NASA Announces De-Orbit Mission For Hubble

maglor_83 writes "NASA has announced the end for Hubble. It plans on performing a "robotic de-orbit mission", and apparently its not due to the monetary costs associated with fixing it, but rather the risks involved. NASA's new goals are now manned missions to the moon, as a platform for Mars."

Comments

Scientific payoff

[BWJones]

OK....... I cannot see what the near term scientific benefit is of sending folks to Mars. Hubble? Hell yeah. The moon? Absolutely, .......but Mars? Look, Hubble has generated more scientific data per dollar than just about any other NASA program as well as helped out more than one project in the defense department and fed data to scientists and scientific organizations world wide. A return to the moon, could certainly function as a refueling point for unmanned missions to other planetary and stellar objects, as well as functioning as a potential resource for mining (with a space elevator which would facilitate this), and a remote optical and radio telescope on the moon could be an extraordinary scientific resource, but I am not sure the payoff of killing Hubble in favor of manned missions to Mars are currently worth it. I would much rather see more investment in sophisticated ground and space based "scopes".

Given current technology, I see a manned mission to mars as a financial boondogle.

Re:Scientific payoff

[drinkypoo]

The moon would be a good place for a prototype space elevator. If it turns out to be a good source for Helium-3, AND we turn out to have a good use for Helium-3, then the moon may be otherwise useful. Mars, on the other hand, offers us the opportunity to do scientific research that simply isn't possible any way other than landing on another planet, and Mars is the most earthlike of planets around (sad as that is) and may have been significantly more earthlike in the past. It's worth going there. As for measurable, immediate scientific benefits, you have to look further than the end of your own nose if you're going to learn anything, and you have to look further than the end of this week if you want to help humanity.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

Given current technology, I see a manned mission to mars as a financial boondogle.

Not that financial boondogles have stopped this administration from doing anything. :-P

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

This is probably a better paper on the subject, titled "Offensive Counterspace: Achieving Space Supremacy"; but is even harder to get than a NYTimes article and probably isn't in google's cache.

Re:Scientific payoff

[BWJones]

Mars, on the other hand, offers us the opportunity to do scientific research that simply isn't possible any way other than landing on another planet,

Like what? And what can we not do remotely? Why send astronauts there is what I am asking.

It's worth going there.

What I am saying is not that we should not go to Mars. I am saying that sending people to Mars right now would not have the scientific payoff that other investments in our space program might.

As for measurable, immediate scientific benefits, you have to look further than the end of your own nose if you're going to learn anything,

Yes, and your point is?

and you have to look further than the end of this week if you want to help humanity.

See my above comments on best bang for the buck.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

Given current technology, I see a manned mission to mars as a financial boondogle.

Aside from inventing new ways to experience porn, there seems to be no better way to advance current technology than to throw smart people at it, which involves throwing money at smart people and the companies that employ them.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Ayaress]

Not just "can't hit what you can't reach," but if we can jump around the solar system in reasonable amounts of time largely under our own power (rather than our current slingshot methods for reaching the outer planets), imagine the sort of mobility that could create closer to home if the technology and techniques were adapted.

Re:Scientific payoff

[drinkypoo]

Part of the scientific process that often goes overlooked is that when you are trying to solve one problem, you often solve other problems that lie along the way, and sometimes you make accidental discoveries that lead to developments that you never thought might be related. Thus, science for science's sake is generally a far more useful [and maybe even noble] pursuit than most of the other things we do.

Consequently, you really have no idea what kind of bang for the buck will be produced by, comparatively, setting up shop on the moon, and setting up shop on Mars.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

Given current technology, I see a manned mission to mars as a financial boondogle.

This is why we go to the moon first. Of course we can't do it with current technology, and if we keep sending up robots, without the incentive to develop better and faster propulsion, etc., that's all we'll ever have - current technology.

Get people up to Mars successfully, and we won't waste any more missions because of stupid "convert to metric" errors and the like that have doomed most of the robotic Mars missions to date.

No more sending up a robot, finding a tantalizing piece of data, and then waiting 5+ years to get the next round of questions answered. This is tedious and silly! Put PEOPLE on the ground with the right equipment for a year, and your precious "science" will start to ROLL in instead of TRICKLING in like it does now!

(sheesh!)

Step 1: Moon base.
Step 2: Build the next generation of spacecraft on the moon
Step 3: Launch Mars mission from the moon, where the gravity well is shallower.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Eternally optimistic]

Why do you need NASA for a space telescope ? Get someone else to fund the construction of a nice new telescope (ESA likes pretty pictures too), and buy a launch from the Russians, they have nice rockets at very reasonable rates. Make NASA do some really advanced stuff, that is what they are supposed to be for.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Zocalo]

Actually, apart from using it as a shield against EM interference coming from Earth, there's not all that much to be gained from sticking a radio telescope on the moon. You'd have to either make it small enough to land intact, or build the thing in-situ as well, plus you'd have to relay any data around the moon, most likely via a satellite unless you want a second base station and someone laying a lot of fibre...

A better idea would be to build two orbiting radio telescopes in Earth's orbital path, on opposite sides of the sun and with the same orbital velocity as that of Earth. This essentially fixes the Earth and the two telescopes in place relative to each other and keeps line of sight communications between Earth and each of the satellites at all times. Massage the resultant data together via the wonders of very long baseline interferometry and you effectively have an single radio telescope the diameter of Earth's orbit.

Re:Scientific payoff

[NatteringNabob]

It has nothing to do with Scientific payoff and everything to do with Electoral votes. If you wanted to pick up a key southern state, say Florida, and you knew that their key reason for existence was about to disappear, you might want to invent an extremely expensive, open ended, project to keep thousands of potential voters employed. Let's face it, the Mars Rovers and Cassini probe have demonstrated pretty conclusively that space exploration is a job for the bots. They are cheaper, more tolerant of extreme conditions, and if they die, nobody cares much. The 'man on mars' program has nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Ford Prefect]

The moon would be a good place for a prototype space elevator.

No, it wouldn't be. Basic space elevator is essentially just a tower to geostationary orbit. Earth, rotating just over once every day (!), that's an orbit radius of 42,000 km. The Moon's equivalent orbit with it rotating once a month (albeit with lower gravity) is about 90 million km, assuming this back-of-the-envelope calculation is right.

The best place for a prototype space elevator would be a small asteroid with a fairly high rotation rate - you could probably get away with a few tens of kilometres if chosen carefully...

Re:Scientific payoff

[thogard]

As scary as your post is, your right.

To the religious right, advanced astrophysics is useless but being 1st to the moon shows that divine providence is still alive.

And don't discount the Zoggs... a large number of religious nuts also seem to believe in UFOs.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Rei]

1) Space elevator: The moon's day is two weeks; it has a very slow rotation rate. Even with the moon's reduced gravity, a space elevator on the moon would have to be ridiculously long.

2) Helium-3 can be produced quite easily here on Earth.

A) Take a chunk of Lithium. There are about 12 million tons of it on Earth that are extractable (much of it in seawater)
B) Bombard it with ~1MeV neutrons for Lithium-6, higher for Lithium-7, from a fission or fusion reactor.
C) Collect the tritium produced.
D) Put the tritium in a holding tank and filter out the Helium-3 that forms as one byproduct of its decomposition (HL=12.43 years)

This is a vast oversimplification, of course, but you get the idea. Helium 3 is part of a readily available decay series here on Earth. Heck, you can get yourself some helium-3: Go to Europe (they don't sell the stuff in the US for most applications) and buy a glow in the dark keychain that uses tritium to produce the glow. There will be a tiny quantity of helium 3 in that keychain.

3) What, exactly, are you claiming that Mars offers that can't be done either here or on the Moon? Certainly, it is a lot more mineral-diverse, offers hope for terraforming, a bit more radiation and thermal shielding, etc, and is at a better position for exploiting the asteroid belt and outer planets - but can that really justify such a huge increase in distance that you need to traverse at this point?

Re:Scientific payoff

[mboverload]

Because there is no financial reason to have one. Unless you got Gates or Allen to fund it, I don't see a commerical one ever happening.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Rei]

So the people get there, find out a tantalizing piece of science, and then keep studying it the same way for the next year. Humans, just like robots, are limited by what scientific insturments they have available to them. Mobility? Any craft that could carry a human could go even further if you didn't strap the dead-weight human to it.

The only thing you gain by having people on the ground is reduced latency. However, it's hard to justify the tremendously increased cost of sending humans along when latency isn't really even a problem in comparison to how frequently we can send new insturmentation to use in studying Mars.

Look at the scientific value of the Apollo program vs. the Russian lunar program. Sure, we got a nice, flashy, feel good event - and heck, that alone may have justified going. But the science didn't. The Soviets spent just a small fraction of the cost that we did, and yet still got sample returns, had good in-situ insturments, and visited many more places on the moon than we did.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Pxtl]

Scientific benefit? No. Political benefit? Hellz yeah. Mars is totally impossible with NASAs budget, even if NASA were efficient. People don't properly consider the magnitude of the Mars mission. Think of the massive Apollo rockets. Now consider how teeny-tiny the Apollo orbiter was, compared to the massive Apollo rockets.

Now imagine an Apollo rocket that has to go way, way further, and carry a vehicle that can keep men alive for months instead of days. Now think about what you do when you get there - the moon is low-G and no atmosphere. Mars is more like earth - and we don't use little bitty landers to land on earth, we use giant-ass space shuttles, runways, and launch platforms. All that stuff has to be moved.

So instead of each Apollo flight being a stand-alone mission, we have dozens of Apollo flights, each launching little bits and pieces of equipment to Mars. Then we get the first planetary atmospheric land-and-takeoff vehicle onto an alien landscape.

I can't say this enough: Mars is hard. Yes, NASA has a salespitch concept - but the first plans for the Shuttle didn't look much like the half-assed end product.

So here's the political benefit: Bush has given NASA a death march. The project will fail, and other projects will stagnate under the resources lost to Mars. Then, once NASA has no discernible product or output, 90% of the organisation can be cut just by eliminating the Mars program, and the public will cheer for the demise of such an incompetent, beaurocratic space agency that had only one job and couldn't even do that.

Sounds fun, don'it?

Re:Scientific payoff

[Rei]

(day is two weeks, night is two weeks - just thought I'd clear this up)

Re:Scientific payoff

[Zeinfeld]

Part of the scientific process that often goes overlooked is that when you are trying to solve one problem, you often solve other problems that lie along the way, and sometimes you make accidental discoveries that lead to developments that you never thought might be related. Thus, science for science's sake is generally a far more useful [and maybe even noble] pursuit than most of the other things we do.

This is trotted out every time that the space program needs justifying and guess what, its bogus. Non stick frying pans were being developed during the Napoleonic wars when the English embargo prevented the French getting their hands on enough cooking grease. Hence LeCreuset.

It gets even wobblier when you get to the old CERN home of the Web stuff. The folk who go on about that don't mention that CERN never assigned any staff to the Web project directly other than Tim during the time Tim was at CERN. There were three students who worked with Tim and another four people from another group who did the Web because they beleived in it. When it came to setting up the Web consortium the CERN director sent to bat for the Web project EU grant wise told the committee that the priority at CERN was physics and the Web was not considered important.

Even when you get to communications satelites the story is somewhat murky. Most satelites are being launched by the French or the Chinese and NASA has done its best to make use of those facilities as hard as possible.

If you want to research networking then give money to networking, if you want to research biochemistry give the money to biochemists. Do not give the money to a bunch of astrophyscists in the hope that they will solve your networking, fusion, and life sciences problems in their spare time. It does not work that way. The only way you can see a return on 'spinoff' research is if you have programs in place to identify and invest in them. NASA ditched all that years ago and there is zero chance of picking any of it up in the current budget cut environment.

There is no way that shutting down Hubble and spending the money on the space station is going to get even 1% of the science that Hubble has delivered already. The basic problem here is that NASA sees its mission as manned space exploration and that has very little to do with science.

There is one solution to the problem that has not been discussed much. There were two mirrors made, the bent one that is up there today and the reserve that was made (corectly) by Kodak for testing purposes. The Kodak mirror must still be in storage somewhere, there are duplicates of pretty much all the equipment. the parts could probably be bolted together to make a duplicate for $50 million or even less. The French, Russians and Chinese would probably put it into orbit for $50 million at commercial rates and given the cargo it could probably be done at no cost in return for telescope time.

The cost of Hubble is almost all in the design. Making a duplicate should be much, much cheaper.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

assuming this back-of-the-envelope calculation is right.

It might be in itself, but you're forgetting something important: Lagrange points. The link below explains how a lunar space elevator can be done.

http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/lunar_spac e_elevator.html

Not only would it be possible, the entire cable could weigh just 6,800 kg according to the article's calculations.

(It's been a slashdot story, but the usual searches wouldn't find it)

Re:Scientific payoff

[DarkTempes]

couldn't we just also just make a small 'asteroid' with a fairly high rotation rate? (perhaps using a tiny piece of the moon)

Re:Scientific payoff

[bbaskin]

I agree that Hubble's cost/benefit ratio is high for a space program. I wonder if anyone at NASA has considered what to me is an obvious proposal... sell it. Perhaps some other country or company would like it. Maybe it is worth saving... just not to NASA?

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

No I don't have the guts to say this unonymously, but it should have been in metrics in the first place! This is science, for X's sake.

Re:Scientific payoff

[cgsamurai]

no $hit!

My fav is: "Counterforce Weather Control (Vol. II) "

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot see what the near term scientific benefit is of sending folks to Mars.

It's the idiotic "bushy" plan by the Bush Admin

Re:Scientific payoff

[quanticle]

Well you never know...

Given Creationism's recent gains, and the growing power of the Religious Right in the administration, one might believe that yes, indeed, Hubble is being brought down to set back science.

Re:Scientific payoff

[iocat]

A human could go further in one day than the current crop of rovers have in their entire mission. You have to go really slow with the Rovers to avoid hitting rocks and because of the irritating slow speed of light that makes it take a while for the rover to receive messages.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Eric Smith]

The cost of Hubble is almost all in the design. Making a duplicate should be much, much cheaper.

Not bloody likely, even assuming that your premise is correct, which it might not be.

First you're assuming that they actually have the correct engineering drawings. A GAO investigation of ISS revealed that although NASA had a system that was supposed to track the ISS engineering drawings, they didn't actually have the correct drawings.

Secondly, the cost of making a one-off of just about anything goes UP over time, unlike the cost of mass manufacturing items which goes down.

And third, I doubt that they would build another Hubble even if they could. They wouldn't be able to resist making a lot of changes to take advantage of advances in technology, so the design work would all get redone anyhow, resulting in no net savings.

Re:Scientific payoff

[AndyL]

Why make a new Hubble? They could just buy back the one in the Smithsonian.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Midnight Thunder]

The moon may even have second use:

Imagining that we manage to set up a constant stream of human transport between Earth and the moon, maybe then we can practice off-world construction by building a telescope on the dark side of the moon?

Re:Scientific payoff

[poopdeville]

Hate to break it to you, but Florida's economy is not driven by NASA. Cape Canaveral and its suburbs house only a tiny fraction of the population there. Saying that NASA is their "key reason for existence" is simply retarded.

Re:Scientific payoff

[AndyL]

"Mobility? Any craft that could carry a human could go even further if you didn't strap the dead-weight human to it."
A human could walk faster than the rovers we've sent so far.

Besides, a mars-buggy with a human piloting it would (hopefully) be able to safely travel a good deal faster than an AI-guided rover.
For example, You mention the russians, did any of their probes cover as much ground as the astronauts in a moon-buggy?

Re:Scientific payoff

[Mr. Slippery]

A human could go further in one day than the current crop of rovers have in their entire mission.

But you could send several thousand rovers for the cost of sending one human, and the rovers can stay longer.

Re:Scientific payoff

[hey!]

Neither a Mars nor a Moon mission are going to have much scientific payoff if, as it likely , they are underfunded to begin with, and their funding assumptions are subject to new constraints down the road (think Space Shuttle, only more complex, more difficult, more costly and more long-term).

Given that we are going to be resource constrained, I personally think we should recognize this and try to create technolgoies that will make our space dollars go farther. Pick a round factor, say an order of magnitude. Pick a round time period, say a decade. Commit the country to reducing the cost to orbit by that factor in that time period. In all liklihood this would take more money up front than the initial stages of a manned Mars mission, but in the long term it would be cheaper. And possibly, if you count the economic multiplier effect, it would be cheaper in the mid term. The idea would be to spur the development of a new generation of space industry, with the US as its leader, the way defense spending made the US a leader in computer technology for decades.

In the meantime, we need to keep our planetary science infrastructure in place. Regular, inexpensive robotic missions to Mars over the next twenty years fits the bill better than a manned mission. I think the combination of advanced automation and lower launch costs would be a winner. I think a Hubble rescue mission would fit nicely with this objective.

I realized the whole manned/robotic debate is a long standing one, and that one side is not likely to convince the other. In fact, I'm actually for manned Mars exploration. I just think that I'm more likely to see it in my lifetime if we focus on other objectives first, that would pave the way for a later manned mission.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

Bush is a born-again creationist.

No, I think Bush is an aristocratic nihilist who professes a belief in Christian fundamentalism in order to get the Jesus freaks to willingly follow his ruling faction. They make excellent cannon fodder.

Re:Scientific payoff

[jelle]

If anything is capable of looking beyond the nose into the depths of the Universe, it is Hubble.

Now, truth of the matter is that they are going to do the 20+ shuttle flights to finish the space station, whose science results have pretty much been limited to 'hey some moss grows in circles in space', and explaining to highschool kids how astronauts live out there. doing valuable circular-growing moss research and all.

But the risk and cost of single flight to keep Hubble operative is too high, and the 20+ for the space station are worth the cost and risk?

Right. I'm not convinced.

This is not about Mars, or the Moon. Mars and the Moon are just decoys. They are only mentioned to make people drool like you are doing.

Most likely, NASA will never get sufficient funding (and balls) to actually go do it. If it's too risky and too expensive to go fix something in orbit, that has been specifically designed to be fixed, then please tell me, how can flying people to the moon and another planet be affordable and safe?

Double standards, that's the only way.

Re:Scientific payoff

[dabigpaybackski]

Skyramp technology combined with nuclear rockets is the way forward to Mars. The technology isn't revolutionary, it just takes the money and political will to do it. A well-made nuclear rocket is a lot less dangerous than a chemical one, and immensely more powerful.

Let's establish a bigger human presence in space. We need it in order to foster international cooperation and to reestablish the concept of a true frontier in the public consciousness. To make this happen takes new technology and a willingness to abandon the socialized aerospace companies, who build their rockets not to move things into space, but to make money at public expense.

Re:Scientific payoff

[WhiteBandit]

But you could send several thousand rovers for the cost of sending one human, and the rovers can stay longer.

The combined cost of Spirit and Opportunity was $820 million dollars.

The potential cost of a manned mission to Mars, using off the shelf technology and launching today: $20 billion dollars.

Which means you can send 48 rovers similiar to Spirit and Opportunity to Mars, with the same payload.

The "rovers being able to stay longer" is a somewhat unqualified statement at the moment. Sure, they have each lasted a year on the surface. It's up in the air whether they will both last another year or not however.

Humans would be forced to stay on the surface of Mars for roughly 2 (Earth) years, until conditions to launch are optimal again.

Regardless, it is technically "cheaper" to send Rovers, but a human on the ground can do so much more.

(Then again, I might be saying this coming from a geology background. I want to be on the ground, physically looking at the rock, breaking it apart in my lab, creating thin sections and examining the mineral content. Right now, all we can do with the rovers is look at pictures and analyze spectrographs... and dig a few inches into the ground. Please, what is beneath all that sound? What is the bedrock composed of. Etc...).

Anyway, for those who haven't read it, I highly recommend Dr. Zubrin's book, The Case For Mars

Re:Scientific payoff

[complete loony]

A space elevator is a tower to just after geostationary orbit. It should be posisble to build an elevator from the moon towards the earth, past the L1 larange point with a counter weight on the this side. This would be a rather long elevator, but it shouldn't need to be as strong at either end.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Scott7477]

I totally agree that Hubble has generated an enormous amount of data; however I believe that the majority of the data generated has yet to be thoroughly analyzed. I would like to see federal dollars spent wringing every ounce of knowledge possible out of the data already obtained before maintaining an expensive telescope.

Also, given that the majority of US taxpayers don't give a rip about the more arcane topics in astronomy, said taxpayers are much more likely to support spending money on missions to the Moon and Mars since these are more exciting. If NASA wants to remain viable it has to engage in projects that have widespread public support.

If we had killed the shuttle program years ago and devoted those operational dollars to improving systems for reaching the moon, I believe that we would now have regular, relatively cost efficient missions to the moon on a regular basis now.

If the price of killing the space shuttle is losing Hubble then I am willing to support that.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAAP and I don't know what baseline interferometry is, but from what I remember of High School physics to have two radio telescopes orbiting the sun on Earth's orbital path and with the same orbital velocity each telescope would have to have the same mass as earth.

So short of splitting earth into 3 chunks I don't see how this could work.

Re:Scientific payoff

[daraf]

Think of the massive Apollo rockets. Now consider how teeny-tiny the Apollo orbiter was, compared to the massive Apollo rockets. Now imagine an Apollo rocket that has to go way, way further, and carry a vehicle that can keep men alive for months instead of days.

The bulk of propulsion is used to escape the clutches of earth's atmosphere. The additional propulsion required to coast to Mars is (relatively to the entire quantity) small. In addition, I'd guess that we won't use the same technology as Apollo. Think nuclear reactors and ion engines. A form of nuclear propulsion constantly accelerating a craft to Mars would also cut down on the months of time we currently need to coast there.

Also, with the experience we've gained from in-orbit assembly of the ISS, I would also guess that we might be able to launch a spacecraft in components rather than all at once.

Now think about what you do when you get there - the moon is low-G and no atmosphere. Mars is more like earth - and we don't use little bitty landers to land on earth, we use giant-ass space shuttles, runways, and launch platforms.

The "giant-ass space shuttle" was an overcomplex monstrosity built by a group of people that couldn't escape winged flight paradigms. Just to point out how things have changed, the upcoming Delta IV heavy will have a payload capacity greater than that of the STS.

From the rumblings I've seen / heard / read, the CEV will be more like an Apollo capsule. Also, you don't need to land your entire craft on Mars. You just need to get your people, scientific equipment, and whatever you need to escape the atmosphere down there. All of the support equipment for the trip back can remain in orbit.

I'm not going to comment on the political thread to this discussion, but I'd suggest not labeling the technological hurdles as insurmountable outright.

Re:Scientific payoff

[markov_chain]

The basic problem here is that NASA sees its mission as manned space exploration and that has very little to do with science.

Well that begs an interesting question: why should NASA's mission be scientific? It is the national space agency, I don't see a problem with them working on manned space exploration.

Re:Scientific payoff

[QuickFox]

Please mod parent up! I don't know if it's true but it's definitely very interesting, and very much on-topic. If it's false it would still be very interesting, as would be a reply discussing its merits.

Re:Scientific payoff

[demachina]

Well thats because you are thinking in terms of science and not practical benefit to mankind. I hate to break it to you but looking at objects that are light years away is good science, nice art, and intellectually interesting but its nearly meaningless in practical value until mankind develops a spacecraft that can manage a significant percentage of the speed of light so can either send something there or go there. Maybe if you contact another intelligence there that will make it worthwhile but those are long odds. A cosmology case can be made if you might answer how the universe originated but I expect the best you will do is identify an origin point and not a cause. The only part of astronomy that strikes me as having real near term value to our planet is the search for objects that are going to run in to, because if the object is big enough it might wipe us off this planet which is why we might want a second biosphere.....

So we come to Mars, as a precious resource, it is the only planetary body close enough to Earth to reach in a reasonable time, and with temperature, gravity, and a minimal atmosphere that will make it viable, though not pleasant for people to live there. It also probably has the resources to sustain life which is something the Moon probably never can. With some terraforming it might be possible to make it relatively habitable.

Putting a colony on Mars would result in wide ranging benefit to mankind, most importantly it would create a second biosphere, which we may need as we continue to overpopulate and stress the one we have, or if ours runs in to a natural or manmade cataclysm.

Its also likely the mere act of colonizing mars would push the technology envelope at a unprecedented pace in a lot of areas.

Aside from that it would open a new frontier and create a place for pioneers, explorers and adventurers which is something sorely lacking in this overcrowded world we live in. I think the sociology potential for a colony on another planet alone would be priceless, it would be a chance for a small group of people to start fresh without a lot of the cultural baggage and bigotry that infects every culture on this planet.

I get tired of saying it but if you have trouble letting Mars capture your imagination read Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy.

Re:Scientific payoff

[hexhacker]

http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/service_pubs/afdd 2_2_1.pdf ?

Re:Scientific payoff

[Cecil]

This is trotted out every time that the space program needs justifying and guess what, its bogus. Non stick frying pans were being developed during the Napoleonic wars when the English embargo prevented the French getting their hands on enough cooking grease. Hence LeCreuset.

Guess what -- THAT's bogus.

Great example, by the way. LeCreuset is nonstick cookware, I'll give you that. However, they do not use Teflon for their ceramic cookware. They did not invent Teflon or anything at all similar. They do USE Teflon, however, in their kitchen textiles, as a fabric protector. Because, that's right, teflon is useful for more than non-stick cookware! Hooray!

In fact, Teflon is among the (at the top of the list I believe, but I'm not willing to back that up) most slippery materials known to man. Not simply the cheapest or most widely available, it is extremely unique.

I do agree with you in general that the Hubble has delivered far more science than any manned mission ever has. However, I believe both have their merits, and both deserve funding.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Rei]

1) I mentioned range, not speed. Speed is irrelevant. There's plenty of time for a craft to get where it's going when you only get one set of insturments to the planet twice a decade.

2) You just ignored the concept of latency that I discussed extensively in the last post. Latency isn't a serious problem because of how long it takes to get new craft to Mars in the first place.

3) For the cost of getting a human you could launch 50 unmanned probes to every corner of the planet - each with payloads exploring a different aspect of the planet if you choose. For a fraction of the cost of sending people, you could send a "hopper" that can take off and land all over the entire planet multiple times. Etc. The cost of adding humans to the trip is extreme, while the only real benefit is a reduction in communications latency - hardly worth the benefit.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Zeinfeld]

"Why make a new Hubble? They could just buy back the one in the Smithsonian."

Possibly, I suspect that it is not completely functional and the main mirror may not be the optically accurate one made at a cost of $15 million or so.

But it would be a good starting point. I'll bet that even the Smithsonian would rather the thing was put to decent use.

The main problem is the mirror and assembling the whole thing in a dust free environment.

On the subject of plans, the ISS is a completely different botch up. The Hubble plans are really well understood because hundreds of copies were made, checked and rechecked when we were going over the whole saga of the spherical aberation in the mirror.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Sentry21]

Well, orbital distance is a function of the mass of the two bodies involved as well as the speed of the object as it traverses its orbit. Thus, in order for an object to travel at the same orbital velocity as earth, and along the same path, it would have to have the same mass (technically, not impossible, but it would take some engineering).

Also, it would take forever to get to the satellites if you ever needed to make repairs (I don't fancy trying to keep up with the earth as it hurtles along its orbital path).

Alternately, you could build a satellite with regular mass and put it in the same orbital path, but with a slower orbital velocity (so it would eventually hit/be hit by the earth), or make it the same size and give it the same orbital velocity, but put it at a different orbit around the sun.

Either way, not really a possibility.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Almost-Retired]

Unforch, there is no "Dark side of the moon" in terms of a permanent dark side. Its day, and its night, are each nominally 2 weeks long. Yes, it maintains the same face toward the earth, but thats not the same else we wouldn't have the phases of the moon as the 'dark side' rotates around the moon as it rotates around the earth.
--
Cheers, Gene

Re:Scientific payoff

[sjbcfh]

most likely via a satellite unless you want a second base station and someone laying a lot of fibre...

And you know that just as soon as you lay that fibre, a backhoe is going to come along and cut it.

Re:Scientific payoff

[bluGill]

The ability to go a significant percentage of light speed doesn't create a need for something like Hubble. You are still in range of the naked eye at 50% of c! (basically the solar system, as anything else there and back is about 40 years. There are too many things that can go wrong on a trip for that long, not worth it unless we are looking at sending a small city worth of support.

If by significant percentage you were thinking 30,000% of c (without all the pesky time travel business that relativity suggests), then yes Hubble is required to see where we are going. However we are unlikely to see this ever.

Re:Scientific payoff

[LWATCDR]

"This is trotted out every time that the space program needs justifying and guess what, its bogus. Non stick frying pans were being developed during the Napoleonic wars when the English embargo prevented the French getting their hands on enough cooking grease. Hence LeCreuset."
You sort of prove the point... You never know what you will develop until you have a strong need. BTW Teflon has nothing to do with the space program. It was developed for the Atomic bomb project. It was uses for seals exposed to Florine.

"Even when you get to communications satellites the story is somewhat murky. Most satellites are being launched by the French or the Chinese and NASA has done its best to make use of those facilities as hard as possible. "
THis is just nuts. Of couse sommunications satellites where developed by Nasa and AT&T.

When you push the state of the art you never know what you will develop. IC based computers where developed for the Apollo program. Why never before? because no needed computer that small before. I mean why would you need a computer smaller than a desk or even a room?
Remote heart monitoring systems. Why would you need to check someones heartbeat remotely.
Yes the space station is a waste. Not because it is a bad idea but because it was cut and cut and is now just a shell of what it was going to be. Much like the Shuttle.

Re:Scientific payoff

[darkpixel2k]

Well--to twist a quote slightly: "Shoot for Mars. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."

Anyways--I have two responses...
1. *You* might not see an immediate scientific benefit....
I see valuable information gathered about being able to establish a perminant presence on a non-earth body. Test out new equipment and devices using more up-to-date technology than what was available in 1969. There are tons of reasons.
2. You might not see an *immediate* scientific benefit...
Eventually we'll establish a perminant dwelling on the moon, then Mars. After that, who knows.

Re:Scientific payoff

[jasonvan]

I absoultley agree. The pictures sent back by Hubble are astonishing and have really captivated me over the years. Farewell ,Hubbel.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Zeinfeld]

In fact, Teflon is among the (at the top of the list I believe, but I'm not willing to back that up) most slippery materials known to man. Not simply the cheapest or most widely available, it is extremely unique.

Teflon was the product of research into friction-free plastics by Dupont in 1938. It was not a spinnoff from the space race, in fact it predates NASA.

In a DuPont laboratory back in 1938, Roy J. Plunkett was researching refrigeration gases. He had connected a cylinder of freon 1114, or tetrafluoroethylene, to his equipment, but nothing came out. Rather than throw the cylinder away, he weighed it and found that the actual weight exceeded the figure on the target weight. So he cut the cylinder in half and saw a white, waxy substance he later identified as a polymer of tetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), popularly known as the DuPont trademark Teflon®:. Had he not been wise enough to investigate what was in the cylinder, this Fluorocarbon resin might never have been discovered. i>

So sorry, there is not one part of the fable that is accurate. NASA did not invent teflon, did not invent the idea of applying it to machinery and cerainly not to saucepans.

Re:Scientific payoff

[kd5ujz]

I think you are refering to one of these two articles

Lunar Space Elevator Instead?

Space Elevator Prototype Climbs MIT Building

Re:Scientific payoff

[Zeinfeld]

You never know what you will develop until you have a strong need. BTW Teflon has nothing to do with the space program. It was developed for the Atomic bomb project. It was uses for seals exposed to Florine.

Hah! see my other post, Teflon was invented in 1938, before the Manhattan project started.

When you push the state of the art you never know what you will develop. IC based computers where developed for the Apollo program. Why never before? because no needed computer that small before. I mean why would you need a computer smaller than a desk or even a room?

The USSR did not develop ICs and still put rockets into space. In fact the ICs did not become important in space until after the Appolo program. They were pretty finiky until the 1970s.

Kilby was funded by Texas Instruments, Noyce by Fairchild. Both companies were working for the Pentagon, not NASA. The first applications for the ICs were in the US Airforce and the minuteman missile (1962). There is a big difference between using an IC in a missile where it has to work for no more than a few minutes and using one in a satelite or such.

There are certainly links between research fields but space is certainly not unique in having a spinoff effect and you do not get spinoffs without also doing basic research in the area in question. The World Wide Web put together ideas from twenty years of formal comp sci research with a different perspective to reach the breakthrough.

I don't see any reason why we should expect that diverting funds from worthwhile science like Hubble to worthless science like the space station is going to result in a net gain through the spinoff effect. Space has been enormously well funded for fifty years. Sending people to the moon does not create any seriously interesting new challenges.

Re:Scientific payoff

[IdahoEv]

apart from using it as a shield against EM interference coming from Earth, there's not all that much to be gained from sticking a radio telescope on the moon.

Yes, well, shielding against the background EM noise of the Earth is in fact the whole point. IIRC it would increase effective range and sensitivity by several orders of magnitude.

Whether that's worth the effort is something we can debate, but you pretty much invalidated your own argument in the first sentence.

Re:Scientific payoff

[IBeatUpNerds]

The moon? Absolutely

Oh yeah? what?

Re:Scientific payoff

[x_codingmonkey_x]

Not only would it be possible, the entire cable could weigh just 6,800 kg according to the article's calculations.

With such a small weight we could make a space elevator on the moon with modern technology. The obvious benefits of this lie in our ability to actually build one of these things rather than running nice theoritical simulations.

Furthermore, with a space elevator in place we can see how effective and easy it is to set up for real. Also, if all goes according to plan, this will give us a chance to easily get material into orbit (from the moon) and assemble space crafts there for a more cost effective spaceship building process. Finally, as someone mentioned above, science always takes an unpredictable turn and we discover things that we didn't think were possible. So you never really know the benifits will come from more moon missions or a manned Mars mission.

Re:Scientific payoff

[demachina]

Not sure I want to be defending the practical value of Hubble in particular and astronomy in general since it was my original argument that astronomy outside our solar system is of marginal real value, but...

The obvious role powerful telescopes would play if you have near light speed travel would be to locate potentially habitable planets around stars within 10-12 light years, like the Alpha Centauri system, Sirius, Lalande 21185, Ross 154, Luyten 726-8 AB, Barnard's Star, and Wolf 359.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Zeinfeld]

Well that begs an interesting question: why should NASA's mission be scientific? It is the national space agency, I don't see a problem with them working on manned space exploration.

NASA costs $15 billion per year to run. Thats rather a lot of money for a government with a $500 billion deficit to be spending on feel good programs.

The only way that the Mars trip becomes viable is with a space elevator. The shuttle and the space station are irrelevant. All they are doing is finding out what we know already, people's bodies start to deteriorate significantly after six months or so in space. And that is within the protection of the earth's magnetic field.

To get to Mars we need a ship with artificial gravity and there is no way we can lift one using conventional rocketry.

Dick Feynman once pointed out that if you take any seriously complex engineering task that is done on an infrequent basis it is very difficult to get the success rate above 98% or so. The sheer number of places where you have an opportunity for error is immense. So far we have had about 100 shuttle launches and the rate of failure is 2%. If you do the calculation in terms of failures per mile flown you arrive at a figure that is pretty much comparable to commercial airline flights.

I don't think that there is much chance that the shuttle will ever launch again. The degree of political risk is huge, so far they are talking about May/June but its one of those dates that just keeps slipping a month each month.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Iron Sun]

Anyway, for those who haven't read it, I highly recommend Dr. Zubrin's book, The Case For Mars

Karma to burn, so...

Zubrin is a barking mad cult leader labouring under the messianic misapprehension that he and only he can get us to Mars. Anybody who says otherwise is a fool and a communist.

If you read his statements made after the release of the basic outline of the current Bush space plan, he stops just short of calling treasonous any effort to go to the Moon as a first step or staging post rather than directly to Mars. He's not interested in consensus building, just his own (dubiously costed and hand-wavingly engineered) master plan. There are a growing number of people in space advocacy who consider him as mad as a bus. In a field full of dogmatic fantasists, he dwarfs all others for sheer cultish zealotry.

Mod me "-1 uncomfortable truth shut up shut up lalalalala"

Re:Scientific payoff

[Banelord]

they are going to scrap hubble, build a moonbase that will likely supersede the ISS, and put a new telescope in orbit around the moon that will take even better pictures of deep space.

Re:Scientific payoff

[NatteringNabob]

May I remind you that the margin of error was only a few hundred votes in 2000? There are more than enough people whose incomes are tied to NASA to make up that big a difference. Granted, this time around the margin was much larger, but BushCo had no way to know that in advance. I was saying that Kennedy was key to Florida's economy, I was saying that there were enough votes available that it was worth giving out some pork, and the 'man on Mars' fantasy is 100% pure USDA Pork.

Re:Scientific payoff

[aussie_a]

I don't know. That pervert across the street probably wouldn't mind one. Although I don't think it would be pointed into space....

Re:Scientific payoff

[NatteringNabob]

Sorry, I was saying that Kennedy was NOT key to Florida's economy, but may have been key to a few thousand extra votes.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Iron Sun]

Just to point out how things have changed, the upcoming Delta IV heavy will have a payload capacity greater than that of the STS.

The Delta 4 Heavy may have a way to go before all the bugs are ironed out. In any case, development of a Saturn class superlifter would be a really, really good idea. Relying on 20-30 tons per throw EELVs would require way too many launches.

Re:Scientific payoff

[dbIII]

The moon would be a good place for a prototype space elevator.

Look up the height of geostationary orbit and then re-consider why space elevators are the stuff of far future SF. It's certainly a few orders of magnitude in size bigger than building the golden gate bridge. If we can't afford to keep hubble going in a low orbit how are we going to afford getting huge masses of material up to geostationary orbit to start to drop a ladder down? The serious SF that deals with such things (Sheffeild?) uses materials that have not been invented and techniques that don't exist for good reason.

Currently, it really is the difference between doing lots of good science relatively cheaply with varied missions or sacrificing all for a grand gesture. The grand gesture may produce good results, but we know the other approaches are producing results far better than we ever expected. A couple of unmanned missions have been lost, but there are plenty of other machines out there sending things back. What do you do after the grand gesture is over and there are no current projects?

Re:Scientific payoff

[1u3hr]

To get to Mars we need a ship with artificial gravity and there is no way we can lift one using conventional rocketry.

You don't need a giant Discovery-style carousel to get some g. Just have your spaceship in two parts. Tether them, let the tether out a few hundred metres and spin around their centre of mass.

A harder problem may be solar flare radiation. About the only way to shield against that is lots of mass, I think. That's where lunar (or even asteroid) mining comes in.

Re:Scientific payoff

[1u3hr]

Sending people to the moon does not create any seriously interesting new challenges.

I think building habitats on the moon; mining, prospecting for water, growing plants, building a rail gun launcher, etc, are all extremely interesting challenges; if not ones a theoretical physicist could get very excited about. But a farside lunar radio or light telescope might.

Re:Scientific payoff

[fingusernames]

Hubble was designed for an era which is dead and gone, if it ever existed: space shuttles making routine trips to orbit. It *requires* regular missions by shuttles in order to operate. That is dead and gone. Since Hubble was built, there have been two catastrophic shuttle disasters, with the loss of the crew and vehicle, and we aren't building more of them. They are a finite resource, far more expensive and risky to operate than expected. The space station requires the shuttle in order to be completed. Not only do we have obligations to complete the station, but the station provides a safe way station in the event of damage to the shuttle. There is no such place for a mission to Hubble.

NASA has decided that the risk to the vehicle and to human life is not justified by a mission to eke out a few more years of life for Hubble. It is a wise decision. Better to design a new orbiting optical telescope which is suited for the new, post-shuttle era. It would probably cost around the same as a shuttle mission, pose far less risk, and would provide a longer payoff for the investment. Get over these emotional ties to Hubble. It is going to burn up in the atmosphere. Get over it. I'd much rather see the remaining shuttles in museums than see one more streaking across the sky in flames with seven suffering fellow humans in it, their remains scattered across a few states, in the name of servicing an old telescope that should just be replaced with an updated more modern successor. As a former AAE from Purdue, I'm all for taking risks in our space program, but not for something so pointless.

Larry

Re:Scientific payoff

[dougTheRug]

You're describing the L2 orbit, which would be dumb. The L1 (ascending the other way, toward earth) could put items in a tricky sort of unstable place, but it would be a much shorter (and even less gravitic) trip.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Mr. Slippery]

The combined cost of Spirit and Opportunity was $820 million dollars. The potential cost of a manned mission to Mars, using off the shelf technology and launching today: $20 billion dollars.

Probes would be cheaper by the dozen. Mass-produce and amortize the R & D and other common costs over 1,000 units.

Zubrin's plan is, shall we say, highly optimistic. (The article you link gives a contrasting figure of $450 billion - at $420 million each for Spirit and Opportunity, I'm amazed to find a number that matches the "thousand times" I pulled out of my butt. :-) )

Humans would be forced to stay on the surface of Mars for roughly 2 (Earth) years, until conditions to launch are optimal again.

Not if - as some plans call for - they only stay a few weeks before launching for home.

Re:Scientific payoff

[mbrother]

Both applied and basic research are valuable pursuits that have paid off in many ways. Basic research, like astronomy, often pays off much better in cultural value than economic, and that's okay by me. I'm not here on Earth just to make money to leave my family and government.

Re:Scientific payoff

[mbrother]

Your high school physics didn't stick too well. The mass of the radio telescopes doesn't come into play in the way you think it does.

Re:Scientific payoff

[mbrother]

Using the moon as a shield from EM interference is a good reason. I have one target I've tried to observe at the VLA three times and interference messed it up each time. I eventually lost interest and gave up. Even though the FCC is supposed to protect many radio frequencies for astronomical use, the infringements have continued to creep in.

Re:Scientific payoff

[CharlesF]

Key reason for existence? What does orange juice have to do with NASA?

Re:Scientific payoff

[mbrother]

If you had a mobile system, you could keep a telescope in the dark constantly going a mere 10 mph or less (10 mph would be needed to circumnavigate the moon at its equator in a month). Also, there are craters near the poles that are in perpetual shadow. But, since there isn't an atmosphere to scatter light like there is on Earth, you could observe most of the sky in lunar daytime without very high backgrounds, so there isn't a need for being in the dark.

Re:Scientific payoff

[mbrother]

There are programs to do this. You can propose to Hubble for new observations, or you can propose to Hubble for money to analyze old observations. NASA has an entire pot of money set aside just to analyze archival space-based data (my post-doc and I just got about $200k to do some of this).

Re:Scientific payoff

[1u3hr]

Zubrin is a barking mad cult leader labouring under the messianic misapprehension....Mod me "-1 uncomfortable truth

I could say almost the same about GWB. But that doesn't mean everything either one says or does is completely insane. No one is going to put Zubrin's plans into effect in the way he wants, but having him out there certainly raises the chances of us getting to Mars at all. He seems to turn up on a lot of TV space documentaries, not as a figure of fun but as a serious talking head, and is doing a good job as a "spokesmodel" for space exploration.

Re:Scientific payoff

[javiercero]

LOL, funny how you are denouncing the space program while using a device that most likely uses VLSI components. Guess what the push for MSI and later LSI which lead to VLSI was made mostly by NASA requirements for highly integrated devices using this new thing called a "transistor" which until then no one really had a use for, except for some fancy qualities as an amplifier.

Thank goodness you were in no way shape or form in charge of any basic research programme.

NASA and the space program may not be responsible for some "great new products" however the need to apply new solutions to manned space challenges is what has pushed the state of the art in a significant way. If you can not see that just go and bugger off, sometimes the worst idiot is the one who things he knows it all.....

Re:Scientific payoff

[Iron Sun]

No one is going to put Zubrin's plans into effect in the way he wants, but having him out there certainly raises the chances of us getting to Mars at all.

I would dispute this. I don't think it 'certainly' improves our chances at all. I think his plan is fatally flawed, and if some numbnuts in DC decided to push him hard, the unworkability of it would soon become apparent.

Mars Direct says to me that Zubrin has the mentality of a toddler. He wants to go to Mars now. That's NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW!!! Despite his claims to the contrary, it's a huge Apollo-style blockbuster designed to get there quickly without farting about with things like near Earth infrastructure and the like.

Let's use one of my favourite analogies for the state of spaceflight. In the first decade of the 20th century, heavier than air flight became possible. Wild eyed dreamers talked about transatlantic passenger flights. Let's say some loon decides that he really, really wants to do this in 1910. He could try to browbeat people into building a series of aircraft cariers or anchored landing platforms across the Norh Atlantic in order to let the primitive planes of the day move in short, slow hops across the ocean at great expense in resources and probably lives. Well, there's the plan. The engineering principles are 'sound'. Let's build it NOW NOW NOW!!

The Apollo program was, to a degree, just such a solution. It pushed the available tech to the absolute limit in order to get there before anybody else. Guess what? We're not still there. Far better to build Lagrangian depots, develop nuclear propulsion (the only way we will realistically get to Mars, IMHO)and build ourselves up to a state where we can do it regularly, rather than as a showy one shot.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Robotdog]

Ok fine, it also serves the fine job of being America's wang.

Re:Scientific payoff

[cheekyboy]

But launching 2 100tonne loads into space, to dock and go to the moon is only really a $250m overhead, ie they can design a 100tonner booster, they just wont coz its not comercially viable, tho easlily do-able. ie Next Gen Saturn designs + new bits added on or do a co-op with russians to mass produce their Energia booster in china (like a car factory, make 10 a month for gods sake to drop your costs)

So its nice to make a moon base and yes I want one, why not just do a earth-2-mars mission at the same time as a moonbase mission too. Since doing both can share technologies/rockets. And its more fun to do both at once. Hell, if they can make 10 rockets a week/month in china with the 100tonner designs, then russian/china/japan can share the rockets and do their own mega missions too.

So build your 100 rockets a year, empty shells, plus engines in clean storage.

You gota improve the roll out rate, like making cars, do what ford did but to rockets.

Re:Scientific payoff

[ChenLing]

The mass doesn't come into play. As long as it has the same velocity as the earth, it has the same radius from the Sun.

(G = gravitational constant, M = mass of Sun, m = mass of orbiting object, v = linear velocity, r = radius)
Force = (G*M*m)/r^2 = m*v^2/r
the mass of the orbiting object, m, drops out and you have:

v = sqrt(G*M/r)

(you can substitute v=r*w where w is the angular velocity if you care).

This is obvious once you know that the moon orbits around the Sun and not the Earth (or rather the Sun exerts a much larger force on the Moon than the Earth does).

Re:Scientific payoff

[Alan Partridge]

I agree. Furthermore, surely it is the MOON that holds greatest promise for new telescope designs, the far side being so effectively shielded from Earth's EM glare. Imagine a Very Large Array installation on the far side of the moon - what we might see!

Re:Scientific payoff

[1u3hr]

Let's say some loon decides that he really, really wants to do this in 1910. He could try to browbeat people into building a series of aircraft cariers

Exactly -- but no one would have put the money up for such a plan, as no one will for Zubin's. No one is going to let him run the show, but having him around keeps the subject alive. Having him challenge the ideas forces Nasa to say why some gee whiz idea won't work; and maybe in the process they'll find elements of his plans are worthwhile; it's the opposite effect to that Luddite senator who used to award prizes for what he decided were "worthless" scientific projects. After losing a couple of Shuttles Nasa needs more challenges, not more suffocating caution.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Midnight Thunder]

Unforch, there is no "Dark side of the moon" in terms of a permanent dark side.

I hadn't realised this, though this shouldn't prevent us from building an observatory on the moon, even if it is useful half of the time. The scientific and engineering advances would both be important here.

Re:Scientific payoff

[hplasm]

"Sending people to the moon does not create any seriously interesting new challenges."

Like the challenge of staring at stellar photos. Oh, wait, that's not new...

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

The basic problem here is that NASA sees its mission as manned space exploration and that has very little to do with science.


Isn't this obvious: "To boldly go where...".
Nothing bold in unmanned missions.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Shadowlore]

You can't see it because you are looking in the wrong spot. You are only thinking of what NASA has told us is "science" on Mars: poking and scraping rocks and taking pictures of dirt.

Your assertion regarding Hubble returning more scientific data per dollar is specious. The Apollo program has resulted in hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars worth of scientific data and technological advancement and products. Even as recent as the last 9 months has some of the original Apollo data been used to create/do more -- in particular physical therapy. What the Apollo project did for science and technology is staggering. Despite it being a mere flag and footprints set of missions. Hubble's contributions while not insignifcant, are hardly up to the scale of Apollo, let alone Mars. Primarily due to it's extreme limitation.

Furthermore, the roughly 5-6 billion the Hubble cost would have paid for some truly awesome observatories capable of producing images that rival Hubble's for a small fraction of the price. For example this telescope set cost under 170 million to build: http://www2.keck.hawaii.edu/geninfo/about.php

This one is about a billion:
http://www.eso.org/projects/owl/

It is a matter of physics that the Moon is a very poor choice of refeuling station for interplanetary travel. Stopping at the moon for feul when goingfrom Earth to Mars is like going from LA Pheonix and refeuling in Portland, OR. The exact same launch capability that took us to the Moon can take you right on to mars w/o "refeuling". Surface to surface, Earth to Mars is cheaper (lower delta-v) than Earth to Earth-Moon.

The best route (in terms of technology, resuability, and performance) is a series of tethers from LEO to GEO and GEO to Mars (GMO and then LMO) for example. The catch is the mass needed to make the tethers. Launched from Earth it is not workable. However, a mission to Mars that established the production facilities to make these would do it quite well.

Mars provides the resources needed to sustain life quite well while making the tethers. You go from Mars surface to LMO and put a LMO to GMO tether in place. Then you utilize this capability to put the GMO tether in place. Now you have Mars surface to Geosynchronous Mars orbit using rockets that are comparatively small (read: already developed) as they only need to go to LMO, rising out of a much shallower gravity well.

With this you could go two ways. You can then build a Mars Space Elevator. We don't need carbon nanotubes for that. Kevlar 49, IIRC, has plenty of wiggle room for doing that on Mars. Again, the shallower gravity well is a boon, as well as it only neededing to be about 10,500 Km on Mars. Of course, a LMO with the tether launch to GMO would make it even easier to make.

Instead of or in addition to the MSE, you put up a GMO->GEO tether. Using these systems you can launch from Mars to Earth using either the MSE, or Surface-LMO rocket power. The tether you put in GEO is then added to the system and you use it to put one in LEO.

Now you have launch windows spanning many months, and transit times as low as 90 days.

The scientific return on manned Mars missions is not necessarily geological. It's largely biological, ecological, and technological. Doing the same thing on Luna is not only an order of magnitude more expensive to start with, it is also going to return less usable data per dollar.

If you go by the old way of NASA Mars, yes it'd be one helluva boondoggle. If you insist on space stations and moon bases to do it, it'd be a ruinous one for all aspects.

The ISS building costs alone are above (last I recall) 60 billion dollars billion, with annual costs to exceed 3 billion. Given it's estimated 10 year life that's 30 billion dollars. So when it is said and done, the ISS will have cost us about 100 billion dollars, and it's scope and capacity have been decreased.

That is a financial boondoggle as well as a serious setback in space exploration.

But if you g

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

Observatories go near the poles in craters large and deep enoough that the rays of the Sun do not penetrate to the bottom. A large rotating liquid metal mirror telscope is in contemplation.

http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/pristine_v iew_universe_moon.html?2812005/

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

This is trotted out every time that the space program needs justifying and guess what, its bogus. Non stick frying pans were being developed during the Napoleonic wars when the English embargo prevented the French getting their hands on enough cooking grease. Hence LeCreuset.

That's absolutely incorrect. France has been a net exporter of food for quite some time. UK on the other hand... My father and grandfather were not starving despite the restrictions during the WW2, they had their own chickens, rabbits, goose, porks and whatever. It was harder in the cities but in rural areas their problem was rather getting soap, cleaning agents and healthcare (my father has a problem in a leg since he would have needed surgery in 1941-1942 and this was impossible) than food. They just lived on what a few thousand square meters of vegetables, corn and vineyard (my grandfather made his own wine) gave them, sharing and trading with other people in the village. They also sold their excess production on the markets in ths small towns around (transporation was painful, no oil based products were available).

The one example I know of product substitution during napoleonic wars is coffee which was replaced by some horrible thing called "chicoree". For the rest, France has never had serious basic food availability problems since the revolution (1789), which was in part triggered by a couple of very bad years where basic food was scarce enough that people started to starve. Nothing comparable with the potato crisis in Ireland however.

Just ask yourself a question, where would the grease had come from?

Hint: think that most of continental Europe was under napoleonian rule, so getting at Spanish and or Italian olive oil was not a problem and grease was not the export of the colonies, whether in Africa, in the Caribbean or anywhere else. It was coffee, cacao, and sugar mostly.

If you are from the U.S. and use olive oil, don't belive it comes from Italy despite what is marked. Spain produces way more oil than Italy, but the Italians cleverly took the market and now sell you a mixture of Italian(15%) and Spanish(85%) oil. I know, my wife is from the province of Jaén, Spain, which would be by itself the 3rd oil producer in the world (after Italy and Greece) but represents only 1/6th of the spanish production. Italians buy the oil there by the truckload (literally).

Re:Scientific payoff

[jschrod]

There is just one minor problem: Due to radiation and us having no shields against it, they will be so ill by the time they arrive on Mars that they will have problems to walk...

This is not Star Trek; this is reality. First, we need better radiation shields. Then, we can talk about multi-month missions outside the Earth's magnetosphere.

Re:Scientific payoff

[isorox]

A telescope on the far side would pretty much be the only point in the universe with no EM interference from Earth.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Tim C]

Have you read Absolution Gap by any chance? In it, an entire religion has sprung up around the belief that the gas giant a particular moon orbits once disappeared for a fraction of a second. A number of large, mobile churches trundle around the equator, jostling for position, trying to keep the planet forever directly above them, the better to observe it and so hopefully see it if it happens again...

(Don't get it just on the strength of that, as the idea isn't explored that deeply)

Re:Scientific payoff

[gnu-generation-one]

"Hate to break it to you, but Florida's economy is not driven by NASA."

For those wondering why bother to post such a short statement without supporting evidence or references, here's wiki:

"Florida's economy is heavily based on tourism. (Walt Disney World theme park, Universal Orlando Resort, etc.)

Other major industries include citrus fruit and juice production, banking, and phosphate mining.

With the arrival of the space program at Kennedy Space Center in the 1960s, Florida has attracted a large number of aerospace and military industries to the state. "

And don't mention the spammers.

Re:Scientific payoff

[CrimsonAvenger]

Not everything is about science.

Nor should it be.

That said, feel free to build your own if it's that important to you.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

Why send astronauts there is what I am asking.

Why do we climb Everest or explore the jungle or jump out of airplanes? It's called living. Not everyone is as much of a coward as you are.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Breakfast Pants]

Seems like it would be quite hard to power a mobile system with no sunlight to charge batteries =P. Also, if the only reason for putting a telescope on the moon is that there isn't much atmosphere to scatter light, why not just use orbital telescopes like we already do? What is the point of putting one on the moon. The only point I could see is to black out the light and other radiation coming from earth, and then the whole 10mph thing is useless cause you want to be on the dark (as far as LOS to earth) side of the moon always.

Re:Scientific payoff

[hcob$]

One thing you're also forgetting about on manned missions to distant areas of our solar system is the EXPLOSION of new technology that comes along with it. Think about cell phones(radio telephones), life support systems, new materials, better insulating materials, COMPUTERS. The list is probably literally longer than my arm. And all that was mainly from the Apollo, and Shuttle programs. It's AMAZING what we come up with to solve the challenges of space flight , and NOTHING spurs the technology growth like manned missions into space.

Re:Scientific payoff

[kalidasa]

A lunar space elevator would have to go much further than an earth space elevator - all the way up to the commmon orbit of L1 and L2, I believe (because the moon's rotation is captured synchronous).

Re:Scientific payoff

[plague3106]

Like what? And what can we not do remotely? Why send astronauts there is what I am asking.

Because along the way, we'd learn alot more. Its much more complicated to keep astronaughts alive on mars then it is a robot. In the end, that means we will have more technology generated to achive that goal. There are unique challenges in that endevor that may bring about new discoveries to benefit people here.

And there are just some things that a human could do better then a robot on mars.

Re:Scientific payoff

[plague3106]

NASA costs $15 billion per year to run. Thats rather a lot of money for a government with a $500 billion deficit to be spending on feel good programs.

Please refresh my memory..how much is the war on terror costing us?

Seriously..when i figure out my personal finances, i start looking at the largest expenses first, and seeing if i can't trim those or cut them completely.

Re:Scientific payoff

[NardofDoom]

Why can't we send robots?

Hang on, I have to send the reply over a 20 minute time delay at 56kbps from an underclocked 386 running on solar power that's only able to move a few meters a day over completely flat terrain.

Re:Scientific payoff

[j-turkey]

I don't think that there is much chance that the shuttle will ever launch again. The degree of political risk is huge, so far they are talking about May/June but its one of those dates that just keeps slipping a month each month.

There's been enough press in this (as well as enough dollars and man hours) that I'd be really surprised if the shuttle didn't launch this summer.

Re:Scientific payoff

[j-turkey]

So sorry, there is not one part of the fable that is accurate. NASA did not invent teflon, did not invent the idea of applying it to machinery and cerainly not to saucepans.

But they did give us velcro. Now, I can fasten my shows without having to know how to tie them! ;)

Seriously though, so PTFE wasn't NASA...whoopdedoo. They really are still at the bleeding edge of materials science. They helped to provide us with quite a few ceramics, composites, and alloys. Further, they helped to provide us with new ways to work/form those materials.

However, I'll agree that materials alone don't justify NASA's existence. Trickle-down technology in general, however, may get us much of the way there. Most of what's left of it is science. Is NASA pure, unadulterated, 100% science? Probably not. But for a popular program to succeed, I think that there needs to be a bit of the pie-in-the-sky stuff. Part of this program goes beyond science -- it captures the public's imagination.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

So by that logic, earth's day is half a day?

Re:Scientific payoff

[Aumaden]

The mirror is the really hairy bit of it.

I remember reading an article on the construction of the mirror from around the time the Hubble went up. These numbers stuck with me:

If you were to enlarge the Hubble's mirror so that it was the size of the Gulf of Mexico, the larget imperfection in the surface would be 0.25 inches.

Wowser!

Re:Scientific payoff

[j-turkey]

If you had a mobile system, you could keep a telescope in the dark constantly going a mere 10 mph or less (10 mph would be needed to circumnavigate the moon at its equator in a month).

I don't mean to jump on this, but it sorta stuck with me that something like this sounds like a physicist's dream...and an engineer's nightmare. Do you think there's cheaper and easier way than developing a mobile lunar telescope which travels at a constant speed? Perhaps building 2 (or 3) stationary telescopes would be cheaper, easier, and far less complex, and keep one in the dark at all times.

Re:Scientific payoff

[mobiGeek]

But they did give us velcro

Are you saying that NASA gave us velcro? A simple search on the web seems to bring up a number of different sites stating a different history.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree.

Ok yeah, it might very well be the case that we can acquire lots more "data" from other financial expeditions, but sending people to mars will benefit two things. The funding will fuel research and development of life support systems for humans. (Something that might be avoided if we're just gathering xray/infrared imagery)

and the biggest thing. Acheivement of humanity. National pride. Kindling of inspiration.

a boost in public sentiment for space exploration could really bolster funding expansion for nasa.

Re:Scientific payoff

[drinkypoo]

Yeah, but it would be really useful to be able to go there from the moon, if we ever actually started building anything there :)

Re:Scientific payoff

[Kombat]

A telescope on the far side would pretty much be the only point in the universe with no EM interference from Earth.

Really? I'm pretty sure that if you traveled 400 trillion miles that way (pick any random direction at all), there'd be no EM interference from Earth.

Perhaps you meant to say "Solar System," rather than "Universe?"

Re:Scientific payoff

[Zeinfeld]

LOL, funny how you are denouncing the space program while using a device that most likely uses VLSI components. Guess what the push for MSI and later LSI which lead to VLSI was made mostly by NASA requirements for highly integrated devices using this new thing called a "transistor" which until then no one really had a use for, except for some fancy qualities as an amplifier.

That is bogus, there were plenty of applications that needed compact logic. The Air Force was a much bigger consumer of MSI and LSI than NASA.

What I am denouncing here is the idea that there is something unique to space exploration in generating spinoffs. All (good) science should produce results in other fields.

Given the choice of Hubble or the space station it is very clear which will produce more science, Hubble is the winner by miles. Hubble is providing more data about the early state of the universe than any other source. The occupants of the space station are doing no experiments at all, they are just keeping the station running.

Thank goodness you were in no way shape or form in charge of any basic research programme.

That really is a funny statement. I don't regard the space station as research of any kind. It is at best an engineering challenge.

But you are completely wrong about influence on funding.

Re:Scientific payoff

[j-turkey]

Are you saying that NASA gave us velcro?

It was a joke, sheesh! Hence the smiley-winkidoodle and the "but seriously"...or did you stop reading when you got to something you didn't like?

Re:Scientific payoff

[aiabx]

Though there isn't a "dark side of the moon", there are craters near the poles which are in permanent darkness, which would make ideal locations for observatories.
-aiabx

Re:Scientific payoff

[virg_mattes]

> This is obvious once you know that the moon orbits around the Sun and not the Earth (or rather the Sun exerts a much larger force on the Moon than the Earth does).

These two statements don't mesh. That is:

...the moon orbits around the Sun and not the Earth

...does not equal...

...the Sun exerts a much larger force on the Moon than the Earth does

The reason is that the first can be false and the second still true. The first statement is false because the Moon can orbit the Earth and the Sun simultaneously, which in fact it does.

Virg

Re:Scientific payoff

[Zeinfeld]

Both applied and basic research are valuable pursuits that have paid off in many ways. Basic research, like astronomy, often pays off much better in cultural value than economic, and that's okay by me. I'm not here on Earth just to make money to leave my family and government.

This is a different issue. What I am saying here is evaluate the programs on their direct merits first.

Hubble has provided real direct benefits, albeit mainly in the cultural field. We know more about the origins of the universe, we are able to better understand basic physics.

The Appolo program produced real direct political benefits. JFK funded the program for one reason, to spend the USSR into the ground. His objective was achieved, the USSR was broken psychologically in 1969, it just continued moving for another two decades.

There were certainly some spin offs from Appolo, but the same effects could have been achieved for far less by direct investment in research into the relevant fields.

The 'spinoff' effect can work both ways. I work in computer security, it has taken us two decades to escape from the seriously warped views that entered the field because early funding came almost exclusively from military contracts. One reason that the Internet is insecure is that the security models being applied are completely wrong for its current application.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Zeinfeld]

Please refresh my memory..how much is the war on terror costing us? Seriously..when i figure out my personal finances, i start looking at the largest expenses first, and seeing if i can't trim those or cut them completely.

Its a fair question, but I look at my largest discretionary spending first. My largest expense is my mortgage, my second largest childcare, I don't have any option in those cases. The largest elements in the US federal budget are payment on the debt and repayment of social security obligations. Those are not optional.

The 'war on terror' has two parts, a compulsory one and an optional one. Most reasonable people would agree that the number on priority should be eliminating Osama Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri. I have no complaint about the money spent there. The invasion of Iraq on the other hand has eliminated Saddam (good) and led to the election of an Iranian backed Shiite theocratic regime with no support from the Sunni areas. That is not a result I would consider to justify the $300 bn expense so far or the $600bn likely total cost.

If we want to apply space station logic to the war on terror though we could say that the cost is justified by the 'spinoffs' that the war will create. There is no field that has generated as much spinoff technology as war. The rapid developments in MSI and LSI in the mid 70s were funded by the pentagon as part of their electronic battlefield program developed in direct response to the US catastrophe in Vietnam.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Zeinfeld]

Just ask yourself a question, where would the grease had come from? Hint: think that most of continental Europe was under napoleonian rule, so getting at Spanish and or Italian olive oil was not a problem and grease was not the export of the colonies, whether in Africa, in the Caribbean or anywhere else. It was coffee, cacao, and sugar mostly.

It sounds like your French Govt. approved education omitted the fact that the French occupation of Spain was a miserable failure resisted tooth an nail by the Spanish. The term 'Guerilla' means 'little war' and refers to the Spanish resistance.

France was in no position to export anything from Spain during the occupation and certainly not bulk produce. The flow of material was the other way, from France into Spain.

As for France not suffering food availability problems, Napoleon's army which mostly starved to death during the retreat from Moscow would have disagreed if the sadistic dictator had not murdered them all.

Re:Scientific payoff

[plague3106]

Its a fair question, but I look at my largest discretionary spending first.

I'm glad you reconize that it was a fair question; apparently a moderator did not. Its been a while since I've been modded down, and I have other, more unpopular views...

My largest expense is my mortgage, my second largest childcare, I don't have any option in those cases. The largest elements in the US federal budget are payment on the debt and repayment of social security obligations. Those are not optional.

True, you need some place to live, and need help with child care. But can you do with a smaller, less valuable house? Maybe have a grandparent or niece babysit? Please understand i'm not implying you personally...just trying to stick with your examples.

At any rate yes, debt repayment is something that should be done sooner then later. Whether SS actually needs saving is a matter of debate.

The 'war on terror' has two parts, a compulsory one and an optional one. Most reasonable people would agree that the number on priority should be eliminating Osama Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri. I have no complaint about the money spent there. The invasion of Iraq on the other hand has eliminated Saddam (good) and led to the election of an Iranian backed Shiite theocratic regime with no support from the Sunni areas. That is not a result I would consider to justify the $300 bn expense so far or the $600bn likely total cost.

I don't see what good eliminating OBL would do. Someone else will take his place. I think a more reasonble thing would be to secure our borders, and find terrorists already in the states. We can do that much more effectively then sending our military around the globe.

Eliminating Saddam is good, but there are also alot of bads. We destroyed much of the infastructure there, and now have to pay the cost of rebuilding it. Both sides continue to suffer casualties. An according to you, the elections didn't turn out as you wanted. Are things better now that saddam is gone? I can't really answer that, I dont' live in Iraq.

If we want to apply space station logic to the war on terror though we could say that the cost is justified by the 'spinoffs' that the war will create. There is no field that has generated as much spinoff technology as war. The rapid developments in MSI and LSI in the mid 70s were funded by the pentagon as part of their electronic battlefield program developed in direct response to the US catastrophe in Vietnam.

Yes, there can be tech spinoffs from war, if we were in a real war. But we aren't. Our economy hasn't shifted to war time production, I really doubt you can compare it to WW1 or 2.

All things considered, I don't think we should be using war for spinoffs either....I'd like to think human life has more value to us then that. I personally would rather fund exploration to generate spinoffs than war. And who knows...maybe if we did pump as much into NASA as we do into the military, we'd see that exploration can generate even more spinoffs.

Re:Scientific payoff

[|/|/|||]

I think a lunar telescope would have quite a few advantages over an orbiter. Here are a few off the top of my head:
1. With an orbiting telescope, size and weight are critical. If you build it on the moon (hopefully using local resources) it can weigh as much as you like and be as large as you want.
2. As you mentioned, the far side of the moon is shielded from earth's EM radiation.
3. Service and repair is far easier and cheaper (assuming you have a manned base accompanying the telescope array)
4. Once you establish a base and figure out how to build 1 telescope, it should be fairly cheap to build 100 more. Think how much we could learn if we had an array of large telescopes on the far side of the moon!

Oh, and you could still use solar power, since you wouldn't really want to build a mobile telescope. The astronomical cost of such a system would not be worth the double amount of darkness, even if there were no earth in your way. Not only that, but vibrations would surely affect your image quality.

Re:Scientific payoff

[RogerWilco]

Building LOFAR on the backside of the Moon is relatively feasible.
Having two telescopes at two positions in earth orbit would result in an even longer baseline, and therefore larger precission, but you'd need 183 days exposure time to generate a picture.

See LOFAR: http://www.lofar.org/

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

I read this and wanted to know where people come up with the crazy stuff attributed to NASA.

Teflon was a critical discovery for the Manhattan project as it is one of the only materials that withstands uranium hexafluoride. It was top-secret until after WWII.

The mirror for Hubble was never bent. It was mismanufactured exactly to specifications. The problem was that they never tested the mirror because that test was deemed too expensive! Whoops, cheaper to test on the ground than after its in orbit and doesn't work properly.

I agree that a manned mission to Mars is probably nothing more than corporate welfare to the Military-Industrial complex who was a big contributor to Bush and the cronies in power. The ideal thing about a Mars mission is that it will drag on for a very long time. Projects like Hubble and other pure science projects are over too quickly and don't have the profit potential of a manned Mars mission.

I really wish that Ken Goldin's pet project would be made instead. That was to send multiple Hubble like telescopes into space and use interferometry to treat them like a giant telescope the size of the distance between them. He claimed that this would be able to resolve continents on earth sized planets around distant stars.

Rick Wirch (don't have an acct, thus the anonymous post)

Re:Scientific payoff

[LWATCDR]

"Hah! see my other post, Teflon was invented in 1938, before the Manhattan project started."
Yes but no one had a use for it. Until the Manhattan project need something to use for seals that would withstand Fl.

"The USSR did not develop ICs and still put rockets into space. In fact the ICs did not become important in space until after the Appolo program. They were pretty finicky until the 1970s."
I suggest you read some history books or even Slashdot. The Apollo flight computer was the first IC based computer. It was not the first use of ICs. You do not jump from nothing to an all IC computer in one big leap. Yes the Minuteman used ICs but it did not have a true programmable computer for a guidance system. In fact early ICBMs and SLBMs just followed a simple pre-programed arc. SLBMs actually had to be rotated in there launch tubs to face the target.

Any big challenging project will create new ideas and new uses for things. Space is one of the biggest challenges and does have some of the biggest spin offs. What people do not seem to get is that by rolling back to Apollo style missions we will loose a lot of the spin offs. Yea it will work but by not pushing for something better we are just spending money with only the planned science as the return. The Hubble is great but we can do better now. How about building the Shuttle C using RS-68s instead of SSME and launching a really BIG replacement for the Hubble? How about an improved shuttle to service the Hubble?
How about a manned Orbital transfer vehicle so the new space telescope can be services from the Space Station instead of from the Shuttle?
Now is the time to be BOLD.

Re:Scientific payoff

[sgage]

Well, I would have said that Zubrin was a wacko nutbag, but "barking mad cult leader" works for me :-)

- sgage

Re:Scientific payoff

[poopdeville]

Wikiepedia is obviously wrong.

Cape Canaveral isn't even one of the 25 most populous cities in Florida.
The official state of Florida portal site lists international trade (with central and south America), tourism, agriculture, construction, "services," software, health technology, and "university research" as "Economy Strengths."

Note that the University of Miami, Florida State U, and U. of Florida eat up most research funding, and each is at least 100 miles away from the Cape.
Does NASA seem particularly relevant anymore?

Re:Scientific payoff

[Zondar]

"Given the choice of Hubble or the space station it is very clear which will produce more science, Hubble is the winner by miles. Hubble is providing more data about the early state of the universe than any other source. The occupants of the space station are doing no experiments at all, they are just keeping the station running. "

But then you have to answer the next question: "What gain to we get from learning about the early state of the universe?"

Some people might argue that the pursuit of that knowledge is just as useless (in a practical sense) as the knowledge gained through manned spaceflight.

Re:Scientific payoff

[mbrother]

Absolutely! It is more of a fun idea than a serious suggestion.

Re:Scientific payoff

[mbrother]

That's kind of fun. Gregory Benford had a story reiniscent of that sort of thing, too, a few years ago. I've read Alistair Reynold's first novel Revelation Space but not the one you mention. I like his work pretty well, and he's the other new novelist with a PhD in astronomy like myself in the field, so I pay attention to him.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope PETA doesn't find the people who were exposing seals to florine!!!!

Re:Scientific payoff

[True Grit]

If anything is capable of looking beyond the nose into the depths of the Universe, it is Hubble.

Uhmm, no, actually the Hubble is now obsolete.

[Please read all of this before modding me down.]

Its generated a lot of pretty pictures, yes. Why are those pretty pictures interesting and valuable? Because they let us look back in time to the early period of the universe. Thats why Hubble was created, not because the public would like the computer-enhanced pretty pictures (you didn't think those pictures were 100% virgin, right-off-the-satellite, did you?), but because they help us understand the past.

But there's a problem: Hubble looks in visible light, which prevents it from looking far enough back into time to answer the kind of questions we're asking. In particular, if you want to look deep into the past, you have to abandon visible light altogether and go to the far infrared. But there's another problem: Unlike the visible and radio wave spectra, infrared is completely blocked by the Sun's, the Earth's, and even the telescope's own heat, as well as interference from reflected light. This means that a ground based telescope won't work for far infrared. That is why Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is going to replace Hubble, because it can look much farther back into time than Hubble ever could.

Now, if its just pretty pictures from the visible light spectrum that you're interested in, there are several Very Large Telescope Arrays coming online now that use interferometry to achieve resolutions better than Hubble, but using telescopes on Earth. The Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope has already beaten the Hubble in terms of resolution. These VLTAs though can't beat the James Webb Telescope or its European counterpart the Herschel Space Observatory because these space-based telescopes operate in the far infrared, which no ground based telescope can do (decently).

In other words, the Hubble is obsolete. I know thats an unpopular idea around here, but its the truth. Now that we have VLTAs on the ground, and the Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared) in orbit (both of which together cover the Hubble's range), we'll have plenty of pretty pictures (all the pics you see from Hubble, the Spitzer, and others are computer enhanced, so it doesn't matter whether the scope is far infrared, infrared, or visible light, on the ground or in space, the pictures will always be pretty) to keep us busy while waiting for the James Webb or Herschel scopes to get up there. But if you still remember the reason Hubble was put up to begin with, to look deep into the past, then you should understand why we need to move to the James Webb as quickly as possible, because the James Webb will be just as dramatic an improvement as Hubble was over the scopes it replaced. So at this point, any attempts to keep the Hubble going will just be taking money away from the James Webb telescope. I really don't see the point in that.

I won't get into the issue of Mars and such, except to say in a sane country NASA wouldn't be hurting so much for cash all the time (as it currently is with the James Webb project). Someone mentioned NASA's budget of 15 billion. That is a lot of money, until you compare it to our other spending priorities, like 3 billion a month for the Iraqi War. Its all a matter of priorities.

Re:Scientific payoff

[N3WBI3]

BWhahahahah. I chalk this up to the same stupidity that caused you to say people are having kids for the tax break's! Way too much fun.

You really think the 'Christian Right' gives a darn about hubble? Seriously you think in my prayers at night I pray for "blessings on my house, peace in my heart, wisdom, oh yea and bring down that magical scientific deamon hubble!". Newsflash hubble was built under Regan (evil Republican) and launched under Bush (evil Republican) and many Christians (such as myself) Marvel at the parts of Gods creation we see though it.

The new McCarthyism is against the Christians, that right folks they are everywhere and they want to get at you with fluids and bringing down honking space telescopes...

Re:Scientific payoff

[LinuxLuver]

China has announced they will be going to Mars. They followed that up by putting their first man into space shortly afterward. China is well aware of the American policy to dominate space and China does not want to submit to that American aim. Bush is going to Mars becasue China announced the same intention 2 years prior. It's a space race.....and China has the edge in terms of not having to worry about politicking or public opinion....and China is amassing huge wealth, thanks to American and European corporates moving the manufacturing to China.....China then lends it back to the US to keep the US dollar from going down the toilet - thanks to Bush's wild 'spend like there's no tomorrow' as he lines the pockets of his croneis with billions of taxpayer dollars.....funnelled through a war he had to lie about in order to start. China could well get to mars first.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Agent Orange]

Sorry, but many of the points you make are correct, but you basic premise - that HST is obsolete, is wrong. For these reasons:

- Not all of "us" are asking the same questions - HST is incredibly versatile. I was waiting for COS to go up in the next service mission, since it was going to have a huge impact in my field, studying the possible accretion of gas into the milky way.

- Interferometry is only applicable in specific circumstances and is not a general replacement for diffraction-limited imaging at resolutions of about 0.1". COAST (please at least give the correct URL!) is indeed exciting, but interferometry is very technically challenging and increases somewhat exponentially with the number of apertures (at least in the optical). We're a long way off VLA-type large-scale optical interferometers. Please don't portray this as being in common usage - it's not (yet).

- MCAO and AO (adaptive optics) systems also do not compensate - again, resolution is great, but the field of view just sucks arse :-( Technical challenges are also significant for adaptive optics.

- On the infrared band, yes ground-based observations are blocked. But then, so are the UV observations that can be made from HST. Much science is left to be done here - some species only have observable transitions in the optical/UV, meaning we can only measure their metallicities in this wavelength band.

JWST and hubble are complimentary, not competing. Some of the science might overlap, but certainly not the greater part. Hubble is old, yes (and now dead, thanks to o'keefe and his political agenda), but it isn't obsolete at all.

Now if you want to argue about where to best put the resources....that's a whole new kettle of fish.

Re:Scientific payoff

[Breakfast Pants]

You have to admit that that is pretty far off in the future. "1. With an orbiting telescope, size and weight are critical. If you build it on the moon (hopefully using local resources) it can weigh as much as you like and be as large as you want." Currently to make the mirror for a large telescope warranting being on the moon alone we have to use massive clean rooms, etc. etc. etc.. I don't see use being able to take less materials than the final weight of the telescope to the moon and through harvesting somehow build one. On earth we have years and years of infrastructure for harvesting and transporting materials, not to mention the electric grid, etc. etc. I just do not see this as viable for a very long time.

Re:Scientific payoff

[True Grit]

is indeed exciting, but interferometry is very technically challenging and increases somewhat exponentially with the number of apertures

but the field of view just sucks arse :-( Technical challenges are also significant for adaptive optics.

I don't claim to know all the technical challenges, but technical challenges are far simpler and a hell of a lot cheaper to solve here on the ground, than maintaining even a single telescope in orbit. Some of the people running these VLTAs are the ones saying they'll be able to beat the Hubble very soon (saw an interview with a director of some VLTA going online in South America). By the time we can construct replacement parts, get a shuttle up there, and update the Hubble, 3-4 years, these VLTAs will be overtaking the Hubble's ability, and in that time we'll have spent 100s of millions that could have been spent on James Webb, we'll have taken away NASA time from JW, and we could have more economically spent less money fixing those technical challenges for ground-based scopes like you mentioned to get the same capability.

JWST and hubble are complimentary, not competing.

I understand that for your needs the Hubble would be just as valuable as JW, but for the primary driving force that is pushing us to put these scopes in orbit, seeing the past, the Hubble simply *can't* compete with the JW.

Look, if it were up to me, we'd keep the Hubble for one more cycle, unfortunately Washington politicians have IMO a bizarre set of priorities right now for spending. They're not going to let us have both. Period. With that in mind, and given that VLTAs have already exceeded Hubble's resolution, and will very likely be able to fully replace Hubble's functionality within 10 years or so, I believe it just makes sense to back the scope that can see the farthest into the past, and unfortunately for the Hubble, that is the James Webb.

Re:Scientific payoff

[dr_straneglove]

You don't have to look far to see the benefits of the Apollo program and the original space race. The investment in the space program reaches practically every area of our life. Wouldn't it be better to push an extra few $B into the space program -- do BOTH hubble and manned missions over time than squander money promoting a future Shiite theocracy in Iraq? I am embarrassed by how readily we'll spend 80-100 $B per year installing a future regime, while the umbrella of space exploration to advance science, technology and human knowledge is kept at a much, much lower level ($14B per year NASA, approximately,I believe). At these rates, in today's world, with today's safety objectives, we'll never make it to orbit again (post shuttle), let alone the moon, mars, or anything else. Why will it take longer to get to the moon this time than in the 60s? The US and its allies should step up investment and collaboration in these areas to at least 2-3 times current levels. As others mention, there will be many collateral benefits to the technology and science related to all of these endeavors (even a robotic mision to repair hubble). If Martian rocks don't interest someone, the hundreds of support technologies required to safely reach Mars with a crew, extract, transport the crew home, etc. surely will. I actually liked GWB's message on the space program, just not the budget, which doesn't match and shows his real priorities are elsewhere.

Re:Scientific payoff

[__aaaqtn3397]

I don't think it'd take a physicist to say "duh" to this, but...

Space elevators are a bad idea. Planets were made separate for a reason.

Let's say we make an elevator to an asteroid. Alright, we have a nice attachment to it and can use it for the elevator purposes. Now, what if something intersects the line while flying past and breaks it? What if there are humans on this line, on the wrong side to get to safety? A strong cable won't hold against mini-planets, my friend.

I'm just not gathering where this'll all be attached... and how it'll have any sort of longevity of use.

Re:Scientific payoff

[danila]

Like what? And what can we not do remotely? Why send astronauts there is what I am asking.

Example - the Huygens probe landed on something. Now the scientists wanted to find out what it was, but since it was just a robotic probe, there wasn't a simple way even to find out whether it landed on something solid, liquid or gooey. If we had a human there, it would take him/her all of the 15 seconds to poke the "ground" with a stick and announce the result.

However, I do agree that sending humans to Mars is quite questionable in financial regard, actually much more so than sending a human team up there to fix Hubble.

Re:Scientific payoff

[markov_chain]

NASA costs $15 billion per year to run. Thats rather a lot of money for a government with a $500 billion deficit to be spending on feel good programs.

The only way that the Mars trip becomes viable is with a space elevator. The shuttle and the space station are irrelevant. All they are doing is finding out what we know already, people's bodies start to deteriorate significantly after six months or so in space. And that is within the protection of the earth's magnetic field.

I think we pretty much agree here. To put your reply in different words, the way NASA is going about manned space exploration sucks. They should be looking into building a space elevator, etc. and if that includes doing science so be it. But again that doesn't make science their primary mission.

As for "feel good" programs, that term is a can of worms. Is social security a feel good program? How about the Iraq war? Some would say so; it's a very vague term.

Re:Scientific payoff

[iwantabettrsn]

Actually, it's extremely hard and ambiguous to test the presence of life within the Martian soil without a human lab. In Antartica, there are microbes that live under a few millimeters of rock and ice, similir to the situation on Mars. Current robotics cannot find this.

When?

[Odo]

When do they intend to deorbit Hubble? As I understand it, the first thing expected to die on Hubble are the gyroscopes. One needs three gyros to point the scope at a celestial target. The deorbit module will definitely have its own pointing system (used for docking, among other things). Which means the mere presence of the deorbit module would fix Hubble. So what's their criteria for dropping Hubble into the Pacific?

Re:When?

[Xshare]

It wouldn't be nearly accurate enough, nor would it be built for long term use, due to it's relatively simple job.

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

But it would carry enough fuel to deorbit the thing -- which I reckon is more weight than a few gyroscopes.

Re:When?

[mprinkey]

I think the problem is that installing the gyroscopes into Hubble is too complicated to do robotically. Personally, I am in agreement with you. Why not just make a "box of gyros" that will attached to some hard point on the unit and adjust the tracking/pointing system to use the new system. If they get them installed *before* the last of the internal gyros go, they should be able to calibrate easily.

I guess powering them might be a problem...the addon unit would need it's own solar panels, be positioned were it could see the sun, etc. NASA has smart people. I am not willing to say this is a wrong move, but I would like to see Hubble continue to fly and do good scient.

Re:When?

[pnewhook]

They already demonstrated robotic replacement of gyros on the ground with a mockup of Hubble and the rescue robot testbed, so no its not that hard for a robot.

Re:When?

[stienman]

1. Pointing an object that has as much mass as the hubble is expensive enough as it is. To create a robot that would attach, and have enough energy (via solar cells, I suppose you expect?) to rotate both itself and Hubble would be cost-prohibitive, even if it could be developed, tested, and built in time to save the Hubble in time.

2. There is more equipment on the Hubble that is failed or will soon fail than just the Gyros. The batteries, some of the subsystems, and probably the gas canisters used to boost the hubble back into orbit occasionally are all items which need maintenance. It is unlikely that a robot could be developed in the time-frame and budget given that would not only point the hubble, but interface to its failing systems and supply the needed resources (batteries, especially).

No time frame has been given. This announcement is simply describing the current budget allocation.

Please remember that a controlled de-orbit while the hubble is still retrievable by a robot is much preferable to an uncrontrolled de-orbit where the hubble may take on an orbit, spin, or fall that would make it impossible to attach to once out of our control. It is likely that the robot must be attached before the last three gryos fail if a robot is going to be attached at all. This means it needs to be done soon.

It is unlikely that even given a large budget a reliable robot for fixing the Hubble could be developed in time to attach to the Hubble before it becomes uncontrolled.

-Adam

Re:When?

[Detritus]

NASA has the responsibility, under international law, to deorbit HST in a safe and controlled manner. A random reentry, a la Skylab, in not considered acceptable these days.

HST does not have any propulsion systems. To deorbit the spacecraft, something would have to be attached.

Gee, I hope ...

[ari_j]

I hope part of it lands on my field. I just haven't had anything to sell on eBay for a couple years. (I am not referring to Columbia. That's just wrong.)

Re:Gee, I hope ...

[mickyflynn]

so... Challenger, then?

Re:Gee, I hope ...

[Lord Ender]

What is so wrong with selling a piece of a wrecked shuttle? Many people died trying to cross the Berlin Wall, but nobody cried when people sold pieces of it.

Re:Gee, I hope ...

[q-the-impaler]

I agree with your sympathy, but you are comparing apples and oranges. The shuttle was not terribly oppressive and a symbol of communism. Most people did not rejoice at the failing of the shuttle, but many people did rejoice and the falling of the wall.

Damn

[Anonymous Coward]

Not like this is a surprise... but seriously, Hubble's been one of the few really worthwhile NASA projects in the past decade.

Rest in peace

Re:Damn

[crymeph0]

I agree that Hubble is a great scientific instrument, but I also think everyone here agrees that the space shuttle is inherently more dangerous than it should be. I'd like to talk to the scientific panel that recommended reinstating the shuttle mission to service the Hubble, and ask them, "If the (not-so)unthinkable happened, and the crew sent up to repair Hubble died in another shuttle accident, would you ever be able to sleep again?"

I seriously don't mean this as a troll or flamebait. Personally, I think we should scrap the shuttle program right now, and to hell with the ISS, because another seven dead astronauts will really kill the enthusiasm for space flight around the world. I don't believe stopping U.S. government funded space flight while we develop the CEV would dampen the enthusiasm that much, especially now that the private space race is finally showing some signs of life.

Back on the topic of the loss of the Hubble, we've got Chandra and JWST (in the not-too-distant future) to deal with the wavelengths that don't penetrate the atmosphere, and adaptive optics are going to give us just as good a view as Hubble ever did of the wavelengths that do come down to our level.

What's wrong with Hubble

[pudding7]

In headline after headline talking about Hubble and how they need money to repair it and what-not, I've never seen a single mention of what's actually wrong with it and why it needs "repairing".

What's the deal?

Re:What's wrong with Hubble

[wikinerd]

You can learn why a fourth servicing mission is necessary by reading my article. I say: "several components of Hubble, most probably its batteries, are expected to stop operating in the next 2-4 years" and "HST was designed to be maintained with servicing missions operated from space shuttles every few years" (i.e. it is impossible to keep Hubble there without launching servicing missions, we need to fix its orbit and replace components every few years). In addition, the gyroscopes will also stop working, but I think the most important problem will be its batteries (Hubble can work with just 2 or 3 gyroscopes, but not with dead batteries).

Re:What's wrong with Hubble

[PixelThis]

The gyroscopes are wearing out. They've done so before and been replaced, but they're going again and the batteries are fading. Without at least 3 gyroscopes Hubble can't be pointed accurately, and with less it starts having trouble maintaining attitude control and could potentially start to tumble and deorbit.

Re:What's wrong with Hubble

[blamanj]

It doesn't need repairing today, but it will in a couple of years. The batteries and gyroscopes have limited lifetimes and must be replaced every so often. These cyclic repair missions, which have been performed in the past, were cancelled after the Columbia accident

While they could restart the repair cycle, NASA no longer feels that repair flights are safe, because, unlike when the Shuttle visits ISS, there are no good rescue options given Hubble's orbit.

Re:What's wrong with Hubble

[mboverload]

That didn't stop them from servicing it before.

This safety stuff is all crap. The space shuttle is still WAY safer than traving in the car to get it.

Re:What's wrong with Hubble

[mboverload]

Actually, considering the distance it is traveling, it might very well be the safest transportation system ever devised.

Re:What's wrong with Hubble

[Bitsy Boffin]

Dunno about you, but my car doesn't blow itself to smithereens every 100 outings or so.

Re:What's wrong with Hubble

[Vadim the Conqueror]

Isn't it obvious?

Mike got ahold of the controls again.

Re:What's wrong with Hubble

[quanticle]

How many millions of miles does your car have on its odometer?

Re:What's wrong with Hubble

[Hafnia]

The safety argument is SO far out. Of course it's not safe going to space - it's not even safe to take your car and go to work, it's a calculated risk. And a lot more people are killed driving their car than flying a spaceshuttle. But ask the astronauts if they accept the odds - they will. So let them do it. Another thing is the economics, but then say it like it is - we would rather spend the money elsewhere.

Farewell, old friend....

[G4from128k]

Thanks for all the great pictures.

What is the point

[bryan986]

They could launch 300 robotic missions for the price of a manned mission to mars...

Moon as a platform for Mars?

[NardofDoom]

That doesn't make any sense. About the only thing that would be the similar between a Mars mission and Moon mission would be terrestrial (or arestrial or lunestrial as the case may be) vehicles.

The moon doesn't have an atmosphere, Mars does. The moon has 1/2 the gravity of Mars. (1/6g vs. 1/3g.) The moon is three days away, Mars is six months, minimum. The Moon has a 28-day sol, Mars has a 24.75 hour sol. Mars has water, the moon's water is still under question. The moon has huge temperature swings; Mars... not so much.

To me, this is like preparing for a mission to Antarctica and saying it's applicable in Canada's North Woods. Yeah, they're both cold, but one has trees, liquid water for at least part of the year, and mud. Not much the same.

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[Anonymous Coward]

what?

it's a lot harder to launch from earth to mars than it would be to launch from the moon to mars

build a moon launch base, build a mars lander vehicle from the moom.. no athmosphere to require you to go like 18X sound to break free (pulling number from ass)

plus the moon probably has stuff we could use for fuel and whatnot

plus if we go to mars it cant be just for a couple days, we need a base.. the best way to to learn how to build a working base in space is to practice on the moon.. that way if you fuck up you're 3 days away from a rescue instead of six months

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[Xshare]

Article wasn't speaking platform in the metaphorical sense, but actually a platform in the literal sense, as in, to launch missions from there to mars, and refuel, etc.

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[MattJakel]

It might not be so much that the missions would be alike, but that the moon missions could prepare for the Mars mission by setting up a refueling station or some other aid.

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[Derling Whirvish]

I have to agree. The moon is an out-of-the-way destination to go to Mars. It's as if we wanted to fly on a 747 from NYC to London for a weekend, but when we took off the plane diverted to Orlando for a week and we spent most of our vaction money at Disney World prior to arriving in London. Just as the time spent in Orlando is a waste of our London vacation, the moon would be waste of our Mars exploration money. Other than both being accessable by air and are tourist destinations they have very little in common. Same for the moon and Mars. Dammit, let's just go! "Light this candle!" "Poyekheli!"

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[protolith]

Moon as a platform for Mars, as in its easier to launch vehicles from the moon to go to mars, than from the earth to go to mars.

Launch several missions to the moon,
Establish a moon base,
Construct vehicles and assemble accumulated equipment to haul to mars.

A large push that might get part of your crap into orbit would take all of your crap from the moon to mars. It might even get there faster.

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[protolith]

This is more like getting 30 shipping containers of crap from LA to London...
You could fly each one individually (Very Expensive)
You could pack them onto a ship and take it through the panama canal and on to London (Long Time/High Initial Cost),
Or you could ship by truck or rail to New York, then load onto a ship when they all arrive, and head to London. (Easiest).

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[mboverload]

You seem to have little concept of the situation.

A rocket/shuttle/anything uses up pretty much ALL of its fuel just to get off the ground. If we could land on the moon, not only could we go faster (full fuel + no air + moon swinging around) it would be safer because the mission would have spare fuel to use on the way to Mars. Plus you have enough fuel to get back since you would be using a capapult+rockets to get on your way.

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[NorthDude]

I come from Abitibi in Quebec, which is kind of up north. You are right when you say that it is not the same as Antartica but I'll tell you what. If it's the conditions which gets you in Antartica, well in northern canada it's the f*cking moskitos!

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[jdhutchins]

it's a lot harder to launch from earth to mars than it would be to launch from the moon to mars

That ignores the point that for both, you still have to get off of the Earth. Actually producing any of the hardware for a Mars mission on the moon won't happen for several hundred years- there are no factories on the Moon. Ultimately, all the resources for the mission have to come from the Earth. Moon base or not, you still have to launch from the Earth, which is by far the most expensive part. A Moon base is thrown into Mars missions becuase it was a dream during the 60's when it seemed that space exploration would keep growing forever.

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[Edmund Blackadder]

You forgot the part where we rebuild the thousands of factories required to build the mars vehicle on the moon. And ship over the thousands of needed workers to the moon.

I am sure that will all be very efficient.

Using the moon as a launching pad is a braindead idea, because anything that you "manufacture" on the moon you will have manufacture on earth and then ship it in parts and assemble it on the moon. Which means that you will still pay just as much for lifting every single ounce out of the earth, but you will put it all in yet another gravity well (the Moon's), which will result in additional cost to get out of.

That scheme will be a good idea when we can make miniaturized chemical and manufacturing factories that can construct a spaceship and its fuel out of moon sand, but we are SOOO far away from that point, it is not even worth planning a spacemission yet.

Which of course brings us to the whole central purpose of the Mars initiative -- to have some vague goal that is practicaly unreachable, as to ensure that the billions keep flowing into contractors' coffers, without them actually having to do much work at all.

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[FleaPlus]

First off: Nobody is proposing launching directly to Mars from the Moon.

Secondly, there are a number of common components between going to the Moon and going to Mars. There's really two main differences between going to Moon/Mars and what we're doing now in LEO: flight times, landing/relaunching, and surviving on the surface.

Now what are the differences in required equipement needed for a long-term stay on the Moon vs. a long-term stay on Mars? Here's what I can think of:

* A bigger booster

* A Mars relauncher can take advantage of in-situ resource utilization for generating fuel

* Longer flight times require more shielding

* Can take advantage of aerobraking on Mars

Besides that, most everything else is common between the two. One big one is settlements. A modified Bigelow- or Transhab-style inflatable space settlement would do well on either the Moon or Mars. Plus, just the experience of running long-term extraterrestrial ground operations like this will be invaluable.

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[plastik55]

A rocket/shuttle/anything uses up pretty much ALL of its fuel just to get off the ground.

True. Every X pounds of cargo you get off of Earth's surface takes N*X pounds of fuel.

But it does not follow that it would be easier to launch off the moon. How would you get rocket fuel, spaceship components, etc. up to the moon? Unless the moon has vast rocket fuel reserves, factories and a moon-based aerospace industrial complex we don't yet know about, you get it there by launching it from Earth. Every pound of fuel you have in the tank of a Moon-based ship actually costs more than N times as much when you include the cost of getting it to the moon to begin with. There is no net savings here.

If we could land on the moon, not only could we go faster (full fuel + no air + moon swinging around)
it would be safer because the mission would have spare fuel to use on the way to Mars. Plus you have enough fuel to get back since you would be using a capapult+rockets to get on your way.

Or, using an even smaller amount of fuel, we could NOT land on the moon, just go around it and use the slingshot effect anyway. You don't need to land on the moon to do that.

Having a "staging area" makes some amount of sense, if we want a Mars craft to be larger than what we can launch from Earth in one piece. But the correct location for a "staging area" is in orbit, not in yet another gravity well.

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[grozzie2]

Except for one little detail, nobody here seems to understand. I'll try explain in terms even the /. crowd can understand.

An earth moon voyage has a cost, both in financial terms, and in terms of energy expended to arrive at destination. Assuming for the moment that finances are unlimited, the real problem is energy and materials, ie packing enough energy into a structure so that it can launch and sustain itself thru a soft landing. The first expenditure is to impart _just_ enough deltaV onto the vehicle that it departs the orbit of the earth, and enters the sphere of influence of the moon. Basically that's a trajectory that ascends to L1 and has _just_ enough velocity left when it gets there, to 'fall' over to the moon side, at which point it begins falling 'down' to the moon. When it gets close, the vehicle will have quite a velocity, and need to be decelerated again to soft land, so we burn rockets again, to put another DeltaV onto the machine, and bring it's motion to zero (or close to it) at touchdown. If you call phase 1 of the journey X and phase 2 Y, the total DeltaV you need to apply to the vehicle is X+Y. From there it's simple arithmetic to calculate what the fuel requirements etc are for a given payload at landing.

The mars equation is a little different. During the launch phase, we need to apply enough DeltaV onto the vehicle to put it into a holmann transfer trajectory, that intersects with the martian orbit. We use careful timing of the launch to make sure that mars is actually at this point of intersection when the vehicle arrives. Assume the same payload as in the above scenario, we'll call this value Z. Upon arrival at mars, we now need to decelerate. BUT, here's where it gets different. To decelerate at mars, we dont burn rocket fuel, we open up a parachute, and let atmospheric drag apply the forces to get the DeltaV we need. The total fuel burn is still only Z, no extra fuel required for the soft landing on mars.

The amount of DeltaV we can put on a vehicle is a function of the ratio of fuel to total mass, along with the engine efficiency. There are hard limits based in engineering as to what amount of DeltaV a given rocket can produce for a given payload. The surprising part to most folks is, with atmospheric braking on the other end, the DeltaV required for a one way to mars is LESS than that for a one way to the moon, simply because we have to carry braking fuel to the moon, we dont to mars.

The mars trip brings lots of other problems, mostly because it takes to long. You need to carry a tremendous amount of consumables if you want to support humans for that timeframe, whereas the consumables for a 6 day moon round trip can be minimal. It's possible with todays technology to build a rocket that can support the mass required to keep a few humans alive for a week trip to/from the moon, and lift that all into a lunar trajectory. It's not possible to do the same for a martian trajectory, you just need to much in the way of consumables on board. But, on a pound for pound basis, for stuff 'delivered', it's actually cheaper to send it to mars, than it is to send it to the moon, thanks to aerobraking on the other end.

Space flight as we know it today works, only because we've refined rockets to the point they can just _barely_ carry themselves, and a very marginal payload, into a useful orbit. Aerobraking for the return trip makes it workable. It's the equivalent of the horse drawn wagon in the 'old west', not very efficient, but, it worked. When we get an improvement in propulsion technology equivalent to the step from the horse drawn buggy, up to todays modern jet engines, then, and only then will space travel become 'the norm'. Prior to that, it's cheaper to go to mars than the moon for scientific probes that dont need to eat/breathe on the way out there. The landing deceleration at the moon, makes that trajectory more expensive than the transfer trajectory to mars, on a pound per pound basis.

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[displaced80]

Thanks for that! Not something I'd thought of before.

I'm by no means someone who underestimates the difficulty of space flight (I'm still pretty awed even by unmanned routine Arianne launches). But it's still something of a surprise (or maybe disappointment) to find how primitive our efforts are in the grand scheme of things.

I'm nothing more than an interested layman. From what you've said, it figures that (unsurprisingly!) propulsion is where we need to progress. Get that nailed, and the economics of everything else begins to fit... does that follow?

Assuming that's the case, I'd like to see robotic missions continue, alongside propulsion research to make other projects more useful/economical.

Some of the recent robotic missions have been great. Maybe we could do more. Would higher bandwidth comms be possible, so we could collect even more data, images and audio in higher fidelity... if only for the 'money shots' for the public?

Seeing as Slashdot has more than a handful of people who know their arse from their elbow in these matters, it seems like a good place to ask. Have we reached a point where we've exploited physics and materials as far as we can with our current knowlegde? Is it a case of plugging along with baby-steps in areas that we don't fully grasp until the next watershed advance?

I bet sometimes everyone wishes science developed just like in Civ3. Discovered X? Great! Now start work on Y and wait 10 turns :-)

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[NardofDoom]

Once you get out of LEO, it costs about the same to get to Mars as it does to get to the Moon. By launching from the moon you make the craft have to climb out of two gravity wells.

Oh, and where are we going to get the fuel for this Mars rocket? Earth, because there's no way to do in-situ propellant production on the moon. So we launch the craft, then all the fuel to get it to the Moon, then all the fuel to get it to Mars. This doesn't include, however, the hydrogen that will have evaporated off while in transit or on the surface.

If Chewbacca is a wookie, you must acquit.

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[NardofDoom]

Maybe we can use the moon for something... Perhaps it could be used as a gravity assist to give a Mars-bound craft a boost. With the right trajectory we'd only need a little more fuel than we'd need to get to L1...

Hrm...

Re:Moon as a platform for Mars?

[Ohreally_factor]

Which of course brings us to the whole central purpose of the Mars initiative -- to have some vague goal that is practicaly unreachable, as to ensure that the billions keep flowing into contractors' coffers, without them actually having to do much work at all.

I'd be extremely surprised if Halliburton doesn't either already have a Space Exploration division, or is planning one. This one reads as pure pork all the way down the line.

It's pretty pathetic how many are falling for this "shiny object" ploy. Even people whose opinions I normally respect seem to be buying the bullshit because it jibes with their science fiction fantasies.

The billion taco question is...

[Kenja]

Will Taco Bell be doing another of their brain dead marketing schemes and offer free food like sudstance if the Hubble hits an a given target?

Re:The billion taco question is...

[The Good Reverend]

The fact that you're still talking about it, and know it was Taco Bell, 4 years later is a pretty good sign that it's absolutely not a "brain dead marketing scheme". It was a no-lose situation for the company. Consider:

Situation 1: Target is missed. It still captures the public's imagination, gets people talking, makes people like you bring up the event years later. To marketing departments, this kind of exposure is exactly what they love.

Situation 2: Target is hit. They have to give away upwards of 300,000,000 tacos. Except, no where near everyone would go, and those that do would likely order a drink, burrito, or other side dish. Even if none of them did, it's still eyeballs and foot traffic, not to mention amazing amounts of publicity. That, and the promotion was insured.

That silly little $40,000 blow-up target is one of the best things that company every did for itself, second only to a talking dog.

Re:The billion taco question is...

[Mattintosh]

4 years later? Wha...?

I first saw this Taco Bell hit-the-target-win-a-prize thing this past year during the baseball playoffs. Game 3 of the NLCS (Cardinals vs. Astros) had one of these targets in Homer's Landing in Busch Stadium. Nobody hit it. :(

Re:The billion taco question is...

[aidoneus]

The hit-the-target promotion from Taco Bell began with the deorbiting of MIR in 2001. Here's an article from Salon about it.

Maybe...

[DrKyle]

Just because there isn't any room in the budget for them to fix Hubble, that doesn't necessarily mean the end. Congress approval has nudged NASA's priorities before, so prehaps the little telescope that could still has a chance.

Back To The Future

[ackthpt]

Back to the moon... like, why? There's no cheese there. It's doubtful there's really going to be any water. Maybe they can generate a lot of energy there (so how do you get it back to earth?)

Well. Might as wel brush up on Lunar Rails, get ready for developing the moon.

sorry, you didn't get the contract it went to halliburton

Re:Back To The Future

[Xshare]

You need to read the whole sentence, including the last 5 little words, which read: [i]"as a platform for Mars"[/i].

Re:Back To The Future

[ackthpt]

You need to read the whole sentence, including the last 5 little words, which read: [i]"as a platform for Mars"[/i].

Mars Rails!!!! =-)

NASA has it wrong

[Garbonzo Pitts]

NASA has consistently pushed the idea that manned space flight gets the public's attention. But the facts indicate otherwise. Photos from the Hubble and interplanetary probes appear on the front pages of newspapers and have a very high "ooh-ahh" factor. In contrast, the public doesn't seem to care at all about astronauts in the space station. Why would they care about people going back to the moon? They've seen those pictures already.

Re:NASA has it wrong

[ScentCone]

In contrast, the public doesn't seem to care at all about astronauts in the space station.

Well, I know this isn't actually true, but from the John Q Public point of view, the space station crews aren't actually doing anything except fixing the thing they're sitting in and in which they're not doing anything (except eating, apparently).

Of course, the space station, if funded and built as intended, would be a lot more bustly, but as it is now... no wonder no one thinks about it. You bet they'd be watching Mars-walks.

Re:NASA has it wrong

[digitalchinky]

Pictures of the moon landing - oh you mean the fake ones? (Ok I kid, I kid!)

Of course we've been into space, (and to the moon) otherwise what the hell am I pointing government satellite dishes at every day - 'cause I'm getting lots of signal in that direction.

Re:NASA has it wrong

[AKnightCowboy]

They care even less about the aeronatics side of NASA (you know, the first A in "NASA"?). The FY06 budget was briefed yesterday and it has huge aero cuts for aeronatics research centers. I wouldn't be suprised if at least 2 or 3 NASA centers close within the next 3 years to divert funds to this manned moon mission pipedream.

and one giant leap...

[Engineer Andy]

backwards for mankind.

It's a pity to lose such an excellent scientific tool without a replacement either in train or already deployed

Re:and one giant leap...

[Tod DeBie]

The replacement for Hubble is well underway. The James Webb Space Telescope is set for launch in 2011.

Re:and one giant leap...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a pity to lose such an excellent scientific tool without a replacement either in train or already deployed

It sure is.

Re:and one giant leap...

[Engineer Andy]

excellent. i display, once more, my ignorance and my tendency to jump to conclusions. thank you.

Re:and one giant leap...

[Pxtl]

Except that Webb is not a visible-light telescope. So no, a replacement for Hubble is not in the works.

Re:and one giant leap...

[Admiral Ackbar 8]

Yet you still got modded insightful... Your ignorance must be brilliance in diguise

Re:and one giant leap...

[Tod DeBie]

Well, yes and no. Yes, it is an IR telescope, but, its primary observation target when stars and galaxies first formed in the universe. Due to the expansion of the universe (thank you Dr. Hubble), the light from the objects formed at that time has been redshifted, so we need an IR telescope to see them. We will be looking at what was visible light at the time it was emitted. This is really important work, because we don't currently have any way to observe objects from this time period.

That said, while it does seem like common sense to keep Hubble going, because we obviously need top notch visible light telescopes, I guess we have to ask how good we could do today with that same money using ground based adaptive optics telescopes. For less than the price of one Hubble service mission, we could build the Giant Magellan Telescope.

Re:and one giant leap...

[haighworld]

And lest we forget:

http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/Kepler/kepler_inde x.html
http://herschel.jpl.nasa.gov/
http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/
http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/SIM/sim_index.html (Probably delayed a couple years due to new budget)

And for that matter, ground-based interferometry (http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/technology/techno logy_index.html) is very promising as well.

Re:and one giant leap...

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, I'm affraid that while partly technically accurate you've probably got the wrong end of the stick.

Yes, IAAA (astrophysicist & especially instrumentation), the reason we don't need another visible light space observatory is that most of the stuff in that frequency has been looked at and done, far more interesting now is IR, which can't be done from the ground due to the atmosphere. Ground based telescopes can now out perform the HST most stuff anyway, and the rest is such a small percentage that it simply isn't worth the cash, when we space spend it better elsewhere. Research budgets are limited and science is generally cash strapped.

It's not the end.

[Hrodvitnir]

Honestly, all this uproar over downing Hubble is a bit dramatic. It's not the end of space research. We'll keep sending up satellites and they'll keep getting better. There's just going to be a hole fore a few years where we won't get the type of data that hubble was able to provide.

We will put up a satellite to replace the Hubble. Space isn't going anywhere.

Re:It's not the end.

[nxtr]

>>Space isn't going anywhere

That's not what Einstein calculated...

Re:It's not the end.

[Tod DeBie]

The replacement for Hubble is well underway. The James Webb Space Telescope is set for launch in 2011.

Re:It's not the end.

[olafva]

The NASA James Webb Space Telescope" is "on the way". I've heard the
images it can obtain will make the Hubble images look like
junk. Let's move on to the future rather than dwell on the past!

Re:It's not the end.

[The Analog Kid]

The James Webb Space Telescope is not a replacement for the Hubble, as it only focuses on infrared while the Hubble covered many wavelengths.

Re:It's not the end.

[Kiryat Malachi]

JWST is not a full replacement for Hubble - it is primarily an IR scope, with some visible capability - it lacks certain wavelengths Hubble covers, like UV, which is one of the primary benefits of launching a space scope in the first place. The band in question, covered by Hubble but not JWST, is the 110nm-600nm band. JWST has significantly more infrared extension than Hubble, but infrared is one of the more usable windows from Earth, especially as adaptive optics techniques improve.

Basically, JWST is not a full Hubble replacement. A good thing to launch? Yes. But we'll definitely lose some capabilities in the bargain.

Re:It's not the end.

[Vulture101]

"We will put up a satellite to replace the Hubble. Space isn't going anywhere"

yeap, but i am , and i would like too see much more of space before my time comes

Re:It's not the end.

[headkase]

...but infrared is one of the more usable windows from Earth...
Infrared does not make it through the atmosphere in any fine detail.

Re:It's not the end.

[Kiryat Malachi]

And this is why we have adaptive optics, to correct for atmospheric distortion. Unlike UV, IR does make it through, just in a distorted fashion. We can correct for that distortion to an amazing extent, but the trick gets harder to do at shorter wavelengths, making it difficult to impossible at this time for optical.

Re:It's not the end.

[demachina]

I think its a product of having a bean counter as NASA administrator. NASA desperately needs to retire O'Keefe NOW because everyday he stays he is going to drive morale further in to the ground and further crater an agency that is almost past the point of no return. But I shudder to think what kind of loser and sycophant Bush will pick to replace him.

O'Keefe has NO background in aerospace and he has no grasp of what he's doing when it comes to space exploration or aeronautics. Closest he came was a stint as Navy secretary, here is his bio. I think Bush appointed him because he viewed NASA as a management problem to be cleaned up and he wasn't there because he has any vision for making NASA relevent again. As I recall when he arrived, they put NASA on a hard deadline to complete ISS launches, they even created a screen saver counting down the seconds until the next ISS launch deadline and they created an atmosphere where managers sacrificed Columbia because they were so busy obsessing over O'Keefe's bean counter deadline.

To O'Keefe the Hubble is:

- A safety problem

- An untidy accounting problem he needs to zero out

so he's willing to wast hundreds of millions of dollars to do nothing but burn it up in an orderly way.

As for the safety issue that O'Keefe is obesessing over, well you see he is a bean counter not a test pilot, not an engineer, not an astronaut, and he apparently can't cope with risk or danger. When Columbia crashed on his watch it so bent his head that its completely crippled his ability to move forward, and he, with the help of the commission that investigated Columbia has effectively crippled NASA's manned space program. At this point the shuttle can do nothing but fly back and forth to the ISS and then only very carefully and at great expense. The shuttle is essentially no more valuable than the ISS and the ISS has no value anyone can discern in its current crippled configuration and its deadend future.

The dangers of Hubble reentering on its own are wildly overblown. Fact is most its going to burn up and what doesn't is probably going to land in the middle of nowhere, most of the earth being empty. Columbia is a lot bigger than Hubble and it broke up over the U.S. and the debris didn't cause widespread loss of life. It is no more danger than a not particularly large meteor.

Wasting precious resources just to deorbit Hubble is insanity.

You can hold out hope all this will change with the holy grail, the CEV, but just note that the EARLIEST a manned CEV launch will launch is 2014 and that is assuming there aren't massive schedule slips which is the NASA/Boeing/Lockheed wat. That is ten years out just to put a small crew back in to space in a capsule. Apollo put men on the moon in less than ten years using now ancient technology and they were pushing back real frontiers and doing things never done before.

The CEV schedule alone is just completely pathetic. It has all the earmarks of an excuse to funnel large quantities of money in to the pockets of Lockheed and Boeing and never actually fly anything.

Re:It's not the end.

[Tod DeBie]

Well, yes and no. Yes, it is an IR telescope, but, its primary observation target when stars and galaxies first formed in the universe. Due to the expansion of the universe (thank you Dr. Hubble), the light from the objects formed at that time has been redshifted, so we need an IR telescope to see them. We will be looking at what was visible light at the time it was emitted. This is really important work, because we don't currently have any way to observe objects from this time period.

That said, while it does seem like common sense to keep Hubble going, because we obviously need top notch visible light telescopes, I guess we have to ask how good we could do today with that same money using ground based adaptive optics telescopes. For less than the price of one Hubble service mission, we could build the Giant Magellan Telescope.

If they get rid of hubble...

[Anonymous Coward]

...how will they know where Mars and/or the moon is?

So shortsighted

[eisenbud]

This is one of the few big budget scientific missions that's had a clear purpose. The space station -- not so much. The shuttle -- takes people to orbit for way too much money (though it would be nice if they could use it once more to fix Hubble.) This is one of the best possible uses of our space dollars, and it's sad that it's being ignored for high profile but not scientifically focused things.

Re:So shortsighted

[fmita]

You'd think with something like the hubble telescope at their disposal, they'd not be so short sighted...

Sad news ... Hubble Space Telescope, dead at 15

[Anonymous Coward]

I just heard some sad news on NASA radio - deep space observatory Hubble Space Telescope was found dead in its Earth orbit this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss it - even if you didn't enjoy its work, there's no denying its contributions to desktop wallpapers. Truly an American icon.

In other news...

[TheKidWho]

They decided to cancel the JIMO mission because of lack of funding. Those bastards...

Re:In other news...

[SlySpy007]

Where did you hear that? I know that SIM had a huge budget cut, but I haven't heard anytihng re: JIMO.

Re:In other news...

[TheKidWho]

http://www.space.com/news/nasa_budget_050207.html

This is a big loss in my opinion :-(

Re:In other news...

[SlySpy007]

Agreed. I'm not sure exactly what to make of the article, though. I know that in the past few weeks, there has been talk that there would need to be other smaller tech-demonstration missions before JIMO, but I was under the impression that the JIMO project office would remain open and functional. The article does not make it clear whether the current mission, as scoped, has been delayed for some demo missions, or if even the demo missions have been axed. I know some folks who work on JIMO, but haven't heard from them yet. I'm sure official word will come soon. It would be a great loss but not all that surprising, considering the fate of the last large project that was attempted (Europa Orbiter).

Upside

[eclectro]

If it hits the target everyone gets free tacos!

This makes utterly no sense.

[Cutriss]

So, sending a team of astronauts into space just over 600km away, still within the confines of the Van Allen belts, is terribly dangerous, but sending them out a minimum of 55M kilometres is safer?

This sort of mission was almost *routine* three years ago...and now it's "too risky". Those NASA people sure have turned into wusses. >.>

Re:This makes utterly no sense.

[TheGavster]

I want to know why the moon landing is slated for 2015-2020, while the last time we did it a) not really knowing how to do it and b) in like half the time. Repeating a past mission with modern tech should not be this difficult.

Re:This makes utterly no sense.

[bkrrrrr]

It's just politics. Servicing Hubble isn't good for the politicians. Wasting billions of dollars to show video of some guy putting an American flag on Mars is good for politicians. These "manned missions" are the stupidest idea ever.

Re:This makes utterly no sense.

[Tackhead]

> > apparently its not due to the monetary costs associated with fixing it, but rather the risks involved. NASA's new goals are now manned missions to the moon, as a platform for Mars."
>
> So, sending a team of astronauts into space just over 600km away, still within the confines of the Van Allen belts, is terribly dangerous, but sending them out a minimum of 55M kilometres is safer?

"Apparently, it's not due to the risks associated with it, but rather the monetary costs (and lobbying, and preliminary studies, and new opportunities to grow departments, and don't forget all those delicious juicy overruns in every congressional district) involved."

A bipartisan resolution declared "It's budget day! 2.6 trillion dollars! Who the fuck cares if any of this shit works?"

Re:This makes utterly no sense.

[pnewhook]

Because now that they know more, they know it is too dangerous.

For the Apollo flights, it was just sheer dumb luck that no solar flare occurred while they were outside the protection of the Earths magnetosphere. If it had the crew would have been killed instantly. Ignorance really was bliss in that case.

No protection from radiation is probably the primary reason why we can't go to Mars yet.

Re:This makes utterly no sense.

[Detritus]

It wasn't "sheer dumb luck". NASA knew about the problem and gave it a great deal of study in order to quantify the risks. The solar flares of the magnitude that could have killed the astronauts are very rare events.

Re:This makes utterly no sense.

[cgenman]

Remember, the apollo missions were taking 10% of GDP for the 10 years or so it was active. I doubt this mission will get that kind of funding.

Plus you're talking about a space agency that goes trolling on eBay for parts to older systems. If they're going to do a moon mission, they're going to have to modernize. Which means re-making a lot of what they had done with a lot of different technology providers.

Re:This makes utterly no sense.

[dbIII]

I want to know why the moon landing is slated for 2015-2020

Because that is well after the length of the current administration - so an announcement can be made but little has to be done yet.

Re:This makes utterly no sense.

[FleaPlus]

Four reasons I can think of:

1. They had pretty much all the funding they could possibly want.

2. Much greater safety paranoia. When the crew of Apollo 1 was killed, NASA fixed the problem and moved on with the program. They didn't paralyze their manned spaceflight program, go into a period of national mourning, and launch congressional investigation committees.

3. Von Braun and the other German rocket geniuses who essentially designed and built the rockets they used are just about all dead. Granted, there's some folks around who trained under them, but there's no one with their sheer amount of experience.

4. NASA is much more diversified now than it used to be. Back then, landing on the moon was their one and only goal, and they were able to focus all their resources towards achieving that goal. Nowadays, it's almost impossible to cancel old programs and refocus on something else, because some constituency is going to have NASA's head on a platter.

Re:This makes utterly no sense.

[FleaPlus]

One more reason I thought of...

The last time around, all they cared about was getting on the moon. This time, we want to not only land a brief mission on the moon, but we want to create a permanent, self-sustaining settlement there. We want to be sure that the systems we develop are not just going to be suitable for a one-shot quick landing, but that they'll also be useful for a permanent moon settlement.

Re:This makes utterly no sense.

[hcdejong]

they're going to have to modernize
No. They need reliable equipment, not necessarily bleeding-edge technology. The problem is that things like ICs have a production/upgrade cycle that's shorter than the lead time for a spacecraft.
The same goes e.g. for military aircraft and missiles: by the time an IC is tested sufficiently for military or space use, it's out of production.
This is why the US govt keeps an old CPU production line (80386?) open, and why Nasa trolls eBay.

Re:This makes utterly no sense.

[grozzie2]

there's more to it than that. it's actually about die size. When you get the tighter dies you see on modern processors, an impact from a gamma particle is guaranteed to cause a short between 2 traces on chip. The older die sizes have wider spacings on die, so a gama particle actually fits between the traces, meaning it will NOT bridge 2 of them, even if it hits one right on the edge. The same holds true across much of the spectrum of ic's, modern stuff just uses to tight of a silicon matrix for it to be useful in the hard radiation environment.

Many many years ago, i was working with a company that owned a few foundries. One of the projects was quite exciting, it was going to be the first chip they produced using 0.8 micron stuff, a big deal in those days. During my tenure there, I met a venture vulture, and he was quite proud of the fact he had just purchased an old foundry in an eastern bloc country. it was very old, and the best they could do there was to produce 5 micron stuff. i told him he was crazy, and he laffed, said 'come back in 6 months, I'll show you how to be crazy like a fox.' Sure enough, 6 months later, he was the proud owner of a number of military contracts to provide small volume production of very old chip designs, at absolutely exhorbitant prices.

funny..

[Feyr]

NASA being american... and the news of this big mission being announced by the.. CBC? (that's Canadian Broadcast Channel for those in the dark)

Re:funny..

[Anonymous Coward]

Woohoo! I thought there was something odd about NASA's budget being reported on by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation... maybe they are just more informed! :P

Re:funny..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the "Canadian Broadcasting Corporation", you mean... =)

Yay for Canada getting a mention on slashdot.

Re:funny..

[Pxtl]

We Canadians seem to like your space program more than you do... but then again, maybe that's cause we don't have to pay for it, just stick big arms on everything you build.

Re:funny..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Re:funny..

[Feyr]

actually, i'm canadian :) just poking a little bit of fun at them

Re:funny..

[Feyr]

yep my bad, honestly i never looked up what the C at the end was for :)

Re:Scientific payoff - Payout, you mean

[ackthpt]

I am not sure the payoff of killing Hubble in favor of manned missions to Mars are currently worth it.

Yeah, wait until you see Hubble Debris for sale on eBay... that's how they really plan to fund lunar and mars missions.

strange, it says paid to *HALLIBURTON...

Risk??

[Anonymous Coward]

They said the reason is not cost but risk but yet they suggest going to the moon. Is the travel to moon that much easier? Pls explain

There is no deorbit module

[johnny cashed]

the idea is to bring it down while they still have "robotic" control. There is no robot to send up to bring it down. They want to be able to command it down, in a nice target path, not some crapshoot deorbit when it goes bad and they can no longer control it due to gyroscope failure. BTW my father worked on pointing and control on Hubble. I'm no expert, but I've spent many nights asking him a lot of questions about Hubble.

Re:There is no deorbit module

[Odo]

> There is no robot to send up to bring it down. They want to be able to command it down [...] BTW my father worked on pointing and control on Hubble. I'm no expert, but I've spent many nights asking him a lot of questions about Hubble.

Oh man, you seriously need to have another chat with your dad. Hubble can point itself in any direction thanks to its gyros. But it doesn't have any engines. It couldn't deorbit itself if it wanted to. They have full control over where Hubble looks, but not where it goes. To deorbit Hubble you need a robotic deorbit module (aka a rocket).

For more information, see this page:

HUBBLE ROBOTIC VEHICLE DEORBIT MODULE (HRVDM)
Contract Award Date: DTD 092404
Contract Award Number: CNT NNG05EA01C
Contract Award Amount: AMT $330,578,914
Contractor: TO Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company

[Off topic] While Googling for the above I found this generated ad:

Find HUBBLE DEORBIT MODULE at eBay
Looking for hubble deorbit module? eBay has great deals on new and used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods and more. If you can't find it on eBay, it probably doesn't exist.
http://www.eBay.com

Re:There is no deorbit module

[johnny cashed]

on Hubble there are reaction wheels and magnetic torquers. there are no thrusters. Hubble can manage its orbit with the reaction wheels and magnetic torquers which interact with the Earth's magnetic field. They cannot provide a large amount of force but like pushing a swing, a little push here and a little push there... Maybe use some atmospheric drag here and there... I would think that NASA would try to save money on hardware and try some orbital mechanics to bring it down without developing a "deorbit module" Kinda like Skylab. (ok Skylab had some thrusters, but it also had control moment gyros) I read the referenced article, no mention of a seperate "deorbit module" Some googling pointed to a proposed "deorbit module" that may cost up to $1bn. I think they will look long and hard at orbital mechanics to bring it down without the expense of a "deorbit module" but hey, I don't work for NASA. Hey, let's give lockmart some more tax money. Yes, I should talk to my father more!

Re:There is no deorbit module

[helioquake]

If the satellite is smaller, one would attempt to position a satellite to maximize its drag force with magnetic torquers and IRW. It makes it easier, too, if the Sun is active (*). By dragging it, it slows its revolution rate, which leads to decay in orbital altitude. We've downed satellites this way a few times. But the HST is probably too large to do this safely.

CGRO was designed to be de-orbited at its end and had a thruster. I guess NASA really was planning to bring the Hubble down with the Columbia, since it has none of that.

(*) when the Sun is very active, it puffs up the scale height of the atmosphere. In turn it increases the particle density in the low earth orbit, which leads to a greater drag force.

Re:There is no deorbit module

[adnoid]

If so, why would they bid this?

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=12847

Re:There is no deorbit module

[mbstone]

Why the "deorbit mission"? NASA need not even spend $10 on a spiral notebook for a formal procedure. Just let the sucker de-orbit itself. If they are worried about it not fully burning up in the atmosphere, and possibly hitting something, well, it would make a great target practice drone for some antimissile missile system gizmo.

Re:There is no deorbit module

[johnny cashed]

It seems the cheapest way would be send a shuttle to nudge it during a mission whose orbit could be coordinated with hubble's orbit at one point during a mission that isn't specifically hubble related. They could use the arm and the shuttle's manuvering thrusters and significantly alter its orbit. I assume all future shuttle missions will be ISS and maybe DoD related, in order to conserve a "precious resource" that is the Shuttle's remaining flying schedule. I'm guessing that hubble's orbit is more elliptical than ISS and in a higher overall orbit. Therefore, it would be difficult to coordinate a mission? Since they can't get more that 2 people on ISS at once!!??? Man, my old man worked on apollo, skylab, hubble, ISS and problably a few more. Apollo was great in every sense of the word. when I was a kid, telling people your dad worked on hubble, with its misshapen mirror, you would be teased. ISS was a death of a thousand cuts, with poorly defined mission(s), I believe it was a very politcal project (ISS) that left science at #2 on the priorities list. (Apollo was political at its formation, but there was good science getting us to the moon (and maybe make our missiles hit their targets better in the process)). It is National Aeronautics and Space Administration isn't it? Kinda vague... Sounds ambitious... Administration

Re:There is no deorbit module

[johnny cashed]

Ok, look that was originally a Service/Deorbit module. Service. That might be a useful goal. We can develop autonamous docking, advance robotics, maybe make a "space tugboat" with it and service other satellites. But I think the bean counters, could counter that satellites should be made disposible and let's not waste our time and money on manned missions to service satellites. However, Hubble should be a historical monument. Maybe I should write a proposal on a study to bring down hubble using software routines that uses its solar panels, magnetic torquers, reaction wheels, gravity, and some atmospheric drag to bring it down in a somewhat predictible and safe manner maybe over a period of several hundred orbits... My point is, people bid on a lot of things...

Re:There is no deorbit module

[georgewilliamherbert]

Why the "deorbit mission"? NASA need not even spend $10 on a spiral notebook for a formal procedure. Just let the sucker de-orbit itself. If they are worried about it not fully burning up in the atmosphere, and possibly hitting something, well, it would make a great target practice drone for some antimissile missile system gizmo.

They are worried about pieces of it not burning up and hitting something on the ground, which is why the deorbit mission has to provide a controlled over-water reentry path.

Blowing anything up in orbit releases large amounts of space debris. If you do that, eventually space debris impacts all the satellites in low earth orbit, and they all get broken.

So please, no target practice.

Re:There is no deorbit module

[helioquake]

You dad can fill you in with more details, but here are my 2 cents for now:

(1) the orbital altitude of the ISS, I believe, is higher than that of the Hubble. The structural size of the ISS is much greater than the Hubble, hence the ISS experiences more drag through air (yes, some air is up there and it matters). And actually everytime a shuttle visits to the ISS, the shuttle pushes it up to a higher orbit with the shuttle's thruster.

(2) I wouldn't think even DoD is using a shuttle from now on. The recommendation, I believe, is to use the remaining shuttles for the ISS mission only. Besides, DoD would do better with using expendable rockets. Much less cargo restriction.

(3) The hubble's orbit is close to circle. Very close.

(4) logistically too improbable to visit two targets per mission with any shuttle. The limits are (a) fuel and (b) mission complexity that astronauts can comfortably handle.

(5) The limit on the crew's number on the ISS depends on the availability of seats in emergency escape vehicle. Right now it's Soyuz space capsule. Until some nation develops a reentry vehicle bigger in capacity, there will be no more than 3 people on board the ISS. This is why the ISS is bound to fail as a laboratory. To me the ISS is a lifeline for the Russian federation (how else you'd justifiably fund Russian scientists to continue their work and feed themselves? Otherwise they'll hit the black market. I'm just guessing).

Sounds like you father works at NASCOM/GSFC.

Re:There is no deorbit module

[gnu-generation-one]

"If you can't find it on eBay, it probably doesn't exist."

Yep, the deorbiting robot probably fits into both of those categories...

will someone deorbit NASA?

[peter303]

They seem to have lost there way since OKeefe took charge three years ago. Space Shuttle mismanaged, Space Station mismanaged, now Hubble mismanaged. Only the Mars probes are doing well, probably because they are subcontracted outside of NASA.

Re:will someone deorbit NASA?

[Walkingshark]

You know, I'm stuck in bad karma hell for a post basically along the same lines as this one.

Sometimes I hate slashdot.

If they say it's not about money...

[SteeldrivingJon]

It's about money.

The budget Bush just submitted cuts the Hubble.

Risks too High?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Right, so we've heard the story - they don't want to send astronauts to Hubble because in case of damage to the shuttle they can't get into a higher orbit to dock with the ISS.

OK, fine, and I admit Hubble is probably too expensive to patch up and the money would be better spent on a new telescope.

But since sending Astronauts to Hubble is too risky they're going to send Astronauts to MARS instead? This does not compute.

Re:Risks too High?

[FleaPlus]

But since sending Astronauts to Hubble is too risky they're going to send Astronauts to MARS instead? This does not compute.

I disagree with not sending astronauts to Hubble, but the rationale is that the space shuttle itself (because of various design issues) is inherently much more unsafe than the Crew Exploration Vehicle will be. So yes, it's quite possible that sending astronauts to the Moon on a CEV (Mars is barely on the picture) would be safer than sending astronauts to Hubble on a Space Shuttle.

It's official...

[rasafras]

NASA is dead. When you claim risk and safety as a high priority for exploration and scientific conquest, you know you aren't going to get anywhere. Lewis and Clark didn't wait for the invention of the SUV before going cross-country, they just went ahead and did it.
I'm not saying that exploration should cut corners and put people in unnecessary danger, but there are astronauts willing to risk going up to do things like this. Face it, shooting somebody into the sky on a giant bomb is inherently unsafe, and that's something you've just got to accept. I understand that another accident for NASA would cut approval and potentially cost them far more money, and I'm saying that that's the problem. Trying to be unnecessarily safe is going to cost them far too much money, and that's money that they most likely don't have and won't have to spend.
(I was referring to the Mars mission as well)

Re:It's official...

[Anonymous Coward]

Going back nearly 60 years remember the Miles M52? British jet that was designed to be the first aircraft to break the sound barrier.

The British government scrapped the project claiming that it was "too dangerous" for the pilot, despite a long list of volunteers.

Thus the US and the Bell X1 got its place in history.

Change Britain to US and US to China and I think we have a changing of the guard on the way.

We're going to the Moon!

[TheOriginalRevdoc]

Yippee!

It's gonna be just the ISS. They'll spend billions designing amazing machines, the budget will be cut 50%, they'll redesign, the budget will be cut another 50%, they'll redesign again, then they'll put up a half-arsed end result that barely meets its mission requirements.

Then the astronauts will hang out on the moon, kicking rocks and wondering what the hell they're doing there. They'll do a trial collection of Helium 3, but there won't be any point, because there's no use for Helium 3, even if we could get it back to Earth.

Eventually, the engineers will admit publicly that getting to the moon doesn't contribute to getting to Mars in any meaningful way, but boy oh boy, the contractors sure made a shitload of cash off the project, didn't they?

And isn't that what American politics is all about?

Re:We're going to the Moon!

[jd]

Sorry, too slow. They're already cutting the funds for building the manned capsule. Chances are, by the time anything is actually built, they'll just dump the manned portion and stick some sort of flag-waving robot on the top.

They've also abandoned the mission to Jupiter and pretty much all research into nuclear propulsion systems, which means that there's not a hope in hell of building a rocket capable of getting people to Mars and back before they've all gone nuts from confinement.

Re:We're going to the Moon!

[wass]

They'll do a trial collection of Helium 3, but there won't be any point, because there's no use for Helium 3, even if we could get it back to Earth.

Interesting comment, I use He3 (in closed systems) almost every day in my lab. He4 liquefies at 4.2K, but that's a bit too toasty for probing certain quantum coherence interactions and quantum phase transitions. A liter of liquid He4 costs about $4 (liquid nitrogen, at 77K, is cheaper than milk). But a gaseous liter of He3 is several hundred dollars.

We've got a sorption-pumped He3 refrigeration system that uses a closed-cycle He3 unit for evaporative cooling, and the whole things sits in a dewar of He4 at 4.2K. Can get to temperatures of about 250 mK.

When we need to go colder we employ a dilution refridgerator, which uses a carefully-tuned mixture of He3/He4, and can create a phase separation between a dilute and condensed mixture of the two helium isotopes. By crossing the phase boundary from the condensed to dilute phase, one can absorb heat from a sample (very similar to standard air conditioner cycling). We can get down to about 10 mK with this system, but it'll take you all day and lots of prep work to just to load and cool one sample.

So yeah, the cryogenics community would love getting more He3. It's really rare here on Earth, but it would be really cool to have more of this stuff. I don't know what other industries would make use of it, but it would probably find other useful applications.

Re:We're going to the Moon!

[TheOriginalRevdoc]

Damn you, finding a hole in my rant!

My reference was to He3 being used for fusion, even though we don't have fusion reactors that can use the stuff.

Using it for cryogenics is another matter, but I'm not sure that it's worth going to the moon for it. It's actually quite rare there, too, but ubiquitous, like gold in seawater.

Re:We're going to the Moon!

[Anonymous Coward]

Got it in one!

The new US space initiative is a con.

Major parts of NASAs activities are being phased out (Shuttle, ISS, Hubble) and new programs are to be to concentrated on a moon/Mars shot.

Except that the US is already running a colossal deficit, the administration is going to cut expenditure to the bone, and there isn't a hope in hell that the money required for the missions will take place. There'll be money for (endless) studies, and maybe another LEO capsule (CEV) with some military applications. And that will be it, at least until China or the ESA/Russians get serious.

Re:We're going to the Moon!

[FleaPlus]

They've also abandoned the mission to Jupiter and pretty much all research into nuclear propulsion systems

Could you point out where you saw that "pretty much all research into nuclear propulsion systems" has been abandoned? I heard about them (effectively) cancelling JIMO (the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter), but I'm under the impression that Project Prometheus (for nuclear-powered space probes) is still ongoing.

This makes perfect sense to me. It really doesn't make sense to use a prototype nuclear reactor on a huge space probe already packed with plenty of (expensive) instruments. It makes much more sense to first test the reactor design on something far simpler.

Ok, I just found a quote from a BBC article:

The multi-billion dollar Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (Jimo) mission was to have been launched in about 2015 as a demonstration for the Project Prometheus nuclear power and propulsion initiative.

It would have gone into orbit around the giant planet and its moons, possibly putting landers on their surfaces in much the same way as Cassini has done with Huygens on Titan.

Nasa officials now say Jimo is too ambitious an undertaking for an initial demonstration project, and a search for an alternative mission is underway.

"These big missions always have ups and downs," commented Professor Fred Taylor, from Oxford University, UK, and a scientist on the Galileo mission to Jupiter in the 1990s.

"At this stage it was always just a study - and when approved missions get cancelled, then one should really get upset.

"If the alternative is a cheaper mission that would go more quickly, we might get more science faster. If the current study is uncovering a serious viability problem then we might be better off backing off and looking for other solutions," he told BBC News.

Re:We're going to the Moon!

[wass]

Yeah, I was just giving a rough semi-relevent response to show that He3 does indeed have uses here on Earth. But of course whether it's actually efficient to mine it on the moon and transport back to Earth, and if the cryogenics community is really large enough to justify that, is a whole different matter, which I cannot answer.

But hey, I was fiddling with a He3 fridge as you wrote that, so I had to give at least some response!

Sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

space is nice to look at. But don't you want to go there?

Goodbye

[mboverload]

Hubble will go down is history as one of the most important space missions ever. It has proved invaluable to the scientific community and a generation has grown up with it flying over-head.

Goodbye Hubble, you will be missed =(

Baby with the bathwater?

[fygment]

We have Hubble which:

1) captured the public imagination. How many posters have you seen bearing pictures from SOHO, Chandra, or any IR camera? How many kids turned on to astronomy after seeing a Keck picture?

2) is known to a huge swath of the public. How many know of SOHO?

3) has a very positive track record. How much bad publicity has Hubble generated for NASA? It was recovered heroically from its intial flaws and has performed stunningly ever since.

In its place:

1) a cosmologists dream machine (read: pictures in the IR that show little blobs of the early universe). Not for public consumption.

2) no inspiring name has been fielded though there is time to fix that. NGST? But Hubble was the first so NGST faces an uphill battle.

3) a telescope many people don't want so money can be diverted to a mission fraught with more danger and potential bad publicity than a space walk.

So getting the axe is: a popular, inspiring, positive public face for NASA. In its place, an item on the drawing boards to free up cash for a truly extreme mission. Begging the question, can NASA make any good decisions?

Re:Baby with the bathwater?

[helioquake]

It is not just at fault of the NASA as an organization. I'd dare say that the failure results from a lack of strong vision and support for fundamental science by a NASA director. It is becoming an institution for engineering, though its general objectives are being defined by the interest groups outside the government.

We need another NASA director like James Webb who had clear vision for the future of NASA and strong voice in the Capitol Hill.

Of course, it is best if we have support from the greater audience, such as yourself. Remember, any superpower nation dies when it loses grips on the supremacy in technology and science.

Thanks.

Re:Baby with the bathwater?

[jstockdale]

Begging the question, can NASA make any good decisions?

You're forgetting, they have to answer to the US Government. So I guess your actually getting at the question of whether the US Government can make any good decisions.

I leave the answer as an exercise for the reader (Hint: No.)

-S ...

PS. To be honest ... given NASA's budgetary, political, and social constraints ... I'm just impressed that they manage to get any science done at all.

Re:Baby with the bathwater?

[digitalchinky]

I'm thinking the average person goes 'ohhh pretty colours - those space people sure are good with computers and stuff'

The average person cares not about where the image came from, but simply the impression it has on them as an individual. The massive public probably wouldn't notice too much if hubble no longer existed. This does not imply that it is in any way acceptable! Since your statements above are indeed true for the scientific community that has benifited most of all. (I'm thinking that last sentence might cause flames, not meaning to though.)

Sure, the hubble is cool and all, but I don't 'feel' it the same way people do with a much stronger connection to astronomy. It would be great to see it stay up for a few extra years, sadly, I think much of the 'replacement' talk is hot air.

Throw some tech up there now, surely it's not that hard to slap on a few extra cameras or filters to these replacements.

I personally don't get all hung up on the money side of it - more of a star trek utopian view where people can get whatever they want, so they work simply because they 'want to' - free in a sense. (Ok, so this is likely never going to happen, since the logic of it doesn't really pan out)

Re:Baby with the bathwater?

[mbrother]

There were problems at NASA under Dan Goldin (e.g., the realization that onlt 2 out of 3 was possible with "better, faster, cheaper"), but I miss his vision. He gave talks at astronomy meetings (and other places, too) that were cutting edge, looking forward to great things. Inspiring. His strengths are all the more apparent in comparison to current NASA leadership.

O'Keefe is apparently on his way out, but I haven't heard any specific rumors about his replacement.

The Conservatives Are Afraid...

[MrSoundAndVision]

Hubble will find life is my personal guess. That and Hubble doesn't kill people, which means it's essentially useless to the lot running things now. With more than half of the budget going to "defense" spending, the quest for knowledge takes a back seat, like so many other things, such as the elderly, social and racial inequality, and the pursuit of hapiness.

Re:The Conservatives Are Afraid...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, November called, it wants its Red State vs. Blue State bullshit back.

Re:The Conservatives Are Afraid...

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea to limit Slashdotters to 700,000 does not sound so bad after all

I know I'm showing my age by mentioning this...

[cutecub]

...but I think I'll have to dust off my old "Official SkyLab Target" T-Shirt.

Seeing as the Government usually can't hit the broad side of a planet, its a pretty fair bet that making myself a target ( again ) will prevent any possibility of me getting hit by Hubble when it crashes.

Cue SNL video of John Belushi smashing his SkyLab model into a Globe of the Earth

Uh Oh!

[lbmouse]

Do we need to put pillows on our roofs?

M.A.R.S. Mars, bitches!

[mcguyver]

- Dave Chappelle in 'The Black President'
Googled Videos

Oh...

[LinuxGeek]

I thought you were going to say So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish

later they'll be announcing....

[the-build-chicken]

...de-velocity, de-location and all de-other information

Re:I feel safer already...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why yes, yes I do feel safer. I'm glad the federal government is spending less on all these extraneous programs that can better be done with private and charitable dollars and devote more resources on military and homeland interests. We need to keep the USA the greatest military power the world has ever seen.

The federal government shouldn't be in the business of fully funding every special interests needs.

Oh my Hubble.

[Guy LeDouche]

So long, and thanks for all the crab nebulae.

tektites, anyone?

[jpellino]

that's one honkin' big piece of glass... 1 ton, melts at about 1500F...

Not Much, but...

[SparksMcGee]

Goodbye, Hubble, from all of us. Like many an upstanding nerd I spent my youth wanting to be an astronaut (not like I still wouldn't jump at the chance) and albeit like many my dire need of glasses, among other things, disqualifies me for the position, you brought space closer to all of us even if we couldn't necessarily be there in person. May the spirit of pure science you emobdied continue and may the world not forget that it's programs like NASA and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake that makes humanity great.

Anyone

[The Dobber]

getting the feeling that NASA is becoming the ADD kid of our guberment. First it's a shuttle, then it's a space station, let's go to the moon, wait Mars is fun, hey I wanna intercept a meteor and have fun with math.

Let's piss away some money on rockets that go kablooey and ones that fall over. Big bouncy balls and little rovers that could.

Maybe it's just a big play toy for the Texan.

A tragic end to a great piece of work.

[Rimbo]

Hubble was one of the first casualties of the Challenger explosion. Remember that the first thing that needed to be fixed was a flawed mirror?

While I was in undergrad at UT, I was an officer in the local SEDS chapter, where Dr. Hans Mark explained that the mirror was known to be flawed before it was launched. When the Challenger exploded, NASA shut down everything. Hubble remained, unrepaired, in a dark warehouse somewhere. When they got the HST program back up and running, they'd long forgotten their problem with the mirror.

HST was a great idea, but there were some big screwups attached to it.

Re:A tragic end to a great piece of work.

[TheSpunkyEnigma]

Ahh, Dr. Marks, most memorable class I ever had at the University was a Freshman Seminar he taught titled "The Future of Space Exploration". The guy had been everywhere in NASA and the Air Force, great stories.

Re:A tragic end to a great piece of work.

[Ancient_Hacker]

Uh, no, according to the guy in charge, they didnt know the mirror was flawed. It wasnt kept in a dark warehouse, it was a lighted and temp controlled clean room. And no, they didnt "forget" about the problem with the mirror.

Punch line!

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."

Actually, if you think about it, while this as a still a lame joke, it's not offtopic, just lame (and, shouldn't Slashdot have "lame" as a mod possibility?). OK, here it is... Hubble is a big _EYE_ with a vision problem, and the Anonymous Coward says "Nothing for you to see here..."

So lame it's funny!

Telescope on the Moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to see them build a base on the moon. From that point it would be easier to lauch to different palces and allow a lot of research. From what I understand the newest telescopes on earth can see almost as much (maybe more?) as hubble. So if we built one of those huge telescopes on the moon (no atmosphere, stable ground) then we could see a long way. Just daydreaming out loud.

More scientific frontiers shut down by Bushco

[Rooktoven]

Sadly, not unexpected. All for wars and the mArs pipe dream.

Re:More scientific frontiers shut down by Bushco

[AlgUSF]

People probably called manned missions to the moon, "Kennedy's Pipe-Dream". Right?

Re:More scientific frontiers shut down by Bushco

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is, Kennedy actually funded the moon landing, Bush is just using this mars crap as a PR stunt, and has no intention of providing adequite funding to see it through. But it won't matter because his second term will be over longer before NASA is forced to admit they cannot possibilty carry out a mars mission given their current resources.

Fuck Bush.

Re:More scientific frontiers shut down by Bushco

[fingusernames]

Yes, and I'm sure they also whined and moaned about all the money being wasted, that could feed hungry, poor masses.

Larry

Re:More scientific frontiers shut down by Bushco

[AlgUSF]

You aren't biased are you.. :-) I bet no matter what he does is wrong to you, because he has an (R) after his name.

Hubble Pop

[Doc Ruby]

Hubble is good for people, American citizens. It's some of the most valuable marketing our space programs have had since we landed on the Moon. But that's irrelevant in the face of massive government subsidy of industrializing the Moon and Mars. I'm all in favor of both those goals, especially faced with competition from China, and maybe India, Russia, Japan or Europe. But it would have been a lot easier, and more fun, to bring everyone along on the adventure, if we were sending snapshots from space back to the folks at home, to keep them inspired.

Re:Hubble Pop

[Anonymous Coward]

There will be otheer telescopes. On the Moon for example, where it can be more easily serviced assuming a base. And the astronauts will have cameras. And therre's the upcoming James Webb scope. And adaptivee optics Earthside get better every day.

Hubble is a tool at thee end of it's life. We should salute it and move on.

One small step for man...

[Anonymous Coward]

One giant poke in the eye for mankind.

Reason No1 for going to Mars

[Rande]

"The entire planet is a desert! With all that desert, there's gotta be oil!"

Re:Reason No1 for going to Mars

[TapeCutter]

Wait until they realise Titan is an earth sized tar pit.

Re:Reason No1 for going to Mars

[loubear]

Reason number six, actually.

First in a while

[Lawrence_Bird]

that hasn't greatly exceeded its planned operational life.
Pioneer, Viking, Voyager, etc... Though in the Rubble's case
I have to say its been precarious its whole life. How many
service missions did they do on it, aside from the mirror
fix? As someone else posted a few days ago.. we can make
a new replacement for cheaper.

NASA = Nerds, Accountants & Scared Administrat

[ShagratTheTitleless]

Dear NASA,

Where the Fuck did the Engineers go. If the space shuttle is too fucking dangerous to use, redesign it or stop using it. I do not understand why it has not been refined over the years in major ways. If it is too dangerous to visit the Hubble, then it is too dangerous to visit that ISS erector set shit. I know, if something went wrong the shuttle would be in the wrong orbit for the ISS. Well fill the empty shuttle bay with fuel and make a burn to change orbit. Shuttle can't do it..then redesign that loaf so it can. If the hubble is not worth a possible death then have the balls to say so instead of coming up with ridiculous cost estimates to prevent a mission. And by the way...when you go to colonize the moon and visit mars, men will die. They do everytime something extremely hard is tried. Consider it a miracle if they do not. If you can not come to grips with this truth then please resign from NASA.

The Future has to start sooner or later...

[emjoi_gently]

They went to the moon in the 1960's, when I was a little kid.

Now I'm a middle aged man....I'm getting old here, and we still haven't even got back to the moon yet. 2020? I'll be in my fifties. And then will a manned landing on Mars be even in my lifetime?

The future isn't moving forwards fast enough.

Re:The Future has to start sooner or later...

[Bingo Foo]

The future isn't moving forwards fast enough.

Sounds like the future is moving forwards, but you wish it would stay put so we can catch up.

Re:The Future has to start sooner or later...

[emjoi_gently]

Ahem, yes. After I posted I realized my English had failed me in that sentence.

Re:The Future has to start sooner or later...

[refactored]

You are so right, if I had mod points you'd have them.

But the Hubble, now that was so worthwhile.

I'm genuinely deeply upset to see the Hubble go.

I feel we're moving into one of those tacky dystopias where cars are all noise and futuristic styling, but the drivers are pedalling.

Our ground telescopes are really coming along!

[Whalonski]

Hubble has been great, but at some point NASA with it's limited resources has to shut it down. With the money it would take to repair it, I wonder what we could do with improved ground scopes similar to VLT or Keck? Interferometry is really making ground based scopes powerful!!

Re:Our ground telescopes are really coming along!

[pnewhook]

What would happen is we would get really clear images of relatively close bright objects, and never see what Hubble can see.

Ground based telescopes cannot take images such as Hubble Ultra Deep Field. These images helped prove the age of the universe, find dark matter and look back to almost when the universe was created.

Re:Our ground telescopes are really coming along!

[mbrother]

But the money it would take to repair Hubble is NOT going toward other telescopes, ground-based or not. It's just going...to where all the rest of that money goes, interest on the debt. Or foreign wars. One of those two for sure.

Re:Our ground telescopes are really coming along!

[grozzie2]

Paying interest on the debt is what happens, when society overspends for a couple of generations. It's only getting worse now too. The generation coming along now is going to have to do without Hubble, but, they will be straddled with paying for it. I hope they wake up to the reality of it all, and get the house in order over the next 20 years, so they dont hand an even worse mess off to thier kids. Maybe then, that generation will once again have enough excess to be able to do things like having cool space telescopes. For now, we'll have to settle for paying interest, and buying lots and lots of ammunition for the military.

We're going to the moon again because...

[Anonymous Coward]

we like the moon
coz it is close to us
we like the moooon!
but not as much as a spoon
cuz that's more use for eating soup
and a fork isn't very useful for that
unless it has got many vegetables
and then you might be better off with a
chop-stick
unlike the moon
it is up in the sky
it's up there very high
but not as high
as maybe
dirigibles or zeppelins
or lightbulbs
and maybe clouds
and puffins also I think maybe
they go quite high too
maybe not as high as the moon
coz the moon is very high
we like the moon
the moon is very useful for everyone
everybody likes the moon
because it lights up the sky at night
and its lovely
and it makes the tide go and we like it
but not as much as cheese
we really like cheese
we like zeppelins
we really like them
and we like kelp and we like moose
and we like deer and we like marmots
and we like all the fluffy animals
we really like the moon!

Re:We're going to the moon again because...

[hyperstation]

perfect, mod parent up.

it's a messed up way to say it, but maybe this is a metaphor for the current state of NASA

My age, too

[yndrd]

I made helmets for my stuffed animals out of plastic soda bottle bottoms (the new-fangled invention of the era, if I recall).

It's kind of sad that my first memory of the space program is being vaguely scared it was going to crash down on me.

Major mistake...

[drdreff]

Setting aside for the moment the foolishness of decommissioning the Hubble, we've paid a lot to get that mass into orbit. One of the easiest ways to affect the orbit of a near earth object (read killer asteroid) is to throw a large mass at it. The HST may not be very large but it is an orbital mass that could be used in an emergency. Mir was a larger mass but we dropped that one too.

The only downside to keeping the HST up is the continued littering of our orbit by debris that damages other birds. My solution to that is to push the HST into a much higher orbit, outside the debris belt.

If we drop the HST the next large mass we could use to alter the trajectory of a NEO is the ISS.

Re:Major mistake...

[The Master Control P]

By the time a potential impactor is close enough for the ISS or Hubble to be maneuvered into impact with it, the danger is either past or it's so close we can't avoid a collision. And there's nothing a few tons of mass moving a few kilometers per second will do to hundreds of thousands of tons of mass moving tens of kilometers per second.

Re:Major mistake...

[drdreff]

Granted, if you wait until the asteriod is close enough to Earth we're in trouble by any account. My argument is that the mass is already in orbit, and to affect ant real change you would need to accelerate that mass and exert a greater force on the asteroid. It would be much cheaper to move an orbital mass then to attempt to increase the force by ither means.

force = mass * acceleration

The easiest way to increase the force exerted is to increase the mass. Smarter people than I have used the same math to determine a possible defense. Space.com has an on a mission to study this exact defense.

Put simply, if we're going to move a rock by throwing rocks at it, we should use the biggest rocks we have. Deorbiting the HST shortsightedly takes that rock away.

Yes, it would reach halfway to the sun...

[leonbrooks]

a space elevator on the moon would have to be ridiculously long

...but would never touch the Earth.

Makes no sense to me

[Rick Genter]

I just can't see how fixing the Hubble is more risky than a manned mission to the Moon, never mind Mars. While the Shuttle has so far had an approximately 1-in-60 failure rate, we haven't launched a manned craft beyond Earth orbit in over 30 years, and I'm sure they're not going to bring an old Saturn V out of mothballs for the first Moon mission.

So, is it really more dangerous to ride a 25+-year-old Space Shuttle design that's flown over 100 times to orbit and rendezvous with the Hubble than it is to ride a brand new design past escape velocity on a multi-week (Moon) or multi-year (Mars) mission?

Re:Makes no sense to me

[oneiron]

You're looking at it from the wrong angle.. The moon->mars initiative is NASA's new direction. The risk is that an accident while repairing hubble could endanger that new direction. Fixing hubble would be a detour in funding and technology...a potentially costly detour considering the newly proclaimed direction of the program.

Re:Makes no sense to me

[jammindice]

First it's too much money to fix, now it's too dangerous

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/05/221 0251&tid=164&tid=160&tid=14

Why don't we just replace it along the way on one of those missions to the moon like the slashdot article above says. It would

A: be cheaper
B: be safer
C: not hinder other plans as easily


Since it could be "dropped off" on other missions, maby even build one there, zero g is supposed to be better for making some things, and i know the moon doesn't have zero g but would provide a good base of operations for things like that (as well as the international space station)

Just IMHO i would like to visit the moon, but i do think it's time to upgrade hubble + make it better.

__

In the great NASA tradition. . .

[Zobeid]

Saturn V
Skylab
Hubble

Whenever you get something that's a really huge engineering success or scientific success -- or both -- you proceed to scrap it. Then apply the money saved to other programs that are on their way to becoming hopeless boondoggles (re: shuttle, ISS, Moon-Mars initiative).

We need newer, safer ships

[Anonymous Coward]

That didn't stop them from servicing it before.

NASA made many wild promises about how safe the Shuttle is. If you read Richard Feynman's book What Do You Care What Other People Think?, where he talks about the Challenger investigation, he tells that NASA had promised five-nines safety (99.999% safe, or you lose one Shuttle in every 10,000 flights). In order to get that estimate, multiple subsystems had to be even more reliable than that; some parts of Shuttle were said to be eight nines reliable. Is anything made by humans that reliable? Obviously, he pointed out, they were cooking the books so that the math would come out to the answer they wanted; they started with the desire to prove the Shuttle to be five nines safe, and worked backwards from that.

Two horrible Shuttle accidents later, the world is pretty sure that the Shuttle is not five nines safe. And a repair mission to an orbit where they cannot possibly make it to the space station if something goes wrong has been deemed an unacceptable risk.

This safety stuff is all crap. The space shuttle is still WAY safer than traving in the car to get it.

Um, no. Henry Spencer, who knows quite a lot about this stuff, estimates that the Shuttle is only about two nines safe. In other words, for every 100 times the Shuttle flies, you should expect to lose one.

Note that losing a shuttle does not necessarily mean that all the people on board the shuttle at the time will die. For example, if the landing gear fails, the shuttle can get banged up too badly to ever fly again, but the crew should walk away from the wreck.

Cars are far, far safer than the Shuttle. Airplane travel is in turn far, far safer than cars.

The correct thing to do is to start working now on an improved Hubble replacement, and offer a huge cash bounty to anyone who can deliver it to the correct orbit. Let's see if Scaled Composites, Armadillo Aerospace, XCOR, or anyone else can build a machine that can do it.

I hate the Shuttle. It consumed way too much money, and Shuttle politics killed off all competition, and on top of that the damned thing is a death trap. There is only one thing good I have to say about the Shuttle: we have several of them, and they work (not as safely as I wish but they do work).

There is something important you need to realize about the Shuttle: there is no amount of money that you can spend to get another one. They are done. It would be just as hard (i.e. just as easy) to build something new and better as to build another Shuttle. At one time we had the ability to build more Shuttles, but no more. The skills have been lost. There is a whole bunch of stuff that would have to be figured out all over again, and it's not going to happen.

We need small, reusable ships that can carry small payloads to orbit cheaply. We also need a few heavy-lift rockets that can get big things up there. (Not as important as you may think; if we really had a "pickup truck to space" we could sent almost anything up in modular pieces.)

Right now we need the Shuttle to keep the space station going. We need to fly a few careful shuttle flights per year towards that end, and maybe launch some science sattelites. But in just a few years we could have a fleet of little ships that can fly to orbit much more cheaply and safely than the Shuttle ever did, and that is the goal to drive towards.

Sadly, NASA cannot be trusted to develop any practical space ships; it has become a bureaucratic nightmare. Individuals at NASA may be smart and may get things done, but as a whole NASA is now useless. That's why we need to offer bounties and let companies like Scaled Composites go for them.

Why not boost Hubble to higher orbit?

[wildsurf]

As long as they're sending a booster to Hubble, why not just boost it into a higher orbit, where it can stay parked for another several years, at which time we might have better means to do something useful with it?

Perhaps even bring it down safely for museum display?

It seems like a waste to send the booster all the way up there just to destroy the telescope.

Re:Why not boost Hubble to higher orbit?

[arbitraryaardvark]

Good idea. All we have to do is get there before the feds do. I'll pledge $100 towards that. Sort of a slashdot prize. What is the deadline?

I know NaSA was looking at one to two billion for the repair mission - could it be done for $10 million? 100 million?
Within the budget of the movie we'd make about it?
What would a slightly used Hubble bring on e-bay?

Re:Why not boost Hubble to higher orbit?

[MortgageMan]

I had the same idea the last time there was talk of bringing hubble down.

I don't understand why we can't push Hubble to a higher orbit to by time, or even push it waaayy up and leave it as an in space museum for future generations to retrieve if/when they wish...

--Richard

Re:Why not boost Hubble to higher orbit?

[JungleBoy]

Perhaps even bring it down safely for museum display?

Hubble was scheduled to be brought down and put in the smithsonian. In fact, the display mount is already in the air & space museum (or was a couple years ago when I visited). The problem is that the Colombia was the only shuttle decked out to down mass the Hubble. All the other orbiters are setup with an airlock and docking port for the ISS. Hubble won't fit in the cargo hold of those orbiters now.

Re:Why not boost Hubble to higher orbit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't it assembled? Can't it be brought down in separate components?

Re:Why not boost Hubble to higher orbit?

[Chrontius]

Hell with sending it down to earth, establish the first orbiting museum!

Re:Why not boost Hubble to higher orbit?

[toddestan]

The problem is that the Colombia was the only shuttle decked out to down mass the Hubble. All the other orbiters are setup with an airlock and docking port for the ISS. Hubble won't fit in the cargo hold of those orbiters now.

Why not modify one of the shuttles so it can service and/or deorbit Hubble? It can't be that much money, and even if the end result is a shuttle that's basically only good for servicing Hubble - it's not like the shuttles are doing anything useful as they are right now.

Re:Why not boost Hubble to higher orbit?

[fingusernames]

No, it was not assembled in orbit.

Larry

Re:Why not boost Hubble to higher orbit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps H.L. Mencken has something to say about your suggestions?

Re:Why not boost Hubble to higher orbit?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see why we can't and shouldn't do this. Attach a remote rocket system to move that beast into a higher orbit. Hell why not park the damn thing at ISS for that matter, and take your time either fixing it or breaking it down for parts?
Maybe we need to place a orbital junkyard around the Earth so so we don't have to keep wasting all the great stuff we put up there in the first place.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Luke, my boy, at -1 Karma, seems that you failed it already! Woooot!

Well, why not soft-land Hubble?

[leonbrooks]

I am not sure the payoff of killing Hubble in favor of manned missions to Mars are currently worth it

I think you got some of those words in the wrong order. Unless we seriously commit to some space infrastructure (and I'm talking about industry, not pork-barrel toys like fred) we're basically not going to see a good return. Better to spend ten times as much and get it all back than maybe 10 billion and get very little return.

Meanwhile, let's soft-land Hubble, have a good close look (as in, with electron microscopes and stuff) at what all that time in space did to the metal, optics and electronics aboard.

It would be great practice for missions to Mars, Titan, Venus, any planet with an atmosphere to practice aerobraking etc using Hubble. Spirit and Opportunity were an excellent trial, now how about dropping something weighing more than 11t into a real atmosphere?

The airforce could even have fun flying a StarLifter through the 'chute shrouds to pluck the sucker out of the air instead of letting it bonk or splash somewhere.

And after the autopsy, you'd have a genuine museum piece.

Re:Well, why not soft-land Hubble?

[quanticle]

Meanwhile, let's soft-land Hubble, have a good close look (as in, with electron microscopes and stuff) at what all that time in space did to the metal, optics and electronics aboard.

Just one problem - no heat shields. By the time Hubble gets to an altitude where you can "catch" it, most of it would have vaporized, and the remnants would be scorched to a crisp...

Re:Well, why not soft-land Hubble?

[FusionDragon2099]

Are you sure you want them to do this? The last time they tried this we wound up with a man-made meteorite thunking in Utah.

They are doing it again

[oldFart]

I worked for NASA in the late 1970's. In that period they raped science for the manned program, and accomplished nothing but killing two crews. It is happening again. We get about 10 times the bang for the buck with robots as with manned probes. That is not an opinion - that's a fact!
I live in Houston, but JPL is the most effective organization in NASA. Unless NASA can define a coherent manned mission, they should keep the folks on the ground and use robots.

I applaud NASA's decision

[patdabiker]

At least they were decisive. Now they can move on, and focus their efforts on other projects. The moon and mars have huge scientific potential, plus the everyday person would probably be more interested. More interest in NASA means more money for NASA, which, if were lucky, means we might see some nice stuff from them.

Hubble Too Expensive?

[Anonymous Coward]

To really lay out the facts, we need to add up the total costs of the "haven't found Bin Laden or the Weapons of Mass Destruction" debacle and then divide that by the number of slaughtered Iraqi citizens.

This will be called a HCU or Halliburton Citizen-Unit.

How many HCUs would it take to go to the moon?

Currently the Iraqi Debacle stands at $153.3 billion. Divide that by 100,000 and you get:

$153,300 is equal to one HCU.

How many HCU's to build a base on the moon?
How many HCU's to set up 8 hubble's in equidistant earth orbits around the sun for fantastic long-wave interferometry telescope the size of earth?
How many HCU's to go from the moon base to mars?

Have fun

Where else are we going to open the portal?

[TargetBoy]

I mean, you can't do research on "teleportation" technology on earth, can you? :-D

Re:good riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

i didnt know george w bush was a poster on slahdot...

You are the one who is teh failure.

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 Karma means that you don't take shit from anybody and you don't tow the party line. People with positive karma are either little talking parrots (bad) or karma whoring trolls (good). There are some high-ranking GNAA members that hold accounts here with Excellent karma. I don't bother to keep a karma whoring account because I can get a new dynamic IP any time I want. However, I am still limited to two logged-in posts per day, so most of my comments are anonymous. If I want to let you know it's me, I'll add something like "With love, Luke727".

With love, Luke727

Re:I feel safer already...

[SlySpy007]

Ooh, I see. But apparently we should be in the business of fully funding every arms program from here to the crab nebula, including the electro bastard death ray, which will instantly kill anyone suspected of not being a good 'merkin citizen.

Give me a break. I'm glad you equate scientific exploration with "charitable dollars". You know what I equate with "charitable dollars"? All the money that this nutjob and his cronies are throwing behind "faith-based sex ed" and anything else that puts god anywhere near the government. Please. Military & security dollars are interested in telling you what to do. Sorry, I want no part in that.

And why is it that every troll that posts some uber-patriotic BS to my clearly clever prose does so as anonymous coward? Come out of the closet sillylips!!!!

What a shame

[FridayBob]

The Hubble may be expensive, but if you look at all the fantastic discoveries that have been made with it, it's been great value for money anyway. And all that's needed is a measly $1 billion to keep it going until the James Webb space telescope can take over in 2011, or maybe even a little longer. That's nothing compared to the money Bush has been throwing away in Iraq. What a crying shame.
Still the worst has got to be Bush's stupid Moon-Mars initiative. It sounds too good to be true because it is; when push comes to shove, it's never going to happen because it's far too expensive. It won't be funded. But, the American people won't find that out until it's too late and so many other valuable projects, such as the Hubble, have already been scrapped.

NASA doesn't want robots

[matusa]

I was chatting with Marvin Minsky a few days ago, we started bitching about space, and he had this sad story to relate:

Once some of the ISS modules were relatively complete and ready for launch, NASA rounded up a group of dignitaries to bless it (I can't think of another reason why they were called in, and you'll see why I had more interesting things to ask about..), and he noticed an engineer really screwing up a docking procedure. He asked why they didn't just have a simple bit of robotics to handle it (any of a billion implementations would work great for something this trivial), and the answer was that NASA had dictated from high up that a human must be the operator for a wide class of tasks.

So there you have it! The space industry has some luddite motivations, which is absolutely terrifying. And unfortunately the great success of JPL/Caltech's probes gives more justification of their _small_ budgets (wow! you're so great you can keep being great with only $10 !!); I guess a large set of the administration still feels a need to justify 'manhood'. fucking retards.

Re:NASA doesn't want robots

[cheekyboy]

MAybe all these higher ups are just CON men working for the secret underground government/cults or whatever and arepurposely slowing things down because they know aliens are here or that they have the area51 technology and dont want us to find out more... its a long shot, but hell, I dont trust any one with uber high positions. So much ego and they'll do anything for it rather than the human race. All currupt MFers.

Re:NASA = Nerds, Accountants & Scared Administ

[Anonymous Coward]

They have stopped using the american gear for manned missions. The ISS is serviced by russian equipment (soyuz).

Re:I feel safer already...

[randallpowell]

The federal government shouldn't be in the business of fully funding every special interests needs.

With that statement, you just invalidated the last 50 years of American politics.

Bushism!!!

[adeydas]

I knew Bush was obsessed with colonisation. First it was Afghanistan, then Iraq and now he is planning for Mars. Some nerve!

Hubble ... NASA

[cashman73]

The reasons for cancelling the Hubble program is very similar, oddly enough, to the reasons for cancelling Star Trek Enterprise after this season. Both instilled much excitement and enthusiasm. Both had a decent run during their time period. But the time is over. Enterprise dried up due to poor writing and a lack of new ideas, leading no one to really watch the show. With the Hubble, we've seen more than we've expected with it, and it was nearing the end of its lifetime anyways. So it's time to move on to new and better things.

I think NASA is finally realizing that if they really want to go places (like, how about, off this rock, for starters?), they can't be tinkering with a bunch of cheesy programs in low earth orbit (read: space shuttle, ISS, hubble, etc), which basically amounts to not even leaving your own backyard! NASA is now desiring to get back to the glory days, when at their height, they were launching rockets to the moon in the 60s. Setting rather "lofty" (but not too lofty) goals like that allow you to set smaller goals in between to help you achieve your big goal. But it gives you a definite project and direction that everyone is focusing towards, which makes people happy and brings in more funding, and lets you accomplish the smaller, but arguably more important, goals along the way. It's these smaller goals that we're actually going to see back here on earth: things like Tang (tm), new metals/products/machinery for industry, aeronautics, air travel, faster computers, better telemetry and data systems for relaying vital signs in hospitals,... the list goes on.

You're not going to develop this stuff as rapidly as you would by mucking around in LEO,...

Plus, methinks that the moon would be a much better base to build a permanent space telescope on.

What good is space if you can't make a weapon?

[gelfling]

Clearly the Bush empire sees only one practical use for space: weaponize it. I wonder how much of the new $450 billion +++ defense budget is earmarked for orbiting weapons systems and not some silly pussy-assed waste of engineering like science. Hell we all know there's no evolution and the sun revolves around the earth anyway. What the hell good is science anyway? Real men orbit atomic bombs, lasers and spy sats.

Re:What good is space if you can't make a weapon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those spy sats have helped keep you safer than you can ever know, you ignorant, ungrateful sack of human shit.

And what's militaristic about sending men to Mars, you fucking worthless dumbass? No evolution and geocentrism? Do you even have any clue what you typed? Or was it the usual random shotgun babble of the brain dead ideologue.

You want to do something for the world. FUCKING KILL YOURSELF, YOU WASTE OF OXYGEN! You brain has shut down. You are dumber than a complete retard in a coma. Die. Please, just die, and take all the other fuckhead ideologues with you. DIE! DIE! DIE!!!!!!

Re:What good is space if you can't make a weapon?

[gelfling]

I did your mom. She cried, a lot.

Re:NASA = Nerds, Accountants & Scared Administ

[RM6f9]

Please re-consider: Just as the vast majority of our troops probably do not really wish to be enforcing their Commander-in-Chief's wishes in Iraq, so, too, the individuals collecting their livelihoods in NASA may not necessarily enjoy what they're directed to do or refrain from doing. While I certainly agree a resignation is in order, I think it should be from a much higher position... Of course, it's not like George ever reads /. (nor, for that matter, would any of his staff ever read it to him), but, who knows? One can only hope...

Politics Aside

[Sephiriz]

Ignoring the simple truth of politics, it's a damn shame that something that captured the imagination of millions and in turn gave astronomers unique opportunities will now be discarded. Seriously, this was one of the few "cool" things the government was doing. A telescope in space, I mean, thats awesome! Essentially, the cold reality of business just comes lashing back. But still, I'll miss the sci-fi invoked dreams that the Hubble brought about. Back to "Star Wars" or some other superior alternative (Daft Punk? Heh).

$30 Billion a month don't buy what it used too...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gee, that $200 Billion + $30 Billion a month spent on Iraq sure would have been useful for Hubble, Health Care, and Social Security.

Maybe if we just cancel Social Security, Shut Down NASA completely, and end welfare
- we can use that money to invade Canada and Mexico?

All the moose meat and tequila you can eat and drink...

Moon telescope

[Nick Driver]

Hubble? Hell yeah. The moon? Absolutely, .......

How about a huge-ass remote controlled telesope parked on the surface of the moon?

This sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

The Hubble has provided us with some of the best geek-oriented wallpaper imaginable.

NASA's sole purpose isn't science

[FleaPlus]

NASA's sole purpose isn't science -- if it was, it'd just be rolled into the National Science Foundation. That said, I'm a big fan of spending the money instead on the Hubble Origins Probe -- hopefully we'll see that happen.

Your argument though reminds me a little bit of something I once saw, which said that all/most space advocates were either Saganites, O'Neillians, or Von Braunians (each named after a famous figure in the space field). The descriptions are as follows:

Saganites: "Look, but don't touch." The sole purpose of space endeavours is to increase our scientific knowledge, which will in the long-term lead to the enrichment of mankind.

O'Neillians: The ultimate goal is to turn humanity into a space-faring species. Our focus should be on space settlement

Von Braunians: They want to push the technology to the limit and beyond, and do what's never been done before. Sending huge rockets into orbit and planting flags on extraterrestrial bodies is valuable in and of itself, if only for the glory.

Of course, many are actually some mix of the above. Personally, I'd consider myself a former Saganite, more recently leaning towards O'Neillian.

During the 60s and 70s (the Space Race) the US was predominantly Von Braunian. In the 80s and 90s the US government's space program has been predominantly Saganite, focusing primarily on scientific missions. It's gotten to the point that now many people think that's the only worthwhile thing to do in space. Bush's Vision for Space Exploration is intended to turn the government's space program into a mix of O'Neillian and Von Braunian, doing things like establishing a permanent, self-sustaining moon base.

I'd characterize most private spaceflight folks like Burt Rutan and Elon Musk as a mix of O'Neillian and Von Braunian.

Re:NASA's sole purpose isn't science

[myowntrueself]

"O'Neillians"

Like as in Jack O'Neil?

Re:NASA's sole purpose isn't science

[FleaPlus]

Gerard O'Neill, who was the major proponent (and designer) of space settlements:

http://www.space-frontier.org/HighFrontier/gkobio. html
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0962237906/ 104-9298540-5520764
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Kitchen_O'Neil l

Re:NASA's sole purpose isn't science

[soldeed]

No. As in Gerard K. O'Neil. (1927-1992)Author of The High Frontier: Human colonies in space THE authoritive tome on space colonization that anyone who wants to understand the subject should read. I heartily recommend it.

Moon as research center

[dokhebi]

The Hubble was greate, but it has problems. Being in orbit (of Earth) makes it hard to fix, and expensive to fix...

Now, if we had a permanent base on the moon, with a sub-station on the dark side, we could put a Hubble like device in orbit of the Moon (or teathered to the Moon) with a crew that could easily go to the new Hubble and fix it. The graivty well of the Moon is much shallower so going up to fix the device is easier. Or just (gently) yank on the teather to bring it down for repair, then gently boost it back into orbit.

Just my $0.02 worth.

Re:Moon as research center

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh.. How do you keep a satellite in orbit with a teather attached to it exactly?

Re:Moon as research center

[FreeUser]

Now, if we had a permanent base on the moon, with a sub-station on the dark side,

There is no dark side of the moon.[1] As a matter of fact, it's all dark.

[1] Seriously, the Lunar day is 28 earth days, so the sun does rise and set. It does not have one face perminently facing the sun like Mercury (which does has a "dark side").

Put the Hubble on the moon!

[Anonymous Coward]

Put the hubble on the moon, repair/upgrade it at will. Then, use it from the moon! Why is this so hard to see?

The modifications would include a cradle to hold and support the Hubble in the lunar gravity. The cradle would also aim it. A shelter could also be useful.

JJB

Not really

[SuperKendall]

If anything is capable of looking beyond the nose into the depths of the Universe, it is Hubble.

Or one of a number of ground-based scopes that are doing just as well thanks to increases in technology.

Re:Not really

[Abcd1234]

Yeah, except those ground-based scopes can only see in IR, and only reach peak performance for targets near bright guide-stars (artificial stars can't compensate for jitter). Sorry, but ground-based scopes simply can't replaced instruments in space. Ignoring the atmospheric distortion, the observable frequency range is limited down here on the ground.

Why can't we...

[firew0lfz]

have the Chinese or the Indians build that 'Son of Hubble' telescope that someone mentioned (I cannot find the linky at the moment)... as I recall, it could be done at around $50 million and would probably be better.

We outsource everything else to them anyway, why not our manned missions?

Re:Why can't we...

[sharkman67]

Why can't we sell the Hubble to someone else? If it is so damn important why can't Canada, India or someone else offer to foot the bill or outright buy the Hubble from the US?

Re:Why can't we...

[Dogtanian]

[Why can't we...] have the Chinese or the Indians build that 'Son of Hubble' telescope that someone mentioned (I cannot find the linky at the moment)... as I recall, it could be done at around $50 million and would probably be better.

In the not-so-distant future, I expect China and India to be in the position where they would be capable of doing stuff like this themselves.

They probably *won't* do stuff like that first; I expect the more commercial and the more "national-pride" projects to be those that are carried out first, but even that is a start.

And this is why I wouldn't consider a complete US withdrawl from manned space exploration to be as significant as it might at first appear.

It's also why the US *won't* withdraw from space; indeed, they'll probably do more in the next 15 years than they have in the previous 25.

At this point

[MonkeyT]

At this point Mars is a headline. It's a recognizable and marketable target that can get press coverage and poll well, exactly the sort of thing this government understands best. The moon may be a viable mission, but the rewards are sketchy at best. The only great and unarguably useful technology that must come out of the millions(billions?) they will spend on this goose chase is new launch methodologies. That's the worthwhile goal here. A launch technology for cargo that doesn't rely on several tons of explosive materials and unimaginable physical abuse of the hardware involved would change this planet like nothing else. (Unfortunately, it looks like they are focusing on the same old methods. I don't buy the concept of the space elevator, but at least it's a new idea and worth exploring.) I wish the White House had the balls to admit that such technology itself is a worthwhile goal without relying on the pep rally sports event of putting our flag on another rock.

What we are capable of

[SuperKendall]

Like what? And what can we not do remotely? Why send astronauts there is what I am asking.

What can we not do remotely?

First of all, consider that everything both rovers, combined, have done to date could have been done easily in a day by one human scientist with a buggy. Possibly even on foot.

Now consider what the rovers have not been able to do, such as going on steep slopes or overly sandy surfaces for fear of getting stuck - things a human could have just walked right over to.

Now consider the things that are just unthinkable for rovers to explore, like really complex canyon-laced terrain. You just can't send rovers there at all.

What is to be gained? A deeper understanding of geology and the forces that shape planets - perhaps offering new insights into our own planet. Possibly of course other lifeforms if they probe deep enough. And all the variety of technology that makes working on Mars practical, like improved propulsion systems, life support systems, etc.

But basically it would be a fantastic boost for the human spirit. Look at how riveted so many people have been to Rover progress, and the Titan mission. Lots of people know about these things and it excites them. It could help to really raise a new generation of engineering minded youth, whereas right now I'd warrant a lot of good potential scientists end up as MBA's or lawyers right now. After all, what is compelling or cool abotu going into science?

If you want a planet full of lawyers, by all means lets shut down manned space flight and just sue each other for IP infringements every time we make a sandwich. But frankly I hope for a more inspired future.

I know it may sound crazy to you, but I would quite happily take a trip to Mars knowing I would only live a day and there was no hope of return. And I think there are a lot of other people like that. Let people with the will to explore go forth and inspire others in turn.

All that we have lost

[cy_a253]

I still can't believe that back in 1972 we could just launch from the Earth, land on the Moon and start driving around in a jeep. It was normal back then.

We have completely lost the ability to do anything like that.

This old footage even looks like science-fiction to us.

Was the new hubble story just testing the water?

[Almost-Retired]

Now I wonder if the new hubble is cheaper story that ran here a day or 2 back wasn't just testing the water to see if it would mollify those of us that would automaticly scream foul if the hubble is allowed to die?

I wouldn't put it past NASA to try and lead us around by the nose to a conclusion that there might be a promise of another, even better telescope when they have no plans to do so, and no money in the budget.

Me, I'm selfish. At my age, I don't have time to piddle around another 20 years while they get around to doing it. If they could do it in 5 years, maybe I might have eyes enough to see its first light, but in 20, my borderline sugar will have blinded me, if not outright killed me with a heart attack, that goes with sugar I'm told. So for my own selfish reasons, I'd like to see this one refurbished one more time at least.

From observing the papers published that are based on its work in just the last year, its my opinion that the first 10-12 years was just exercize, learning how to use it to its fullest, and now we are actually using it for real research the last couple of years. I don't think it has made its most important scientific contribution to our knowledge yet!

--
Sadly, no cheers tonight, Gene

Moon as Platform for Telescope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely servicing a DSOTM telescope is safer.

Re:Moon as Platform for Telescope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely servicing a DSOTM telescope is safer.

Why can't we plop a scope on Pluto?

Woohoo!

[jcuervo]

NASA's new goals are now manned missions to the moon, as a platform for Mars."

Yay!

On the other hand, I may lose that bet, after all.

we know the real reason

[flacco]

people are starting to talk about pointing the hubble at the lunar landing sites to see the landing craft and other remaining artifacts, only to find that they're not there.

if the truth were to get out that it was all a cold-war hoax, it would send american self-esteem into a crisis.

Re:we know the real reason

[advocate_one]

the truth is, hubble isn't really up there at all... it's just some very talented graphics artists having fun with photoshop

Pure nonsense

[SuperKendall]

I guess your fictional humans must be dead, since they seem incapable of walking!

That's the biggest thing. Something like 90% of Mars is off-limits to current rover technologies because they would fall over in about a day. When a human falls over, they right themselves. When I was about eight I had an ATV tip over on me - so I stood up, rolled the ATV back over, and kept going. One rollover like that is Game Over for the rovers and they are done.

The earth based Mars Express project has shown that humans using ATV devices in suits can easily go places that there is NO WAY a rover s going. They can do things like deploy spider bots on sheer cliff faces to examine things no rover is going to come near, or deploy other speciailized devices like ground penetrating

Consider the rover at the bottom of the crater. It saw some really interesting dunes, but could not check them out because the soil was too sandy, and the rover might get stuck. Were a human there, he could just walk over and take a look. Or the sheer rock faces in the same crater, too steep for the rover. A human could just walk over to the face and chip away... sense a trend here?

A human explorer on an ATV could do everything the rovers have done so far in about a day, easy. farther distance, more samples, and better insight into what to look at than we can possibly have with our delayed low-resolution view of the surface today.

You can provide other reasons why you might not want humans on Mars, but to argue against there being several orders of magnittude improvement of both quality and quantity of research done is just misguided.

Re:Pure nonsense

[Rei]

There are quite a few types of robot designs that can easily outclass humans. One that was mentioned on slashdot a while ago was the "tumbleweed" design - a giant hollow frame which can essentially maneuver around anything. Some proposals being looked into involve "multi-hop" robots which can land, take off, land, take off, etc - in effect, covering the whole planet, and reaching places that would take humans weeks to climb/descend.

Your "ATV" wasn't designed to explore mars autonomously, or otherwise it would have had a self-righting mechanism if they planned to drive it on rough terrain.

If we were to send a spider bot to mars, there's no need for a human. A spider bot can deploy itself quite fine unless it's designed specifically not to be able to. And what on earth were you talking about when you said "specialized devices like ground penetrating". Did you mean core samples? If so, Beagle was supposed to do that, while MSL is going to be able to do that. If you meant ground penetrating radar, that's even easier - have you ever seen anyone use ground penetrating radar? You merely have to drag it behind you.

"but could not check them out" - this statement is incorrect. They did a risk-benefit analysis and decided that the data they could gather wouldn't be worth the risk; they've studied dunes elsewhere on Meridiani Planum already. Besides, if you want a fair comparison, you'd need to compare humans with a robot that cost 50 times what Opportunity costs; a single robot with that kind of budget that could not only study dunes and fly around the planet, but juggle Opportunity and Spirit at the same time ;)

Once again, the point people like you cnotinually ignore: One manned mission vs. 50 robotic missions, when you factor in the cost. The one mission goes to a single part of the planet, while the robotic missions go to 50 different parts, or revisit the parts that they find to be interesting (the manned mission may end up in a completely uninteresting part of the planet). Etc. The economics just simply don't work out, as far as science goes.

SELL THE THING!

[elzurawka]

im sure there is some rich guy out there that would love to buy the thing if it went to auction. Imagin owning a space telescope. Why destroy it when u can make MILLIONS!?!?!?! Cummon people...dont u think some rich fuck out there...wouldnt blow a mesily 100 million on a space telescope? W/e....too bad for nasa, they could have made a few bucks.... But newho....ill start the bidding at 100$....ne1 top that?

End of Hubble is Symbolic End for US

[petethemidget]

The end of support for Hubble is quite simply the final installment of proof for whoever still needs it that the US govenment has fallen into barbarism and has abrogated the country's position as a leader in the advancement of science for the public good. All hail the Texas Visigoths! Burn the books, smash the statues, and fire up the barbeques ...

Just pay for the insurance instead

[Namarrgon]

So, estimates for the cost of the deorbit module range from $190M through $330M up to $1B - that's a lot of money just to toss something into the bin a little more accurately.

This might sound a little callous, but why not just let its orbit decay naturally (helped along with whatever its gyros can do), and put the some of the money into a global Hubble-damage insurance policy instead?

Chances are it'll just land in the water anyway, and even if it does hit the ground, it's still extremely unlikely to hit anything (or anyone) important. Skylab got away with it just fine.

Bad PR, you say? Announce a global Hubble Impact Lottery! Put $100M into the fund, and divide it up proportionately among those who are lucky enough to have to have any flaming wreckage plunging into their backyard. Highest allocations reserved for property damage or actual, provable injury. People will be praying for a "windfall" like that.

Now, where did I put that giant electromagnet anyway...

Re:Just pay for the insurance instead

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is they don't want people to discover the Hubble's secret Major Leauge Baseball technology.

Why do they need a robotic deorbiter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't they just leave it up there for amateurs to use? Or shoot a bunch of stupid clay at it or something?

Questions Questions...

[Alpha_Traveller]

Can't we save Hubble?

1) It seems crazy to stop getting the valuable information Hubble continues to give us despite not being the perfect telescope. It makes more sense to replace it BEFORE downing it, since it would pay to keep an eye on the sky for Near Earth Objects at a minimum right?

2) Why doesn't NASA ask one of the other research groups out there if they want to care for Hubble? If NASA doesn't want the responsibility anymore, can't they sell it to a corporate entity like Coca Cola or Virgin? How about selling it to a company that likes research or could benefit from the research at hand? There has to be some company...the SAIC's of the world who would be interested in learning as much as possible to make itself more effective. Hubble can help in that regard if it wants to pursue space contracts right? How about selling it to a government? .. How about Great Britain, or China, or some other government that wants their own space program? We never saw any problem selling ships to Great Britain or some other country when they needed hardware in the past, why stop now?

Re:Was the new hubble story just testing the water

[SeaDour]

Some snappy conclusions you've made there, but with no sound backing at all. The new Hubble Origins Probe is an academic proposal by some leading astrophysicists -- they're trying to convince NASA to launch it, not the other way around.

Why don't they do a robotic mission for fixing?

[Whatsmynickname]

Quoting from an online article: "NASA had considered a robotic servicing mission, but now doubts the technology would be mature enough before Hubble suffers a fatal equipment breakdown."

Well, let me get this straight. They don't want to repair the Hubble with a manned mission. Well, OK. Assuming no planned repair, the Hubble is guaranteed to fail anyways. So, what's the risk of trying a robotic repair mission? They are spending the money to make a robot to bring down the Hubble, so why not at least try a robot that will attempt to repair the Hubble? If it doesn't work, oh well, it was coming down anyways, right?

My God, it's quite evident that NASA has SO lost any initiative to take any risk at all now.

who really cares about... mars?

[audioplaster]

The basic problem appears to be a "collective hysteria" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_hysteria) regarding some future (probably impossible) mars mission. Who cares about mars? There are no practical benefits of "going to mars". It's a propaganda machine. An amalgamation of fabrications, in similar fashion to the weapons of mass deception (WMDs).

Clearly, from the recent robotic missions, it is clear that THERE IS NOTHING THERE. Why is our government going to spend all available budget in a nonrealistic effort to travel to a completely worthless, lifeless planet? The answer is: lobbyists.

Lets get the money (why not).

Anybody with half a brain would spend their (very big) money developing new methods for advanced launch vehicles (e.g. spaceship one, space elevator) and launch new telescopes with orders-of-magnitude improvements over the Hubble (which IMHO has added 1000000x more to our knowledge than any stupid moon or mars mission). Let's resolve planets, understand the origins of the universe, measure event horizons, see the cosmos...

But, unfortunately, we are now living with a government that has no common sense, or scientific sense.

Maybe we should just have "faith based missions" to determine the acual, real and undeniable email address of the "intelligent designer". I don't have a problem with retiring the Hubble, but what bothers me is the lack of vision regarding the potential of high resolution replacments for the venerable Hubble. 100, 200, 300, 400, 500...(who knows?), billion dollars for war in Iraq, and umm.... 15 billion for NASA. It is clear what the (foolhardy) priorities are. I hope I outlive this bizarre low point in the cycle of humanity.

Economy of scale

[SuperKendall]

Once again, the point people like you cnotinually ignore: One manned mission vs. 50 robotic missions, when you factor in the cost. The one mission goes to a single part of the planet, while the robotic missions go to 50 different parts, or revisit the parts that they find to be interesting (the manned mission may end up in a completely uninteresting part of the planet). Etc. The economics just simply don't work out, as far as science goes.

It doesn't have to be a case of 50x the cost. If you can get a trickle of people visiting mars on a regular basis (permanent manned station) you can deploy bots like you are talking about for a fraction of the cost, as you can build some on site. They don't have to cost nearly so much because humans can get them close to where they need to be.

Over time, a constant human presence is far cheaper than even the most spectacular one-off robots. Even with a fixed base a large area could be covered with flying draft that could carry humans pretty far, or a mobile habitat.

The key is that the value humans provide is far greater than any one robot can ever be, because humans can construct some useful tools on the spot that might not have been included on a robot. And you have one person making a choice to pick up a rock instead of a week of debate from a committee about weather or not a rock might even be interesting, or safe to approach.

Even fifty robotic missions will not yield the value of one human staying for one week on the planet. That's why it's of great value to work towards sending humans to Mars.

Also, the trip could be a lot cheaper than the fifty robots if we would just skip the moon altogether.

Re:Economy of scale

[Rei]

Bots need minimal radiation shielding. Bots don't need food. Bots don't need air. Bots don't need to stretch. Bots don't need their "personal space". Bots don't require medical care. Bots can take tremendous G forces and temperature extremes. Etc. When you factor in the baggage needed to keep them alive, humans are incredibly bulky, heavy, fragile beasts, and all you get from them is reduced latency.

I'm not talking about some theoretical Mars colony which no nation in their right mind has budget for and which you can make up for the cost in bulk; I'm talking about the actual proposed Mars missions vs. actual probe costs. Sure, if we can eventually get a self-sustained mars colony, that will drop research costs; however, nobody is currently offering a serious proposal that stands a chance of being accepted for a mission to establish a colony.

There once was a spacecraft named Hubble,

[Anonymous Coward]

There once was a spacecraft named Hubble,
whose finances fell into trouble.
When its budget runs dry, it will fall from the sky and break up into nothing but rubble

A long, sad night...

[mbrother]

I really thought we could keep Hubble going until the James Webb Telescope goes up. Guess not. The proposal I just put in last month might be my last chance to do a new Hubble project (failure is expected for 2007, but could be sooner, or a little later). I've got some grant money to hire a postdoc, and one of my friends who currently works at Space Telescope is going to call me about it tomorrow. He says morale there is awful, and many are looking for outs. They'll be running James Webb, too, so there will be things to do, but still...

But Hubble only had a 15 year mission!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Hubble may have done good science, but everybody forgets that this instrument (launched in 1990) was only intended to be operational for 15 years!

The mission was extended in 1997 to 2010 - which would have been 20 years. If it fails in 2 years, that will have been 85% of it's extended mission or 113% of it's original mission. Which is absolutely excellent as far as I, a scientist and American taxpayer, am concerned.

The damn thing's getting old. I'm glad they're retiring it. It is a design that dates to 1977. Funding a modern replacement would be a better use of the money. It would be more efficient, do better science now that we know what to expect, and it would be cheaper in the long term.

Only need to change one thing...

[leonbrooks]

...this time, aim it better.

Did Spirit or Opportunity need big heat shields?

[leonbrooks]

No? Well, then, there's your answer. The same device that does the deorbit burn can be a heat shield, and strap device on the other end to be drogue and later brakes.

Private Enterprise to Buy Hubble from NASA

[Bapu]

Why doesn't a private corporation purchase the Hubble at fire sale prices. If it is scheduled to be de-orbited anyway, seems like $1 would be the asking price. It would be up to this venture to keep it flying. Contract for the robotic mission to repair it, and then sell images and time on the telescope to pay for it.
Seems like Bush and the neo-cons would be all over it if someone with the money to make it happened stepped forward.

religion...

[kardar]

We have a president that is very comitted to the particular brand of Christianity. I went to a "fundamentalist" Christian grade school; I was taught early on that I might fail tests that asked questions about the age of the earth were I to enter a public high school or university, that this was just a test from God and it was the right thing to do answer the questions "wrong", (i.e. write an account of the creation story in the Bible on an essay question, or stick to the young earth theory) - regardless of the consequences to my grade in the course. All those scientists are wrong. Rocks aren't billions of years old, God is just testing our faith in him by making it look like they are. The universe appears to be expanding because God made it look that way, in order to test our faith and see how strong it is; it's actually only 4000 years old.

Yes, the Earth is 4000 years old, and God created it in seven days. That's what it says in the Bible, and obviously that's how the American people feel about it. Why have some gizmo up there that's costing billions of dollars telling us that the Bible is wrong?

A mission to Mars is not incompatible with the Bible at all (even though the science involved might make certain assumptions about gravity and time) - but the Hubble is incompatible with the Bible, which is incompatible with "what the majority of God-fearing Americans want", so how can you ask for people's tax dollars to send gizmos up there that keep telling us that the Bible is wrong and that the universe is billions and billions of years old?

Of course, I AM wrong about this; that's not the deal at all. It must be just a strange coincidence.

Commercial space

[DenDave]

With the advent of comemrcial space why don't they auction Hubble to the highest bidder? Most of the space cowboys don't care much for risk, just look at Burt Rutan, he does the unthinkable...

oh, great!

[Rado.hr]

Because one man (being President or not) has a dream of reaching Mars, all the other science must be scrapped now? Destroying Hubble project (with all its scientific achievements that were and, worse, that could be) because all the money is going to be spent to eclipse President Kennedy, which leaves no Space (pun intended) for other scientific projects, no matter how good they were/are/might be - it's another example how politics doesn't understand, or care for a science. It will take years to advance technology to make a spacecraft safe enough for Mars exploration. Not that I do have something against going to Mars, I think it is a great opportunity, but simply focusing on just one goal is just calling for a missed opportunities in science. And a chance for Europe to take scientific lead in Space. Hmm, that's not bad for us. Go to Mars, Mr. Bush, go go go!!

Conspiracy theory ;-)

[Kvasio]

probably Washington got warned by their alien friends to prevent scientists from finding their exoplanet. And scientists are closer and closer to do it ....

No help if you look at the actual delta-v

[m50d]

Thing is you actually need more delta-v to go to the Moon than to Mars (because you can aerobrake on Mars). So using the Moon as a refuelling station makes no sense.

Re:No help if you look at the actual delta-v

[grozzie2]

This is /. and you can explain this with hard numbers forever, but they still will not 'get it'. It's closer, so it's gonna use less gas to drive there, it's the only thing they understand.

Re:No help if you look at the actual delta-v

[QuickFox]

I disagree, people will get it. You explained it quite well in your comment #11604781. But there are thousands of people here, and several hundred comments. Not everyone reads all the comments. Especially considering your comment appeared ten hours after the article, and many people read comments only in the first two or three hours.

Keep a copy of your explanation on your hard disk. Copy-paste it as a comment when the topic arises, early if possible. Then people will get it and start telling each other.

I suppose the economy of moon voyages might change in interesting ways if this moon-based space elevator can really be deployed, with the top close to the L1 Lagrange point between the moon and Earth.

Bastard Fundies

[JimPooley]

Let's face it, the last thing a government in the pockets of the bastard fundamentalists wants is to increase people's knowledge about the universe. They'd be a lot happier if we all believed the stars were just lights in the sky hung there by god.

japan is mega lazy, so are all financiers.

[cheekyboy]

So japan is willing to spend $100 to $300 billion in buying US DOLLARS to prop up the dollar and lower the yen to a medium level, those stupid ass govts wont even spend $5b on science?

I swear everyone is totaly loopy, dump the $300 billion on science and apps that uses $150billion of american GOODS (make some jobs) and that will help the dollar more than simply buying a few numbers on a spreadsheet in some central bank computers files.

Why not test SDI and SHOOT IT DAMN IT

[cheekyboy]

GEE what a waste of cash

Just ask the Air Force to use its "test" SDI missiles and blow it off in 50000 pieces. Or is that going to unnerve the planet and proove the airforce "CAN DO IT" as apposed to now when everything things "oh they probly cant"

Then again, they could launch their area51 space ships if they can start them up and get it. Or their secret blank shuttle they have hidden ;-)

Or why not sell the damn thing to japan, they can 'attempt' to fix it and keep it.

Too many egos and too many secrets are preventing the human race expanding ever faster.

nasa hasnt heard of post it notes?

[cheekyboy]

Surely a post it note on the warehouse door and box where the mirror is that sys, "mirror is flawed, see document F93D99202" :-)

Too many cooks I think.

everyday 711 staff are at higher dangers

[cheekyboy]

Everyday , millions of people have more dangerous jobs and they shrug it off.

Nascar racers, scoober divers, pilots, security guards, sky divers etc.. etc...

So theres a 1 in 100 chance of dieing, same for a 711 worker, so get over it, and risk it.

Conclusion

[PrayingWolf]

From what I read above I conclude that Hubble should be saved like this: 1) push it onto a higher orbit for safekeeping 2) build an elevator to the moon 3) take hubble to the moon and modify it for use there sound good?

Re:$30 Billion a month don't buy what it used too.

[grozzie2]

Invading canada would get rather messy for you guys. We have more guns per capita than the usa, and another big difference, most of us actually know how to use them. A lot of the folks I know have taken to putting 3 inch us flags onto range targets these days, shoulder patches. It's an excellent way to measure a 3 inch grouping at 300 yards, and it's getting us all practised up.

Amen to that!

[Anonymous Coward]

The moon and Mars are great goals, but Dubya and his doublespeak signify NASA is on its way out of the budget. The loss Hubble is the first sign of this.

I agree that the ISS is worthless and not worth the trips whereas Hubble is. If we were serious about a space station we would have picked up one of A.C. Clark's designs, but we got this mishmash of international parts.

I say go with Hubble...at least we'll be able to watch the Mars ship loose its ability to land.

Life on Mars = End of religion

[TM22721]

The hidden agenda is staggering especially coming from an administration of Bible-thumpers.

If life is discovered on Mars, it would bring an immediate end to the 'intelligent design' movement and religious hegemony in general.

'Pray' for this to happen.

I don't think so

[ZehFernando]

Yeah, just like proving that the Earth's not flat... Even if we found little green men with helmets on mars it wouldn't matter. Religions live on ignoring what they want to reinforce their beliefs.

I wonder...

[hachiman]

How difficult it would be to move Hubble out of orbit and nudge it very, very slowly to the moon... I'm thinking that when/if we actually try and settle the moon as a halfway house to everywhere else, or a mining facility or something, then having a large telescope around the place would be quite handy.

It would certainly beat just scrapping it by putting it into the sea somewhere and it can't be that much more technically challenging than missing shipping lanes can it? (probably...). If you sent it slowly enough, then by the time it got there, the first settling missions to the moon might actually be ready to receive it.

Mind you, it'll be old by then but I suppose they can always use it for scrap or something.

Too lazy

[JustOK]

Too lazy to read the FA or the FP, but I hope they plan to leave it on when its coming in. Imagine the pictures!

d-obit

[Anonymous Coward]

Going to cost 75 Mil to d-orbit (obit) the Jubble. Why not SAVE that 75 Mil and just let it plummet where it may. Vegas bookmakers could take odds on which populated area it might hit. Not to worry Detroit, it should weigh less than 48 tons after re-entry/partial_vaporization.

who are the fuck wit managers?

[cheekyboy]

I gota say this, who are the fuck wit managers who run half the world? are they just after the money? or are they currupt as shit? what is their problem? are they scare their 190k job will be killed?

Either 90% of the world is so filthly currupt beyong belief or people are just plain utterly brain dead stupid and should be shot or stricken with cancer and die because they really server ZERO FUCKING PURPOSE.

Yeah, "im a manager, I contribute nothing intellecutually, I just run the place and make it look good"

Billions wasted on garbage and on money funds, and proping up stocks (PPT) while dumping gold and making banks look good.

Utter scum that god will drop in the trash can, thats where half the souls belong, in the trash, because they utterly are 100% USELESS and only care about themselves, not the whole human race as a whole.

Like they say, if too fucked up, DELETE *.* and start again, bring the nukes on baby.

Maybe they found something up there??

[therealking]

Ever think that maybe they found something up there that maybe they are not telling us about?

I'm not talking about little people running around per say. But maybe something else.
Artifacts or maybe rich mineral deposits.

Maybe thats why there is a big push to get people to mars.

LAUNCH FROM THE MOON?!?

[NardofDoom]

Launch Mars mission from the moon, where the gravity well is shallower.

With what factories? With what people? Eating what food? Grown under what nuclear powered flourescent lights?

What you're proposing is getting to Mars in 100 years, at least. If we had gotten to the East Coast of the US and stopped to build more ships we wouldn't have had the capabilities for 100 years. It took us 200 years (1600-~1800) just to mount a government funded expedition across the continent.

Go to the moon *and* go to Mars. Give people living on the moon a reason to go to Mars.

Not that target, the other one

[Seekerofknowledge]

They had another target in March of 2001 for the spacestation Mir.

http://freebies.about.com/cs/foodfreebies/l/bltaco bell.htm/

Killed today in Iraq

[Catbeller]

ALSO KILLED: PFC Hubble Space Telescope, killed 02/07/2005 in a guerilla political attack in Iraq, victim of a sneak budget mortar.

The President expressed sympathy for the family of PFC Telescope, tho he blamed terrorists for forcing him to spend the money necessary to save PFC Telescope on .2 day's worth of occupying Iraq.

PFC Telescope's family was quietly outraged, because the President's people had previously pledged to supply the money for the operation. None would comment on the record, for several other children are at risk at the moment.

Pictures of the cremation will not be permitted. Any NASA contractor taking such a picture will be terminated, the Administration said, so that PFC Telescope's privacy will be respected.

Several more casualties of the Iraq occupation are rumored to be announced soon: the education system, social security, medicare, public health, and police funding. At time of publication, the deaths cannot yet be confirmed, tho their passing seems to be imminent.

And I thought W didn't get it ...

[royalblue_tom]

It's all about the grand gesture. A bunch of cheap missions will not inspire a new generation of scientists in the same way, say, a moon landing, did (insire to become scientists, or vote for ... - well, the jury is out on that, but I'm sure there is thinking behind it).

We're too damn rational. But ultimately, this is all funded by the public, and the public (as an entity) loves the dog and pony show - we *need* the grand gesture.

Darkness and "Darkness"

[virg_mattes]

There are a few considerations about the "dark side of the Moon" that make it valuable for a telescope even without always being shielded from the Sun. First, with no atmosphere a telescope can observe things in the daytime near the horizons with very little distortion, so it's not like having the sun up would prevent the telescope seeing anything like it does on Earth. Second, "dark" refers to more than just visible light. Radio telescopes would be shielded by the Moon itself from Earth-based EM radiation, thereby giving a more clear signal from extrasolar spots. When the dark side is visibly dark, it's even better for radioscope operations.

Virg

When did the US turn into such pussies?

[KlomDark]

What a shitty lame reason - Waaah, someone might get killed. WTF is wrong with us? We have no problem sending 150,000 troops into Iraq with a relative certainty that some will get killed.

However, we are too much of a bunch of chickens to run the same risk to fix a telescope that has a far more positive effect on this country than Iraq ever will.

I thought the French were supposed to be the wimps, but it's looking more like us in this case, as the French are launching a lot more spacecraft than we are. I bet they'd go fix it for us if we asked (and paid for it).

This is really embarrassing for the United States.

Re:When did the US turn into such pussies?

[dankjones]

We went into Iraq because we are pussies silly.

Remember the WMD's?

Eeek! Terrorists! /Amerikkka hikes up it's skirt and goes to hide under it's President's dick.

O'er the laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaand of the freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee...

and the the hooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooome of thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...*BANG!*

OH SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Human Science

[virg_mattes]

> The cost of adding humans to the trip is extreme, while the only real benefit is a reduction in communications latency - hardly worth the benefit.

This is simply not correct. There's one thing that a human astronaut adds to the project that can't be covered by any mechanical device. That's adaptability. If a rover digs in or turns over, it's done. If a Mars buggy gets stuck, a human operator can pull out a winch line and free it, or tip it back on to its wheels. A human can compensate for equipment malfunction that can stop a machine in its tracks. If a high gain antenna sticks on deployment, a human can manually free and deploy it. If the solar panels get dirty, a human can get out a whisk broom and clear them. If something is discovered that wasn't expected, a human can adapt an instrument on the fly to do further testing. A human operator can drive a buggy places where no remote lander could possibly go safely, and could even take a remote-controlled lander along because running it from a mile away is possible where running it from Earth is impossible due to the latency in communications.

In short, a human team would provide NI (natural Intelligence) that would far exceed anything mechanized, and they could therefore be much more effective in gathering information (which landers can do) and analysing it (which landers can't do). It's not just a benefit in latency, it's a pair of hands on the spot attached to a brain far beyond anything we can build. It's the ability to handle the unexpected.

Virg

This whole thing smells funny.

[l4m3z0r]

Why is travelling to Hubble and fixing it much less risky than traveling to Mars. Somehow in my mind the great distance and the boundless possibilities for something to go wrong on such a long invovled trip is much more than going up to repair hubble.

Now I'm not normally a conspiracy theorist but there has to be some reason why we don't want Hubble up there anymore. Hell instead of de orbiting it why not say hey china you want some toy we don't like anymore? You guys will need to service it and be responsible for it here are the keys have fun. No instead we are simply going to destroy it... Why?

Re:This whole thing smells funny.

[tfulton2]

It just makes me mad that I try hard to recycle/reuse stuff, going so far as to pull stuff from the curb; yet they feel justified in wasting a perfectly serviceable [and most beneficial, thus far] deep space 'scope. Should I not even bother to recycle anymore? What's the point? -Tim

The Real Reason

[Anonymous Coward]

See folks, this is what happens when you let christian (or any other superstitious paranormal believers) fundamentalists into power.

First things that go are things that contradict their world view.

Just like ashcroft spending millions to cover up the topless statute, so must dubya kill the device that has produced so much evidence to the contrary of their hocus pocus bullshit creationist dogma.

Pun Fun

[virg_mattes]

> So yeah, the cryogenics community would love getting more He3. It's really rare here on Earth, but it would be really cool to have more of this stuff.

Please, please tell me you did this on purpose.

Virg

Re:Pun Fun

[wass]

I don't really understand what you're asking, but I gave a semi tongue-in-cheek response to the parent poster (probably not too noticeable). Meaning that I only argued against the fact that He3 has no use on Earth, but of course not implying it would be efficient to mine He3 on the moon.

Corrections

[SuperKendall]

Bots need minimal radiation shielding

But a lot of hardened computer components to function.

Bots don't need food

What do you call power that they run from? One crucial component in descisions as to what the rovers can do is how much power the batteries and solar panels can supply. This is not limitless.

Bots can take tremendous G forces and temperature extremes.

So can humans with suits that protect them. Bots can sustain higher forces but at far greater degrees of cost. Why spend all that extra money on high-G survivabiliyt for a robot for isntance, when you could just make one on the surface of mars that did not have to survive impact because it was already there?

Sure when you factor in what humans need to live it's a lot. But not a lot more than what you have to do to get robots to haev a good CHANCE of surviving. There's another factor you dismiss, you act as if landing every bot on Mars is a certainty. Beagle and the Polar Express say otherwise. Having humans on the surface gives you a far greater degree of reliability for missions, rather tahn spending billions on a bot that may just make a new crater on the surface.

A mars colony does not have to be expensive as you seem to think, read Zubrin's books on Mars for insightful ways it can be done. We already have the technology today. In fact I am pretty certain that private interests will be on Mars before any governmnet, though they may provide support in some areas.

Re:Corrections

[Rei]

First off, you're really stretching here. You should know very well that bots, while not invincible, can handle conditions that would easily kill humans.

> But a lot of hardened computer components to function

We have geosynchronous satellites that regularly pass through the Van Allen belts for *decades* on end. Even a regular home PC could survive hundreds of more times the radiation than a human could, but hardened electronics let you survive *hundreds of thousands* of times the radiation.

> What do you call power that they run from?

The same power that humans need, plus more, for all of their equipment and mobility. A 5 kg RTG will run a spirit-sized probe for a decade. 5 kg of food will run a person for a week, and they *still* need that RTG (or equivalent) to move their vehicle around.. And lets not get into the non-food infrastructure that humans need to keep their metabolism going - everything from water to air.

> So can humans with suits that protect them

You can launch satellites *OUT OF GUNS*. Out of bloody 16" smoothbore cannons at hundreds of thousands of Gs, and have them survive - Gerald Bull did this in the HARP project. 20Gs will kill a person, and 5gs is typically considered the "safe" limit for rocket launch and reentry (fighter pilots get more, but only for brief periods of time). The shuttle typically operates at under 4 Gs.

Once again, your fake equivalency is really way-out there. You know very well that humans aren't even remotely close to bots in terms of what they can handle. Why pretend?

> Reliability

For many of the mars missions, having humans on board wouldn't have helped at all. Lets look at all of the failed Mars missions, shall we?

Phobos 1 could have been recovered if there were a human to turn it back on (it died to a mistaken "off" command).

Phobos 2's navigational computer died. It is questionable to whether humans could have handled it without a functioning computer; probably not.

Mars Observer: It's rocket exploded when doing final manoevers to get into orbit. All humans onboard would have perished.

Mars 96 never left Earth orbit, crashing into the Pacific Ocean due to an upper stage failure. Depending on the manned design, humans may or may not have had a successful Abort-To-Earth scenario with this kind of failure.

MGS almost failed. Due to a joint failure, it couldn't aerobrake properly, and the aerobraking had to take a year longer than expected. With humans on board, this would have been catastrophic; however, it was simply a delay for a robotic craft

MCO: English to metric error. If humans had noticed the error before reentry had begun, they could have fixed it - but how they would know the error had occurred before it was too late is beyond me.

MPL: A jerk from leg deployment made the accelerometer indicate zero acceleration, giving a false landing reading and having the engines shut off, dropping the probe. Humans probably could have survived this one.

Nozomi, due to a mistaken calculation for orbital telemetry, ran out of fuel before reaching Mars. This would have killed any humans on board, and there is not really any way they would have known about it until it was too late.

Beagle crashed, in all likelyhood, due to a misestimation of the density of Mars' atmosphere. Humans would have started reentry using the exact same atmospheric density assumption, and fried.

In short, in response to your concept of humans present fixing the error, the general response is "No.". All you're doing is putting all your eggs in one overpriced basket.

> read Zubrin's books

I've read Zubrin. The only way he gets a realistic mars colony price tag is by making preposterous assumptions about launch costs.

space elevators, helium-3--my god, man, stop!

[Kris Magnusson]

nothing personal here, drinkypoo, and i really hate to be negative, i really do, but you should know that . . .

i summarily ignore any posts/posters that mention

-- space elevators, or
-- the extraction of helium-3 on the moon for nuclear fusion

again, nothing personal, but imho any poster who mentions either of these in a post, let alone both, is so ungrounded in consensus reality that he/she confuses highly speculative science fiction with hyperexpensive, megastructural engineering feats that Won't Occur Within Our Lifetimes, If Ever. we might just as well be talking about warp drives and transporters for exploring the alpha quadrant.

sorry to take it out on you, drinkypoo, but i just hit my breaking point.

....... kris

What I want to know is...

[YuppieScum]

The premis of de-orbiting HST seems to be that it costs too much to fix it where it is, and is too dangerous to leave where it is.

What I want to know is, why de-orbit into an ocean? Why not just use the self-same de-orbit technology to lower to to a point where it becomes cheaper and easier to fix, fix it easily and cheaply, then kick it back out?

Maybe *I* should become a rocket scientist?

Other corrections

[SuperKendall]

First off, you're really stretching here. You should know very well that bots, while not invincible, can handle conditions that would easily kill humans.

And by the same token humans can handle a lot of situations that would otherwise disable bots. Bots are generally really specialized in one area, outside of which they are just about worthless. The thing is that in a place like Mars about so little of which is known, it's far more valuable to start with a huge general base of knowledge and then send in specialized units that can do things humans cannot.

We have geosynchronous satellites that regularly pass through the Van Allen belts for *decades* on end. Even a regular home PC could survive hundreds of more times the radiation than a human could, but hardened electronics let you survive *hundreds of thousands* of times the radiation.

I'll grant that, obviously electronics can handle a lot worse radiation than humans. Irrelvant for Mars exploration though as it's not like the Van Allen belt there.

The same power that humans need, plus more, for all of their equipment and mobility. A 5 kg RTG will run a spirit-sized probe for a decade. 5 kg of food will run a person for a week, and they *still* need that RTG (or equivalent) to move their vehicle around.. And lets not get into the non-food infrastructure that humans need to keep their metabolism going - everything from water to air.

Indeed, RTG's could power things for a while.

Wake me when we're allowed to send RTG's in orbit again. Until then we have dust accumulating solar cells.

Read Zubrins stuff on how we can essentially build refineries to provide fuel on the surface of Mars - his plan also does call for a small scale nuclear reactor which has the same problem shipping out that RTG's do. But at least it's one mission and not an RTG per mission which get people all fired up.

You can launch satellites *OUT OF GUNS*. Out of bloody 16" smoothbore cannons at hundreds of thousands of Gs, and have them survive - Gerald Bull did this in the HARP project. 20Gs will kill a person, and 5gs is typically considered the "safe" limit for rocket launch and reentry (fighter pilots get more, but only for brief periods of time). The shuttle typically operates at under 4 Gs.


But again this is all relevant only for one oprtation - landing. That's great that satellites can get there a little faster, and land harder. But that means each time you have to build that in as a design goal for each project, each time with a corresponding chance of failure. Again it's just easier to get humans to the surface, with a human pilot helping with the landing - then building robots from there with far less stringent requirements.

Once again, your fake equivalency is really way-out there. You know very well that humans aren't even remotely close to bots in terms of what they can handle. Why pretend?

Not at the edges, but in terms of general capability they are far superior. Why you will not admit that I cannot say. Where is the robot today that could do everything a human althete can do? Just look at athe Asimov running, it looks like a nintey year old! And yet you claim robots are some kind of superhuman force that can do anything you ask of it.

For many of the mars missions, having humans on board wouldn't have helped at all. Lets look at all of the failed Mars missions, shall we?

Sure, every case you list with problems is solved simply by humans building the damn things on the surface! You ship them parts, and who cares if one breaks? You build another. As you say you can fire them out of guns if you like so you could have thirty-four Polar Express units if you wish and fire them all over the globe.

Be honest with yourself and think about how close we are to having something like the capability of a five-human crew on Mars constructing specialized bots and doing basic research themselves using just robots. We could s

Re:Other corrections

[Rei]

> And by the same token humans can handle a lot of situations that would otherwise disable bots.

I just went through the bots we've lost so far at Mars; very few would have been saved had a human been there.

> Bots are generally really specialized in one area, outside of which
> they are just about worthless.

Yeah. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go do a spectral analysis of a rock with my eyes, dig a core sample with my fingernails, and perform isotopic separation with my left foot.

> it's far more valuable to start with a huge general base of knowledge

Which you propose to get by a single mission with a much smaller scientific payload to a single part of the planet? Great plan there.

> Irrelvant for Mars exploration though as it's not like the Van Allen belt there.

Please explain *your* proposal for handling the bremstrahlung from GCR on the way to Mars while still dealing with CMEs and flares, Mr. Radiation-Doesn't-Matter.

> Indeed, RTG's could power things for a while.

That just completely dodged the point. An RTG powers the craft. Food powers a human. The amount of food that will power a human for a week would power a much larger robot for a decade.

> Wake me when we're allowed to send RTG's in orbit again.

Oh geez, why am I even bothering to talk to you? You obviously don't even know the most basic aspects of space exploration. Not only have we been using RTGs on almost every last outer-solar system probe that we've launched in history (Cassini ring any bells to you? *4* RTGs with ~70 kg of plutonium?), but we're planning to launch a bloody nuclear reactor on JIMO. *AND*, radiothermal heaters have been launched on most probes, even in the inner solar system.

> Read Zubrins stuff on how we can essentially build refineries to
> provide fuel on the surface of Mars

I already mentioned that I've read Zubrin, now didn't I? I'm not talking about power generation, but how inefficient humans are (using food as their power source) in comparison to robots (and any machinery that humans would use), which use electricity as their power source.

> But again this is all relevant only for one oprtation - landing.

And takeoff. So yeah, lets ignore it then - I mean, it's not like humans would ever have to take off or land or anything, now would they?

> Not at the edges, but in terms of general capability they are far superior.

Excuse me, I need to go use the laser in my index finger to remotely burn off the coating of remote rocks for my eyes to do spectral analysis just like MSL.

The innate abilities of humans, as far as scientific value is concerned, are limited to low-latency pathfinding and travelling. Clearly, they're best for pathfinding (however, as I think we concluded in the previous discussion, latency is not an important issue). In some issues, they're better at travelling (for example, a rock climbing robot may well be unreasonable); in others, they're worse (for example, vs. a tumbleweed or hopper bot in terms of distance traversed); plus, you have to factor in that while some mobility is good, unless your distance becomes hundreds to thousands of miles, extra mobility often isn't that value, scientifically; meridiani planum, for example, is pretty monotonous; so is gusev crater, although we're hoping to find something new in the hills.

> Where is the robot today that could do everything a human althete can do?

Sport: Running
Goal: Traverse long distances quickly
Machines: Jets, rockets, and little segway scooters easily outperform people.

Sport: Swimming
Goal: Traverse water quickly
Machines: Boats, submarines, and jetskis all put humans to shame

Sport: Pole vault
Goal: Get as much altitude as you can
Machines: Aircraft and rockets put the best pole vaulter to shame quite easily.

(I could keep on going)

What, did you want robots to do it in the *same manner

Why NASA is a Failure

[Stormy Dragon]

The current budget has $75 million budgeted to cover the cost of deorbiting Hubble. The fact that NASA has become so completely bloated an inefficient that it takes them $75 million to crash something into the ocean goes a long way toward explaining why the agency is so troubled lately.

Re:Why NASA is a Failure

[cornychris202]

thats probably chaney's doing...you know how the bush cabinet likes to waste money

Re:Did Spirit or Opportunity need big heat shields

[quanticle]

Actually they did.

From the site: The heat shield protects the lander and rover from the intense heat from entry into the Martian atmosphere and aerodynamically acts as the first "brake" for the spacecraft.

Oh Well...

[virg_mattes]

> I don't really understand what you're asking, but I gave a semi tongue-in-cheek response...

I guess if you don't get the joke, you didn't make the joke on purpose. Y'know, "it would be really cool", cryogenics community...

Never mind.

Virg

You lost it

[SuperKendall]

I just went through the bots we've lost so far at Mars; very few would have been saved had a human been there.

Actually as I said all them would have since like I said already, which you could have read before because it was written right there in plain english that anyone could READ, that all of them would have been saved because freaking humans could have carried the working fully constructed bot to the spot where it needed to be - and if that failed just carry another. No de-orbit hijinks. Pretty clear it seems to me.

Yeah. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go do a spectral analysis of a rock with my eyes, dig a core sample with my fingernails, and perform isotopic separation with my left foot.

Do you know what a TOOL is? Those are TOOLS, and SENSORS, not robots. Just to clear things up for you.

Which you propose to get by a single mission with a much smaller scientific payload to a single part of the planet? Great plan there.

I am an advocate of Zubrins plan which gets us humans on Mars on a perminent basis with rotating crews. Seeing as how humans are the best generalists, my statement holds and your argumet devolves even further.

Please explain *your* proposal for handling the bremstrahlung from GCR on the way to Mars while still dealing with CMEs and flares, Mr. Radiation-Doesn't-Matter.

Shielding is a well-known topic, Mr Doesn't-Understand-Basic-Science. How do you think people in the space station fare now? Or did you realize we had people up in space already on a continuing basis for long durations?

Oh geez, why am I even bothering to talk to you? You obviously don't even know the most basic aspects of space exploration. Not only have we been using RTGs on almost every last outer-solar system probe that we've launched in history (Cassini ring any bells to you? *4* RTGs with ~70 kg of plutonium?), but we're planning to launch a bloody nuclear reactor on JIMO. *AND*, radiothermal heaters have been launched on most probes, even in the inner solar system.

Why are you bothering, when you are just blithering?

Perhaps you forgot all of the controversy surrounding Cassini, that's what I'm talking about.

Perhaps you'd care to explain then why the rovers are not using RTG's? It seems impossible in your fantasy world where we can pack an RTG on every load unfetterd from political considerations. I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying that idiots have made it difficult to do so - as is evidenced by the rovers, a fact you'll have trouble disproving since if you look it up they use solar panels. Or did you know THAT?

And takeoff. So yeah, lets ignore it then - I mean, it's not like humans would ever have to take off or land or anything, now would they?

I hinted at that in my text (longer journey) but I see it was far too subtle for you.

The innate abilities of humans, as far as scientific value is concerned, are limited to low-latency pathfinding and travelling. Clearly, they're best for pathfinding (however, as I think we concluded in the previous discussion, latency is not an important issue). In some issues, they're better at travelling (for example, a rock climbing robot may well be unreasonable); in others, they're worse (for example, vs. a tumbleweed or hopper bot in terms of distance traversed); plus, you have to factor in that while some mobility is good, unless your distance becomes hundreds to thousands of miles, extra mobility often isn't that value, scientifically; meridiani planum, for example, is pretty monotonous; so is gusev crater, although we're hoping to find something new in the hills.

We're not sending naked humans, or at least I would not reccomend it. And we'd probably send humans with a few tools. Then they could build things like rovers and gliders that get you much larger range, including self-contained rovers that would let you go out for a few weeks.

Then if the first base worked out you coul

Re:You lost it

[Rei]

> (snipped insult) ... that all of them would have been saved because
> freaking humans could have carried the working fully constructed bot to the spot

If you could "freaking READ", you would have gotten to the spot where I discussed the fact that the fair comparison of sending humans to Mars is sending a bot to Mars. To say that humans should build the bots onsite would require that humans have already been sent to mars (not only that, but require a huge degree of infrastructure)

> Do you know what a TOOL is? Those are TOOLS, and SENSORS, not robots.

And they're EMBEDDED into ROBOTS. while they're NOT in HUMANS; humans come with a BUNCH of scientifically useless FLESH taking up their mass instead, and the only BENEFIT you get are some minor MOBILITY benefits and reduced LATENCY. Why the excessive CAPITAL LETTERS, by the WAY?

> I am an advocate of Zubrins plan which gets us humans on Mars on a
> perminent basis with rotating crews. (snipped insult)

Which plan of Zubrin's are you referring to, out of curiousity? His basic "Mars Direct" is one to three missions.

> Shielding is a well-known topic, Mr Doesn't-Understand-Basic-Science. How do you think people in the space station fare now?

HAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!! Oh, this is just rich; I'm talking with a person who doesn't, apparently, know anything about space. I guess I'm going to have to teach you the most basic elements about radiation in space.

The sun emits something called "solar wind", as even you are probably aware. This is a steady stream of charged particles. During CMEs (Coronal Mass Ejections) and flares, the strength of this radiation increases several times over. There is also GCR (Galactic Cosmic Radiation). Solar radiation is far more common than GCR, but it is lower energy particles.

As a charged particle moves through a magnetic field, it experiences what are known as Lorentz forces. Earth's roughly dipole field creates regions known as "magnetic mirrors", in which the lorentz forces act to continually bend incoming radiation back and forth; these are the "Van Allen Belts".

There are two main radiation belts on Earth - a more intense inner belt, and a less intense outer belt. Below the inner belt, relatively little radiation makes it through. ISS orbits below the inner belt, and is thus protected from radiation just like we are on the surface.

When a craft leaves earth carrying humans, such as the Apollo missions, they try to set a trajectory and timing that avoids as much of the belts as possible. This means launching with as much of an inclination to the equator as possible and trying to pass through the outer belt during "daytime" (since the outer belt is stretched backwards, so is thinnest on Earth's day side).

These cause humans present to experience an initial dose. As they travel, they take continuing doses of radiation. The Apollo astronauts reported seing bright flashes of light on their retinas from GCR. Had there been a flare or CME, they would have been at serious risk for their lives.

Shielding from radiation is a relatively complex topic, so I'll just discuss the most basic issues here. As I mentioned previously, the most intense radiation comes from the sun at lower energies. It is intractable to shield an entire craft with passive shielding against CME and flare events; the mass just becomes far too great. The general plan proposed for most mars missions is to have a "shelter" in the craft. Even with the shelter design, astronauts would over 10x their risk of dying of cancer by this source alone.

A more pervasive threat, however, is GCR. Not only is it immune to active shielding concepts, but there's a nasty complication that it poses against shielding. The best way to block GCR is with heavy metal atoms. However, when they block the radiation, they release a shower of lower energy particles; this is known as Bremsstrahlung radiation. This radiation is released typically

You keep repeating yourself

[SuperKendall]

As I said, you just missed all my points entirely. I don't know if you simply are inacbale of understanding clear and consies points, or you simply like to argue for the sake of it.

First of all, yes my plan calls for humans on Mars first. Easy enough as I have said and resaid. If you disagree fine, but you are ignoring that assumption altogether and then saying everything elses I say is false. And you do not need any "infrastructure" beyond a warehouse of sorts for various parts, and a habitat that can maintain humans. A few buildings at most.

As for the whole idea of building robots, no Zubrin did not present that idea - it's just simply a good idea on its own, and you seemed to like robots so much I'm using it as an illustration of just ONE way in which we benefit sending humans to mars. If by "illogical" you mean "way better idea than sending robots one at a time", then yes its fantastically illogical. Any other conclusion calls into question your ability to do simple math.

On the steps I made everything simpler. You send up one larger unit. All of the supplies/parts within are, AS I SAID AND YOU DID NOT READ, packed heavily. It's cheap because AS I SAID AND YOU DID NOT READ, the parts do not have to unpack themselvs. I guess you must also have failed to read the bit about sending over parts for fifty robots at once (instead of fity seperate launches) and the reduced chance of failure (with less complex systems all around, the whole process can be dumber and therefore easier). You do have probably more padding, but it does not have to fold out of the way. You don't need a complex shell that's capabile of opening by itself. The whole thing is as simple as dropping crates of food to a remote location on earth.

Do you honestly believe that the cost of fifty seperate reentry shields is less than one slightly larger one that holds bits for fifty others? And assembly is not more complex on mars, since you are basically doing glorified mindstorms work with all the hard parts already figured out back on earth (of course there would be room for tinkering on, site, which I'm sure is another benefit you'd prefer to ignore).

At last you put a cost on launch prices. Those sound reasonable. Still do not see the problem as the resounding benefits hold with far more science missions.

But really the moster fallacy you engage in is that one large mission cannot be done with huge margins for success as opposed to landing a fragile robot on the surface of mars and unpck itslef. The human elements (which all shipents could be from the second mission on) could pilot themselves down, which if you'd read even a smattering of Zubrin you would remember. If you did want to go with fully automated drops dropping almost indescructible crates can far more easily be done, plus you have multiple crates so if some don't make it no big deal. Right now you send one robot, and hope it works out.

Your plan to continue sending robots to places lacks any kind of imagination or even a sense of reality. If it's so much better, why are robots not entirely used to examine the seas or remote locations on earth? Invariably more is learned by sending humans to these locations, and letting them leverage technology on-site to extend what they can do. A similar plan for Mars is so obviously the correct course of action that even Bush could see it - but I guess you are not half as clever as he his judging by how stubbornly you cling to the past and tradition in space research.

Re:You keep repeating yourself

[Rei]

I see you've given up on responding to what I've said. Well, despite your continued demonstration of a lack of knowlege of "things space related", I haven't.

> First of all, yes my plan calls for humans on Mars first. Easy enough
> as I have said and resaid.

How amusing that you call that "easy enough" when even Zubrin's optimistic budget makes it cost tens of billions of dollars, and Mars has eaten half of the craft that have been thrown at it in ways that humans couldn't have saved. You're kidding, right?

> As for the whole idea of building robots, no Zubrin did not present that
> idea - it's just simply a good idea on its own, and you seemed to
> like robots so much I'm using it as an illustration of just ONE
> way in which we benefit sending humans to mars.

Address the points I raised concerning how awful that would be, cost and complexity-wise, or drop it. You don't get to just assert things and not address criticisms raised.

> On the steps I made everything simpler. You send up one larger unit.

Ah, like, say, the 2 ton Mars-2 probe? You really love the whole "all your eggs in one basket" approach, don't you? Besides, if reasonable people liked the "all your eggs in one basket" approach, we could send completed robots all in "one basket" as well.

> SAID AND YOU DID NOT READ... AS I SAID AND YOU DID NOT READ ...
> the parts do not have to unpack themselvs.

and, to quote you, "AS I SAID AND YOU DID NOT READ", unpacking is only step 9 of 9 steps, and one of the simplest. You have trouble with simple concepts, don't you?

> I guess you must also have failed to read the bit about sending over
> parts for fifty robots at once (instead of fity seperate launches)

My god, it's like talking to a wall; it's like my last post didn't even exist. You know, like the spot where I pointed out that sending 50 probes to the same point on the planet for assembly and then launching to other parts of the planet is simply adding a completely unecessary reentry/launch step?

> and the reduced chance of failure (with less complex systems all around,
> the whole process can be dumber and therefore easier).

Yeah... cut out the easiest step only (leaving the other 8, complex and expensive, steps), in order to have the probes land in pieces, be assembled in a dusty low-tech environment, then *relaunch* and *reenter* and then have them have to deploy anyways. OR, have all of your science conducted on a small part of the planet. Brilliant strategy; you should get a medal.

> You do have probably more padding, but it does not have to fold out of
> the way. You don't need a complex shell that's capabile of opening by itself.

Oooh, a pair of actuators for each petal! How scary! I mean, it's not like the probes themselves have several hundred actuators, let alone the rockets that got them there. Oh wait... it is exactly like that! Unfolding and deploying a spacecraft is the easiest part of getting there; address steps 1 through 8, please, or don't bother to respond.

> The whole thing is as simple as dropping crates of food to a remote
> location on earth.

Assuming that those crates contained incredibly complex, incredibly sensitive components that cost hundreds of millions of dollars (dwarfing the "unpacking cost"), had to be launched off of a device that shoots them at many Gs and intense vibrational loads, kept them in a hostile vaccuum and exposed them to radiation for months (or more, with ion drives), had them fire a series of retrorocket burns, then a series of aerobraking maneuvers, then orientation with a aeroshell, then deployment of one or more chutes and the separation of the aeroshell, then retrorocket braking and/or airbag deployment. And you're saving yourself a figurative crowbar on the shipment, at the cost of 50 times the shipment itself. It's a laughably stupid idea.

How old are you, anyways?

Heres an idea

[Cow007]

Why don't the test out some sort of anti sattelite weapon on it?

Not silence, just tired of contnuing your educatio

[SuperKendall]

I notice a huge degree of absense in your post, by the way, on the discussion of RTGs, RTHs, radiation, etc, when you sounded so haughty just a couple posts ago. The silence is deafening, Kendal. Please enlighten us. Come on, Kendal. You can do it. Show us your brilliance, oh dealer of insults who didn't even know that ISS orbited within the inner Van Allen belt. Come on, enlighten us about those tricky banned RTGs. Tell us some more about how humans would have been able to make the Mars craft that we lost survive (in specifics, for specific accidents). Tell me how I'm an idiot for not knowing how to deal with radiation, when you apparently don't know anything about radiation (I bet this was the first time you ever heard the word "Bremsstrahlung", wasn't it? And yet you still acted like you know everything - teenager, right?).

Well it's rather easy to be haughty when you're right. And frankly if you want me to type the same things agian, well OK then! I guess perhaps you'll get it with a second or third or fourth or 800th reading.

Yes the ISS orbits within a Van Allen belt, but it still needs some shileding. As I said, shilding techniques are known. More research could be done to imrpove things but it's not like it's the giant mystery you make it out to be.

Did I say RTG's were banned? Actually not at all, as of course once again you failed to read the bit where I said "they can be used by are politically impractical". Nice how you ignored my question to you about why the rovers use solar panels when RTG's would obviously have been superior. Furthermore it's a tangent not even of import to my primary point, in that even if you could really use RTG's in every project (which as history which you would deny as shown we do not) the argument for the efficencies of humans on Mars are untouched by that point going one way or ther other, it's just that you happen to also be wrong in that regard.

The way humans would have been able to save the lost craft? Because as I said, they would not have been reentering only placed - or replaced if the first failed. Pretty simple (and child could understand the concept of taking a block three feet over and putting it down is going to be simpler than dropping an egg from a skyscraper and having it land intact) but you are dense as a diamond in uranium lunchbox.

Bush did propose a manned presence on Mars, part of what I am also proposing. You seem unable to grasp the concept of combining visions from different people, understandable I guess when you have no vision of your own.

I am saying scientists would use instruments, have said it all along. Read again.

Your argumnet about it being cheaper to send humans than robots on the surface ignores the fact that it is horribly expensive to send either to mars - thus from the standpoint of cost it is obvisouly better to send things En Masse. Thus humans are needed to be able to assemble things there, because we lack the technical capacity to build a good automated factory for that need. Hey wait, I said that about thirty times already! Perhaps that sentance will be comprehesible to you. I doubt it, but invite you to proove to me you understand a single word I say.

Actually I asked for your problems wit Zubrins estimates almost right away.

The rest of your post was just repeating what you already said, and pretty mcuh fundametially stupid so I'll ignore it. But I will say one thing - a man who publically states that the effort to make something like the unfolding triangular rover case vs. a Box that can survive a harsh landing the difference of "a crowbar" - well sir, that takes some balls considering that a future emplyer might actually run across this when considering your competency! I salute you for bravery in the face of your own misguided arguments.

Well, one other point needs adressing

[SuperKendall]

How amusing that you call that "easy enough" when even Zubrin's optimistic budget makes it cost tens of billions of dollars, and Mars has eaten half of the craft that have been thrown at it in ways that humans couldn't have saved. You're kidding, right?

You miss the point again and again that having humans on the surface means that Mars is no longer eating these things, the primary benefit of my argument. As long as you fail to understand that humans are on Mars doing things is the core of my argument, your counter arguments are just a lot of mindless bluster which is why I saw no need to respond to the rest.

Re:Well, one other point needs adressing

[Rei]

I am not contesting that having colonies on Mars would be a great thing! You're not understanding that the argument is not about having colonies on Mars, but the economics of *getting them there* and about *how little they could do before they had some serious infrastructure* on the planet. THAT is what you need to address. No one is contesting that when you have a full Martian colony, that it would be a big benefit for scientific exploration of Mars.

The word I want to emphasise is _big_

[leonbrooks]

The piccies make the material look no heavier than a cool-drink can. If that's so, one for Hubble need only be a few times as heavy duty to shed the majority of relatively high re-entry speed to Earth by aerobraking. Lofting a 50kg heat shield to 750km (actually, if Hubble was deorbited in stages, not even that - maybe 200km) is a lot easier than lofting anything as cumbersome as the system used to protect the Shuttles.

So the plan is: use Hubble's remaining fuel to begin the deorbit, meet it en route with a small booster built into a light heat shield plus two sets of 'chutes to strap onto the other end - one small drogue to keep it oriented/stable and one real 'chute to slow it down once the nice compression-plasma has faded a bit. Fire the booster to initiate the final deorbit stage, kick the drogue out at the first sign of atmosphere, ride the plasma, kick the big 'chute out, have that intercepted by a 'plane with a big bungee and the ability to cope with suddenly adding 12t of deadweight, and you're done.

Re:The word I want to emphasise is _big_

[quanticle]

meet it en route with a small booster built into a light heat shield plus two sets of 'chutes to strap onto the other end...

Hubble is pretty big. Are you sure we can build a two-part spacecraft that can automatically attach to either side of the Hubble? Even if such a craft did exist, what would latch on to? The handrails used by astronauts look pretty flimsy to me.

have that intercepted by a 'plane with a big bungee and the ability to cope with suddenly adding 12t of deadweight, and you're done.

Do we have a plane that can handle 12 tons of deadweight being essentially dropped onto it in midair? Remember, even if there is a 'chute Hubble will be coming down pretty quick.

Re:Not silence, just tired of contnuing your educa

[Rei]

> Yes the ISS orbits within a Van Allen belt, but it still needs some shileding.

ISS has no radiation shielding, apart from its aluminum skin and thermal insulation. Apparently you don't understand what it means to be below the inner van allen belt; there are *ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE DIFFERENCE* in the amount of radiation you're exposed to compared to out in space. Once again, you're wrong about a fundamental concept. How many times do you have to be wrong before you give up?

> As I said, shilding techniques are known.

Not for a trip to Mars, they're not! Don't you dare claim that again without providing a paper to back it up; I've read the literature; there are no known solutions. Address how to handle the bremstrahlung radiation. *There Currently Is No Known Way To Address It For A Mars Trip*.

ISS astronauts, despite having no real shielding, are fine during solar flare events. On the other hand, the 1972 flare that occurred between Apollo 16 and 17, had it occurred during one of the Apollo missions, would have exposed them to 20,000 REM in 14 hours. They would have been incapacitated immediately and dead within days.

Flares are the *easiest* aspect to deal with, because you can actually shield against them; with GCR, the more you shield against it, the more bremsstrahlung radiation you get instead.

> Did I say RTG's were banned? Actually not at all as of course once
> again you failed to read

God, this is now, what, the 7th time, that you've asserted something that is just blatantly and obviously false? In response to my claims that RTGs can power robots for far, far more time than food can power humans, per kilogram, you stated:

"Wake me when we're allowed to send RTG's (sic) in orbit again. Until then we have dust accumulating solar cells"

When I pointed out to you that they're not banned, and that we not only are "allowed to" send RTGs into space, but in fact do it all the time, you then becamne incredulous and asked what a simple google search would have told you, as to why the MERs are using solar cells instead of RTGs.

Give up; every post you just dig yourself further down into the hole that you're in.

> Nice how you ignored my question to you about why the rovers use solar
> panels when RTG's would obviously have been superior.

~8th blatantly and obviously false claim. To quote:

"Apparently I have to do everything for you. RTGs are generally used for *outer solar system missions*, not inner solar system. RTGs are very expensive; their use is typically only justified for outer solar system missions because incoming solar power is so weak. Furthermore, to avoid damaging sensitive insturments and electronics, RTGs are typically held on booms away from the craft; one avoids them if one can for "cheap" missions. They can also cause heat problems

Spirit and Opportunity were only designed to last 3 months, because that was all that was estimated was needed to assess Meridiani Planum and Gusev Crater. On a cost-benefit analysis, solar power comes up as the power system of choice. MSL, on the other hand, has a planned minimum lifetime of 1 year (since its target mission scope is greater), and for it, a cost benefit analysis puts RTGs as the most viable option. More craft will probably be using them as the production of MMRTGs and SRGs progresses and makes them more cost effective by increasing power generation efficiency."

> the argument for the efficencies of humans on Mars are untouched by that
> point going one way or ther other

Humans can't be powered by RTGs. Humans are powered by food. Food weighs thousands of times more for a given amount of energy. You better damn well believe that a multi-thousand-fold increase in mass is relevant!

> Because as I said, they would not have been reentering only placed

Parts start on Earth. Parts end up on Mars. Without some sort of stargate or nascent martian manufacturing capacity, they *D