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Subcommittee Stops Human Mars Mission Spending
An anonymous reader writes "Last week's House Appropriations Subcommittee for Commerce, Justice, and Science FY08 budget markup would prevent work on programs devoted to human missions to Mars. According to a House Appropriations Committee press release, the markup language states that NASA cannot pursue "development or demonstration activity related exclusively to Human Exploration of Mars. NASA has too much on its plate already, and the President is welcome to include adequate funding for the Human Mars Initiative in a budget amendment or subsequent year funding requests." The Mars Society is already leading an effort to get the language removed."
You can either go off starting random wars of aggression, or you can conduct planetary exploration. The American taxpayer, quite rightly, doesn't want to pay for both. Many don't want to pay for either, frankly.
If you would rather support explorers than crusaders, make sure the Presidential candidate you vote for in '08 agrees with your point of view, and hold him/her to it.
This is basically a big FU to Bush, one of many that will come out of Congress over the next 2 years. The relative merit of appropriations is irrelevant - this is the "We Hate Bush" congress, and their actions will typically have that as a primary element.
In other words, politics as usual.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
According to the article, NASA "has too much on its plate" and needs to focus. Given the fact that there are many problems in the low Earth orbit area (aging weather satellites, and Hubble to name just two), should NASA be diverting valuable manpower and time to Mars mission planning?
I know I'd rather have NASA put up replacements for aging weather satellites before putting up manned missions to Mars.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Sorry folks, but Mars is a waste of time. We're better off studying the asteroid belt and sending probes to the more interesting moons. Even with fusion, it would take a really long time to make Mars even close to livable.
The asteroid belt is full of resources and the great thing about them is that they are already in space. We should start cataloging them and marking the ones that have necessary things like water, iron, gold, etc. Once we know what's out there, it won't be long before someone figures out how to get it and bring it back.
NASA is a dead end.
Stick a $1 billion prize into an investment fund and hand it over to anyone who can get people on to Mars and back alive. Do same for moon base. Close NASA down. Billions saved and lots of highly motivated businesses and individuals will do their damnest to earn that cash.
Deleted
Sucks that short-term politics and pet pork takes precedence over the future of humanity itself. (disclosure: I don't give a frig WHICH party is at fault - this simply sucks) :/
I feel the same way, at least about the importance of the ultimate goal -- but I'm not sure that the Human Mars Initiative (or whatever they were calling it) is really the right way to go, and that canceling it is in any way bad or wrong.
Right now, we're so far away from having a self-sustaining (both physically and economically) off-Earth settlement, sending one guy or a few guys out to Mars and back really isn't going to get us that much closer. We have too much basic research yet to be done, in order to make it permanent. And really, non-permanent human exploration doesn't get us that much that we haven't already gotten.
Look at it this way. Imagine that we're some European nation in the 15th or 16th century, and we want to plant a colony on the New World. The Mars project that's on the drawing board now is like sponsoring a long-distance swimming contest. It seems like it's going in the right direction, but really it's not that helpful. It's the wrong set of skills to be developing. Instead, you need to be doing boring crap on shore, building shipyards and learning how to make ships that don't sink.
In terms of progressing towards the eventual goal of a permanent, sustainable, off-Earth human settlement, the money that we're spending pushing a few people to Mars, so they can dig around in the dirt and pose for a photo op, would be much better spent improving our materials science, producing a good reusable launch vehicle, or researching advanced robotics systems. None of those are as sexy as actually putting a person on the surface of Mars, but all of them will bring us closer to actually putting people in space, permanently, than a quick sightseeing trip would.
About the only reason to send a person to Mars and back without a sustainable presence there, is because it would be good PR for NASA and possibly result in a lot more funding for long-term projects. But I'm not sure it would be worth the cost and diverted resources, particularly since it would mean basically setting aside all other projects and priorities in order to work on it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
... a manned Mars Mission is a "feel-good trip". It has nothing at all to do with the future of humanity. If we can get self-sustaining colonies running on the moon and mars, perhaps we can worry a little less about life-ending-events, like meteor strikes, on earth. Sure it's a long way in the future before a colony on the moon could repopulate the earth - but if we never start, we will never get there.For any of you who aren't aware, the Bush administration is notorious for unfunded mandates. If Bush thinks it's so good as to put it in the State of the Union address, he better damn well find a way to pay for it... otherwise it's just hot air as usual.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
If we can get self-sustaining colonies running on the moon and mars,
And if we had a million billion dollars and a pony, we could fly off to Candyland and have the faeries protect us!
At current launch costs, a "colony" (read: independent, unlike a base) is so far beyond the realm of possibility that it's laughable to even consider.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
Basically telling the president to pay up.
When Bush first announced this initiative, the director of Nasa was a Bush lackey and immediately moved to cut funding to other Nasa program likes Hubble to pay for it. (Eventhough presidents change every 4 to 8 years and with them their initiatives.) Congress pays for Nasa activities, and usually they have control. It just turned out that their was a Bush lackey in charge at Nasa and he started gutting other programs to pay for all this.
This was just a way to call the president out to have him pay for his initiative. You don't want to start a precedent where every time the president changes then existing programs are all gutted just because the president makes some random policy speech.
The committee has it right: trying to impose a manned trip to Mars on NASA without a huge funding increase is going to wreak havoc with NASA's science programs. If the president wants this, he needs to fund it.
The Mars society should be ashamed for trying to have this language removed; apparently, they think that going to Mars is worth dismantling the rest of our space program.
I totally agree. However, we should be setting our sights a little closer to home as regards the future of humanity. Terraforming Mars (if possible) and transplanting people (and our problems) there won't fix anything. If we can't solve the problems of disease, war, overcrowding, famine, racial/religious intolerance, etc. right here on Earth, maybe we don't deserve to survive as a species.
That's silly. We're never going to solve those problems -- they're fundamental to our nature as individuals with different goals and desires, coupled with limited resources. What we can do, is try to spread out enough to keep a single major incident from ending us as a species.
In contrast to some other people in the thread, although I don't think that permanent, self-sustaining (or at least economically self-sustaining, e.g. "oil platform") settlements are right around the corner, that doesn't mean that it's a bad goal, or one we shouldn't be working towards. One of the most disappointing things about our society, to me anyway, is that even though we have organizations and entities that are capable of preserving themselves and executing very long-term projects, we seldom think of more than a few years out. (You would think that large corporations and governments, which by their nature don't grow old and die, would have long planning horizons -- instead they have even shorter ones than individuals.)
I'm not saying that working for peace, justice, harmony, etc. on Earth aren't noble endeavors or worthy of support. They certainly are. I'm just saying that if you make them a precondition for exploration, then you're dooming us just as effectively as if we don't try at all.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
And while 50 years may be realistic for simply getting people there, for establishing a real "colony", it's more than a little optimistic. Modern manufacturing just has too much of a "long tail" to simply bring a small amount of infrastructure and expect that to suffice. On another planet, you need modern technology simply to survive. And you need to be able to keep producing it. Our modern technology infrastructure is premised on mining thousands of types of raw materials, running them through tens of thousands of industrial processes to produce hundreds of thousands of types of outputs and manufacturing those in to millions or tens of millions of products.
Yes, you can simplify. If it would be optimal to make some bottle with polypropylene, you might, say, substitute HDPE for it. But that only goes so far. You're not going to, say, substitute HDPE for neoprene where you need a rubbery material or teflon where you need to contain fluorine. There's a fundamental level of compexity that we have to accept, and this gives an incredibly long tail of production needs.
Here on earth, we were able to bootstrap to industry because we didn't need it to survive. On another planet functioning independently, it simply has to be there -- everything from the mining equipment to the ore haulers to the ball mills to the refineries, and on and on. They all have consumables, even if it be just the need for replacement parts when things break. Most machinery has frequent consumables -- hydraulic fluids, lubricants, and the like. And to those who say, "worst case, we just have people out there digging with picks!" -- it doesn't work that way. You not only have to be *able to produce what you need*, but *able to produce what you need faster than you consume them*.
You can't even just put it all in one part of a planet, because all of the minerals you need won't be clustered in one location. You need huge refineries, pipelines, roads, seperate mining colonies, manufacturing centers, etc. You're looking at the equivalent of shipping, say, the industrial equivalent of Detroit to Mars.
It's just not at all realistic with as-far-as-can-be-forseen technology.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
The cost of a manned Mars mission is currently estimated at $120B, with the highest estimate I've ever seen (for the far more ambitious program that was proposed, and killed, during the first Bush administration) was $400B. The cost of the war in Iraq so far has been $320B; the GAO projects a total cost in the area of $640B, and I've seen some estimates in the low trillions of dollars. And I'd argue that the War in Iraq (not the one in Afghanistan, which is a different kettle of fish) has nothing to do with the future of humanity, or even of the US (except perhaps endangering that future by damaging our foreign relations).
Challenge:
1) Pick a finished piece of technology sitting somewhere around you.
2) Figure out what all of its components are.
3) Figure out what all of those components are made of.
4) Figure out the industrial processes needed to make those ingredients.
5) Figure out what raw inputs are needed for those processes (all of them, not just the primary ore).
6) For every input that needs to be manufactured, trace it back in the same way. Repeat.
7) For every part of the industrial infrastructure that might wear out or be consumed, trace back a complete route for its production.
8) For every truly "raw" input, figure out what sort of process it takes to mine it (factor in all equipment and consumables). Also figure out how much infrastructure it will take to move all of the "raw" inputs, once mined, to their destinations, given that deposits won't be next to each other.
9) For all new parts that you've just added, go back to step 2.
This doesn't even address the issue of actually *manufacturing* parts and products and all of the facilities needed to make the millions of accumulated parts of all kinds, shapes, sizes, and raw materials.
And this just looks at what's needed to get you that one piece of technology that you picked.
Modern technology suffers from very serious "long tail" problems when dealing with colonization.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
I'm all for establishing colonies on the moon and Mars, but the idea that we need to do this now because of an inevitable meteor strike is not terribly realistic. Given a worst case scenario like a gigantic comet hitting the earth and setting everything ablaze...with dust blocking out the sun for decades, and a new ice age, etc... Humans would still be able to survive in very small self sustaining shelters, similar to the places where people would be living on the moon and Mars. If we're using a some kind of mass extinction event as justification, then it's still easier to survive on an utterly lifeless and devastated Earth than it is to survive on the Moon or Mars. If for no other reason than we have an near endless supply of oxygen and water and dirt that is suitable to growing food.
You keep up that attitude, and you'll be walking to Mars. ;)
(why am I reminded of Google's directions from New York to London?)
The proper first step to get from point A to point B is usually not to just walk. It's to figure out the fastest way to accomplish the trip. With your route, you might end up walking to point B, while a wiser person would get in their car and drive.
In this case, the proper course of action is not to send people on a money-wasting trip that accomplishes virtually nothing toward colonization. The proper course of action is to invest in lowering the costs associated with space exploration.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
Ah, the "stupid" analogy. :)
Question - how much did it cost to fund Christopher Columbus' initial 1492 expedition? (Considering that it required royal patronage... I'm thinking it was nearly the same order of expense). In retrospect, that cost was paid back and then profited by history (consider the combined GDP's and natural resources found in Canada, the US, Mexico, Central and South America...)
Colombus didn't go to colonize, and I don't have his numbers, so let's check out an early colony for comparison: Jamestown.
Check out this nice set of referenced calculations for how much people paid to get to the New World. Depending on how much they were bringing, some people paid less than as ~$2k to get to Jamestown. The most expensive were ~20k. That is, for themselves *and* their gear. That much money wouldn't even pay for a single kilogram to go to Mars.
Oh, but it gets worse. On an unsettled part of Earth, modern technology is not needed to survive. The technology you need can be created in the wilderness. Not so on Mars. You need technology to survive, and modern technology suffers from "long tail" problems: each piece of technology has many components, each component many materials, each material taking an industrial process with many steps and often many raw materials, and so on. You simply can't go there and "bootstrap" like you can on Earth.
A more apt comparison would been if instead of going to Jamestown, the British colonists instead went to colonize the Marianas Trench.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
"Why would you care if one day a man walks on Mars? Maybe I am just a selfish prick, but unless that man is me, I don't really care. Turning vast amounts of society's resources into a project to get a handful of humans onto Mars is a waste of my money. It might make your nationalistic pride feel warm and fuzzy, or maybe give you a feeling of greater human accomplishment, but warm fuzzy feelings is the extent of what is really accomplished."
Replace some of your text to reference the Olympics games and you have another huge waste of money to give glory to a few and fuzzy feelings to the rest.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Sure it's a long way in the future before a colony on the moon could repopulate the earth - but if we never start, we will never get there.
You're missing the point Rei was making. A manned mission to Mars is not the first baby step towards having a full-fledged off-planet colony. It might seem like a rational progression from sending a few people for a short stay, to a few people for a long time, to many people for a long time, to a complete self-sustaining off-planet colony. But it isn't. The Mars Mission would basically solve none of the major problems that make a colony completely out of our league any time in the future.
We should be working on cheaper reusable vehicles to reduce launch costs. Any Mars colony is going to require a lot of material to get it started, and to sustain it until it can become self-sufficient.
We should be working on robotics and fully automated construction/industry. We will want to build as much infrastructure on Mars as possible before any people actually arrive.
We should be working on ecology and hydroponics because right now the smallest self-sustaining ecosystem we have is arguably between the size of a country and a planet, and we have never succeeded in boot-strapping an ecosystem from nothing. The whole point is that the colony can't depend on Earth, and we have no ability to do anything in space that doesn't depend 100% on Earth support.
By the time we actually solve these problems, the minor task of actually getting a human's feet to touch the ground on another planet will be considered trivial.
The Mars Mission is not the start of a Mars Colony. It's a boondoggle that was threatening to get in the way of the actual science that could, in time, lead to an actual off-planet population.
The enemies of Democracy are
Really? You mean to tell me that figuring out the cheapest way to send people to mars wouldn't result in lowing the costs of space exploration?
Going to the moon taught us an awful lot about getting people into space, and supporting human life for a couple of weeks in space. It taught us a lot about landing on low-grav, no-atmosphere bodies, and lifting off from them again. We learned quite a bit about space exploration from that. Sadly most of it has been ignored for the space shuttle program, but if we don't try to branch out, we will not ever leave this planet. You don't just figure out the cheapest way to colonize a planet without sending humans there a few times first. How stupid would humanity be if we invested in everything needed for colonization, sent it all there, and then discovered that, since we'd never actually done the human trip to Mars beforehand, there was some hugely significant thing we missed about the planet or the trip? What if there actually is a significant difference in the impact on the body from a months-long trip to Mars compared with a months-long stay on a space station just outside our atmosphere?
The proper first step to getting humans to Mars is most likely developing a CHEAP way of getting humans to and from space. From there, developing useful, CHEAP space stations that can support launching missions deeper into space. Through all of this, a primary goal must be that these actions will be compatible with future exploration of space. We don't need another shuttle or ISS. This mandate from Congress would pretty much prevent taking steps towards Mars exploration.
I swear, if the government continues pissing me off with short-sighted crap like this and an inability to actually effect CHANGE, I'm going to wind up having to run for office in another decade. Cut the pork, stop throwing money at the rest of the world's problems and invest in something that will benefit all mankind for centuries to come.
Sigh. *forces blood pressure down*