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How To Beat Congress's Ban Of Humans On Mars
An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this year, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would ban humans on Mars at NASA: "Provided, That none of the funds under this heading shall be used for any research, development, or demonstration activities related exclusively to the human exploration of Mars." The bill is held up in Congress and the anti-Mars language may be taken out. But in case the Mars ban becomes law, the Space Review has a handy guide on how NASA can beat the ban and continue its research and development without breaking the law."
Somebody please tell congress that they don't have jurisdiction on other planets.
There is no 'ban' on Mars. It just means that no funds from the current funding bill can be used for funding potential human exploration on Mars. Future bills (every single year) would have to include this 'ban' every time they were passed.
What, they think if they ban it all the other nations of the world are going to say, 'ooh, mighty america, she say no', and not do it either?
Ok, China's a long way off from anything like that, but the US proved it doesn't take long from baked bean cans with windows in orbit to men playing golf and finding orange soil on the surface of another planet (ok moon).
'Bout that 'losing the initiative' thing. Oh wait, that happened in the seventies..
What does Congress have against funding for exploration of Mars? What's the purpose for that?
Forget I asked, the answer to that question is already known!
Why would they put language like that in place, why do they think they need too?
Country is going to hell in a hand basket.
No wonder we as a country are getting plowed under by the rest of the world on the innovation front. No wonder math and science grads are dropping, no wonder there are more foreign students than Americans in the College science programs, there is no place left to go to do interesting things in America. We are legislating them out of existence with stupid funding policies.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Plan to go to Pluto. When a congress more favorable to a mars mission is in place, have them remove the ban. Funny enough, developing technologies to get us to Pluto would be very handy in getting us to Mars as well.
Or plan to send a ship the opposite direct then are rotation and plan to meet up with it in 8 months.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That doesn't even make sense. "Provided that..." (i.e. "on the basis that the following is true") makes sense, but not with a comma.
As for the ban, those are some interesting ways to get around it. "Humanoid exploration" could potentially also include a human-shaped robot that has tactile feedback to a suit that someone wears in orbit. We're a little way off a decent tactile suit, but then again I'd imagine we're a while off properly and realistically exploring Mars with humans and that this is just "pro-active", forward planning legislation.
Send a letter saying that the terrorists will blow everything here in the earth...
I hear Congress's Martian cops are really patrolling the Mars surface vigilantly. So watch out, humans.
To perform non-robotic landings on Mars without violating a ban on human landing, staff the Mars mission with members of the current US administration!
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week! Try the veal, it's delicious!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Is it a waste of money to consider putting humans on Mars in our lifetime? Probably.
Should NASA be free to spend its own budget without Congressional oversight? Probably.
Perhaps NASA needs to earn back some goodwill by proving that they're still relevant and useful first.
Then River Tam will kick Barney Frank's ass.
This has been already done with no need for exaggerated funding.
"Provided, That none of the funds under this heading shall be used for any research, development, or demonstration activities related exclusively to the human exploration of Mars."
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The rest of the world will get mankind to Mars and beyond. Who would have thunk that the new American century http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century/ would mean retreating from scientific advancement. It's 11:00, do you know where your tax dollars are?
If we aren't going to actually explore anything beyond our own "bubble", what is the point of NASA anyway? I can understand not wanting to spend public money on space exploration anymore...especially now that private sector spaceflight is ramping up. But it seems stupid to keep NASA around at all if they eliminate the exploration. I guess they just want to turn it into a bureaucracy purely to regulate the private sector. I say if we are going to spend the money, at least make it worth while and keep Mars as a goal.
Get the government out of the space exploration business. Government doesn't work. Remove unreasonable restrictions on space exploration by businesses and private citizens, and you'll see a boom in space exploration funding!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
There goes my summer vacation plans with quiet days traversing the canals of Mars. I just hate Saturn. The noxious gases always leave my kids with a rash. Oh, well.
The house of Represenatives passed this bill... What about the Senate?
As has already been pointed out, the summary is misleading. But you might as well get used to this idea. We will NEVER colonize the planets. As soon as the technology starts to get close, the scientists and environmentalists will stop it, so as to not contaminate a virgin environment. *Particularly* in the case of Mars, because scientists want to see if life already exists there (it doesn't, but they want to find out for sure).
I understand the romance of living on other planets, but it's inevitable that these will become permanent bans, because once it starts, it'll never end. The future of humans in space are spinning habitats.
And yes, Earth can stop it happening. Forget the idea of a Heinlein-style hero taking off and say f-you to the Earth. There is no way a colony can survive without assistance from Earth, probably for centuries before it could be self-sustaining.
I could also talk about the fact that very, very few will want to live on Mars because it's lifeless dead rock, but that's another subject. :) [hint: how many people try and live in Antarctica? And that's a hell of a lot more hospitable.]
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that they are just not wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on it. With a nation so far in debt why are we trying to force the taxpayer to foot the bill to go to Mars anyway? Ooh, we could always just tell the federal reserve to print more money and further devalue the dollar. But of course we would have to pay those private banks back.
We are not getting our ass to Mars. :|
Or defense contracts for companies owned by Nancy Pelosi's husband..
Or billions in subsidies to Fortune 500 agribusiness companies.
There can be no funding for frivolities like the human exploration of space when so many of the needs of the Permanent Bipartisan State of Porkistan remain unmet...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
All these worlds are yours, except Mars. Attempt no landings there.
But what would happen if all the Chinese on Mars jumped at once?
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Far me it from me to presume that I can actually explain the reasoning behind legislative language, but could these loopholes perhaps be intentional? The thinking might be "we don't want space exploration to be all about getting humans to Mars, so if you want to go that way, make it gradual and make it part of larger-scale research". Given that the original moon landing was not so much about furthering scientific knowledge (although it surely did, as a side-effect) as it was about proving our superiority over the dang ol' commies, Congress might well be worried that a race to Mars would end up as a similar (but much more expensive) political gesture and divert attention from the actual research side of space exploration.
(Yeah, yeah, this may be an overly charitable interpretation, I know.)
Okay, so humans on Mars are banned... How about we send RIAA lawyers instead?
It says that the funding can not be used for EXCLUSIVE mars exploration R/D. IOW, they can fund dual use items. Kind of lame, but not a big thing. Most of what NASA does is multi-use. We really should keep alive research that is geared towards mars (as well as small nuclear power). So for the moment, other than human habitat and Martian suits, just about everything else is dual-use in that it either is robotics for Mars, or will work on Moon/Mars.
What is interesting on this, is the amount of games that politicians play.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Do we have to send them whole? Or can we send them as Puree?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I don't know of another group so aptly named.
Since pro- is the opposite of con-
It shows so well that the opposite of progress is congress.
Regardless of whether one thinks that the "Mars ban" is a good idea, would it be good for NASA to get a reputation of using loopholes and subverting the intent of Congress? Even if NASA complied, space enthusiasts could inadvertently build such a reputation in the public mind.
Then what? Would Congress get more strict the next year, resulting in dozens of started-but-never completed projects? Would the public say, "Those NASA dudes can't be trusted! See how they handled the Mars ban? Let's use that money to subsidize professional football instead!"
Sounds suspicious. Don't underestimate the power of the Martian lobby, especially in an election year. What is Mars trying to hide?
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
Just send them without spacesuits and let the cosmos sort it out.
What's so wonderful about manned exploration of space anyway?
Transporting humans and all of their environmental requirements is ridiculously expensive. The risk for the travelers is ultimate. Alternatively, unmanned missions can go not only where no one has gone before, but also where no one will ever be able to go (e.g. the Venutian surface), and for a fraction of the cost.
The only upside from a manned mission is that we feel all warm and fuzzy when our heroes return from the voyage. Big deal.
Sounds odd to say, but I'm with Congress on this one. I just wish they'd taken it farther.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Manned missions look cool, but you get more science out of the unmanned missions. Trying to get NASA to concentrate on the unmanned stuff is what they're trying to do.
As I understand it, it's all about bang per buck.
threadeds blog
You can drive a truck through that "exclusively" language. It says nothing about activities related to a mission intended to put, e.g., a monkey on mars. Or a human somewhere else. Life support for a Mars mission? No problem, it's for the monkey project. Mars suits? Those aren't Mars suits, they're suits for some moon of Jupiter...
Does anyone but me see the OLPC XO-1 as an insulting "let them eat cake" sort of message to the world's poor?
Hands Across America, Live AID, the Concert for Bangladesh, and so on. The American (and world) public has witnessed one feel-good event (and the ensuing scandals) after another. Each one manages to assuage our guilt about the world's problems, at least a little. Now these folks think that any sort of participation in these events, or even their good thoughts about world poverty and starvation, actually help. Now they can sleep at night. It doesn't matter that nothing has really changed.
This is how I view the cute, little One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO-1 computer, technology designed for the impoverished children of Africa and Alabama. This machine, which is the brainchild of onetime MIT media lab honcho Nick Negroponte, will save the world. His vision is to supply every child with what amounts to an advertising delivery mechanism. Hence the boys at Google are big investors.
Before you cheer for the good guys, ponder a few of these facts taken from a world hunger Web site. In the Asian, African, and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called "absolute poverty." Every year, 15 million children die of hunger. For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for five years. Throughout the decade, more than 100 million children will die from illness and starvation. The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well fed, one-third is underfed, and one-third is starving. Since you've entered this site, at least 200 people have died of starvation. One in 12 people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of 5. Nearly one in four people, or 1.3 billion--a majority of humanity--live on less than $1 per day, while the world's 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world's people. Let's include Negroponte and the Google billionaires.
So what to do? Let's give these kids these little green computers. That will do it! That will solve the poverty problem and everything else, for that matter. Does anyone but me see this as an insulting "let them eat cake" sort of message to the world's poor?
"Sir, our village has no water!" "Jenkins, get these people some glassware!"
But, wait. Think of how cool it would be! Think of how many families will get to experience the friendly spam-ridden Information Super Ad-way laced with Nigerian scams, hoaxes, porn, blogs, wikis, spam, urban folklore, misinformation, sites selling junk from China, bomb-making instructions, jihad initiatives, communist propaganda, Nazi propaganda, exhortations, movie clips of cats playing the piano, advertising, advertising, and more advertising. Do you now feel better about the world's problems, knowing that some poor tribesman's child has a laptop? What African kid doesn't want access to Slashdot?
Of course, it might be a problem if there is no classroom and he can't read. The literacy rate in Niger is 13 percent, for example. Hey, give them a computer! And even if someone can read, how many Web sites and wikis are written in SiSwati or isiZulu? Feh. These are just details to ignore.
Every time I bring up this complaint to my Silicon Valley pals--usually as we race down I-280 in their newest Mercedes-Benz S Class sedan while listening to their downloaded music from their iPod to the car's custom stereo--I get flak. They tell me, "It's a start. Computers will save the world from poverty. You are just jealous you didn't think of the idea."
Yeah, that's it. I'm jealous.
Apparently, saying anything negative about the OLPC XO-1 computer amounts to heresy in this community. You may as well promote NAMBLA or the KKK. People don't want to consider the possibility that their well-meaning thoughts are a joke and that a $200 truckload of rice would be of more use than Wi-Fi in the middle of
Well I'm not surprised there is a ban especially with all that crap by the UAC.
A law is made by the USA to stop the science. But, happyly for the mankind, other country take the lead.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
"..., but you get more science out of the unmanned missions. T"
That's not true at all. You can get a lot of data for some specific missions from unmanned missions. SOme missions need to be unmanned by there nature, Voyager, for example.
But humans can do a lot on the fly, respond to changing conditions or mission priorities. Then can even ignore priorities that have become inappropriate do to an unforeseen change.
Why is it robotic OR humans, why not robotics AND humans?
I would want to see the adventurers that got o mars ahve a wide range of robotic help. A robot they can just put down and say "Go collect samples in this area". Then later pick it up and carry to some other interesting spot.
I would also expect there to be a lot of support sent ahead of the manned mission so they would have supplies, communication satellites and maybe even building when they arrive. Possible send fuel for the return flight ahead of time.
Hell, put me in charge and give me political protection and I can have people on Mars and back in 15 years. It doesn't take a genius to plan and manage these things, but it DOES take someone who can hire geniuses and be comfortable knowing there not the smartest person in the room, just the best planner.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Congress loves to use their power over funding to push the (just barely) majority agenda and encourage lots of special interest lobbying. What if we gave the tax payers the right to send something like 50% of their taxes to government projects of their choice similar to how we handle non-profit donations now. If people like to fund space travel, feeding the homeless, stem cell research, or a war against terror, they can send their own tax dollars. This would only be on our income taxes (social security, medicare, unemployment, etc would all be untouched), and it still leaves at least half of our taxes to go to the less popular projects.
That's the way I read it as well. Doesn't say you can't send humans to Mars, you just need to justify their reason for being there.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Earth First
We'll mine the other planets later
In other words, it is not a complete ban, but rather a ban on using the funding provided by this bill. Future bills and even supplemental funding bills can include funding for the Human Mars Initiative.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The headline ignores that they upped NASA's budget over what the President asked. (Congress hates NASA...honest). I grimace with each launch of the Shuttle now. I keep expecting another failure. They're running on a shoestring as it is now.
C'mon /.ers...
"I did not, nor have I ever gone to Uranus!" - Larry Craig
How To Beat Congress's Ban Of Humans On Mars and NASA's Funding Thereof: 1. Get private donations to build your own spaceship! 2. Goto Mars! 3. Congress gets mad! 4. Fund NASA's manned mission to Mars to arrest you! 5. Congress 0WNED!
All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there. Use them together. Use them in peace.
FYI,
The provision is not statute, it only covers the use of Fiscal Year 2008 appropriated monies. It does not cover future years. A Congress may not commit a future Congress to either fund or not fund something. The soonest NASA's reference architectures indicate a potential human expedition to Mars in in the 2030's.
The prohibition is only for activities exclusively for sending humans to Mars. That means robotic missions are unaffected. That means a dual purpose mission, like a lunar expedition, may have "practising for a Mars mission" as one of its many goals.
The prohibition is a parlimentary trick introduced by Members (and their staff) friendly to NASA to avoid a less carefully worded prohibition that was to have been introduced by a Member who was not friendly. NASA consented to the careful wording this past summer to avoid more damaging wording.
The prohibition only means that the Mars Design Reference Mission 5.0 study must be finished up using carried-over Fiscal Year 2007 funding, and not new Fiscal Year 2008 funding.
The prohibition only stands if it because part of the Appropriation law. This is subject to many external forces outside of the current draft of the Commerce, Science, and Justice bill.
No drama here,
-Someone who's worked this issue
Congress only has power in their own country, NASA can't just work in conjunction with the Canadian Space Agency and do their research here, after all he have the best testing ground for mars related stuff up in Nunavut. Congress pretty much has no control over what goes on up here in the great white north.
The reason for the ban (which is supported by a lot of scientists, which is why Congress could do it) is not because Congress doesn't want to go to Mars, but because scientists have seen manned space programs suck up budgets that would otherwise go to robotic missions. And the robotics missions are the ones that bring in most of the science.
I just read in one of the science magazines (Science, I think, although I can't find the article) about how the European Union spent $1 billion to build a research satellite to be attached to the space station, which would collect data for many scientific projects. But NASA backed out of its commitment to put the satellite into space, because of shuttle problems, and now it's sitting in a clean warehouse and may never be launched.
I was brought up on science fiction like everybody else here, and I'd love to see a manned flight to Mars, but if you send humans to Mars, it takes a support system with 10 times the weight of a robotic lab, and you have to build everything to strict safety standards. So the cost is 10 or 100 times as much. A death can halt the program for a year. And they're much more likely to scrub a human mission if there are any safety doubts.
If you want good science, a robot can do almost anything on Mars better than a human. Right now, the main purpose of a human on Mars is entertainment, like TV football or mountain climbing. As Theodore Sturgeon said when he watched a liftoff, they're spending billions of dollars just so that some space geeks like us could get an orgasm. He's right. I love the space program, but there's a constant amount of money, and you have to ask what it's taking money away from. It's a better orgasm to get electromagnetic data and readings from micro-sized analytical chemistry and physics labs.
The final bill for the war in Iraq will run around $1 trillion, according to the best estimates I saw. If GWB had spent $1 trillion on a manned Mars mission instead, I would have taken a guilty pleasure in it (ignoring for the moment the more socially pressing things money could go for). But he didn't. He pissed it away for a war, and the cupboard is bare. Now we have to go back to zero-sum budgeting in aerospace again.
Here is how you can beat the ban of humans on Mars:
Just go lobby the Congress into believing that the arid, Afghanistan-looking planet is a socialist state that painted itself all red, supplies illegal immigrants and exports products that could cause severe health problems. You don't even need to suggest it is in development of nuclear weaponry, once Mars gets the attention, any journalist looking for quick fame will release a "breaking news" that our spy satellites have found bomb testing sites. Not to mention the famous "they'll follow us home" scenario study with countless versions of simulations that can be slipped into the appendix section.
Then in no time you will see some 250,000 men up on the planet automatically without NASA having to spend/ask for a dime.
"related _exclusively_ to the human exploration of Mars"
So NASA is still free to work on any projects related to the human exploration of Mars, so long as they can tie them to something else, like human exploration of Jupiter moons?
into space, and that money is never seen again. This is nothing like those pallets of $100 bills that got shipped over to Iraq.
The money spent on space exploration pays NASA employees and contractors in congressional districts all across the USA. Employees spend their paychecks, contractors hire more workers, purchase materials/equipment, subcontract some of the work out, etc. The money goes back into the US economy.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Yet not only you don't have any control over how it's spent, you don't even control the amount in any way.
The real question is 'Why don't these morons work on some legislation that's actually useful?' They sure haven't been putting it toward that whole 'checks and balances' thing.
The money went the the stargate program and they have been to places way past mars.
Space exploration is one of the few things I am actually willing to pay tax money for.
However, seeing how NASA is mainly US funded, I am not going to complain. I've gotten to see a lot of interesting things from NASA and I haven't really paid for any of it with my tax money.
I had high hopes for the ESA (European Space Agency) when I firt heard about it, but it will probably take quite some time still before their projects are even half as interesting as NASA's.
However, maybe this is where we should place our hope for human missions to mars.
NASA should do what Congress tells them and not try and work around it. Congress - for whatever reason - wants them to avoid manned Mars missions. NASA should do so. It's not NASA's position to second guess the administration.
Yes, this is exactly the same shortsighted thinking that led to Russia getting a headstart in the Space Race, but if Congress wants to be shortsighted, then let them look foolish when China puts a man on Mars but the harm done will still be quite small.
As others have pointed out, the bill does not ban humans on Mars but simply forbids NASA from spending money on the hare brained scheme of sending men to Mars. Good. Only countries running huge budget surpluses year after year should even consider a stunt like that.
Of course this is a free country. All you sci fi fans with delusions of creating a Martian free state can spend your own money on it.
I support temporarily banning NASA from making any efforts toward sending any manned mission to Mars. Modern spaceflight is just to damn primitive. For one, we need a new space shuttle. One that is design for 21st century space flight because there is a lot more hazards up there than were in 1970's. Second, we need better propulsion systems. It takes to much effort to get humans into orbit much less sending them to the moon or any planets. Moreover, modern spaceflight is still a complex precise pagent that does not forgive error. There is no room for improvisation if something goes wrong on the trip to Mars.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
We've grown up on Star Trek and Star Wars, and every other sci fi tripe we can get. We have games based on exploring the galaxy now. It's man's dream to go to outerspace. Yet congress is still standing in our way.
Come on, the people want to go to mars, date (and mate with) aliens, and have pimped out space ships. Let's get with the program and start funding this.
This bill HAS NOT BEEN PASSED.
It's not even before Congress. It's been shoved out there for consideration, but isn't even close to actual law yet. It's in committee and totally bogged down. This has not taken effect yet.
That said, it needs to be put down like a squirrel with rabies.
Oh man, we really live on Krypton.
I'll be brief.
:-
If you beleave that God will look after mankind and all will be OK then we don't need man space travel.
If you don't think God is going to that helpful, then mankind faces a bit of a problem.
Currently our economic system is based on growth and that growth is gained by consumerism, which is a little bit of a problem when we have a fixed resource.
So mankind has only two choices.
1. Move over to a sustainable system with zero growth (and invent a new system of money supply, and not charge interest, no making money from money).
2. Get into Space ASAP and start mining our solar system.
Why ASAP, we are reaching peak everything very quickly, why?? simple math more that the fact we are actually running out of everything important. To quote Albert Bartlett. "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
Ok its really 'peak everything thats important', research the ingredient list of minerals required to manufacture consumer electronics, solar panels etc. Some of the raw materials are already very difficult to find and very rare.
Recycling delays the problem, but you've still got entropy to deal with.
See
Shoveling Fuel for a runaway train - Brian Czech
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_currency
http://sydney.indymedia.org.au/story/peak-minerals-landmark-report-warns-mineral-resource-depletion
Sending humans to Mars is stupid and pointless. It's an idea trotted out by politicians every decade or so to distract voters, not something to really do. Congress is right to pull the plug.
Space travel on chemical fuels is just barely possible, and it's not getting any better. Chemical rockets work about as well as they did forty years ago. Chemical fuels haven't improved, and they're not going to. We've had liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen for forty years, and that's as good as it gets.
Hence the fundamental problem. All spacecraft have to be so weight-reduced that they're fragile and unreliable. If spacecraft could be built with the weight budget of a jetliner, with about 50% of the mass at takeoff being fuel, they'd work fine.
Without fission, fusion, or antimatter power, or new physics, this isn't going to improve. We're stuck without a better power source.
There hasn't been a new power source for half a century now. First time since the Industrial Revolution that's happened. Most of the major problems in the world today, from global warming to the Middle East, come from that fact.
That's the problem. Mars is a sideshow.
Dear Congress,
Piss off.
Love, NASA
P.S. Piss off
Either we're landing a man on Mars, or we're going to land a man on Uranus...so what's it gonna be?
Then again, there are alot of people in Congress who seem very favorable to such missions...
The key word is "exclusively." IANAL, but I'm sure that they can put humans on Mars, as long as the funds are not "exclusively" used for that purpose.
Anything NASA does in order to get to Mars could be used to get to other planets/moons in the system.
So this is a dead ruling.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Congress stops NASA from wasting money on Mars sounds so simple. What is doesn't say is the money wasted by NASA and a lot of companies due to this change in policy. For the last couple years, NASA has spent huge amounts of money on getting "humans to Mars" research projects started. With funding cut, or just merely in doubt, all these programs will be cut short. Promising new developments will be terminated, reports about it will be written, and tossed into boxes without reading.
The guys at NASA know the loopholes, but the ones in charge are political creatures, and they know not to piss of their funding source by going around it in a blatant way. Happens all the time; if you work with government agencies you can tell if the politics surrounding your projects have changed. Everyone still goes through the motions, but the mood is like a team that already missed the playoffs.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
Man. Just because government doesn't fund something doesn't mean it can't exist. Should big brother wipe your asses for you too? NASA should be disbanded AND we should go to Mars.
Like the Pilgrims once fled Europe for freedom of religion, humans will flee to Mars for freedom from religion.
The only upside from a manned mission is that we feel all warm and fuzzy when our heroes return from the voyage. Big deal.
I don't know of any fuel on this planet that will take a large enough payload of fuel to Mars for the return trip. Who said they would ever return? At current tech, it's a one way ticket.
You haven't seen any probes sent with enough fuel to return. You won't see it anytime soon. Fuel that is light enough to take, but has enough mass to provide thrust to escape Mars orbital velocity doesn't exist. Nuke has a limitation, as you use the fuel, it drops below critical mass. Shielding the travelers is a problem. Getting enough initial thrust to launch off Mars, then reaching escape velocity without overheating is a problem.
Got any working ideas. Before you post, check the physics involved. A quick crash course in the basics is here.
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978373 Watch or listen to Gravity and Satellites 1 & 2. When you understand the amount of energy required to take enough energy and mass to Mars for the return trip with passengers, then feel free to post. Don't forget you need more than just enough fuel to escape Mars, but also enough to slow down to reach Earth. Earth is in a lower orbit. To reach this orbit, you need to slow down.
Deceleration to orbital speeds is required for survivable re-entry. Leaving Mars to return to Earth does include going from an higher solar orbit to a lower orbit and the requirement to reduce kinetic energy to reach the lower orbit. In other words, you will expend fuel just to slow down.
The Moon mission had the advantage of the Moon and Earth are in the same Solar Orbit and return from the moon required only a little energy because of the low lunar gravity. To get to the Moon, there was not the requirement to leave Earths orbit. Going to Mars has none of these advantages. Mars does have lower gravity than Earth, but the requirement to leave Earth Orbit, increase kinetic energy to reach the outer orbit of Mars, land, and relaunch (with atmospheric resistance), reduce kinetic energy, to reach Earth orbit, and reduce kinetic energy for re-entry is simply a physics problem for energy of magnitudes greater proportion than visiting the Moon and returning. The Mars mission can not be done like the Moon mission. They carry way too little fuel.
http://www.muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/PffP.html
You might make it to Mars, but I doubt you will be returning in my lifetime.
The truth shall set you free!
This is the kind of stuff that you need to figure out who did it. Then, you need to find out why. Most likely, the reason will be somewhat insane, but at least you know what you are dealing with.
Maybe somebody who's read the U.S. Constitution. (Yes, it might be insane to think that anybody in Washington DC has read it.) Congress isn't allowed to fund things just because they're cool. Article I Section 8 spells out exactly what they're allowed to do. Unless NASA is planning on "establishing post offices and post roads", then I think putting a man on Mars is out.
From the reference, it seems that this is an attempt to keep NASA form being administratively destroyed by a Bushism.
Oh for cryin' out loud. Does everything have to be about Bush?
Look at everything we have gotten out of the space race so far. Microwaves (communications and ovens), new materials, better computing, better aircraft, and more!
I appreciate these conveniences as much as anybody, but the Constitution does not actually have a clause that says "Congress is also allowed to fund any mission which results in the development of improved kitchen gadgets".
Would it actually be good to go for Mars at the expense of so many other things?
At the risk of being branded a Ron Paul supporter (because you seem to think this has only to do with the president): would you first amend the Constitution to allow funding of space exploration, or would you just keep funding more things because somebody thinks they may have a technological benefit way down the road?
Nobody seems to ever stop and ask "is funding NASA actually Constitutional?". It always gets a free ride, because (a) we started it during the Cold War, when beating the russkies to space was more important than the Constitution, and (b) they do cool science, sometimes, and nobody wants to be the one to cut funding to cool science.
Leave the United States.
Space shouldn't a nationalistic endeavour, and to be brutally honest America is becoming increasingly hostile to scientists and science compared with the rest of the world. Japanese space scientists aren't asked to falsify their results on climate change. Russian scientists are harassed by creationists. European space scientists aren't put off international collaboration by idiotic export rules. If you are involved in the space industry and you think your countries approach to it is stupid (which it is), then vote with your feet.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I, for one, welcome our new -- wait, I'm being handed a memoranda -- Apparently they are our old, still-existing Congressional budgetary overlords. Seriously. Who voted for these turkeys? I demand a show of hands.
You think environmentalists have power to dictate the course of human progress? That's just funny. :)
Try arguing that it will never be profitable to colonize Mars, you'll be more credible
Personally, I think that our climate here on Earth is only going to get less habitable, not more, but technology will continue to improve to allow us to keep expanding anyway, till the point that population will dictate expanding to other planets. By then, there won't be much difference between living in a metal cave on Mars compared to one on Earth. Of course, I doubt this will be within our lifetime.
Seriously, stop calling it the "Red" planet. It just confuses the congresscritters into thinking it already belongs to China, and they're worried it'll turn into another Taiwan situation.
> True, but this reveals a great lack of motivation and vision among U.S. lawmakers
So telling NASA to use their budget on science rather than propaganda shows "lack of vision"?
Bang for the buck? It depends on how you define 'bang'.
If the only point of exploration is to collect various factoids about faraway places, then I would agree with you. Manned missions would be pointless.
If the point is to expand our horizons and travel to places to experience them firsthand, then I'd say robotic missions are very limiting.
I see the current bill under discussion as nothing more than a Democratic Congress attempting to make sure a Republican President is never seen as a visionary. It is a petty and pointless tactic. This President has done more than any Democrat ever could to insure he is never seen as anything more than a joke. The current bill just give Congress a chance to look like meddlers.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
While I am not a fan of many things Congress does, the banning of humans on Mars is one of the most sensible things I've seen in ages. Humans are not designed to travel or survive interplanetary voyages. The most sensible course until the human genome can be redesigned for such expeditions -- which could take decades -- is to ban any and all attempts to send humans there.
Give NASA goals, such as sending robotic missions where we would like to explore. Do not send machines, i.e. human bodies, to places they where they are poorly designed for the environment.
Man on Mars timelines are so long that robots will be much better at that time. We can out perform human exploration NOW! Its only a waste of money to do it before it gets cheap. We can send dozens of robots for the cost of 1 human. Its not cost effective and will not be for sometime (if ever.) When we are ready to build bases to live on then we can send humans (not exactly exploration at that point.) We NEED advances in robotics on earth more than methods for space travel. Everybody keeps neglecting how cold and O2 free mars is and the traveling problems; which are best saved for solving later.
Its a DISTRACTION, didn't anybody notice how Bush has been trying to slow or stop climate science? He has NASA refocused on mars and neglecting other areas that he doesn't want or care about moving forward. Remember, he stopped a climate science probe that other countries would have paid to launch (it was already built) just because he didn't want any climate science probe backing this vast conspiracy of climate scientists scamming people about global warming. (we know he tried to censor government climate scientists, even after the public woke up.)
I've said it before; won't waste time doing it again even if I'd get mod up like I did before.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You need to dial your Cynacism-O-Meter up a notch and realize Libertarians are not so far from Democrats/Republicans as you may think.
Unlike Democrats and Republicans, they'll never have to worry about actually getting elected and are free to keep the purity of their beliefs away from all that nasty lobbyist money.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
When Slashdot finds out that its liberal democrats banning manned mars missions, they of course put aside any notion of "Geek" / pro-space exploration, etc, and elevate the liberalism.
Liberalism is a religion people. And slashdot is not a geek site, because they are practitioners of liberalism, and to liberals, liberalism over-rides everything.
nothing preventing you from a mission that supports 150+kg load of ... "cargo" ... to mars, and then after the ban expires, lo and behold the cargo includes humans.
stuff |
I agree that the Aztecs were nasty, but I would observe that they, and all the other native peoples that Spanish explorers "rolled over," were wiped out more by the plague than by the Spaniards' superior tech.
Also, in his book "Guns, Germs and Steel," Jared Diamond makes a good case that the reasons why Europeans dominated the world had more to do with geography and resources (mineral, animal, and vegetable) than it had to do with effort or intelligence. Consider, for example, that the llama is about the only beast of burden that the Americas had to work with.
It's very interesting and worth a read.
I think you're igonoring the fact that the ratio of functions that robots can do to those that they can't is growing exponentially, and will continue to grow over the next 10 years and beyond. Humans, on the other hand, are pretty stagnant as to what functions they are capable of. Robots might not be able to do all of those things *now*, but they certainly will in the near future.
"It's not *specifically* for Mars, that's just where the next test will be. Eventually we'd like to take this tech to exploring the moons of Jupiter, or even beyond the confines of the Sol system, once we figure out a way to travel greater distances efficiently. Oh, and since we're going there anyway, mightaswell do some research there too, right? Would hate to waste the opportunity."
Just takes the right spin. Might help to take it to the Moon first, for extra cred.
That's a key word in the proposal. It'd be damn silly to put money into R&D that couldn't translate to another domain. The intent is to be able to use (frinstance) the Constellation lifters for both lunar and Mars flights. There was never any plan to ban people from Mars.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Please read what the "ban" really is. It is a requirement that if the president wants to shift the mission of NASA to going to Mars, he must supply the money.
The people whining about this "ban" are the same people who are whining because NASA doesn't want to continue servicing the Space Telescope, and wants to stop Shuttle launches. They HAVE to do this in order to commit their resources to the task of landing on Mars. The house bill was intended to designate that NASA get MORE funding provided by the president. It has a very small fraction of what goes into defense today.
If you don't want NASA to fund things like space telescopes, the shuttle, or supercolliders, then by all means- overturn this bill and watch what happens.
And by the way, its not a ban on "HUMANS on mars". This is just wrong. Its a ban on using the funds provided under NASA's existing charter to fund research that solely benefits a manned mission to mars. It has nothing to do with whether you're american or not...it applies to where the funds can be used. The money cannot go to the European space agency either. So the tags that have been applied about non-americans being human is almost as stupid as some of the knee jerk reactions in response to this.
Just spend the money to figure out how to get to Jupiter and then stop short.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
As your new leader I hereby execute Martian Law!
Don't you mean Martial-
No!
I guess all their "Mission to Mars" hype was for nothing... Oh, well.
That's why Canada should strike first.
Breakfast served all day!
Loopholes described in TFA aside, are we trying to give Mars to China or something? I guess this would explain why everyone in the 'verse speaks English and Mandarin.
(You had to see that coming. Don't lie.)
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
But just the same, I hope you yahoos note that its a Democrat-controlled House that passed this. As it was the Democrats who killed the 70s space programs.
Um, they are making rules for activity on Earth. Comprehension is not something to be avoided. Nor is it a "ban" its a limitation on funding.
Doesn't this only pertain to American humans?
How To Beat Congress's Ban Of Humans the rss feed cut an important part out...
"the House of Representatives passed a bill that would ban humans on Mars at NASA"
Why would they want to keep humans on Mars out of NASA? I would've thought the transport costs were sufficiently prohibitive already.
Research [insert terrestrial mammal here] exploration of Mars instead. The wording of the bill is such that it invites loopholes. Go Congress.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
The Democrats are truly idiots!
Socialist Healthcare of course... which is what I have a problem with, being a healthy person who has to pay for your medication out of my tax money.
It isn't 'your' tax money, it's our tax money. 'Your' money is what you take home after you pay the portion that belongs to everybody. If you have a problem with that you can move somewhere else, or rot in prison. Either way, stfu.
Just like politicians know better than intelligence agents on what constitutes a real threat to the USA, and how politicians know better than generals on what constitutes a feasible war plan.
Some old shit...
Blar.
I hate the fucking Chinese, er, U.S. COngress. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/05/2041209
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
this just goes to prove that their are martians and they either want to be left alone, or are giant mechanical automatons looking for their game cube.
Ave Molech Setting
I hate the fucking U.S. Congress, er, Chinese, er... http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/05/2041209
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
There's currently only one laboratory where anybody's seriously researching how to terraform planets - it's called "Earth" - and the group running it have been doing a spectacularly bad job so far, and haven't even figured out where the thermostat is. The kind of research that needs to be done if we're going to create off-planet living environments mostly overlaps with the kind of research we need to fix Earth, so we might as well focus on the important parts first. For the most part, that's not rocket science, it's something much harder.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
its wonderful that them Yankees think they can ban the rest of humanity from another planet. I think your getting ahead of your selfs, with the way the states is currently looking i don't think they'll be around to make it to mars.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
And if we break a bunch of windows and pay people to fix them the money goes into our economy also. What is your point?
REPEAT!
Wot Planet Are These Jerks On?
RR
Is the US space program even relevant anymore? The moon landings are ancient history. The space station is a political thing that is slowly decaying into mediocrity. So much for the space age. It'll never happen as long as politicians are too busy stuffing their pockets with blood-money.
Basically, fallout would lead to loss of life if it was launched from the ground meaning we just need to launch our nuclear spaceship in space! From there we can start our walk to the stars :)
He discovered by accident that adding a third element to the thermionic diode would control the flow of current through the device. He did NOT understand how it actually worked and as a result was trumped by another inventor who perfected the circuits that used the triode. Deforest used the courts to attempt to gain ownership of those circuits from their actual inventor (Armstrong). The only person more blind than DeForest on the operation of thermionic devices was Edison, who actually discovered effect. If Edison had devoted even a small bit of his usual insight into things on the problem, he might have connected the dots and invented the triode 20 years earlier. Edison was looking into ways of improving long distance telephone circuits and here was the amplifier he was looking for!
You need to get ur ass to mars! I'm a learning computah, and you can TALK TO DA HAND. You psychopathic bitch.
Keep your laws off my celestial bodies!!!
I hate the way lawmakers think they are god. Bunch of self serving dipshits, it is our choice to explore the cosmos, keep your laws off my celestial bodies!
The funny thing is Barney "the Dinosaur" Frank is a democrat, I though they were pro-choice.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
NASA is a private institution, they are not a government entity, and Congress banning "humans" on Mars is flat-out silly for one simple reason:
NOT ALL HUMANS ARE AMERICAN!
So once again, we put ourselves last in the space race, as countries like China, India and others decide to create, explore, and potentially colonize planets that we have forbidden ourselves from exploring.
Thank you Congress, for making yet another braindead decision that further places the United States towards 2nd world and 3rd world country status.
Well, first, I think a lot of the expense is about making it 100% safe. We'd be better off taking volunteers for a one-way mission, and we'd surely still have takers. Human exploration isn't safe anyway, but having to build in a million safeguards makes it worse. So part of the reason I'd claim that it looks not worth it to send people is we're costing it wrong.
But beyond that, one reason to send people to mars might be symbolic and another practical: Symbolically, it might get people to thinking about just how amazingly important the Earth is to life just now... and perhaps to talking about just how fragile our hold is on all that.
Practically, the way we're going, this planet is going to soon be habitable only by robots, so perhaps humans should scout out some alternative locales. But even if we can't move all that way in the short time before global warming becomes a serious issue, we can still learn a lot about things like how to build habitats that could survive in hostile environments... which is what we're likely to be living in on Earth if we're not careful. Notwithstanding approaches like the Arctic Doomsday Seed Vault, we need a lot more experiments like the Biosphere before we're ready to survive the ecological worst case scenarios for the next 100 years.
Mankind as a "going concern" will be a lot more credible when we have sustainable, permanent bases elsewhere or is prepared to survive here in the absence of things working in the way they traditionally have accidentally happened to do. The not-so-often-discussed implication of SETI isn't just that there isn't a lot of life in outer space, but that by implication, nature of its own accord is not prone to be naturally accommodating of life anywhere... there's no a priori reason to think it will go out of its way to continue to be friendly even to us here on Earth just because we're lucky enough to have had that happen before; the overwhelming evidence at this point is that the oasis we live in is just a fluke and one on which we're far from having demonstrated a robust foothold.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
On current mars probes:
1) We couldn't send humans to mars 3 years ago. They've been talking about 20 years before we can get on mars starting from now--- so you're saying if we went back in time 23 years and told them to start working on it then humans would out do the robots we sent 3 years ago? Don't tell me you seriously thought about it before you wrote that hypothetical 'argument'? That perspective is in fairy tale land.
2) Robots last longer, are less fragile, and require a LOT less resources to operate. This is not exploring some island. This isn't even deep sea diving. Its just the most habitable place besides earth and getting there and back is a massive expense. The probes are made cheaply for specific tasks because its smarter than a giant monolithic robot that does everything. The same reasoning extrapolates to humans.
3) Cost to benefit ratio will always favor robots. As technology makes humans cheaper it also makes robots more effective. They easily WIN today and tomorrow.
If you still don't get it, your probably hopelessly blinded by emotions. If your going to make robots, high tech tools, a ship and a jeep for humans to operate on mars, why not slap the tools onto a smaller cheaper jeep trash the ship and eventually trash all the gear and put your money on that tiny niche where the human performs well.
Sorry, but Star Trek isn't going to happen like that, most the exploration will be by robots -- which doesn't make for good dramas about exploring our humanity in an ironic way.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
"The NASA budget is so tiny compared to so many other budgets, the solution to achieve things is not to slash and burn, but to fund it. OMG! Look at everything we have gotten out of the space race so far."
"Remember how many things this administration has made happen for short sighted goals that have disastrous mid to long term impacts."
Every once in a Loooong while, I wish that +5 insightfull, were the starting base for a +2 Brilliant. Your post is both insightfull and brilliant!
What, in your opinion, projets have had short term goals, that were disastrous for the mid-term and long term?