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Forget Space Travel, It's Just a Dream
An anonymous reader writes "The clash of two titans — physics and chemistry — are major barriers to human space travel to Mars and beyond, and may well make it impossible ... at least with current technologies."
If it is impossible in the real world, why not solve it with math?
We've been able to do that since at least the early 80's.
The question is can we make it worth the trip and comfortable?
Probably not, but we need to make the trip, at least once, just so we can say we did and we can better prepare for the later real trip.
Beyond that? We don't have the tech. Not yet.
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a space elevator aka beanstalk aka orbital tower.
Once you get out of earths atmosphere and gravity well, you're halfway to anywhere (in the solar system)
Most people have no real appreciation of the scale involved in psace travel. As daunting as our own solar system is, even that pales in comparison to the scales involved in traveling to other solar systems. Currently it takes us about 9 years for a probe to reach Pluto. When I ask people to guess how long it would take that same probe to reach the nearest solar system (a mere 4.2 light years away), people's estimates are usually comically far off.
120,000 years is the correct answer. Most people guess between 100-1000. That's why people think it is plausible for mankind to colonize space. They don't appreciate the scale we're talking about.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...But that's the thing about current technologies: They inevitably insist on becoming obsolete technologies.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Who here thought we could build a starship "with current technologies"?
So basically something we haven't invented the technology for is impossible until the technology is invented.
I'm so shocked.
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
wow really? Even a monkey could have figured that out.
did you forget to take your meds?
There is only so much power you can get out of a locomotive, and it's never gonna make one fly in the sky due to the considerable weight of a steam engine.
Great summary. All of one sentence that tells us nothing, not even what the source is. I really don't understand what Slashdot wants for a submission so I've mostly stopped bothering.
Get these kids off hire – they're negative. Hire someone smart and while you're can you get me some Twinkies?
The purpose of existence is to make money.
Plenty of interstellar ship concepts propose nuclear power and are therefore outside the "titanic" power of mere chemistry.
They assumed people are going to use chemical rockets for any sort of meaningful space exploration.
An article on "physics vs ill-informed scare mungers and the politicians who listen to them" would have been far more appropriate.
An Orion engine could get you to the stars in 40 years, Mars in a few weeks. A solar sail can accelerate you almost up to the speed of light and travel to the ends of the universe. It's politics and economics that are major barriers to space travel, not physics and chemistry.
Remember, any kind of space travel was thought impossible at one time ... until the multi-stage rocket was invented. We need more creative thinking and less of this overly pessimistic nay-saying.
Of course chemical rockets are very limited, in fact they barely work at all to get to other planets (gravitational assists are needed, etc.). But with ion drives, nuclear rockets and other technologies (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_propulsion#Table_of_methods), some of which have already been tested and used, other technologies still under development, and others in the further future, such missions will become far easier and more routine. These are not limited by the energy you can get from chemical reactions
or fusion...
Forget rockets, we'll discover how to use Stargate like technology way before cracking warp drive and long term space dwelling.
This is the most depressing submission of the day. I could rant and rave about how humanity will overcome the barriers put before us, or perhaps about the evolution of technology. I could go out on a limb and say that all of the world's physicists are wrong, and that faster than light travel is indeed a possibility. But, I think I will take one from the page of the submitter and keep this concise: You suck.
What would we need to find out there? Why would anyone want to be there?
Because at some point the sun will turn into a red giant and swallow the earth whole. This will obliterate humanity and every single thing we've ever done. We will be completely and irreversibility erased from the universe.
A lot of people find that thought rather uncomfortable.
It assume you have to start on the ground and make it to the ground on Mars. It does not account for orbital manufacturing and assembly. Could we not build the ship in high orbit, and ship people/supplies up piecemeal over an extended period of time, then fly to Mars and build an orbital station to receive future travelers. And so on. Set up way points. It would take a lot longer I realize, but we put robots in orbit and on mars on a somewhat regular basis. So we should be able to put robots there to build the infrastructure to receive humans. That could include fuel production and other manufacturing and mining sites.
According to Physics and Chemistry self-propelled chariots are impossible STOP self-propelled flying vehicles are a fool's errand STOP Internet is that little net inside some pieces of underwear STOP.
Premise: You cannot go into deep space because chemical rockets have insufficient energy to get you there.
Recommendation: Therefore you should only send people into space one way.
Real purpose of article: For the Author to brag that he is wealthy enough to book a flight on Virgin Galactic.
OK, OK I concede that stuff like flue powder, aparating and portals seem improbable, just to show that I am not unreasonable, and am considering only proven viable technologies.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That article is a joke. It doesn't even take into consideration very public recent development like http://www.fastcompany.com/1744745/russia-us-plan-a-nuclear-powered-space-rocket-should-we-worry
Plus Russia announced it created a nuclear reactor that was capable of being transported and used in a rocket some months ago. Plus the sun is an infinite source of energy when you are in space, which should make whatever fuel you are going to use last longer.
Its hard to tell because the article contains no facts or assumptions, but I think it is working on the assumption that the Mars space craft and all fuel will have to be lifted from the earth in one go. If we assemble the craft in earth orbit then fuel it in multiple trips the energy requirements to get it to Mars orbit will be much lower. At that point it can again use a "lander" vehicle to take the astronauts and equipment to the surface, a lot of which can be left behind for the return trip (as was done with the moonshots).
with current technologies, if it weren't we would be doing it right now.
People are stupid -- Dr. House
I mean, really, in 1969 we magically had all the tech to get to the Moon and back, it's not like we had to invent anything. /sarcasm
People get paid to write this crap?
--
BMO
Most probably, space travel is not worth the energy required for propulsion. What would we need to find out there? Why would anyone want to be there? For all the answers you might have come up with, I think virtual realities are a solution that is much cheaper to deploy and maintain.
Using the same logic, I would argue that most humans are not worth the resources required to sustain them. And if we spent less resources supporting those humans, we would have more resources for space travel.
NOM NOM, Nothing wakes you up in the morning, like crushing the hope of science dreamers everywhere.
To quote Einstein: "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods."
Of all objects, the planets are those which appear to us under the least varied aspect. We see how we may determine their forms, their distances, their bulk, and their motions, but we can never known anything of their chemical or mineralogical structure; and, much less, that of organized beings living on their surface
Said by Comte in 1842. There is a difference between unknown and unknowable.
at least with current technologogies? Duh. If we could do it, we would have. No one seriously believes the main obstacle to a Mars mission is the liberal agenda or the freemasons or anything, right?
.
Isn't that what dreams are about? Inventing new technologies to do in the future what is not possible now?
I can't argue with you, wjousts, because you are right. But, I'm more concerned with that huge rock that the scientists haven't discovered yet, which is on a collision course with the earth. That sucker is HUGE - nearly the same size as the rock they say caused the moon.
Life on earth will probably survive that impact, but I don't think it will be "life as we know it".
"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
Asteroid mining?
The quick answer (which I'm sure many posters have already said) is don't involve chemistry; use nuclear engines, or ion engines or solar sails or magnetic balloons. There is a lot more energy (million fold) in nuclear bonds that you can get from fission reactors or by using the fusion furnace at the center of our solar system.
That said, I haven't really heard of good answers to long time LIVING (not just survival) outside of the earth's magnetic field/shield and without one-gee acceleration keeping our bodies reasonably fit. Want to COLONIZE Mars and not just go there for a flags and footprints mission? Well we have no idea if the 1/3 G gravity will keep the astronaut's bones from becoming brittle. Who knows if women can give birth to healthy infants in such an environment or even if we can grow crops there! (I really thought they shouldn't have cancelled the centrifuge that was to be a part of the ISS. Hopefully, if the Falcon 9 works out, it'll be cheap enough to add it later).
I'm actually a little more optimistic about the long term ability of humanity to spread throughout the cosmos. In just a few decades, hopefully we'll know enough about our biology to really tinker with it. Getting rid of susceptibility to low gravity is a given of course but how about a little radiation hardening? (Some organisms can tolerate millions of times as much radiation as we can). Perhaps later we could learn to deal with decompression sicknesses (like marine mammals) so spacesuit design could become a lot simpler. Maybe we could learn the tricks of hibernation from bears and squirrels so long space flights wouldn't consume so many resources (and be so boring!).
We might end up not quite the same as homo sapiens. Call it man plus. (For INTERSTELLAR travel, we'll need some pretty spectacular physics or some pretty radical reengineering of ourselves. How 'bout brains in boxes? Or better yet, just software running on commodity hardware?).
But it might take awhile.
Despite calling itself a magazine on the "Science of everything", this Cosmos is pretty outdated. Last I remember, nobody bothered about chemical rockets for interplanetary or longer travel: they pack a lot of punch, but they're heavy and can't be used for continuous burns, just short corrections. For which they work fine.
Then there's the ion engine: low specific impulse, but can be used for long periods on end, perfect for shaving time off the free coast phase. Already operated on several spacecrafts.
Fusion rockets: medium specific impulse, though still nowhere near a hypergolic rocket, but still can be fired for months on end as long as you have fuel, and it also takes care of power generation. Requires a leap or two in LASER tech for ignition, otherwise possible (in 10-25 years, at most).
Project Orion: riding on the shockwaves of NUKES. Can you guess at the impulse? Also advances nuclear disarmament, but kinda risky (the astronauts ride in essentially a box over a dampened shield behind thousands of nukes. You really don't want one warhead to have a bad day...). Possible, requires international cooperation and massive balls of steel to try, so let's discount it for now.
Light sails and ion sails: low specific impulse, but carry no propellant, and can accelerate all the way to the edge of Sol, making for some significant velocity when it hits the heliopause. Technically possible with today's technology, but unneccesary.
So there, we could pretty much achieve sustainable interplanetary travel today if we put our mind to it. And if we really wanted it, we could have STL generation ships on the way in 50-100 years, at most.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
Christopher, why, oh why, do you want to sail west? Everybody knows, it's just water and more water. And then you fall off the edge of the world. What a waste! Look, can't you even read a map?
Thank Eris for those last five words.
The article talked about the laws of physics and chemistry, but failed to mention biology. And the truth is that the amount of radiation an astronaut absorbs each day in interplanetary space probably far exceeds the amount of radiation that anyone has received from the "catastrophic" Fukushima reactor leak. When your DNA is getting fried like that, you don't want to hear about year-long detours. Outside of the Earth magnetic field, the radiation dose is in the tens of Sieverts per hour. With shielding you can get that dose down to a fraction of a Sievert, but that's still not good. (source)
Think about it this way: Fukushima emergency workers are required to stay away from reactors for the rest of the year if they absorb a quarter of a Sievert. In outer space, you get that every hour. In the US, the annual limit for radiation workers in non-emergency situations is a tenth of a Sievert.
Please let us moderate the summaries. Bad summary of a bad article.
I think the real reason we won't be back in space is politics and lack of interest. Most people don't care, and there are more pressing needs here on earth. Now, there's always the possibility (and high probability) that the answers to many of our needs down here will come from technologies invented for or made possible by space travel, but most people don't care. They see only the immediate near-term, and can't see the big picture... Thusly, we will never really go back on any scale, and the science and research needed will never really be financed... at least not to any significant degree.
The author of the article needs to read "Not final!" a short story by Isaac Asimov
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Final
It was understood in 1492 that the Earth is round. Please don't perpetuate the myth that people thought Columbus was going to fall off some edge of the world.
The author makes it sounds like there's air resistance in space that makes it possible to go to the Moon but not to Mars... :p
"See, it's the air drag that makes the journey to Mars simply consume too much rocket fuel!"
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
...because chemistry is just applied physics.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
People might find that idea uncomfortable now. Five billion years from now humanity's attitude might be a lot different.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I'd like to remind people that scientists as recently as the 1940's said that flight faster than the speed of sound was impossible. That flight beyond the atmosphere was impossible.
Before that, they said that flight was impossible, and anyone travelling faster than 35mph would kill the occupant.
Just ask any top-fuel dragster jockey about what's impossible. Engineers were swearing up and down that they had reached the limit of what internal combustion engines could do in the 60's, but the guys building the dragsters kept proving them wrong.
I'm sure as far back as cavemen, there was a 'scientist' that was positive that man-made fire was impossible.
The point is: Sooner or later, anyone that says that anything is impossible is proven wrong. Don't be a naysayer, be that someone that changes the world. Find the way to achieve the impossible.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
nice info thanks for information,,,
Reading Cosmos for science is like reading the National Enquirer for news. TFA presents a false dichotomy: it takes lots of energy to move stuff between space and the surface of the earth. Therefore space travel is impractical. Whats wrong with this?
Space travel takes a huge initial investment to establish a real infrastructure, including mining and manufacturing. After that, it's all gravy.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Yes, lots of things are possible with current levels of technology. That's why we invent new technology.
Impossible is just a word people use to make themselves feel better when they quit.
With Apollo era technology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct
http://www.nss.org/settlement/mars/zubrin-promise.html
The key is to ignore the "conventional" thinking about orbital assembly and exotic propulsion. The Martian atmosphere can be refined into rocket fuel for a return trip using steam age technology. You the crew return vehicle is sent well ahead of time and fuels it self on mars. You don't need more then a Saturn V or Aries launch vehicle to do it. Falcon 9 Heavy could do it in multiple launches. Colonization is even easier, you delete the return trip. Now that water has been found on Mars it is quite habitable pressurized tents, green houses, and nuclear power are not exotic future technologies.
Apart from many people having no real appreciation of the scale involved in Space Travel, we as a people have still yet to learn the responsibility involved in utilizing the resources we are given. If we haven't yet figured out how to live sustainably and peacefully, I doubt any extrasolar world or any Unobtainium we find will show us the way to peace, happiness and prosperity. Sorry if this sounds too transcendental, but that's what the Universe is all about - doesn't matter where you are, all we might ever need might just be inside us...
I can only assume that your sense of humour also took a trip off the edge of the world...
And not in a "build on the knowledge of past generations" kind of sense. Literally.
Also, compared to some other "adventures", the whole thing would be rather cheap. On budget too.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Just a week ago I've seen the report on talks about cooperation between VASIMR's Ad Astra Rocket Company and some branch of Rosaviacosmos developing the Russian megawatt class space-based nuclear reactor. If they succeed, it will be your next level space drive.
just need a stargate addresses to dial
I'm pretty sure "carry our own fuel" is fine - but you plan for fuel boosts along the way like a giant video game. It's all about staging. The docking tech is a little weird but it has to be "relatively easy" to make the docking interface. Then you launch up a bunch of fuel cargo ships and park them all in orbit. Once you think you have enough, you string them all out in a row at intervals. Then you just 1-UP your way to Mars.
Bonuses for multiplexing the types of energy - part solar, part stored fuel, debris gathering maybe for a ballast dump twice per route to save fuel on a course correction.
The bigger thing is we absolutely have to quit squabbling among ourselves and get a grip because it will take the resources of at least two nations to pull it off.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Ultimately, you can bet future won't be as imagined in works of popular fiction - because you must remember that's what scifi is. Grandiose, fabulous, "awesome" style of exploration depicted in those - that's catering to audiences which would be uncomfortable with anything too dissimilar from Earthy experiences; and coincidentally making the work of writers helluva easier. A sign of... limited imagination (how many people remember that we can already transport people while miniaturized and in deep hibernation? Heck, give me one medium launcher + additional few dozen million bucks, and I can transport at least a thousand living / viable humans to pretty much anywhere in our system), afraid to face what the wild realities of existing universe.
And ultimately, people will remain upset how space travel will most likely remain different from earthly experiences
BTW, how is that building of ships' hulls ignoring Archimedes' principle going along? It's over 2k years old, surely we should be able to ignore it by now, eh?
One that hath name thou can not otter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_for_Less
Or try this, if you are more partial to video.
And then... there's the colonization option.
Best part is, no unobtainium needed. Everything is based on current, tried technologies already in use.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
We have known since the 1930s that the energy bounding atoms together is nothing compared to the energy bounding the atom nucleus together. In the 1940s we started learning how to use that energy.
We have been stalling ever since. It's like we stopped developing automobiles because some people became afraid of them.
"at least with current technology" - Well NO FRIGIN SH!T
Why are we still saying these pathetic quotes.
Maybe I should waste time writing an article why something cant happen and then say... at least for now.
Recently, there were a few postings mentioning the stealth blimp and I went to the linked page and found that according to the information there, blimps can go higher than traditional aircraft due to their method of lift. Question is, can it carry all that weight high enough for a lighter vehicle to thrust itself the rest of the way out of Earth's gravity? Theoretically, a device that is so far out should be able to be smaller and lighter while carrying a larger payload of supplies and life support gear.
Space elevators and all that are supposed to reduce the need for resources to escape the Earth's gravity. Stealth blimp oughta do it I think.
What if we split these two?
What if it's miserable as all get out - you start with an athlete and end up with a 40 year old nursing home resident - "It's just a man/woman". Before all the shocked people chime in, the value of a person is horribly flexible - it can take tons of work to train up someone, and then they can still get on the wrong side of luck.
But what if it's worth it?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It should be possible to get to Mars and back, however it won't be cheap. It would probably take the equivalent of as many Saturn V rockets as were ever launched to put enough material into Mars obit for ONE mission. This would include leaving in orbit the return rocket, and sending to the surface a return to obit craft (empty and landed by remote control or by computer). Then sending down the crew on a landing only craft and yet other landing craft with supplies. The crew wouldn't be able to take much back in samples, just dust perhaps. What would be sent back would be digitized data and photos.
Mars is the only planet in our solar system that we COULD visit. There are also the asteroids and here at least the gravity well is shallow enough that a return trip is on par with the visit to the moon. The author of the article is correct in the degree of difficulty of a Mars trip compared to going to the moon. I can't imagine it being worth while to send astronauts to explore Mars because we have done very well using robots. But impossible? No, just very expensive, risky, and not worth the price considering what other exploration could be done with the money.
Did the author really think that the *only* form of energy that can be extracted from fuel is by means of chemical reaction ? Does the author think that the sun is burning gasoline and oxygen ? Ever heard of nuclear fission and fusion ?
I'm a social science ("cough") major, and even I blanched at the mention of "rocket fuel" in the article. Nice assumption. I read about successful ion propulsion experiments years ago. Where have these guys been? I mean, it isn't rocket science, er...brain surgery.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
It needs to be broken down into parts... At some point we'll realize (or maybe not) that a vehicle that gets us from the ground to orbit is a completely different thing from a vehicle that gets us from one orbit to another. It's analogous to trying to use a boat to get from a point 100 miles inland on the US East Coast to a point 100 miles inland Europe. Sure, the boat is a good tool for most of the journey, but you need a different type of vehicle to traverse the 100 miles.
Let us not forget that in the 19th century there was some discussion about closing the Patent office because everything possible had already been invented. This is really nothing different. Later on there was powered flight, radio, computers, etc -- all quite impossible from the perspective of the mid-19th century. The part that I remember best about JFKs speach about going to the Moon was 'not because it is easy but because it is hard'. One might modestly suggest that it is only by trying to tackle the impossible problems that we learn anything. Setting the bar low and then not trying because, of course, it is impossible will always apeal to some people. Happily, the rest of us will leave them behind some day. But if we stop trying... then what they said will become true.
There are plenty of ideas out there that probably can work. Most of the technology exists, and just needs to be assembled into a single project. Its not even beyond the realm of economic possibility to implement some of these plans they question is why?
What is there on the moon or Mars to make it worth going there. Why should anyone want to live there? Don't say over population even if the population on earth continues to grow at the current rate somehow it will be along time before conditions here would be more cramped then they would be on space/moon/Mars base. Don't say resources its pretty evident that supporting one person on a space/moon/Mars base would take more resources from Earth that keeping that same person right here on Earth. The only reason to do it is for practice colonizing and for the investment required it probably makes more since to try and simulate things here on Terra.
There are for the most part know ways to build and power a multi-generational ship There is lots uninterrupted solar power and other radiation out there to scavenge for your day to day needs, and you could bring enough nuclear fuel from Earth to propel the craft. The trouble is where do want to go. Oh and your going to live the rest of your life in this box, you will never see the destination, nor will your children, their children, their children's children, and likely ten more generations after that. That is if you pick someplace nearby and NOTHING goes wrong. Who wants to take that risk and for what?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
We have the technology. It is just impossible to send humans and their living quarters and their supplies and a research station and a return vehicle and return trip supplies on a SINGLE chemical rocket. Once you start using more than one chemical rocket for this list, even at just two, it becomes possible. (Unless you can do the smart thing and use a single nuclear rocket instead.) We already have demonstrated that we can resupply a spacecraft in orbit, do docking and assembly in orbit, do precision landings, survive long enough for the trip in space etc. The mission to Mars probably shall not use chemical rockets, but if we decide to use that technology, there are plenty of possibilities to make it happen. We can even colonize Mars with current *propulsion* technology (but new technologies are required for other aspects of colonization) : Aldrin Mars cyclers (basically Mir, ISS like stations in an interplanetary orbit) are sufficient for regular travels or resupply missions.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Peripheral Holographic Sensory Optic Drive. This technology will employ Optics and light with the amazing ability to bend that light at will and traverse the spectrum, sending and receiving sensory signals and data streams using the different characteristics of the light spectrum we create from back here on earth. Without ever having to leave our chairs, we will be able to transmit signals to light amplification stations that we have sent out and set up many years prior using light sprectral beam assays. We will travel right into the backyards of unsuspecting strangers' galaxies from afar with our view portals at the tip of a light beam. That is what everyone is missing.
http://astronauticsnow.com/history/goddard/index.html Old wine in new bottles. Will they never tire of this argument?
This summary is such FUD, and the article is nearly so. The author is a Medical Doctor, and if Doctor's had their say humans would have never gone to low orbit in the first place! Physics tells us Moore's Law is not a Law, but rather an idiom that expresses human ingenuity in the field of electronics. Moore's Law does not say transistors can get indefinitely small, it says people can build cheaper and cheaper transistors on larger and larger circuits. I can double the payload capacity of LEO vehicles tomorrow. Give me a 747 at 40,000ft and a rocket, and I'll put up twice the cargo for half the cost of a conventional rocket launched from sea level. Physics says I can do that. I'm not sure what point the author is trying to make with Moore's law, but the comparison between human ingenuity in spaceflight and electronics, and the laws of nature, is mute. Just because it hasn't happened, doesn't mean it is impossible.
Mistaking a large Keynesian space program that explicitly prohibits large leaps in engineering is a common mistake people make when it comes to the impossibilities of space travel. The space station was built, in part, because NASA and Congress didn't know what to do with the large 'space truck.' What do you do when you've got giant reusable vehicles with a HUGE cargo hold? Apparently, you build a space station with it!
We have been living continuously in low orbit for decades without a single fatality. The only Americans who have ever died in space died coming and going, but once you’re up there it has been statistically much safer. One would think moving a group of humans 60-100M km over 9-15 months would be quite possible. We've been living in hostile environments here on Earth for almost a century now with submarines, where a person can't exactly go out for a walk 600ft under water. And in the last 40 years or so, the crews of big submarines have continuously lived underwater for months on end. We know how live in enclosed environments for long periods. If 200 men can go months on end without killing each other, I think a dozen over the hill astronauts might be able to do the same.
The hard part of going to Mars is leaving Earth and then landing safely, landing being the most difficult but NOT impossible feat. Physics tells us that all the elements needed to create breathable air, fuel, water and return fuel for indefinite exploration of Mars can be found on Mars. Physics tells us the power needed to make these compounds can be made on Mars as well. All with ‘current’ technology despite the "low grade" resources, as claimed by the author!
Physics tells us all the hazards of interplanetary travel can be reduced or mitigated. Physics tells us radiation can be reduced with shielding, as can micro meteorite impact dangers.
If you want to really learn what Physics says we Can and Can't do, I'd suggest checking out on of the all time greatest book on the subject, "Spacetime Physics" by Taylor and Wheeler from you public library.
You think that's science fiction? How about this. Physics tells us it's possible to put all the DNA of earth on a tiny little probe the size of a dime, complete with tiny robots, that can be quickly accelerated to large fractions of c and travel between stars in decades. These probes can smash into planets and build life for us. Why send our descendants in large cumbersome bodies when you can send the information needed to create them. The technology to do this doesn't exist yet, but we are developing it Now. And physics doesn't say anything here is impossible.
While the article goes on to point out one persons opinion, a link on the first page of the article points out another persons opinion that a flight to Mars would be possible in only 39 days.
Beyond energy and biology, the absolute scale of interstellar travel is a firm barrier. The myths borne of the great sea faring vessels traveling our planet does not scale up to interstellar travel, as most astrophysicists well understand. The answer to this problem is simple: avoid traveling through the intervening space between origin and destination. This is the only practical way to travel through the universe, and represents the evolutionary progression necessary for the transition from terrestrial travel to universal travel. We simply cannot transport our bodies through the intervening space from Earth to any destination of interest.
What do you think of the idea of sending "progress" type payloads up? One or two in orbit, possibly ahead of the astronauts, one or two on a slow course they could catch up to, possibly even adding to the size of the vessel, and maybe even some already making a return trip before they leave they can catch on the way out? Sure the math to do the mid journey intercepts is difficult at best, but we've proven ourselves rather capable thus far. (launching on time on the other hand.....)
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The author of the article does a good summary of our present space capabilities. I mean, come on people, we haven't been back to the moon in almost 40 years. Anyone who has seen the saturn 5 rocket in kennedy space center or huntsville can appreciate why. That thing is a monstrosity and all it did was take 3 astronauts and some equipment to moon and back for a grant duration of 3 days. Scaling to mars mission level (20x saturn 5 type payloads?) really becomes cost prohibitive. Hence, the cancellation of the Bush era directives.
So what, do we stop human exploration and invest more heavily into robotic? Not necessarily, we do have a low gravity buddy called the moon to provide natural resources for human exploration of the solar system. We just need to send a few robots there to prepare craft and fuel for man based exploration of the solar system. Such automation systems are more technologically feasible then other pie in the sky tech like nuclear propulsion, hibernation, solar sails, space elevators....
Unfortunately, economic incentives are a problem. No gov't will burden its coffers for a trip to mars now or in the near future even with heavy automation and cost savings. Maybe mining operations for precious minerals may finance human exploration? Or, use ISS as a model to divvy the cost burden of moon machine colonization and subsequent human solar system exploration. Well, it took 15 years to complete the ISS. Maybe by 2050 we'll have an international mission to Mars...
What a load of unimaginitive crap. The writer of the article seems to think that we have gotten as far as we can in Physics and Chemistry, while we have only scratched the surface!
In 1601, the thought of electricity was not even invented yet.
Certainly, a lot of energy is needed to bring us to another world, but why pretend energy is so hard to create?
Our current sources of energy are actually inefficient. If the writer of the article means to claim that we cannot get to mars by burning oil or spitting thermite out of the back of the rocket, than he is correct. That will get is to the moon and no more.
But nobody is pretending that is the only way to get to space. That is the only way we are used to getting to space.
If somebody would be willing to forget about petty politics and fund some serious technology, we could easily create new forms of energy and transportation.
1. Heat means Energy, right? Geothermal energy isn't very efficient simply because it doesn't get hot enough naturally.
Too bad we don't live on a planet with a mantle of molten rock, right?
2. The sun is a big massive ball of energy.
He says that we can't create enough energy to get to anywhere in a decent amount of time.
It's too bad there isn't a sun that can create a tidal force on a ship attachment so strong that it would fire the ship away at the speed of a gamma burst, right?
3. Warp Drive.
The writer of the article would probably say "Fantasy. That will never happen", being the close-minded naive person he acts like, but it is becoming more and more in reach the more we advance in quantum mechanics.
This is what I call a bad case of journalism, where the journalist fails to realize that we know more than an 19th century man could ever imagine (minus Jules Verne, who hacked the matrix). In 200 years, we will have learned more than anything us puny primitive humans can begin to imagine.
Isn't that basically what we have now? With muscle atrophy on long duration flights astronauts usually can't stand in Earth's gravity for a few days, their hearts don't pump blood properly and their bones loose density. Yet we still have a long waiting list.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
In a few billion years. Yeah I get it, you want to see it happen but if we take a thousand year hiatus and reboot our space exploration in the year 3000 that won't even amount to a rounding error. And we're still sending out probes, building bigger and better telescopes. We're just not sending fragile meatbags out there.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
At the time locomotives were getting faster it was believed that humans would die if they travelled faster than 25mph.
The laws of physics and chemistry say i can't propel a car, a human payload, life support, and a snowboard from milwaukee to denver either. Somehow i manage to bypass them by stopping at a gas station.
I guess that is possible but I don't see the point. What is the advantage of doing stuff en route to Mars rather than in Earth and Mars orbits?
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
This article is dead on. There hasn't been major progress in making rockets more efficient since the 1960's because the basics of chemistry and physics.
If we spend hundreds of billions of dollars, we might be able to send a select few men to Mars, but it would be like the lunar landings in the past. It will be a one time event then people will realize that it is a waste of money and resources to do it again.
The current technology won't work to make space travel apart of our daily lives. It won't support advances like suborbital commercial airplanes, space tourism, colonization, or mining the Moon and comets.
There has to be major advances in technology to make space travel that are order of magnitudes more efficient before any of these dreams becomes a reality. These technologies are mostly theoretical and probably won't be available during our lifetimes. Until then, we will just continue to spend billions to send a select few into space like we have been doing since the 60's.
Now consider the laws of chemistry. You canâ(TM)t change them by legislation.
I'm sure that doesn't stop our current-day politicians. These guys have been living in lala-land for a decade or more, sure they can.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
His hypothesis that chemistry cannot provide more than a set limit of boost from a given amount of fuel completely ignores other means of propulsion, such as:
1. Nuclear fission based ion engines such as the Chang-Diaz engine currently being used
2. Potential nuclear fusion based systems such as the Bussard Ramjet which was proposed in the 1960s
3. Maglev railguns
4. Solar sails, being tested currently by U.S. and Japan
5. Far out stuff like Zero Point energy
A magnetic field is all that protects us currently from solar radiation, why not use a similar field around an interplanetary rocket? There is a ton of research left to be done before you write off space travel.
If nothing else, wrap a bunch of fertilized embrios in lead and ship them off in a cryogenic state to the nearest habitable planet, unfreeze and raise to adulthood and then release in the wild.
This whole article read like a justification for him to buy a ticket on Virgin rather than a scientific treatise. I do agree with the OP that there are some major hurdles to overcome to make space flight feasable but you have to start somewhere. When we stop trying we are saying we are stuck here on this rock forever.
IIRC In Robinson's novel 'Red Mars', the travelers went on a one way trip, so no need for the fuel to go back. Once you got there you were there for good, doing hard work and preparing the planet for the future generations. Sounds nice and heroic. And as stated in another comment, some of that preliminary work can be made by robots now. But I still see that one way ticket as a cool thing
Future designs most likely will have abandoned chemical propellant anyways in favor of magnetic/electrical propellant. And no need to speculate about unknown future technology, the principles have already been layed down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrically_powered_spacecraft_propulsion
Most likely, we are limited now only by our culture, not by (lack of) ideas and knowledge.
My drift here is that no one could very accurately predict the value that exploring ultimately would have, in Columbus' day, and I'm sure the same uncertainties are in effect today. This argument is much more thoroughly made in Zubrin's book, THE CASE FOR MARS, which I would encourage everyone to read. There are plenty of recent, surprising discoveries regarding Mars. There's also plenty yet to uncover there - firstly, "Hey, where is all this seasonal methane coming from, and where is it going to?"
People might find that idea uncomfortable now. Five billion years from now humanity's attitude might be a lot different.
If humanity never tries to get off this rock, the only way humanity's attitude will be different is that it will not exist at all.
Because at some point the sun will turn into a red giant and swallow the earth whole.
Just as interstellar distances are unimaginable to most of us and our human-environment-size-and-time-scaled brains, so is time. We are about halfway through the lifetime of our sun, which means we still have a comfortable one to two billion years before any noticeable change.
We could wipe out all life - down to the bacteria and one-celled, I mean absolutely freaking everything - on the planet and there would be enough time for another sentient species to evolve. They'd have a lot less time, we don't. I really don't think we should worry now. Two billion years is plenty of time to come up with interstellar travel, even without trying.
We will be completely and irreversibility erased from the universe.
A lot of people find that thought rather uncomfortable.
If you worry about the sun going out, why not worry about whether or not K > 0? If there's going to be a "Big Crunch", then we'll be wiped out whether or not we go to the stars.
I honestly think there's something else to the whole space exploration meme. It is a symbol of freedom, because it is so huge that for alle we care it's unlimited in size and time. On a planet where we are just about to map the last few remaining white spots, that means a lot.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Also, compared to some other "adventures", [wikipedia.org] the whole thing would be rather cheap
The challenge for space travel is to get buy-in from the broader population, and to do that it has to have the same visceral, senseless emotional response that warfare has. War is mate competition carried out by other means, and as such engages our deepest emotional responses.
While exploration is daring and dangerous, the vast majority of people can't participate in it in an active way. We sent 12 people to the Moon, compared to hundreds of thousands rotated through Iraq.
So from my point of view the problem with exploring other worlds is that we aren't doing enough of it to engage a large enough segment of the population. If some country were to commit to militarizing the Moon, say, we'd see a vast increase in resources flung at space travel, and at this point I'm not sure that wouldn't be a bad thing. Even done by an organization as stupid and inefficient as any standing army, it would be cheaper and vastly less destructive than even a fairly tiny war.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Einstein didn't say that. That quote is from Edmund Burke's Preface to Brissot's Address
And this is why setting up operations eventually on the Moon is such a smart idea. We can waste less fuel getting into space(possibly even using some sort of Moon-based launching platform) and make it possible to use virtually off of the fuel for actually moving through space. Also, there are space and materials concerns that cease to be a real problem if you build on the Moon as you don't need to cram it all into a tiny space on a rocket. Even if you built something 6x the weight on the Moon as here on Earth, it would still take a fraction of the fuel to get into space as there's no atmosphere to deal with(among other advantages).
We can easily do this. We just need to get that Moon Base (tm) built first.
Do we even need to do that? SpaceX and their competitors have (or promise to) significantly reduced the cost of getting payloads into orbit. If your goal is to use multiple heavy-lift launches to assemble the launch vehicle in orbit, why is that not doable today with a sufficiently large amount of money? I'm not saying it'd be cheap, but it's doable.
Part of the cost problem is that it currently costs NASA roughly 12x more than it costs SpaceX to get payload into LEO (based on $450 million per shuttle launch). It's hard to do such a mission affordably when your costs are so obscenely high.
What the article presumes is that we MUST undertake this as a single launch from Earth's surface, land the entire craft on mars, and launch the entire craft back. Of course this is going to be impossible under the confines the article covers. You would need a VERY massive ship to contain over a years worth of fuel, food, water, air, toiletries, parts, and other supplies... Even the shuttle only can support people for a couple weeks, 3 at best. Of course rocket fuel would not be able to launch a SINGLE vehicle multiple degrees of magnitude more than the shuttle.
The same could be said of the Space Station. Yes, it would have been impossible to fully assemble it all here on Earth and stock FULL of supplies for 30 years operation, construct a vehicle that had enough capacity to launch it fully assembled, and get it up there. Impossible... but yet, it is up there, despite the twin terrors of Physics and Chemistry, just as the article points out. Its because it was MODULAR, assembled in space, and supplied with separate lifts.
HOWEVER... if we could get farther out of Earth's gravity well (not entirely... but higher than the ISS), we could launch multiple cargo rockets up, and work on constructing a modular vehicle in space. One which, fully constructed, would never touch the surface of a planet. We have somewhat the experience of doing this with the ISS... although we lost the all-in-one lifter + manned spacewalk capable craft that was the shuttle.That said, a lot of smaller launches could get us the modules for a vehicle up there, and also the supplies (again, see Progress supply ships resupplying the station... now imagine modifying a heavy lifter cargo rocket with a larger than Progress airtight cargo module in its bay, and parking it up in orbit.)
The ship doesn't have to LAND on Mars, just orbit. We also have the knowledge (although partially lost) to make a lander. The hardest part will be a vehicle to escape Mars gravity. We don't really want to create a launch gantry if we don't have to, thats more supplies to drag along with us on the way to Mars. The Apollo-era landers were designed able to escape the Moon's lower gravity well, not a full planetary gravity well.
Assemble a space travel vehicle that ONLY needs to take its own fuel for the space portion of the travel. Separately launch all the supply modules. Maybe even work on pre-positioning some resupply modules ON Mars so you're not taking the surface food and water with you, and also some in Mars orbit or near Mars, to pick up before returning, so you're not really dragging along two legs worth of supplies all at once. And either pre-position a lander in Mars orbit, or lash it onto the space travel vehicle.
Yes, its a lot of smaller rockets to assemble this... which would mean more fuel, more destroyed material (as I believe the existing heavy lifter rockets are not reusable.) However, it IS possible to assemble a mission to Mars, or Ganymede, or any of the dwarf planets... you just have to think space construction, not all-in-one lifting from Earth's surface.
One more thing... who said a GOVERNMENT has to do this? I could see a coalition of private industries, like Boeing, Google, Kraft, and Apple getting together, pooling money, and doing this as a commercial endeavour to each give themselves a boost. Boeing for the aeronautics specialty... Kraft for the food marketing... and Apple for the interior design aesthetic and tech... and Google just because they like doing unusual stuff. The profit margin, the bottom line... those would be the hard parts for a corporate space exploration that returns absolutely zero profit, but this would be a big PR thing for them.
An I wrote about on Slashdot was it approaching a decade ago?
"Both CATS and DOGS are needed... (Score:2)"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=5821178&sid=62113
See also, from J.D. Bernal in the 1920s(!):
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/world/
"Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred years or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant."
We can do this, and we can support quadrillions of people (and other beings) living in the solar system in space habitats. The only question is if we want to.
So, while there may be limits to growth, we are nowhere near them when considering the solar system.
That article is just ignorant in part because it ignores things like laser launched craft or possibly the new cold fusion ideas (by Rossi, if they work out):
http://pesn.com/2011/04/07/9501805_Rossi_Cold_Fusion_Validated_by_Swedish_Skeptics_Society/
Also, it says resources are not concentrated, but that is what energy and robots are for.
So, it is a pretty ignorant and defeatist article.
A better thing:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
My hopes:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
3 ways to break the barrier.
1- Space industrialization through telepresence (on Moon and/or Near Earth Objects, where real time telepresence is possible)
Spaceships on space could be extremelly efficient. The most cost is break the Earth's gravity barrier.
2- Space elevator.
An elevator don't have the losses of a rocket, so you break the barrier on other way.
3- Aneutronic fusion power scaled down.
Altought the most difficult in technology, the incredible energy density of fusion if possible on a spaceship scale, and the absence of radiation of aneutronic fusion would allow incredible spaceships capable of Single Stage to Orbit very similar to todays airplanes.
The author of the original article is presumedly no dummy, and I agree with his analysis as far as it goes. But he makes no attempt to discuss travel powered by something other than chemical rockets you bring along.
VASIMIR is one alternative, which will indeed gain efficiencies from Moore's law (extremely rapid adjustments to optmiize magnetic field?).
The juice to run that can come from nukes or solar...
Chemical fuels are a barrier to chemical propulsion, that's all.
Yeah. And someone once proved communication with Mars was impossible, since it would require a flag so huge it would be impossible to wave.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The end result of the project is the spin-off tech that we will enjoy that has very little to do w/ a house on Mars. The end result of military projects also give us spin-off tech like low-cost flying surveillance.
It's not the radiation or the length of time or the fuel that will keep humans from going to Mars - it's the lack of will and funding, combined with the advance of robotics. Has anyone seen the "artists conception" video of the upcoming Mars Science Laboratory that they will be landing on Mars in 2012? As I watched that thing, my jaw dropped lower and lower - if we actually manage to pull this robotic mission off, I'm convinced that we will never personally go there unless someone whips up a magic transporter. Figure it out - one one hand we can send robots to Mars on the (relative) cheap that let us explore, test, examine, and travel to just about anywhere we want to go, and we can keep sending more and more sophisticated bots. Balance the bot strategy with the incredible expense, human suffering, risk, and probability of actually learning anything new of going there personally. On balance, it just ain't worth it. If we can actually build automated spacecraft and rovers that can do what is pictured in that video, then game over. Bots are the way to go. I used to be a strong "send humans to Mars" proponent, but after watching that vid, I humbly admit that our real strength lies in our proven ability to design semi-autonomous spacecraft and incredibly productive bots, and that's the best way to leverage our money. Google for "Mars Science Laboratory Mission Animation".
Give me a break. I'm sure we have enough buried in black projects to sidestep rocket fuel. Postulating traversal of the galaxy with rocket fuel is moronic. Going to the moon with rocket fuel looks primitive enough to me. Every time I witnessed one of those behemoth rockets launch I would be thinking: "pesky humans." Eventually, more technology will be released from the mighty sandbag we call "black ops." Unfortunately, last time we unveiled major technology from black ops it resulted in a nasty little thing we call an "atomic bomb". Needless to say, people started to get really nervous about the spread of technology at that point. Any research or development dealing with energy is watched closely by shadow government. Any advancements are confiscated, evaluated, and henceforth controlled and released when "they" see fit, and to who "they" see fit.
Seems very complicated. First of all, these fuel depots will be in different orbits, going at different speeds, and your main craft zips by at yet another speed. How are you going to align everything, and what happens if you miss the launch window ?
Carrying your own fuel seems much simpler.
"Well I dreamed I saw the silver
space ships flying
In the yellow haze of the sun
There were children crying
and colors flying
All around the chosen ones
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
All in a dream, all in a dream
The loading had begun
They were flying Mother Nature's
silver seed to a new home in the sun"
"After the Gold Rush" by Neil Young
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
I was thinking to myself "Why would Cosmos publish this article full of outdated and misleading information?"
I got to the end and read: "Alan Finkel is a neuroscientist and entrepreneur, and one of the founders of COSMOS. "
I'm guessing we'd see similar accuracy if Stephen Hawking wrote an article on neurology
That article assumes no other breakthrough technologies. What's the true status of Boeing's continuing research into "gravity shields" that was started in the late 1990s by some Russian researcher. Wikipedia is not a reliable source. That might explain some of the recent UFO (silent hovering aircraft) sightings in some HD nightvision camcorder recordings in Pennsylvania and Japan. Point is, don't draw broad conclusion on non-classified information.
I would just use my iRocket!!
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So far, people thought it dangerous enough to sit on top of a conventional bomb which undergoes a controlled reaction.
But indeed, maybe in the future we can find people who wish to strap themselves onto a nuclear bomb which undergoes a controlled nuclear reaction. Why not? :-)
Going to the moon was impossible (and seems to be impossible with todays tech too).
We choose to do these impossible tasks to learn. This makes the tasks far easier for generations to follow.
Part of trying to go to Mars and beyond is the tech we need to have to get there and back. That is the challenge. We humans choose to do the hard things so that we can learn.
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But, I'm more concerned with that huge rock that the scientists haven't discovered yet
Then how did you find out about it? newsletter? Does it have a facebook page?
That sucker is HUGE - nearly the same size as the rock they say caused the moon.
The "rock" that caused the moon was a protoplanet roughly the size of Mars. It's tough to miss a planet headed for us.
life on earth will probably survive that impact, but I don't think it will be "life as we know it".
Well, considering last time we were hit by something that big the planet was partially shattered and once it coalesced the surface was molten for a couple hundred years, I'm not sure what you're expecting to survive.
tl;dr: cool story bro.
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Umm... Isn't Chemistry governed by the laws of physics?
Chemistry vs Physics is kinda like saying Han Solo vs the Entire Star wars Rebellion.
Whoops, my Star wars nerd-ness is showing.
We need to focus on developing an energy source that powers self-replicating robots that are capable of building more self-replicating robots, more energy sources, and (especially) the facilities necessary to sustain human life. This is an amazing challenge.
We should build the hotel on the other planet before we send the guests.
The article is IMO incorrect because it concentrates only on chemical reaction motors. There, of course, their answer is correct. But that isn't the only way to move around in the solar system. One question I ask my intro physics students is to contemplate the light sail as a means of propulsion. To do this, one simply works out the balance between solar gravity and radiation pressure to determine how thin a sail has to be in order to directly support its own weight (and the answer, of course, is "very, very thin":-).
However, this isn't the end of the problem. I then ask them how much force is required to remain in orbit. The answer (neglecting the tiny amount of atmospheric drag in near earth orbits and e.g. tides) is "none" -- orbit is free fall where the centripetal force required to bend the trajectory into a circle is provided by gravity. A feasible light sail can be built that can exert enough force via reflected sunlight to provide an acceleration of (say) a millimeter per second squared for it and its payload in a scalable way, or even more (with sub-micron sail designs). Not much, but given 86400 seconds per day, that is as much as 86 m/sec (or nearly 200 mph) delta-vee per day, for free, every day. One can add a kilometer per second every two weeks, and that's enough to reach anywhere in the solar system in time, especially if you amplify it with a gravitational slingshot off of (say) the moon.
Sure, it would take too long to move humans around, but that isn't the challenge -- we can move humans around now at large but not impossibly large expense, at least as far as Mars or Jupiter or Venus, even using chemical rockets although there are probably better solutions than chemistry in the long run. The only really hard part is getting things into low Earth orbit -- once there you are "halfway to anywhere" as Heinlein liked to put it (virial theorem) and light sails mean getting the rest of the way is scalably/reusably "free" if you don't care about taking order of years to get there. Light sails would let us move everything that isn't a human to e.g. the Moon or Mars to set up a more or less permanent base and maintain a long-term line of supply. Who cares if your food and water take years to get there, as long as they get there cheaply enough?
A second thing that would change the economics (aside from either new physics or radically new ideas, e.g. a fusion-driven relativistic ion drive that again uses free or abundant energy to eke the maximum possible reaction thrust out of reaction mass by accelerating it to close to c where it has a lot of momentum per particle) would be to build light-sail driven robots to mine the asteroid belt for raw materials so that we wouldn't have to lift e.g. steel, nickel, and possibly even water up to Earth orbit. Those robots could equally well deliver mass back to Earth at e.g. the Earth-Moon Lagrange points and allow extended permanent habitats to be constructed there that are a light sail away from anywhere.
The only thing preventing us from settling the solar system is time and the will to do it -- we could do it now for a tiny fraction of what our military forces cost us every year. Sure, it would be good to find solutions to the time problem -- it's easy and cheap if we don't mind transit times of decades, so perhaps working on various forms of suspended animation would permit humans to take the light sail route as well as their food, clothing, water, air, and construction materials. A Lagrange point colony with a decades-long, robot-filled pipeline of raw materials could create a steady flow of humans moving out to permanent colonies throughout the solar system on a timescale of centuries.
Or, as some clever human posted yesterday, perhaps a flying saucer really did crash at Roswell. If so, then interstellar travel is indeed feasible somehow, which means that there is likely a solution waiting in new physics. If the federal government would just 'fess up
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Let's expose thousands of humans to radiation for several (hundreds, or more likely thousands) generations. Sure, most of them will die horribly of cancer, but perhaps they'll evolve radiation resistance.
Of course, the survivors / evolved ones will end up Looking Like This
slow courses and catching up dont really work, if you catch up to your supply ship at 1000 km/h, that means that to dock peacefully, either you need to slow down a lot, of the other craft needs to speed up a lot. I also suspect continously differing transit trajectories between earth/mars would screw it up big time.
The obvious trick would be to just stage the supplies in mars orbit
People, what a bunch of bastards
No. Check out DeltaV for earth and moon. Even worse remember that everything will have to go from earth to moon, then out. Your plan actually makes it more expensive. It would be cheaper to just launch from the earth to target. Unless you think that all the stuff you want to take to space is already sitting on the moon waiting.
There is one fundamentally wrong presumption here, and it's the notion that the craft would be sent from Earth. If you could build an orbital station and devise a way to get resources to it then you could assemble and produce spaceships without worrying about gravity, size, aerodynamics etc. Since there is no friction in space once you reach the desired velocity you could just turn off the engines and cruise. Such a ship could not be able to land on a planet but it could remain in orbit and send shuttles for exploration. That ship would become an orbital station which could be used to extend the reach of other ships and so on...
This reminds me of all the people who claimed we would never travel faster than 50mph, 60mph, 100mph, the speed of sound, the speed of light, etc. They were wrong. The key is to have enough people working on the problem. This is why you need to have more children. Expand the human population. There are not enough people yet. We need more people to add to the brain power of working on big problems like this because if we don't get off this rock and expand into space, other planets, moons, additional stars, etc then we're doomed like the dinosaurs. There is a astroid out there with our name on it. Let's get moving.
You use modern mathematics, and computing power. Transfers from one orbit to another, pace rendezvous maneuvers, etc. are mostly handled that way already. I don't think that is the obstacle. It rather is affordable propulsion. How many Saturn Vs do you need to lift the mass equivalent of one Saturn V to space? Way too many!
Unless you're talking about building from lunar resources, you're talking about bringing payloads up from LEO, then from LEO to the moon, then from LTO to the lunar surface (in a non-crashing manner). WAY more expensive than building on Earth or in LEO. If you're talking about building from lunar resources, we're nowhere even near to that being economically justifiable due to manufacturing process consumables and the absurd cost of assembly/maintenance (because it's so expensive to get people to and keep people alive on the moon, your labor costs are correspondingly absurdly high).
..my sister, who got the Donnie Darko numbers tattooed on her arm so she looks like shes making fun of Holocaust victims
If it wasn't for your article, I'd have wasted the rest of my life trying to figure out how to get around things that today are believed to be impossible.
If only it was available earlier in human history, it would have given this extremely valuable service to our sad ancestors that wasted so much time coming out with impossible things like medicine, electricity, machinery, airplanes, genetics, quantum mechanics...
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
I think that George W Bush proved that the key to making the deficit unsustainable is to massively cut taxes while starting an unnecessary war of aggression.
It's by far the best way to turn a surplus into a deficit. Then, with the excuse of cutting the deficit, we are free to kick the poor, sick, or old squarely in the balls. And also giver millionaires $200,000 tax cuts. That'll fix the deficit.
The one thing we absolutely can't do is raise taxes on the super-rich who benefit the most from the stability that government provides.
In conclusion, kill Medicaid. I'd rather watch your grandmother die in the street than pay my fair share of taxes. Die Granny Die!!!
For every 1 engineer who figures out how to do something, there are 999 that like to yank their own chains by listing elaborate reasons as to why "it can't be done". It's these 999 that give the rest a bad name, and it's these 999 that are the first to get laid off and the last to get hired. It's easy to say it can't be done. Easy is boring. -W
In the words of Tsiolkovsky, "the Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever." The reason that we (humankind) MUST go into space is not to expand our population, resources, or to find a planet that better supports us, although I believe that these may become valid reasons in the future. Rather, it is to expand our POTENTIAL, unlock new possibilities, and gain valuable knowledge about the universe around us. People will die, ships will be lost, but in the long run these sacrifices of lives and money will be worth more to us as a species than you could possibly imagine, and I think you'll find plenty of people more than willing to take those risks.
The challenge for space travel is to get buy-in from the broader population, and to do that it has to have the same visceral, senseless emotional response that warfare has. War is mate competition carried out by other means, and as such engages our deepest emotional responses.
No... not really.
A HUGE part of population is very interested in space travel COMPLETELY VOLUNTARILY. In fact, find me one kid who would not choose "Astronaut" as a profession if it was available.
You don't need it to be anything like war - just as colonists of the "New World" didn't go there because of some antiquated patriotic notion. They went to find a better life for themselves or to prove themselves. Fuck... many of them went to GET AWAY from antiquated patriotic notions.
As for "mate competition" - way off there. Wars are no longer fought in order to "git the'r women an' food".
Nor are they fought to "preserve the species" - wars are political tools. Have been since humans invented guns and by doing it made "warrior noblemen" obsolete.
And the quote goes "War is not merely a political act, but also a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means."
While exploration is daring and dangerous, the vast majority of people can't participate in it in an active way.
Depends on your definition of "active participation".
By that same logic, people voting for their political representatives are not "actively participating" in politics.
Same as people who donate to various causes don't "actively help".
Give the humans a way to donate their time and money to such an endeavor. Hell... People donate both to deletionists at Wikipedia.
We sent 12 people to the Moon, compared to hundreds of thousands rotated through Iraq.
Besides obvious logistic differences here, most people that were sent to Iraq would actually like NOT to be there.
Those 12 were volunteers chosen from thousands others who would swap places with them in a blink of an eye if they could. Just ask the other 12 that went there without actually landing.
So from my point of view the problem with exploring other worlds is that we aren't doing enough of it to engage a large enough segment of the population.
"A large enough segment" is very much engaged - if by that you mean interested in space travel.
If you mean "sent to outer space" well... compared to your "engagement in war in Iraq" example - it costs a little more per person than a just some jet fuel, uniform, gun, ammo and a couple of months training to send someone to space.
If some country were to commit to militarizing the Moon, say, we'd see a vast increase in resources flung at space travel, and at this point I'm not sure that wouldn't be a bad thing. Even done by an organization as stupid and inefficient as any standing army, it would be cheaper and vastly less destructive than even a fairly tiny war.
Why militarized?
Look up at that Clausewitz quote again. It's POLITICS by other means, not war by other means.
Politics is also "Hey, let's go there TOGETHER". There really ARE friendly ways of competition available to humans where you don't even have to kill anyone.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Two billion years is plenty of time to come up with interstellar travel, even without trying.
That may be, but if you take my answer in the context of the AC I was replying to, he (or she) seems to be of the mind that there is no point to it ever. I gave the most extreme example of why his (or her) proposal that it would be better if we all lived in the matrix (or some similar nonsense sci-fi fantasy) is flawed.
A 1,000 yard field goal? A 30-foot slam dunk?
Retirement homes for the obese (600lb guy weighs 100lbs on the moon).
Extreme climbing - Olympus Mons is 82,000 feet high.
There's lots of non-science stuff to do in a low gravity environment, mainly in the area of sports and entertainment.
The above linked plans and costs are all WITH NASA spending ON NASA budget. Completely doable and affordable.
Problem is, they are neither pork nor do they need a bunch of pet projects.
You know... "ALL" they'd do is get a crew to Mars and back and let them do some actual scientific work while at it.
Perhaps pave the way for colonization and other useless crap that never got anyone reelected.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I read a convincing article to the effect that we won't ever live on other planets, because in order to get there we will not only have to master living in space, but actually do it for generations. The final generation won't want to live on a planet - they'll want to live on a spaceship. They won't want to accept the risks that come with surface life and they will be perfectly accustomed to the risks of space life. And they won't want to jump into a huge gravity well that is expensive to climb out of, either.
Not to mention that if we ever do manage to propel things at nearly the speed of light, humans certainly won't be living on any planets if they can't get along with one another. Because planets are easy pickings for kinetic energy weapons - the proverbial tungsten telephone pole traveling at .95c.
Just launch all your fuel in low earth orbit, and attach it to the main ship. Much less hassle, and requires less fuel overall.
Go to more of a "faith based" space travel, not encumbered by "Science".
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
...Who wants to take that risk and for what?
Well, it could be a good way to rid ourselves of the useless third of our population.
The idea that Physics and Chemistry are FIGHTING? Of course, it turns out to be an analogy for nothing more then two problems, but it reuses the analogy so often that you get the image of a chemist and a physicist slapping each other.
Then there is the idea that we'll be using chemical thrusters for everything, because it's not like we have non-chemical propulsion or anything.
It also follows the idea that problems are somehow insurmountable, that there will never be a decent solution to them, despite not knowing what future technologies will look like. Few people had any idea what the internet would look like before Facebook and Porn.
50 Years ago simply getting into space was seeming impossible. 50 years prior to that, flying through the air was a pretty big deal. Before that traveling over any distance not using horses was a big deal.
What the article is saying is using current technology, going to the stars is a bit, shall we say implausible. Mars is a stretch but we can probably do it if we really want to.
In a 100 years who knows what technology we will have at our disposal, heck if we are still around in 1000 years just imagine what kinds of technology we might use to explore.
That said, yes our current technology isn't there yet, and we would need something seemingly "magical" in order to make it possible. It will likely be easier to use robots and whatnot than to use Humans, as we have a host of biological issues that would need solving on top of everything else.
My current favorite magic technology is the development of a "cosmic anchor". This would allow you to stop in absolute space, while relative space simply revolves by. Using multiple anchor throws, and complex calculations of various systems and velocities and rotation, it may be able to navigate through relative space,
Or like many fictional accounts, there is always instantaneous travel.... that would be handy. Though my current favorite off shoot would be a quantum entanglement transporter, that much like that movie the Illusionist, it might destroy the old you (maybe), and recombine the new your someplace else. Another flavor I like (I believe it was in Old Man's War) is the simply warping to other parallel dimensions/universe that the differences are so minute as to not matter but someplace else.
There is of course the Hitchhikers Guide's Probability Drive also, or the David Brin Tandu drive of the same name, but not so funny outcomes...
A perfect example of trying to use today's technology and ideas for the future is The Forever War. You can see by the end of the book its pretty silly, particularly when you start messing about with relativity, and time. Essentially your technology will over time outstrip whatever current methods you are using. A Moore's Law sort of thing....
Part of the cost problem is that it currently costs NASA roughly 12x more than it costs SpaceX to get payload into LEO (based on $450 million per shuttle launch). It's hard to do such a mission affordably when your costs are so obscenely high.
The joke there is the number of OTHER things NASA does on the same shuttle launch that nobody else in the fucking world can do. Satellite launches are a sideline; the rest is science.
Seems like the standard Retardican line always fails to consider this. NASA does the things that would never get done in their fabled "free market" because they're not "cost effective" at first to do - but when we count up how much we've benefitted from it since, it was obviously worth every penny.
The reason we would set up a base on the moon would be to mine it for water for fuel, radiation shielding for occupants, etc. If the amount of gear we'd need to mine water from the moon is less than the amount of water we need, then at a certain point it becomes more economical to ship mining equipment to the moon and get our water there. It is the large delta V for earth to space versus moon to space that would make it worth it. There is also the issue of mining the moon for things like iron and then doing manufacturing in space. However the research needed to be preformed to figure out if it is economical would probably be enough to continue mining the moon or get to Mars in the first place. It becomes a question of if we are just going to Mars to put up a flag, or if we are in the process of expanding into space. If the first, we might as well just go to Mars because that's all we want to do and it's all just wasted money anyway. If the second, the most of the ground work for going to Mars will have already been done. Even then, going to Mars is going to require more space research just to be able to do it properly and with a decent chance of success. I've seen some people complain because we're spending money on the ISS and talking about missions to the moon instead of spending it on a trip to Mars, what they don't realize is that going to Mars is going to require more money spent on the ISS as well as moon trips to develop the tech needed to go to Mars.
(I wrote this on Slashdot back in 2003..)
The basic problem is that space travel with chemical fuels isn't feasible. You just can't pack enough energy per unit mass into the fuel.
Only by desperate weight reduction measures, resulting in incredibly fragile vehicles, is anything made to fly into space at all. The vehicles are almost all fuel. Pieces have to be thrown away after launch. Payloads are dinky for the size of the vehicle. Costs are insanely high.
It's been that way for almost forty years. It's not getting any better. No combination of parts will fix this fundamentally broken technology.
Space travel is like lighter-than-air travel. The technology has been around for decades, and it reached its limits a long time ago. It's possible to build vehicles. But the weight limitations are too severe for them to be more than marginally useful.
Space travel won't work until we get a better energy source.
That's still valid. Consider Apollo. They launched a 50-story building and got a minivan back.
Suborbital flight takes far less energy than reaching orbital velocity. What Virgin Atlantic is doing is comparable to Alan Shepard's suborbital flight atop a Redstone ICBM in 1961. It's a roller coaster, not space travel.
Nuclear rocket engines would work, and were tested in the 1950s. That solves the mass ratio problem. But they're rather messy.
The challenge for space travel is to get buy-in from the broader population, and to do that it has to have the same visceral, senseless emotional response that warfare has.
So if you gave people a choice between (a) Mars mission and (b) current wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, you think the majority would choose (b)?
Maybe I'm hopelessly out of touch, but I didn't think war was actually that popular with the broader population. Only with politicians.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I think I'd want to see a Mars sample return mission before saying all technology is proven. We haven't yet demonstrated that we can send payload to Mars efficiently enough that something can be launched from the surface and sent back to Earth.
We can certainly launch a 1 tonne lander to Mars. We've done that several times now.
So we can also launch a 1 tonne capsule full of astronauts to Mars - but the technology that got a lander there we won't have enough thrust for the food, water, air, etc that the astronauts will need. If that additional mass is 50 tonnes - then why (at least conceptually) can't we launch 51 identical one-tonne-payload rockets - one full of astronauts and the other 50 full of food and water - and once we're out there in space, we link them together.
So long as we can build a rocket that can get to Mars with a payload of any non-zero mass, we can get any arbitrary amount of mass there - including enough fuel, food, water and air to get us back again.
There is clearly no fundamental physics or chemistry bottleneck - hence this article is nonsense.
There may be a motivational bottleneck (robots to a pretty good job) and there is certainly a financial bottleneck - but there is no doubt that we could put humans onto Mars and bring them back again if we wanted to.
I'm not familiar with that proverb.
The moon is made of rocket fuel.
Look it up.
In it Earth is ruined and humanity is taking a last gamble at survival. Robots are send out to terraform planets with AIs in charge of the mission. This is followed up by humans but as embryos. When the destination is reached, they would be placed in artificial wombs and then raised by robot care takers for the first generation. The main part of the story would be how that society turns out and how people that are raised by robots designed to mimic parents. I can't really think of plot elements to make the story interesting yet.
There are many options that we would have imployed if we wanted to colonize other star systems. it's just that the drive for it doesn't exist.
Well, let's hope the Russians make the next Baby-Step in that direction with Fobos-Grunt (At least Mars-Orbit and back).
1) We can handle the space environment (Apollo anyone?)
2) We can get to Mars now, with current tech. (I know, trust me). 5 technologies can do it, VASIMIR being one, build in orbit, fuel on moon, etc. Humans can handle 3 months in a can, no prob (I know a few astronauts who would love to try). Let alone in a few more years....
3) We HAVE to to survive as a species...i.e. we must and will colonize...anyone who says otherwise is a short sighted, and unimaginative person (same category as all those other 'cant be dones' in human history...those silly folks are laughed at eventually).
There is a decent chance we will, as a species, shed our mortal coils before we overcome many of the biological/technological hurdles to long range space travel. Assuming the transfer of human consciousness to a technological substrate is not impossible (or ostensibly impossible) due some heretofore empirically unseen factor such as the ‘spirit’ or higher dimensionality of ‘mind,’ it seems inevitable that humans will evolve into a technological speciesthat is if we survive at all. Once we are no longer biological, many of the difficulties currently inherent to space travel drop away. We would have virtual worlds in which to live while we travel, we could more easily shield our ‘bodies’ from cosmic radiation, and we would require far fewer hard resources to sustain both our consciousness and our virtual worlds. Now I don’t believe I will live forever because the technology to download my conscious is just around the corner. I think that technology is some ways out and almost certainly beyond my lifespan. If consciousness is ultimately just data and computational power, however, there doesn’t seem to be any hard reason why it can’t be ported to a different kind of hardware. I hate to even suggest the idea because I general take great pleasure in dashing the quasi-religious zealotry of friends who are convinced they will partake in a digital-rapture, as it were, and live for some incredible span of time via a technological apotheosis, but the fact remains that we will probably obtain the ability to leave our bodies behind at some point in the next 200 years. PS I’m not anti-religious, but that’s a whole other discussion.
The challenge for space travel is to get buy-in from the broader population, and to do that it has to have the same visceral, senseless emotional response that warfare has.
So if you gave people a choice between (a) Mars mission and (b) current wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, you think the majority would choose (b)?
But that's not the choice we face. The choice we have is not between you go to (a) Mars) or (b) Iraq.
The choice is, you pay for someone else to go to (a) Mars or (b) Iraq.
Sadly, more people picked (b).
The only intractable problem about a Mars colony is a closed ecosystem. And if we can solve that, I'm not sure that a planet is the right place to aim for. Asteroids look a lot more promising. (Though you'd want 3...a carbonaceous chondrite, a metallic one, and a head of frozen gases. If you're far enough out (the outer asteroid belt?) you might be able to find all three blended in one body. Otherwise you'll need to catch at least the frozen gasses item and fetch it.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" -- Hanlon's razor
The biggest technical problem is getting to Low Earth Orbit. Right now it is too expensive, though people are working on solving that.
The biggest overall problem as I see it is the socio-cultural approach we are taking with regards to space.
Back in the 1930's space flight was science fiction, though a few people like Goddard, Tsiolkovsky, and Oberth had been working on the technical aspects for a few years. People dreamed what it would be like to go into space and came up with some ideas on how to do it and what they might face. But it was just a dream that needed technology to make it real.
In the 1960's science fiction became science fact as the Space Race came into play. National pride and national security demanded that the money be spent on space. It got us places, but not cheaply. We learned a lot about what to do and what not to do. The dream was alive.
Since then we've been coasting, making little steps and sometimes stumbling. Space flight has become a 'so what' type of thing for a lot of people for a variety of reasons. It was also a fairly restricted 'club' limited to professionals and a small number of multi-millionaires. But the dream continued to live on and a few hundred ambitious people made it into space. They had to work hard to get those seats though.
In the not too distant future, as a result of private enterprise getting interested in space, 'normal' people will be making baby steps into space. These baby steps are much like the 'barnstorming' flights where pilots sold airplane rides. You went up, you came down, and you talked about it to all your friends. That creates an greater cultural awareness of what could be done with airplanes and it will do the same with suborbital space ships. And if people like Rutan and Branson can make a profit at it, an greater economic awareness will develop.
When the ball gets rolling in the suborbital area, people will start looking at orbital flights with a greater degree of seriousness. Once you reach orbit, you're halfway to everywhere.
"A polar bear is a rectangular bear after undergoing a coordinate transformation."
My wife, PhD in physics/astrophysics, almost bust a gut when I told her that one.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
You might check into James Hogan's book "Voyage from Yesteryear."
A robot probe is sent to a nearby star with a habitable planet and the equivalent of embryos. Robot caretakers raise the children and help with the colonization of the planet in a cultural vacuum that doesn't transmit a lot of cultural bad habits like racism and classism. (This is a minor part of the story.)
Back on Earth World War III comes and goes. A much larger spaceship is sent to the colony to take charge of it for the 'good guys,' arriving a few years before two other ships from competing factions of 'bad guys.' A culture clash happens, with the robot raised types countering the 'good guys.' (This is the bulk of the story.)
The robot raised types, and the kids they have, have a lot more going for them, intellectually and socially, than many of the 'good guys.'
It is an interesting story.
How about a nuclear powered rocket ?
The entire article assumes a 1960's approach: launch everything from earth with rockets. That's stupid. Its focus on chemical propellants is even sillier because nuclear propulsion is arguably already a "current" technology.
There are lots of technologies that you can use to get things out of earth's gravity well, including launch loops. There is lots of mass out there that you can use as a propellant and for other purposes. For propulsion, fission is close to ready, fusion is feasible, and even something like antimatter propulsion doesn't involve any new physics, just engineering for scaling up the antimatter generation and storage.
If we want manned spaceflight and colonization, we need to do several things. First, we need to stop wasting money and resources on the current manned space program and instead focus on extensive robotic exploration of the rest to the solar system to know what's out there and how we can take advantage of it. Second, we need to start investing in new launch technologies that don't use rocket propulsion. Third, we need to aggressively pursue the engineering behind fission, fusion, and (eventually) antimatter propulsion.
Simple as that. We need definitive proof of sentient, space-faring extraterrestrial life. Get that, and you'll have your visceral response in a hurry.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Before the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs, landing on the moon was impossible with the current technologies. What's relevant is if really smart people can conceive of a way to solve the problems inherent in whatever mission is being conceived, not if we can or can't do it NOW. If we can't even fathom it, then, yeah, it may not be something for this point in time. Otherwise, the implication is that we have to wait around for the technology to just organically drop off the tree.
There are several methods that are feasible today, and others that are possible in the near future - if we had a leader who actually had vision and the ability to carry something to term.
What a piss-poor post. Makes no mention of the Space Elevator research. Which, yes, moores law and general raw electrical power applies too. Apparently 300 microwaves can generate enough magnetic energy to lift humans on a pane to outer space, not that that fessible, or how it would actual be deployed, but just so you know.
The real missing ingredient is a reason to go up. Tourism? Not enough rich people. Mining? Nothing yet that can be obtained on Earth for far less cost. Religious zealotry is the only reason I see in the medium term. The Mormons once sold everything they owned and trekked out west in harsh conditions. Maybe they'll feel compelled to colonize Mars if they become paranoid......I mean bold enough.
What is there on the moon or Mars to make it worth going there. Why should anyone want to live there?
Probably quite a bit, but we probably won't know till we get there. :D I'd be a lot more interested in the asteroids as an intermediate step, literally trillions of dollars worth of raw materials just floating around out there, and a gigantic nuclear furnace just pouring out free energy to help you process it right behind you. Welcome to the post scarcity society. Once we have that licked we can swan about planetary gravity wells on a whim, probably even create macroengineered catapults to make insterstellar travel more accessable eventually too.
Oh and your going to live the rest of your life in this box, you will never see the destination, nor will your children, their children, their children's children, and likely ten more generations after that.
Most people spend most of their lives in a tiny geographic area anyway, the only difference is you couldn't take holidays.
Use Nukes. An adaption of the technology used in Nuclear weapons should be more than sufficient to provide the majority of the thrust for a two-way trip anywhere in the Solar System.
The joke there is the number of OTHER things NASA does on the same shuttle launch that nobody else in the fucking world can do. Satellite launches are a sideline; the rest is science.
Perhaps you ought to first read what Space Shuttles actually do. I consider the record an embarrassment to the US and its space efforts.
Satellite launches are the primary value of space development right now. Space science is a great way to soak up OPM because it has vague goals and be said to succeed no matter what the outcome or how much was spent on it.
Seems like the standard Retardican line always fails to consider this. NASA does the things that would never get done in their fabled "free market" because they're not "cost effective" at first to do - but when we count up how much we've benefitted from it since, it was obviously worth every penny.
"Worth every penny"? No effort to develop commercial activities in space. That right there indicates NASA has squandered its money. No manned activity beyond LEO since Apollo 17. A long series of one-off unmanned probes.
They explode, they are unreliable, they are slow, they have to be really huge to move only a small amount of mass, you need an army of PhD's to keep just one of them under control, and they smell like pee. Frankly most of the space programs money should go to projects like the LHC which will eventually solve actual problems which will enable true space faring ships and energy production facilities. Rockets are for people who think small.
Seriously, maybe you should go see the boats that men traveled to the New World in. Yes, yes, I know. They had air...
But seriously, water was an issue with their technology, so was food and other crucial nutrients. Yes, many died in their journeys. But thousands did not. Most of the issues with reaching Mars are easily overcome with today's technology.
However, here lies the real problem. Humans have gotten soft. Seriously, we don't want to risk life or limb. Little advancement will be achieved until we do. I am sure that several thousand would volunteer to make the journey, even if the odds were that only 10% would reach Mars.
We should be sending raw materials to Mars already. Furthermore, we should be developing the ISS. Seriously, why have we not started a hydroponics unit. They've got sunlight. One of the biggest focus of the ISS should be developing technology for food production. We hear how the earth's population faces food shortages. We've got enough sunlight passing us by that it's ludicrous not to pursue utilization of that sunlight.
We're making progress on rail gun technology. We should be able to reach a point with the technology that we can fire off resources. But the real issue is not technology. It's our "hearts".
Our iPhones are 10,000 times more advanced that the Mercury capsules that took men into space.
I believe I've read that the real speed limit is 100 kilometers per second. Any faster any the electron-shell stability of most atoms will become significant enough to induce heavy thermal increases.? (Essentially, you will cook as if in a microwave oven,,,) As far as "going fast" is concerned, the easiest solution would be to build a large mag-lev train in space. It would be like a large particle accelerator so you could get the ship up to just below the speed of light as it circled around, The problem, of course, is the 100kmps limitation as originally stated (if true)... Well, the other problem is "stopping"...
3 words:
Orbiting fuel stations (I'm sure someone mentioned this earlier but I didn't see it in first 100 postings)
Think of how absurd it would be if trucks had to deliver fuel to us at out homes for our round trips to work. There are hundreds of solutions to this problem its just a matter of will (and $$$). I'm frankly surprised this made it on the /..
There are more fundamental limitations to drilling past the mantle than this. Furthermore, I think exploring the oceans would be a much better place to spend this type of money. Colonize the ocean!
I don't quite buy "complicated".
The simple explanation is "Play a game of Asteroids and go get it", the fancy phrasing is that the adjustments needed to get the boosters are still less than 1 big tank from earth, because the bad part of them is getting them out of the main earth field.
I still believe we're too busy squabbling and not trying hard enough like we were in the 1960's when we felt it counted for real. Now we have the comps but we got lazy.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
In breaking news from 150 years ago: "The clash of two titans — physics and chemistry — are major barriers to human heavier than air flight, and may well make it impossible ... at least with current technologies."
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
the barriers to space have never been technological... engineers of any nation have always been able to solve these problems given reasonable expected time and resources.
the problem is that engineers rarely have a say in the allocation of time and resources, with these decisions usually being made by technically incompetent politicians, accountants and academics (usually allocating more resources to themselves than the engineers). ...and unfortunately these morons will also do whatever they can to preserve this status quo, so our feet will be planted firmly on the ground for a long long time to come.
To quote the venerable Robert Heinlein in "Time Enough for Love":
"Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so. "
This clearly applies to Alan Finkel and this particular op-ed. Alan Finkel's credentials are as a biotechnologist, NOT an expert on space, astrophysics, space propulsion, or anything else even remotely related to the topic he is writing about with such authority. Frankly, I can't believe this was even printed. There is not a shred of fact in it that could not be refuted by a ten year old and a fifteen minute search on Google.
But that's not the choice we face. The choice we have is not between you go to (a) Mars) or (b) Iraq.
The choice is, you pay for someone else to go to (a) Mars or (b) Iraq.
No, the latter is exactly what I meant. I didn't mean each individual taxpayer would be given the choice of going to Mars, don't be ridiculous.
Sadly, more people picked (b).
Really? I don't remember any kind of referendum on the topic.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
A full Earth surface to GEO space elevator is not possible with current materials. But you can certainly build a partial one with what we have now. And a partial one is still highly useful. For example, one that reaches 30% of the way down from orbit, and 30% of the way up from orbit can be done with current materials. That would make the job of any vehicle coming up from the ground much easier. At the other end, 30% above orbit velocity is nearly to Earth escape (41% is escape).
A 30% space elevator works out to a cable stress of 300 G-km. In other words the same as hanging a 300 km long cable at one gee under it's own weight. For carbon fiber, that works out to 5.3 GPa, which strength is available. In a real system you would taper it somewhat from center to tips, which lets you use lower stress and get realistic safety factors.
1. Resources. No it doesn't take a huge number of people. But calculate the value of a cubic kilometer of nickle iron. I'll allow you to ignore the platinum group metals in your calculations. The introduction of that much platinum would crash the market.
2. Energy. The sun shines all the time. Building flimsy mirrors to concentrate it is easy. Can be used as raw heat to melt rocks, or converted into microwaves. If microwaves don't turn out to have unintended consequences this may be the easiest way to wean ourselves off of oil.
3. Vacuum. There are a whole bunch of processes that having unlimited cheap vacuum makes possible.
4. high energy + vacuum allows easy element separation by mass spectroscopy technology.
5. Microgravity. Whole bunches of new materials may be possible.
6. Dinosaur killer interception. Once we are in space to stay, we've got a much better chance both to spot and to stop the next big rock.
Population pressure may encourage some people to live in space, but it is unlikely that people will move faster than they reproduce. (Very few emigrations reduced the population of hte source country.) It is far more likely that initially people in space will be long term contracts similar in nature to peopel working on arctic mines or oil fields today.
However cramped living facilities are entirely a result of having to lift all the mass out of Earth's gravitaional well. The slag from refining can be readily blown into glass foam, which is both a very good insulator, and strong enough to be a component in habitat construction.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
I agree. But then again, I don't take the GP serious in that. Because, you know, his "not ever" will die with him and the next generations will make up their own minds about it.
"never" is so unlike what the word means when a being with a ~100 year life-span talks about spans of millions and billions of years.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
To quote Einstein: "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods."
Unless of course they are too busy playing Craps to be paying attention
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
What are the limits we truly face in the long term?
How much energy is hitting the earth from the Sun? How much energy is available from the Sun to a ship in space? How much energy is there on earth (from every source including geothermal (there is a lot of heat under the earth's crust) and nuclear power?
What are the limits of genetic engineering (maybe humans of today can't travel far, but what about humans of the future?
There are limits - the earth is pretty darn small and Space is pretty darn big. When you hear those comparisons "peanut in Reading and a small walnut in Johannesburg, and other such dizzying concepts" it seems amazing that a bacteria from the peanut could find its way to the walnut. Apparently we've done it, but how much of the peanut did we destroy in process? How many times can we repeat it? And can we find find a place to go to that makes the trip worthwhile?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
1) Clean up the space debris. so we don't get hit by it.
2) Build a space elevator (bean stock). Rockets are just to expensive, given the amount of mass we need to lift.