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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.
...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?
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....
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.
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).
beaming back terrabytes of data every second.
Aresbytes, not Terrabytes.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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.
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
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.
Yes, because getting the funding to run a huge missile program right after the cuban missile crisis during the height of the cold war was soooooooo about taking money away from "People wanting to kill each other more efficiently." and gicing it to an altruistic aspiration to greatness. Sure, it came in a very nice sales package with a civilian agency and a great morale booster but the reason it passed was that it created lots and lots of high tech research and equipment of military value. If it was about "aspiring to greatness" why would the russians break their back trying to keep up with it? The other two points are timeless classics though. Add "Getting the girl" and you've summed up the reasons for most of humanity's innovation...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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".
IT'S THE MOON. Jesus.
You think Jesus didn't know that???