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Russia Plans Its Own Moon Base
Socguy writes "After being rebuffed by NASA, Russia now plans to build its own moon base by as early as 2027. The nation now plans to send a manned mission to the moon by 2025 and establish a permanent base shortly thereafter. 'According to our estimates, we will be ready for a manned flight to the moon in 2025,' Roskosmos chief Anatoly Perminov told state news agency RIA Novosti. A station that could be inhabited could be built there between 2027 and 2032, he said. While Russia will be refurbishing existing spacecraft, the U.S. is taking a different approach after the space station is finished and plans to scrap the space shuttle program in favour of a new kind of spaceship to be called Orion."
Jetsons was 6 years ago people, freakin' heck.
But The Great Kazoo failed to show up. Don't you know your cartoon history, dude?
Why are we so lazy? Space is the future, and we're failing at getting there.
Because its not profitable, not self-sustaining, and its dangerous. Hate to say it, but its cheaper to outsource exploration and mining to robots.
And we'd be there by now if it was not for those pesky kids.
Table-ized A.I.
We welcome your mooning of russian overlords with your base. Just remember that space is really really cold outside of your suit.
Table-ized A.I.
...do they have the technology to fake it as well as we did?
Table-ized A.I.
But hey, robots are still freaking cool and can pave the way for remotely constructing habitats.
Please take note that all of them are indeed belong to us, monsieur.
Ice Cream has no bones.
In Soviet Russia, all our base are belong to YOU!!
Circumcision is child abuse.
You must be new on this planet.
global warming, ozone holes: Relatively pointless to solve. An asteroid hitting the planet will cause far more damage than someone not being able to grown corn in their backyard any more.
overpopulation: Unsolvable, unless you like forced abortions.
nuclear threat: Unsolvable, the genie is out of the bottle.
If we stay on Earth, we as a race, are fucked. No - not just Americans. No - not just those brown-skinned terrorist folks. No, not the Jews, or the gays, or the Democrats. EVERYONE. EVERY LAST MAN, WOMAN, CHILD AND SMALL FUZZY ANIMAL. *FUCKED*
So, hey, let's ignore that fact and start Wars on everything, hey? Hate to break it to you, but utopian fantasies aren't ever going to come true. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.
robots are still freaking cool and can pave the way for remotely constructing habitats.
That is true, but not very practical yet. Plus, the further away from the Earth, the longer it takes the signal to control them and get feedback. We'll probably have to wait until AI, and by then they might decide they don't want to keep us.
Table-ized A.I.
Can you efficiently make vodka on the moon, or would it have to be sent there?
Maybe 'Moon Vodka' could be a money making thing for them....Oh well..."Budem zdorovy!" *tosses back shot of vodka*
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Seeing as how many Russian hospitals can't even get running water, it's not unreasonable to call bullshit on this claim. The country is still by-and-large in shambles, struggling to survive. They just recently announced a military build-up as well. Good'ole Putin sure is a winner, sinking that ship even further.
Project Orion was nuclear powered spacecraft. Are their Marketdroids really so bereft of imagination that they couldn't think of another name for the STS replacement?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Boom
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
This has nothing to do with interest in space exploration. It is about investing in local technology companies and making sure that the technologies are mastered by local industry. It is also about investing a lot of money into military applicable technologies.
Yes, they should cure cancer first.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Drat, couldn't find the whalers on the moon part from Futurama.
I'll just post Bender's Moonsong instead.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Odmt2HTjwrE
This is the sig that says NI (again)
The Russians first said it was their idea not to participate:
RIA Novosti, 25.05.2007
"No plans to join NASA lunar program - Russian space agency"
Five days later BBC said Interfax carried the claim that the US turned them down:
BBC News, 30.04.2007
"NASA 'rejects Russia Moon help'"
The same day NASA said it didn't turn down Russia because it never got an offer:
New Scientist Space, 30.04.2007
"NASA denies that it has received any proposal from Russia to conduct joint moon activities, despite media reports to the contrary."
Four months later CBC ignores NASA, quotes Interfax, and credits RIA Novosti:
CBC News, 31.08.2007
"Spurned by NASA, Russia plans its own moon base"
Not content to sit still with this mere confusion, CBC includes in their article a graphic from AP with a caption that contradicts the "spurned" claim:
"NASA has said it will establish an international base camp on one of the moon's poles"
Did Russia misread this, leading them to send a mission to the north pole to claim it for themselves? Or was that just one more piece in this grand conspiracy to drive the Canadians slowly crazy, and to see if we could get them to send people to the north pole?
I suspect the following accounting (also 30.04.2007) to be as accurate as any of the others:
"A reporter from TheSpoof.com was sent forthwith to find out why but no one at NASA was willing to discuss the issue. All he could glean was that they would be taking a replica of the original Moon Lander with them, presumably for some kind of celebration.
After our intrepid reporter arrived back to TheSpoof.com offices, he was contacted by someone who wouldn't leave their name but simply stated that "there are no plans to take a replica Moon Lander as there is already one up there"
Mr Perminov said "personally, I think they do not want us to get to the Moon first, because they don't want us to find out that they didn't really get there in 1969 and that the whole thing was filmed on a sound stage in Nevada"
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
...Exploration someone trumps in with:
* What about the starving children?
* Maybe we should cure cancer first?
* What about AIDS?
* We can't even cloth/feed/house our own people. Why not that first?
* The ________________ nation doesn't even have running water (electricity, enough food, etc) for everyone. Why spend resources on space?
You wanna know why?
Because exploring space and ensuring a future for the human genome is WAAAAAAY more important than all of that. Period. There is no debate. Any argument that you make that says, "Don't do Space Exploration because XXXX is more important, " can easily be shown to be silly by the simple statement:
"If human beings remained confined to this planet they will become extinct."
Thank You,
G.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
money is the problem most likely. russia is not what you would call a developed country for the most part.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Do we really need to build a dozen because US, Russia, China, India, Europe, Japan can not agree to invest a billion dollar-equivalents each instead of spending 10 times more money for separate bases?
Co-operation would be good, but would it be the best method? Maybe not. If we have 10 people independently working on 1 problem, we could get as many as 10 solutions. If everyone works together, we get no more than 1 solution. (Of course they'll come up with many ideas, but they'll only fully develop and test one.)
This is not about invention -- it's about engineering. Imagine if the world's civil engineers had all worked together to build bridges and between them, they'd built millions of bridges like the Mississippi bridge that recently collapsed, or the Tahoma narrows bridge. We could now be living in a world without bridges.
And consider the houses in earthquake zones. It's the Big One and 50% of the town is levelled. Had there been one engineering team in charge of all houses, maybe 100% would have been safe -- or maybe 100% would have collapsed.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Perhaps Russia is taking a cue from North Korea - you can survive on relatively little if you only support your military and keep the rest of the population in stark poverty. Of course, Russia is likely banking on getting a lot of money for oil, especially if they can somehow tap reserves beneath the northern ice caps. Thus the military buildup and the Cold War rhetoric. Plus, I'd imagine that it's obvious that governments don't go into space for just exploration: there's definitely gotta be some profit in it (monetary, political, etc).
This seems to be turning into a real space race. On one hand we have china and india competing in who will land a human first, and on the other hand we have Russia and the US competing for the first moon base. But in the end, the US will be looked upon as the total victor of this space race as well. The reason is that because of their new long term vision, the US is the only contender that will develop a way to go to mars at the same time as they're planning the moon trip. By 2030 when moon bases are old news, everyone will be looking at mars but the US will be the only country with a chance to get there. Mars will probably be the end of this space race since its so much harder to go anywhere else.
;)
On the other hand, that also means the americans probably won't keep ther moon base manned for many years. The russians probably will though and the moon base will become their source of space prestige.
Meanwhile, ESA will stick to cheap, unmanned missions: 500 years of world domination means the europeans don't need to prove anything
Well it will be a pity if the world's big countries can't collaborate on this - and leave a space at the table for the Chinese too while you're at it - but it does strike me as a little ironic that the Americans are rolling up their sleeves to re-invent the Apollo spacecraft as the big step forward. Hand crafted solutions vs Russian mass production again? Presumably it will be a whole lot cheaper for the Russians, who are still turning out Soyuz same as they ever were, to tweak an improved model a bit. I suppose the earlier Russian (Soviet) plans were based on quite a bit of hardware which is tried and tested (apart from the N1 rocket).
I have to say it's all a bit disappointing that the biggest vision that the Americans can come up with is an updated version of the kit they were using 50 years ago. The romantic in me had hoped that even if the only way to get to planets is in disposable capsules, maybe we'd have come up with some reusable craft for the hopping between the planets and their satellites. That way we might get to use it a few times on the Earth-Moon shuttle and maybe even have a go at looking at Mars...
Global warming is beneficial. Would you prefer to have another ice age?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Please forgive me as I recently moved to a Mac and now think I know everything.
Fixed
Russian space agencies are very promiscuous project-wise. They'll be happy to launch you to Alpha Centauri, as long as you pay. Needless to say, they can't really do it. There won't be a Moon-base not because of technological limitations, but because it requires huge money and a management that a)can get those money _over the years_ (that's the hard part) from the government b)make sure the project is done, which is non-trivial given its complexity
Do you imagine that the hole in the ozone layer or global warming or global CO2 concentrations were thouroughly mapped without spacefaring technology? What else is out there that effects our entire planet that we have not discovered yet, are not yet aware of, because we are not standing outside of the system in order to see it? Shall we all hide our heads in the sand? Return to living in tipi's? Were the first mammels ready when they first ventured out of the forest treetops? Were the first Europeans ready when they crossed a dangerous ocean in primitive boats to build a new life in a harsh and hostile environment? Had they solved all of the problems in the Old world first? Were the first pioneers who set out across relatively unknown lands in covered wagons, hauling their wives, children and families with them to seek some temporary measure of freedom... ready? Had they solved all of the problems they left behind them before moving on? Or had they discovered it is pointless to argue with those who are set on maintaining the status quo, because lack of change gives the illusion of saftey? And in so discovering, set out to do for themselves what others saw as threatening?
Colonizing the moon, the asteroids and the planets will not stop you from solving the problems here on Earth. Some of the solutions created by those pioneers addressing their own problems will undoubtedly be of benefit to you. Rather than condemning such efforts, you might try looking on future colonists as potential allies.
In these times many people from Mitteleuropa fare to Russia for work and bread. Economically Russia became a very strong player since end of Jeltsin era.
If you really want to know why we would like to go into space, then look at human history. Heck why don't you look at the history of any creature on our planet. Observe a dog as it explores a new house. Or even watch a baby as it goggles at the world it was just brought into. Sure we have machines to explore for us, but where is the excitement in that? Global warming is eminent. We should try to prevent it. But when it comes to exploration, space is the final frontier. Well not quite the final one, but a great one. I could also point out that if we can learn how to teraform other planets, we can help our own. Exploration is about inspiration, science, religion, origin and finality. Global warming is huge but exploration is beyond all imagination. Science fiction only perpetuates it.
>Jetsons was 6 years ago people
>>But The Great Kazoo failed to show up. Don't you know your cartoon history, dude?
I know cartoon history. Kazoo already showed up in the stone age.
Oh, right, topic.
Do you think they will send up Martin Landowski and Barbera Bainovich?
Not sure what you point is, but did you know that some theories suggest that global warming could trigger the next ice age. Here are some links:
2 374,1083419,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,1
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8398.html
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0130-11.htm
I dont read
Far better to use Saturns or just slightly bigger and do many more launches. The high costs of launches are NOT the rockets themselves, but the ground crew. The shuttle costs about 1B/launch because of the fixed costs of ground crew to service them. Spacex is doing it right. They are designing their rockets to have a VERY minimal team (big part of the reason why they use jet fuel rather than hydrogen). They do have in the works a BFR (big fucking rocket), where the engine itself is pushing into the F1 (saturn V) class. Combine that with the spacex plan to use 9 engines on a booster, AND are tying together 3 boosters, and suddenly you are looking at a monster, in a hopefully cheap config. But that is planned for later this decade. perhaps combine that with a maglev launcher, and we are looking at a low costs launcher.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Does the ISS serve any useful purpose...? Scrapping it would save billions.
Going to the moon could be big business if the whole Helium3 thing works out. The USA should be joining international efforts to build a shared moonbase.
Save the planet, etc.
No sig today...
Being as I remember watching 'the Jetsons' in the 1960's on television, I am wondering what kind of young child would claim they are from six years ago.
Stop them before it's too late! They're just trying to corner the market on the cheese mining up there!
If there's one thing Orion definitely won't be, it's "a new kind of spaceship". It's the same fundamental design used by every other manned vehicle with the exception of the STS and Buran (which sadly never made a manned flight), all the way back to Vostok-1.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
You can't there, we already planted a flag. It's ours, by your rules.
-Styopa
Yeah, but one reason that the ground crews are so extensive is that conventionally fueled rockets must use razor thin safety factors: they are over 90% fuel mass, after all. If you can get it down to 50% fuel mass (like an airplane) or 5% fuel mass (like cars) you can afford to have much higher safety factors on not just the structure, but also the mission planning.
If your car was made of paper and 90% of it's mass fuel and used that up just going to the grocery store and back (and all of that was on the to trip; the trip back is downhill, but you gotta time it just right) you'd probably want a ground crew for it as well.
With robustness comes smaller ground crews. How large is the ground crew for autos and airplanes? In both cases, it's less than one operator per vehicle. In both cases, infrastructure improvements are projected to eventually obviate the physical drivers as well. The shuttle needs so many more because it's experimental and only just barely makes it to its destination both in terms of fuel and structure.
It's just too bad that NERVA and ORION put out big clouds of radioactive materials. They'd really be quite useful for getting out of the atmosphere, being both high thrust AND high Isp. Usually you have to pick one or the other.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Have they finally got that troublesome N1 working then? No?
How and with what rocket are they going to use to achieve lunar orbit? What do they have that can put the required mass into orbit? The only rocket (in my knowledge) the Russians had capable of lofting the required mass reliably was the Energia, yet with the fall of the USSR the project floundered and was scrapped. This begs the question, what spacecraft do they currently have capable of getting to a lunar orbit? I am sure they prob could use a number of Soyuz type flights to assemble a lunar mission in orbit, but to build a base, methinks youd need something heftier..
Also 'as early as' seems a bit of a joke in the article, that's an age away. When you look at how much progress was made in the early days of the space age to the present, you'd think we were regressing. Still, if this is a genuine threat and not just chest beating, I see it as a good thing.
moon base or vodka bar?
Just a note, there are no plans for the Saturn V booster. They were destroyed along with all other Apollo program blueprints when the program was cancelled. Which is really quite funny when you consider Orion is just a super-sized Apollo system. The only thing new is the computer technology... I read an article recently that they're concerned about the Orion heat shields because they don't know if they can replicate the process without the original workers that put them together.
Our tax dollars at work...
I've got to say of all the retro things that can be cool I don't think space technology is one of them. Not when we were damned close to a single stage to orbit fully reusable shuttle replacement ten years ago before all the programs were cancelled.
.technomancer
And who was bullied most in school?
One that hath name thou can not otter
but to build a base, methinks youd need something heftier..
Not necessarily. All you need is more flights and/or round-trips.
Actually, building a moon station, while farther away, may still cost less energy than building a space station, if done right, because you don't have to lift as much mass from the Earth! Most of the heavy materials needed for the superstructure is already on the moon. Just dig out some caves (which can be done by robots which don't need a costly artificial atmosphere), seal 'em off with light titanium or similar stuff flown in from the earth, fill it with the usual set of cables, pipes etc... and there you have a nice, perfectly usable permanent underground moon base! It may take some years to build, but since it's a modular design, it can be done over an extended period of time. And if you're already on the moon, you could start mining and using the local minerals etc... to extend the station.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Shoot, I can plan a base on the moon. Doesn't mean a thing. It will cost them billions of rubles to actually DO it, and I don't think they have a big enough credit card.
Ah Bullwinkle Bear, that trick never works!
Seriously, the Russians have been announcing a moon base in 'ten years' about every third year since the Soviet Union failed. (During the off years, they announce a Mars mission.) About the only thing that changes is the date on the press release.
This is nothing but political manuvering by Roskosmos.
Are we in charge, or is economics?
I think we are letting the tail wag the dog here. Profitable
cant be the only motivation for us to do everything.
emt 377 emt 4
Many years ago they found bases. From what I hear, all or most of the UFO spacecraft that people find or see siphoning water from various waterways are taking that water to the moon. Many things that were and are thought of as secret, are really no longer considered so. What we exhibit now is the filtering down of that information at its pace to be slowly realized by the public. Have a look see at youtube at duderinok users videos. I think if you were to do a little google video searching as well you would find some. Me just finishing up reading The Day After Roswell. For most to believe though of course it will take an actual event in front of the eyes,, but then they will tell you that you are now nuts and saw Venus. Pretty typical cycle. Also, my favorite interviews are of Jim Sparks. Look that up on google video. He actually met people on an abduction experience FIRST, then later in life at conferences. Look to the sky people. We are alien too.
What are their real intentions?
The Russians float out these proposals regularly, and wait to see if anyone expresses interest in investing in it. Which usually doesn't happen.
This space available.
Another way to suck money away from the people instead of finally building a refrigerator that works.
Unfortunately the answer is one that the questioner probably won't want to hear:
There is NO point to a moonbase or going to Mars. None. We can send robots to do excellent work. Nearly everything a human can do in those harsh miserable environments, a robot can do. Maybe not as fast on the ground, but certainly don't require a few acres of food and water and entertainment. The robots can be made to be much more robust than humans and if one gets a direct hit from a micro meteor on the Moon or super sonic sandblast on Mars, we're bummed about losing a good machine, but there isn't a family back home wailing over their death.
The only reason to put people on the Moon is set up and supervise machines harvesting the regolith for He3, an even that could be intensely automated over time. Mars? Too far. Too Cold. Not enough there. I imagine they will send some few people there just to be able to say "We sent some hairless ape creatures to Mars", but beyond that? Naaah. Not worth the trouble.
So, basically, they didn't send more people because there is no reason to send more people. And unless some bunch of geniuses can actually make Fusion work and thusly give a reason for He3, there is NO reason to bother with the moon. It's close enough that we can set stuff up by robot. And in the next 20 years ,the robots will be MUCH smarter and more capable...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Well it will be a pity if the world's big countries can't collaborate on this - and leave a space at the table for the Chinese too while you're at it - but it does strike me as a little ironic that the Americans are rolling up their sleeves to re-invent the Apollo spacecraft as the big step forward.
The Moon is a big table. Plenty of room for everyone. And I don't see the value of cooperation here. If a moon base is so expensive and difficult that only the combined efforts of multiple nations are necessary to build it, then it's not worth doing. My take is that each country can afford several lunar settlements though they probably won't build more than one for some time.
Also keep in mind that this is a similar project to the International Space Station (ISS), which is legendary as a budgetary disaster. Namely, there will be large conflicts of interest between the international partners and the goals of the lunar station just as there was with the ISS (eg, NASA used the ISS as an excuse to keep funding the Space Shuttle, Russia used the ISS to acquire hard currency, and everyone used the obligations under the ISS agreement to lock in funding for their respective supply chains). Also, there will be frequent, politically motivated restructuring of the project. Each time will push the cost of the project up. Having only one country or even batter just one business building the settlement reduces the number of parties that can break things in the development and construction phases.
I see considerable value in competition as well. Considerably more techniques will be tried and everyone will have incentive to try harder.
I have to say it's all a bit disappointing that the biggest vision that the Americans can come up with is an updated version of the kit they were using 50 years ago. The romantic in me had hoped that even if the only way to get to planets is in disposable capsules, maybe we'd have come up with some reusable craft for the hopping between the planets and their satellites. That way we might get to use it a few times on the Earth-Moon shuttle and maybe even have a go at looking at Mars...
What would be better? A reusable craft needs a decent launch frequency to justify the overhead (and there is considerable overhead with a reusable vehicle). NASA just doesn't have the launch rates to justify anything sexier than a disposable capsule.This is what I've been wondering about. Why don't we send up some sort of habitat that can be assembled by robotics? The robots can check the habitat and make sure that it's airtight, make sure everything is functioning correctly, all that. Once they're done, we can start planning sustained colonies there. Who knows? We might even be good at it and decided to build a small town where we can bring an entire colony. I don't know, but robotic construction really does seem to be the way to go here.
Bad analogy. There's been plenty of fruitful reinventions of the wheel over the millenia. A modern example is the inflatable radial tire.
It appears to me that someone truly interested in human space exploration should become an expert in international politics and direct his/her talents in that direction before committing to reinventing the wheel many times over.
Pointless waste of time, even compared to reinventing the wheel.I favor many more launches over bigger rockets. Many of the costs, including ground crews, R&D, launch infrastructure are mostly fixed costs. So the cost per launch goes down a lot when you increase your launch rate. Also, high launch frequency gives you valuable experience to make your future launches safer and more efficient. And that in turn helps with such things as insurance, another big cost of launching rockets.
Why are these countries developing space programs at all? Considering that these programs are a massive money sink, this must be an attempt to show the world that China and Russia are still world powers. Setting up a moon base before the U.S. would be a boon to either country's prestige, effectively telling the world that the U.S. is no longer #1 in space flight. Should be interesting to see if a U.S. political response develops. We could very well be seeing the next space race unfolding.
With vodka! And hookers! In fact, forget the moonbase
SpaceX is also only working on a 500 kg payload class vehicle, and it's unmanned. I think the only other rocket in this class is the Orbital Sciences Minotaur. Hopefully their lean methods will be able to carry over somewhat when they start doing COTS launches, but that will still be a long ways short of what NASA is proposing with Constellation.
SpaceX hasn't done anything with the BFR except some design studies on the engines (at least, not that they've told anyone about). Frankly, as big of a project just getting the Falcon 1 and 9 off the ground, consuming most of their capital, it wouldn't make sense for them to do so.
The Falcon 9/Dragon will have a LEO payload capacity of around 20,000 pounds. That's about 2/5 what the Ares 1 will have and less than 1/10 of what the Ares 5 will be capable of. It's a little bit more than a Soyuz. The Falcon 9 Heavy (with three boosters) is still planned, but not certain. It will have a capacity similar to a Ares 1, but still a lot smaller than either an Ares 5 or Saturn.
When you add on man-rating, things get really complicated, and that's something the Falcon 1 didn't have to deal with. Keep in mind, SpaceX hasn't gotten a rocket into orbit yet.
'I imagine they will send some few people there just to be able to say "We sent some hairless ape creatures to Mars", but beyond that? Naaah. Not worth the trouble.'
There are very big reasons to expand to both the moon and to mars. The first is that the only purpose we have in life is to perpetuate the species and we are all sitting on one rock looking pretty vulnerable at the moment. The second is overpopulation, even going the Chinese route is only a stop gap measure.
I'd assume it's because of technological constraints. Sure, people got up there, but there was also a good handful of failures along the way for things like how much oxygen was in the air. Recall that Columbia burst into flames just because of one tile, and that was only a few years ago.
Also, the Soviets and Americans had an unhealthy fixation on orbital nuclear weapons at the height of the space race. I doubt many corporations really had any serious interest in space flight at the time.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
I don't see many exotic animals leaping around on that gray rock up there.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Well surely the writers didn't think people would have flying suitcase cars the next day.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Need to use resources on the moon to build the base. Send some robots there to do the work in a very modular way. Have them work around the clock and it'd easily be done in ten years. The process will mirror the complexity of all the parties involved. (c:
Nah, after countries industrialize population size basically stagnate, take Europe and Japan as an example. Even the US is only increasing in population because of immigration. The world can hold another 12 billion people or so, and by then the worlds population will have leveled off. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population it's mentioned in there, sorry for not getting a more specific reference) And computers are way out pacing space technologies in terms of research and improvement. By the time we can colonize other places there may be no need for humans to be there.
It's the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. And incidentally, they not only rebuilt the bridge, but just this summer they finished a second one.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Even if you are right about population (I'd have to disagree, the world might be CAPABLE of supporting 12 billion but the US about as heavily and densely populated as it SHOULD be) that still ignores the fact that if one of the many big rocks hurling at our planet should hit it we are toast.
The space program will begin to progress at a more reasonable rate once it is out of government hands. Private corporations will hush up accidents so they aren't as afraid of mishaps. They also understand that there are literally billions of expendable lives on earth. People are relatively cheap and plentiful, robots are valuable.
Actually the Sea Dragon had this in mind. It was less efficient other rockets but much simpler. While the physical testing would be more expensive due to size, the crews to support it would be smaller than that which was required during component testing for the Saturn V. It was expected that the size of the ground crew to support and launch it would be at about the same size or smaller than that of the Saturn V. It was also designed to be reusable.
It is interesting that the estimated price tag was about the same per launch as the actual cost of the Saturn V. This may have been wishful thinking, but even if it were twice that value it would still be less than half the cost per unit mass of the Saturn V put something in LEO. Of course, there aren't a lot of 550 tonne programs. Even the ISS will have less mass when complete. On the other hand, this rocket would be very useful for massive lunar bases or Mars missions (for which it was primarily designed).
Even beyond the cost of space travel making exporting people to space and beyond silly, there is the simple fact that Earth is jammed full of resources. Even if you could magically dump a billion people on Mars, why on earth would you? Would you rather go to the frozen and lifeless radiation filled near vacuum that is Mars... or simply go live in northern Canada or on the ocean? It isn't like Earth has a great shortage of surface area, especially if you are willing to make a few floating or sunken colonies. As far as resources, the Earth is far more abundant than the alternatives. Mining from the ocean floor is certainly going to be cheaper than running around on Mars a few million miles from the nearest factory or breathable atmosphere. We have not even begun to tap the resources this planet has. 2/3 of the world is nearly completely untouched and uncolonized. It is silly to think we would go a few million miles to a lifeless vacuum when there is plenty of unexploited territory right off the coast.
If there is going to be some movement to colonize due to population or resource pressure, it will be the oceans that we go after first. To be honest, I doubt that population pressure will ever be a real issue. Either a nation is far too poor to contemplate exotic over population problems like heading to sea or going to space and simply solve over population the old fashion way (genocide, disease, revolutions, mass starvation, etc.), or the nation is wealthy and has zero or negative population growth. The people with the money to 'solve' over population through pioneering new frontiers are the people who don't need to do it.
The only good reason to head to space is for financial gain. If someone can make space travel profitable, space travel will happen. If colonization happens, it won't be because we need more land and resources, it will be because some pioneering person found a way to get up into space, collect some resource, and sell it with enough profit to make the whole ordeal worthwhile. That very well might lead a human presence off world, but it will happen in the same way the US was founded. Europe didn't depopulate to fill up the US. A handful of Europeans came to the US without even making a dent in their home nations population, had a pile of a babies, and a few hundred years later you had 300 million people.
Europeans were sure not ready to go to America. They ended up exterminating the existing sentient spieces at their new home, in a significant part by accidentally or knowingly spreading diseases to which the native's immune system was not prepared. We don't need any more of this kind of "exploration". Do you really want to turn Mars into an overheated parking lot with a few Walmarts? We might need to live there someday you know.
I might future suggest that we refrain from radically altering composition of the atmosphere or releasing large amounts of unnatural compounds into our air, water and soil. Then perhaps spacefaring technology can be put to better purposes than recording the damage we have down to our home.
If we have 10 people cooperating to work on one problem, they can still introduce some independence and redundancy in a design process. And they can still decide to implement 2 solutions with radically different designs to maximize probability of success. They would just be able to ask each other questions when lacking individual expertise on a particular issue.
Russia (reportedly) got so close to getting thier N series launchers operational only to throw the whole program away for Energia, which whilst successful, has done a big fat nothing and thanks to all of the pork barreling the American space program has been subject to, I'm starting to understand why so many people are getting cynical about space programs.
If we can get International co-operation for a crappy space station, maybe we can get co-operation for an International Space Elevator (hey there has been no obligitory mention of it in this thread) or is it that every spacefaring nation wants to control space for themselves so they can lob nukes onto each other's cities.
All I see is a litany of political failure marring the potential accomplishments of space programs everywhere, it's so frustrating. Lets put it into perspective, it took 9 years from concept to an actual landing on the moon. Today with existing technology, test data, expertise, control systems and better testing procedures and experience it will take at least another 12 years to get back what we had in the early 70's.
The reality is that the last 30 years has made little or no contribution to manned space flight past L.E.O otherwise we would be able to go to the moon tommorrow or next week instead of in 12 years time.
Am I the only one getting sick of all the talk and pretty concept drawings. Rockets and a space race to mars - we could have done that in the 70's, big deal. Give me a race to build a real, operational space infrastructure, after that everything else becomes easy.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
NERVA does not produce "radioactive clouds". The reactor heats the reaction mass, but there is no direct contact between the two. It might produce ONE, if the reactor exploded, but we've gotten pretty good at safely launching small reactors, even though I suspect most people don't realize it (many satellites are powered by simple reactors, RTGs). It's also worth noting that due to the limited temperatures that are possible (you don't want to melt the ship, and you're limited in terms of the weight you can launch) the reactor wouldn't be started until the vehicle was in space anyway. NERVA is not a viable ground-launch technology.
Confusingly, "Orion" is the name of the new "Crew Exploration Vehicle" that NASA is designing, but I assume you're talking about nuclear-bomb-powered spacecraft, Project Orion. I agree that it's a somewhat shortsighted approach as launch vehicles go (unless you buy into Freeman Dyson's assertions that single missions could carry such huge paylods [the largest detailed Orion proposal was for an 8 million ton ship] that far, far fewer launches would be necessary in the first place), but it would make an excellent candidate for in-space propulsion.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Sure, everyone wants that, its just that robotics isn't at that level yet. NASA is increasing its spending on robotics research though. Perhaps for the future mars mission, that's how we'll do it.
Everyone is in the Race, but we will use the same old technology. I think we need to look a new stuff.
http://nlspropulsion.net/default.aspx
I believe the problem with NERVA was that the material at the interface between the reactor and the propulsion mass becomes radioactive, and this material tended to ablate.
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Russia is a mafia state. China: Maoists in business suits. 'Nuff said.
an ill wind that blows no good