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The Wrong Stuff
b00le writes "The New York Review of Books has a trenchant piece,
The Wrong Stuff by the great Steven Weinberg, arguing against the utility of manned spaceflight, which he feels has a largely political or sentimental function. He adds: '...I have taken the President's space initiative seriously. That may be a mistake.' Even so, his argument is detailed and rich in facts, particularly the nasty economic kind."
Giant squid flesh has a high ammonia content which makes them unpalatable. On the other hand, here's a good Martian recipe.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Weinberg's opinion is no news. Bob Park already said it in his book Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud and in his testimony before the Commitee on Sicence, Subcommitee on Space and Aeronautics (April 9th, 1997)
Steve Weinberg is a dimwit.
I would have to disagree; and so would the 1979 Nobel commitee, who awarded him the prize for physics. For those who aren't familiar with him, his best-known work has been in unifying the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces. More information can be gleaned from his biography.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Ah, yes, once again we see that famous 1 Trillion Dollars figure. That's 1 Trillion Dollars using technologies and methodologies that are 15 years out of date to be spent over 30+ years and including missions that have already been accomplished and other missions not directly related to the Moon or Mars. This is becoming the stuff of Urban Legend. If you haven't read http://www.thespacereview.com/article/119/1, I highly encourage it. It appears to be a very thorough debunking of that whole misinformation campaign and clearly points the finger for bad numbers at media outlets as opposed to real accountants who are directly involved.
Omeganon
Like these: http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html
Alternatives are all well and good, but as was pointed out during the Apollo era, the money would not be diverted into, say, education or whatever, it would just not be spent at all- and would diaappear. The good causes are already after money, and it does not arrive. The new causes, eg, spaceflight get an allocation. If the cash wasn't allocted, it doen't just hang around, to be donated. Funds have to be raised by people puting a case for them. Sure, 1$T would go a long way towards AIDS research- so why hasn't it been sent that way? Govt funding isn't that simple... unfortunately...
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Untrue. Roughly one third of NASAs budget (5 billion of 15 billion) is devoted to manned space flight.
Quote: After the former President Bush announced a similar initiative in 1989, NASA estimated that the cost of sending astronauts to the moon and Mars would be either $471 billion or $541 billion in 1991 dollars, depending on the method of calculation. This is roughly $900 billion in today's dollars. Whatever cost may be estimated by NASA for the new initiative, we can expect cost overruns like those that have often accompanied big NASA programs. (In 1984 NASA estimated that it would cost $8 billion to put the International Space Station in place, not counting the cost of using it. I have seen figures for its cost so far ranging from $25 billion to $60 billion, and the station is far from finished.) Let's not haggle over a hundred billion dollars more or less--I'll estimate that the President's new initiative will cost nearly a trillion dollars.
This old figure has been comprehensively debunked. The 1989 initiative was used as a dream sheet for every blue-sky project in NASA over the next twenty years, with no attempt at reducing costs anywhere and then inflated by 50% anyway. Taking that figure, adjusting for inflation (approx. 1.6 multiplier, giving 750-865 billion), taking the higher figure, rounding it up and then adding 100 billion on top anyway does not seem to be an unbiased type of approach. Another way to put it would be that every blue sky project that NASA had in 1989, less the deliberate 50% addition and extra roundings up, would be 314-361 billion in 1989 dollars; 502-577 billion in todays dollars. For every blue sky project. Over 20 years.Quote:Compare this with the $820 million cost of recently sending the robots Spirit and Opportunity to Mars, roughly one thousandth the cost of the President's initiative.
And roughly one-thousandth the utility of a manned mission (for a summary of the humans versus robots debate please see robots versus humans Not to mention that the program of Lunar Base plus Manned Mars program will be unlikely to be anywhere near one thousand times the price of Spirit and Opportunity.
Quote: It had been hoped that the shuttle, because reusable, would reduce the cost of putting satellites in orbit. Instead, while it costs about $3,000 a pound to use unmanned rockets to put satellites in orbit, the cost of doing this with the shuttle is about $10,000 a pound. The physicist Robert Park has pointed out that at this rate, even if lead could be turned into gold in orbit, it would not pay to send it up on the shuttle.
Indeed, the shuttle is the least cost effective vehicle for space travel. Unlike, for example, Soyuz. I also agree that manning the launch of payloads that can be unmanned is not at all essential.
(Skimming through, because I have to get back to work)... Quote: After NASA had pushed the Apollo program to the point where people stopped watching lunar landings on television, it canceled Apollo 18 and 19, the missions that were to be specifically devoted to scientific research.
Which implies that no other Apollos were specifically dedicated to scientific research. Apollos 15, 16 and 17 were dedicated to scientific research; when NASA had to cancel two landings originally, it cancelled the original Apollo 15 (which wasn't dedicated to scientific research) and Apollo 20. 18 and 19 were chopped later, after the "J-series" missions (scientific research) were in full swing. No other missions could be cancelled.
Oops, gotta go. Boss is coming ...
I certainly hope that his Physics research isn't as sloppy as the google news search that he ran as the basis of this article.
For one thing, the $1 trillion figure cited is an widely acknowledged misquote made (and retracted) by an AP reporter. Ten minutes of fact-checking would have revealed that.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If you're looking for actual numbers on thrust, cost and whatnot, I suggest reading The Case for Mars
It's written by an actual rocket scientist and he is very good at laying out the numbers without taking leaps like "it's 100 times as far so it'll cost 100 times as much".
Blaze a trail to the New World
103 = 20%, then 515 = 100%.
So we need 5 times as many reactors. Hmmm.....
So to power the ENTIRE WORLD, we need:
441 = 16%, 2756.25 = 100%. I don't know where we'll put 1/4 of a reactor, but hmmmm...
and
Above is from the Pro-Uranium website.
Given that there are about 196,935,000 sq miles on the Earth's crust, and it is something like 5 miles deep, we have something around 2000 cubic miles of Uranium available. Some just may be hard to access.
Nukes for everyone!
Fellowship 9/11