Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
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.
The Augustine commision presents options - not recommendations.
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 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.
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
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
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.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
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.
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.