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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
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.
Weren't those considered unsafe for manned flight?
Table-ized A.I.
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....
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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.
Why would anyone care what is interesting or not? The purpose of space flight is gain the ability to colonize (as in moving people out there) space. All we do we do for survival, and colonizing space is vital for survival. That is why we need manned space flight.
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.
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.
That's just a canard. The only thing we learn from manned spaceflight is that it's really expensive. If we want to colonize other worlds we need to spend the money doing the research and developing the technologies we need, not wasting money sending people on weekend getaways to airless rocks or spacestations that will deorbit in ten years.
It's kind of paternalistic to condemn manned spaceflight as risky when the risk is something that many astronauts assume gladly for the chance to experience space.
The inherent risk of manned spaceflight is an argument that people tend to throw in to give their otherwise self-serving cost arguments a false feeling of moral weight.
This has a different POV on it:
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/firstonthemoon.html
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.
No. Self sustaining colonies should be practiced in orbit around the Earth.
The moon is an X day trip, whereas the time to orbit is much shorter. It's easier to help them if things go wrong.
Once you have self sustaining colonies in space, it doesn't matter so much how long it takes to get to Mars.
But people might then think, hey why bother landing humans on Mars, we'll just stay in our comfy space stations and send robot probes down to mars, while we mine the asteroids (and build more probes if necessary).
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".
"News Flash: Buzz Aldrin doesn't understand delta-v."
He has a frigging doctorate in orbital mechanics. Do you?
The moon has effectively zero atmosphere, no water (frozen or otherwise), highly abbrassive surface dust, and offers practically no protection from solar radiation. It has little in the ways of mineral wealth or useful building materials. This things (mostly the lack of water) combine to make a truly self-sustaining colony on the moon effectively impossible. Even with the best recycling technologies, you would still need water, oxygen/replacement atmosphere every now and then. There would be some leakage, especially whenever airlocks are cycled- even once depressurized they will still release some atmosphere every time they're opened.
The moon would still be ideal for some things. If we ever figure out the nuts and bolts of profitable fusion, the He-3 on the moon could power us for a century or two. Yes it's close, so it's a good first place to put some permanent structures. It would be a great location for a science station and telescope array. So I'm all for putting an externally-sustained helium-3 mine and telescope base, but I don't think it's the place to try a truly self-sustaining colony.
Mars has dry and water ices. That alone provides a major component required for a self-sustained colony. There's also large amounts of metals and metal oxides in the soil. These can provide both building materials and oxygen. Sodium, Aluminum, Sulfur, Titanium, Iron, Magnesium, and Calcium can be found readily in the soil in various oxides.
The obvious challenges Mars presents are the distance from the earth and the distance from the sun. Solar power may not be practical since solar cells sufficient for any large colonization effort would weight quite a lot. A self sustaining colony would likely have to be nuclear powered. The challenges posed by landing a nuclear reactor on mars would make an orbital power station and microwave power transmission attractive - at least until and unless manufacturing on the surface could eventually locally produce solar and nuclear power systems.
IT'S THE MOON. Jesus.
Don't be crazy anymore!
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.
An important part of learning to do something on the magnitude of colonizing another planet is doing similar but easier things and learning from them.
Furthermore, we already have the tech we need to colonize Mars. We could've done it year ago in fact. If we ever want to get this done we have to get our thumbs out of our asses, get out there and just do it. With the speed of innovation we've had in recent history it's all to easy to fall into the "I'll just wait for it to get a little better" trap and never accomplish anything.
To use a computer analogy, look at flash memory. Right now it's getting cheaper and gaining capacity exponentially. If you have a specific price/performance target, have a good idea how long it's going to take to hit that target and are cool with waiting that long then you can get yourself a good deal, but sometimes you just need to transfer some fucking files today, and sure, you'll feel silly when your expensive high capacity thumbdrive is the 10 dollar bargain in a few months but it's certainly better than getting fired because you couldn't get important files where they needed to go, right?
Likewise, space colonization is going to keep getting better and cheaper as time goes on but natural disasters don't wait and if we don't use the tech we have now there's not only less incentive to develop better versions of it for future use but less practical input on just what needs improving in said future versions.
PS: Hey slashdot, it's 2009, html is simple enough but it's damn annoying to have to add the tags for something as simple as paragraphs in 2009. If you're going to go around fucking up everything in sight anyway can we atleast get WYSIWYG already?
Cheaper cheese.
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
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.
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?
Please Moon is 8*10^22 kg. Suppose we remove 10 tons a second from the moon. Then after 1 million year we'll have removed 10^6*10^4*356*86400kg
ie 3,1586*10^17 kg i.e nothing. Even if we mine it at this rate till sun explodes, we'll only have removed 1.2*10^21kg, this is less than 2% of the mass of the moon with ridiculously optimistic mining efficiency and with a ridiculous timespan.
In conclusion, it's not because the moon looks small in the sky that it is. Get a sense of scales. Do you think it's possible for human beings to level Mount Everest ? The moon is much bigger. It'll stay there.
IT'S THE MOON. Jesus.
You think Jesus didn't know that???
We (USA) and the Russians have had a spaceport on the moon since the 60's. It is just kept secret from the civilians. The little rover stuff is just a way to divert attention from what is really occurring.
By the way and along the same lines, we have had a space port on Mars since the 70's. It too is secret.
There is a lot of stuff that is kept from civilians and these two examples are typical of what humanity is unaware of that various nations are actively doing in the present moments.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make