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Asteroid Missions May Replace Lunar Base Plans
An anonymous reader alerts us to a story about efforts to modify the United States' space exploration plans to focus on asteroid missions rather than a lunar base. Scientists, astronauts, and former NASA division directors will be meeting next month to develop an alternative to the Bush administration's Vision for Space Exploration. We have previously discussed the possibility of a manned asteroid mission. Quoting:
"Numerous planetary managers told Aviation Week & Space Technology they now fear a manned Moon base and even shorter sorties to the Moon will bog down the space program for decades and inhibit, rather than facilitate, manned Mars operations--the ultimate goal of both the Bush and alternative visions. The first lunar sortie would be flown by about 2020 under the Bush plan. If alternative-vision planners have their way, the mission could instead be flown to an asteroid in about 2025."
Just because he was an unpopular president everything he did is wrong, and needs to be reverted, once he leaves... Come on get realistic Presidents are people like you and me they make mistakes sometimes huge ones but they are not wrong all the time... I would like to see more work on the moon vs. asteroids. Asteroids seem much riskier without the benefit yet. The moon on the other hand is fairly stable and we could really work out the kinks in exportation.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
At least NASA has the intelligence and a plan to reverse the idiocy that George threw at them in his effort to paint himself like JFK.
Asteroids are a danger. The odds of one hitting the earth are slim, but if one did, it could end most life on the planet. I'm glad NASA is able to stand up to the little dictator.
If true, this is very good news. Asteroids, the smaller and more numerous ones being undifferentiated bodies, have considerably more scientific value than the moon. It's actually much easier to rendezvous with and return from many asteroids than to land softly on the moon and return. The moon is relatively large, with a big gravity well, and without an atmosphere, aerobraking is impossible. Landing from lunar orbit and takeoff to orbit each require delta Vs greater than 2000 m/sec. Entering and leaving lunar orbit takes even more. Asteroids require earth escape, but that is only slightly more than reaching the moon's high altitude (400,000 km). The velocity change required to rendezvous with the asteroid could be minimized by careful choice of asteroid and launch window.
Asteroids would take much more time to reach, and a mission could not be quickly aborted in an emergency. The communications lag would also be significant; real time conversations would be impossible and communications might even be blocked entirely by solar conjunction for a few days at a time. These are challenges for human space flight, but not insurmountable ones.
They provide valuable data on contents and structure of these rocks. Moon doesn't have a chance to fall on Earth anytime, but these
zap through atmosphere everyday.
There are dozens of large asteroids which pass pretty close http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/
Its fairly logical to think that if its so expensive to get stuff into space, just build it there. While manned missions to the moon and on to mars would certainly be amazing, I fail to see the point of a manned mission to an asteroid. Just send a probe and play around with altering a small asteroid's orbit and bring it into a lunar orbit. Creating an automated system that collects small asteroids (small enough that they'd burn up in atmosphere) and bring them to the moon to be processed would be a tremendous step forward in human expansion into space. Unfortunately, I don't think anything like this would happen until commercial space missions start making it further out there.
For anyone that hasn't heard of him, I'd strongly recommend you check out Bill Stone's TED talk. The whole thing is pretty cool, but its the last chapter in the video thats really amazing.
Didn't they already try exploring asteroids?
I seem to remember the NewsReel.
Ed
Obviously, there's pretty much no scientific value in sending manned missions to the moon anymore, and there is a lot we can gain from meeting up with asteroids.
But it's a little sad, because it really is incredibly cool that we can put a man on the freaking moon, and I was rather looking forward to seeing them start doing it again.
Given how there was no funding to begin with, it is hard to see how it can be cut back. However, the resulting confusion is indeed highly likely to get rid of both missions at the same time.
Practical, cheaper, potentially immediate benefits.
* Learning how to manage NEOs in case of the ultimate nightmare scenario
* Applying and extending our experience in microgravity
* Potential to access resources far easier than on the moon (metals, water, oxygen)
* Returnable to earth orbit for building an orbital industrial infrastructure
* Easier to build completely reusable vehicles a possibility
* Nasa guys clearly read Stephen Baxter, Kim Stanley Robinson, and have played Eve Online.
The only problem with an unmanned asteroid mission is that it may require some human decision from time to time - but normally there is no problem with time delays there. Not much that's in a hurry on an asteroid unless it's heading for Earth. Just put the robot to sleep for a while and recharge the batteries. Keep in mind that there may have to be different robots there compared to the robots we have on Mars.
The thing that's more interesting with a permanent moon-base is that there is a possibility that a lot of the material found on the moon can be used as construction material. It will require a processing plant - and it can't be used for everything, but it's there. Much of the soil is composed from oxides - which means that you can extract oxygen. Allocation of area for growth is no big problem either. The catch is that all this may have a high cost. But what is the cost when the Chinese decides that it's their turn to go to the moon?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Good, I hope that they succeed in changing that strategy. For any colony to actually be useful and self-sustaining, there has to be some hope of an economic return on investment. The driest deserts and coldest tundras here on Earth are like tropical paradises compared with anything outside our planet, whether that's the moon, Mars, or a space station floating around the asteroid belts. Any space colony would be heavily dependent upon imports for survival (e.g., food, clothing, natural resources, manufactured goods, etc.). That will require a roughly equal amount of exports to balance trade, probably in the forms of valuable minerals and manufactured goods that are best made in microgravity environments. That becomes rather difficult to accomplish if you're stuck in a gravity well like a planet or relatively large moon, because lifting those items back out would be prohibitively expensive. We need to stop obsessing over planets and moons, just because we happen to be bipedal and live on a planet now. Asteroids are the way to go.
I really can't help wonder if some people try to keep us from going to the moon (again) and this time actually see for ourselves what has been going on there in the past. Or they simply are incapable of looking at the big picture. A moonbase would be a much better solution, but in the longer run. Simply because launching rockets and other spacecraft from the moon would require tremendous lesser amounts of energy, thus reserving those to be used during the mission. And once you've overcome that problem even asteroid missions could be a lot easier to accomplish.
And thats not even touching other big advantages over a lunar base. For example space exploration. The best way to look into space now is Hubble. I'm pretty sure that a telescope on the moon would also give us lots more insights then we have now. Simply because the "distractions" from the Earth would be nearly gone (talking about light interference and such). And what to think about asteroid tracking? Its not very easy to simply "shift" the Hubble whereas a stationed telescope might be able to cover more parts of the sky due to a more dynamicly approach.
All in all I can't help wonder if people aren't trying to get their short termed solution suddenly accross. Perhaps even fed with the disdain most people have gotten from that nincapoop president.
All these people seem to think that getting to Mars is the ultimate goal, that gathering scientific data is the point, and we've been to the moon already. This is starry eyed gee-whiz thinking. The quote at the end of TFA explains the REAL goal - we need a permanent colony somewhere other than here. Yes the Moon is a harsher environment, but the cost in time and money to put a colony on Mars is so much higher than putting one on the Moon that it just doesn't make sense. Sure, while we're there we should do some science, but getting people to live there will produce more sustained value than dozens of brief scientific visits to places with only scientific interest. Look at how they consider the Moon now - if a place is only worth visiting a couple of times at most, we're going to run out of places to go pretty quick. A colony would provide LOTS of incentive for private company participation. Building an Earth/Moon ferry service is feasible in 50 years - no private company is going to invest in one to Mars anytime soon.
I want a Moonbase!
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
The US government wastes billions every year. By waste I don't even mean programs that I might disagree with. I mean money that just goes missing. How about we fix that, get rid of earmarks, and put that money towards deficit reduction *and* space exploration among other scientific endeavors.
Shouldn't we solve our own little worldly conflicts before we go ahead and conquer other planets/moons/asteroids and claim them in the name of [insert country here] so we can have full-blown interplanetary wars?!
I've been watching a lot of the old Twilight Zone episodes lately, and based on the examples they show, asteroids look like a better destination than the moon anyway. Asteroids seem much more habitable to humans. It looks like they have breathable atmospheres, earth-like gravity, and in fact they look almost exactly like our own Mohave Desert. In comparison, the moon is a bleak airless wasteland. I'm all for it.
Why is it "so hard" to duplicate a known result 50 years later? The kudos go out to the first designers who did it with 1960's tech. Our computers are gloriously more powerful now, and their target deadline is another 8-ish years out anyway. (Past Windows Seven, Running *nix?)
Isn't there value to learning how to commoditize "it nearly killed us last time, now it's only $10,000,000."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
This is a situation where we need a concrete reason to develop the heavy lift infrastructure needed.
And a moonbase makes as much sense as the "International Space Station".
The REAL driver for developing the infrastructure remains Space Based Solar.
http://www.nss.org/settlement/ssp/library/final-sbsp-interim-assessment-release-01.pdf
If we started TODAY, in 50 years we'd have all the pieces. Sustainable, Renewable, Non-Polluting Energy; Heavy Lift to GEO; And the ability to deploy a workforce to GEO to do the work needed.
We'd go to the moon for R&R. What happens on Luna STAYS ON LUNA!
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Not sure there is any future in putting people on the moon, or down on the bottom of any other gravity well. To prove it can be done? Well, we proved that in 1969, and that didn't get us anywhere.
I'd much rather see us put people (or robots) somewhere that actually direct us towards a future in space. Mining the asteroids has potential, not for putting anything back to Earth (too expensive), but for raw material for further space exploration, building space stations, and manufacturing specialized composited that require weightlessness.
Eventually, we may send expeditions and construct bases on the bottom of the gravity wells. But that should be done from our permanent bases in space, not from Earth.
I suspect there is a limit on how many blind alleys we get a chance to explore. Let's go towards where there is most potential. And that is not on the bottom of any gravity well.
just hope the orbital path of the asteroid does not bring it to a location in space where it can collide with other asteroids...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
There will be no asteroid mission. There will be no lunar base.
In the book, "The Case for Mars" the author, also the creator of the Mars Direct Plan, argues skipping the moon all-together and go straight to Mars. This is because Mars is full of resources that could be used to make a self sustaining colony, whereas a Lunar base requires everything to come from Earth. Differences between a Lunar Base and the ISS? The Lunar base is on the Moon, and on the Moon you can do geology and astronomy particularly well; on ISS, there's not much useful science.
I'm not sure cruising to asteroids is the answer, but at least there are probably lots of interesting and diverse resources, and the missions could be made lightweight(no lander required). The geology of Asteroids is probably alot different than the Moon's because there was no volcanic past or differentiation. But my opinion is, cut to the chase, go to Mars, its the most interesting thing out there.
I wish I had mod points for you. It's a great idea.
:)
1) You could attach probes to passing by roids and then detach when they're about to pull back towards the sun. Saves on fuel and gets the probe further out our system.
2) If we could make lots of inexpensive tracking satellites we could track lots of roids. I think it would give us a lot of useful data as well as give us automatic collision warnings.
3) You could make an asteroid into a manned spaceship by landing on it. Why bother with the moon when an asteroid gets to see more things, albeit more dangerous of course.
It is not just NASA that wants the moon.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I have felt this for a long time.
A number of Earth-crossing asteroids are easier to get to, energetically, than the Moon. (Apollo could certainly have
reached some asteroids, which was pointed out at the time, and a lot more Earth-crossing asteroids are known now.) The trip times tend to be long,
so you need to be prepared for long duration flights (which is not that different from being prepared for long duration lunar visits, and is also
true of any trip to Mars). And, you don't need anything like a lunar module. (With most asteroids, and certainly all of the Earth crossing ones, you will "dock" with
them more than "land" on them, the gravity is that week.) The weight saved from the lunar module can be used for provisions instead.
There is plenty of science to do, and if we are ever going to economically exploit the materials in space, we are much more likely to
do it with asteroids than with either the Moon or Mars.
Yes. There are legitimate criticisms of GWBush. Some of your listings are among them. (Others, like the state of the dollar, are only incidentally related - there, it's the culmination of a long-standing trend, and criticisms of Greenspan would be more accurate than those of Bush).
P.S. Original poster gets + Insightfuls. I get - Offtopics and - Overrateds. I'll admit to Offtopicness, but I suspect that the moderation was not, in fact, applied for Offtopicness so much as Disagreeingness and that some of the +Insightfulness was just the "yay bush sucks!"ness.
P.P.S. in some vague notion of on-topicness (*waves a dead chicken over the post*):
this big Mars space program idea of his is a big stupid waste of money. Axe it, please.
(At least the asteroid idea has a modicum less nonsense to it.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The moon's like, just hanging round up there all day long: let's face it, we've all seen that old boy before! At least them asteroids are always goin new places.
Now, if I was a spaceman (and i'm not saying an alien or anything - just a regular spaceman from down Florida) i'd much rather git aboard one of them asteroids and go to new places - wouldn't ya'll?
Anyhoo, I hear them asteroids git hot damn good fuel econ: so none of that bitchin''bout the vironment and all that polushon jazz, now boys!
"He Who Dares Wins"
Your criticism, however, is orthogonal to the point that I was making. It's not that "Bush rocks!!!" ... just that he's not the drooling idiot that so many people
like to pretend he is in their intellectual/political masturbation exercises.
I just wish people could take a step back from the constant war of agenda-pushing
every now and again.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Because they are more likely to find valuable metals, etc. in the asteriods for mining. There's not any money to be made on the Moon. :)
Can I be the first person to suggest that the crew of the first manned mission to an asteroid absolutely must be...
1) Bruce Willis
2) Ben Affleck (Hey, send Matt Daemon too, sure it has nothing to do with the movie, but I think he deserves to be in space)
3) A sketchy guy (Who I can't remember the name of and don't care) and some big black guy for racial equality (Who I also can't remember the name of and don't care)
Either way, this is the only way I see a mission like this succeeding.
Besides this happening, I believe it would be much cooler to establish a colony on the moon, however the first colony absolutely must...
1) Setup an amusement park
2) Setup a monument in said amusement park to the first whalers to land on the moon
3) Send Matt Groening there to show him that, this is what happens when you make a popular show which resonates with nerds who have a huge sense of irony
Both of these activities will garner the support NASA needs to undertake these missions from the common man, while increasing the future success of the human species, specifically as it pertains to colonization of the universe.
So to conclude:
4) ???
5) Profit!
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I agree with the other reply. Manned asteroid missions probably have very little to do with detecting and preventing asteroid collisions... which definitely are a priority. But we are talking apples and oranges here.
While your comments are not put together very clearly, apparently you are trying to claim that sending a rocket to an asteroid from a "deep gravity well" (earth) is easier than sending one from a "shallow gravity well" (the moon). And that is pure nonsense.
Given that there is at least a manned base, and both (earth and moon) have rockets prepared and ready to go, then it is FAR easier and less resource-intensive to send a mission from the moon than from earth. All your spouting about delta-v does not change that. The "delta-v" for leaving from the moon is much less than that necessary from earth, which also means that the vehicle can be MUCH smaller and lighter.
A low-gravity base that is well supplied with equipment is our best bet for frequent "outward" missions. That means a moon base. Yes, it would be expensive in terms of total resources. On the other hand, we have constantly been learning more about what raw materials are available from the moon, and how to go about extracting them. The results have been encouraging.
We need to take baby-steps for these kinds of projects, and because of our abandonment years ago, we need to start over.
Facts:
We don't have any astronauts that have experience landing on satellites or anything other than the Earth.
The moon has a very stable orbit around the Earth
Asteroids do not have very stable orbits around the Earth
From these observations, as well as other common knowledge, I'm willing to state that it would be easier to have a Lunar mission than a mission landing on an Asteroid. Why? Because it's most-likely easier to land on the moon than on an asteroid. Also, by the time we have finished doing whatever we were doing on the asteroid, it will (most likely) be much further away from the Earth than it was when we landed on it.
Sure, I don't see any real reason why we shouldn't do any manned asteroid missions. I just think we need to work our way up to them. As it is now, astronauts don't have the experience to be able to land on an asteroid. They should be able to get enough experience to land on the moon rather quickly. And I know I've ignored the ground crews, who have no experience sending people to the moon any more, so the same comments about the astronauts also apply to the people staying on the Earth.
That proposed mission seemed at bit strange at first because the asteroids are further out, but not having to escape the gravity of a small planet would make it a lot easier. It seems a lot more exciting to go that far out than returning to the Moon.
Let's let China and India bring back the Helium 3 and we will buy it from them. -- That's probably the only good reason to go there anyway, but if we go there we might have to use Helium 3/deuterium fusion for our energy. That would really disappointment the coal, gas, and petroleum industry.
Going to Mars via asteroid trips is a good idea because it will spend lots of money without any of those annoying technology returns and society-changing science findings to cope with. Also, nobody else will be pursuing Mars, so we won't be embarrased by our failure when somebody who still has technology and manufacturing resources beats us there.
Others, like the state of the dollar, are only incidentally related
So you don't feel that the actions of this administration over the past 7 years have contributed to the state of the dollar? Right...
Contrary to the first reply, I agree that a moonbase would be a much better long-term solution. Lack of available local resources was apparently the primary objection in the other reply, but in fact the moon is resource-rich, as we have been learning. Iron, aluminum, oxygen, lesser amounts of other minerals and metals, oxygen are all there in abundance. All that is needed is the energy to extract them.
There is a bit of an energy problem, in that it has to be stored for long periods of darkness. But when in the light (half the time or so), energy is abundant and free! So with storage, it is not really a problem at all.
We also must consider that a rocket lifted from the moon only has to be a small fraction of the size (actually, mass) than if sent from the earth. There is no atmosphere to overcome, and much less gravity. Less gravity means less fuel, which is a feedback loop... less fuel to lift the mass means less fuel necessary in the rocket, which means less rocket, which means even less fuel... so it takes A LOT less. probably about 1/10th. When you consider that 90% of an earth rocket's mass is fuel, that is saying a lot.
Once we have a shallow-gravity-well base, with resources, we will be much better-placed to send more "outward" missions.
Sure, the technology got better, but the fuel is still the same and got a lot more expensive...
Asteroids make more sense. It will be much more practical to mine asteroids because there is very little expense in escaping the gravity well of an asteroid to get the mined material back here.
-- QED
If it were, maybe we would be going to Uranus...
NASA had their shot. They got us to the moon and back.
Since then the shuttle has been a very expensive moving van to LEO. ISS is an expensive exercise in international relations (I hope the new science module proves me wrong, but I'm not counting on it).
NASA combines the best engineers with the worst bureaucracy on the planet, their "Can Do" attitude has been replaced by "I'll get back to you on that".
Returning to the moon sometime so far in the future that most of us are going to be retired or dead is being replaced by a mission even further in the future. Yeah NASA, whatever, I no longer care.
One big advantage of a crewed mission to a near-earth asteroid over a crewed mission to Mars is that we simply don't have the technology to get to Mars. A transfer orbit to Mars takes 1.4 years (total round-trip time). (This is simply the period of a body in a Keplerian orbit that's tangent to the Earth's orbit at perihelion and tangent to Mars's orbit at aphelion. A spaceship isn't like a car, which takes less time to get there if you drive faster. A spaceship only thrusts with its engines in order to change its orbit.) The big unsolved scientific and engineering problem is how to keep a crew of human beings from getting exposed to unacceptable doses of radiation when they're in Earth-Mars orbital space for that long. The radiation intensity from galactic cosmic rays is much, much higher out there than it is in Earth orbit. Feasible amounts of shielding actually make the problem worse rather than better, because of secondary radiation. According to this article, the duration of a mission to a near-earth asteroid could be 60-90 days, so it avoids this very tough, unsolved problem. There are many other aspects of a near-earth asteroid mission that are also a heck of a lot easier than a Mars mission. You don't have to land in a deep gravity well and then take off again, for one thing. If you look at the history of uncrewed Mars missions, it's pretty damn scary -- the success rate is very low, and that's for missions that don't have to take off and return to Earth, and don't have to provide life support.
The big question in my mind is what is the rational justification for government-funded crewed spaceflight at this point. There's no scientific justification; uncrewed probes give more bang for the buck. The shuttle's only mission is to go to the ISS, and the ISS's only mission is to give the shuttle somewhere to go. Thirty or forty years ago, this was all basically cold war propaganda stuff. It seems to me that the U.S. is having a hard time dealing with an unanticipated outbreak of peace. The rational thing to do would have been to continue harvesting the peace dividend, start ramping down our foreign military commitments, and let both crewed and uncrewed space exploration make the transition to the private sector. Instead we've been blundering around like idiots with our ridiculously large military, and in terms of space exploration we've been choking the scientifically productive uncrewed program by diverting the available money into extremely expensive projects like the ISS that have no rational justification.
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The moon is a much safer place to try the first attempt at a colony. If someone gets sick, injured, the complex collapses, gets a hole in it, aliens attack or if people just get space madness, a lifeboat to Earth is much more likely to succeed because you don't have to wait for the orbits to align themselves just right. Only after we have figured out solutions to some of the problems we have not even thought about yet, then we will be ready for Mars.
And to summarize with one more analogy: you don't take a trip to the next town over until you can first walk out of your own back yard.
I can't believe what I am reading. First of all. This was a setup from the get go. There never was any intention by Bush to put a base on the moon. This was a rouge to divert funding from NASA. The same tactic has been used before. So this isn't really news, it's been in the cards all along. After awhile they'll cut the Astroid missions back too.
Now that fact that so many posters think this is a good idea, is terribly disheartening. If these posts are for real (and not more b.s. from the propaganda machines that now dominate our media), then it means America has lost it's Spirit. We no longer have a can-do attitude. We no longer care about going beyond ourself and pushing frontiers. We no longer see our ourselves as capable of achieving great things. In short we no longer Dream. And that...more than anything else will be our doom.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Why bother sticking with a solid plan on a solid foundation going to a predictable path, when instead "the powers that be" (do we really know who they are anymore??), have instead decided to abandon the mission and chase the Frisbee that just streaked by? Will rover catch the Frisbee in it's teeth? Or will rover just abandon that Frisbee for the shiny baseball, or the wooden stick? With tail wagging ready to change direction in a moment. Wait, we just ran out of dog food. Sorry rover, off to the pound. We need more dogie surveillance platforms.
There are numerous alternative architectures that can deliver the hundreds of tons of supplies you need on the lunar surface within practical budgets. But they involve direct commercial and industry involvement. Until these players are fully engaged we will not be going back to the moon in a meaningful way. Most importantly these architectures provide the foundations for going to Mars in a meaningful way. Anyone who thinks you are gonna do anything meaningful on Mars with a handful of crew is simply wrong. It requires a bare-bones crew of at least 90 to support three science teams of 6 each. If you want confirmation look at Antarctic operations to get yourself calibrated. Furthermore on any real Mars mission at least part of the crew that goes does not come back on the first return opportunity. They are there for at least two cycles and transfer tasks and responsibilities to the second cycle crew etc etc. It is getting used to not coming back for 5 years that is perhaps one of the most important psychological barriers we must cross. The moon is a good place to start this- staying there permanently creates an enormous improvement in efficiency. You can finally forget about the retreat to Earth as the only safe option. Worth nearly 3000 m/sec delta V.
So the moon is worthy goal- but it is the practice of developing self-sustaining colonies that is the real barrier.
The Moon-Mars plan is referred to as the "Vision for Space Exploration."
What exactly is the vision? The founding document [large PDF warning] for the "VSE" lists goals and strategies, but no vision of what the goals and strategies are meant to accomplish. A vision involving the Moon could be "create a new civilization on the Moon that might do for the U.S. what the New World colonies did for the Old World." (you can snicker but that is an example).
"Go to the Moon and Mars" is not a vision. It's an strategy.
"Build launchers and spacecraft based on current infrastructure & technology" is an implementation of that strategy.
Again... what is the vision?
If the US government decides it wants to go to Mars bypassing the Moon, go ahead. If the European Union decides it wants to go the asteroids bypassing the Moon, go ahead. (Insert other governments following there own ideas as well.) What would be helpful, is if the environment would be created whereby there is a commercial reason for others to go to the Moon, should they decide there is a reason to do so. A commercial trip to the Moon is just as dangerous as any other mission, and there is a good chance people will die or be horribly injured. Commercial interests do not have access to military personnel to perform these missions. There has to be a way that private citizens can step up and say, "I know this mission is very dangerous, but I still want to do it.". It is bad enough that there is probably too much red tape surrounding commercial attempts to do things in space. But even if we drop all the red tape, the inability of someone to do something knowing there is a significant chance of death is a show stopper. Space is the most dangerous worksite we have.
The Moon actually has more sunlight than anywhere on earth, especially any tundras. You can use that both for energy and farming. Greenhouses could be pretty simple to get operating there. What plants can handle month long days I don't know, but there's got to be some.
There is also no real weather problems in terms of wind, rain, snow etc. Yeah, it's a harsh environment, but it holds no surprises, other than the occasional solar outburst (serious enough though).
And the killer feature is that it's so close. You can get there in a few days, as opposed to years for any asteroid missions.
That also brings in the revenue source you didn't mention. Even if there is nothing useful a moon base could manufacture, I think it could sustain itself very well just as tourist spot for the megarich.
Getting to any of them, (and cheaply staying in LEO) will require some baseline technologies; suits, life support systems, food growth, recycling systems, power systems, etc. It's really all the same. The only place where it gets different is in fluid handling (Waste, food, etc.) So, when you develop a suit for the moon, it is also good for LEO or the asteroids. (Mars takes slightly different suits.) They all require cheap lift to orbit. (People can argue for an against heavy lift all they want, but any way you do it, you still need lift.) Much of the equipment to keep people alive for these sorts of missions are all the same! Moon base, Mars exploration, or the belt. The vast majority of this equipment is interchangeable.
And, Be clear on this, since the most expensive part of any such mission is not the fuel and the launch, but the development costs! So, the trick is to maximize the development costs. What's the best way to do that? Stop building one use hardware! If every thing's a prototype, then everything will of course be insanely expensive! Get the economies of scale working for you rather than against you. (I know, way to obvious... Therefor it can not happen in Govt. I'll get to that.)
Also, if you run all three programs simultaneously, you will also get some synergy. Use Lunar H3 to drive the long distance nuclear rockets, saving fuel, time, and a HUGE level of costs. Use Asteroid metals to build the rest with. If you find an ice asteroid, drop a couple on Mars to start the terraforming project, Break them up into smaller pieces and land some on Luna for water. Use Martian food for the whole pile. (It's cheaper to lift it out of a 1/3g gravity well than out of a 1g well, even with all of the other expenses.) All of the projects work together synergistically.
As a complete aside? This is a great place for private industry. Let the Govts fund some of the basic research, then contract with real private industry to actually build the stuff, and allow them to sell the equipment to anyone. (Have space suit will travel?) Look at how far some private industry has gone without Govt help. (Such as Scaled Composites or 4Frontiers Corp http://www.4frontierscorp.com/) Imagine how far they could go with even a little govt spending.
And lastly, As every one who has even looked a little, the NASA budget it trivial in the overall. I think the DOD is spending more per month in Iraq and Afghanistan than NASA gets all year, and for what the "Sub Prime" mortgage fiasco will cost this year alone, we (Private industry) could build a Martian settlement, including the development work! 4Frontiers is working on just that! There has always been problems on Earth, and waiting 'till their solved is insane, because there will always be problems on Earth. We need to get off this rock before it's too late. Am I the only one who noticed that no one could tell for sure that this last meteor wasn't going to hit Mars until a few weeks before it was predicted to (almost) hit? That doesn't give us a lot of time to prepare. Hell, We can't even get a shuttle (30 year old tech!) off that fast...
The time has come and gone, let's get this done now... (And Yes, This is a big part of what I do for both a hobby and a living...)
Your Moon, Your Mission, Get involved! http://www.openluna.org
Jumping to Mars is a poor idea. Despite the advances we have made with ISS and life support systems in general, we need to develop landers and hab systems well before we push for Mars. Its like testing prototype equipment by going straight to Mt Everest and HOPING that it works. ISS is teaching us life support, long term zero G technology's and assembly in space. Now we should move to the moon, learn to land (again), establish bases and maintaining them. The moon is just 4 days away, mars, months.
But either place you go to, the most important thing you need to do is get a working ecosystem that can run for a fairly long time without significant inputs from outside, and we can do that research just as well in space (and a lot of it down on Earth as well.) So far we don't know how to take cute little terrariums like the Biosphere and run them at steady-state, and we'll need to do a lot more ecological research before it makes sense to do much human travel past orbit or L5 or whatever.
Sending out robots is a different issue - most of the near-term value of space exploration doesn't need canned monkeys to operate things, and you can get by with much smaller simpler spacecraft if you're not trying to maintain an ecosystem. The issues of working at a time-delayed distance mean that it's really helpful to have somewhat artificially intelligent robots and not just waldoes, but there's not much that requires humans to be up close and personal.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So the permanent lunar colonies will inevitably be Asian.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Meanwhile, any significant human base off-planet needs three things - enough physics to get it built, an ecosystem that can run indefinitely without refills from Earth so we can live there, and some useful job to do once we've built it. Everybody likes to focus on the physics, whether that's rockets or space elevators or starwisps or whatever, but that's in some sense the easy part. There are a lot of useful jobs to do in near-earth orbit, but it's not enough to say we're going to Mars just because it's Way Cool (though it is.) And just because the US Gov't can get the public to fork over a trillion dollars for Fear and Terror, that doesn't mean we'd be that cooperative about spending that much for Phobos and Deimos. There's also a Zeroth requirement, which is that we have to be Not Dead Yet before we can go anywhere else, though that does overlap with the second one.
We can't build a long-term sustainable ecosystem on Mars until we learn how to do it on Earth, and so far we're not putting anywhere near enough science and technology into that - we've built a few little ego-trip terrariums like the Biosphere that haven't worked, and the one big project (Earth itself, with subprojects like Agriculture, and Finding the %$%$ Thermostat) is not going well either. Remember that the cost of spending money on the space program (or on the military) isn't just the money - it's that you're diverting a lot of scientists and engineers and regular workers from what they'd otherwise be doing, whether that's better solar power or cancer research or water purification systems or flying cars or more exciting video games. Sometimes there's synergy - dragging all those engineers into the Space Program helped semiconductor solar cell development, and helped make military airplanes more efficient, and therefore civilian airplanes, but it probably cost your cars a few MPGs, increasing the US need for foreign oil. (We did get Tang and freeze-dried ice cream!) And we got GPS and satellite photo systems, which are seriously useful in understanding the planet.
Going into space isn't a Bad Thing, but it's definitely a job for robots for most of the work, and much of the important space research can be done down here, figuring out how to terraform Earth first.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The thin CO2 atmosphere could perhaps sustain plant life. I think that is the most exciting prospect of Mars. Still, the pressure is too low for liquid water on the surface, something like pressurized greenhouses are needed. I can imagine there's several plants out there that could survive the Martian desert though (a cactus? a lichen?) with a little watering now and then. Here's my dream of a green Mars!
Dear asteroid skeptic,
Exploring asteroids, especially the ones that come near enough to us to potentially be dangerous, is NOT a purely scientific endeavor. Do I really need to outline them?
If so, then see my other posts under this story for more information as to why I believe that. Feel free to debate them, indeed, I hope you do.
Cheers,
SB
PS Oh, and asteroids are also "solar bodies". There was a memo...
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think a moon or Mars base is evil or bad or stupid (I do think it's unnecessary, as I think we could do better using that kind of money for a jillion robot probes and massively improved space telescopes, but I don't think they are wrong - merely suboptimal) I just think there isn't enough money and reosurces left to throw at such a project as a Moon Base, much less a Mars Base.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
One of the few really ontopic toplevel posts in the whole story, actually presenting arguments that relate to asteroids vs. moon.
See my other posts.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
This sounds very much like the argument used to bypass building a space station before going to the Moon in the 1960's. We got to the moon in a decade, but we did this by over-reaching ourselves -- all the infrastructure was stuck on Earth. We have spend much of the succeeding decades back-filling what we should have built as a part of going to the Moon. Going to Mars without first establishing a permanent presence on the Moon means that all the resources for the spacecraft to send a manned expedition to Mars will come from Earth and have to be pushed up a daunting gravitational well. This is like spitting into a desert sand storm to fill a cup. What we need is a considered bootstrapping effort -- something we have never done when it comes to space exploration. As part of this effort, we should establish a Lunar presence, develop an industrial base of mining and manufacturing. There is nearly a planet full resources already in Earth orbit. Besides providing, at least partially, for the construction of interplanetary spacecraft, a Lunar industrial base will give us resources for things like solar power satellites, a geosych anchoring mass for a space elevator et al. What asteroids, or rather cometary objects could give us that the Moon may have difficulty providing is volatiles. And I am all for this. But as long as one has to pay the price to get everything needed from Earth to orbit first, space exploration is a game overly restricted by those costs.
How on earth does the McCain-Feingold Act prevent me from saying what I want? It's not impacted what I can say at all.
The dangerous concept of a "Free Speech Zones" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone) are the things that are chilling to free speech. While not invented by Mr Bush, they were certainly perfected by him.
All Bush plans will be irrelevant exactly one year from today.
There is a certain threshold, past which you do not expect professionals to make mistakes, like surgeons, advocates, astronauts, fighter pilots etc. In certain professions, there is very little margin for error. Being President of a country is one of these professions. Your current president runs the country like he is playing amateur baseball in public, but his cowboy public persona of is simply a front for hiding the shrewd fascist intentions of your current government. He is no fool, and he makes no mistakes, and he does not care if you like him of not. The legislation has been put in place will not easily be reversed, because there are enough democrats as well who would also like to have the ability to scrutinise and log every move you ever make, to have the right incarcerate you without trial to make sure that you conform to their plans without dissent.
Having lived under a fascist regime in South Africa, I can assure you that having a society of sociopaths surrounding you is no fun, and very difficult to get rid of once in power. Ironically it was the terrorist ANC that ultimately brought the Fascists to their knees, the very enemy (terrorists) that the USA government is spending so much money to ensure will not topple them once they have enacted the legislation that they have now put in place. The real eye opener is, that these 'terrorists' were also South Africans, living among us. the irony is, that they ultimately turned out to be the friends who freed us from our tyrrany. If you let your current regime achieve their objectives, you will be faced with the same future.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
Did anyone forget that whomever controls the ability to manuver an asteroid into earth orbit may also have the ability to direct it into a very bad earth orbit?
That's in Titan (a Stephen Baxter book). So I hope they actually discuss this in the United Nations or something before they proceed. Or we're going to get idiots playing pool with major cities as the pockets.
Most watches made during these troubled times utilize LCDs, which, when broken, give no time at all.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
There is a not-insignificant value to being first with a moonbase, and that's the primary mantra of Real Estate developers everywhere: location, location, location. Except in this case, it's just "location x2". There are two optimal locations for a moonbase which then has the ability to observe Earth AND farside simultaneously as well as having permanent solar power - the poles. AFAIK the lunar axis wobbles slightly, but not too much.
Being there first means first choice of locations, and when there's really only two, that's a pretty significant issue that could have impact on American lunar policy for decades or even centuries.
It would also mean we're the first to work on the unforeseen problems that would crop up, and, although our ability to keep secrets is positively seive-like, would also confer early advantages to other bases throughout the solar system.
-Styopa
(For more, please read this post and its responses, a bit further down, for why an asteroid may be a better place than Luna or Mars to build an off-Earth habitat.)The physics are already there (for an asteroidal or other micro-gravity human habitat), and the technology is there, or nearly so.
Probably more research needs to be done on systems to prevent a spinning habitat from wobbling, but my guess is that a sufficiently smart system can avoid wobbling by shifting water around to compensate for the movements of humans and other masses.
Also, (I have not seen this mentioned elsewhere, but I doubt that I am the first person to have thought of it), by using counter-rotating masses with co-incident centers of gravity and equal angular momentum, one can avoid using rocket fuel to spin up the habitat in the first place (or to spin it down, in case of emergencies or need for repairs that can't be done at 1G).
Essentially, the habitat acts like one big electric solar-powered motor, with half of the habitat acting as the stator, and the other half acting as the rotor.
(One example would be a rotating central wheel flanked by two smaller counter-rotating wheels (possibly with a non-rotating central axis for micro-gravity science/industry and to make spacecraft docking less hazardous), but other configurations are possible.)
In addition, the magnetic fields produced by such a large motor may help to shield the habitat from some kinds of radiation.
The ecosystem thing is still problematic, but it's getting there as well.
(IIRC, Biosphere2, while a bit of a publicity stunt, might have succeeded (scientifically) had the chemical properties of the concrete been taken into account.)
It seems to me that a space-based environment, where sunlight is (almost) always available (except when transiting behind planetary bodies, but such occurrences can be reduced or possibly eliminated by choosing an appropriate orbit), would be more conducive to growing things than an environment that's dark for two weeks every month.
(Yes, one can grow things using artificial lighting (many "recreational plant" growers can attest to that), but then there's all of the problems with energy storage and so forth that one doesn't have in space, where sunlight is almost always available.)
As far as useful jobs go, I would think that there are more useful (can't-be-done-on-Earth) jobs in a micro-gravity environment, like in the hub of a space habitat, than in a merely low-gravity environment such as one would find on the Moon.
In a spinning habitat, one can experiment with/utilize many different levels of gravity, from nearly zero (at the hub) to greater than 1G (by dropping a cable from the rim).
In addition, the vacuum near a space habitat is harder than the vacuum on the Moon (which has an (admittedly very very tenuous) atmosphere).
This may be more useful for certain experiments/industries.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
No, you idiot, the GP was saying that it's easier to get to an asteroid *from Earth* (and get back again) than it is to get to the Moon *from Earth* (and get back again), because it takes more fuel to land on and take off from the Moon than it does to land on and take off from an asteroid. Other replies explain how the GP was wrong about this, but (s)he was not wrong for the reasons you think. You seem to be the only one having difficulty comprehending simple English. Learn to read.
P.S. My reply to you would have been nicer if your reply to the GP had been nicer. You can cache more files with money, etc.
The problem is that the original discussion was about REPLACING a moon base, in our long-term plans, with asteroid missions instead. And in that context, his reply made no sense. He missed the point that going to an asteroid from Earth and back, if done in a reasonable amount of time, requires more "delta-v", on start and finish, than a mission to the moon. He did mention travel time but not in actual terms of expense and "delta-v". So his statement about asteroids needing less delta-v is just plain wrong.
But that is not even the real issue. The issue is that future space exploration needs a base on a shallower "gravity-well" body than the Earth... and an asteroid just won't cut it for that purpose. The moon will. Period. If we want to make lots of outward missions -- like to asteroids for example -- starting them off from a moon base would make more long-term sense than launching from Earth every time.
The real difference here is between long-term, worthwhile goals and myopic, short-term goals. The first is more expensive in total and takes longer, but the payoff is much richer. The other gets more done in a short time, but is a dead-end.
So, you can call me an idiot all you want, but since you did not understand what was being said IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ORIGINAL DISCUSSION, then I suggest that perhaps I can indeed read, after all, and that I am not the one being an idiot, after all.
I don't much care how polite your words are. You (and he) are wrong. It is that simple.
If that was in print, that is disturbing. If its in TV, well, TV doesn't have free speech to begin with, so it really wouldn't be that much of a loss.
But the goal is Mars, not research .. so from that standpoint why even land on the asteroid? I doubt we're going to setup a major robotic mining, smelting, and product fabrication operation on an asteroid any time within the next 30 years (though I would love to be proven wrong). To land on the asteroid you will probably need to slow down (unless the asteroid was going to Mars .. in which case your launched object would be on that same trajectory anyway). So why even stop on an asteroid? Why not launch the required systems into space and have them freely solar orbit somewhere between the earth and mars. When needed, other systems can rendezvous with it. It's the same practical value as an asteroid.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Seriously, though, the problem with setting "a moonbase" as a major target is that it's purely a symbol. What's wrong with symbols? We've already got too damn many of them. Almost all our "accomplishments" in space have been symbolic. We specify some grand-sounding goal: put up an artificial satellite, put a man in orbit, put a man on the moon, create a permanent presence in orbit. Now it's create a permanent presence on the moon and put a man (or woman) on Mars.
The problem with these big symbolic projects is that they mostly don't go anywhere. Once the goal is achieved, people lose interest. Getting to moon made everybody feel all good and patriotic, but once we got there, the constituency for the Apollo program disappeared, and funding for half the planned missions dried up. Same thing's happening with the ISS. Oh, it's still there, but it's still not completely built, and given the funding issues and absence of a good delivery vehicle, it probably never will be. So it's just a symbolic presence, with the crew mostly acting as highly-skilled janitors, spending most of their time on maintenance, with a little time out now and then for a science experiment or teaching a groundside science class. This is just not a sustainable project.
To make a permanent presence in space sustainable, you need two things. First you need to cut the cost of putting stuff in orbit, which basically means starting the shuttle program all over again, and this time not trying to do it on the cheap. Second, you need to move towards making space travel economically self-sustainable. And that doesn't mean taking a few rich tourists on a suborbital junket. It means doing serious industry: manufacturing that leverages cheap microgravity and vacuum, and mining materials both for export back to earth and for supplying your colony.
From this point of view, Bush's big Moon/Mars venture is actually a big step backward. Not only does it create more expensive, dead-end goals with no economic self-sustainability, it abandons the important goal of creating a reusable launch vehicle. Instead, we get another gigantic, expensive throwaway Apollo-style launch vehicle. The cost of creating a moonbase with this monstrosity is mind boggling. And that guarantees that your moonbase, if it gets built at all, will never be much more than another expensive box in space manned by highly educated janitors. Another expensive, pointless symbol.
No more symbolic projects. We've been doing them for 50 years now, and we're no closer to having a permanent presence in space than we were when Laika died. I once heard Chris Craft (one of the pioneers of the early space program, though he seems to be pretty much forgotten now) suggest that without the Apollo program to suck up all its resources, NASA could have created a real space infrastructure, and we might have been to Mars long ago. Maybe not, but I'd like to see a serious attempt to prove him wrong, not pointless reruns of the whole Apollo boondogle.