of them.
If anything, competition encourages increased effort into projects.
Actually, we only took a couple of days to make it to the moon. As to our 5 year old ion drive, it is heading out of the solar system. Don't get me wrong, I am hoping that if USA does not get a base on the Moon, that Europe does. But in all fairness, USA and Soviet had the inovation. Now, if we can simply get back into space, let alone the moon. The X-33 was our best bet and Bush killed it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The thing I am wondering is when a country will decide to build a space station on L4 or L5 so that they can more easily go to Mars, or other places.
;^)
(For those that don't know, L4 and L5 are the stable Lagrange points, where the gravity of the Earth and Moon are equal. Can be said for any other set of orbiting bodies too, but I am talking about the moon)
Whoever controls L4 and L5 would have the capability to control all travel to Mars,Venus, etc. Not like we will have a manned visit to Venus any time soon
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
What we really need is some kind of international space agency that any country could contribute to. We'd be able to claim things for humankind rather than bickering about country lines. Plus, we could get alot more done with resources from many countries. Of course, this is unfeasible as all hell for the world to get along.
It's funny to see how cold war thinking still infects US minds. The "space race" was only a "race" because the US desparately wanted to prove that US society was superior; in part, this was because right after WWII, the Soviet model actually seemed to be working pretty well in terms of economics and science, and it looked for a while as if the Soviets were going to take over pretty much the rest of the world. In contrast, after WWII, Europeans didn't really care about anybody proving superiority to anyone anymore, they just wanted to live in peace and prosperity. Big guns, big rockets, or big words stopped impressing Europeans. This is perhaps also why Bush finds it so hard to get much support for his current adventures.
The moon isn't going anywhere. Missions to it (as all space exploration) should be driven by available technology, resources, and scientific goals, not by some horse race mentality.
We may have been the first, but we haven't even left LEO for more than 20 years. Our space program has become a joke. On Columbia's last flight, the payload consisted of experiments designed by students, including one that involved ants in zero-g. Fortunately, they weren't sorting tiny screws. Nevertheless, our space program has ceased to do anything innovative. Every attempt that has been made to breath new life into the program has failed, and so nothing happens.
It's hard to pin the "down on space" tail on Bush. Especially when he's talking about building nuclear powered interplanetary exploration craft that will use ion impulse engines and magnetic shielding for ultra-high energy transfer flights to Mars taking weeks rather than months.
I did some testing, and found that if we are successful in building a ship that can sustain 1 g of acceleration over six days (Prometheus calls for constant thrust to keep astronauts under 1 g of gravity to maintain bone and muscle mass, so it could go a hell of a lot faster), I can send a manned mission to Neptune that will take 40 days to get there. This trip would take 14 years on a Hohmann transfer.
And the Vikings made routine trips to North America (Vineland) centuries before Columbus. Yet, it is with the Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, German and Dutch we ascribe the discovery of the New World--because they didn't just visit, they took possession of it. Sitting on our laurels just means we're sitting uncomfortably. Don't you want to do something bold, today? Get to the Moon, stay on the Moon, go to other places. Just a thought.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Well, power is cheap for starters. There's a lot of He3 for fusion, or you can just roll out a bunch of solar panels (made locally, of course!).
Once you've got power, you can do a lot. Shipping stuff into orbit is easy; a laser-based propulsion system will lift stuff of the Moon readily. Heck, even if all you can lift off is moon rocks, you can use that as construction material, you know.
Furthermore, the Moon is thought to be geologically like the Earth's mantle. You know, the top bit where we get all of our metals and minerals from. If that is the case, the Chinese could reasonably expect to mine metals up there, and use those for construction materials.
The point here is that you don't have to ship the stuff back down to Earth to be useful. You can leave it in orbit and use it there; orbital shipyards, anyone?
Of course, if you can ship it back to Earth, then you've got a weapon of enormous potential. A few tons of rock coming in at orbital velocities makes a big splash. And don't think that hasn't been thought of by the Chinese, either. Ever read "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress"?
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
You haven't heard of DS1?
anyhow. The key benefit of an ion thruster is that it needs very little fuel. So, it can be left thrusting for very long times, so generating very high end speeds.
Best case so far: the DS1 probe was the first spaceship running on an ion thruster. Even with the force of a running ion thruster being not much more than the pressure that a sheet of paper makes on the ground, DS1 has long overtaken the older probes which were launched with regular chemical engines.
bye,
[L]
Rough numbers: An ion engine with an exhaust velocity of 30km/sec would have to use up 327g of propellant per second to push a 1000kg vehicle at 1g. At 100% efficiency, this engine would require about 147MW of input power.
To push this vehicle for 1 hour at 1g, it would need an initial propellant load of 2245kg, and an initial power input of 477MW. For 2 hours, it would need 9531kg of propellant and 1.54GW initial input power. The initial propellant load goes up exponentially with the amount of time you want to accelerate at 1g.
Disclaimer: These numbers might be wrong; I'm a bit rusty on my differential equations. And, of course, all these calculations go out the window if someone (other than sci-fi writers) comes up with propellantless propulsion. But I'm not holding my breath for that one.
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Well, what do we really expect to learn from it that we already haven't? We know what's up there, we know how to get there, we know how to get back. We learned all that over 30 years ago. Also it's kind of unfair to discredit some of the residual accomplishments of the race to the moon because they were discovered in the process of getting somewhere else.
Did you take credit away from Christopher Columbus when you learned he was actually trying to go to India? He took a leap and landed somewhere no person from his continent or any continents he had ever known before had landed before (yeah, that's a confusing line, but it's correct.) His accomplishment(s) changed the world. Of course someone else would have done the same thing eventually, but he still get's credit for being the first we know to have made the trip (how other people were already on the continent is still in debate.)
matguy(.com)
But, since the moon is in orbit, thrust is an issue. But the question is, why waste a lot of money getting their fast when you're just sending a robot? It sounds like the ESA is going to get valuable ion engine experience out of this, and at the same time get to the moon cheap. And that's what going to the moon should be; cheap.
If going to the moon isn't cheap, how can we reasonably expect to go to Mars?
the biggest bitch was of course the massive costs, but if you look at the other truley great space/aerospace inovations they all cost a fricking boatload.. B2 and F117 stealths, going to the moon(it is estimated that it would cost in the trillions to replicate that effort today)..it was truly sad when the x-33 went away..
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
Interestingly enough, after the second last ESA launch "problem", the artemis satellite which was on board was brought from low ellipitical orbit to geo-stationary orbit using the only system available, its ion thrusters. Pretty impressive achievement, especially when 20% of the satellites command and control software had to be rewritten to allow the fine control of the engines required.
This is valuable experience for the ESA. They also did some other pretty nifty stuff, like image transfer using an optical link
Story here
Rational thought is the only true freedom
Sure you would see that - the US would even put them up there. All NASA needs is a qualified Muslim or Chinese to step up to the plate. From what I understand, it takes many years for the training, so don't expect it to happen tomorrow, unless these people are already waiting in the wings.
In a gratuitous effort to keep their oil pusher friendly, the US sent Prince Sultan Abdul Aziz Al-Saud into orbit aboard STS 51-G, Discovery, on 17 June 1985. The official excuse was that Saudi Arabia was having a satellite launched by this mission, and the prince went up as a 'payload specialist'.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
To remake the heavy lift Saturn rockets or reconstruct the Apollo heat sheilds, we would have to redo everything from scratch.
that doesnt make any sense. i went to the kennedy space center and they have a saturn V just sitting there.
in fact, who cares? if we were to remake ENIAC right now it'd probably cost millions and require infrastructure to make vacuum tubes that we might not have nowadays, but nobody would say we can't match the feats of ENIAC, or that we're behind where we were in the 40s.
if we really had a reason to go to the moon (and hence a budget to do so), then we'd go. to say otherwise is ridiculous, "Now we don't have a clue as to how to get back." give me a break.
Wasn't there a project a few years back to create ENIAC-on-a-chip as part of some sort of anniversary celebration?
NASA is already seriously considering building a second station at the Earth-Moon L1.
This wouldn't be a science station, unlike ISS. This would be an staging "gateway" for missions to asteroids, the surface of the moon, Mars, and to construct huge space telescopes. (Because it wouldn't be a science station, it would be simpler that ISS in many ways. This, combined with the experience gained developing ISSfar higher than the shuttle can.
All of this has been discussed heavily on the web in discussions of the NASA Exploration Team's (NExT's) planning for expanding joint human-robotic exploration.
If we wanted to go to the moon again, we wouldn't be able to do it for the simple fact that all the engineers who were in NASA during the Apollo program's time are now retired or dead, and since the US has had no focus on space exploration since then, there's no newer generation of engineers with that expertise who could replace them. In fact, there's no engineers at all since, over the years, everyone has seen what a terrible career field aerospace engineering is (especially in the space program), and no one bothered to study it.
If there's no engineers in the US who are qualified to design spacecraft, how exactly do you propose it could be done?
Answer: contract it out to the Russians. As with most things, America, in its infinite short-sightedness, just gets other people to do all its technical work for it since native-born Americans have been discouraged by society from doing anything technical.
That's close enough to propellantless for me, I suppose, so thanks for the correction. :) For some reason, when I think "propellantless," the things that come to mind are "push-against-the-quantum-foam" and "zero-point-energy" and "warp drive" and such. Can you tell that Coast-to-Coast AM helps keep me awake while I'm working to meet a deadline? :P It's easier to stay awake when you're ROFL.
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