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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?"'"
A billion here and a billion there, who's counting?
What one really should notice about this is they can get someone on Mars for $10 billion; why the fuck haven't they started yet? 20 billion dollars poured into the US economy, into research and development and finally into production would probably have done a heck of a lot more than the trillions wasted on trying to save a few fat cats.
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.
The key points of the mission were
This still seems to me to be the most sensible and effective way to put people on Mars. Preliminary back-and-forth trips to the moon not needed. Establishes a genuine human presence instead of just planting a flag. And at a cost which in the light of numbers being thrown around during the financial crisis which looks like a bargain.
#define struct union
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!"
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.
Let's be honest here: Put in the context of the bailout, or even of the military budget or social programs like Social Security or Medicare, everything we could possible do in space looks like a bargain. The issue has always been political will.
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. It's easy to campaign for keeping Social Security because nobody wants to see grandmothers starving on the streets. 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.
So, when we decide we want to cut money from the budget, NASA and other programs like it are the first on the chopping block. We cut a billion here and a billion there from various programs, but won't touch the programs that take the largest bite out of the federal budget: the military, social security, and medicare. We could fully fund a mission to Mars right now just by cutting out a small portion of the money the military wastes on various projects it doesn't need or even particularly want, but that's never going to happen because to the average voter failing to fund whatever Congress thinks the military wants is anti-American and will cause the terrorists to win.
Our government has consistently shown that the way to win elections is to increase military spending and cut education and science research, including space exploration. This should tell you where our priorities are as a society, and why we're unlikely to make it to Mars or anywhere else in our lifetime.
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.
Did it occur to you that my point was just as valid for the moon in 1968? What have we gotten from the moon?
The moon landings were cold war political theater. There's little technology that we couldn't have gotten by other means.
Had we put up long term near-earth stations designed for say, power generation, zero g manufacturing, etc. it would have made sense. The moon? Just another gravity well.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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