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Buzz Aldrin's Radical Plan For NASA
FleaPlus writes "Apollo 11 astronaut (and MIT Astronautics Sc.D.) Buzz Aldrin suggests a bolder plan for NASA (while still remaining within its budget), which he will present to the White House's Augustine Commission; he sees NASA heading down the wrong path with a 'rehash of what we did 40 years ago' which could derail future exploration and settlement. For the short-term, Aldrin suggests canceling NASA's troubled and increasingly costly Ares I, instead launching manned capsules on commercial Delta IV, Atlas V, and/or SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. In the medium-term, NASA should return to the moon with an international consortium, with the ultimate goal of commercial lunar exploitation in mind. Aldrin's long term plan includes a 2018 comet flyby, a 2019 manned trip to a near-earth asteroid, a 2025 trip to the Martian moon Phobos, and one-way trips to colonize Mars."
Seriously, NASA (and most space programs in general) should have one crucial long term goal: Getting us off this ball of rock and inhabiting other ones. I think that Aldrin's plans make more progress towards this than most of what has been going on for pretty much my entire lifetime.
how much for a one way ticket?
...punch Bart Sibrel in the mouth. Repeatedly. My only criticism of Buzz Aldrin is he didn't plant his feet hard enough to break Sibrel's jaw with the punch. And have me there so I could hold Buzz's coat. Hey! Maybe we could fire Sibrel at Mars to colonize it on his own. And then deny he ever existed.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Less Bucks. More Buck Rogers.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Less fleshy ones. More robotic probes...
Good idea ditching the extra launch vehicles. Let someone else take the risk if you can.
But an international consortium? Did he even pay attention to station?
International consortiums are great, if your goal is "to work together with other nations towards a goal." But they tend to fail miserably if you have something you want to actually accomplish. You end up doing everything redundantly anyway, and somehow it costs even more than just the redundancy ought to account for.
The only upside to the consortium idea is also a huge downside: you can sort-of force certain milestones by making them treaty obligations. Unfortunately, then you have a pile of treaty obligations in your way if you need to scrap part of the project to go down a better avenue, or you just want to cut your losses and get out.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Yeah, a one-way ticket to colonise some other place...
We believed you the first time, when you said we were all "Criminals" and needed to be sent to Australia.
We're going to be a bit more suspicious when you start sending us to Mars though for the same reason...
And it won't be for stealing bread this time I bet... Probably for downloading music or similar.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
I really like his ideas, hopefully they will come to fruition and NASA will turn into the space agency we all have been wishing we had. To think, if Aldrin's plans succeed we will be on Mars in my lifetime...That sends thrill filled shivers through my body.
Parent nailed it.
It just saddens me that man, after thousands years of dreaming of the stars, should not use space travel for anything other than the financial enslavement of his planetary brothers. Doesn't space travel put human pettiness into perspective for anybody?
Ah well. At least it will be great to see more pictures.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
Weren't those considered unsafe for manned flight?
Table-ized A.I.
he's been to mach 32.
Shouldn't self-sustaining colonies be practiced on the moon first, before Mars? The moon is a two-day trip while Mars is roughly an 18-month one. It's easier help them if things go wrong during the learning curve. Moon colonies is what the current plan calls for.
Table-ized A.I.
For every useless wanker up there, just to make sure he has a reasonable chance to come back in one piece, and to provide him with a place to shit, sleep and eat, you've spent the equivalent of a hundred Mars rovers.
For the price of the Uselessational Space Station, we could have built an interferometric telescope with which we could have looked at neighbouring solar systems' planets, and figure if they had life.
Go ahead, tell me how sending dozens of rovers exploring the whole solar system and/or having a look at Proxima Centauri's planets is any less interesting for the general public than watching a bunch of bozos awkwardly trying to bolt a nut in 0g.
IMO we should just leave it to nice little bots until we can come up with something other than giant firecrackers to put people in space.
We just go there and, like, build it on top of the anomaly?
In my lifetime three things have driven technology's march:
* Space exploration.
* People wanting to kill each other more efficiently.
* Making a quick buck.
Of these, only space exploration is an example of Man aspiring to greatness. It's about time we shifted our space program out of neutral and brought back the creativity and blue sky thinking that went on in the 1950s and 1960s. What NASA has been doing the past 10 years or so has been minor league and simply lacking ambition. Setting big goals and developing the ideas and technology to reach those goals is what our people are investing in.
To the robot mafia: YOU DON'T GET IT. Space exploration is not just about getting data. Sure, collecting data is important. But so is forcing man to grow and adapt to new challenges. The scientific advancements driven by the space program in the past are in large part due to making it possible for a person to travel and explore a hostile environment over impossible differences. Sending humans is expensive, complex and risky, but is rewarding thousandfold beyond it's cost. Exploring space with robots is easy and cheap but does not drive the kind of thinking that changes the world as the space programs of the 50s, 60s and 70s did.
Another note to the robot mafia: Robots killing people is a bad idea. Actually, so is people killing people.
-- $G
I don't see the big plus of inhabiting other "gravity wells". It's not like they're that much nicer places, and it'll be expensive to get back off them.
Better to work on building sustainable space stations with necessary stuff like artificial gravity and radiation shielding, so that people can actually live on them _indefinitely_. Start by building them near the Earth. After that work on space stations that can build space stations out of stuff like asteroids - space factories. Then we can have space colonies and roam about colonizing the solar system.
Once you have a sustainable space station, it doesn't really matter how long it takes to get to Mars or Titan (within reason of course). No rush.
In fact, the long term inhabitants of space colonies might view living on Mars or the Moon far more unpleasant than living in a space colony.
Trying to live on some other planet or some moon without having a "real" space station seems like trying to jump before even being able to stand unsupported. Yes, maybe you can still do it with great effort and cost, but it's ridiculous and stupid.
The current space stations don't count - they're spaceships "going nowhere", the equivalent of living in a cramped subcompact car. Not suitable places for raising future generations of humans.
I'm reading this thing so let me chime in with my annoyances as I read it.
Instead, we should stretch out the six remaining shuttle flights to 2015--one per year. Sure, that will cost money, but we can more than make up for it by canceling the troubled Ares I. In its place, we should use the old reliable Delta IV Heavy or the Atlas V satellite launchers, upgraded for human flight. (It won't take much.)
Sigh. I expect better from Buzz Aldrin - he's Buzz Freakin' Aldrin! What it "will take" is 6 years and the time it takes to build and gift new launch facilities to ULA. And that's their estimate. It will likely take longer. SpaceX says they can do it faster, but it's still not an Ares I class vehicle we're talking about here.
NASA should also step up its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program to subsidize private rockets like the SpaceX Falcon 9, which could make its first flight any time now. SpaceX is also developing the Dragon capsule to fly seven astronauts to the space station.
Yah, more money for SpaceX.. I humbly agree with Mr Aldrin. However, even if SpaceX's COTS D capability was available tomorrow it would not dejustify the Ares I. They're two different launch vehicles with two different capabilities.
In the short term, some combination of an extended shuttle schedule and a new Orion/Delta, Orion/Atlas or Dragon/Falcon would fill the gap and give us the kind of continuity and flexibility we had during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. In the meantime, we need to develop new strategies, new launch vehicles and new spacecraft for the years beyond 2015 to bring us to the threshold of Mars.
Orion isn't ready and won't be ready for 6 years. Whining about the 5 year gap is not going to change that. Anyway, I can see that Mr Aldrin is now setting us up for the "love the Mars" speech.. so let me just say the ESAS specifically addressed the support needed for mating with a future Mars Transfer Vehicle and that is being studied right now.
The key to my medium-term plan is simple: Scrap our go-it-alone lunar program and let international partners--China, Europe, Russia, India, Japan--do the lion's share of the planning, technical development and funding. The U.S. would participate, and we would provide the technological leadership.
Wow, you actually want to lunar mission based on the International Space Station model?
To encourage more partners for both the lunar program and the space station, we should develop a manned spacecraft that other countries could afford to buy or lease.
Uh huh. So you're saying that other countries are interested in paying the small fortune the US spends to launch the shuttle? Or are you saying that if we just tried a little harder we could make the shuttle cheap and affordable? Aldrin, you're not this naive.
My alternative plan is simple math: Ares 3+3 is better than Ares 1+5. In other words, two medium-size Ares 3s would be a more efficient way to launch crew and cargo than a small crew-only Ares I and a huge cargo-only Ares V. NASA would require just one much less expensive rocket program.
Sigh, this again. Read the ESAS.. is that too much to ask?
If no commercial or mineral exploitation pans out, perhaps a few wealthy space tourists will pay $100 million for a lunar flyby.
Like they're lining up for the Soyuz flyby that is available right now?
To reach Mars, we should use comets, asteroids and Mars's moon Phobos as intermediate destinations. No giant leaps this time. More like a hop, skip and a jump.
News Flash: Buzz Aldrin doesn't understand delta-v.
For these long-duration missions, we need an entirely new spacecraft that I call the Exploration Module, or XM. Unlike the Orion capsule, which is designed for short flights around the Earth and to the moon..
Umm.. no. It's designed for lifting the crew to the station, or to an ERS/LSAM or to a mars transfer vehicle. Again, it's right there in the ESAS.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I, uh, don't think this contest is over yet Buzz. If that is your real name. I believe there is still a little something called the swimsuit competition.
Would you rather see Mars as an eternally dead rustball, or a thriving new home for humanity, full of farms, factories and cities? And if millions of people are ever going to participate in exploration and colonization, how exactly are they going to get food (or even air!) from the new and hostile environment other than by "exploiting" it? And should we expect them to live non-commercially and work together out of selfless collectivism, as on Star Trek? They tried that method in Jamestown and Plymouth for a while -- and the death rate was incredible.
Also, I don't see how the concept of "enslavement" can be applied to an inanimate object.
Revive the Constitution.
For the price of "setting foot on Mars" you could have hundreds or thousands of robots circling it, drilling it, terraforming it and beaming back terrabytes of data every second.
He started to talk about one way trips to Mars. That last statement just made him sound like a crack pot loony. Even if we could find a few people willing to (say they will) live on Mars for their days, in conditions that would make your average prison look spacious and well lit, I don't think the general public would accept it. Most people would think we were sending nutjobs into space and a fair portion would demand that we have some way to bring them back.
As for the other stuff, sounds good. Ares I is shaping up to just a be rehash of what we already have. While it's certainly very expensive to build a new man-rated rocket are we really saying that it's so expensive it's not worth capitalizing on the advances of the last 40 years and sticking with the original craft?
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
That is a problem, when you talk about *B*illions of dollars peoples eyes glaze over and they shut down. For many people there's no real conceptual difference between 2, 20, or 200 billion dollars. It's all just an unimaginably huge amount of money.
If there's any good to come out of the whole economic mess, one may be that trillion is the new billion. It will seem so petty to obsess over relatively minor expenses like education, social programs, and space exploration.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Don't worry, start a Reality TV show called: "Vote Them Off The Planet".
Depending on the categories, winners get a one way or return ticket to various space destinations.
The voters pay for the tickets by voting (SMS etc).
And depending on the categories, either the candidates or someone else presents the case for why the candidates should win.
For example:
Proposer #1: "I propose George Bush, 'one way', since he's so keen on going to the Moon, we should send him and it would be a net benefit to the world".
I thought Buzz Aldrin's plan involved rapping with Snoop Dog and Soulja Boy.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
I just don't get the benefits of going to the moon
Its sad but this turkey is done.
... will probably like & make an offer for broadcasting the one-way trip to colonize Mars.
Burt Rutan has the answer!
Launch payloads from a White Knight Two++ vehicle and assemble in orbit.
It's not rocket science!
The Atlas V is unpopular with NASA because it has a Russian rocket engine - the RD-180. It could, in theory be manufactured in the USA if Russia was to withhold sales for political reasons. The engineering and blueprints have already been worked on to do this, but it would be more expensive. It is more efficient then the Delta IV becaused it uses kerosene for the Russian first stage rather than the hydrogen that the Delta IV uses for all of its stages (better for upper stages only). There is also the issue of a non-US rocket engine being used for a flagship US rocket.
I think you've watched too much Star Trek.
The threat to human survival isn't primarily external, it's what we do and how we live. In the span of a century, we have gone from a hardly any effect on the global environment to big changes of the ocean and athmosphere. We can't run away from that, and we face the same problems even more severely on our trips and elsewhere:
* Just getting to another star system requires an extended period of maintaining a totally self-contained environment.
* Colonizing planets like Mars would be far more difficult than even colonizing Antarctica and would require a degree of stewardship that people have never shown to be capable of.
* Even if we find an Eden-like planet, we can do to it what we have done to earth within a few centuries, probably before that planet has the resources to send out more colonies.
Space colonization isn't the answer yet; humanity first needs to learn to live sustainably. If we can't live sustainably here, we'll die out no matter where we run because probably won't get there, and even if we did, we'd kill ourselves faster than we can colonize.
(Note: We are not a GOP-sters, Republicans or affiliated with any parties, and as George Washington warned against parties We do not believe in parties and, unlike most people, We evaluate every issue on a case by case basis and do not defer to the judgments of politicians who are corrupted and untrustworthy as a group.)
Obama is controlled by the same people as Bush see The Obama Deception documentary [youtube.com]
Yuan Forwards Show China May Buy Fewer Treasuries, UBS Says [bloomberg.com]
Anemic Treasury auction effects felt beyond bonds [reuters.com]
The Sherminator Kicks Some Wall Street Ass [dailybail.com]
China Angry That Fed Is Deliberately Destroying The Dollar [bloomberg.com]
China suggests switch from dollar as reserve currency [bbc.co.uk]
What are the reserve currencies? [wsj.net]
Anatomy of a taxpayer giveaway to investors [ml-implode.com]
Geithner rescue package 'robbery of the American people' [telegraph.co.uk]
Geithner just put only the rich in Titanics lifeboats [examiner.com]
Geithner Plan Will Rob US Taxpayers [cnbc.com]
A False Choice [viewfromsi...valley.com]
Bargain-hunting house buyers wearing on sellers ajc.com [ajc.com]
Time to Take the Steering Wheel out of Geithner's Hands [alternet.org]
Socialising and Privatising [freeradical.co.nz]
Fannie, Freddie to pay out bonuses [politico.com]
Fitch Raises Prime Jumbo Loan Loss Estimates Sharply [researchrecap.com]
Chinas central bank on Monday proposed replacing the US dollar as the international reserve currency with a new global system controlled by the International Monetary Fund [ft.com]
- Russia on an new world reserve currency: It is necessary to work out and adopt internationally recognized standards for macroeconomic and budget policy, which are binding for the leading world economies, including the countries issuing reserve currencies - the Kremlin proposals read. [en.rian.ru]
- President Barack "The Teleprompter" Obama is deeply connected to corruption. Rahm Emanuel, his Chief of Staff, is radical authoritarian statist whose father was part of the murderous civilian-killing Israeli terrorist organization known as IRGUN who is obsessed with gun control and compulsory service to the country in a capacity which he has yet to define. (Think brown-shirts.) Barack is intimately connected to disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (Rahm inherited Rod's federal-congress seat). Barack Obama is also connected to William Ayers (who ghost-wrote his books); Ayers is a man who promotes the concept that civilian collateral damage is ok in a war against freedom. Saul Alinsky, a man who made the quote as follows, "From all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom - Lucifer," is a man who had much influence on the young Barack Obama. A man who admired Lucifer for gaining his own kingdom in an act of rebellion. Barack also subscribed to Preacher Jeremiah Wright, who is himself a Afro-elitist who wants all the people who largely "pay the freight" to suffer at the hands of angry African-American mobs. There are over 30 million Americans on food stamps, and more blacks are in prison and on food-stamps per capita than anyone else. The problem with Wright is simply this: the facts are "racist." There is no conspiracy against African Americans here by citizens.
- Obama - AIPAC-bootlicker, corrupted to the bone Chicago-style and a traitor to the US Constitution and a liar whose real "legal" name could very well be Barry Sotero and an Indonesian citizen (The US does not allow plural citizenship) (If you care, not that it matters anymore under a lawless authoritarian totalitarian regime such as Barack Obama's, you can see more here at an aggregator; obamacrimes.info [obamacrimes.info] )
- Raytheon lobbyist in Pentagon, many lobbyists getting exemptions even though Obama promi
That's a pretty accurate description of what Ares is. What Apollo 13 taught us is that getting to and from the moon and other bodies, regularly and safely, is damn difficult. You need a lot of unseen infrastructure in place to start making that happen. You're not going to do it with Apollo + 40 years.
A big problem I have with colonizing Mars is that, unfortunately, it's really rather easy to kill everybody on a planet. What's kept people from doing that in the recent past is that we all [well, all but six people right now] live here...killing everybody doesn't do anybody any good.
But any kind of interplanetary war would be swift and devastating. At least, that's how it appears to me.
The moon, or the asteroids, might actually be more defensible.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Would you want to live on titan?
Yes. Yes I would. Absolutely, without a doubt. Where do I sign up?
Spending all the money fixing this world does nothing to get all of our eggs out of the basket, and if anything harms that basket, then we are screwed. To paraphrase Carl Sagan in "Pale Blue Dot", any species that does not move off its planet is doomed to extinction. You may not care about the long term survival of the human species (or any other species), but some of us do, and the best way to increase our chances of survival is to spread out. We aren't going to do that by spending all of our money and resources here. We aren't even going to do that by pussy-footing around sending only robotic explorers to other places (as much as admire these feats of engineering and the data they bring back). We are only going to do that by getting out there and doing it ourselves. And it will only become cheaper, easier, and safer as we do it more and more and more.
So, one way ticket to Mars? Titan? Points outward? HELL YES. I wouldn't hesitate to accept such an opportunity, and I doubt I'm alone in this.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
As for Jane Q. Public, Aldrin may have a doctorate in orbital mechanics. The only person with an equivalent qualification I know (sometime expert on Lagrange points, has worked for NASA) remarked to me not long ago that, going through his old papers, he found his thesis and couldn't understand it. And he's much younger than Aldrin. You cannot use someone's qualifications as a guide to current expertise once they haven't actually been working in the field even for 10 years.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Much better to spend the colossal amount of money on fixing this world.
But that isn't happening, is it? It won't happen. It doesn't happen. That's the key problem here. I guess that's the thinking from congress and other governments from the mid-80s to now is: "Isn't the money better spent on the ground fixing real problems?". Well that's the primary excuse to not fund space exploration. What really happens is the money ends up going down all the usual bottomless holes of the government, and dare I say it: this world is possibly too broke to fix.
IMHO, directing public funds to specific, dedicated, scientific endeavors is the single best thing that can be done with government money. Sure roads need fixing and schools need resources, but discretionary government spending should not be diverted to the endless bottomless pits of public resources, because they are always needing more money. The money just disappears. A dollar spent on space exploration eventually generates a hell of a lot of useful science and engineering.
By one famous quote every dollar spent on the Apollo program generated seven dollars for the US economy.
This is what governments don't get about science, even if the LHC never fires up, and never turns out anything useful, it actually would have been terrifically useful, since it has already generated a lot of scientific just to figure out how to build it. Not to mention all the Internet 2.0 infrastructure put in place by universities etc to handle all the data it will output. So this is why we need to get on with the job of going back to the moon, and to mars, to stay.
There's almost no such thing as useless science, and on the most useful level of all, space exploration is species-saving level stuff.
Spending up on aerospace tech usually trickles down to the private sector. A lot of political leaders do not understand what the billions of dollars the US poured into science and engineering during the cold war have done to the world today: Basically pretty much everything we have, and take utterly for granted as a technological civilization now can be traced back to the space race in the cold war. Even the beginnings of silicon valley goes back to cold war funded roots.
Right now, dollar for dollar putting a human in space to do science is much better value than the equivalent robot.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Please address the Augustine Commission thus:
Indulge me, for a moment, please close your eyes and imagine if you were a lunar colonist standing on the moon, watching the earth rise over the horizon. You raise your arm, and place the Earth's crescent between your gloved finger and thumb. Ponder that all of human history, every human that has ever taken a breath, and everything we have lived and fought and died for, has taken place between your fingers on the the little blue orb that hangs in the sky.
And marvel, at the foresight of the leaders that lifted humanity to where it is now. Because if we didn't make it to the moon, if we didn't succeed in prospering in space, it could all be for nothing.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
.
To help you get into the depression phase: consider that it used to be possible to travel faster than sound on a commercial airliner. Not anymore. Soon the pinnacle of human space travel, the shuttle, will be decommisioned, and you'll probably won't see a reusable spacecraft carrying humans in your lifetime again. Ultimately, one fleeting moment in time, the very last of our decendants will shut down. So be it; you won't be there to witness it anyway.
.
Once we'll accept this, we'll understand that there is plenty on earth to work with: the small rather than the large. The amount of atoms to our disposal is massive, and so are the means to rearrange them into finely detailed structures. That's where our future lies.
I'm not a coward by any name.
No, that is a indeed a fantasy. A self-sustaining base has to be able to produce food, clean water and energy. It has to be able to make replacement parts, and that means mines, chemical plants, machine shops, factories and chip-fabrication facilities. Oh, and also universities. That is a pure, utter fantasy given our current technology and our capacity for space travel. We can't make a self-sustaing colony on Antarctica or underwater, so why would you think we can do it on another planet?
Instead of a steppingstone to Mars, NASA's current lunar plan is a detour. It will derail our Mars effort, siphoning off money and engineering talent for the next two decades. If we aspire to a long-term human presence on Mars--and I believe that should be our overarching goal for the foreseeable future--we must drastically change our focus. Here's my plan, which I call the Unified Space Vision. It's a blueprint that will maintain U.S. leadership in human spaceflight, avoid a counterproductive space race with China to be second back to the moon, and lead to a permanent American-led presence on Mars by 2035 at the latest.
Counterproductive space race? Sounds like an oxymoron.
Races between nations produced many technologies.
And second back to the moon isn't a bad thing, particularly for it to be the stepping stone he speaks of.
May we vote or nominate people to send on these one way trips? I believe there are quite a few people without whom Earth would be better off ... :)
He is merely referring to the fact that the man was kicked out of Garden of Eden for eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.
Which was the first recorded case of theft of Intellectual Property.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It's amazing how people who think they are modern can adopt ways of thinking that belong with Ozymandias (Shelley - check it out.)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Is a big spaceship assembled on orbit, with artificial gravity from huge rotating sections, nuclear propulsion and landing craft viable within a trillion dollars budget?
That's what NASA should be planning for. Such a beast would make the trip Mars - Earth a commodity, opening up space for good.
Geeks talking space exploration. The main drive ofcause being that we HAVE to leave earth, because it looks so cool in all those scifi-series.
In reallity there is no need to leave earth, it's all fine for us. Sure that's not thinking "long term", but if we start planing for when the suns going to explode now, we may aswell start forming contingency plans for when the universe implodes. By the time any of those things happen, the human race will nolonger even be a faint memory in what we will have naturally evolved into.
Buzz Aldrin's Other Radical Plan for NASA: All astronauts are to record rap songs ...
If you time it right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct
Check out Mars Underground for details.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Remember, they circled the moon more than once before they landed. Lots of stuff that can get ironed out just on the journey and we all know a Martian landing is uniquely tricky.
There is only one problem with that goal.
Who chooses.
Even if we could decide it was something we had to do, how could anyone choose and be successful all the while being PC?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
the NASA budget is about 1/20th what our total military expenditures are
Hey, there's a thought. If you want to get NASA's budget increased, as well as getting "space" back into the public eye, just declare war on the moon or mars or some other damn planet. I'm sure the gummint could dredge up some astrologer, from somewhere (pity Regan isn't in the job - he, or his people would easily come up with someone), who could tell everyone what a bad influence the planet of choice was.
And if that didn't work, you could always accuse them of having WMDs.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
For a trillion a year, yeah, maybe.
Or do you think it is going to maintain itself for free once built?
Now, who's gonna take a chunk that big out of their paycheck for this?
for any resources they are short of. And while doing that, repopulate the more resource-rich earth after whatever catastrophe killed all humans on the earth.
You nail it!
Not that it matters but I happen to believe in an invisible superbeing* (my choice of insanity if you will although naturally I don't view it that way) and I think you're absolutely one hundred percent correct as long as the next last part is written partially in jest to get the point across.
Our natural task in this Universe is to spread life, ourselves included. When or if we meet new life our task includes continuing the existence and propagation of that life too as well as we are able to.
We have a long way to go, the universe is young, the sooner we start the sooner we'll grow up come what may.
* More specifically the God of Abraham (just one of many names) which I believe transcends time and space; a detail which to me explains many of the "conundrums" like omnipotence, fate/destiny vs. free will, etc.
The primary reason to go to the moon?
Spaceport for the Belt
Transshipment in and out of the Earths Gravity Well is immensely expensive, compared to the same on the moon, and it can be used as a construction platform more easily than null-g.
The Belt is where the real prize lies though.
Five time the entire Earth's Mining Output of Iron (as well as many times that amount of rarer metals like iridium) in a single nickel-iron asteroid. And it could be mined in a matter of weeks or months with a parabolic mirror and some rockets for spin.
That's where the money is, and where there is money, there will be people.
If we can get the Bureaucrats out of the way.
Science? Science is a good beni. But more, useful science is done in the closed labs of major corporations than in government-funded research. You would be amazed at how much (U.S.)Government grant money is spent on such things as determining how the cleanlyness habits of Chinese Hookers affects STD spread, instead of things like High-energy physics and deep-space telescopes.
IBM has made more discoveries in quantum physics than Los Alamos.
Because IBM makes a profit on them.
Let's hope that Virgin Galactic does the same to NASA.
You joke... but with China aiming for the Moon, that actually is a possibility. After all, they might put missiles on the moon (ignoring the fact it would be cheaper and easier for them to just put the weapons in orbit). We can't allow a moon-missile gap!
It's sad that nuclear deterrence / détente is what will get us into space... but frankly, even if it the spectre of nuclear devestation that motivates us, I'm still feeling just a little bit hopeful because there's a chance we'll finally get off this planet.
I'm in - where do I sign up?
Seriously, if I wasn't going to be 85 years old by the time they get around to this (and I hope they do) I'd be the first in line at the spaceport.
Guess it's in the blood thanks to all my ancestors who took the risk to get on boats from Europe to travel to a new, distant wilderness with little or no guarantee of success much less survival and then every generation after who kept moving into the wilderness until they reached the Pacific Northwest 130 years ago.
Well, since Mars is out guess I'll have to settle to sailing around the world - still plenty of wild places on Earth to go visit.
What?
Ok folks, this planet, the Earth, is a death trap for all life on it. At some point in the future, everything on this planet will be killed off. That is a fact, not some depressing vision, but FACT.
An asteroid hit is the least of our problems. Don't get me wrong, we need to watch for them and have long term plans of action to shift the inbound rock enough that it doesn't hit us. We'll need a backup plan should that shift effort not work well enough. We also need to search for asteroids in the "hard to find" regions of our sky to prevent another 20 day notice asteroid event like last year. That isn't quick enough to address.
We have to get off this rock if we, as a species, want to survive. The further away from here, the better. Sadly, many of the things that will kill the Earth will also kill Mars and most of the solar system.
There is already a star pointed at us that **will** send high energy gamma rays AND **will** destroy all life here when it goes supernova http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1878. It is a matter of time and will probably happen before the Sun becomes a red giant and boils away all water on Earth, before expanding beyond Earth's current orbit.
We need to take the first steps to get off this rock and find alternative travel methods beyond normal propulsion (throwing stuff out the back to move forward) to get to other star systems. There is no viable method of propulsion to get us or anything to another star system currently. Ion, solar wind, etc are pure fantasy and CANNOT GET ANYTHING TO ANOTHER STAR SYSTEM in 1,000 years.
Like Deckard Cain, they never listen to Dr. Carmack!
>They tried that method in Jamestown and Plymouth for a while -- and the death >rate was incredible.
Seriously, the only thing you have missing is some mention of nazis to make your examples even more idiotic than they were.
Lots of blowhards here think THEY have the answer and everyone else is a douche but its the rare /.er who can make this kind of leap.
Bonus pts for being a moron AND getting modded up.
You don't have to send people and animals to other star systems!
Send robot probes with DNA sequences stored on computer chips.
These ships would have no life to protect and could travel faster!
When they find a suitable planet... recreate life, human and other, from the synthetic lab.
An interplanetary war might be quite devastating, but it would be unlikely to be swift. Planetkiller lasers are very hard to make, so a 22nd century Red Scare would probably consist of bombs on rockets. Maybe antimatter instead of nuclear, or something like that. But, the opening salvo would probably take weeks to get from Mars to Earth. In all liklihood, Interplanetary warfare will leave you enemies with plenty of time to huff and puff and deploy adequate defenses. Assume the invention of FTL, and that all changes very quickly. But, nobody is sure that FTL is even possible, so it is hard to assume it will play a big role in the forseeable future.
But, I definitely see your point. If everybody lives in one city, nobody wants to flatten the city. If everybody lives on one island, nobody wants to sink the island. I think that even in the fairly distant future, MAD may prove to be an effective strategy. After all, no matter how big a bomb you land on the enemy planet, the shockwave travels at the (local) speed of sound. The amount of time it takes to circle the Earth at Mach 1 is more than enough time to decide whether or not you want to push the big shiny red button.
...a 2025 trip to the Martian moon Phobos
I'd recommend staying away from Phobos in the spring..imps get a little feisty during mating season.
Now that is some vision, it's just like we stepped back to the '50s while groking the economic realities of the new world order.
We can't destroy life on this planet, you're right. Absolutely right.
Because the definition of "life" includes extremophiles that can accomodate that thrive in battery acid at 200C under 100 atm of pressure.
But destroying most of life as we know it ... well, yes, we can.
Sign me up. I will stow away if I have to, I'll be the fucking Coyote.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
To paraphrase Carl Sagan in "Pale Blue Dot", any species that does not move off its planet is doomed to extinction.
I like Larry Niven's aphorism better: "The dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space program."
(Someone else posted the aphorism, but they left out the attribution.)
I do wonder just how practical manned exploration/colonization beyond Earth would be given technology foreseeable in the near future, but certainly we could be doing more in Earth orbit, and telepresence exploration of the Solar system seems like a reasonable step.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
"At some point terrestrial homo sapiens is guaranteed to take an irrecoverable hit,..."
This is extremely weak argument. Deflecting asteroid is many many orders of magnitudes cheaper than evacuating the whole planet. I bet that we'll be able to correct asteroid paths in the next 100 years.
The same people who, working with von Braun, gave us some fundamental and essential inventions, such as cryogenically (regenerative) cooled motor nozzles, when necessary resorted to outright hacks to get the job done. For instance the Saturn 1B was a collection of 8 Redstone missile tanks and motors clustered around a Titan tank. They went for whatever was the best combination of fastest, cheapest and most powerful. More important, they went for what made the best sense. Their focus was on getting the job done. In fact they solved more problems and developed more programs than were ever put into space. For instance, had the namesake of my UID been followed, Neil Armstrong would have been the first real space pilot, riding a winged craft into space then flying it to landing, 5 years before his Apollo flight and decades before the shuttle made this mission profile a reality.
One of the von Braun groups visions was to make the road to space a series of reusable and adaptable stepping stones rather than a series of one-shot spectaculars. Central to this philosophy was the development of orbital construction, refueling, scientific, telecommunications, command and control, permanently inhabited (through crew rotation) space stations. Their ideas, and similar ones from others, evolved over the years through a sort of intellectual genetic algorithm to give us the present ISS, a working model but as is unsuitable for the purposes they had in mind. They wanted, after all, to make it possible for us to get started on making it possible to do more and more things. As such their designs were far more generic and capable of adaptability. A collection of designs through the years can be seen at:
http://www.astronautix.com/craftfam/eurtions.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/craftfam/usstions.htm
http://www.astronautix.com/craftfam/sovtions.htm
Their plans were to get there for good, by means that made the most sense. Only when given the option of working only on fastest did they turn to building vehicles from existing hardware to carry out one-shot missions. They had no intention of doing anything by such-and-such a time, as that limited their options. They wanted a permanent presence that never had to back step and /or reinvent.
A program that was actually meant to get us there and keep us there would follow their design philosophy and quite likely end up with many of the same steps. Permanent orbital construction and outfitting stations would make the most long term sense. Expensive to build and taking a long time, they'd at first seem to stifle those with the urge to GO. But the expense, spread over the great number of missions they'd make possible, create and support, would be far less than faster alternatives. Similarly, once these are mature, many more varied missions could be sent more often, eventually allowing the number of missions to surpass what would otherwise have been possible in the same time frame.
Kennedy's challenge to get to the moon allowed us to show ourselves what we could do, a valuable lesson, but not the basis for a future. von Braun's vision was more aligned with what were could become. Sadly, even Aldrin's vision falls short in most respects. However, in calling for an international consortium (rather than half partnered, half competing teams) he may be pointing to the sort of organization that might be able to carry out such a program.
Eventually even O'Neil type habitats could be built providing the same services as these earlier stepping stone stations, fulfilling yet another dream but in a rational manner. They'd be built only after learning how through building their predecessors. Similarly, from these stations permanent settlements could be sent out, but their permanence would quite likely be made possible through the creation of permanent infrastructure on tho
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
But destroying most of life as we know it ... well, yes, we can.
We can destroy a significant portion of larger life forms, but not close to all. Even with nuclear holocaust. Compared to what nature has in store for us, we can hardly make a dent at all. Nature will kill us all, and the only option is to get off this rock. Therefore the only sane, moral and rational thing to do is to spend significant amounts of resources on real exploration. Not doing so is suicidal.
Man must learn that nature is not here to make our life easy. Nature is "evil" and it is trying its best to exterminate us and all other life on the planet and in the universe. The only way is to fight back. Sadly there is only one way to do it, and even that is temporary, namely to multiply like mad and spread out as far as we can. In that way we will delay the inevitable. In the end Nature will win though, and and it will succeed in exterminating all life, not only on this planet, but in the entire universe.
If NASA doesn't pay attention to his advice, well...
Well, maybe he should give 'em what he delivered to this annoying pantywaist!
This should wake 'em up!
.
- aqk
F U
Give Airbus and Boeing the job and pay $250,000,000 for the Moon toilet they develop.
Regulate to make sure their speed sensors don't crap out at Mach 10.
"Old bag" has more than one meaning.
The Space Elevator is AWFULLY hard to get working on Earth ... ... but its a piece of CAKE for the Moon and Mars !!!
Why should I pay them.
Cut out the regulations, and let them pay their own way: and they can keep the profit they make too.
Profit drives innovation far more effectively than government contracts.
Government Contracts seem to drive little more than cost overruns, these days anyway.
We've argued that our space program needs a purpose which justifies the expense. I'm in the camp of getting a sufficient number of people off this planet to ensure the survival of the species. The thing I don't understand is why would we expend all this effort to get out of one gravity well only to crawl into another. The short and mid-term goal of our space program should be to establish a permanant colony in space that is prepared to ensure man's survival. The earth is still going to be the best place for humans to live. The purpose of any colony we build should be re-colonize earth in the event of major catastrophe. It would support seed and gene banks, an exportable technolgy base, and a sufficient population armed with a plan and the resources to jumpstart civilization once the dust settles. I'm not saying the moon can't play a vital role in the process, but any serious exploitation of the moon for resources is going to require heav lift capabilities on the moon that may be centuries away. That leaves us with exploration, and to the exteny possible, development of the asteroid belt as a resource base for building a "permanent" habitat in space and equiping it for its mission. As much as I'd like to see us go to Mars, resources will too valuable for a sight-seeing junket. Use the resources we have to grab the low hanging fruit if its our there. Half a dozen exploratory trips to the asteroids should be the short term objective.