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Bush's Space Panel Seeks Public Input
brandido writes "Space.com is reporting that Bush's space panel is seeking public input on the effort to return to the Moon and then reach Mars. From the article: "President Bush's new space advisory commission for getting humans to the Moon and Mars has launched a web site seeking public input with the promise of reading all comments." The article provides a link to the website for Bush's Space Panel, but it does not provide a direct link to the site for sending comments. I personally think we should use a Martian Space Elevator to further our exploration of Mars."
Sounds to me like bush is trying to bring back the pride we had back in the 60's during the race to the moon agains the USSR. We don't have a major competitor anymore, so now they're trying to get people on the bandwagon again.
My ghEtt0 webpage.
...they aren't really sure if it is worth doing and will only move ahead if they get permission.
Talk to the public that's already shown animosity to the plan! Great idea, guys!
Goo goo g'joob.
I personally think we should use a Martian Space Elevator to further our exploration of Mars.
Or how about a direct cable elevator from earth to mars - yeh, that would work
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
The thing is the cost of atmospheric launches against the cost of pushing up in a vaccuum. Instead of costing $10k per kilo, it's $1k per kilo.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
I mean, we can barely keep the ISS running, and our current space program is hurting significantly. So when my back is against a wall like that, i think i too would come out with crazy plans like this.
Not to mention the costs that it would have, NASA budget doubled for like 5 years when the appolo missions were going on.
Dont get me wrong I am not anti-NASA, I am just anti-mars right now. We could use that money for more important things.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
But what if the public tell them that science would be better served by robotic exploration, and that he should prioritise the economy and public services here on earth? Would that make a difference?
Michael Jackson is on the commission? I know he's an expert moon walker but this is taking things too far.
We know they have WMDs. (hello! all that Radiation doesn't just fall out of the sky! they are hiding something)
Soon all martians and moonmen will know what it is to live in a democracy (whether they like it or not!)
~note all in jest.
I cheer Bush's decision to advance our space program. However, hasn't the current Mars program been pretty successful?
Let's use the money to build a shuttle replacement. Right now we are talking to Russia about transporting our guys up and down?
Pour the money into a more efficent, safer transport system... Considering the huge amount of debt we are in now, methinks that is a better use of our money.
We are kicking Mars's ass right now.
AC
George, why don't you go yourself? You'll get the chance to explore Mars yourself - what greater mark can a man make on the human species than to be the first to set foot on anotehr planet? Right after Neil Armstrong in the history books, kids will find George Dubya.
Now, as for your first travelling companion. Look, we know you two guys haven't gotten on well in the past, but we think Saddam and you've got a lot of common attributes. In the right setting, we think you could achieve wonders together.
We reckon there's gonna be oil on Mars. Now, to make things easier for you, here's a map of where to start looking. Saddam's gonna start on one side of Mars, and you can start on the other. Whoever gets the most oil, wins. Yep, just like here on Earth.
All those other guys? Oh, they're the management consultants and hairdressers. We know you're gonna need a lot of them around.
Bye now. Y'all have a nice trip
What's that? Oh sure, we've packed enough fuel so you can get back, don't worry about that...
The only way this is going to work is if Bush can demonstrate that Al Quaeda is building an Islamic rocket that will take the word of the Prophet to Mars. The space race of the 60's was about nationalistic pride, but these days, who are we trying to beat? The French? The Indians? The Martians?
The current enthusiasm for space is nice, and gratifying to us geeks, but it's based on not a lot more than thin air. One serious budget crisis, one change of president, and it'll be cancelled.
Just my 2c.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
from the article...
Committee members:
Michael Jackson
Kill the mars program and fix the Hubble.
We will go more places this way.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Marvellous.
A real attempt to try and include people in the decision making by allowing them a way to comment.
Then it gets posted to Slashdot.
Then the trolls flood the comments mailbox with irrelevant drivel.
Then they stop reading the comments because the signal to noise ratio is too poor.
This is a real opportunity. Don't screw it up.
Why not just cut military expenditure and fund the whole Bush 'Here, look at the left hand, ignore the right hand, yes, just the left hand.'?
Seriously, US military expenditure could be cut massively and while I don't agree with why Bush is doing the Mars program I do agree it should go ahead.
No clue why I had to Thndercat up the title, go figure.
I know someone from the space programme in the 1960s - a man named Gene Kranz, who was (maybe still is) a member of the flying club I was a member of when I lived in Houston. Gene Kranz, if you don't remember, is the "Failure is not an option" man from the Apollo 13 mission when it all went pear-shaped.
He did a talk for the whole club about the Apollo programme, and why what's happening in today's NASA is happening. The talk was in 2000, so this was before the Columbia break-up. His analysis was basically society as a whole and by consequence NASA was now too risk averse to do anything exciting in space. The irony is that the risk aversion in NASA is actually a risk in itself, and contributed to the Challenger accident (and now the Columbia one as we've seen in the reports).
Bush's speech is all well and good, but I'm highly skeptical that anything will come of it. Going to Mars will be a very dangerous mission. Going to the Moon was very dangerous, and it's surprising that there were so few casualties in the Apollo programme. I don't think NASA has the guts to stomach these risks without a very serious shake-up in culture.
I hope I'm proven wrong, but I'm not particularly confident.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Majority Of Americans Thought We Already Had A Moon Base WASHINGTON, DC--A
NASA poll conducted to gauge support for President Bush's space-exploration initiative revealed that a depressing 57 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. already has a research base on the moon. "We put that international space-station thing up there in the '60s," phone-poll respondent Randy Snow said. "It might be on Mars, but I think it's the moon--wherever they have the golf course that President Kennedy played on. Remember, the Cubans tried to take it over?" NASA officials said they hope someday to make Americans' perception a reality.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
We are in the middle of a jobless recovery, nearly 50 million don't have health insurance, and people are starting to roll off of unemployemnt benefits. Not to mention, college grads are having a really tough time finding jobs.
Gee....... why don't we go to mars? Maybe someone on Mars has the answer to our economic problems. Are these people in the same reality?
but I think that someone is trying to block voter's brains with nice images of american flags on martian soil, so they can' think of other wonderfull things that the US made last years:
:P
- Boicot Kioto pact.
- Attack countries like it was done in the middle age.
- Pretend to be the protectors of the world, with power to do everything they want without being questioned.
- Disband space technology/health studies in favor of military studies.
When I was young, I though about America as presented by Hollywood: land of opportunity, freedom and "the good ones". Now, every day, week, month that passes I just realize that you're becoming a really strange country where words like privacy and liberty mean nothing, and I find really hard to figure out if the US are still on the "good" side.
I know it's a us centric site, and I'll be modded down, but someone had to say it
I wouldn't discount the "major competitor" side of things! The ESA is likely to mount some sort of manned mission series. Europe may be behind in terms of volume of missions mounted to date (they've by and large been quite successful though), but it's sure doing things a lot more cheaply than the U.S. What's more, we have a launch base nearer the Equator, in French Guiana. (As we are reminded each time we look at our banknotes). Hopefully the new Soyuz launcher facility will be up and running there soon - launching stuff from Kazachstan is surely far from ideal! The ESA of course has the benefit of Russian co-operation and the legacy of their space program.
It all looks like being quite some fun! (Not to mention pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, etc, etc)
Last one to land people on Mars is a rotten egg!
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
There's already a serious deficit blow-out, government spending is increasing at an unsustainable rate, the US is still officially at war with someone - we're not quite sure who, but there's quite a few suspicious looking goatherds in north-western Pakistan - and to top it all off, no one is really sure if the economy is picking up or relocating to a happier country.
Who's gonna foot the bill?
Well, bin laden is not on the earth or we would have found him already...
He must be hiding on the moon, or mars...
In a surprise show of support even Democrats and partizan groups from all over the United States admit that they
- Want Bush To Go To Mars
but they admit anywhere out of the way would do.This is all window dressing from a failed President eager for votes. If there wasn't land they thought they could command, and new technology money for Haliburton involved in this the current administration would'nt be involved.
- The administrationt that scraps the Hubble is not interested in space exploration for science
.We just have to get there before the Taliban does. I'll go ahead and call this an open schedule.
This is not my sandwich.
No cheers for bush (like he could ever come up with such an idea anyways),
though a moonbase would be sensible, I think, before we go any further.
ISS seems to be not so popular anymore, but I think that it is still very important for making progress
We shouldn't go too fast, too far!
Maybe something more modest, like a permanent moon base? Or more modest than that, wait a few years so we can fund this project with cash instead of Easy Credit Terms?
This is not my sandwich.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
I'd love to have had NASA & the rest of the space programs working towards these ends since the moon landings. We might well be better off. The technology we use to discuss this today, along with the telemetry systems and materials science (to name a few) owe a debt to the Kennedy space program.
The support for the proposition that the current administration has ANY reason other than political gain for this proposal is lacking.
If we had 40 years of consistent manned spaceflight behind us, I'd expect that we would be able to assess the risks and costs of this "mandate". What we have is a group of really poor administrators at NASA who have killed two shuttle crews and the shuttle program through their gross errors in judgment.
We need an entirely new NASA-with an international mandate to cooperate and jointly budget new programs long before we start back to the moon.
It's not possible with the current NASA - all we will have will be bloated costs for proposals and a few happy contractors.
There is only so much time before the election... Umm, I mean that America is in too much of a rush to space before, err, them communists get there, or something. Yessirree, no time to wait for no elevator.
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.
According to the Original speech announcing the plan, what you propose is already viewed as the first necessary step.
(Celui que tient la peur de devinir nuage)
This is an utterly obscene waste of money, time, and human effort that is in service of nothing but political ambition, and every single person involved in this frippery knows it.
If anyone who might read this is still capable of shame, do the right thing and tell the public all the myriad reasons this is a pipe dream.
Then shut this project down and tell the Bush claque to eat shit.
I think not
This morning I spotted two ladies with keyboard-vacuumcleaners, display wipes, and telephone sanitizing spray in my office...
(although at first I thought they were dusting for prints, they claim they were doing field training in a harsh environment for an upcoming major job)
Fist keep it simple and use existing technology.
I think the best approach is to assemble 2 ships in low earth orbit, or one large modular ship. These ships would be assembled by robotically docking "russian" style space station modules.
Pre build all the required modules before lanch.
Some of the modules required for each ship.
- habitation modules, either one can be used for planet habitation.
- power modules, "probably nuclear is required for enough power" either one can be used for planet
- sealed cargo modules, which can hold supplies and tools for crew, can be used for planet if mission requires
- cargo racks, and robot arms to assist module assembly,
- crew excape modules, aka chinese or russian style capsules,
- propulsion modules
- fuel modules
- numerious landers to attach modules for planet landing
This is just a draft
1. build a tiny little space ship
2. ask all the Bush and Cheney family members to enter this thing
3. close the door
4. let this ship travel to Mars
Thats it. end of story.
Here are some humble suggestions:
1. NASA should be required to make any purchase of over $50M in a competitive bidding process. This can be open auction if need be, or sealed bid, but bids must be published afterwards.
2. No Cost-Plus contracts should be awarded unless a congressional waiver is granted.
3. PRIZES: NASA should award at least $100M per year of all-or-nothing prizes for technology demonstration projects. Requirements should include disclosure of all technology used, so the experience curve (a.k.a. learning curve) of other companies benefits from this tech. Patents are always possible.
Prize 1: first private launch into space (100 km) using air-breathing engines for > 50% of time of flight.
Prize 2: First two-stage to orbit flight using wholly reusable components (>90% by mass re-used) for 2 subsequent flights. Similar to X-Prize, only going to orbit.
4. NASA should auction delivery of consumables (Air, Water, fuel) to within 200 meters the ISS (not necessary to dock). PAYMENT SHOULD BE C.O.D. FOR CONSUMABLES AT THE ISS. No payment should be made if nothing is delivered. Contractors should arrange for their own insurance, everything.
5. Likewise, NASA should offer payment of 0.1 cents per pixel (or something close to that) for delivery of all photographs of any planetary body taken from orbit around that body. Maximum award per body should be set by committee.
6. The space shuttle, conceived in 1968 and an albatross around the neck of NASA, should be RETIRED immediately and bids taken on its separate primary functions (delivery to ISS and higher orbits of personnel).
7. NASA administrators should be given real power to reform their agency, without irrelelevent Line-Item appropriations from congress. Facilities should be able to be closed. Existing power structures (political ones) should be phased out or replaced with different ones somehow. NASA KILLS TOO MANY PROJECTS DONE BY THE PRIVATE SECTOR, DON'T LET THAT HAPPEN!
Just some humble suggestions I like to call the K. Rice Plan.
Cordially yours,
-- Kevin Rice
-- Kevin J. Rice
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
This is just propaganda saw during the cold war! Trying to get voters back that he lost during the war, ect! The only difference is that there is no outher country to race with!
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I always wondered what the call that area between his ears...
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I realize that NASA's mission has become heavily weighted in symbolism and emotion and that this is the reality of 21st century politics.
But, as a member of the public, as a taxpayer, I would much rather that they pay for 50 select astronomers, geologists, physicists, engineers, chemists and biologists to come to a conference and ask them what kinds of space missions would be valuable from their perspective. Put the ideas in a ranked order, with costs and risks, and then let the administrators decide what they'd like to do.
As it stands now, there are some interesting projects that have made it through the cracks, but all the big money goes towards various make-work manned missions meant to whip up patriotic fervor, demonstrate international cooperation, or keep the inertia going with some large project that everyone is afraid to let die because of its size.
There's nothing wrong with pride in one's country (except that the emotion is often used as a tool by less honourable men), or with international cooperation. But please let those things be incidental to defining NASA's mission and not central.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Well, my public education worked fine for me. And the school bent over backwards to accomodate my learning disability, so long as my parents kept prodding them.
And I'm doing alright at a community college, too. You can even work at the same college you're a student at, to pack in some experience for down the road.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Moon+Mars=distraction till one week before November 04
Then US special forces in Afganistan magically pull Osama Bin Liner out of a cave. That would have to be the ultimate election gimmic...
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Period.
The problem is not unlike that of weapon systems in the 1980's. Contractors would dump billions of the government's dollars into systems that never worked. Every time it was "we almost had it working, but we need another $xxx,xxx,xxx." No one wanted to call them to the carpet, because no one wanted to be the one who signed the check for billions of dollars down the tubes.
Oddly, many of these billion dollar "learning experiences" centered around space-based defense systems researched by the same companies that Nasa contracts out R&D to as well.
We have to get away from billion dollar at a time projects. Only the big dogs can play, and they have a tendency to sit on their ass once they have a contract.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The solution is easy. I'll just disable the "space race" server setting.
Anyway, back to FreeCiv.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Put a series of telescopes on the moon.
Replace the Hubble and large quanities of the terristial radio telescopes with moon based ones. Get the benefits of the location for more science. When the Hubble goes it will be an extreme loss, replace it with something more grand as soon as possible.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
I read the journal entry, and I laughed very hard. Then I started to suspect the post was serious, and I started to cry.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
If Bush wants to go on this one-way trip into outer space, we should let him.
I'm just worried he might not understand. But we can't have everything.
I say 'send him!'
Grab yourselves a copy of Arthur C Clarke's "Fountains of Paradise". Most often reviewed as as novel about a "space elevator" from Earth to a geosynch orbit, it also includes passages about the development of the same concept on Mars. Clarke's address "The Space Elevator: 'Thought Experiment', or Key to the Universe? (Part 1)" (which also acknowledges that the concept isn't his, nor new) can be found here: http://www.spaceelevator.com/docs/acclarke.092079. se.1.html
- crew excape modules, aka chinese or russian style capsules,
They are really usefull when you are orbiting Mars or are halfway between Earth and the red planet.
/wojci
"President Bush's new space advisory commission for getting humans to the Moon and Mars has launched a web site seeking public input with the promise of reading all comments."
Poor Mr. Bush. He made this promise before his web site got Slashdotted.
There ain't no rules here; we're trying to accomplish something.
Disclaimer: IANAA too. I was thinking to land in America, but after 9/11 I've left that weird country. It's not that other governments do not create any deceptions or delusions - they just do it not so loud. It also good to know that my taxes do not kill so many people.
Less is more !
My first choice would be for a space elevator, but if we want to get to Mars without it we should go nuclear
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
observation: humans have evolved in a atmospheric environment. they are not designed for vacuum environment. they are fragile and need extensive life support systems.
proposal: send ONLY beings designed for space travel.
Robots are cheaper, we could be doing 10 times as much science for the same cost. I know that some experiments can only be done by humans today. the right decision is to improve robotics. A.I. , visual object recognition, self-repair ability, robotic hand. this research would have a positive impact on civilian aplications, too (working in hazardous environment, like nuclear reactors and dumps).
The ISS is an expensive political project. It is hard to kill it, because of international involvment. but it should be killed, because it is using up resources, which could be spent much better.
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
The Bush adminstration wants input about this? But ignores the input it has been received about the Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission? We are supposed to take this plea for input seriously? Is this the latest attempt from the Bush administration to build a coalliation? This administration's method not worked in the past and will likely contiinue not to work. They seem unwilling to listen to anyone and go blindy where noone has gone before, with a little blessing from God and while cursing the Infidels. Do not kid yourself, the only input they want is fro their friends in the aerospace industry.
Okay. Time for a little straight talk, folks.
Lots of folks inside and outside of the USA are starting to whine about just how bad the US has become in terms of privacy, liberty, and justice. From what I'm hearing, it's like America is the most oppressive regime in the history of mankind.
How bad is it really? It's so bad here, that any under-educated, overfed citizen/illegal immigrant can publicly parrot any anti-American diatribe from the rooftops and not get arrested.
Hell, if they do it while smearing themselves with feces, they can probably qualify for an NEA grant to take some of my money from me. So yeah, it's bad here.
I just wonder what other country is as oppressive as the USA today. I mean, certainly the parent poster would not have gotten in trouble for saying anything like that about/in any given Middle Eastern country. Try telling any given sub-Saharan "President" exactly what you think of his policies, then tell me what freedom is. Go on, let your girlfriend drive a car in Saudi Arabia. Better yet, have her do it with her hair down. Even worse, let her register to vote.
Everything's relative, folks. The USA is still about freedom and justice, no matter how much the Left wants to change that.
As for boycotting(and spelling) the Kyoto Treaty, up yours. That specious piece of Flat-Earth nonsense was designed solely to cripple the US economy. Fuck no, we're not going to sign it. Even Bubba "I'd sell my Mother down the river" Clinton wasn't gonna sign that piece of crap.
Get a clue. We're number one and you can resent it all day long.
I'll bet there's several astronauts willing to risk their lives to fly up and fix it, blasting a foam-impact-sized-hole in the wing of the safety excuse NASA is currently trying to fly in the media.
We're seeing great results from the Hubble, it would take a relatively small amount of money, supposedly was already planned for before the last accident, and it would be a significant loss to current astronomical research if this working piece of equipment is allowed to fall out of orbit.
Get off my launchpad!
Hi.
Can you please send Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and all the other lying crazies who clearly miss the cold war to the moon and mars so the rest of us can concentrate on fixing our own planet before the U.S goes off and destroys any others?
Yours sincerely,
The rest of planet Earth.
PS. I understand that the moon is not a planet, but that wouldn't fit in with the above sentence.
But until it's proved possible, we shouldn't base our entire space program around a pipe dream.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Listening to the public is the essence of democracy. They didn't say they would blindly follow the suggestions, just listen.
The best thing you can hope for in a government is a smart guy who will listen to advice and then make his own decision.
(I thought this was posted once already, but now I can't see it in the thread. Sorry if this is a dupe.)
Not that any of you should care, but here's what I posted to their comment site:
Going to the moon only makes sense in the context of getting raw materials. Building ships or habitats or almost any other activity would be a lot easier off the moon, probably at one of the libration points.
People going to Mars doesn't make any sense unless they intend to stay for good. If getting people back is part of the plan, then send them to the asteroids instead. Much easier to get there, easier to get back from, and probably easier to exploit for raw materials than the moon, frankly.
In fact, if you're going to the moon for raw materials to build with in high Earth orbit, it might be easier to swipe a few asteroids and bring them back to a libration point manufacturing facility than to bring the equivalent material up from the moon.
But Mars is not a stepping stone to anywhere; it's a destination. Only, there's nothing to do on Mars that couldn't be better done in Arizona.
The same could be said for the moon, except it's easier to lift raw materials from the moon than from Mars or Earth. But that assumes you figure out what to do with raw materials in space.
If you aren't going to figure out how to process raw materials in bulk in space, then quit sending people. At a billion bucks a pop, Man in Space only makes makes sense if he's building something there.
In no case should you drop stuff down a gravity well (moon, Mars, or Earth for that matter) unless it's going to help you get materials back up.
Man's future in space is basically about moving materials; down is an expense, up is an investment, construction is accrued value. The net worth of the whole endeavor then becomes a pretty simple equation.
(ps: I had to promise my mother I wouldn't go to the moon as long as she was alive. She's doing okay at 72, so I can wait a little longer.)
"I really think it's great that money's being put into space exploration again, but I'm nervous that the Kyoto Agreement was seen as being too expensive to ratify. The priorities _have_ to be to ensure that our own planet has a real future before we try anything else. We only have one Earth."
Not amazingly literate, but it sums up how I feel.
Tom.
Oh arse
Very true. This is exactly why a change is in order. ISS/Shuttle is a white elephant. For the same money we can be doing far more real exploration.
So when my back is against a wall like that, i think i too would come out with crazy plans like this.
Bush's back isn't against a wall. These changes have been in the works for a long time. The Columbia disaster just forced a decision. Unlike other administrations of the last 10 years, GDubya has the guts to make the decision.
Not to mention the costs that it would have, NASA budget doubled for like 5 years when the appolo missions were going on.Clearly, such budget increases are not going to happen. However, the US does have new powerful and economical launchers (Atlas V, Delta IV) and the potential for rapidly developing Shuttle derived launchers. This is not a cold start like Apollo.
Dont get me wrong I am not anti-NASA, I am just anti-mars right now. We could use that money for more important things.Like what? Social spending?
an ill wind that blows no good
Remember, "Mars is teh suck" isn't constructive criticism.
are they going to outsource this to India ?
Martin landau was right in "Accidently" setting off the nukes stored on the moon, thus setting in motion a wacky zanny trip across the universe. (How come they wernt going at light speed but encountered a new planet every episode?) Does anyone remember the episode were the white fluffy balls were making everyone blissout...ohh hang on, that was E.R. Pres could mine the sci fi archives for other good ideas regarding the moon and space travel and aliens.... Headlines " Bush negotiate heroically saving the world from aliens" opinion polls soar. wake up now, you fell asleep reading asimov again.
"Persistance is Fertile" - Me. I can quote myself if I want to.
I have already sent the Presidential commission a suggestion to use midgets for the crew of the Mars mission. Massive savings on payload weight and demand on consumbles are my justification. Of course, the candidates will require degrees in engineering and other sciences, and they will have to be flight trained on specially adapted aircraft, but I think this could be the big breakthrough for the program that makes it feasible. Brings a whole new meaning to "One small step for mankind".
Open Software Initiative, ....
:) )?
Open Hardware Initiative,
Open Rocketarwe ? Open Astroware ?
Open Terraformingware ? OpenEcoformingWare (Ach! Himmel!
Open Hyperdriveware ?
Yeah, yeah. Doing a collaborative MINIX based kernel via, basically, 1200 or 2400kbps email and bbs just isn't going to work in the early 90's, either. Let alone a GUI to compete with "market standards". Everyone knows only big governmbennts and b.i.g. M.I.Complex corporations can ever do *that*. (sigh)
This is a madly optimistic dreamer idealists initiative. All critics, naysayers and otherwise "quenchers", please proceed to the nearest working VASIMR, remove you lumpy upper appendages from where it is presently tightly wedged, and place it where that *very* shiny light is. Thank you.
i'll tag along but prolly there isn't enough ...
aspirin in the world for all the head-ache
involved
Personally, I don't think the government should be funding space exploration (or health care, for that matter), so I'm not arguing in defense of NASA, just in defense of actually considering the numbers.
Also, I have enormous pride in my country. I feel very lucky to have been born in the US.
It's not quite a space elevator, but it looks like the next Mars rover planned is going to be lowered down to the surface by a tether attached to a "Skycrane" craft hovering 5 meters in the air. This is to prevent the potential problem of a rover getting stuck in a landing platform. After lowering the rover the Skycrane will fly off to another area.
and the humans won.
Energy: time to change the picture.
See NASA TV.
Also, this was scooped on sciscoop yesterday, with more info than the slashdot story.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Tight budget ?
Ok, just call off the occupation plans, pull the guys out and let the locals divide things up over there their way.
That way, you could invest, say 20 trillion in space travel, settlement and technology; another 20 trillion in health and education. And there would be net savings of 40 trillion.
And, with acceptable health, good education, and somewhere to go; and with something important to do with their health, education, and healthy, educated, more humane dreams, ambitions and aspirations, people would be happier. (Obs.: for more than technical reasons, obvious ones, cento-millionaires, politicians and corporations are not considered to be *people*. ).
OK, Mr Republican Propaganda Machine, I'll bite.
I lived in the UK up until 1997, and had the pleasure of experiencing UK National Health Service care in 1996, and the same treatment supplied by the USA's #1-rated HMO (Harvard Pilgrim) in 1997.
My medical needs included diagnosis and treatment of a kidney stone (i.e. typical non-surgical stuff) plus treatment for common chronic conditions like allergies.
Guess what? In my personal informed experience, the best US HMO healthcare is about as good as the UK's state-funded National Health Service. Wait times are about the same, quality of care is about the same. Yes, I had to wait weeks or even months for treatment in the US.
And remember, that was the #1 rated HMO in the country that year. I hate to think what kind of medical care you get if you live in rural Alabama.
Of course, the medical industry loves the fat profits it soaks out of the US consumer, and has lots of money to pay for the dissemination of propaganda to try and convince US consumers that those poor European countries with their universal healthcare systems are much worse off than the lucky USA. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if they paid people to post propaganda to the Internet.
Here's your free clue for the day: Try talking to people who actually have experience of both US healthcare and state-funded European healthcare. Don't just believe what you read in the corporate media or hear on FOX News.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Find me a country with so called 'Universal Health Care' with the quality of care that exists in the US. Let me tell you: about every country in Western Europe. You speak of wait time only, while this is of course due to the number of people who have access to these services.
Having very long roots in my community's puddle of conscousness, and having wafted information-mists ever since I was a sapling, I could be of immense help in pointing out all clotters and un-scummers. ;)
Thank you.
Yeah, great idea, going to mars.
You know what ?
Let's give the orders to companies connected with the carlyle group. That way we're sure the filthy rich get even richer from this.
Just like from the wars on terrorism/drugs/iraq.
Why would you spend all these billions on something sensible anyway ?
Kyokushin - ultimate truth from within.
The Moon seems like a very dead and uninteresting place unless it can be confirmed that there are ice deposits in some of the deeper craters. There seems little point in going back there - other than to explore the geology - and we know how to do that with robots like the ones that are doing such great work on Mars right now.
The Mars mission would probably be better served by assembling the craft at a Legrange point - but to do so, we need a better lift capability.
However, I concede the President's desire to get the public excited about space again - and setting up an assembly facility at L5 isn't going to do that...it sounds like just another space station like the hideously expensive waste of vacuum that we are probably about to abandon.
I'd have preferred to see the President putting his weight behind the construction of a space elevator to earth orbit. That is a worthy goal, it's certainly at least as do-able as a manned Mars mission and would have immense benefits for mankind beyond the Mars mission. The likely need for novel materials to build it would also have great spin-off potential for American business - and hence go a long way toward justifying the expense.
Setting up a facility at a Legrange point would also fit nicely with the plans for the Hubble replacement - so there would be synergy in that effort.
www.sjbaker.org
We all know why Bush wants to go to the Moon: to have somewhere to put all that nukyuler waste. Before too long, Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, and a cast of others will be flung out of the solar system by a massive nukyuler blast (caused, no doubt, by al-Queda). Our plans for domination of Mars will be put on hold as Bush continues his search "for the real terrorists" here on Earth.
i don't know what there is on the moon.
...
:) ) lurking out there.
...
/
i don't think building a smelt on the moon for
making space ship parts is economically feasable.
yes, everything new is hugely expensive because
you have to do a ton of research.
also you don't know if it's going to pay off.
i think the trip of Christopher Columbus to
America was also hugely expensive.
now the very country, bah, continent is home to
world super power, huge economy dwarfing Spain
we have 99.9% mapped earth. next logical step is
to the oceans or into outer space.
the main problem might not be economical, but the
stamina for a long term commitment, which def.
will be required for it to succed.
of course 10 years will be enough time for a
"plant the flag" mission, but who knows what ores
or other maybe even exotic materials exist
on mars or in the solarsystem in general.
we might find some really strange things (not
cannibals and the like, but maybe potatoes and
tabak
just looking at the newest images from opportunity
with the embedded round pebbels in rock and seeing
cracks going thru the rock but not thru the
pebbles, wierd, definitely
for a long term commitment priorities will have to
be set. to me one major priority must be a "space
shuttle" for interplanetary travel. a ferry
between stars. a real spaceship!
this spaceship only "lives" in zero G much like
the ISS or MIR.
it must be able to transport cargo, humans and
fuels to the moon, mars and, for the extra margin,
to the asteroid belt between mars and jupiter and
do this more then once (with refuel in earth
orbit).
there are still some priority problems in the
technological/engineering sector. this mainly
being propulsion and astronaut security and,
unless somebody is going to come up with
a small portable fusion reactor tomorrow,
energy-source.
i just want to point out one more thing that
always gets me whizzy. transporting huge vessels with
humans on board. the "whatever" rocket/ship that
is going to take crew to mars and moon should be
launched unmanned and the crew should be brought
up to the waiting transport ship in a reliable
manor (soyus?). seeing a bigger then space shuttle
construction with humans on the back of a buran
spaceshuttle tank with mega boosters is just plain
scary.
"How Can I Buy Your Vote?"
He is fishing for votes by suggesting man be sent to the Moon or to Mars.
Think about this - Man went to the moon and the excitment did not last long.
It is much less expensive and much less painful to blow up or burn up a machine in the hopes of exploring a moon or a planet than it is killing a person.
Great. So India will get all the outsourcing work, then.
Well, that's cool. I hear they're outsourcing part of the work to even more down-and-out 3rd or 4rth worlders with any technological skill. Or, maybe, it should be called sharing ?
Well. As long as there's a profit somewhere in it. Or a job for some relation's relation...
Here is my input to them. I welcome input from the Slashdot community.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Space Exploration is a hobby of mine, and I read and think about it quite a bit.
I think nothing will have as big an impact on Space Exploration, and indeed the average American, as building a space elevator.
A space elevator would reduce the cost per pound of transporting both humans and cargo to space, be signifigantly safer (as your not sitting on top of a controlled explosion), and herald in a new era of Space Exploration.
The general consesus is that a space elevator could be built in less than 10 years, for less than $40 billion. Advances in carbon nanotubes only serve to further that more.
Things we could accomplish with a space elevator include:
1) Spacecraft would no longer have to be built around the need to break out of the earths gravity. They could be assembled in space, much more suitable to long distance or rapid travel, and much less costly.
2) Nuclear and other toxic waste could be inexpensively and safely lifted to space, loaded on an inexpensive barge, and using a space tether or other means be sent on a collision course with the sun. On impact they'd burn up, having done no damage to the sun, of course, and causing no more damage, cost, or fear on earth. Since we own the space elevator, we would be the benefactors of this new industry. If another country or a company builds the space elevator, we would have to pay for these services rather than profit thereby.
3) A space station becomes a much greater reality. Space may even become so accessible that the average American can take their family up to a zero-G amusement park for the weekend, like Disneyland in space. Again, a new industry is born.
4) With the massive cost and risk associated with launches out of the way, missions to the moon, mars, and beyond become safer and cheaper, and putting satellites in orbit becomes far cheaper, furthering industries on earth such as satellite tv, communications, gps, etc.
5) The possibility of harvesting near-free electricity from the moon, polution-free using rectennas, becomes feasible.
In short, all of the benefits of space travel, dreamed of for centuries, could be realized or pursued better using a space elevator than any other means.
I say now is the time.
I hope he tries to read them out loud. Dyslexia can be funny.
The results, of course, usually aren't.
The web page www.moontomars.org is not up!
How is that Republican piece of propaganda shit insightful? Get a clue, mods! Just because it's pro-US it doesn't have to be insightful! Really, sometimes I think you mod up because of the presence of sentences like "show me one country that's as [something] as the US!" alone. What is your fucking problem? Got no self-esteem?
Morons!
Absolutely Inviable !
1.It's obvious. => No glamour.
2.It might work! => No-one wants that.
Dilbert, is a lonely man (or comic-strip/cartoon character.).
According to Internic's who-is, the moontomars web site is registered by ANSER. I'm curious why the space panel couldn't get a .GOV address for this?
ANSER. could be a spam outfit for all I know.
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
The USA is still about freedom and justice, no matter how much the Left wants to change that.
The USA is no more about "freedom and justice" than any *other* country that spouts a set of ideals to inspire patriotism. Many nations, including repressive dictatorships, have come up with all kinds of flowery ideological backings. The Soviets after their rise, the Nazis, etc. The US has some good policies -- we have *very* strong free speech laws, though you aren't going to get thrown in jail for criticizing the government in most other industrialized nations either -- England, Canada, what-have-you.
As for your girlfriend driving a car -- it's all relative as to what you value as freedom and rights. We in the US happen to not be particularly Islamic, and push hard to allow women the freedom to assume traditionally male roles. On the other hand, we have a relatively high drinking age. In the US, you cannot drink until years after vote or make decisions about sex. Driving a vehicle, controlling potentially lethal thousands of pounds of metal at high speed, comes even earlier than drinking. Most other first-world nations take the position that humans have a fundamental right to life, and do not have the death penalty, unlike us. We have a Christianity-influenced background, and have laws generally banning freedom to engage in public nudity. We happen to consider the full-body burka oppressive, but the baring of a breast illegal. It's all what you're used to. I'd say that the United States has a good track record on freedoms, but it certainly isn't the end-all-and-be-all, it's "less free" than many other countries in many areas, and the idea that the ideologies of "true, justice, freedom, democracy" or whatever are anything more than a political tool to influence the masses is ridiculous.
As for Kyoto, we may have had excellent reasons for not signing it, but you're going to have a tough time arguing that it was designed "solely to cripple the US economy".
May we never see th
I'm pretty sure in cost studies that the Russian heavy lifters are cheaper to operate than our antiquated shuttles. I'm sure its a temporary solution to use Russian Technology, but like the book says, if it aint broke, why fix it?
The problem is choice..
power modules, "probably nuclear is required for enough power" either one can be used for planet
You'll probably also want to add nuclear propulsion to that list. The high thrust and Isp of Nuclear Thermal Rockets are pretty much the only thing that would make a Mars mission feasible.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Hussein didn't even have to be aware of it. Abdul the fundamentalist sympathizer over in lab #3 could sneak the stuff out. The the mere existence of a well funded WMD program in a turdhole like Iraq is a danger.
But if we turn the production on our cities completely over to building space ship modules, we won't complete the SETI program wonder in time.
maybe they should spend a little of that $12 billion on a new website. for something this high profile, i think a site calls for someone with a little more experience than an 8 year old and golive
...you mean you *WANT* some flowery piffle hacked out by a speech writer? And forget the fact that Kennedy's led to the stupidest boondoggle ever seen instead of a rational and incremental move into space.
--- Ban humanity.
"The first thing you must do is to find a way to save Hubble. If you cannot do that then I have serious doubts of NASA's commitment to be anything other than a welfare program for aerospace contractors"
The rest of the universe has a pretty clear picture of who it is. Where has your head been stuffed, dumbass?
I would like to see space exploration undertaken by the private sector by projects like X-Prize. They will have more incentive to build "smaller, faster, cheaper, better", as they say. My input will be to request reduced restriction on people and companies who want to get into space.
NASA is no longer so interested in "big science" as "big bureaucracy" and maintaining a certain bottom line for employees and contractors. I think this is why the space shuttle has not been replaced and ISS has not been abandoned, I mean, outsourced to the international community.
I am particularly opposed to continued government investment in space until they can get working high-speed passenger rail from Washington, DC to Boston!!!
Feel free to cut and paste as you see fit.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
What better way to divert public attention than to make the public look up at the stars? The timing of the Martian probes seemed planned to coincide with the Iraq stuff.
Selling air and food to the people who go.
Dont think it wont happen!
emt 377 emt 4
I hope I don't sound like a troll, but I gotta say this going to the moon plan is incredibly stupid and really shows the Bush administration's lack of originality or real vision.
I think the really visionary thing to do would be to make AI the big goal. Maybe something like having an intelligent humanoid robot by 2012, or something crazy like that. That would be as big of a deal as going to the moon for the first time.
Throw tons of money in it, give a lot of programmers jobs, and there would be benefits in just about every sector. Increased production, efficiency, military advantages, etc, etc... The Japanese are making a lot of significant advances in robotics and AI, and we could very quickly be left in their dust if we don't jump on it now.
Weapons of Media Distraction
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
only the rich are getting paid.
I'm sorry,
but I just don't find manned missions very inspiring if it's to Mars - it's basically just one big desert.
The ESA missions are largely uninspired also.
The only really interesting missions for me were Nasa's Galileo at Jupiter and the forthcomming ESA mission to Titan - Cassini Heugens (if it doesn't crash as a result of it's shoestring budget)
Also, Nasa long distance unmanned mission to Europa is very interesting to me..
It's because Bush & co are doing bad things.
for posing the question. Bush has been around long enough that you should know the answer is NO.
>>Pour the money into a more efficent, safer transport system
Oh please!
How about making sure that every human on planet earth has clean drinking water.
That would be a much bigger step forward for mankind than sending a few astronauts to pootle around on a remote, dead rock - or a safer transport system!
Belgian parliament ratified (sp?) the treaty while G.W. Bush was visiting the country as a sign that the USA should do the same.
How can we possibly send astronauts to the moon and Mars? We've decided that a mission to service the Hubble is too dangerous, yet going to the moon or Mars is more dangerous yet.
I posted this on their website...
The proposal to use the Moon as a base to launch to Mars is absolutely without merit.
This program is a waste of resources. The current programs are successful, and have been successful with a long track record. New funds should be applied to the Shuttle program, and regular launches should be restarted. We need to fulfill our commitment to the ISS - finish what we started.
We need to keep Hubble aloft, as it has provided scientific knowledge about the origin of the universe that no manned landing on Mars or the Moon could ever provide.
NASA should also seek to continue the Shuttle program by eventually retiring the current shuttles and by outsourcing our shuttle trips to the possible winner of the X-Prize.
Furthermore, it is very obvious that this program is not designed to go to Mars. This program is designed to funnel money away from programs that work - Shuttle, ISS, Hubble, robotic landings - to development expenses for large aerospace firms. This yet another blatant transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to these firms - its nothing more than corporate welfare.
The current programs, Shuttle, ISS, Hubble and robotic landings, can't generate the kind of profit for big aerospace firms the way a blank check and pipe dream can. Why are we sacrificing the programs that work, that yield important findings, for the sake of just sending an astronaut to Mars? Even if we get there, which I seriously doubt, we would have lost our space telescope, watched the ISS come down in fireball, and will have lost our edge in space travel.
Save Hubble! Stop giving away my tax dollars to aerospace firms that never build anything (They only develop stuff that's never bought). Didn't we give them enough to develop the YF-33 and YF-34 in the late 80's (that never got built) and the JSF in the 90's (which also never got built)? I demand a return on my investment - that means I want to fund programs that work - where the money actually goes to launch a probe, for example, instead of to a lab that tests possible Mars landers. Testing burns through cash, whereas there is a high return on investment when we continue to fund successful programs.
Personally, I think the next time there's a major disaster like a volcano or a hurricane, we ought to just keep our foriegn aid and assistence at home.
--- Ban humanity.
I don't think it's fair to say that someone who doesn't want government involvment is an extremest. I mean searously, name one thing the government here touches and doesn't screw up.
In a country founded on the notion that the government shouldn't infringe on peoples lives, it doesn't really make sense that the government should be spending so much money on social programs. The idea is that people are (at least should be) responsible to regulate their own behavior. For example, if people donated time and resources to charity of their own accord, there would be no need for welfare or medicare. Likewise, if people volunteered their time to the military, we could mantain a milita of local volunteers as a fraction of the cost of our defense spending. Moreover, the government wouldn't be able to have an expansionist foregin polocy.
Is this an extreme view to take? People should be responsible for their own lives.
my reasons for going into space:
1. cheap power to manufacture anything people use.
2. more elbow room.
all i need is a cheap way to get there. i hear that the space elevator is a cheap way to lift mass into space, that clearly makes sense. and because of wind friction, the elevator will generate 'tons' of 'clean' electrical energy. hell, that alone is worth the endevor.
... ... ...
<form action="/dev/null" method="post">
We promise to read every submission
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Space Elevator R&D fits perfectly with the national space strategy. An enduring, heavy-lift system, with low amortized cost would of course be ideal. But regardless of whether one actually gets built or whether the concept even works, research dollars in that direction would be very well spent because of the great potential for spin-off products and materials.
This is a perfect opportunity to put a bug in their ear about the space elevator concept, as one /. poster has already done.
See this related story on LiftWatch.org.
.
Off topic troll!
.
(useless spam from fascist responders slowly diluting a useful dialogue to just noise, mod this down)
.
I heard yesterday on NPR that in Iraq, the only jobs are as policemen. That all the fertilizer factories and other businesses are closed. This is a reality, that cannot be appreciated in the Corporate Bubble. Now, if Rummy really had the best interests of Iraq in mind, they'd concentrate on finding those former business owners, and get them set back up! You cannot have a country, without an economy; but that's exactly what we've given them. Iraqi business owners are not the idea though. Nope, the plan has always been:
- Invade Iraq to assuage Bush Sr's embarrassment for not taking Bagdad in the first Gulf War;
- Taxpayers foot the massive war costs ('they can afford it...');
- U.S. companies directly connected with the Party, get no-bid contracts and reap the revenue from rebuilding Iraq, with oil paying for it (hopefully);
- Taxpayers, unfortunately, not reimbursed.
Trouble is, Shi'ites are in the majority, and any election would stupidly create another Iran. Foolish. Clearly, none of this was thought out by the Bush Admin II. It's a quagmire... a tarbaby. And today we discover that Afganistan has been greatly increasing its opium poppy regions. Well, that's just great... is there anything else Bush can do to destroy civilization as we know it? Oh yeah, deforestation, park drilling, drift-netting, Kyoto-bashing, etc.
Lately you may have noticed that the White House is 'in disarray'. In the past few weeks Bush has proposed hydrogen cars, men-to-Mars, Segways-for-the poor, etc, all costing masses of money. (NASA says they weren't consulted -um-, and that it's far cheaper and safer to just go straight to Mars, without stopping at the Moon)
Dubya asks for more money for defense, oil, and others who do not need it comparatively, while 'phasing out senior citizens' with the recent Medicare overhaul, and cutting thousands out of education programs.
The objective fact is, the Bush Admin II has managed to ruin our country's economy with their radical self-interest, in three short years. We have slingshotted from a $350bb surplus, to a $550bb deficit, solely due to the Party's spending and spending and spending. An historic budget deficit, and we know that another Iraq request for $45bb is waiting for elections to be over, in addition to the astounding, unprecedented Defense budget. 9/11? We're told that cost only $79bb. So, where's the other TRILLION or so, Dick? (And WTF are you blasting under your house, Dick? Who's paying for your new underground office, in your real house, Dick?)
Can anyone tell me why we still have a Navy? To "project power"? When missiles, long-range bombers, C5's, and in-flight fueling exist? Which are far faster? Aircraft carriers were proven obsolete in Pearl Harbor. (indeed any large, slow, expensive weapon is obsolete) We have a whole service branch that's not needed... and ties men up in isolated, cramped quarters for months. (These ideas proposed here for the first time) But the real problem that needs to be addressed is inertia. Gore started this with his Streamlining Govt initiative.
Repubs seem to cronically do the complete opposite of what they say they will: they spend money profligately; restrict civil freedoms; and dampen competition! No reasonable person could look at this chart and fail to see a pattern of thieving, over the past 30 years. We would be so much better off without this hidden corruption, being able to afford universal healthcare and Euro-style free university, were it not for special interests emptying our Treasury with Dubya's $1.3 TRILLION tax cut. Reagan's tax cuts didn't work to "stimulate the economy" (in fact caused a major oil and real estate crash, which average taxpayers had to pay for... opposed to beneficiaries of the tax cuts), and there
Campaign finance reform is national security.
The last time we asked for public input, George W. Bush became the president. Maybe we should just leave the public out.
I've lived in Kentucky and West Virginia, and I've seen what mining can do to the land when there aren't any labor laws or environmental regulations. But I've also been to a Material Sciences lab and seen what people can do with ore. The Moon pretty clearly has no life (at least none in the fairly distant past) but plenty of exotic minerals, as well as other minerals we can still find here.
'The will to explore' won't do it for today's money-oriented economy, and we don't have the USSR to compete with now. Looking at it pragmatically, the only way we'll be able to fund space programs is by selling the products of it.
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
Yeah, the same guy who did Chaos Manor for Byte,
He's writing it now for Dr. Dobbs.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
But I don't recall Wilber and Orville having a governement contract to build their plane.
Privatizing something does NOT mean that it will perform better and/or cost less than a governmental program.
That's a typical strawman put forth by people like you who simply cannot think anymore. There's no point in even arguing with you. Your mind is completely and absolutely DEAD from ideological toxins. All you have is irrational hatemongering. You think you think, but it's just an illusion of sentience at this point.
--- Ban humanity.
Without specific design goals, "a shuttle replacement" is going to have the same problems as the last ten years of failed attempts to replace the shuttle and the shuttle itself-- meandering design requirements, meandering design, programs that stall out in beauraucracy.
Saying "let's replace the shuttle" has gotten us nowhere. Saying "let's go to mars, we'll need to replace the shuttle to do this" gives the people designing the shuttle both real design requirements and real reasons to get done.
Personally what I'd do is say screw replacing the shuttle, what we need is INTRA-orbital crafts that can do things like move from LEO to L5 or somesuch. We can just use the old shuttle space planes or rockets to heft stuff into space and put our fly-to-mars craft permanently in space.
I dont want money to go there. Give enough money to NJ so that these bastards stop collecting toll everytime I leave the state. I am sick of paying money to use lousy and unsafe pot hole riddled roads. I already surrender 33% of my income to the government for god's sake.
The Space station is actually Cheney's idea. Since we have to lay low in the nation building department for a while, Halliburton has to get work somehow!
Bush's environmental and foreign policies are damaging this planet for this profit of his pals. He needs to colonise other planets before he's finished wrecking this one.
Politically speaking, the government will do what they think will best benefit their supporters. Their supporters are the guys who pay to get them re-elected. This isn't about finding out what the public thinks, but it does help them in a few ways.
First, it builds public interest. When they come out and say "we've decided to do it this way," then the majority of people feel that they've had their say, and the government has listened to them, and what the government thinks is probably the best decision for some reason that completely escapes everyone's grasp, so they just go along with what the government decides. As if they had any say in it in the first place.
Second, it tells them how to spin what they're doing. What they're really doing is spending the public's money on something that isn't particularly accomplishable with our current technology. If they get our say-so, then they can hand billions over to our nation's "defense contractors" to try to figure it all out. Don't doubt for a minute that it'll be a long and expensive process.
Looking for public comment? Mr. Bush, I am unimpressed. How's that comment for you?
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
The scope is named after James Webb, not James Watt. But Watt the hell, both were bureaucrats. Given it's inauspicious name, the scope probably will never see first light. All the more reason to can ISS and keep Hubble going.
The United States will *NEVER* pay back its debt.
) . Last year our GDP was an estimated $10,983,900,000,000 (http://www.bea.gov/bea/dn/home/gdp.htm). It would take 63.81% of our production from a whole year to generate that money. In other terms, that's everyone's work product for the next 7.7 months. The amount of money that we can actually *afford* to put towards debt repayment barely (if at all) services the *interest.*
As of 02/05/04 the total debt was $7,009,333,811,289.69 (http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpenny.htm
As it stands now we can keep paying out bonds using money from new purchases. However, if there's ever a large-scale loss of faith in the US economy and government the whole house of cards will come crashing down...
Here's my input to the President's comission, if anyone's interested:
The cost of large-capacity space launches currently runs around $5,000/pound. None of the serious plans on NASA's drawing board are going to have any chance of taking that below $500 per pound.
Every aspect of space exploration would benefit immeasurably from lowering this cost significantly. There is only one technologically feasible plan for achieving greatly lowered costs to space: a space elevator. Due to great advances in materials science, the technology to achieve this is clearly right around the corner, and our drive toward that curve in the road could be greatly accelerated by NASA funding. The marginal cost of moving material into space could fall to $10 per pound. Suddenly, space would be wide-open. The most serious limitations we face would be removed.
Please try this: have a panel estimate the lowest total number of pounds it is roughly feasible that Bush's proposed mission could possibly require. That is, roughly the least number of pounds, in a best-case scenario, for construction of a manned moon base, plus launching a mission to Mars that could take a minimal crew all the way there, land them, and return them to earth. Multiply this by the lowest realistic price per pound you hope to be able to achieve in time to do the mission. Multiply the pounds by the cost per pound and tell me if there's any way this can be done under your budget constraints. I think this basic accounting will make it clear to anyone that this mission is not happening in the next 20 years using any conventional launch technology, including possible new launch vehicles to replace the shuttle.
To make a serious attempt at achieving these goals under budgetary constraints, the construction of a space elevator is the only viable course.
Bush/congress would have to increase NASA's budget to a trillion dollars a year to undertake this mission using conventional launch technology, which isn't going to happen, making the proposed mission impossible. Whatever administration we have over the next 20 years, and the press, will probably make this look like NASA's failure, saying there were terrible cost overruns and such that prevented the mission outlined in Bush's 20-year timeline from becoming a reality. It won't matter than that the numbers never added up in the first place and the mission was only a pretense all along. The time is now for NASA to complete a feasibility study making public the numbers I suggested above, and make it clear right now that this mission can't be expected to be done under the proposed budget the way Bush is asking NASA to do it. But obviously you can't let the American public down, and just sit around being the nay-sayers, saying "it can't be done," when you're supposed to be the visionaries. Say it can be done, but you need a lot of money now for a space elevator, and that will make everything else possible. NASA will come out the clear visionaries, the space elevator will be the obvious world gateway to space that makes far-out plans like Bush's feasible when they were otherwise impossible.
Additionally, if one of the goals is to demonstrate US dominance in space, a space elevator would instantly move us beyond compare. No country paying thousands of dollars per pound for space missions could compete in any way with a space program that's paying a marginal cost of $10 per pound.
Kick all available funding into space elevator research. It's an inevitable step if we are to begin serious, long-term, visionary space exploration. No other technologically feasible method can achieve a price per pound ratio that makes large manned trips possible. The sooner this step is taken, the sooner significant space exploration can really begin.
I do not have the time or resources available to me now to argue the technological case for how possible a space elevator is. But I'm sure you need to do this kind of feasibility study in-house anyway.
Best of luck in your endeavors.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Largely, most of the early replies were completely off-topic and irrelevant. The cost of healthcare has absolutely NOTHING to do with the price of tea on Mars. Rather than concern myself with a meaningless and over-debated off-topic thread, I just wanted to address the issue at hand. I'll get into the whole "The US is a bunch evil, sucky, arrogant bastards who are in bed with the Jews to own all the worlds money while they kick the Palestinians around" arguement elsewhere, should I find I've got nothing better to do than waste time, that is (FYI, I'm a dual citizen of the US and Germany, and am German-Jewish by birth... Most of you don't know what you are talking about and just need to STFU unless you are talking about the space-program... Take your ideological [or idiotillogical] beliefs and rants somewhere devoted to those topics). That said, I know it is highly unlikely anybody will ever read this post, it being so far down in the thread, but I'm gonna post it anyway... The following is copied from the comment I sent to the MMB (Moon, Mars & Beyond) website:
;)
"This is an idea whose time is long overdue. This great nation should have had a permanent outpost on the moon shortly after SkyLab was completed, a dream whose time never came due to lack of public interest (mostly lack of education on their part) and the unwillinginess of previous administrations to set the goals and make the budgets necessary to completion of mankinds ultimate goal: the shedding of our earthbound chrysalis so we may stretch our wings, and fly beyond our home,so we might see what lies beyond our own isolated world. Humankind is doomed insignificance at the least and extinction at the worst if we are never able to slip the surly bonds of this world, much in the way of the 30 year-old son who never manages to separate himself from mother and leave home. This is an idea whose time has come. Werner Von Braun did all the math necessary ages ago, and materials science was up to par in the 80's... Now it is up to our policymakers alone to make the decision to make the investments necessary to push our species forward to it's next evolutionary step. DO THIS, and countless generations in the future will remember you. Not for your policies and beliefs... Those memories are short and will last perhaps 50 years, maybe a century at most, to be remembered simply as a name of a guy who did a thing... No, make this decision, make this happen, and humankind will always remember the people who freed them from their shackles and set them loose upon the universe, much in the way the American people still remember and honor Columbus and the Monarchs (Ferdinand and Isabella) who financed his great mission of exploration. Moon, Mars and Beyond... What a wonderful sentiment... I can but hope I will live to see "Beyond" in my lifetime."
Not only did the race to the moon do great things for our national pride, way back in the day, but it fueled out economy and industry as a result... It also encouraged invention and research, and the public actually backed the dream of getting off of this beautiful (but god-forsaken) rock of ours... This might be exactly what this nation needs. With a drive to complete such a project, more infrastructure of all kinds would need to be established (always good for the economy), research encouraged (also good) and investment in our future. As well, we do have a competitor equal to Cold War Russia, and it's name is China. Somebody has to figure out what to do with China's excess population (shipping them to Australia is prolly not the answer) and if we don't figure it out, China will... An idea I am loathe to consider. Their population figures are frightening enough, much less the thought that they may one day be more technologically and economically advanced than us. *shivers* Anyway... It's about time, and I hope this and the following administrations have the guts to make this happen. Now if you'll excuse me, I have work to do before I start my Enterprise/Babylon5/Stargate marathon tonight
S13G3
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
Reading the responses would be a bit of an intellectual challenge for Dubya. Best if everyone keeps to words of one syllable.
Like parenthood, there's never a good time to do it - there'll always be pressing needs elsewhere. My take is if we can't build a colony on the moon, we may as well forget about manned space flight. If we do elect to abandon manned space flight, we'll be like old ladies in retirement homes waiting to die. Except our death will be delivered by our own hand or possibly a Permian level event. Either way, we're dead if we elect to stay here.
If we elect to build the colony, it has to be designed from the outset to be self-sustaining. By self-sustaining, I mean the whole shebang - kids (or at least the means for making them), farms, lots of people, machine tools, everything. The colony has to be able to weather failures on earth, be they political and/or economic failures, cutting them off.
I'm old enough to remember the first Star Trek broadcast and have that meme deeply imprinted - we need to explore and go out beyond earth. The moon's but the first step.
I recently read a good article about that same attitude. It goes something like this. I would rather have good health care then Farm Subsidies, I would rather have good health care then the arts that the gov supports. I would rather have good health care then all the other ridiculous projects the government funds like urban renewal, allergies drug research, or any of the other projects that only indirectly affect me. The fact is there will always be a project with its hand out. If we hold of space exploration until Cancer is cured, then there diabetes, followed by smoking diseases that still persist regardless of warning labels. Thank god the world didn't solve of its peoples problems before Columbus was aloud to set sail. It would have gotten really crowded by now.
I always thought the moral of the story was that the Tortise kept plodding along on Earth and won the race because the Hare spent all his time and resources with his head stuck in the clouds chasing some dream for the sake of it.
To spend the money on these missions is a poor use of our limited resources, and I do not support it.
Thanks,
Steve.
My post didn't perfectly align with the exotoxic political meme sludge in your head, so I must be on "the other side". Black hats and white hats. So simple and childish. Amazing.
we're just idiots, we should be serving your every desire...
I don't agree with the latter, and your post did nothing to disprove the former.
--- Ban humanity.
Here is the feedback I sent: "The plan is entirely unambitious. With the utter lack of technological know-how we had in the 1960s, Kennedy proposed that man set foot on the moon by the end of the decade. Within 10 years we accomplished this amazing feat. Now Bush wants to maybe send someone to the moon in a little OVER 10 years? Give me a break. Let's get a fully staffed lunar base up and running in 5 years. Let's spend all the necessary money to fund the final stages of research required to make the carbon nanotube fibers that would comprise the cable of a space elevator. Bush's plan is insulting to the collective intelligence and ingenuity of the human race."
Of course I know you're lying, because adbusters said you'd say that. :)
Yes, lets look at my exact words: "No, national self-flagellation is actively encouraged here. However, it is preferred if it isn't mired in ideological foofa like yours. You clearly have an outsider view, and seem hellbent on seeing the world in purely monochromatic good versus evil terms. Real life is about a billion times more complex than that."
Where do I even mention Bush? I was talking to the original poster.
From this we know that you think the world is full of "grey areas" to paraphrase a little. From many statements by Bush we know he thinks that is not the case.
Can you not even see the non sequitur here?
Yes, I said REAL LIFE is grayscale. I DID NOT SAY Bush subscribes to this view. I never applied claimed my POV was in any way, shape or form aligned with Bush. I don't like Bush. I never even mentioned Bush. I accused the ORIGINAL POSTER of also having a mono-view.
What part of this is eluding you?
Apparently you have a major disconnect with the leadership of this country.
Yes. I don't agree with it.
I don't see where I made any error in reading or understanding your statements.
You seem incapable of comprehending that a citizen of the US can have a different point of view from Bush. And that, my dense friend, is what little ideologies are made of.
--- Ban humanity.
The nation with a vision, not afraid to spend resources or even risk lives on new, unproven endeavours?
I don't want to be one of "those" posters, but the nations I can think of that most fit that description are the Soviet Union, Pol Pot's Cambodia and Nazi Germany.
I think we're doing pretty well as it is.
It's odd how many people who are all for taking "risks", but assume they will always pay off. By definition, if there isn't a significant risk of failure, it's not really a risk.
Except TANSTAAFL's origin is much earlier. See http://www.wordorigins.org/wordorf.htm or the Oxford English Dictionary.
Then you can go play on the moon.
For extra points, solve the energy problem.
There was no reason for the comparison. It was a complete non sequitir. It existed in a vacuum.
--- Ban humanity.
More Science, More human exploration, and NO WEAPONS in Space!
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
You know as well as I do that the purpose of the Decadal Surveys was to set priorities for the astronomical and planetary sciences communities. They were not intended to set priorities for NASA as a whole.
So, comments like
are completely disingenuous. Proposing priorities for the human space program was completely out-of-scope of the mandate of the Decadal Surveys.
(But, given the new reorganization at NASA, setting priorities for the human space program may actually be in-scope by the next time we have to take a Decadal Survey. We better be prepared to take advantage of that!)
In the past two decades, there have been many international projects that have floundered or soared in cost because of their joint nature. Notable ones are:
Eurofighter: billions over budget and over a decade behind schedule. Block one versions are just now entering service, sans important capabilities such as multirole strike. In contrast, both France's Rafale and Sweden's Grippen, initiated at the same time as Eurofighter, have now been in service with full multi-role capabilities for almost a decade.
War in Kosovo: Targeting by committee and lack of plan for ground war led to an extended air campaign that inflicted almost no damage on the Serbian military. Only heavy targeting of civilian economic targets led to a gradual Serbian capitulation, after they've uprooted a hundred thousand Albanians. Post war confusion and bungling nearly led to WWIII as Russians steamed into Kosovo airport and Wesley Clark ordered the NATO ground commander to eject them.
The lesson from these costly bungles is that other countries are every bit as bureacratic and inept as we are. Working with them will only add to, not ameliorate our own incompetence. Without a coherent vision and an efficient and powerful lead organization, internationalization of an effort will only add to cost and delay.
What's needed is for NASA to be born again in the exploratory spirit of its former self. The President has presented a space vision that, if you read between the lines, makes reform of the agency its centerpiece. He has given Sean O'Keefe a mandate, and now it's time for you to do your part. Give them the political backing they need to cut through the bureacratic tangle at NASA!
Don't forget the pony module, and the transporter room.
Material costs are of course going to be high considering that the manufacturing will cost billions of buckyballs or similiar hard material.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the scientific instruments on Spirit and Opportunity, made an interesting comment a year or two ago.
He said he went with some of the world's best field geologists out to a training site, to watch how they do their job. They wanted to learn how to effectively use the robotic rovers by watching human field geologists.
His comment was this: The rovers can do in one day on Mars what a human field geologist can do in thirty seconds.
What does that mean? The 100, maybe 200 day missions of these rovers will be equivalent to one human on Mars for a couple of hours.
In the first human mission to Mars, there will be maybe six humans on Mars for a couple of hundred days. It will be a whole different ballgame.
But one nitpick. The Hussein government was irrelevant beyond potentially funding active WMD programs. Those could have made their way into terrorist hands without Hussein ever knowing about it, much less approving it. People act like he was some sort of omnipotent god who controlled every atom in Iraq. There's thought that the anthrax used in those attacks could have been leaked from labs in the US, so how secure would the Iraqi labs be?
That's a point no one ever thinks to talk about. they all say, "Hussein would not have given them to terrorists." The answer is, "So what?" Is it completely unimaginable that organized terrorists couldn't run an operation to get the WMDs by, shall we say, less official means? Whether the Sunii power structure had any direct ties was irrelevant.
2. You really can't answer this on your own? You really cannot see it as a different situation that calls for a different approach? I mean... really?
As for the rest, I read about history voraciously, and I never said the US was innocent, so spare me the lecture.
--- Ban humanity.
For the amount of money a new major space initiative is going to cost, we need more than a few hundred pounds of Mars rocks and a thousand research publications which is all we're likely to get from the alleged Mars project.
NASA has already worked on a Space Power Satellite project, it estimates the costs for a 250MW demo for $10 B and discusses a 10,000 gigawatt system capable of replacing all other earth energy sources.
Throwing in a moon mining and processing facility and a space crew shack and either a Space Elevator or earth-to-orbit railgun might add tens or hundreds of billions to the cost but would make building the powersat system capable of rendering oil a non-issue a believable investment for the private sector.
We can get cost numbers down by buying
If the major oil companies want to continue selling energy, they can pay for the space power satellite systems which will make it possible to stop buying oil out of the Middle East.
As in the days of the railroads in the American West, a government/private sector initiative is needed to make a new place for industry and habitation and research available to the rest of us.
The best news about this is that the space infrastructure we need to build will make a trip to Mars a lot cheaper and safer and probably happen sooner than in the original Bush "plan". Fueling a Mars probe is a lot cheaper if one can simply order propellant shipped from a Moon facility to L-5.
For more discussion of this and other initiatives proposed to get America's brainpower working for the profit of everyone instead of sitting wasted and idle as current outsourcing promises to do, click here. The links on which this post and my further discussion are based can be found there.
Tech Public Policy stuff
While I am excited by mankind's abilities to reach out into space and touch other planets, there are more immediate concerns.
One which I was made aware of yesterday, through a link on Fark, is Peak Oil, something which appears will make our worst Y2K nightmares look like pleasant fantasies.
This is scary stuff! Read the linked page, read the pages it references, think about it for a while, then tell your friends and loved ones.
Important info:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
http://www.peakoil.net
They should outsource substantial amounts of the work to India. India has a 10 year lead in nuclear technology for building nuclear powered ion engines, a 10 year lead in information technology for the computer systems, and is right next door to the largest manufacturer in the world.
If it can't be built in China it can't be built. The US can assume a testing role to verify finished products as they come from India and China.
Doesn't anyone read these articles? I can't imagine anyone else would let this jewel slip by...
The commission members:
Carleton S. Fiorina
Carly Fiorina serves as chairwoman and chief executive officer of Hewlett Packard. She joined HP in July 1999. She previously served in senior executive leadership positions at AT&T and Lucent Technologies. She holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy and history from Stanford; a master's degree in business administration from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland as well as a master's of science degree from MIT's Sloan School.
It should be new money. Where does this money? How about wiping out the billions and billions of dollars that go into pork barrel projects just so corrupt politicians in congress can get re-elected? The amount of pork barrel money has exploded in the years since Republicans have taken control of congress (the Democrats do it too though).
Then you're incapable of reading and reasoning, then. Let me describe in the most simplisitc, most childishly plain terms that I can, and perhaps it will register in the dark recessess of your underused cranium: Iraq had the ability to manufacturer chemical, biological, and nuclear arms.
...
Ah, good. Opening with an insult. That's the best way to present your argument as grounded in firm logic instead of emotion and supposition, isn't it?
I should point out that the experts -- by which I mean David Kay, the man Bush hired to look for weapons programs and not Fox News pundits -- would disagree with you. Saddam seems to have had R&D on chemical and biological weapons, but he had no actual weapons produced, he had no plants ready to produce them, and his nuclear program was a complete shambles with no capacity to manufacture weapons.
Now, if you said that he was clearly deceiving the international community, that he was in violation of UN resolutions to show inspectors around properly, or that he actually had conventional weapons that were in violation of the UN resolutions, then I'd agree with you. I might even agree now that that justified the war. However, if you want to nod your head along with the ludicrous statement that he the capacity to produce "over 25,000 liters of anthrax," "more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin," or "as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent," then I'm going to have to laugh in your face. Saddam's programs were mostly dead by the time the second war started.
[H]is very possession of them could put him in a position of blackmailing the entire world. It doesn't help that, as the formerly most powerful Arabic nation, he could have singlehandedly walked all over Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and more if he chose to do so.
Not without retribution. The entire lesson learned by the war on Kuwait was that he could not do so without terrible retribution. Saddam has bargaining power only because there was international pressure against the US moving. An actual attack with WMDs in the current environment would've seen France, Russia, Germany, and China's (paid-for) political position crumble and support given to walk all over the country. Saddam wasn't a fanatic. He was a cold-blooded, rational dictator who played the game of brinksmanship and lost hard.
Such an action would've caused grave economic damage to this nation
Didn't do that much the first time, did it? It actually helped pick up the economy quite a bit when we stepped on his little army the last time.
Again, you completely misunderstand the subtlety involved here.
Again, you miss the fact that Saddam didn't like jihadists like al-Qai'da. (Furthermore, according to the linked article, Osama didn't like Saddam either.) He was more than willing to fund money into Palestinian terrorism because it was a good PR move with other Arabic nations and Palestinian terrorists had a defined goal that wouldn't come back to bite him, but al-Qai'da has made its mission to see Sharia implemented worldwide. That would mean toppling his own secularist government, too. Remember, the reason we allied with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war was that we saw Iraq as one of the few non-fanatical governments in the Middle East. The Baathists were secularists who oppressed a lot of the more religious minorities in Iraq. This and the flood of foreign fighters is why Iraq is seeing its first waves of suicide bombings. Iraqis were too scared to do this before.
Also, Hussein didn't have to want political gains here. Haven't you noticed that these terrorists aren't trying to make political points?
Once again, Hussein was a ruthless dictator, not a terrorist -- just as evil, but completely different g
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The war was pitched to the American public and to the U.N. as pre-emptive self-defense against an enemy that was poised to launch a deadly attack against the U.S. Most of the world's countries were skeptical of those claims, yet the U.S. invaded Iraq anyway.
;-)
I know just as well as anyone that the rhetoric thrown around was only propaganda to sway constituents into accepting a fight that Bush and company felt was necessary for whatever agenda they have.
Question one: Was it right to depose Saddam?
Question two: If so, is it right to manipulate constituents into accepting deposing Saddam?
I followed the world media quite closely during the build up for Saddam's destruction and the rhetoric coming from Bush sounded more like "We're sick of Saddam breaking the UN sanctions and constantly being evasive".
The feeling I got from Bush/Saddam was more akin to the frustration two kids have in the back of a car vying for parental attention. Both kids antagonize each other and finally one snaps and hits the other then the parents punish the one that lost his temper while consoling the one hit... neener, neener, neener
The media hype did sound like we, the world, were in immanent danger of Saddam's WMD threat.
I look at this mess as being an example of many wrongs (governments, corporations, media, etc...) doing something right (eliminating Saddam). That's not to say doing something right doesn't have consequences though.
27b-6
Where does he give credit, or urge Congress to pass, HR 3057, The Space Exploration Act of 2003, which has *exactly* the same timetable and goals?
Oh, I'm sorry, that was brought in by Democrats (Lampsan, TX-Johnson Space Ctr).
And in the meantime, we're hiring foreign engineers and scientists, because we don't have young men and women going into the sciences. More offshoring....
mark, who's old enough to remember when the
US had *the* highest tech in the world
Man, talk about an ethnocentric quotation! I wonder if the native North and South Americans would agree that the Europeans killing them off and taking their land were making mankind better and the World a better place to live in.
One could argue that exploration and the gains in technology that accompany it are making the World a much worse place to live.
> Bush's Space Panel Seeks Public Input
1. Bush is an idiot.
2. Bush is using this to promote himself and will NEVER be thought of in the same spirit as Kennedy is remembered for the "go to the moon" speech.
3. Bush is an idiot.
4. Send Bush to mars and lets get rid of him once and for all before he invade Canada or something.
5. Bush is an enormous idiot.
Perhaps you should read a few more Onion stories. Like the one about MS buying Evil from the devil (I don't remember the headline).
If it's an Onion headline, you can be certain that something else happened.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
yes, it has major flaws, and it probably has no legitimate value, but i sent it in anyway (i actually ran over the 6000 character word limit, so I had to delete alot of it. Stole alot of ideas from what I had read here on slashdot, and added a few of my own viewpoints.
here's what I sent in:
___________________________________________
To Whom It May Concern,
First off, I must state that I am pleased that there is a website now available to the public that allows the whole community to comment and suggest ideas on the space program; this has been needed for awhile.
In a depressed economy, including a national deficit that is sure to rise tremendously in the next few years, I agree that looking for proper funding and public support of space will be no easy task. But at the same time, the people that continue looking forward, even through hard times, are the ones that stay afloat. Otherwise, we all might still be living in jungles, still searching for ways to better our societies.
It is with these thoughts in mind that I would like to list the following plans and goals I feel NASA should work hard at:
First, *SCRAP THE SHUTTLE.* The Space Shuttle technology is ages old, and has been badly needing a replacement. I would admonish NASA to instead build a replacement, and even consider different methodologies for future undertakings in space. For instance, Why not instead of putting everything on one rocket, launch payload cargo and humans in separate vehicles? If we are going to dedicate ourselves to returning to the Moon and to Mars, we are going to need to re-evaluate, and maybe return, to some other/other designs for space vehicles, or create the ones needed.
Secondly, *SCRAP THE ISS.* The International Space Station isn't doing much in the way of any major important science. Rather, as someone put it, it's more of a welfare program for scientists. If we cannot find enough reasons to scrap the ISS, at least limit its size and operating costs, if not decrease them some way. Each day it costs us millions to maintain it, and overall, it is not totally beneficial for the moment.
*A MOON BASE IS NOT NECESSARILY NEEDED. PUT TELESCOPES INSTEAD ON THE MOON.* At least, not in the whole extended stay concept. Perhaps if one day the commercial industry wanted to open a lunar hotel with the funds going into the space program, then yes, a moon base could be built; but for the most part, the cost of putting humans in space and providing for those humans to live in space is tremendous. Instead, especially with the controversy with the Hubble Space Telescope going down, why not put telescopes on the moon? Doing so eliminates some of the problems with viewing the heavens through earth's atmosphere. These telescopes (perhaps with a *small* facility for those astronauts that go to the moon to service them), would have the best seat in the universe, so to speak, of the heavens. The energy needed to run them could be gained from solar panels planted on parts of the moon receiving constant light, or from the vast amounts of helium-3 that litter the lunar surface. By doing this, we provide for good science that is worth being funded. There is also talk of even mining the moon for helium-3, so perhaps once we have built telescopes on the moon, we could look for ways to earn back some of that money by mining the moon.
*IF WE GO TO MARS, WE NEED A WAY TO BUILD 'EM IN SPACE.* If we do want to go to Mars, it is much, much, much more cheaper to just launch the materials into space and then assemble the materials into a proper craft headed to Mars. Doing so also eliminates most of the energy needed to get out of the earth's atmosphere. Launching from the lunar surface is ineffective because again, you are launching against the moon's gravity. There has been talk of building a shipyard/space-station facility at one of the Lagrange points (the point in space between the earth and the moon where the pull of gravity between both equalizes, and the object between them remains s
Try not to let life get in the way of living.
My first suggestion to NASA is to not do anything Bush suggests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
Going to Mars is nice..... ...but does it have oil?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I find it extremely disturbing that there is still such a great emphasis on manned space exploration. It is colossally expensive and wasteful, and adds little to our access to space, our exploration of our solar system, or our overall technology base. It is too close to cronyism and pork-barrel politics, and too far from a serious and deliberate program for space exploration and broad-based technology development.
The model I would like to see take the lion's share of funding is one similar to that used on the Spirit/Opportunity mission to Mars. Unmanned missions with ever more sophisticated robotics sent in replicate (preferably triplicate or more) to the Moon and other interesting nearby celestial bodies. They should be built and sent in large numbers, with technological participation of as many US companies and academic institutions as is feasible, in order to test as wide a range of ideas as possible. The participants can be subsidied with NASA funding and have the freedom to commercialize whatever technology they develop for the projects. Companies and academic institutions from other countries should be welcom to participate, but would not be subsidized by NASA.
Emphasis should also be placed in multimedia feeds from the robotic spacecraft to earth. More stereoscopic imagery, preferably in color and full-motion video with at least stereophonic sound, as well as full-immersion virtual reality from Mars as soon as possible. This will allow all of us to be participants in the space program. Until now, we have been supposed to feel inspired by watching other people fly around in the space shuttle at great cost and modest benefit to the taxpayer. I do not feel inspired in buying these people extremely expensive amusement park rides. This is not the '60s, and they are not Neil Armstrong. It is an entirely different world from the old-time NASA mentality, and those old romantic views are long gone.
For a serious exploration of Mars, a chain of way stations orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars could form a backbone along which to transmit greater data bandwidth, as well as a distributed platform from which to study the practicality of interplanetary travel. The Mars mission hit rate is low, and clearly there are many things that could be learned from this interplanetary backbone. A similar platform could be built to Venus, and the Stairway to Mars could eventually be expanded into the asteroid belt.
Here's what I wrote:
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Can it, privatize NASA, and lower our taxes accordingly.
Damned right! If we keep pelting them with British landers, they'll have to give up, sometime!
Putting living bags of mostly water (humans) into space is extremely costly.
Compare this to the incredible successes of the Galileo, Eros and Mars missions (for example). The money to discover the wonders of the universe can be so much better spent.
On the other hand, having humans explore the moon and Mars is incredibly exciting. Maybe the focus is not so much on putting humans in space, but that it should be use far less costly propulsion systems and safer modes of transportation.
If exploring space is to go forward, the goal should be on reducing the net cost of getting mass into space at a preset 2004 dollar level and then determining if that goal is achievable.
Lastly, I see the moon as an incredible location for observatories: The far side is protected from earth-based radio transmissions. It is also a stable platform requiring virtually no fuel to orient the telescope(s). There is no atmosphere to affect image quality.
Maybe manned missions to the moon are warranted in order to set up the telescopes.
As for Mars, unless there is a plan for a permanent colony, I don't think a trip to and fro is warranted.
Please consider the sheer volume of information that has been learned about the universe: we have learned more about where we live in the last ten years than in all time prior to that.
If monies which were directed towards the science get hijacked in order to put people in space with minimal return on investment, then I would take a pass.
Given the growing energy consumption of the Third World, it is exceedingly unlikely that earth-based renewable energy will replace the need for oil. So we need a new source of power to permanently replace the old.
This is why I've been calling for a Space Power Satellite program instead of a Mars program. In 20 years, we might be able to get a 20 TW power satellite system up capable of replacing Middle East oil if we start now. This will require infrastructure items like a lunar mining and processing facility and a railgun to get processed silicon to an orbital factory capable of cheaply turning silicon into solar cells and other semiconductors.
It will be expensive, it will require pushing some technologies to the limit. It will not relieve us of the necessity of conserving energy in the meantime. The incandescent light bulb needs to become a thing of the past. We should already have started looking for low-hanging fruit type items, i.e. easy to do that would save substantial energy.
Bush should defund the Mars project in favor of reviving the Space Power Satellite.
It beats the hell out of the alternatives.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Sorry, but individual to individual, an affluent resident of a first world country owes no more to a poor countryman than to a poor person from another country. Why should such a person, even a charitable one, wish to pay to provide very high quality cancer treatment costing $50000.00 to a homeless countryman when that same $50000.00 could save 500 lives in a third world counrty?
The answer is that choice has nothing to do with it. The aid is taken with force by a government that is elected by rich and poor alike, where the poor are more numerous though less likely to vote. If money is power then power is also money.
Eat at Joe's.
My signature is more a condemnation of the Democrats than an endorsement of Bush or the Republicans.
My main worry with the coming election is that most of the Democratic candidates (except for Lieberman, but he's out now) have been saying that Bush's stance of aggressive, unilateral actions against terrorist threats is bad and should be repudiated.
I believe that there is a significant threat from terrorists today, and that threat will continue for some time. At some point, the terrorists will be disorganized and disbanded, and the law of diminishing returns will dictate that further aggressive actions against them will be unprofitable. Until that time, a strong policy, including the threat of decisive military action on our part, is necessary to defeat terrorists.
The U.N. is designed to prevent war, which was good in the case of a war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., but has proved a hinderance in bringing force to bear on world-threatening dictators like Saddam. So, in order to be aggressive, the U.S. is forced to act without the U.N., in a manner that some have termed unilateral. As September 11th showed, working with the U.N. is not a protection from terrorists.
A lot of your accusations about the Republicans are based on ignorance, lies, or misinformation--Republicans aren't the root of all evil, but there are grains of truth in some of what you said about them and they have made serious mistakes. It doesn't matter, though. There are lots of things that Bush does wrong, but he is saved by one thing: he knows that his fight is just, and he knows that it is necessary. None of the Democratic candidates believe both of those two premises, and until they do, I will not consider voting for them. It would be possible to have a Democratic candidate that would get my vote, the old (pre-Al Gore) Joe Lieberman probably would have gotten it. All a candidate has to do is say "Bush has done the right thing against terrorists so far, but he hasn't done enough. I'll do better." It's that easy to get my consideration.
What scares me is that, in all the general Bush-bashing that goes on, people forget that there are terrorists who are trying to kill us. The central argument of this presidential debate should not be whether or not there were WMDs in Iraq. Sure, the existence of WMDs is important, but it's not of prime importance. The central argument should be how best to pursue and crush the terrorist organizations.
That was supposed to read "the fight against terror is greater than party affiliation", with a greater-than symbol. I didn't think to preview it. I should have realized that a greater-than symbol is a special character that should be tested to make sure it works right.
Here's what I sent:
"
A manned reach for Mars, without first establishing a manufacturing base upon Luna, will only repeat the mistake of the Apollo Program.
Apollo's mistake was characterized by unsustainable infrastructure. The Moon was only reached by a very waste-intensive launch system that could not deliver much to its destination. To correct that, Apollo should have followed a sensible station program, which would have come first to establish a modest "space station" in Earth orbit. That would have served as a necessary waystation.
Luna is the minimum waystation for a sustainable infrastructure for Mars; and it can be even more than a waystation with our ability to manufacture structures from the aluminum, oxygen, silicon and iron in the Lunar regolith. Without the Lunar manufacturing base, we will launch expensive loads from Earth and will not have any way to amortize that investment over other missions; in effect, the return on that type of investment in Mars will be too intangible. Eventually the intangibles will pile up, the adventure will be viewed as a bad investment, and the entire enterprise will be abandoned.
Learn from Apollo or be condemned to repeat that grand mistake.
"
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
The agenga has been set by Bush to be war, as can be seen by the Democrats emphasising the war records of their canditates, so you don't have to worry about the US being run by a pacifist for a long time to come.
I don't think I implied they were evil - I'm far more interested in actions and policies than any party, so I'm not taking an opposing view for the sake of it - a lot of things may have been short sighted, and all those things I mentioned have been in the mainstream press and are a matter of history. Iran-contra did happen, and somehow North came out of it smelling of patriotism instead of treason. The hostage payout did happen, and it was in the billions, and gave Iran the money to wage a long and bloody war. The Iranian terrorists holding hostages were the guys that Carter lost an election trying to stop. Once again it's really like the Clinton/Monica thing - the president was caught lying to everyone. It was all a big sideshow with all kinds of hysterical claims, baiting the French and getting an entirely predictable rude gesture in return, and an invasion of a country that had been bombed back into the third world, which the terrorists wanted to topple the government of themselves. Saddam was only a threat to his own people. The fact that it was a real war and a difficult occupation and not a cheap surrender appears to have surprised a lot of people. Meanwhile the opium comes out of Afganistan in increasing amounts, funding the terrorists.The USA will get a leader that is focused on war no matter who wins. The rest of the world prays that they will be competant and consistant.
Terrorism is not a new problem despite what people have been saying (a bunch of Albanian Anarchists started WWI with bombs and an assassination), but finding Saddam in a hole in the ground gets the USA no closer to finding those that have been attacking it. My country will follow the USA wherever it goes, whether it is a good idea or not and no matter how much it hurts its allies, which is why I care, and is why I don't care what party the President is from, so long as he wasn't picked for who his daddy was or his film career.
I have explained my convictions to you. Now you ask me to defend a lot of accusations, many of which are again based on misinformation, intentional or not. I will do my best, but from the sound of it you have a lot of problems with the U.S.. I cannot hope to cover every aspect of U.S. policy; I cannot hope to defend all of it. One problem with the U.S. is that you only get to choose between two people in a Presidential race. Neither choice is going to be perfect. I disagree with Bush and the Republicans on a lot of things. Not much that you bring up in your current post, though.
I don't know much about the Iran-Contra affair. I don't see anything to disagree with in your criticism of that time, but I'm not one to judge. It's actually because of this that I had to admit you might be saying some things that are true. I just don't know enough about it.
But, I have been looking at the Saddam/Iraq issue for some time, because my vote hinges on it.
The U.N. is impotent. There are at least three events in recent history that give evidence to this fact. 1) The U.N.'s inability to stop the genocide in Rawanda 2) The newly discovered Libya-Iran-North Korea-Malaysia-Pakistan (more to come) trade in supposedly banned nuclear technology 3) The U.N.'s inability to agree to overthrow Saddam despite his being in express violation of the peace treaty he signed at the end of the first gulf war. The member nations of the U.N. that are in themselves impotent, do their best to enforce their powerlessness on their more-powerful allies. This was probably a good thing during the Cold War, as we're not all dead now. But now, because the terrorists continue to operate, I am of the belief that inaction is more dangerous than action, and so the U.N. is a hinderance.
Bush did not lie about the weapons of mass distruction in Iraq. He was misinformed, as were the leaders of Europe, as was Clinton before him. Bush made a mistake, but it was a justified mistake. Saddam had WMD before, and he used them, he said he had them still, and he refused to live up to the terms of his surrender (a surrender demanded by the U.N.). There was evidence that his threat was not a bluff, even if the evidence turns out to have been incomplete, and probably pointed to the wrong conclusion, the evidence was still there. That's a mistake, not a lie.
A mistake is bad, but I'd rather have a mistake that ended up doing as much good as it did than be overly cautious and wake up to the news that 340 people died in a gas attack on the New York Subway, or that there's a glassy crater where Atlanta used to be. It's a tough choice, but no one can be expected to have perfect knowledge of all the options, and we're on a tight schedule. The terrorists aren't sleeping.
Your last paragraphs are somewhat disjointed.
It's not really a Clinton/Monica thing, because the president wasn't caught lying. There is a similarity in that the president is a very devisive figure and the discussion of guilt/innocence seems to fracture along party lines.
It was not a sideshow. Bush tried for months to act through the U.N. through diplomatic means. Only after the U.N. (through the agency of the French) declared it would not act did he resort to force.
Saddam was a threat to all countries through his support of terrorists (not al Qaeda particularly). This was public knowledge, including his rewards to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
Not very many people are surprised that it was a real war and is a difficult occupation. The bigger surprise was that Saddam's army collapsed so quickly. At no time did Bush or any of his cabinet say that this would be anything less than a long and difficult struggle. You cannot find a reputable news source that quotes them as saying otherwise.
The rise in opium trading in Afganistan is bad. I have not heard much good news from that country. Recently I read a status report by a U.S. official in that country, and it sounded better than the news I had heard. I don't know if he was just protecting his job,
That heat wave happened when the majority of the health system were on holiday, it's a tradition there to take holidays in August.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
laughing, so true. But if you are playing to win by space race. You must be the first to leave.