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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."
We can't just use 60s technology to get there? I'm shocked!
I bet this question has been asked many times, but here goes:
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?
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
You mean we actually went to the moon before?
Bush wants us to go back to the moon so Red China won't be able to control all the green cheese.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
"The Apollo program cost $25 billion, equivalent to about $125 billion in today's dollars."
[Source: http://www.waltercunningham.com/op_ed_0204.htm%5D
"WHY the hell HAVEN'T they been back there YET?"
I guess you could say that the public interest in a given topic does not LET'S RIDE BIKES!!
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
You guys are COMPLETELY forgetting about space oil!
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.
A Funny thing happened on the way to the Moon
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
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.
They should still have the sets around somewhere, and I think today's CGI is FAR better than what they had in the 60s! On a more serious note, I saw a report several years ago, showing that for every $1 paid into NASA, $9 came back into the economy by way of R&D advances, and taking those advances to market. Not to mention, the amount of cutting-edge medical knowlege and equipment that has come from the space program. It is very dumb, not to fund bleeding edge technology to go to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
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....
NASA is hiring many Apollo engineers back as consultants to help with this. These guys did a lot with basic engineering skills and great common sence and a WHOLE lot of testing. Many are alive and in their late 60's.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Actually NASA has a lot more to offer than just ISS. They also conduct experiments in aircraft technology. Even if we were to abandon space "exploration" (read: taxpayer expenditures) altogether, NASA would still have a very good reason to exist. I for one do not wish for aviation technology to stagnate - especially technology available to general aviation.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Turning hydrogen into oxygen would be a nifty trick...
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.
We have to beat the terrorists to the moon!
You support him. Q.E.D.
If you post it, they will read.
Sadly not, while space is "considered" quite cold the only way to cool is through heat radiation, which is pretty fucking inefficient, especially in near-vacuum. That's why satellites are usually shielded against heat: they can't dissipate it.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
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. ~
"sponging off Apollo"
Damn you, Slashdot! Now I'm picturing some strange Greek Hentai stuff. *goes to stab out eyes*
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.
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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.
Last I heard they'd only use 486s. But this was in 2000.
r s/Ch4-3.html or http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shut ref/orbiter/avionics/dps/gpc.html or even
No, not 486s. The CPUs in the 5 shuttle computers are AP-101S, which are upgrades from the AP-101B. iirc, the upgrades were circa 1991.
This CPU has its lineage in IBM 360 mainframes. See http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/compute
Helium-3 is a good reason to return to the moon .
6 30.html
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r ia_and_candidates_for_terrestrial_reactions
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It is theorized that there are over 1 million cubic tons,
with oil over $50 a barrel, and helium-3 then being worth
about 8 billion USD a ton, the total worth equalling 8,000 trillion USD .
It could smash the US deficit with 7,991 trillion USD to spare .
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Also keep in mind most of the "other" moons have this as well .
Here are some photos of the reactor at the University of Wisconsin :
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/GeneralOpPics.htm
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/GeneralOpPicsII.htm
25 tons could power the US electrical needs for a year :
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_000
I don't need to tell anyone that the US is the largest user of electricity on
the planet at present, and slated for massive growth .
The current immmigration bill sets aside for 100 - 200 million new citizens .
Kulcinski adds that, if it sold for $4 billion a metric ton, helium-3 would still be a
good energy value: "That's the equivalent of paying $28 a barrel for oil."
It will be a cold day in hell before we see oil at $28 a barrel again
So adjust the math accordingly
It becomes more viable with every passing day .
If we can make solar mining robots for the moon to process the soil, and
then use a mass driver to fling a projectile canister into lunar orbit for pick up.
Then a lunar orbit robotic satellite mass driver to fire it into earth geo-sync orbit .
Then have either a new space station, shuttle, or satellite prep it for re-entry
into the ocean for pick up much like the apollo capsules .
The robotic equipment could be tested here on earth prior to deployment on the moon .
It might be possible to make robots that could build it all via remote control, but
most likely we would initially need ppl to go to the moon to build the mass driver
and support facilities .
Building some or all of the support facilities underground would protect it to some
degree versus leaving it exposed on the surface .
At some future point 3HE+3HE fusion will be achieved and it will have zero nuetron emissions
and thus be truly clean as per the following link .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Crite
Hope for the future
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
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.
And why do I care about sending people to other planets?
My poing being, if I want the most scientific bang for my buck, sending someone to the moon is not the way to go. Sure, we might learn some more things about space travel. So what. That's of limited utility. I'd rather solve the problems on this planet first, or at least make a dent.