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NASA To Team Up With Russia For Future Mars Flight
xp65 writes "NASA has invited Russia to carry out a joint manned flight to Mars, the head of NASA's Moscow office said on Tuesday. Russia is currently planning to send its own expedition to Mars some time in the future. Marc Bowman told an international aviation and space conference in Moscow that the Mars mission should take advantage of the achievements made by the International Space Station and use a multinational crew."
I've always thought that the only way for us as a race to become a unified nation is to simple explore space together. As soon as one nation decides to call Mars or whatever other celestial body their own, it will just be downhill from there.
The partnership thing that is. Emerging powers like the BRIC countries plus Japan have the $$$ and we have the technical know-how and experience. And there is no doubt the prestige factor at work here too.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
The ISS as an international logistics project has been a resounding success. The European ATV, for example, can be launched and then dock with the ISS under the direction of 4 different control centres in different parts of the globe. The station itself is the most massive spacecraft ever assembled and has been constructed from components built by different agencies in different countries, and they work together pretty well. Most of the valid criticisms of the ISS are of the utility of having a LEO space station, not as the ability of the ISS to perform that function.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Will each nation have to provide their own toilets?
However, the Russian system -- with its corruption and massive budget cuts (afte 1991) in government-funded research and development -- has hampered Russians scientists and engineers in their effort to produce breakthrough technology. NASA's collaboration with the Russian scientific community (and possible NASA funding for it) will help the Russians to achieve what they can not achieve in their own system.
If only President Dmitry Medvedev and Dictator Vladimir Putin created a Western society (with its intellectual freedom and clean government) in Russia and generously funded government research and development, then the Russians would likely dominate the winners of the Nobel Prizes in the sciences and of the Fields Medals in mathematics.
If we really want to do anything with space, we need to start doing things with economic significance. The moon trip should have been about pioneering the way towards moon habitats, moon industry. In that case it would have been money well-spent. All we really did was plant a flag and thumb our noses at the Soviets. Entertaining but of little real use. Sure, there was some spin-off technology but we threw it all away.
Planting a flag on Mars would end up being a similar waste of time, not if we weren't going to follow it up with anything else.
If we were really serious about it, we'd look into moving heavy industry offworld. Prospect our nearby apollo objects, see about mining them. Put manufacturing in Earth orbit. The only thing that comes down to Earth would be finished products in nice, simple, recyclable dropshells.
We might want to look into solar power sats while we're at it.
If nothing else, at least space exploration and living offers us an engineering challenge of figuring out how to live minimally with minimal resources. Our problem in this day and age is that resources are too cheap and there's little incentive to save. If gas were a nickel a gallon, the only selling point for fuel efficiency would be not having to stop for gas as often. Gas costs more than that, of course, but it still doesn't cost enough for us to take conservation and fuel efficiency seriously. And we don't. It's just like the buffet. If you go to one that charges by the pound, you're careful about what you take. If you go to one that doesn't charge by the pound, you take as much as you want and are casually wasteful about what you leave on the plate. Simple human nature.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Growing up in the 20th century the mission to mars was always just around the corner when presented in science books and media in general. At some point I got used to hearing the so-called predicted dates for when this could happen being pushed back yet another decade after yet another decade. The cold war race to the moon was one thing. But I think the only way we will ever conceivably branch out into space beyond the moon (and to mars) is for nations to work together sharing resources and knowledge. Nice to see these steps being taken in the right direction.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
With so many modules built, independently, in so many countries, spare parts from cancelled Russian and stalled American programs re-purposed, multiple, incompatible electrical systems, and whatnot, it's pretty easy to see that the ISS mode of international cooperation was not particularly efficient. Billions of dollars could have been saved if it had been coordinated in a smarter way. ISS was a success by some measures, but probably shouldn't be used as a model to be copied.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
We've already seen what Globalization does when "the" economy has issues. A housing crisis in the USA doesn't cause issues in China without globalization.
The Free Trade advocates always sold the advantages, which were readily calculable; but ignored the disadvantages which are harder to measure until you actually experience them.
Only now are people beginning to realize something that should have been apparent right from the start: one single, massive economic system is inherently bad. It's like a monopoly. There's no backup.
It's even worse if you take this philosophy and duplicate it outside the financial realm. We already see this with the "war on drugs". Many countries that would like to legalize may not do so, not because of internal resistance; but because they've signed a UN convention.
Now take that, and apply it to ALL the laws. Yuck.
Most people don't like war, but if the alternative is a "one size fits all" solution, there will be times when it doesn't fit, and war becomes the only alternative. They just won't be wars between nation-states anymore. They'll all be civil wars, which are oftentimes far worse.
Also, what about refugees? Tell me, where do the boat people go when everywhere is Cuba?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?