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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?"'"
So we're just 999 million dollars short?
In other news: Google To Expand Outsourcing
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
$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?
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.
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.
How is Jefferson Starship a "starship"?
You should just go ahead and blame the last 25 years of administrations and congresses, not having a program to replace the shuttle isn't just a failure of the last 3 years.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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?
.
The proposal of a one-way tripe has been around for a long time. From what I have read, most, if not all people in the field that are qualified, would be willing to volunteer to go. And why not? You would be one of the first people to set foot on an alien world. You would be history. Movies would be made of your life. Ego aside, the experience would be amazing. You'd see things no other human ever has and discover things that could possible change the way humanity looks at itself. This would be one of the most epic journeys mankind has undertaken. Many qualified sane people would willingly volunteer to boldly go where no man has gone before.
With current technology (and current technology discovery rates), anything we send past the outer planets will, almost certainly, be overtaken by something else that we send later way before it ever makes any new discoveries. The speeds and distances involved mean that waiting 100 years (twice as long as the entire history of spaceflight) is more sensible because then we'd be able to build something that would overtake ANYTHING that we could send today. And, to be honest, it's quite probably that even THAT would be overtaken LONG before it got anywhere interesting (e.g. nearest star).
If we tried to catch the Voyager's NOW, it would take probably 15-20 years if we could use all the best technology (and assuming everything just worked as we expect it to). By that time, they'd be another 15-20 years in front. And the point at which we overtake them will be a point at which we could probably launch something from Earth that would get to the same point in much less time (and probably, again, overtake both!).
Interstellar travel is nonsense at the moment. It's a waste of money to put even one remote probe out that far because by the time it gets to anything interesting from an interstellar point of view (Voyager took nearly 25 years to get out of the solar system), we could build something that would launch, travel and pass it and have better sensors too. Any notion of sending these 20-generation, half-the-speed-of-light fanciful starships to other stars is a waste - unless you WANT your great-grandaughter to watch someone overtake them, waving as they go, and realise you are several generations away from your destination, several generations away from the home planet, AND you never got to any real interstellar science while you were travelling.
When something is possible in a generation (or possibly two) then it's worth doing. But it's really embarrassing to spend billions in order to be overtaken by a faster, better, cheaper probe that will get to your destination years before you ever do anything useful and was sent by people who've not had to do with food shortages, oxygen problems, radiation, muscle-weakening, etc.
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.
You know what I've been thinking? I'm thinking that if the US doesn't go ahead eventually with the idea of a one-way trip to claim the title of First Country on Mars, that China, with their, how do we say, somewhat greater "willingness to sacrifice the individual citizen for the greatness of national prestige" (so to speak), is going to get to it first, and a lot sooner than we all think.
And seriously, since it involves space travel, I'm willing to say good for them.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
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.
...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.
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.
First, the obvious conclusion of your argument is that we should never send anything into space because we will always be able to overtake it 20 years later.
Second, you ignore the benefits of the first 20 years of using the thing (i.e., knowing things 20 years earlier than we otherwise would have).
Third, building the initial improves our ability to build a successor. Without building one now, the one we build 20 years from now might be ten years behind where it otherwise could have been. We might as well not build anything we can send into space until we've got FTL travel down cold.
Your first assumption is wrong. Because there is a point of diminishing gains at which it can ONLY be worthwhile to go then. That's *not* now. Give it a few generations (more if the US wants to dismantle more of it's space budgets).
Second, those benefits will be few. Because, for a start, interstellar communication will be incredibly lagged and slow and unlikely to yield enough useful data. If it was useful, a probe would be much better. How are the best probes we've ever sent into the deepest part of space doing on collecting science and communicating back? Not too well. How much data have they sent us that we can use to build a replacement that does a better job? Not much. How many governments have thrown money after sending a probe that far on accomplishing the exact same thing already? Zero.
Your third point has merit, but again that suggests that (basically) 50% of the money we spent on doing such a mission would be wasted on poor attempts that we later improved, surpassed and overtook (literally).
Man's best spaceflight achievements were done on the basis of almost zero previous sojourns - first man in space, first man on moon, Voyagers, Mars Rovers (although we did have some stuff in orbit at the time). The fact that we'll "improve it later" doesn't mean we couldn't do that if we just waited anyway. Experience is good, but 25 years of technological advances in similar but unrelated fields is a hell of a lot better than the (possible) results of a single-shot mission (that might fail) which we won't be able to get significant data from because we will overtake it (and thus be travelling into the unknown before it ever would) before it can get that far.
1) We cannot already "send someone and get them back" from Mars, unless you're a member of an extraterrestrial race, and in that case, greetings.
2) We still talk about the settlers who landed at Roanoke, and still pretty much give them the honorary title of "first," even though they all died. Catch my drift?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
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
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.
There's always the idea of planning for your current ship being overtaken by the next wave of the fleet. That way, each ship would only have to be completely self sufficient for 20 years, and the first ships wouldn't have to be inhabited at all, they could just be loaded up with a huge amount of some important resource (water, nuclear fuel, whatever you're going to need). And if propulsion really improves as fast as you seem to think it will, the ships could easily request what resources they will need; only problem is that it assumes your base on Earth will still have the power and influence to continue launching ships. You'd arrive at the destination at the speed of your slowest ship, but by then you'd have a fleet with many different capabilities, a larger population, and with more resources than you ever could with a single ship.
There are a number of reasons to send missions sooner. First, going through the design process sooner will lead to more discoveries that might speed up research in space travel technologies or lead to other discoveries that might be useful here on Earth. Also, we are not guaranteed of producing a better space craft simply by waiting. The best way to improve our technological capabilities in terms of space travel is through actually traveling in space. The other advantage of sending a mission sooner is that if some cataclysmic disaster affected earth, at least the pioneers would be saved. So, we are increasing the chances of human survival simply by launching a mission, even if it is overtaken by faster ships later.
That ignores how many interesting targets beyond outer planets are well within 100 years of probe travel with current capabilities. How speed of Voyagers was determined by their mission and budget, not only technical limitations (a Saturn V with NERVA upper stage and on the probe, borrowed from the Soviets, ion xenon thruster with nuclear reactor could all give a much higher speed, and nothing worse from what we can do few decades later; but it would actually limit their usefulness, limit flyby times during Grand Tour)
Generation ships are overall a horrible idea - if we'll even do direct interstellar travel, it will be probably by the means of embryo colonization. Even then at most 0.2c or so, possibly not more than 0.1. And probably just gradual spread across our scattered disk and Oort cloud; ultimately also other Oort clouds. What's the point in "overtaking" in such setting anyway? Contrary to wishes, we will almost certainly not find a nice semi-habitable planet nearby, there's no reason to rush just to move your space habitat in a virtually identical place.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
probably because the winds of change have them knee deep in the hoopla causing them to go to deep space/virgin sky whilst leaving Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Starship_discography
That would have been funnier if you hadn't used italics or provided the link. As it is, you just shouted "hey look at me, I made a FUNNY!"
In a perfect world, you would be right. We would just wait until we are ready.
The problem is that is not how it works. First, you need to not only build up competency, you also need to build confidence that we can do things like this. No one will want to launch an interstellar craft without having tried something that goes some substantial fraction of the way. There are practical reasons for this, but also morale reasons. No one is going to feel confident in going interplanetary to interstellar in one single program even if the theory is solid. Considering that we know absolutely nothing about interstellar space first-hand, it is not an unreasonable attitude to take.
Second, even if we accept that approach and are willing to wait until the theory tells us we are ready, we are making assumptions about the rate of scientific and engineering advances that may not be justifiable. I know people love that we are in an age of increasing, even accelerating scientific and technological achievement, but there is absolutely no reason that such a rate of change has to continue. For one thing, the simple fact of the energy crisis is a clear and present limiting factor to advancement. Without almost exponentially increasing amounts of available energy and resources, we are unlikely to be able to sustain forward momentum at the present rate, let alone at an ever increasing rate. Beyond that, I hope I don't have to explain the effect of any one of the developing global conflicts on the possibility of a slow down, or even a dark age in our future. It is entirely possible that any ship that can be launched *will* be the one that arrives first.
Any interstellar journey that has a reasonable chance of success is going to be the most important thing mankind has ever accomplished to that date. Any reasonable level of success means that humanity's eventual extinction ceases to be an absolute certainty. I can't see why we wouldn't want to launch as soon as possible, even if after 20 years or so, one of our later designs drops out of warp in front of the ship and picks up the crew before they have even gotten a tenth of the way there. And no one can tell me that twenty years of studying interstellar space itself is not worth the effort even if it is not the primary mission.
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