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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."
how much for a one way ticket?
Not just NASA and space programs. A good chunk of our entire worlds resources should be devoted to getting us off this rock.
Sooner or later we will have a global disaster that WILL wipe us out. Volcano, comet, magnetic shift, meteor, gamma ray burst, germ, ect ect ect... And then what. we're done. no more humans. haha. game over.
Instead we bicker over who owns what dirt and what invisible superbeing is watching us try to die with more stuff than everyone else.........
Maybe its not such a bad idea to wipe us out. We're insane.
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
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.
I have a couple of articles that I might suggest you read:
Neil Tyson on exploring space
10 Everyday Gadgets With Ties To The Space Program
And actually, I could continue copying links for a long time. This is just barely scraping the surface. The space program has paid for itself many times over (one conservative estimate is 3 times) with advances to technology and industry.
I think we will get off this rock. But not in the form that you might think of.
We will send out robots. With our brains uploaded into them. And robots with a high intelligence.
We will also create wetware robots. We will move from planet to planet via data transmission. From robot body to robot body... to wetware body.
In a way, we could call this the "energy lifeform" that you see in so many sci-fi movies.
So, in some time in the future, "humans" will be a term, associated to the "program" (or whatever it will be), and not to the body itself. That will just be another tool.
I wonder, what porn we will be watching. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Because we could put something much larger, more powerful, and decades newer than the Hubble on it. A telescope array on the Moon could accomplish orders of magnitudes more than the Hubble plus our land based observatories. You could place a large radio telescope array - more powerful than a satellite telescope - like you have on Earth, but without the atmospheric and EM interference you get down here.
The moon is also an astoundingly good - and close- source of Helium-3. Helium-3 is a particularly good potential fusion fuel. A good way to consider how much energy this could mean is to understand that there is more energy in the He-3 on the Moon than there ever has been in all fossil fuels on the Earth. The problem with He-3 though is that, on Earth at least, it's pretty rare stuff.
No we shouldn't. Firstly, because there is simply no way we can mine fast enough to significantly change the mass of the moon within the forseeable future. Secondly the moon is becomming heavier all the time because rocks from space crash there (same applies to the earth). And last but not least since gravity scales with mass, making the the moon lighter should not (significantly) affect its orbit.
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.
better to spend the colossal amount of money on fixing this world.
Lets see...spend peanuts on the space program or
1) spend billions on clean up of a world where we have to rely on the other guy to keep his country clean.
2) spend billions on clean up of a world only to have some other cataclysm happen:
a) asteroid
b) plague
c) world war
I'd rather spend the money on the space program. Not only is it cheaper, but it also fits in with our own nature. Since we evolved, humans have not had to clean up after themselves; however, since the beginning humans have been explorers.
I'd rather play to mankind's strengths and continue exploring.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Weren't those considered unsafe for manned flight?
The story I heard was thus: There is a process called "man-rating" which means that you certify a particular launch vehicle to be able to carry a capsule containing people. The process is sort of like ISO9000 or whatever. Essentially, you have gobs of documentation that say things like, "this bolt will fail in this circumstance. The resulting stress on the other 20 bolts is X" "In the event that this tube leaks, the pressure will be Y" In some cases, you have to make things redundant: "the failure rate of this pump is X, which is beyond the risk tolerance for manned flight, so we have this backup pump - the chance that both pumps will fail is Y"
Bottom line: you might have to replace or redesign parts of the rocket in order to make it man-rated. And what I was told is that it might actually be more expensive to man-rate a Delta IV heavy, than to simply design a man-rated rocket like Ares from the ground up.