Slashdot Mirror
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."
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. Then, after you know who and why, you work to make sure that it does not happen again. Ignorance is a powerful disadvantage.
From the reference, it seems that this is an attempt to keep NASA form being administratively destroyed by a Bushism. Remember the guy Bush put in place that started slashing everything else to make one thing happen. 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. Microwaves (communications and ovens), new materials, better computing, better aircraft, and more!
So, the who is not so important, but the why is very important. To prevent another slash and burn like the last Bush appointee.
Maybe this language is needed. Remember how many things this administration has made happen for short sighted goals that have disastrous mid to long term impacts (yeah, nothing new, but they are very good at it). Would it actually be good to go for Mars at the expense of so many other things?
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
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.
No, it reveals the great frustration of US lawmakers with NASA for screwing up and mismanaging project after expensive project, year after wearying year. Between the overhyped and overpriced Shuttle program (and two very visible accidents on top of other problems), Hubble, the ongoing disaster that is ISS, and whole string of less visible projects... Congress simply doesn't trust NASA.
Historically, post-Apollo, NASA has tried to spin every project it can into being a precursor for manned Mars missions... Which Congress has historically been uninterested in funding. (This 'ban' isn't the first such, nor even the second...) Worse yet, NASA has also (historically) tried every trick in the book in the book to get around the 'bans', further engendering mistrust of them in Congress.
NASA has been hobbled practically since it's birth by the Shuttle - Station - Mars!! vision laid out by Werner Von Braun and enthusiastically endorsed by early NASA administrators. Yes Virginia - the Shuttle program has been around that long, the earliest studies are contemporary with the Mercury project. Many in NASA (at the time) felt that Max Faget and the STG represented a shortcut to beating the Russians and a way of getting early engineering experience before getting to the real task at hand - developing a shuttle and all the rest of Von Braun's vision.
Except - in real life it didn't happen that way. The Apollo (Lunar) program was an accident of a) the Cold War, and b) the Kennedy assassination. Before he died, Jack Kennedy was already seeking to distance himself from, and minimize the program. When he was killed, Apollo was funded as his memorial. Even so, budget cutbacks started as soon as they could be managed - Apollo landing missions and post Apollo programs were being cancelled or cut back as early as 1966! By the time we actually reached the moon, the program was already running on vapors.
So far as public interest goes - just look at the TV numbers of the various landing missions. The great public interest, much ballyhooed by space fanboys, simply never existed.
And honestly, I am all for stopping the funding of a human mission to Mars. It sounds cool and all, but it isn't worth it right now. Manned missions are so much more expensive than robotic missions. Are they any better? Except for the coolness factor, there isn't much benefit having a human over a robot, especially how robots are improving. We can leave a robot up there indefinitely, we can't do the same (for a while at least) with humans. There are so many reasons why we should be focusing on robotic over human exploration.
Everyone is up in arms about how there's a lot of programs (like the Hubble and the spacestation) that we are abandoning. The reason we are abandoning them is because of a lack of funding. Why is there a lack of funding? One big reason is because we are spending money on human space-travel projects because of this goal to reach Mars. No, instead, let's keep funding the projects that are actually providing us with all sorts of valuable research.