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Where Are The Space Advocates?
QuantumG writes "Greg Zsidisin appeared on The Space Show today to ask Where Are The Space Advocates?. For the first time in decades Space is once again a political issue with all four major presidential candidates having something to say about space policy and yet nothing is being heard from space advocates. As we enter a new "Space Nexus" like we did after Apollo, now is a critical time to let your representatives know how you feel about space exploration, and yet no-one has anything to say." The show itself is a podcast if you want to give it a listen. Personally I'm hoping that this election puts space exploration back in the public consciousness- Apollo inspired a generation to learn math and science. I want my kid to be inspired by something bigger than that. And as some readers have noted- there are 3 candidates left (and really only two) so the submitter is probably high.
I can think of 2 big science issues.
1) Fusion.
1a) The unintended effects of fusion on the biosphere and how to fix 'em.
2) The study of biology.
2a) What man does not know about the the effects of what your grandparents/parents did and how you became a human is only being hinted at. What we do not know about the chemistry from conception to birth is only, again, hinted at with what research has been done.
Fusion would be the next 'energy source upgrade' (that or the theorized zero point) and being able to 'upgrade' or 'fix' humans sure sounds a whole heck of a lot bigger than a rocket.
Cancel NASA, and stop space exploration. It's a big waste of time/money. Military needs can be handled by military budgets.
NASA, the U.S. populace, and the world in general have no real interest in propulsion systems capable of realistically lifting large payloads into space economically. We've done everything we can in space with the toy payloads we currently lift, and the only real economic sectors which benefit from continued exploration is orbital satellites, something which NASA handles very poorly (i.e. expensively).
Until someone has the balls to restart Project Orion, I don't see why we should even bother. The technology to put cities in orbit, not to mention on other planets, is readily available and understood. And cheap (on a per kilo basis). So why are we still playing chemical rockets?
It's a waste of time. The silly little experiments done on the ISS are pointless. Until someone invents a drive that can lift 100s (or thousands, or millions) of tons into orbit (or beyond) economically, we should stop bothering and try and let private enterprise come up with something.
The turn away from Project Orion in 1963 represented the end of man's technological development when it came to interplanetary space travel, and commercial space utilization. We dropped the reigns, and walked away (as a race). The current efforts at space travel are a gimmick and a waste of taxpayer dollars, and will continue to be unless we are willing to switch from chemical to nuclear propulsion. That's the truth of the matter.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Seriously -- the Government isn't taking it seriously, and just like immigration that leaves an opening for citizens who recognize a problem, and a lack of response, to do something about it themselves.
Like in Jules Verene's "From the Earth to the Moon" -- open the project up to subscription, so to speak. seek donations from individuals, as well as from large donors, organizations and governments world wide.
Release all of the schematics and source code, take submissions from volunteers but try and maintain a budget high enough to ensure that high-quality engineers can be maintained on staff and that hard devices can actually get built.
Turn a manned mission to Mars into a world-wide, grass-roots endeavor. We all have a stake in getting off this rock and its clear that the powers that be aren't going to actually bother.
I have some experience in non-profit management and fund raising. Anyone want to help start an Open Space Foundation?
In the meantime, the current administration let the nutty banking policies developed under Clinton's watch to http://www.usa-foreclosure.com/">fester and metasticise, and now the country's technically insolvent.
As a consequence, I think putting people in space is going to be seriously backburnered, and I would humbly submit that the majority of people who will ever be in space have already gone.
I'm not happy about that - I would love to go put bases on the moon to harvest He3 and do all that kind of groovy stuff, but I think we shot our wad, and pissed away the resources on crap like highways for Cadillac Escalades and useless cities like Las Vegas. We had our chance, and we blew it.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Don't think for a minute that NASA exists purely for humanitarian reasons. The reason it's becoming such a focus of political attention now is the same reason it did back in the during the Cold War - because of Space's importance in national security.
With the other developing superpowers quickly approaching the same level of access as the shuttle currently has, and some with ambitions to reach even further, the US Government can't afford to fall behind and lose the advantage of it's head start. China and India have both announced plans to revisit the moon -- something the US doesn't even currently have the capacity to do again. With Mars being the next great frontier, who will be the first to develop the technologies that will take us there? In a hundred years, what will be the ramifications of ceding the first foothold there?
Aside from the political aspect of being the dominant space power, there are also tremendous military technologies that come from developing for the space program, not to mention tactical advantages that can result from dominating space. From "innocuous" threats like shutting down enemy sattelites, to the real potential for MWDs parked in LEO over your enemies, there is a very real necessity for the space program to remain part of the government.
Private technology companies should have greater access and receive more funding, and further research into the depths of space will always require international cooperation and support. However, the US has reached the deadline of being the "Sole superpower" in the world, and once again must make the effort to compete in a global technology race. Anything less than a total commitment to being the leader in space technology would be irresponsible and dangerous.
The market reflects what is near-term profitable. Don't conflate near-term profitability with importance.
Regardless, lets suppose we privatize space exploration, and a handful of entrepreneurs, with the gifts of great foresight and deep pockets, step forward. They make great strides. They drive the R&D for space-related tech, so they end up owning the spin-offs. They control the orbital research, so maybe they start amassing patents from that.
Now years down the road, space travel becomes really important, and they're poised to make a huge profit. Are we (as a society) prepared to let them profit for their decades of investment, or will we claim that this undeserving elite is trying to exploit our need from a position of unfair advantage?
I'd like to see some questions asked, and some answers. I think that humans need some form of contingency plan that does not consist purely of holes drilled in mountains. As such, we should be moving in this direction in a long-term fashion - the end goal being a self-sufficient and growing colony somewhere that is not earth. So here are some questions.
Given budgets of different sizes, what can realistically be achieved? Hence, what brings us the best bang for buck? What are the most likely approaches?
Is it possible to turn space exploration, colonization and the like into a positive feedback loop that generates more of the same? (i.e. is there a valid business model somewhere? What are the best chances for building some sort of self-sufficient colony up there somewhere, even if populated by self-replicating robots?)
What type of government is most likely to fund this for as long as it takes? If not, what sort is necessary? As much as possible should be open-sourced to prevent research being wasted forever.
What necessary technologies can we anticipate that make it much cheaper to just wait a while longer (e.g. computer hardware, robotics, solar panels, etc)?
Is there any utility in being able to put something city-sized into space via Project Orion? Ten people dead due to cancer is nothing compared to most yearly road deaths. But again, only if there is utility in that approach. Maybe self-replicating robots can do the same thing for less cost but just taking longer to ramp up.
In the end, I think that there are two issues:
1. How do we build a self-sufficient system (at first, probably sans humans) capable of growing - i.e. net energy positive, net resource positive, growing at some sort of exponential rate, even if slowly?
2. What are the minimum requirements in terms of energy/unit time and resources/human, radiation shielding etc for humans to survive and reproduce in some sort of closed-loop system bar energy?
The key is the self-sufficiency. We have finite energy on this earth, but a lot of time and brainpower to do basic research. If we can set something up such that we only have to get it working once and after that it takes care of itself, we have won. If we can figure out how to do everything completely closed-loop bar energy (which can be gotten from solar), we have won. (Water and oxygen should be able to be transported in one big shot via Project Orion provided that it is fully recycled after it arrives.)
Somewhere there needs to be a checklist and someone going down the list until all those bugs are squashed. I suspect that with a lot of it, we don't even need to go to space, it can be done cheaply on earth. Not too glamorous, extremely hard, but all necessary. It probably needs a good movie or two to convince the public though.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
And yet building a small biosphere on another world would give us invaluable data on how to protect and develop a biosphere. We could get data in a situation where we control all the variables, without having to guess whether todays rain is the result of El Nino or La Nina or some other phenomenon. That data would help us learn what's really going on with our home planet. How is trying to control the atmosphere of an entire planet with 6+ billion people on it several orders of magnitude easier than setting up a biosphere for 100 people on the moon? Fixing earth's problems doesn't have to be mutually exclusive with manned space exploration.
Nuts. That's not how technology works. We conceptually divide R & D into an R-part and a D-part for a reason. As the old saying goes, if you know what you are trying to accomplish, how long it will take, or what it will cost, you aren't doing research. Research is a process of filling in the gaps in your knowledge, figuring out how the piece fit, and in general pursuing knowledge directly.
But eventually, in any given area, this process winds down and stops.
That's where the development part comes in. It is the mirror image of research, the logical complement in which you take what you've learned and try to apply it to some concrete goal. By it's very nature it can't be done without some sort of goal (more typically, thousands of interrelated goals), any more than you can become a concert pianist without ever sitting down trying to play some specific piece of music.
Science comes out of the former, and technology comes out of the later. Both have their special needs, rewards, and limitations. In this case of technology, which is what we call the results of trying to apply some sort of science to accomplish some goal, these needs include a) some science, and b) a goal.
To drive this point home, can you name one single significant technology that was ever, in the whole course of history, developed directly by some person or group of people who weren't trying to accomplish some goal?
--MarkusQ