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Panel Recommends Space Science, Not Stunts
wisebabo writes "A panel reporting to President Obama is recommending that we skip landing on the Moon and Mars and instead consider progressively deeper space voyages (first to the L1 Earth-Moon point, then perhaps the L2 Earth-Sun point, then a Mars flyby/orbit or asteroid visits). While in Mars orbit, the astronauts could send robotic probes to land on the surface, which could be much more effective than current rovers without the 10-minute time lag to Earth. I, for one, whole-heartedly agree that this approach would lead to 'the most steady cadence of steady improvement,' and keep us from inconsistent achievements in space (like not leaving Earth orbit for 40 years). Some would say that this approach would be lacking in the photo-ops necessary to maintain interest in the space program (no footprints on Martian soil) but I think there would be plenty of cool vistas — perhaps a rendezvous with a comet, or even orbiting one of the moons of Jupiter, assuming they figure out radiation shielding — to keep the taxpayer dollars flowing. The science return would be much greater because it would hopefully utilize both man and machine at their best; robots on one-way trips down into a gravity well while the humans provide the intuition and flexibility from orbit."
You've got to burn engines to enter and leave it.
I can see an argument of humans vs space probes, but the idea of putting the humans in orbit to release the space probes seems to be the worst of both worlds.
If we are going to send humans out there, they should be landing on something, otherwise send probes.
We've been to the moon. Let the Chinese try it again. I think landing on an asteroid, or a moon of Mars, or buzzing a comet - they are all much more exciting. The moon is a dead end - tackling deep space is the real future!
record the mars human landing on a stage in nevada and save loads of money like we did before?
oh wait...
The only way to sustain any interest in space exploration is what you call "stunts".
We have, for the past 30 years, embroiled ourselves in space exploration which has led us to the current state of apathy. NASA is at the ends of its life if we continue to follow a step-by-step progression towards the future. There is no hope in a slow progression towards the stars.
We need to take bold actions to ignite interest, because in America only bold actions and strong interest drive anything forward. Lukewarm actions toward a goal are not in our nature, so stop trying to sell us on it, man.
Science does not operate in a vacuum. It needs both public and political support and for that, you definitely need those photo ops... and while a Mars flyby might provide that, a trip to the L1 point won't look especially different from the average space station trip aside from the vehicle used. Just lots of space. Without the pretty pictures, congresspeople who usually don't know any better start asking what the point of NASA is and fight to de-fund it even more.
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The problem with probes on Mars and the like, is just what the article said. A good space program that would advance science would take a huge ammount of money. The public is a very easily bored creature, just look what happened after Apollo 11. "Well, we made it to the moon! Wait, why are we going back? we DID that already."
The public is very cold on science for science's sake, you have to have photo ops. A trip to the moon would get interest going, get money flowing so they can DO the important stuff. You have to get the public on your side, and, sadly, there's no big Russian menace for the public to cry out, "We must beat them!" Quite a few people thought that once we beat the Russians to the Moon, well, that was fun, no need to go back. Hopefully people will realize how important the space program is, but something tells me that it won't be soon, and it won't be until we get something inspiring. Deep space voyages, while important, won't inspire anyone. Landing on the Moon or Mars? That will.
We have enough rocks already.
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Why go all that way and not send a few men down to the surface of Mars in a lander? Sure, it might be dangerous, but the whole mission of getting there would be dangerous too.
What part of human experience ever made you think we do something logical and reasonable?
Another sad turn for our once-glorious space program. The simple motivation here? Not wanting to spend money on the landers for lunar surface access, or the base(s) we'll build once we get there. The shuttle program was short-changed grievously during its design phase, and while its design was compromised, its mission expectations were not - and this led to catastrophe. Going down the path of expecting miracles without adequate funding for them will, once again, lead to grief.
The Augustine commision presents options - not recommendations.
yes its more logical, and cheaper, to send machines into space. its also logical, and cheaper to video conference than to work next to someone, but those things aren't the same. using immense quantities of energy and huge machines to propel humans across large distances is what half of the engineering sector is about (auto, mech, aero, lots of civil). Machines would do an admirable job, but humans EXPERIENCE it and, well, experience is half the fun. Without the fun engineering and science are just work. Space exploration is supposed to be exciting and inspiring, and robots on Mars are nowhere near as exciting as humans on Mars.
It so much more difficult to get a juicy conspiracy theory going around boring science. I was looking forward to the "we didn't really go to Mars" entertainment.
What NASA needs to concentrate on is making ground to orbit cheaper, then move on tonovative space drives such as VASIMR. Find a way to loft cargo to orbit without paying through the nose for each kilogram, and everything else becomes much easier. No point in going anywhere if it requires bazillions of dollars in disposable hardware.
than current rovers without the 10-minute time lag to Earth.
At opposition, the average round trip time (RTT) to Mars is 9 minutes.
At superior conjunction, the average RTT to Mars is 42 minutes.
At other times, the RTT will be in between these two values.
Both of these numbers will vary at the 10% level due to orbital eccentricities and inclinations, but, clearly, most of the time the RTT will be greater than 10 minutes.
However, this is almost irrelevant. All currently and planned rovers or landers use "bent-pipe tracking," where data is sent to an orbiter, and then the orbiter, sometime later, sends it to the Earth. This greatly increases the effective RTT (there are not orbiters passing over any given surface location at any time).
I believe that the Phoenix, the current rovers, and the Mars Science Laboratory all basically plan on an effectively daily RTT (i.e., at best one up and down link per day). These long effective RTTs and the use of orbiters to store-and-forward data are part of the motivation behind the efforts around Delay / Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) - AKA the Interplanetary Internet.
I remember when the space shuttle was new. People were once again in awe of the space program. But the shuttle became as ordinary as a 747... which is, in a way, as it should be. Space transport became very routine and ordinary and more reliable as long as people were paying attention to the details. We need landing on bodies in space to be just as ordinary. So go land on the moon again. Go land on Mars. Go to planets that are hostile to human life and land there too. Our technology needs to be able to deal with all of those things. We need to be able to make habitable places where people can eventually do useful things or even colonize successfully in the future. Exploration via probes is useful and has its place, but the end game is our living out there and we need to be ready for it.
The problem with the progressive approach is that going to orbit is one price and going past earth orbit throws you into an entirely different price bracket. One's expensive, one's ridiculously expensive. The price is so (I want to say astronomical) high, that it's far cheaper and easier to do a single really big step than it is to take baby-steps getting there.
One of the people on the mars lander program (specifically Spirit and Opportunity) stated that the amount of work done by the probes over the course of all the years they've been in operation could have been accomplished by one man in a month and a half.
Probes work, but they are not necessarily the best option (unless maybe we can actually duplicate the longevity of spirit and opportunity).
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I hope so. This should have been done IMHO in 1973.
People who have gone to the Air and Space Museum in DC may remember the "Skylab" space station there, which was actual flight hardware. What they may not realize is that this space station, the third state of a Saturn V, was intended to support manned deep space flight, starting with a Venus flyby in 1973. The idea was that the Saturn V third stage would be launched fueled, would be used to send 3 astronauts towards Venus (thus emptying it of fuel), the astronauts would then take up residence inside and the weight taken by the "LEM" in Lunar flight would have been used for food and other provisions. It would have been risky, but it could have been done.
I also remember discussions at about the same time about going to some of the Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) - even then, some were energetically easier to reach and return from than the Moon. Again, there is no need for a LEM (Astronauts could just space walk over in the weak gravity of any NEA), and the LEM's mass would have been used for provisions. All of this could have been done, if the USA hadn't have turned its back on space exploration 40 years ago.
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Mars is fascinating, is there life there. What can we know about the history of the Solar System from there. Will it be easy to colonise. I think Mars and the Moon are both worth manned missions and permanent basis.
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Its so damn expensive getting stuff up into space, and so useful having stuff up there. That is ought to be worth, have manufacturing and mining bases out there. These ought to be as robotic as possible. People on earth ought to be able to by shares in and operate asteroid mining ROV (remote operated vehicles) as fun investments. There is a lot of expensive metals up there, to make it worth while. Other manu factoring options, a chip foundry, solar cell plant, smelting for aluminium, iron and titanium (plenty Al, and Ti on the moon), oxygen from the moon-rock, hydrogen from the solar wind, carbon, methane from the asteroids. Space bases manufacturing for space based operations.
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People aren't interested in space because space sucks. The moon is one big rocky sonuvabitch, so is Mars. The rest of space is a big, bleak vacuum. Meanwhile, billions of people on Earth don't have enough to eat. Fuck space.
Wether it's truly external (extraterrestrial) or fabricated (ie Watchmen) and large, globally effecting event would be great towards galvanizing the general human population towards looking up. Nor would it need to be a disaster like Hollywood likes to project, just something AMAZING.
we need a good reason to show why it is important for the economy and/or national security to have human presence in space, if humans in space became fundamental to one of those areas we are half way to conquering space, the other half (most difficult part) being having a compelling reason to travel to other star systems and built self sustaining stations elsewhere than earth orbit and surviving long enough as a civilization to achieve those goals
see the situation with the satellites now, they are fundamental for the economy and national security, if due to space debris a multi billion cleaning operation is required, the arguments in the congress will be about the cheapest or safest or more efficient way to do it, newer about the need to do it
I'm completely missing the point about why a mission to the earth/moon L1 point would be any kind of useful. About the only thing I'm aware of that point is useful for is putting a telescope to take really good pictures of the moon... but only the half of it that faces the Earth, since it's tidal locked with the earth. Better to having orbiting photo satellites... which we already have. But I can't see any point to sending humans there.
And if you want a "stunt" that doesn't take 2 years to finish the mission like Mars, how about when the ISS is "finished", instead of de-orbiting it, send up and attach some boosters to put it at L4 or L5. Then we can even forget about it for a decade or two before we go back.
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That so called "plan" would have human crews travel all the way to Mars and then sit in orbit around it - in order to save 10 minutes that it takes to contact rowers.
A flyby of the moon might be followed by more distant trips to so-called Lagrange points, first to the location where the gravity of the Moon and the Earth gravity cancel each other out, then to where the gravity of the Earth and Sun cancel out. There could also be visits to asteroids or flybys of Mars leading to landings on one or both of the low-gravity moons of Deimos and Phobos.
To what use are ANY of these trips?
Lagrange points are only useful if you are actually going to position a permanent lab there.
Flybys and visits... What for? You can do that just as fine with robotic probes.
The whole point of space travel is to permanently get humans to other places in the Solar System, Galaxy and Universe other than Earth.
It is not a test to see how far we can throw a rock - it is a test to see how close we are to the colonization of our solar system.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Sending robotic probes down from a manned orbiter is not the way to explore Mars, or anyplace else that we can send people. All a probe like that can do is things we planned for before the mission set out. If the designers didn't think of an experiment, there's little if any chance that the probe can be adapted on the spot to do it. Even if there's a way to load different instrument/manipulation packages into a robot before sending it down, you're still limited to what whoever it's loaded with. The whole point of exploration is that you don't (and can't) know in advance what you're going to encounter or what you might need to examine it and robots can't improvise. Yes, the team running the Mars Rovers has done wonders, but only within the narrow limits of what was built into the rovers in the first place. Robots can't react to the unexpected; you need a human for that, and sooner or later, it's going to happen.
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With 2 meetings to go they already have "findings". Not a chance they had "findings" before they started this process, is there.
Space travel creates new tech. New tech creates new jobs and new product to trade overseas. New tech is INCREDIBLY valuable. Why isn't this a point of interest in the space program? While I'd like to see people walk on Mars I will of course concede the point to those who comprised this panel as they are obviously more in-the-know than I am. We are capable of so much if we just learn to get over ourselves.
Space is not about science it is about exploration. The science is just a side show.
This panel sounds like just a way to justify cutting spending on NASA without making Obama sound like more of a wimp than Bush.
Vistas are never ever cool. I am going to hold out for NASA 7!
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I hope Obama stops the space Programm and puts all it's fund to a "Let's solve the Energy Crisis in the following decade" programm.
;) ? I mean, with the energy problem solved, we would have time till sxxx, global warming kill us all.
At the moment: 25% of the Wolrd Population has acces to energy:
- Oil, Gas, Coal reserves will be over at 2050.
- Uranium reserves will be over between 2100-2150.
IF China's population gains acces to energy (electricity, heating...), the world population with acces to energy would go over the 50%. The thing is that with the actual economic growth of China, they will get acces in the short term (2020? who knows), but that would mean:
- Oil, Gas, Coal would be over before 2050.
- Uranium would be over before 2100.
At the moment we don't have any other MAIN energy sources. We have solar energy, which is a really low efficient energy source. We have wind, which has a medium enviormental cost and is not reliable enough to be a main energy source. And we have hydraulic powerplants, which are highly efficien 94% and highly reliable. But without normal temperature superconductors they can only supply certain regions of the world and their enviormental cost is tremendously big.
So we have x possibilities at the moment, some of them are:
1) Solving the energy crisis before we run out of energy (that means put all the money we have into solving it)
2) Enforce the use of the actual regenerable energies and improve the energetical efficiency of buildings to maximize energy savings (today this will only be a patch to decrease our energy expenses but it won't solve the energy problem in the long term)
3) Go to Mars, ignore the problem till it's too late, and then start praying and die, because No Energy => No Industry, No Research, No Progress => No solution for the energy problem.
So yes, space trips are cool and stuff, but can we do them after we have solve the stuff that matters
Keep in mind what you're doing without ever forgetting how you are doing it.
is nice and many scientists seem to enjoy it.
But IMO, Buzz Aldrin (iirc) has the right point of view: from Kittyhawk to Apollo 11 was 66 years. It is an embarassment that we may not be able to put boots on Mars by 2035 --- which would be 66 years after Apollo 11. Human Flight -> Man on Moon shouldn't take less time than Moon->Mars.
If you want to argue that science doesn't concern itself with putting boots on Mars, fine, lots stop funding space science and get back to funding space engineering.
Any human being can understand these words: "the human race has set foot on a different planet". I look forward to the changes that will take longer to understand: what it will mean to the world pscyhe to know that we have demonstrated the possibility of escape, to know that there is a new world to explore, a new adventure to be had, etc. The re-colonization of the Americas by europeans co-incided with the beginning of the greatest leaps forward in technology, prosperity, and freedom (as long as you weren't brown at the time...) in world history. I am looking forward to seeing what shape the "discovery" of Mars will have on all of us.
Short of discovering God or alien life, no unmanned mission will ever get every single human being around the world simultaneously watching their TVs. That's the power of putting boots on Mars. There will be plenty of hard science and engineering to get us there. But having a single goal that any idiot can understand in just 1 statement: that's powerful, and it's worth working towards.
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It's just fine for the government to aim at scientific achievements. Nothing wrong with that. But, the PURPOSE of exploration is to find homes, resources, and work for PEOPLE.
They want to stick permanent research stations (manned or otherwise) at the lagrange points? Cool. Put them up there, put beacons on them, so that real people who are pursuing real life don't run them over. Real life is much much more than just looking at stuff, and figuring out how it works. Real life means USING stuff. If NASA discovers a new crystal on Mars, something that man has never seen before, neither Joe Sixpack nor Aviator Alex is going to give a damn that science has learned something new. Both want to know how they can USE IT! Does it make a super cutting tool? Does it make the greatest lens ever imagined? Maybe it's a superconductor at room temperature, and it can be used in electronics? The best insulating material man has ever seen? If so, then someone is going to pay for transportation to go GET some of the stuff, so he can sell it to people!!
There is nothing wrong with science, but science isn't a goal, in and of itself. Science is a means to an end - the end being, to improve human life.
Sitting around on the earth, and speculating about if and when a moon sized comet might strike the earth certainly doesn't improve human life, or the chances of humanity's survival.
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It's been mentioned here in the past, but what would combine the awe and excitement of a 'stunt', along with the progress of science, would be to establish a manned space station/city. It can be fairly near the Earth at first, and then progress further as appropriate.
Get us off this rock before a demented asteroid decides it wants a crash in party.
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Let's face it: until NASA can't come up with some proof of ET or God or an extinction-level threat from space, NASA and space exploration in general will never get the same center stage of attention of mankind as it was fourty years ago.
The population of Earth is much more interested in finding and switching over to cheap renewable energy from oil on this planet than anything else is space. That's where American science, politics, military should focus on, the way JFK was focusing on landing on the Moon.
We need to forget the whole "landings" idea.
we need to properly plan permanent outposts with sufficient staff and resources.
There have already been methods developed to extract water from lunar soil, so basically you establish a base with a strong nuclear power facility and work from there.
Without permanence its a massive waste of money whether you land there or just orbit.
The reason the "science" space is not interesting to the average joe, is that it lacks the "human interest". I mean, look at the mars rovers. They became much more interesting once we anthropomorphised them; tough little guys lasting way longer then we thought they could. Same thing here. We need humans for the human interest; it doesn't matter much what they do exactly, just so long as it is "against the odds", and embodies the "human spirit". And I reckon a trip around Mars will bloody well do it. Years in space, impossibly far from human contact, unable to be assisted if anything goes wrong? Yeah thats human spirit in spades, against some pretty bloody big odds. It's like the polar expeditions of yester-year, except we'll get frequent updates. I say go for it, I couldn't give shit if they land on a bit of dirt or not.
I think one of the reasons that the general public lost interest is because the Apollo Astronauts made it look easy, it was only when peoples lives were at stake did people take interest. Perhaps with the exception of Landing on the moon and Yuri Gagarin it's so vapid that for the general public to appreciate something so amazing and risky they have to do it through a sense of television drama which causes, or nearly causes, a fatality.
People think space travel is routine, mundane, they are indifferent to it because they are suspended in their ignorance into thinking LEO is the same as moon or anywhere else in the solar system. They don't understand the difficulty.
As long as we do *something* it's great but I think this is worthwhile because it hasn't been done and also a bit easier than actually traveling into a gravity well. We go to Mars but we don't land would be worth it for the sheer prick tease value it would garner. I can just see Joe Sixpack sayin it now 'You mean we flew all the way there and we didn't land. - why don't we land that puppy.' There is a lot to be said for going to smaller gravity wells and building capability. Considering we haven't mastered the ability to construct long strand Carbon nanotube and build a terrestrial (or martian) space elevator why not utilise the technology we do have and construct a Moonstalk. Surely by doing this it would be possible to gather resources and build further capability to utilise materials and construct infrastructure outside of our gravity well, allowing more ambitious achievements.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Right on the money... That' what JFK would do today...
Beyond the earth is wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. Fields strewn with diamonds, entire moons made of hydrocarbon, lands to take dominion of to make Alexander the Great appear an insignificant tribal chief. But the people who take ownership of the realms beyond the sky will send men, not robots.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
All the helium 3 we could ever want is just sitting up on the surface of the Moon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_3
But you're right. Before we go off to the Moon for a limitless supply of fuel, let's stay here and solve our problems without it first.
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I can see an argument of humans vs space probes, but the idea of putting the humans in orbit to release the space probes seems to be the worst of both worlds.
If we are going to send humans out there, they should be landing on something, otherwise send probes.
It turns out that the last 200 kilometers, getting from orbit to the surface and back, is vastly, completely, incredibly the hardest part. It is much, much simpler to get humans into orbit than to land them on the surface of Mars. Among other things, to land on the surface, you need design, build, test, quality, and fly two additional vehicles, a lander vehicle and a launch vehicle, both of which are flying in regimes that are hard to engineer for. Not to mention a long-duration habitat for the Mars surface, and spacesuits that will survive for hundreds of EVAs on the Mars surface-- not easy.
Orbiting Mars is vastly simpler than landing on it.
Of course, I've talked and written on that subject many times before-- Teleoperation from Mars Orbit: A proposal for human exploration, Footsteps to Mars, etc.
(I agree, however, that L-1 is silly-- nothing there to explore.)
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If blowing people up into space isn't a stunt then I don't know what is.
"The abundance of helium-3 is THOUGHT to be greater on the Moon"
The whole point of space travel is to permanently get humans to other places in the Solar System, Galaxy and Universe other than Earth.
It is not a test to see how far we can throw a rock - it is a test to see how close we are to the colonization of our solar system.
I don't know why we would want to colonize space. Honestly, it doesn't sound like feasible, fun or anything else positive before we develop teleportation (though I don't believe that to be impossible. Probably won't happen in my lifetime, though).
I don't think the space exploration has any point, at least for the next century to come. And I think that we should spend resources to more urgent things before spending massive amounts of them "just in case we invent something to make the idea feasible".
However, the useful thing is all the other research involved. "We want to do X but it is impossible due to Y so let us develop better technology to overcome Y. Doing X might not help mankind but the technology might actual have some useful applications."
And I think that trying to take men to Mars would probably be a lot better to that than "let's send unmanned drone to this point in solar system because there is low gravitaty"
But the deal is, we humans are explorers, we want to GO places. Hard coded DNA. Sure send robots to wherever, but we are going to be sending humans as well, no sense living in denial. I know I can't be the only one who is annoyed as all get out that here it is 2009 and we don't have a full time Mars colony yet. WTH?? Trillions for those parasite casino bankers and lameass stoopid wars, chump change relatively speaking for space exploration. The priorities are rather skewed there.
I remember sputnik, can tell you what happened all over the dang planet. Anyone and everytone who was aware of it, even villagers over in whoknow'swhereistan from listening to far away shortwave news broadcasts, everyone who was physically able to walk or get carried outside just went outside and just stared at the sky. Just stared. Billions of people all went outside and contemplated the universe and their place in it and other sorts of things like that, all of the above, it was scary and alse awe inspiring at the same time.
Not to many years later, we all did it again, a HUMAN was up there now!
Not too many years later, we did it AGAIN, a human was on the moon! Outside staring looking up.
Now what, what happened, what happened to the drive, the wonder, the excitement the longing? Strangled by lame politicians and pork and the "necessity" of wasting huge sums on total crap and Cxx "profits", that's what happened. And they even want to deorbit the biggest space station ever built, and also the only one we have. More WTF??
Humans need adventure, robots are OK, but it ISN'T adventure or exploring, not the stuff that gets people to all go outside and stare at the sky, or what they did in the olden days, stare at the horizon down at the beach after some little wooden sailboats set sail. That's what humans NEED and you just can't slap a price on that "need for exploration" with some bean counters cost/benefit spreadsheet.
Human spirit is priceless, destroy that, you've destroyed what really makes us human.
For a long time, there have been too many pigs gorging themselves at the NASA feeding trough. We need to get rid of the Boeings, Lockheed-Martins, and other contractors. A NASA engineer primarily oversees a horde of contractors who oversee sub-contractors who oversee sub-sub-contractors. By the time all of the time/cost billing is added up, NASA is being billed $800,000 for a $120,000 engineer. NASA does things like award a $175,000 contract to Lockheed with the cutsy sounding name of "determining an alternative zero gravity point device" when the ball in the old mice didn't work. A company which was flying a project on the KC-135 (vomit comet) ran into the same problem of the mouse not working, ran to the computer store, grabbed a $50.00 trackball, and the problem was solved. Solve these problems with cost-plus contractors, and NASA's budget will practically fix itself.
Wherever you go, there you are.
Mr. Nasa approaches a taxpayer... "Say, would you mind funding an attempt to get better data for a group of scientists?" Or he says, "Say, would you mind funding an attempt to physically explore our universe?" Why do we keep making this mistake? Does Mr. Nasa WANT his budget to dwindle to zero?!?
because I still think that any real space exploration requires we remain off planet. Not trapped in something like the ISS. As such having a permanent presence on the moon is not a stunt but a jumping off point. Throw in decades of science fiction that puts forward moon bases and it is easy to get the public to accept it. I agree that going back for a simple landing is nothing more than a stunt. To show real technical ability requires putting teams of people up there.
The suggestions for a fly by of Mars comes off as a stunt. It really won't accomplish more than we can do we probes we have. The risks a far greater. The moon offers many tantalizing bits that a fly by won't. It is far easier to reach. It opens the opportunity for not only finding out if off world resource gathering is possible it is far easier to make it an eventual destination point for the public. Let the governments pay to show it can be done and let free enterprise expand on that. We can learn a lot about off world structures, human interaction, and hard sciences. Being trapped in orbit is no better than being trapped on our planet.
Leaving the moon to the Chinese or other nation is not a good idea. We already have nations laying claim to vast stretches of the arctic because they have a presence there. Can you imagine what happens if only one nation goes to the moon? The PR alone is worth it to say "we are here and here to stay"
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Japan has the space program thing mastered very well. They build lots of probes to do a lot of scientific work, and then they basically go out to a store, by a nice 1080p Panasonic camera, or something, and weld it to the probe. JAXA gets their science, the people get their awesome photos/videos (e.g., Kaguya, and hey, scientists like looking at pretty pictures, too!
I can see the argument here, we need space stations. But gathering data about other worlds is only a secondary mission of the space program. The primary mission is to get human beings out there.
Consideration of getting to the moon has shown why we need to be going there. We actually let the infrastructure needed to travel even as far as the moon collapse. After landing on the moon we should have been working toward a moon base from the get go. We should have had one twenty years ago not be debating sending someone into orbit around it. That is a step back.
Space exploration is expensive but frankly it is a drop in the bucket compared to what we are spending elsewhere. We are working on technology advances to expand the average human lifespan to 1000+ years and those advances are nothing but a series of practical, reasonable, progressive steps with an expected release date of roughly 20 years. We aren't going to need to get off this rock to escape an asteroid in 50k years people, we are going to need to get off this rock to escape ourselves in perhaps 100-200 years. With each of these missions being spaced 10 years or so apart how many of them do you think we can waste?
Look at it this way.
Putting money in to the space program employs people, keeps them employed, or causes contractors to hire new employees for the initial duration of a mission (such as technicians during the construction of a new probe or rocket). That's a direct benefit. You could also argue that working for the government is more stable during these economic climes--though working for a government contractor is much less so.
Then there's the somewhat distant benefit that you alluded to with regards to science, discoveries, and even new materials or construction techniques that might find their way into aerospace or the automotive industry. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I could therefore argue that programs like these have an immediate benefit as well.
Though, I do question the point of visiting the Lagrange points. Exploiting them isn't new to us, and I kinda get the idea that either the poster of this story or the author of the Times article didn't do their homework. First, the article doesn't mention any specific Lagrange point; whether I can blame them directly for ignorance is uncertain. Wisebabo (the submitter), however, is evidently not aware that we already have two probes at the Earth-Sun L2 point and we're planning on sending three more.
Seriously, the L2 point isn't something we've never visited. We have probes there.
He who has no
We don't need photo ops to ignite taxpayer interest. We need China to announce a plan to land on Mars. Then the collective American ego will kick in and NASA will get what it needs to allow Americans to continue to wave those big foam fingers that say "We're #1."
We should start by spreading life onto other Mars or the Moon as soon as possible for two reasons:
1. we really are the only life in the universe, or at least the only life in the knowable universe.
2. start learning how to support life in a real environment without the overhead of risking human lives which should get us to our goal faster.
The first thing I'd want to do is create a habitable site on the Moon since it's closest. Initially populate it with hardy plants and small animals in a way that is self-sustainable. This way the cost of mistakes is relatively cheap and we learn quickly in a way that should scale up to human habitability in a predictable way.
I'm still in favor of throwing some resources into some kinds of space exploration, where the potential gains in knowledge look worthwhile, or prepare us for longer term programs after we hopefully have more cost effective technologies. But, you just raised an interesting point.
Hydroelectric has some perceived advantages when it comes to environmental impacts. That is, the lake behind the dam changes the environment, where the pile of tailings behind the coal plant damages the environment. Lakes are generally positive (if you're a power boater or bass fisherman), neutral to mildly positive (for most people in the general area), or negative (if 'they' immanent domained you out of your family farm).
But, with the increase in extinction rates, lakes become potential environmental stressors. I know that, in my area, there are native species (both standard brown trout and related trout variants) and outsider species (rainbow trout, brought in by humans to stock those nice lakes for sport fishermen). Rainbows can't jump as well as the natives, so if you follow streams up into the Smoky Mountains, you get to areas where the pools are still only full of native species, but the closer you get to the artificial lakes, the more rainbows displace the natives.
A three foot waterfall generally stops rainbows, and in recent years, TVA and Forestry services have started cleaning them out of some spots, maintaining crumbling small waterfalls, and generally keeping the non-native species under control. For now, a new balance appears to be pretty successful, although we probably lost some more specialized local fish species when TVA first started in the 30's and 40's. The area still has a great deal of species diversity. But, if rapid climate change can greatly endanger a capstone species such as polar bears, then it can also make the whole ecology of some areas more fragile, so a once acceptable trade off shifts to more negative, or something humans could once manage becomes unmanageable.
Who is John Cabal?
An example of Project Orientation is, "the space station is complete, lets let it fall back to earth." An example of Goal Orientation is, "A permanent base on the Moon." It appears to this observer that the group of people that are afraid of venturing into space are allowed to make decisions for the rest of us. I don't know who selected these "experts", but I think a full refund is not out of the question. I can say the same thing myself, "hay! let's sit on our chair and do nothing! Oh, and spend everyone's money." The end result is the same. I see two issues that are worthy of resolving. 1, Long term habitation of space. 2. Gravity Well Entrance, and Exiting. As to burning billions on training a Test Pilot to put a nut on a bolt in space; it's a insult to the intelligence level of the rest of the planet. This country was not founded on finding ways to control its population, but on the principles of compartmentalizing mediocrity.
Not to mention the moon has plenty of Helium 3, which would make it worthwhile to set up as a mining colony.
Helium three has no known use, with the exception of the trivial amount used in low-temperature science.
While, in principle, the fusion reaction D+3He --> 4He+p would be a nice reaction, in practice the ignition barrier to this reaction is twice as high as the ignition barrier to the D+T --> 4He+n reaction... a reaction that we can't achieve breakeven for. There's little use in going to the moon to get the fuel for a reaction that we don't know how to do.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Instead of sending people to Mars, send an unmanned probe to collect rock samples and fly them back to earth. This is hard enough, but still a lot easier than sending people. Besides, there's nothing for people to do on Mars except walk around for a bit, collect some rocks and come back.
The problem with a manned mission to land on Mars or even orbiting it is how to protect against radiation. There is no ozone layer or magnetic field on Mars so one big solar flare and the crew are fatally exposed. Landing on Phobos on the other hand has some huge advantages. One side of Phobos constantly faces Mars so landing they would have Mars on one side and the bulk of Phobos on the other to shield against radiation. In addition there is negligible gravity so the Delta v is less than landing on the Earth's moon or Mars. That savings to the energy budget could be used for a faster transit time which again reduces the risk of radiation. There is also a possibility that there is water on Phobos which could be used for fuel production, possible missions to the Mars surface and perhaps even enough to support a colony. Landing on Phobos is not as sensational as landing on Mars but what is the use of sending a crew on a suicide mission that would hurt spaceflight more than help? Phobos provides the best solution for a survivable mission.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
This sounds like the same group of thinkers that thought that wars could be won through air power alone, without "boots on the ground". We've seen how well that worked in Vietnam, Gulf I and II, Afghanistan.
We are humans. It's not real until there is a person standing RFT.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
There is really nothing to be gained from landing on the moon or mars at this point in cosmic history. There is a lot more to do closer to earth that could be done to generate the funding for the future of space.
. * Industrialization of near earth stations to enable launching deeper missions into space from space itself. * Getting more civilians into space at an affordable cost. * Solving some of the more pressing issues of cosmic living - toilets anyone?
Going into space might liberate us from gravity, but the economics are not as easy to escape.
Hope is the currency of fools
Wouldn't anything involving Mars be irrelevant at the moment, as Congress decided to pass a bill saying no funding will go towards putting people on Mars?
If we are interested in doing Science we will send robots. Having human control nearby seems like a waste of mass.
If the goal is saving the human race, then I suspect we will eventually decide to save culture, or knowledge, or memories, or whatever. Legs and sweat glands were great for moving from the trees to the savanna but not so much for the move into the galaxy.
The short term save is to build robots to detect and protect us from impactors.
The long t erm save is to build robots that like us, will write home, and send them into the galaxy.
Cutting military expenses by only a few percent would be far more effective in saving money than completely stopping space exploration.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yeah, but then the polygamous moon colonists would start becoming all libertarian and such, stage a revolution, and hurl rocks down at Earth as makeshift WMDs. No thank you!
I exposed the opinion, that instead of raising the funds for space exploration, the government should increase the funds to fix global warming, find new energy generation technologies or increasing the efficiency of solar panels, and get moded as troll.
But guess what, although research should have no economic frontiers (because i'm sure that even from these ridicously expensive space misions to mars and venus useful technologies would come), with a limited amount of funds, solving impending dangers should be a priority, and at the moment space travel ranks 5 in my list.
1) Enery crisis
2) Global warming
3) Asteroid impact
5) Sun explodes (we would need space travel to escape!)
*4) Terrorist bringing zombie dinosaurs back to life and killing us all!
Keep in mind what you're doing without ever forgetting how you are doing it.
What I'd like to see is a probe voyage to a nearby star and its planets using nuclear energy to propel it at say 20% the speed of light. We'd get results back within about 30 years. That's not a long wait to see a whole new solar system. (Besides, I might not be around longer than that.)
It could zip past the first target star (30 years), taking a quick look, and then gradually slow down in order to orbit the next target star in line so it can get a better look. It may be 80 or so years until reaching the 2nd target.
Table-ized A.I.
I recommend that we, instead of investing billions in messy, dangerous, volumnous, explosive and bulky rocket combustion based technologies, instead power our moon and mars missions with an efficient drive based on Heim theories. This would allow just a fraction of the energy of a rocket system and allow the craft to glide into and lift off from the planet nearly effortlessly without explosions with simply superconductor magnet driven systems. Heim theory could make space travel ever more cost effective and easy and with its propulsion and antigravity levitation capabilities would make our craft much more versatile than they are now. It could also shorten the time needed to reach mars, quite significantly, down to a few days. Furthermore, it would put distance star systems reachable within just a year or two of space flight through its superluminal travel capability.
Far fetched you say? Heim theory so far has predicted the masses of 20 subatomic particles and force interactions, so it is well on the way to being scientifically verified. It manages to unify all of the forces of nature into a single cohesive theory of everything, and introduce two additional forces.
Ok maybe I'm not very knowledgeable about asteroids, but i heard some of them have shitload of rare resources like gold ore even uranium and other neat stuff. So why no one talks about starting asteroid mining? i know it probably is insanely hard thing, but it would really give something. If you could bring down chunks of gold from some asteroid i think you could cover cost pretty easy, or uranium or other rare resource. Also such missions would/should lead to nice advances in science, maybe even in space construction from asteroids themselves.
Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death. - Major Motoko Kusanagi(Ghost in the Shell)
The best way to eliminate waste and inefficiency on large projects like planes and rockets would be to make it illegal or better yet impossible, for Congress to gerrymander the sub-projects and manufacturing plans. NASA struggles to get funding support in Congress. NASA works with its primary contractors to "solve" that problem by dividing contracts up along artificial lines and spreading parts out to every Congressional district possible. This is not really the fault of Lockheed Martin (et. al.) but the fault of Congress. Left to their own devices, Lockheed Martin would rather build, say, something like the X-33 / Venture Star system, by optimizing for efficient production, rather than maximizing the number of sub-projects deployed to the maximum number of Congressional districts.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Great. More far-sitted planning by Norm Augustine, the same guy that wrote the same report in 1990. Umm. L1 and and L2 are great destinations, except there is nothing there! Is it suprising that Obama is throwing sand in NASA's gears? He wasn't bashful about hijacking the American car and banking industries, so why shouldn't he think he can run NASA as well? He is a Harvard lawyer after all.
an ill wind that blows no good
What are we doing, as humans, the last 40 years, after sending men to the moon? we are sending robots in order to increase our scientific knowledge.
That's fine and sweet, but we are not gonna explore space with robots. What we need is a spaceship. A huge spaceship, assembled in space, with huge rotating sections for artificial gravity, big spaces for agriculture, for scientific experiments, and with nuclear propulsion that can get us to relativistic speeds.
With this spaceship, the trip to Mars can be shortened to a few weeks, even days. The spaceship could have landing craft that are launched from it towards the surface of any planet.
Personally, I can't see anything more advanced, until major physics breakthroughs are achieved.
When it starts with a catchy title, especially one that has to take a swipe at something else to make room for itself, you can be sure it's got an agenda that isn't high on the list of realistic possibilities. Or else it's a parody of that.
A "panel reporting to President Obama" is one or more persons that have an idea and know the address of the White House. I have every bit the ear of the administration (ie. essentially none, sadly) and I'm a scientist. I want my headline too.
NASA's present plans are a rerun of its history of "Go, Get Back, Give Up". The stuff in TFA are apparently the opposite in every respect except for actually accomplishing a permanent exploratory and colonial presence. A combination of both, but with the intention of making each step another rung in a ladder would get us there, keep us there, and get us farther later easier and cheaper. Any program that's a subset of the Stepping Stones approach floated years before Sputnik is a waste of time and money because it requires replication of what it accomplished in order to do more later.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Humans are still far better at doing actual science out in space. Even in a ungainly space suit we're far more mobile than any remote controlled rover that's defeated by a bit of a soft sand.
Theres just no substitute right now for a pair of human eyes and there probably won't be for decades.
We do actually want stunts. It makes it relevant and human to the public.
NASA has been systematicly failing to engage the public since they stopped moving ahead with human spaceflight. Ironically this endangers the pure science.
In the 1980s if you asked a classroom who wants to be an astronaut when they grow up, about all of their hands want to go up. Now they all want to be lawyers or american idol winners. Please get the kids interested again, put people on mars.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Voting on the basis of skin color is quite acceptable by today's moral standard.
Pstt, dude.... Firstly, this is off topic, and secondly, people can vote for whatever reason they damn well like.
Sure we could do this all fine and dandy with probes, but the fucking point is to develope the ability for us to go and stay. That would be like all the great explorers over the ages of just sailing by and painting a picture and going back home.
There is more room and resources in the asteroid belt than our current population would even know what to do with. Unfortunately we gave up on the race to get there 30 years ago, that is why we need to go back to the Moon and on to Mars. Baby steps
I made a poll to ask my visitors if Americans should go back to the moon, Mars, somewhere else, or don't go at all. I had mixxed results so far.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Fuck sending meatspace people anywhere. Let's get virtual and then send that system. Smaller, faster, less risk, better in-flight entertainment. Although, the off-site backups are going to be tricky.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
If we're going there, close enough to be in orbit, we should land. We're humans, we explore. End of story.
Instead of relying on national space agencies that are beholden to military and political whims, why not create an international space agency, just for peaceful and scientific space exploration. Countries, corporations and private individuals could donate money and expertise while any scientific findings or commercial technology developed will be released to public domain. Why, if you want to attract geeks, just name it as Starfleet. I don't see why the open source model could not be applied to space exploration.
If you want to have NASA 20 years from now, land on the Moon, land on Mars, or both. Visit the Lagrange points too after that if you must.
Otherwise, give the $15B a year to AIG so that they can buy more monogrammed staplers for their executive suites.
I love science, but I COULD CARE LESS about what the rocks on Mars look like unless I have a chance of ever going there in my lifetime. Nor will you inspire _my_ kids unless they have at least the dream of such a chance (if you buy into the NASA's there to inspire the kids thing)
All that being said, I _did_ spend 6 years at NASA and vote on space issues before anything else...
We're humans. We thrive on exploration. We absolutely love going into the unknown and revel in the joy of returning. 19th century America got off on hearing of Lewis and Clark's journeys. Peary in the Arctic, Shackleton in the Antarctic, and Hilary on Everest; these are the stories of endurance and adventure we love. It's pretty tough these days to find the summits that haven't been climbed, the epic lines that haven't been skied, and the places on the map no one has gone. Sorry, I just don't find any interesting in going to L1 and L2. However, if you send a crew to Mars I'll watch NASA TV every f*cking day, 24-hours to see what happens. It'll probably result in selling every possession I have and booking a trip on Virgin Galactic, but it'll be SOOOO worth it.
----- obSig
The fat is NASA spending 150k to do what a private company did for 60.00. The fat is when the major contractors sub-contract the project out and the sub contractors shoot it out to more sub-contractors. NASA winds up paying four hundred thousand + for an engineer who's being paid 120K by some other contractor. It's in the cost plus contracts that get let to accomplish tasks which could be easily handled in-house. Granted, it's not the prime contractors like Lockheed and Boeing, they are just taking advantage of the existing structure. What I'm saying is change the structure which they operate under. I personally know of one project where Marshall Space Center spent several million and many years of effort for a project which never succeeded, and a private company successfully completed the project in 6 months for 360K. It's called the commercial approach. Nothing is done if it not cost justifiable.
Wherever you go, there you are.
Man's TRUE advantage is the ability to deal with differing situations. Robots can not do that nicely. OTH, the disadvantage of man is the difficulty of living conditions ESP. in space. The more that we have to keep man in space floating around, the greater the expense and difficulty. That is exactly where robots excel. We are far better off sending ppl on one way missions to Mars (possibly the moon first) and allowing them to survive there (some MAY die). In the mean time, we should send some probes around the solar system to examine various asteroids/comets (small nukes with VASMIR).
But the idea that we will simply send man around the solar system makes absolutely NO sense.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This same panel is apparently recommending that more private launches be done. IOW, they are pushing SpaceX, Orbital, and even Bigelow. Of course, that is not official yet.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We have to throw away 90% CURRENTLY. But it does not have to be that way. For example, it is possible to do a rail launch esp up the side of a mountain. Or if we go back to hypersonic engine and craft development, it may be possible to obtain mach15 at 100K feet in a REUSABLE vehicle and then simply launch a rocket which has VERY little waste. If W really shut down BlackSwift (and not just simply moved it into a black project), W. would truly be one of the bottom 3 presidents ever (as opposed to bottom 10 that he is currently ranked).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...was to build a base their to launch other missions.
should be
...was to build a base there to launch other missions.
Nobody's going to take you seriously if they need to reread your statement in order to understand it.
It seems that if you keep reading the link, there's a lot more than just "THOUGHT"...
"The Moon's surface contains helium-3 at concentrations on the order of 0.01 ppm."
"each year three space shuttle missions could bring enough fuel for all human beings across the world." - Chinese Lunar Exploration Program
"In January 2006, the Russian space company RKK Energiya announced that it considers lunar helium-3 a potential economic resource to be mined by 2020,[43] if funding can be found."
/sig
To slowly boost the ISS outa orbit and put it in Moon orbit, or at a Lagrange point.
Hey, it's scheduled to burn up anyhow in 20xx... And, would it be worth much out there?
.
- aqk
F U
www.spacex.com - where innovation will come from as opposed to NASA (pronounced NA-SAY)
To me, the biggest reason to send humans to Mars orbit and not land is to do systems tests — the first Lunar missions with people on them didn't land either.
So what you're saying is we've got to fly before we can walk.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
A lot of this discussion seems to boil down to the question, "How do we get the taxpayer to give space exploration more money?" I think it worth mentioning that making money in space would neatly sidestep this problem since it would no longer matter if Joe Public cared about space or not. The people who were making money would care enough for everyone. Further since the activity is profitable, it is also self-funding and wouldn't require a funding source indefinitely.
To put it in stronger terms, in the sports world there is a difference between amateur and professional status, that is, whether or not you are paid to play a sport. The general result is that while amateurs can be quite good, the best players are generally professional. They can not only afford to play the sport fulltime (without having to work a side job in many cases), but they need to in order to continue to earn income from playing the sport. In the space world. every major space exploration program including NASA's would be amateur class. Sure they are quite good, but because the owning country doesn't earn money from the program, there's no serious incentive to maintain the program or insure that it does good work. As long as the program is "playing", most people are happy. There's a heavy dependence on the goodwill of taxpayers and politicians. If that goodwill evaporates sufficiently, then the program is in dire straits.
If on the other hand, businesses can make money from tourism, mining, solar power satellites, or any other idea out there, then space will get used in that way. The respective businesses will get very skilled at their niche and human knowledge will be advanced without much need for input from Joe Public or his politicians.
Mars Idol
send probes out.
Space travel should have three goals right now:
1) Long-term habitable space environments with atmosphere, power, sustainable ecology, etc.
2) Power generation on a large scale.
3) Reversible temperature control of the Earth.
These are *useful* and may just save our collective bacon. Mars isn't going anywhere. Neither is the moon. If there's anything useful there, we can get to it later. The three things I've mentioned seem far more important to humanity than exploration for exploration's sake, and not on the radar of any of the bureaucrats at any of the government sponsored space agencies.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Psst... dude, don't feed the trolls... they don't really care what you think
I can tell you how to do that right now...without spending a dime. Limit population growth.
Wow, you know how to convince humans to limit their global population growth (i.e., override their natural instinct to procreate without bounds) without spending any money? Please, tell!
Anything that increses our progress to becomming a multi-planetary species is good (and would help many things on old home earth too). Capturing and crunching a few asteroids for rare minerals could provide enough economic emphasis to get the big ball rolling. We must eventually put down boots to stay on Mars and the Moon, but if a takes a few look see missions first, with the undertsanding that more will follow, then it is AOK.
Want a scientifically useful stunt?
Why not send astronauts on a one-way (or very long term) trip to the moon or Mars. Lets try to establish a permanent outpost there and do some science while they are sitting around. As they spend more time there, we can develop the return-capability for them to be able to eventually leave and also continually upgrade the structure for future inhabitants.
Sure, it's crazy and incredibly dangerous. Sure, some people will probably die before they would on earth. But I guarantee that NASA will have no problem finding qualified volunteers. And it's no less insane than it was to try to send people to the Moon in a tin can 40 years ago.
Robot missions have been useful and have been giving us reasonable science, but at an incredibly slow rate. We're ready for the next step. We need to start working at getting off this planet. We have the technology, we have the will, we just need to demonstrate the effort.
The problem is that NASA has undergone the two-fold operation that the government attempts to administer to all employees: they cut off your balls and then lobotomize you. They are no longer willing to accept any risk and will not tell the president when he is wrong. Russia has the balls, but limited funding and interest. China just wants to copy Russia and the US and the ESA has too many cooks in the kitchen.
But someone is going to have to sack up and do it if we are ever going to reach the next stage of exploration.
virgin planetary ecosystems
Oh, great! Now you made me wanna volunteer.