Slashdot Mirror
NASA Reveals Hundred Year Starship Program
cmansley writes "NASA Ames Director Simon Worden revealed that NASA Ames has 'just started a project with DARPA called the Hundred Year Starship,' with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA. Worden said 'Larry [Page] asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, "Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?"'"
What has going to mars got to do with a starship? Shirley, a starship would be about going to another star.
So we're just 999 million dollars short?
How is an interplanetary transport a "starship"?
The article has some interesting tidbits about electric planes. A quick read. Take a look.
I would cut and paste a couple sentences here, but chrome+slashdot don't let me do that...
In other news: Google To Expand Outsourcing
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
http://www.google.com/virgle/ ;-)
$10 billion to $1-2 billion? What corners are they going to cut I wonder...
"Ok astronauts, we had some budget cuts so you will have to hold your breath once you get out of our atmosphere..."
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
.. oh, you mean ALIVE?
one-way..... he and Sergey Brin not getting along these days? Or do they have someone else in mind?
The kind of people who will volunteer for a one-way trip to Mars aren't the ones you want representing your country on a one-way trip to Mars.
Well, that should pay for the catering for a year.
But seriously, I know DARPA and NASA are just fulfilling their primary missions here (i.e., dazzling the press with PR), but is there anyone out there still gullible enough to think that ANYTHING will ever come of this, that this is anything more than pissing $1.1 million down a hole? With changing administrations, there is no way that DARPA or NASA could ever mount even a 10-year campaign for anything anymore, much less a 100-year.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...without your manned launch ability.
I think it's funny how much touting of past success and distant future goals the present administration seems to do after dismantling the US manned space program by executive order. (Rushed out days before congress could vote on emergency funding.)
NASA and the rest of the industry would be unable to do it. The entire industry is oriented around project based operations with a defined start and end. Where is the "end" of a one way colonization ship? If an accident wipes them all out? Its incompatible with the whole corporate structure and mindset. Example, after the project ends, you get evaluated and perhaps promoted, on a project that never ends, that means you never get promoted, I'm sure they'll love that.
That's also why the cost concept is pointless. They mean $1B per bi-annual colonization shuttle sending more and more people, supplies, and capital goods? Or is it just a one time stunt?
I would not mind a one-way trip at all, IF I knew there was a continuous line of people behind me lining up for their one way trip. But if I/we were being abandoned to die there, when vital material X finally runs out, not so cool, I'm staying home. Its also psychologically safer if you imagine your friends and family could theoretically join you on the next ship, rather than you'll never see them again.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
That's how Bugs Bunny did it like 50 years ago and It only took 20-30 seconds to get there. 2-3 Billion seems like a waste.
Reference Material: "Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century"
Then offer $2 billion to put someone on Mars. The Chinese probably won't take your money for political reasons, but I'm damn sure India will, probably buying Chinese rocket parts off the shelf.
Oh, wait - you meant, how can we give $2 billion to Americans to do it? Well, forget it - you need to spend that much just on the Oversight Steering Committee Review Board's annual team building retreat to Aspen.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
$10 billion does seems pretty cheap, look at the price tag for the shuttle program. The scary part is the "one-way" aspect. So what they take the astronaut scrubs and put them on that mission? They would have to put that person in a holding chamber until it reached Mars or they might hit the eject button.
I was expecting to read some radical plan for getting to the Gliese 581 star system with some kind of Orion nuclear pulse starship built from a moonbase. Instead I read about interplanetary travel and even airships. Interstellar travel is exactly what we should be planning. We've already mostly explored our own system with robotic probes. Time to move on. I picture large scale uranium mining on the moon similar to the mining operations in the film Moon, and a huge spaceship manufacturing base. Something like that is what we really need to get the the next phase of space exploration. In addition to building solar system sized interferometer telescope arrays to see which systems are worth visiting. Although Gliese 581 is an obvious choice. Nasa should be focusing on a permanent lunar settlement as its next immediate goal.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Why have we not started a project based on a scaled up(more fuel) ion-propulsion engine to send something out of the solar system? We have our ears craning to the sky to hear a 1/2 watt voyager signal, but we could be sending something else deeper, faster, more powerful and with a lot more scientific instruments on it.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
So how about a nuclear accelerator ring as a propulsion device. Instead of the two proton beams colliding, they would be projected from each edge of the accelerator ring. The ring should be lighter than an earth based one because a vacuum is already present. A nuclear power plant would be required to power the ring, and a tank of hydrogen would be required as a proton source (Unless hydrogen or protons can be harvested from the solar wind).
The perfect engine would generate 1G of acceleration over a multiple year period.
With this engine, a trip to Mars should be a rather shorter endeavour.
Anybody have any idea what it would take to build such a thing, Or how fast such a thing could get to Mars at it's closest approach assuming 1G of acceleration?
.
This is a great idea. Send someone who has a short life span but is still healthy enough to do the job. There will be thousand of volunteers. What a glorious exit ! What a great commitment example for the people !
No problem 1 billion dollars please. As long as they do not read the fine print about the return ticket costing 9 billion.
Find out if you are going to be on the "A" ship, the "B" ship, or the "C" ship.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
it's the new austrailia
To beam energy to a vessel, you have to cross the atmosphere. Methinks you're not just going to only heat up the vessel.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Interesting take.. But, the "project" would be set up with the endpoint being "got to mars", just like we do with other space activities. Your project might end with "delivered spacecraft to the pad, ready for launch".
But $100k from NASA means basically 3-4 months work for one person. This is clearly a "study" type activity. With the total of about a million, you can get some people together in a room periodically, run some simulations, and write a decent report. For instance, just setting up an experiment to test their 140GHz propulsion scheme might burn the whole million. Sending significant power at 140 GHz through the atmosphere is going to be a challenge. Absorption is moderate (about 2-3 dB total, if clear, dry sky), but propagation uncertainties will make "forming the beam" as shown in the picture a challenge.
$1,100,000 is hardly enough money to get the stationery and logos printed up. It hardly constitutes the "funding" of a program.
I think it's sad how the US government can print up trillions of dollars to reward select banks and companies like GM by taking away the consequences of screwing up, and yet they keep NASA worse than starving by giving them these paltry amounts. Either shut it down, or fund it properly. These halfway measures are just an utter waste of money.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Cost of sending people 1 way to Afghanistan or Iraq.
Priceless.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
We're spending more than 10 bil to send all sorts of people on a one way trip to Afghanistan to "negotiate" mineral rights. The terrain there is very similar to Mars.
It sounds heartless right? However the person whos dying and is told "You can be the first person on mars and we will provide enough supplies and medication for the rest of your life and big chunk of money for your family and let you have the biggest blowout party in history but your not coming home". It aint such a bad deal.
My enthusiasm for the contents of the article waned when I read "Kurzweil" in the URL. More often than not, claims made when he or his name are within glancing distance always seem more ridiculous than they would be otherwise.
I think the Song was better...
Turning US$ 2 Billion into US$ 100 Billion in 100 years is no big deal. One just needs a 4% return above inflation. That is trivial for a good asset manager with a long term outlook.
In fact, make it into the "120 year starship program" and we will have US$ 220 Billion to play (don't you love compound interest rates?).
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
The AC responder makes a good point, but also missed something. You're confusing a "project" with a "program". Programs have lots of projects and milestones which you could be working on and get promoted for accomplishing. A project is a component task, assisting goal, or tangible feature.
An example of the difference: Military recruiting is a program that never ends (just like the one way colonization ship) but there are many projects that people work on that do end like this year's USMC recruitment TV commercial (or as the AC said, delivering the spaceship to the launch pad and prep it for launch).
The only people responsible for the success of a program are program directors and upper management, who are already at the top of their game and are gauged based on quarterly/yearly performance rather than end-of-program success.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Wow, yeah, hell let's just get stoned, come up with crazy halfbaked dreams and get grant monies! One million dollars, this guy's so fucking delusional he probably thinks he just got elected Shadow President by the Secret Chiefs of the Universe. Fucking MORON.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
“Anybody that watches the [Star Trek] Enterprise, you know you don’t see huge plumes of fire. Within a few years we will see the first true prototype of a spaceship that will take us between worlds.”
:)
So we are to assume that Gene Roddenberry had more insight on space travel and engineering than actual NASA engineers?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
...what the point of getting humans to Mars is? It's not science. We have robots and will soon have better robots. It's not resources. There's nothing *there* worth bringing back from a distant gravity well. If we're going that far out, why not just do a mining survey of the asteroid belts and find out which ones might be heading our way at the same time.
Sounds like NASA doing what it does best. Avoiding practical real world missions at all costs. Guess why people want to cut their budgets?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Isn't this just a wish-list by NASA considering the current lack of any way to actually implement it given how Congress seems to mess things up and change their mind every term?
Until we fix this problem, we're going nowhere. We need to lock in funding and missions for a few decades instead of a a couple of years at a time. Having a bunch of idiots in Congress who know nothing about science and engineering changing the game plan more often than we change Presidents is just crazy.
Well, he came up with concepts, and not really the science behind it. What's happened is the scientific community sees these kinds of things, and thinks, "Hey, we can make that!" Then they try to develop the science, and they're succeeding at a reasonible pace. I'd actually argue that starting with the design in mind makes the process easier, because then you already know the end result you're trying to reach.
Average members of our specie had lots of practice in abandoning friends and family; we can cope with that. And in this case even a decent communication would be possible, if a bit far from realtime.
Too bad the financing in the style of New World colonists probably can't work, there'll be probably nothing which could repay the debt in a reasonable amount of time. At least there's always place for "spiritual" reasons, I guess - which faith is willing to claim the Mars for itself with a first temple/etc.? ;p
One that hath name thou can not otter
No no no, NASA, you've got it all wrong! You're supposed to ask for less funds than you need! Then when you do pull off your mission to Mars, you look like miracle workers!
If the maximum distance from the Earth to Mars is 401.3 million km, then the statuses that they read on Facebook or Twitter will be no newer than 22 minutes. This does not include the initial HTTP request.
With the time and money that NASA puts into researching issues as minor as "how are astronauts supposed to poop in space without gravity", I'm sure that this "gotcha" has not been overlooked.
If they are still considering investing in sending someone to Mars knowing full well about this hang-up, It is reasonable to conclude that somewhere, someone, has successfully developed an ansible, and that they are keeping this technology from us.
Mars Direct (or Semi-Direct) plan can't be used for the Moon on account that Moon has no atmosphere.
Which would be the source of the fuel for the trip back home.
Also, most things that were a part of the Mars Direct plan were there because they are an issue if you are going to MARS. Not Moon.
Prolonged exposure to 0-gravity, fuel, launch window every 1.5 years etc.
Take a break and watch the documentary about it for more info.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
All the spending items you mention have some clear immediate need they are addressing. Sending people to Mars does not have a clear immediate need.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Sounds like the words of a Biotech Nutter. ;-)
I don't think the future is going to be as rosy as you hope. Overpopulation, pollution, climate change, fuel and water crises, etc. Interesting times, certainly, but unpleasant for large groups of people.
signed, the Ecoterrorist Nutter.
OMG! They will waste billions and kill American astronauts in the process!
No... to late... if only you were there to point out that Wikipedia article to them sooner.
Come on...
BESIDES the fact that the Hydrogen payload is going AHEAD of the rest of the mission so the fuel for the trip back is already there when astronauts arrive - don't you think that they would you know... include the proper safety measures for landing 6 tons of H2 and a FUCKING NUCLEAR REACTOR ON THE FUCKING MARS?!
Since the contemporary political reaction to any insufficiently large disaster is to create the conditions for truly massive failures (aka. the "stimulus), the big hydrogen clouds on mars must look pretty attractive to Obama ...
Oh! I'm sorry... Didn't realize you were a troll, just going about your daily business.
Terribly sorry about. Didn't mean to offend your race or culture or anything.
There are some nice political stories coming up in the Firehose. You might like them.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Dude: How far do you have to drive every morning to get to work?
Homey: 10 miles
Dude: Can you get there in 1 or 2?
Homey: Nope
What about the alien terrorists!?!?!?
We must spend on space. Think of the children!
Hey cheer up Mr. Smith you will be the first man on mars. The bad news is you will die on impact when your capsule crashes into the planet at 40 times the speed of sound. Budgets cuts and all that we can't afford to slow you down, or bring the supplies needed for you to survive and return. Nobody every said making history was going to be easy.
No method has yet been created (as in, put into practice) to enable human bodies to withstand prolonged microgravity. Physiologically we're just not built for it. Our bodies have grown in earth's gravity, our blood vessels below the chest have grown to return blood against gravity back to the heart. As yet, there's no viable method for keeping a human able to do what they need to do in microgravity for a very long period and enable them to function properly once they reach the surface (and gravity environment) of another planet.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_medicine
...but a lot of this gets omitted from the political rhetoric and financial posturing because we don't like admitting that we're squishy earth-bound creatures.
$1 million will last about a week on a program like this.
It will also buy 1/6th of a bionic man.
So you would tell the wright bothers not to bother, because someone is sure to come along with a better design soon, a better design based on... oh wait.
I don't think you got how science works. For the next generation X, you need the current generation. This ain't a game of Civ were you can cheat your way from the stone age to the exodus.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Putting humans on Mars is of absolutely no value what-so-ever except for stroking people's egos and for marketing purposes.
Over the last 4 decades I've heard all sorts of ridiculous plans for putting people on Mars. But no one can give a solid argument on why that would be any better than sending robots. And don't get me started on those terraforming morons. Mars has no useful magnetosphere to prevent any significant atmosphere from being torn away by solar winds. Mars is a money pit, don't start digging!
The Governator himself said it : " GET YOUR ASS TO MARS! "
Are you going to argue with him?!
What more reason do you need?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Possibly. A.C. Clarke apparently did.
Well, actually, I am American. But I'm not from the USA.
If I were, which I'm not, I'd outsource it to those Brooklyn guys. They most certainly mirror the old US spirit of entrepreneurship: doing the impossible at the lowest budget.
Heck, I'd hire them to come everyday at 8 o'clock and sit on an elevated chair -- for employees to look at them and stop saying it can't be done or requiring billions.
BTW, /. , it sucks. Stop doing that, if possible. You know what I mean.
Why wait that long?
The only good reason to wait that long is if it sucks resources away from more important or more urgent endeavors.
Oh wait....
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You don't need a Starship to get to Mars, a starship is for going out of the solar system.
Why go to Mars anyway?
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids,
There already ARE US personnel on Mars.
Search "Andrew Basiago"
Great link - thank you Sir - or Ma'am, as the case may be. I'm busy downloading the series.
"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
The U.S. taxpayers did.
DARPA deals with cutting edge technology. Like the first packet switching network, telepathic spies, and cars that can drive themselves.
By 1975 ARPANET was no longer cutting edge pure R&D but rather a growing production system. As such control & funding of ARPANET was transfered to the Defense Communication Agency. No matter how massively sucessful ARPANET was (or could have been) DARPA was never going to fund it forever. That isn't how DARPA works. It is a incubator for technology. Those technologies are either abandoned (like telepathic spies) or move on to production systems (like APRANET).
Similarly today DARPA is doing research into autonomous vehicles. However someday when those vehicles are in production DARPA will move on to other projects.
I grant you research into telepathic spies wasn't the most productive but is a misnomer to say DARPA abandoned ARPANET.
ARPANET remained functional until 1990 (although by 1983 the military nodes had broken away to form the isolated MilNET).
It was the first, and being first, was best,
but now we lay it down to ever rest.
Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.
For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years
of faithful service, duty done, I weep.
Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.
-- Requiem of the ARPANET
Mars has no useful magnetosphere to prevent any significant atmosphere from being torn away by solar winds
A good point that's often ignored/missed. Though I have, on occasion, wondered if a magnetosphere could be created with nukes or something (Obviously, IANAGeologist)
If just one "astronaut farmer" could get to mars, and upon arrival declare himself "King of the Planet" and refuse to pay tax to any earth bound government, then that would trigger every nation with a rocket program to head to Mars to establish a colony and snuff out any idea of libertarian personal sovereignty.
Or if a probe found evidence of life then the world super powers would be obliged to send in a force to eradicate the potential threat. We don't have a funding problem, we have a motivation problem.
This is like friend running DOS 3.o (his first computer purchase). That thing is still running.
Every time I'd talk him about getting a new computer he says he is just about ready to. I remember when he was going to get that 386, but while at the store he read a magazine about the 486. He actually went to the store and was going to buy a 486DX 25mhz computer and the guy was telling him pretty soon the 486 DX2 was coming. 50MHz!!! So he decided to wait. Same happened with the DX4 and then the Pentium. The Pentium II, III, PIV.
I talked to him the other day about the Intel i9. He said the current one uses 22nm process, but in a month the new i9 using an 18nm process should be shipping, so he'll just wait and get one then.
Seriously, we should set up a donation account for that.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Have you tried discussing your ideas in English that is intelligent and easy-to-follow, discursive rather than pedagogical, and isn't bludgeoned to death with myriad tiny hammers of stupid stylistic choices? You might find people don't immediately discount you as a tool!
Would you like a slice of toast?
You are one of those guys that never buys a computer because next year they'll be faster right?
Do they accept nominations? :P
I can see no immediate flaws in your logic.
Disclaimer: I'm probably one of the most conservative religious posters on slashdot, I'm a little further right than what most "evangelicals" are, though I do think I have the ability to think for myself.
That being said, we can spend a trillion dollars to go to war for barely truthful reasons (at best), but can't spend 10 billion to go to mars?
Even as a creationist, there is something wrong here.
Yes.
Truthfully though, it is a good model on which to draw inspiration. Cochran's first warp flight was 2063. Ambitious? Maybe, but then we've still got half a century of science to go. Consider the technological advances we've made in the last 50 years. On most accounts our knowledge growth isn't linear it's accelerating. The notions proposed while certainly dosed heavily with Hollywood aren't as far fetched as you'd expect from what our physicists are claiming possible.
"If you're a conservative, you worry about it killing us; if you're a liberal, you worry about us killing it."
And you were doing so well. Leave the politics at the door, and try working on actual space problems, eh?
"why don't we modify life ... including the human genome ... so it's better suited to [Mars]?"
How about we figure out how to live on Mars instead? Basically, Mars is a very, very high plain, at an altitude where atmosphere is insufficient for humans to survive on the air alone. How hard is it to drag around a supply of air to breathe? hard? I don't think so. Cold is pretty simple to solve. Go to L.L. Bean before you leave. It's really about getting there, with enough supplies to establish ourselves, and a way to maintain sustainable resources like food.
"Worden also thinks we should go to the moons of Mars first, where we can do extensive telerobotics exploration of the planet. "I think we'll be on the moons of Mars by 2030 or so."
We're doing telerobotics ALREADY ON MARS. Are you aware of that? Sheesh.
"Larry [Page] asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, 'Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?' So now we're starting to get a little argument over the price."
We were ALWAYS in an argument over the price. So we still are.
I really expect better from NASA. Am I being too harsh? Did I miss something?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Seriously, thank you for noticing that money spent on space exploration is actually spent here on earth and therefore doesn't simply disappear from the economy.
I've seen too many negative comments about how spending money on space exploration is a waste when we have problems here on earth. The way some people talk, you would think we were proposing taking billions of dollars and sending it all into space.
"They're everywhere, and they're against the American way of life!" Instant funding for any Mars space voyage.
... and make your visit to Mars in the last 10 when the money grew to billions and technology will have advanced.
You can't even write NUCLEAR properly, why should we believe the rest of your crap?
Don't get me wrong... rocket science isn't my area, but I'd like to pretend I'm at least logical.
The way I see it, one way to Mars takes a few steps :
1) Design an build a means of travel from orbit to Mars.
2) Get the components of the ship into space and assemble them.
3) Transport a human to the ship and perform final testing
4) Break orbit and shoot for mars.
Each component of the ship can be design to be self assembling using small thrusters on the units and mechanical arms. With enough cameras, it can be remotely controlled at all times.
Each component should be small enough to be launched using normal satellite launch equipment. I was under the impression that the chinese and/or the indian's were doing this for $100,000 a pop now.
The hardest part is transporting enough fuel and water for the flight. I'd imagine that SpaceX can deal with this. As they'll have a "heavy lifter" ready for this specific purpose soon and they're cheap.
The cost is engineering and testing. You might have to send up 5-10 of these things and lost a bunch before you find a successful way to produce a proper airlock by using means of unmanned assembly. The size of the ship will be limited strictly by costs of launching. You can send up enough modules to make a mansion if you wanted.
Somehow I always pictured it would look something like Capsula. Each module would be big enough for a human to rotate freely on all axises in. The units would connect and disconnect, creating and/or breaking an airlock when doing so.
The life sustaining equipment would probably need to come from NASA guys since you'd need good air recycling equipment. Water recycling, etc.
As for getting to Mars, I don't see any reason this needs to be one way. For a billion, you should be able to launch enough water and food to make the return trip. Though I'd imagine that would be purely and orbital flight. But when you got back, you can resupply and send up more capsules, possibly including a means of landing and relaunch.
I'd imagine that a much better idea would be to attempt to make an orbit or 10 around Mars, launch something to land, recover soil samples, relaunch, meet back at the craft and head home.
NASA knows how to do things big... but I bet you give a few guys like John Carmack half a billion to work with, he'll make something spectacular.
Absent an imminent threat, real or perceived, the average voter doesn't want to fund anything, especially in today's political climate. It's easy to campaign for increasing military spending because of the evil terrorists. {...} In contrast, it's very difficult to win elections running on platform of increasing our efforts in space. Most voters don't understand why we're even up there and wouldn't care if they did because it doesn't impact their day to day lives or their perceived sense of security.
Then what we need is more astronomers discovering more asteroids with a significant probability window of hitting earth some time in the future...
We have to find a way to scare enough people from space so they start pumping funds into space exploration.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Get some convincing shots of a "global killer" that's "20 years out" and lots of geeks saying it's a "99% guarantee to hit the planet" and you'd get your funding real quick.
Like this one, or like that one which came close but might had his orbit perturbed enough to come closer some time in the future ?
Then, when it "misses" (because it wasn't there) and the geeks say "oh, this was an imperial unit asteroid, we were doing the calcs in metric. Our bad. But look, we got cool space ships!
Sorry, but I fail to see why you need to give an explanation why the meteorite only came closely by instead of hitting earth ?
I mean : You're the country who started a war against another based on weapons of mass destruction that didn't even exist in the first place ? And you think you need to provide complex metric-vs-imperial based excuses ? Or the actually "shrinking probability cone" explanations ?!?
At worst, you could explain them the keyhole phenomenon and buy an additionnal decade of funding.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]