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Bush To Announce Manned Trip To Moon, Mars
edmunz writes "Foxnews just placed an article on their website saying that Bush is expected to make an announcement towards the middle of next week, proposing a manned mission to Mars as well as a return to the moon. Bush hopes to spark a renewed public interest in space exploration. No mission would happen any time soon, rather a preparation of over a decade would take place before the first men/women set out to explore Mars."
nasa has a plan for a lander on europa complete with a sub-ice probe that's been sitting on the backburner for years.
if dubya is going to spend money on the space program that's a worthwhile project!
2 1337 4 u!
using conventional rockets, a mars trip would take at least 2 years. During that time, NASA has estimated the crew would be irradiated at such a high level that every cell in the body would have received some damage. There are few solutions to this: 1) Go faster. Requires nuclear propulsion. Not going to happen in my lifetime. 2) Use lots of sheilding with high density materials (e.g. Tungsten). 10x more weight than we can currently send to mars and back. 3) Some new thing nobody has thought of yet. It's nice to think it's just a matter of money, but it really isn't.
Yes. Let's colonize mars.
Hmm... this sounds awfuly similar to an awful mistake made in the past. Spain reluctantly sends Columbus to America. Before you know it, they've colonized much of central/south America. This leads to a series of wars which has yet to end.
Seriously. If you look back, every war to this date can be traced back to some form of colonization or another.
Even the war in Iraq can be traced back to colonization. As the European empires are beginning to implode on top of each other, WWI breaaks out. Once it's over, the empires are desparate to keep what little land they have left, and hastily write the Versailles Treaty which causes WWII, sets borders in the arab states (creating political instability in Iraq and Iran), and prompts for the creation of Israel.
It seems that now we've learned our lesson, and that the countries of the world are not willing to expand or colonize. They know the consequenses all too well. Sure, war will always happen, but I just can't see the US, china, or India becoming expansionist nations.
Now we bring another planet into the equation. Mars will soon become the next fronteir. Bush wants it to belong to America.
Just as it was Europe's destiny to colonize America, it seems like it will become our destiny to colonize Mars. If the Earth's population continues to explode at the current rate, the survival of our race may depend on an interplanetary colony in the future.
Do you see the dilema we have? If America colonizes Mars, we will create a conflict which may never be ended. If we don't, another country will. Either way, the world will fight over the control of Mars.
It's sad to think that our future seems destined to hold both great discovery and great war.
A new epoch is about to begin.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
With the ISS serving practically no purpose, and the shuttle fleet's reevaluation after Columbia was destroyed, there is no better time than now to redirect NASA and give them a real goal. This gives NASA an excuse to stop funding the ISS money pit and mothball the shuttles.
If the resources spent on those two projects could be diverted to a singular goal, such as sending people to Mars, then we should have the ability to accomplish it.
Oh, and this leads me to another thought. One way trips to mars. One way as in a volunteer(s) that go to Mars, explore, and when resources run out they die. Step back and take a look at our planet. It is covered with several BILLION creatures with the capability to do amazing things. MILLIONS of us die a year under the most trivial and wasteful circumstances. Sending a few of our kind to explore a whole new world (literally) at the cost of their "premature" deaths is an extremely trivial thing in that light - if the rest of us could stomach it as individuals.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Re:Skip the moon! Go straight to Mars!
At the time that our solar system is greatly developed and colonized, you will find that the Luna (our moon) has become a major transport hub, and that the Earth is a very lush residential garden planet.
Luna's lack of gravity makes it easier to land, refuel, refill, maintain, take off. It is an excellent storage post for mined resources and medium-scale manufacturing.
We will get to Mars, and we will live on Mars, but I can guarantee that there will be a grungy little spaceport dive bar on Luna before the first permanent residence is even attempted on Mars.
Before we can go to Mars, however, there are some issues we need to figure out. A Mars mission (round trip) is expected to be somehwere in the neighborhood of 2 years. Thats 2 years without the possibility resupply from Earth, or the ability to quickly return to Earth should a serious problem arise, not to mention you simply can't land on Mars and expect to live off the land.
What I'd like to see is a Moon base be built and have some volunteers provide the proof of concept that a 2 year mission without Earth's help (except for remote control where needed) is doable. Its easy to send up a few barrels of water to the ISS every few months. Its quite another problem when your talking about sending it to Mars. We didn't go land on the moon wit the first Apollo launch. At least one (I can't remember how many) Apollo missions circled but didn't land on the moon prior to Apollo 11, taking the incremental approach to what would turn out to be a very successfull project.
Sure you can send stuff on ahead of the humans (which is what some proposals I've seen suggest), including habitation modules and equipment that can manufacture the needed fuel to return home, before the humans even leave Earth, but none of this has been proven to be practical for a Mars mission yet. We have a hard enough time sending unmanned missions to Mars to help understand what is and isn't on Mars.
Personally, I see a human Mars mission being an international effort. After all, the USA isn't in a space race against any other country humans to Mars first (okay, maybe China is thinking about it, but Russia definatly isn't).
The ISS and Shuttle were great concepts when designed and planned, but frankly, both of them keep us chained to LEO with no place to go. And the ISS isn't even close to living up to what it was supposed to be.
Now let's get down to it:
Let's take these one at a time.Dude, I hate to be the first to tell you this, but humans breathe air. This means that, from a pure economic standpoint, Mars won't be settled until Antarctica is full. Since I think the planet Trantor is more fun to imagine than to actually live on, I think we'd better find a solution to the population problem that takes effect before Antarctica is full.
They're called "robots". You may have heard of them, since one is on Mars right now. NASA designed and launched two of them for $860M, less than the estimated cost of three shuttle flights. We could and should build a lot more of them, at very reasonable cost. They're fun, they're cheap, they work pretty well, and even if they occasionally blow up... nobody dies.
I'll bite. Which ore is this, exactly? Dilithium? Here's a homework assignment: after you realistically estimate the cost of mining an asteroid and shipping it back here, tell us which asteroidal element could be mined profitably. And please don't try and pretend that humanity hasn't invented recycling.
I can't argue with this, I guess. Pass the pork! All I can say, though, is that you can generate gratuitous tech jobs with useful projects (zero-pollution cars?) as well as you can with useless projects.
There are already plenty of inspired youngsters. They become postdocs. For every scientist with funding, there are 10 scientists working as postdocs, or accountants, or cabdrivers. Instead of spending billions of dollars trying to put spam-in-a-can where no spam has gone before, how about if we give that money to actual scientists? So we can cure diseases, or reverse-engineer the brain? Or even... build robots?
Please, do go on. I can already hear the violins, warming up to play the Star Trek theme.
Do we really want another flags & footprints Mars mission? If so, go there first, get it over with and then we can all forget about interplanetary travel for 50 years like we have with the Moon.
:v)
I suggest a more thorough approach, which incidentally gets around the problems associated with a quick and dirty Mars mission.
Establish a lunar manufacturing base, and build what is essentailly a moveable space habitat, say, 400 metres in diameter. Shield it with a fixed shield of several metres of lunar-derrived material. Fill large storage tanks with more lunar material. Establish a known working, self-sufficient, rotating habitat inside the shielding. Build a solar-powered mass driver pointing out the back. Fire lunar material out the back, taking large numbers of colonists and thousands of tonnes of materiel for colonisation to Mars nice and slowly.
It won't run out of food as the habitat is self-sufficient. Psychological stress is minimised because of the habitat's large size. Gravity is sustained, and a full medical team can go out to maintain health. Shielding removes the radiation issue totally. Journey time becomes irrelevant.
What's more, the vessel is completely reusable so rinse and repeat. Refuel from Phobos/Diemos and go back to the Earth/Moon system or head on out as far as the asteroids. Any further and the solar panels will have difficulty powering the mass driver.
There's an old joke related to this:
An old bull and a young bull are at the top of a hill, looking at a herd of young, healthy, and dare I say attractive cows in the fields below.
"Let's run down and do a few," suggests the young bull.
"Let's walk down and do the lot," replied his elder.
There's an immoral moral there.
Vik
It may just be a symptom of my generation, but I really think the reason we need a moon base is obvious.
I take it as a given that we need to establish a self-sufficient human presence off of this planet; we are screwing this one up at a amazing rate, and so many things exist that can destroy the race in a relatively short period of time it's ridiculous; from Planet killer asteroids, to mutant Ebola, to a new cold war, to killing all the plankton which produce the majority of our oxygen... etc.
In order to have a self -sufficient human presence in space, raw materials are going to be necessary; it's stupid to boost all the construction materials out of the earth's gravity well, when we can just mine the moon; alternately, I could see towing a asteroid to a LaGrange point, but that's possibly beyond us currently.
Once we have the moon, we have it all; a electromagnetic catapult to put processed raw materials back into orbit or shoot them to the earth would easily pay off the cost of putting a base there. The only problem I can see would be water, if ice turns out to not exist at the poles as some think (I don't); the easy availability of selenium, and abundant Solar power, should make making our own water out of elemental H & O a snap.
And, the best argument; President-for-life Bush will be able to drop gigantic canisters of rock anywhere on the planet he wants to suppress dissidents terrorists! peace in our time!.
Which is why I'm encouraging my kids to either pursue mechanical engineering or aerospace tech; I want them OFF this planet as soon as its possible.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Folks, take a step back and absorb this:
Manned exploration of Mars.
Permanent human presence on the Moon.
This is probably the most exciting news I've ever seen posted here at Slashdot. When do we leave?
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
"Sources said Bush will direct NASA to scale back or scrap all existing programs that do not support the new effort"
What about the exploration of the (possible) oceans on Europa? The rest of the solar system? The Terrestrial Planet Finder?
There's more to space than Mars.
Dubya is sure trying to put some zap into his reelection campaign with this nonsense.
... oh ... 80% over the next 10 years.
Now, back to earth and things that matter: How about a plan to reduce our dependence on non-renewable sources of energy? What I'd like to see is a commitment from our government to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel by
Like the proposed space program, such an effort would produce profound advances in science and technology and create thousands of jobs. In fact, the technological and financial impact of fossil fuel reduction would be far in excess of anything a space program could possibly hope to accomplish.
But, unlike the space program, our efforts would be spent working on several very earthly problems: climate change and dependence on imported fuel.
'Impossible' you say? That's what they said when JFK proposed putting men on the moon within the decade. Technologically it's well within our grasp. All we need is the political will.
We can and should go to space when the time is right. But right now there are pressing matters to deal with here on earth: War, Nukes, Climate Change, War, etc.
Dubya and his posse are crooks. They could give a flying fuck about Mars or the Moon. They just want to get reelected. Ignore them.
I find it somewhat ironic that on the very day scientists announce a likely 15% to 37% reduction on plant and animal species due to climate change that Dubya spews forth something like this.
We don't need to send people, but not doing so creates a paradox of sorts. Machines may be able to harvest the heavy metals likely to be found in the belt, but this will have two results. It will help build an economy rich enough to support a real space program, while simultaneously proving that men are not needed to staff one.
Who is John Cabal?
Read up on Mars Direct before you speak to the impossibility. 20 billion is Zurbins most optomistic estimate based on getting away from the absurd cost plus contract system in place.
If you want to know how much weight his estimate has ponder on this little tidbit. That insane 500+ billion price tag in response to Bush Sr.'s desire for a mars mission is one of the things that got him working on his plan in the first place. Once he had fleshed mars direct out- including a small scale demonstration of his fuel production method- his plan became somewhat co-opted by NASA as their current plan of choice for a mars mission and a lower price estimate for a manned mars mission was revised down from the 500+ price tag to around 60-80 billion as a direct result of adopting some of the ideas he proposed.
That 500+ billion dollar plan figured on the development of new technology and a massive expedition in the vision of Werner Von Braun, new technolgy everywhere. In short it was A bonaza for space contractors that made the commitee proposal acceptable to all parties that took place in its creation.. ie they all got a nice slice of the pie. Hell its entirely possible the 500billion was a woefully lowballed estimate of what that plan would have ultimately cost had we actually persued it.
The Zurbin plan uses known hardware. The fuel creation process is a very well established set of checmical reactions that has been in use since the 1800's and as I mentioned already demonstrated ( in martian atmosphere conditions ) by Zurbin. He proposes a return of a heavy lift booster either by reviving saturn V, using the russian energia design or adapting shuttle hardware to lift payload mass rather than a heatshield/landing gear/control surfaces for the shuttle. IE its not new.
One of two 'new' elements is the length of time. He proposes a 500 day long stay on the surface of mars instead of the roughly two weeks proposed by most other proposals. With roughly 6 months travel time both ways the equipment then has to be sufficiently reliable or backed up by redundancies for a 3-4 year period. The other and probably only truly new element to his plan is to utilize artificial gravity via rotation of the habitat against the counterweight of the final launch stage during the trip to Mars. An element that is optional but desirable to avoid the loss of bone density during prolonged exposure to zero G.
Lastly he has one very contraversial element and that is a small nuclear reactor as part of the mission. By the way, if you think reactors havn't gotten to space you don't know much about Soviet sattelites.
Now before you question this price tag again I ask you do two things. One research the proposal ( Mars Direct ) presented as being atainable for 20billion. It has been reviewed enough by those who know their stuff that it has slowly gained acceptance in the space industry. 2, instead of stating that a program will over run because other programs have state specifically why it will happen in this case. Overuns are not mandatory and they are not magical. They happen for a reason.
As a side note I will simply say Station is a very poor example for you to use as a program that suffered over runs. If all you know about the station program is that it suffered over runs but not WHY you need to look into what happend, and you need to dig deeper than the generally shallow and politically motivated attacks on stations budget overun.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
NASA needs something to help it change, and providing it a vision besides LEO would be a vast improvement. I don't know how many times I read that NASA starts a project to design a replacement for the Shuttle and then it gets cancelled. The Shuttle was designed in the early 1970s. And they want to keep flying it for another 10+ years?
Before we can go to Mars, however, there are some issues we need to figure out. A Mars mission (round trip) is expected to be somehwere in the neighborhood of 2 years. Thats 2 years without the possibility resupply from Earth, or the ability to quickly return to Earth should a serious problem arise, not to mention you simply can't land on Mars and expect to live off the land.
What I'd like to see is a Moon base be built and have some volunteers provide the proof of concept that a 2 year mission without Earth's help (except for remote control where needed) is doable. Its easy to send up a few barrels of water to the ISS every few months. Its quite another problem when your talking about sending it to Mars. We didn't go land on the moon wit the first Apollo launch. At least one (I can't remember how many) Apollo missions circled but didn't land on the moon prior to Apollo 11, taking the incremental approach to what would turn out to be a very successfull project.
Sure you can send stuff on ahead of the humans (which is what some proposals I've seen suggest), including habitation modules and equipment that can manufacture the needed fuel to return home, before the humans even leave Earth, but none of this has been proven to be practical for a Mars mission yet. We have a hard enough time sending unmanned missions to Mars to help understand what is and isn't on Mars.
Personally, I see a human Mars mission being an international effort. After all, the USA isn't in a space race against any other country humans to Mars first (okay, maybe China is thinking about it, but Russia definatly isn't).
The ISS and Shuttle were great concepts when designed and planned, but frankly, both of them keep us chained to LEO with no place to go. And the ISS isn't even close to living up to what it was supposed to be.
I over heard a conversation yesterday about the recent Mars Mission. To sum it up the comments where, " All that money for pictures of a bunch of rocks? You could get that in any dessert for nothing". You expect the general public with notions like this to support a multi-decade effort to Mars? This isn't TV or game console instant gratification and special effects. This is decades of hard work and trillions of dollars.
As long as not a single adult who is thusly-barred from voting is subject to a single law, tax, or other government-imposed restriction.
That's only fair right? If you don't have the right to change or the ability to consent to the laws, you certainly shouldn't be subject to them.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The people there are too busy being shot at by dimwitted American troops to engage foreigners about the transgressions of the former regime. The current one is worse.
Really? You've been there and asked the people directly? Gosh, you must really get around to have interviewed everyone in Iraq so quickly! Or, could it be that you're simply regurgitating news you would like to believe is true without first checking to see whether it is true or not? Could it be that you actually want the people of Iraq to be suffering because it feeds your anger against Bush?
Amnesty International was doing its thing. Being a respectable, diplomatic charity, it uses words and public opinion to change the world.
And over 300,000 innocent civilians are DEAD IN THE GROUND, executed by Saddam and his henchmen, while Amnesty International was "doing its thing", being "respectable" and using "words and public opinion to change the world." This all happened since the U.N. sanctioned war against Iraq in 1991. I wonder what the dead would say about Amnesty's "respectable" way of getting murderous dictators to change their ways. Oh, I forgot, they're dead, and you don't care a damn about them. If Amnesty International had been running things back in 1939, Hitler would be in power, the Jews would be history, and Frenchmen would be speaking German. Well, I guess that last one wouldn't be so bad.
And how Bush Sr. gave Saddam equipment to make WMDs, then gave him intelligence to use it. Hardly innocent.
Actually, you'd have to go back a lot further than Bush Sr. to see who was giving Saddam weapons. Try the Carter administration. As for innocence, perhaps you've heard of the all the Russian, German, and French conventional weapons we've found in country. You know, the ones that have been imported into Iraq after 1991 in violation of the U.N. mandate against Iraq? You're so eager to blame the U.S., but the key appeasers in the U.N. have far more blood on their hands, and far more recent blood at that.
You really need to turn off Fox News and read some books.
And you really need to quit living at DemocraticUnderground.com, Moveon.org, and CNN, since that seems to be your primary source of unfounded vitriol against the President and these United States.
Ronald Reagan was called a warmonger and idiot lunatic by everyone not a staunch Republican.
That's odd. The only people who called him that were hardcore leftwing liberals, not moderates, not right wingers, and not conservatives.
Well, seeing as Jimmy Carter has done more for the world during Bush's term than Bush, I think he'll be remembered in a much, much nicer light.
What's he done? Well, let's see. He badmouthed the current president on foreign policy, something that no former president has ever done, regardless of party affiliation, since the country was founded. He got a Nobel prize from a commitee more concerned with sticking their thumb in the eye of the U.S. than anything else. He's pontificated at length on how he doesn't think the U.S. has done the right thing, but he's completely dodged any possible question of what he would've done differently except to say that he would've handed it all off to the U.N -- which is a fancy political dodgy way of saying "I wouldn't have done anything."
I'm sure all of this is falling on deaf ears, because you're clearly too angry and naive to be even remotely rational. Please, try to think about what I've said, though. You're not doing anyone any favors by allowing your emotions to rule you in this manner.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky