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Europe's Space Agency Wants To Do What NASA Can't
coondoggie writes "The European Space Agency is moving forward with a plan to land an autonomous spacecraft on the moon by 2017, with the idea a manned vehicle could land there sometime in the future. It's a mission NASA had on its roadmap before the current budget debate, but such plans seem doomed now. The ESA is now seeking proposals for a lunar lander that would land on the south polar region of the Moon, which possible deposits of water ice, heavily cratered terrain, and long periods of sunlight make promising for explorers and scientists, the agency stated."
I do hereby formally propose April 1 as International Internet Abstinence day.
Heh, I just got it. Took me a while.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I'm reasonably sure this isn't an April Fools. See story from the horse's mouth, dated 31st March.
If it is an April Fools joke then the joke is ultimately on them. That something like this could be considered absurd would only highlight how incredibly pathetic space programmes have been for the last 30 years.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
a manned trip to mars would be the only goal i could think of that would truely be worth the price tag for an achievement just to say we have done it (similar to why we went to the moon), with all our technology we are still yet to walk on another planet.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Really? So NASA can't send an unmanned lander to the lunar surface?
/. to stop posting shitty stories.
First of all, NASA has done this several times. Second of all, NASA is great at seeking proposals to do things they won't do, which is all the story from the ESA side is at this point. And lastly, I want do to do things NASA can't, who doesn't? You know, like, get
We already did it. With both automated systems and manual. Multiple times. Likewise, we have landed a number of different systems using different approaches on Mars. ESA still has not put one on mars (though apparently into it) or any place that requires something difficult (doing a parachute on titan is not that difficult).
Personally, I would rather that NASA get our CHEAP private space into orbit and help them get multiple destinations for money (via bigelow aerospace private space stations), while working on new approaches on putting a real base on the moon and mars.
With that said, I am glad that ESA is working towards doing a system to actually land on a planet/moon using active systems. It will be a good education for them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No, it isn't.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Do you actually work for NASA?
NASA represents the United States of America. As Americans, we can associates ourselves with NASA, just as we do with our military. If the Army invades a country, WE invaded that country. Simple concept really...
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
I have worked for NASA on MGS.
Secondly, I have little doubt that NASA still CAN. In addition, I suspect that NASA will be doing one or more of these missions once OBAMA lays out goals (assuming that it is moon and not mars). In the end, it will not matter. If NASA does not go to the moon directly, they will do so indirectly with private space. IOW, they will help private space to do so. My belief is that once WE (as in America) have private space up and running, then NASA will combine with private space, and likely all of the ISS partners to go to the moon. After all, with water and uranium there, there is now going to be real strong pressures to get there since it will be cheaper and safer to be there for any length of time.
Finally, NASA is OWNED by all Americans. So it is CORRECT for ANY American to refer to WE in this context.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
just start it already ffs!
...
Man, this place is a cesspool today. A cesspool!
Facebook is the new AOL
Like understanding metric?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
that have no WMDs, you could indeed save a lot of money.
Or: NASA Wants To Do What NASA Can't
which is totally what she said
I do not know why someone modded you a troll on your post. Well, unless someone thought Troll was synonymous with ignorant and tried to be ironic which is humorous to say the least.
Anyways, the water in your back yard is very expensive to get into space. In fact, it's so expensive that stopping on the moon to pick it on the way to mars or wherever up would ultimately be cheaper then taking it from earth. Imagine carrying a pale of water up a 300 meter incline to dump into a pool. Now imagine you have to fill this pool up which would require 2379 trips with a 5 gallon pale to fill a 24 foot pool. Now imagine doing the same with a 300 meter trip across level land. That's not quite the different in effort and energy that would be spent but should give you an idea.
As for mining, well, they say there is plenty of Helium-3 on the moon (or so they say) and just one cargo bay of the space shuttle full of it could supply all of the US's energy demands for at least one year. Of course that would require cold fusion to be more then a pipe dream but Helium-3 is currently rare on earth so a cleaner energy source could be one product other then water for future space exploration that could be mined.
But lets go back to the water for instance. Suppose a manned mission to mars was going to take 4 people to mars and back. Now they say you should drink 8 8-ounce glasses of water a day. Your food will provide about 20% of the total fluid intake so you need to add more water to remain healthy. But lets ignore that and the entire if your active you need more and so on and take a safe constant of 8-8ounce glasses of water per day. Now there is 128 ounces in a gallon and 8 8-ounce glasses is 64 ounces. Times that by the 4 people and you have 256 ounces or 2 gallons of water for each day. Of course this doesn't account for laundry or bathing or anything, just to drink. So it takes between 6-8 months to reach mars and the same to return. At a round 30 days to a month, that's 360-480 gallons of water one way or 720-960 gallons round trip. At 8.3 pounds to a gallon of water, you are looking at 5,976-7,968 pounds (3614kg) extra to lift off from earth. At $5 to $10K per pound to launch into space, we are looking at roughly 59 millon just to get the water up there.
Of course they wouldn't actually send that kind of water up as they could recycle most of it (if you don't mind drinking refined wastes). But solar panels could split the water into oxygen and hydrogen, compress them to a liquid state, and supply the fuel for the trip back or maybe even a detour. Getting to the water on the moon could be the key to doing what you would like with other planets/destinations.
The whole reason this is important, and that no-one seems to be talking about here, is that we need another planet. There's no way we can sustain our current population on this planet into the future, and the population is growing. People will start to die en mass and life will become tragic and harsh for a much higher ratio of people (currently, thats just life in the worst places to live). We need to figure out how to create contained ecosystems and how to use the resources of other planets (and moons and asteroids and dwarf planets and eventually exoplanets). Some work is going to get done in LEO for sure, but advancing the knowledge of how to actually exist on another planet will always be valuable and important progress. Eventually, earth will just be a retirement planet, where its nature and remaining resources are protected and safe from development, and can be treated like the rare and delicate jewel that it is.
... just one cargo bay of the space shuttle full of it could supply all of the US's energy demands for at least one year.
Not to worry, we'll just scale up our demands to make full use of the available supply.
Happy Weekend, Sir!
The high cost to the human race's colonization of space, is caused by the complexity and danger of reaching and leaving escape velocity within the earth's atmosphere, whilst dragging the fuel with which this is achieved up from the earth's gravity well, this is illogical when a supply of rocket fuel is close at hand on the moon.
The Space Shuttle turned out to be an expensive and dangerous white elephant, the reason the Shuttle was so expensive is, because of its complexity with millions of different manufactured parts and the requirement to lift the fuel up from the earths surface with which it achieves escaped velocity.
There is another route, we can reach the edge of space no problem Burt Rutan proved this with Space Ship one, when he won the 'X' prize by reaching over 100 km twice in one week.
Yes the Shuttle was 'reusable' but in name only. They could not have turned that around in a week.
One idea could be to create rocket fuel on the moon, there is lots of water on the moon, use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen which makes very good rocket fuel.
Use robot technology controlled from the earth to create the rocket fuel.
Use the rocket fuel to fuel a space tug, use the space tug to accelerate and decelerate Space Ship one, to and from escape velocity in the safety of a vacuum.
The moon is the door to the solar system
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
Nobody was talking about manned missions. Simply sending autonomous drones out into the solar system to do the work, then there's no need for large amounts of water. And yeah who said I was trollin? I just disagreed slightly from the expected response that everyone else parrotted along with
~don't feel threatened by my pineal~
How is europe going to the moon doing something that NASA can't? NASA has already been to the moon. Not just once but several times. Its not a big priority to go back because we already did that . While everybody works on how to get to the moon we are working on how to get to mars.
Suppose a manned mission to mars was going to take 4 people to mars and back. Now they say you should drink 8 8-ounce glasses of water a day. Your food will provide about 20% of the total fluid intake so you need to add more water to remain healthy. But lets ignore that and the entire if your active you need more and so on and take a safe constant of 8-8ounce glasses of water per day. Now there is 128 ounces in a gallon and 8 8-ounce glasses is 64 ounces. Times that by the 4 people and you have 256 ounces or 2 gallons of water for each day. O
Survival experts will tell you that a good rule of thumb for survival situations is 1 gallon per person per day. This is for drinking, cooking, and washing. More would be better for long term comfort. Of course, this comes from experience with terrestrial wilderness survival, I don't know how the conditions in a spacecraft/habitat would affect that. Certainly you would have recycling systems as you mentioned. If we are talking about just water for human consumption, then in a perfectly closed environment with minimal waste I would imagine you could continuously recycle say 5-6 gallons per person.
But given that Hydrogen and Oxygen are also primary fuel and air components, your concept of "one stop shopping" at a fueling station on the moon seems very practical.
If you want to talk WW2 in relation to parent posters, don't forget how it helped to build economic strenght in the US...
And yes, Russia sometimes steamrolls into countries that they think they can dominate...US totally doesn't do that? Or, for that matter, did it do anything during recent such moves by Russia?
Don't kid yourself about geopolitical realities. Russia needs prosperous Europe. US too, plus staging bases.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Like the myth about US never being involved in imperialistic tendencies much?
Plus with how US military is overstretched now...
One that hath name thou can not otter
There is already some water recycling on ISS, spacecraft environment can be essentially closed, and considering ISS is just our training ground before long missions into deeper space...
(you still want lots of water from smaller gravity well (makes the initial launch so much cheaper...) of course, as you say for fuel and also for shielding)
BTW, I don't know why you equate Helium-3 usefulness with cold fusion (which will likely remain a pipe dream). H3 is good for "hot fusion" because the process is much easier to handle (there's much less readiation of the kind which degrades reactor, easier to handle byproducts, etc.)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Fuel depot on the Moon doesn't sound usefull to you, also for unmanned probes?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Well, if you look at the issue primarilly from the perspective of Mars Global Surveyor, I'm sure you've heard about Mars Express... ;)
(though landing on Titan not being that difficult is an...oversimplification)
BTW, how NASA is "owned" (especially in relation to ESA) might have proved to be a hindrance, IMHO. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but basically NASA activities (which includes deals with subcontractors) are financed from a "monolithic" federal budget, but where (to which states) that money goes has little relation to from where (from which states) most of it came from. Which might have worked fine during space race, when it was also a matter of national pride; but now it seems to take on characteristics of pork barrel politics (I think the recent mess with Constellation might be a good example)
Contrast that with ESA (which achieved nice successes with limited resources after all...), where the say of memberstates in regards to direction of activities and who actually does them is directly tied with financial input from each memberstate. I think that's more workable, more sustainable in the long term (yes, recent push towards towards private companies should gradually push things into sustainable tracks for NASA)
One that hath name thou can not otter
haha, good one.
NASA wants to do what congress won't fund them to do.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
So what you're saying is that we need to get cracking on mining space, because doing all this space stuff is going to consume a lot of resources? Let's think about that one a little more carefully, shall we?
True, for what it's worth. But when are we going to figure this out? The answer seems to range somewhere between "not for a really, really long time" and "never". Until such time as the problem of cheap access to space is solved, these questions resemble nothing so much as "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"
No. What we really need to make manned missions to various celestial bodies is some reason to actually do it. Bringing fragile humans millions of miles through space, landing them, and bringing them back safely is really, really expensive. And what do you get out of it that you can't get from unmanned probes?
NASA (like every other serious engineering outfit) balances the amount of risk they're willing to take against the payoff they think they'll get. NASA's clients, the American people, have very sensibly decided that they're not willing to get a bunch of astronauts killed for the extremely limited payoff involved. And OBTW - it's clear that you really don't think there's any place for the discussion of risk (hint: when you refer to risk discussions as "blabbering and yakking" it kind of gives away the game).
Problem: earth is overpopulated. Proposed solution: ship lots of people off earth. Actually achievable solution: control our tendency to reproduce out of control. For those who haven't noticed, the population growth rate has dropped off significantly in recent decades, and shows every sign of continuing to drop. Not to mention the fact that shipping lots of people off planet would be so unimaginably expensive that it's a total non-starter.
Right, and it's not like building an entire solar powered refinery on the freaking MOON would be expensive or anything. Who's paying for that? What are they getting out of their investment?
News flash: your proposed "solution" is also absolutely wildly expensive.
Indeed. I only just got your word play, brain clearly doesn't work before 9am (GMT)...
which is totally what she said
Oh stop crying. I'm absolutely certain that the insurance policy you hold so dear will be on the approved list, if it costs so flipping much as you claim. You can bet that every policy the insurance company wants you to have will be available. If the insurance company decides your alleged cadillac plan costs them too much, they'll carefully avoid filing the paperwork to get it on the approved list, and stand around wringing their hands in despair that they can't provide it for you without taking yet more money from you for a second plan. Boohoo. And you will dutifully blame the government, while totally ignoring the fact you got screwed by people making a profit off of gambling with your health.
Needless to say, the health insurance "reform" bill I wanted was the one that bans for-profit health insurance companies outright and institutes a single-payer system. A system that only makes money when they don't help you is fundamentally, wildly, utterly broken.
Meanwhile, I haven't used health insurance in 15 years. Now I'll have to buy a policy. You think you're feeling a little robbed? Get in line.
Unless the rockets are going to use hydrogen from the water as fuel then no, it's pointless. Hydrogen is a very unstable form of fuel, which is the reason they don't allow cars to run on them. It wouldn't be economically viable to risk an expensive mission using this fuel, unless they were sending out say a hundred duplicate probes and allowing a number of them to fail. Even then it would be even more risky entering an atmosphere holding this as fuel. Feel free to vote me down and call me names though..
~don't feel threatened by my pineal~
Oh, absolutely know about the SATELLITE express. But those are relatively easy to do. OTH, this article and conversation is about LANDERS, so the right one to look at is the beagle 2. And I as I correctly pointed out, ESA still has not put one on mars (though apparently into it) or any place that requires something difficult (doing a parachute on titan is not that difficult). still stands (though to be fair, that is UK, not ESA). Basically, ESA has not had a successful lander, just a parachute suspended capsule (very easy to do; in fact, developed in old italy).
Sadly, when the politicians took over NASA, they tried to move things around in various states and helped create the jobs bill approach. Pretty much the same philosophy that ESA and EADS has. After all, they spread all of the work around EU. The issue with EU's approach is that the contracts go to whoever has the most money, not who has the ability to do something. Worse, a lot of ESA money is wasted in politics. Witness Galileo. Even with next to nothing to do in real research (all done for you), it is taking 2x as long. That is Politics.
OTH, America is (hopefully) about to take the approach of having multiple private launchers that are human and cargo rated. Ideally, we will have 2-4 Super heavy launchers available around 2020 (no sooner). That way, we have competition for services. To really lower our costs and get things past the politics, and be able to handle accidents, then we need multiple providers with differing arch. By 2013, we should have 1 human rated launcher, ASSUMING that congress does not screw up like they have for the last 18 years. In addition, we should 2-3 human rated launchers by 2015, possibly 2014, again based on what is expected (though I will admit that I am still shocked by Direct not happening so far).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I first learned about the Helium-3 in an article I was reading on the practical drawbacks causing cold fusion to be a pipe dream. I just equated the two together and never really thought about it much more outside of knowing that there is supposed to be loads of it on the moon.
My understanding of it which isn't to any great extent, is that there should be much more Helium-3 on the moon then there is accessible/usable plutonium on the earth and something with how the sun's rays pass over the moon would create a supply to replace any taken if enough time had passed so it's sort of renewable to boot. The connection to cold fusion is only because of my lack of knowledge with it. I do remember the lower radiation and all and that. Helium-3 isn't radioactive which makes it somewhat more desirable as a fuel if it was plentiful in supply.
Your previous post was modded as a troll which is why I brought it up. I couldn't tell you who did it. The comment wasn't about me believing it, but how silly it seems to mark you as one. I also understand that you have a difference of opinion then everyone else, I just seem to think that you weren't considering all of the possibilities.
As for manned missions, that's somewhat the goal of autonomous missions or has been with the US space agencies for a while. As far as Hydrogen being used as a fuel, the dangers of it that stop it from being used in a car is the danger to humans- not the machinery. The space shuttle used it right now and there are people pushing to turn the booster rockets into hydrogen fuel rockets so they can be reused. Anyways, as I stated before, the solar panels would create the hydrogen in transit while it was coasting to the destination so there wouldn't be too terribly much of it at one time. Something like that could allow an increase in speed as well as deceleration making a 6 month trip somewhat shorter. Also there is a benefit in space that isn't available on earth, we can simply position the containment devices on the side of the space craft opposite of the sun and use the lack of heat (no atmosphere so no ambient temperature) to aid in the cooling and stabilization of the hydrogen which would negate some of the instability problems preventing it's consumer use on earth.
but when it comes to spending a measly extra $3 billion on real science and progress they get the finger. wall street must be thrown down from it's slimy throne.
Maybe I should have put more effort into my original comment. It was a bit lazy lol
~don't feel threatened by my pineal~