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Back to the Moon
starexplorer2001 writes "Space.com is reporting that NASA's planned trip back to the Moon isn't without a significant amount of science and technological innovation. Simply 'sponging off Apollo' won't do it. Among the issues: safer human spaceflight, lunar ice, sustainability, robotic scouting missions and more. This won't be easy."
From the top of my head:
In a word, it's not that it's impossible to go to the moon now, but that it's inacceptable.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
In short, it's all about politics. The actual physics have never changed; it's just a matter of the government giving NASA the money (which IIRC was only .04 cents/federal tax dollar for Apollo)and the clearance to do a moon shot. Back then Vietnam killed off the last two Apollo missions, and now it'll be The War On Terror and Balanced Budgets that has made it hard for us to do any realistic shot at the Moon or Mars. Quite sad, really.
Napalm is nature's toothpaste
We're doing this to lay down a sustainable infrastructure for continued unmanned and manned spaceflight.
We don't have the industrial setup to make new 60's gear - and doing so would be unsafe and unwise.
This is like building shipyards - so we can build ships.
Properly done - and I have some doubts about the CEVs basis in design - this will allow for much more access to space.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Yep, of course, how didn't I think of that one, the american government created 300kg of rocks that couldn't have been created anywhere on earth, shipped them all around the world, and no scientist ever realised it!
Those 419 guys are sooo beaten...
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
The reason we won't use Apollo Hardware is because we want to do much more then land 2 guys on the moon for more then a week. The ultimate goal is to build a moon base and use that as practice for a Mars base. In order to do that you need to bring more stuff to the moon and be able to keep your service module in orbit unmanned for up to 6 months at a time. This isn't all that hard. But currently NASA is working with its current budget so things won't get really rolling until Space Station is built and shuttle retires. Those two programs ending will free up almost $10B a year for NASA. That is plenty of money to do a slow gradual build up to a moon base.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The whole "back to the Moon" thing is a load of garbage.
Your short-sightedness is amazing here. "There's nothing more to learn on the Moon"? Where do you get that from? We've sent precisely six manned missions to the moon in all of human history. Only twelve humans have actually walked on it. Almost none of them had a strong scientific background (although many learned it in order to be more effective). Yet we know everything there is to know about the moon according to you. Your hubris is absolutely mind-boggling.
Experts have long admitted that launching a mission to Mars from the Moon is far more difficult than doing it from here.
Umm...exactly who is proposing we launch a Mars mission from the Moon? Bush sure isn't, and neither is any other sane person. To build up a launch infrastructure on the Moon would be a multi-decade endeavor and would likely eclipse a Mars mission for sheer complexity and cost.
No, the Moon is a beta test site, if you will. No human has left low Earth orbit for almost four decades! All the engineers who made Apollo work are either dead or retired. Our heavy lift capacity is completely moribund. With but few exceptions, we're going to have to learn a bunch of things all over again. Which is a better place to learn these things, a spot that's only a couple of days away from the Earth via free-return trajectory, or a spot that's months away with no such option? It doesn't take much more intelligence than a turnip to understand the former is far more advantageous than the latter. It's safer, it'll cost less, and we'll get quicker "knowledge returns".
Once we rediscover how to get to the Moon, setting up a moonbase will essentially be a "dry run" for setting up a Mars habitat. True, the lunar surface and Martian surface don't have a lot in common, but they're both immensely rugged and challenging environments to construct even a sand castle. Learning how to build a moonbase will teach us in no small part how to build a Mars base. Or would you rather we get to Mars first then try to figure all this out then, when astronauts are beyond any easy help from Earth?
NASA has become the "Santa Claus" of the U.S. Government. Keep the children excited and maybe they'll think there really is a future, after all.
While I'll freely admit NASA is merely a vast sinkhole for funds and functioning solely as a reason to have a space station right now, the return to the Moon does not fit that category. There is a future if ostriches like yourself would only see it. Instead, your cynicism and politcal bias appears to be clouding what might otherwise be a capability for sound judgement on your part.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
There's nothing more to learn on the Moon
New technologies to do it faster, better, and cheaper is a very good thing to learn. If we can do it on the budget that NASA has today.. that is an awesome achievement that will produce lots of great technology not only for future NASA missions, but also to further science which has a direct positive affect on everyone's lives.
Here comes the predictible velcro and Tang rebuttles.....
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
Life needs to find a way off this gravity well before the next "great extinction". For better or worse that burden falls on us, homo sapiens sapiens. People view earth as some permantent hospitable sustaining womb and that "we should just solve our problems here on earth first" before venturing out.
The truth is we will never solve our problems here and geological and life history tells a story with several instances of wide spread extinction of species. Life has come a long long long way and if our puny existance has any meaning at all it is spread self-aware intelligent life beyond our little neighborhood.
There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us, And the Wild is calling, calling...let us go....
March 14, 1992: Vice President Dan Quayle, who heads the space council, made public a space policy directive approved by President Bush that assigns "major roles" to the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy...
What? President George H. W. Bush got support for a big NASA budget to put men on Mars and then diverted the money to defense and energy contractors? Must've been a fluke. That could never happen again in a million years!
January 15, 2004: President seeks $1 billion more in NASA funding
Saying "the desire to explore and understand is part of our character," President Bush Wednesday unveiled an ambitious plan to return Americans to the moon by 2020 and use the mission as a steppingstone for future manned trips to Mars and beyond.
So what? Thats what? Just under half a war.
False economics. For every $1 paid to nasa, maybe $0.10 went into R&D that had a practical use here on earth, and that's generous, as most of it went to overhead, materials and non-R&D stuff. And what did go into R&D was mostly to solve problems for getting to the moon, not for getting products to market.
,and of course, sucking billions out of the economy that would otherwise be available for a wide range of research and development.
So, if the $0.10 that actually went to useful R&D resulted in $9 in economic growth... then if the whole $1 that went to NASA had been retained by the economy (it was taxes, remember) then $90 in economic growth would have resulted. (As the value not destroyed by NASA on a project with no positive economic impact, would have circled the economy at least ten times before going somewhere that was a dead end, so each $1 retained would have resulted in at least $1 in R&D even if the initial dollar was spent on floor wax.)
Socialists (eg: anyone who supports government development of anything) always point to the benefits, but never pay attention to the costs. And the costs are always much higher than the benefits.
If they' just shut down NASA a private space program would get to the moon again faster than NASA could. NASA is interfering with private efforts
And this is just the economic argument. It doesn't even address the massive number of truely talented people who could have prusued access to space in an economically viable way, who were instead wasted working for NASA for 20-30 years. NASA's brain drain probably exceeds its budget impact by an order of magnitude. Imagine what kind of a space industry we'd have if venture capitalists could have underwritten access to space back when the technology was just viable and everyone wanted it? (Unlike now when 40 years of NASA incompetance have caused people to give up on the possibility.)
Fortunately, private entities are working on it. But they have to fight NASA every step of the way.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Um, they're commited to over-engineering and risk avoidance because if the astronauts die or the spacecraft fail, then a bunch of money and lives have just been wasted. The whole point of exploration is that you don't know what conditions are going to be like, exactly, in the places you explore. Over-engineering in such cases isn't even really over-engineering. It's just "not being a complete fucking moron".
That said, NASA is still a government organization (worse, it's now become a sort of international government organization), and as a result it suffers from the $1000000 toilet-seat effect you see in any government organization.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
Are you nuts or just stupid? As a previous poster said, the Apollo program cost $135 Billion. What private entity has that kind of capital lying around to spend doing something as extremely risky and dangerous as sending humans to another celestial body?
Even worse, what private company would spend ANY money on a purely scientific mission such as the Mars landers or Titan probe?
If there were ANY instances of private companies doing anything successful like this, you'd have a point. But you're just trolling.
You could buy a new car for $2,500. .27 a gallon.
Most people didn't wear seat belts, and most cars didn't have them.
Most cars didn't come with air conditioning, if at all.
Gas cost around
Most people watched the moon walk on a black & white TV.
Calculators were big and expensive ($500.) and did the basic stuff.
The total electric house was the "house of the future".
I don't think that it would be possible to use the old 1960's technology to get to the moon nowdays. It would be like me dropping $45,000 to restore a 1960's car, that originally retailed for $2,500. It can be done, but why? You wouldn't trust it to take a cross-country road trip, would you?
My Doctor prescribed daily nasal saline irrigation, hehe
Jerry Pournelle likes to say that he always hoped he'd live to see the first trip to the Moon, but he never expected to see the last one. It's about time we started exploring the Universe again!
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It's because, as many have already said, going to the Moon serves as a sort of beta test for future manned missions to other planets (since it's so close, it's relatively safer) and as a way to possibly discover a new way to send people into space more safely. After all, the Shuttle program needs to get a replacement somehow.
Derive Politics
I read those stories too, years ago, and another common feature of them was that they all expected it wouldn't cost as much as it did. Heinlein, for example, expected one incredibly rich guy to bankrupt himself to do it. Others seemed to think that it would be knocked up in the back yard by some really smart mechanically-inclined boy not at all unlike the average reader of Astounding magazine.
According to another post in this thread, the total cost in 2006 dollars was $125 billion. That's about four times Bill Gates' net worth if he sold every single thing he had (though only about 50% more than his peak net worth). And it's 40 times the net worth of a random member of the Forbes 500.
Presumably, there turned out to be great numbers of unexpected problems, each of which required new equipment to be added. More equipment meant more weight which meant bigger rockets which add new layers of technological problems to handle, which means more manpower and time and therefore more money.
I like to think that we could do it cheaper today, what with readily-available computers both on board and in design, and 40 years advances in metallurgy and engineering technique. Assuming we wanted to do the same thing we did before, that is: put two guys on the moon and bring 'em right back. If you want to preserve the human race or mine the moon for treasure or whatever your reason is for wanting to go back, you'll have to spend more.
Simple enough, the government, rather than doing itself, contracts it out. Preferably on a competition bid.
Actually, way back when NASA was new, they weren't bad. They had a specific goal and a mandate to reach it as fast as possible. Bureaucracy hadn't had a chance to build up. Now it's got it really bad, and the big three subcontractors for NASA are just as bad, if not worse.
I like the bounty system. You have multiple competitors for the goal, and the first wins. Increase the reward each year until somebody gets it.
Odds are that, on average, it'll be cheaper.
I don't read AC A human right
This is retarded.
Private interests were able to fund and develop cars, electrical power, and telecommunications because the advances there had immediate and obvious commercial benefits. People were all too happy to buy Model Ts and stop riding horses, and they were happy to have electric lights. Telecom's a little different: a lot of the development of infrastructure for telecoms has been government subsidized because of the enormous capital expense.
Where's the commercial benefit to space exploration? Especially in the 1950s-1970s when it was at its peak? If you really think private interests could have had a man on the moon in 1969 you're a complete fool. Even today, private interests (which are only funded by 1) wealthy individuals like John Carmack, and 2) the incentive of big prizes from government money) haven't managed to get a man out of the atmosphere.
In today's economic environment, if there's no profit to be gained by something within 5 years, it's simply not going to be done.
I'm sorry if the reality of the necessity of government-funded research goes against your Randian ideals, but that's reality.
Do you have any idea of how much regolith you would have to process in order to get a ton of He3?
And by "process" I mean "extract it, transport it to H3 extraction facilities, grind it, bake it and get rid of the waste". Those facilities will need to be huge (because they have to process a huge amount of rock), built there with local materials (which, in turn, will have to be made there in factories built here), supplied with power, and, unless we advance robotics substantially, manned.
All that assuming we can do He3 fusion on industrial scale at all.
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Why was it possible to go to the moon in '69 but not possible now even using the same old technology? Has the moon/earth/atmostphere/space changed?
A little thing called "lost technologies". It is entirely possible to forget how to do things.
A goodly portion of the knowledge encapsulated in any serious technological endeavour cannot be captured in blueprints and technical documents. It exists in the heads of the engineers, scientists, and astronauts who actually do the stuff. Going back to the original documents will give us a head start in re-learning how to do it, but not much more than that. If you don't have a teacher that actually knows how to do it, you are in the same position as someone learning how to speak Ancient Egyptian, given nothing but walls of hieroglyphics. It is possible to deduce some semblance of meaning, but it's frightfully hard to actually learn how to do it.
The primary problem is that the senior NASA engineers in 1969 are mostly dead now. They did not have any apprentices whom they could mentor in the arcane business of placing men on celestial bodies, and no young masters in that art grew up in their footsteps applying their own clever insights to refine the art further. The entire business was pretty much forgotten, and now we are back where we started, albeit with some hieroglyphics that we could spend some time trying to decode if we had to.
At Cape Canaveral, there is a complete Saturn V launcher on display at the Visitor's Centre. This is like the Great Pyramid of space missions -- a complete, working example of a device to put men on the moon. Unfortunately, they chose to lay the rocket on its side, which it was never designed to do. So structurally, the device was completely destroyed and is now useless, having even lost much of its value as an engineering archive.
So in many respects, we simply have to start over, and re-learn what we already knew.
We still know how to put a complicated technological device into orbit and how to include humans in that. We still know how to find the point of breakaway orbit to accomplish putting that object in places outside of Earth orbit. We still know how to manage the health of those humans and how to return them to Earth.
I get your point, but I don't think the situation is as dire as you present.
We will have to redesign the systems. Newer composites and materials that are lighter, more resiliant and possibly, thought not probably, less expensive. But in any case, much different. Faster computers, better robotics, more intelligent software... the possibilities astound me.
I really don't think that circa 1969 expertise, even having been maintained these several decades, would be all that relevent today. I see it as a positive thing actually since we're now forced into a redesign that, had those entrenched interests persisted, we might not.