Slashdot Mirror
NASA Unveils Strategy for Return to the Moon
mknewman writes to tell us that NASA recently announced plans to build a permanent base on the moon by 2024. The (still tentative) plans call for building the base on one of the moon's poles, which constantly receive light from the sun and have less temperature fluctuation. This base will start small in 2020 and grow over time with the hopes of eventually supporting 180-day stays and providing a jumping-off point to Mars."
and I was able to read the article first... just hope they're not gonna be bean-counted to death on this one... those auditors are already sharpening up their knives to trim the budget... I'd hate to see an astronaut die because things were cut too fine...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
We should have done this 20 years ago, and, I hope they aren't bluffing.. i'll believe it when I see it.
Why not spend a decade concentrating our efforts on designing and building radically new heavy launch lift concepts? While we are far from being able to build a space elevators, we could build both launch assist catapults and orbit assist tethers.
Letter To Iran
I would guess that the lunar budget would be cut totally before it got that fine. There is plenty of time before an actual landing for Congress to cut that part of NASA's budget, saying "The money could be better spent here on Earth," leaving out the last part of the phrase. ("The money could be bettter spent here on Earth getting pork for my constituents so I get re-elected and/or my party gains more seats.")
I hope that it doesn't happen that way.
NASA is fully aware of the current work in commercial spaceflight.
Some NASA centers (*cough* Marshall *cough*) feel threatened by it. The brass, and some of the centers, love it, though. They can't say it strongly in public right now, but they would love to take advantage of it to make lunar exploration cheaper and more sustainable.
If the commercial sector --- including COTS, Bigelow, and the other players --- take root and grow, expect NASA to revise the lunar plans. The current plan is the fallback plan. Read the words they used today. They make very clear that the plan is provisional, pending future developments.
I haven't been doing calculations on this, but I imagine you need to bring a lot more weight to send someone to Mars than to the moon, so if you could somehow get the weighty parts you need to the moon in small bits (or even better extract it from the moon or make it on the moon, for example the fuel through solar panels) then I think you could save a substantial amount of fuel doing so. ... this is just what came to mind.
Also with the moon rotation around the earth you probably would be able to get an extra starting speed that you wouldn't have to spend fuel to get.
There are probably other factors involved in this that I haven't considered
Just look at the steaming pile of crap that is the ISS and there's your Moon Base Alpha right there. Grandiose dreams and visions reduced to a paltry 3-man crew that spends most of its time trying to stay alive. Rah farkin' rah.
Put down your Heinleins and spend a little time trying to make the planet we will all live and die on a better place.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Now we might all agree that space exploration is exceedingly exciting. But why on Earth (no pun intended) would we want to go to the moon? There's nothing there but sharp and spikey moondust. Now, missions like Hubble I understand and support. Those make sense as they get us a much better insight into what is out there and how it might have come to be. But manned missions to nowhere just to prove "we can do it"? It seems to me this kind of mission is designed purely for the publicity value. For the general public, stunts like these are much more interesting than some probes sent to other planets that actually provide us with new and possibly new information.
And don't even get me started on the "we have to spread out humanity to other planets" argument. I'd rather die out as a species than to have to live on Mars, I tell you that.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Well seeing as the point of sending people to the moon is to figure out how to get humans to survive off planet just sending robots seems rather pointless. There is nothing to stop you sending robots as well in fact sending both is probably far more productive than either alone as then enhance each others strengths.
Forgetting one moment about the ridiculous time schedule (17 years with current technology after Apollo took less than 10 years after starting virtually from scratch half a century ago is simply embarrassing), the question remains what to do up there besides scientific explorations. The Moon is basically a pile of worthless dirt: Light crust material with all the volatiles gassed out.
Going after astroids is both cheaper (in terms of delta-v) and more interesting economically: You have anything from volatile rich comets to core material iron/nickel balls in all different sizes and at delta-vs as low as several hundred m/s from HEO (as compared to 2 x 1.4 km/s for the moon). Also, a zero gravity enviroment has many advantages for processing, requires less structural support (e.g. for solar pannels and mirrors) and makes it easy to move heavy stuff around.
After all, if you're serious about developing a permanent space presence, you will need some sort of space industry which is easier to bootstrap from astroids than on the moon.
Whatever happened to "before this decade is out"? Why the hell could we go to the moon almost from scratch in the 1960's and do we need almost 20 years now?
-- Cheers!
You don't stockpile your supplies on the Moon. You stockpile them in Earth orbit. You don't build a spaceport on the moon. That would be pointless. You build an interplanetary spacecraft in orbit. The moon serves but a single purpose in a Mars mission: Technology proving ground. Can we build functional habitats? Can we stay in space for months, years at a time? What tools do we need? What issues might arise?
The only role the moon might play in the actual Mars launch would be as a gravitational slingshot.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The US had no way of knowing, of course, but his death signalled the end of the space race and the US had won.
:) Russians only have double and triple birthdays on orbit. :)
When did US win space race? USA was second to put man on space. 2nd woman. 2nd to be over 24h at space. 2nd to space walk. 2nd to do multi-personnel space walk. 2nd to put a space station on orbit (3rd space station). 2nd birthday on orbit
About staying in space. Longest US stay on US station 84 days. Longest USA stay on Russian station 188 days. With those figures they would not even listed in Russian list top 20, could be more but top 20 is listed with a longest single stay 438 days. Longest cumulative stay 747 days. USA cumulative record 230 days.
USA leads 18-4 space deaths. So that race you won if it ended today.
Don't be a victim of US propaganda. What USA can claim is winning of "moon race". But that isn't space race.
Apollo program, not apollo missions. One apollo mission was relatively cheap, but the program required to develop the technology for that missions (and the others) was expensive. I suppose there could have been a new moon program and a fusion power program (or a sizable donation to the ITER)
And one might call you a bigot, because you are a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion, such as those who choose to be racist. So you are a bigot towards racists. What makes you any better?
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
It is perfectly legitimate to judge people by their actions. You are welcome to believe anything you want about people who are in some way different from you. But the instant you step over the line of treating them differently because of that belief, you have marked yourself as evil. And realistically, there are very damn few racists/sexists/religionists/whatever-ists who can keep themselves from crossing this line.
What makes the anti-racist better than the racist? The same thing that makes the person who kills in self-defense better than the serial killer.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
.. because it throws down the gauntlet to China. China's in the same position the USSR was a generation ago - proud, insecure, and eager - perhaps overeager - to demonstrate its "greatness". But unlike the USSR, they actually have the economic viability to mount a decent long-term challenge to the USA.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. America is a great country but it NEEDS a competitor. Without Russia to "compete against" the whole game has fallen apart, the US has lost its confidence, progress in "national pride" projects such as this grinds to a helpless standstill while the narrow-minded lefties whine about "the money could be best spent at home" and similar short-term thinking - and let's not even mention the miserable standstill in the middle east.
China is shaping up to be the new Russia for America - a capable, proud opponent who will catalyse any number of "races", some good, some bad. But any way you cut it, this can only be a good thing in the long term, and China certainly presents less of a threat than Russia.
Now if the Euros could get in on the action, we could have a three-way race to the stars, and progress in space technology will accelerate to a pace we can only dream of today, and about time.
Brilliant news, let's wait for China's response - that's what will really "lock it in".
Let my new 7-digit UID be a lesson to all - write down your passwords.
Wrong. Such changes happen if, and only if, they give a significant advantage in the number of offspring such people produce. Since the human hipbone is already too thin for safe birth, and the reason it can't get wider is that you'd have trouble walking then, it is likely that evolutionary pressure would be for wider, not thinner, people. Why the muscle structure would change I have no idea; large (strong) muscles are only disadvantageous during a famine (since they consume energy), since upkeeping them consumes more energy than smaller muscles, and such famines are pretty unlikely in a colony dependent on high technology (if it breaks, the colonists are all dead anyway). Unless you meant the places the muscles anchor to, in which case we're talking at least millions of years of evolution...
Of course all of this completely ignores human medical and other technology, which is likely to render any such advantages/disadvantages insignificant. But even discounting that, let's all repeat now: "Acquired charasteristics are not inherited, with the only exceptions being mutations".
Good fearmongering nonetheless. And, I suspect, a good troll.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.