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."

Comments

Good ideas.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Good ideas.

[MaskedSlacker]

Except it's not a colossal amount of money at all--this is the absurd misconception about space travel. The reality is it is peanuts. Cheaper in fact than fixing this world, by a several orders of magnitude.

Re:Good ideas.

[savuporo]

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

NASA is a government agency ( an arthritic one ), government agencies don't colonize. Especially when international law explicitly forbids that.

What most people miss in 2001: Space Odyssey, are the logos on the space plane and Space Station V itself, where dr. Heywood flies to . They read "Pan American" and "Hilton Hotels" accordingly, NOT NASA, RSA or any other *SA.

Ironically, when time called for beating the communists to the moon, the great U.S. of A. did not tap into free enterprise, but created a huge socialist government-run space business, which 40 years later still thinks it should be running a space trucking line.

Re:Good ideas.

[Jane Q. Public]

Really? Have you read your Darwin? Are you aware of how much of natural selection takes place? Often, it happens because a population gets isolated due to the destruction of the main population.

You may think it's fantasy, but keep in mind that eventually, a life-killer asteroid strike, while extremely unlikely in any given year, is eventually a mathematical certainty. By all the best evidence, it has happened before, probably more than once.

It may be a long-term goal, but eventually we must send at least some people "off this rock". Scoff all you want, but that is playing the real probabilities.

Re:Good ideas.

[clarkkent09]

We would have to launch over 200,000 people a day into space each day just to keep up with the daily increase in the population

You are right, shipping people off to other planets without making other changes, such as reducing birthrate, is not going to reduce population of Earth. However, if your goal (among others, such as access to new resources) is to ensure the survival of the species should something horrible happen on Earth, then a long term plan to spread to one or two other worlds does make a lot of sense. A self sustaining base on Mars is not a fantasy, it is something that could possibly be achieved with today's technology if the will was there. In 50 years, just as the biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction are getting within reach of even small groups of psychos, it will be no problem at all. You have to make a first step somewhere.

Re:Good ideas.

[uglyMood]

I would argue that the main advantage of the "get us off this rock crap" is that at some point we are absolutely going to take an extinction-level hit from some other rock, or a massive solar flare that toasts half the planet, or some other damned thing. If we don't spread across several worlds, we vastly increase the likelihood of becoming just another trilobite bed.

It isn't merely a matter of fixing the earth, which I wholeheartedly agree is of prime importance; off-world colonies are essential for the survival of the species. We don't need to colonize only Mars and Luna; we need to colonize other star systems. Gamma-ray bursts, supernovas and asteroid impacts aren't imaginary bogeymen. The universe is an incredibly dangerous place, and so far we've been lucky, but that's only because we're new in the neighborhood. The geologic record is littered with evidence that bad shit happens. Hell, just look at a map of Canada. Lake Manicouagan in Quebec was created by a chunk of rock three miles wide.

At some point terrestrial homo sapiens is guaranteed to take an irrecoverable hit, and if we haven't put down roots elsewhere, that's it for humanity and any of our eventual descendants.

So yes, we have to get off of this goddamned rock, and the sooner the better. I'm astonished anyone even bothers to argue about this.

Re:Good ideas.

[Ogive17]

Well, for one thing, a manned space program keeps some very intelligent scientists and engineers employed. It also hopefully captures the imagination of the youth to provide us with another generation of scientists and engineers.

We keep complaining that math and science education in this country keeps sliding. Giving kids something tangible that says "math and science can be fun and exciting" is what we need.

Plus it's not like 100 billion dollars gets strapped to a rocket and blasted into space. Most of the money spent is put straight into the economy (through salaries). The only actual "loss" is the cost of the raw material sent into space.

Re:Good ideas.

[EbeneezerSquid]

You want Firefly? First you need FireNASA.

http://www.spacefuture.com/vehicles/how_the_west_wasnt_won_nafa.shtml

NASA should be a regulatory agency, just like the FAA. But when you give regulation to a "competitor-in-the-field," amazingly, no-one else meets the regulatory requirements to compete.
(offtopic/ Think of that when they talk about a "public insurance plan" too. \offtopic)

Poor Author C. I wish he had lived to see his 2001 visions come to life. . .

Gah, no.

[zippthorne]

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.

Re:Commercial exploitation

[timmarhy]

it saddens me that people like you still bitch about commercial ventures, when you wouldn't have the PC or internet to do so if it wasn't for such ventures. repeat after me - just because it's being done for money, it doesn't mean it's evil....

Re:Ummm... Yes?

[Thiez]

> 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.

Dude, unless some meteor comes along and kills us all, we still have *millions* of years to perfect space travel. If we delay manned missions to other planets/moons for half a century, it won't matter. If you really care so much about the survival of the species, you'd be encouraging research that can protect us from really big rocks on a collision course with ours, rather than trying to get a colony on titan.

It's funny how you're using "Won't somebody think of the HUMAN RACE?!?!?!?!" like politicians would use "Won't somebody think of the children?!?!?!", using it to support your agenda by accusing your opponents of 'not caring about the survival of the species'.

Re:"Self sustaining base"

[smoker2]

Blah blah blah. Planes can't fly, we've never seen the bottom of the ocean, we'll never walk on the moon, we can't see what's happening on the other side of the planet in real time, if you go over 20mph you'll suffocate, if you sail west you'll drop off the edge of the world, the atom is the smallest thing in the universe, don't go outside, you'll be hit by a bus ....

Do you have any balls ?

We don't need to create self-sustaining colonies in Antarctica, or underwater, so why do it ? If you put yourself in space, you not only need to, you have to deal with it. Necessity is the mother of invention. But I guess in the slimy greedy world of Intellectual Property, you would rather just accumulate wealth for yourself, fuck the universe (and your neighbours). If the only way we can have a space colony is to replicate exactly what we have here, then you're right - it's a waste of time. If you want to head in a new direction however, space is the ONLY place to do it. This planet's full of nay-saying assholes.

BTW, you missed out Burger King and Walmart from your list of "necessities".