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NASA's Next Mission: Deep Space
gManZboy writes "NASA's Mars Science Lab and Curiosity rover are the next steps in a long-term plan to travel farther and faster into space. Check out the future spacecrafts and tools that will get them there — including NASA's big bet, a spacecraft that combines the Orion multipurpose crew vehicle with the Space Launch System, designed to take astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit for the first time since the Apollo 17 Moon mission in 1972. NASA will need 10 years to prepare astronauts to take Orion and SLS for a test flight."
Or are we going to offshore it?
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Sadly, there is on the one hand the desire to come up with ever more grandiose projects now that the space shuttle program is defunct and on the other hand looming budget cuts... so what we will get is a huge launch and a couple of years of data and then a giant chunk of metal hurling through space that no one can afford to keep track of any more. Civilization is collapsing.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
SLS exists by Congressional mandate, to send cash to ATK and the other Shuttle contractors. It'll probably never fly.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
They'll die right here on earth too. I guarantee that. Maybe theyll get hit by a bus. Maybe have a heart attack at 50. Maybe develop cancer by 55 and In 50 years time no one will even know they existed.
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beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
"Just send a couple of guys there and make it a one way mission. They can start colonising immediately and start building stuff."
Unfortunately there are no Martian princesses there for these couple of guys to breed with, so you are gonna have to include some females in the crew.
"Pioneers used to do that sort of thing all the time in the new world"
"
The new world (the Americas) had a lot of advantages that Mars does not:
Breathable atmosphere
Climate suitable for growing stuff
Fertile soil with plants and animals already there
turkeys, cranberries and mashed potato for dinner (and locals to tell the colonists how to cook them)
Trees for making wooden structures out of
fresh water
mineral resources
etc
They'll die right here on earth too. I guarantee that. Maybe theyll get hit by a bus. Maybe have a heart attack at 50. Maybe develop cancer by 55 and In 50 years time no one will even know they existed.
That's okay because eventually, anyone who could have known they existed will be dead too. So you see it's self-correcting.
I mean it doesn't make much sense to say we over-value human life and then worry about the partial memories of those lives. The life itself is more valuable than the memory; if you recognize no other reason for this, then at least because it can continue to make more memories.
I think that's your own desire to "make your legacy as an answer to mortality" using the topic to manifest itself. Otherwise I agree with you about having balls and understanding that exploring new frontiers might mean facing new dangers and this is not a good reason to give up. It would make a lot more sense than dying in some pointless undeclared war against a foreign nation that isn't really a threat to you.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Let's think about all that we have learned from our manned space program in the last 30 years. And now let compare that to everything we've learned through our unmanned space program. What amazed us more, pictures from Hubble, or pictures from the ISS? Or was it shockingly detailed infrared pictures of the universe's first light? Or was it the ISS? Was it the amazing Mars landers? Was it the fact that a human-made probe made a soft landing on freaking TITAN??? Well it turns out that the ISS was more expensive that all those missions put together. That's largely because human exploration is just expensive and it's getting more expensive all the time. Alongside, robots are quickly closing the capability gap on us, and in 20 years I'm confident that they can do more on Mars than humans could.
In the 60's our robots sucked, lives were cheap, the Soviets were scary, the economy was pumping, the politicians were united behind NASA, and the Moon was close. Yes, that was the single coolest and most amazing thing that any space program has ever done. But we're fooling ourselves absurdly if we think that in the present day we can get our glory back by doing Mars. The conditions are different in every way.
And I think it would be terrible for the space program as well. Just like the ISS ate up an ungodly chunk of each year's Space budget (for what?) as serious and far cheaper science experiments got vetoed, a Mars mission would just *be* the NASA budget for three decades. It can't be denied that it would primarily be a prestige mission. There are much better ways to learn each and every one of the things we would learn on such a mission. But I think Americans want to do it because we feel like we're on the decline, and like all aging men, we want to get back on that horse and show that we've still got it. It's like the old dude who reminisces about that time he was 24 and hooked up with a model, and ends up buying a Porsche and a mountain of Cialis because he thinks he can relive those glory years. Yes, we're looking for an excuse to whip out our cocks again and scream madly about how we can piss all the way to Mars. But it's more than a little pathetic, not least because there is no political way that our political system could produce the huge volume of steady funding that such a project would require. If we try it, it will be mentioned in every two minute version of the history of the American empire, right at the end.
Can we put this whole pioneer bullshit to rest? Pioneers were going into a world where there would be food, animals, materials for shelter, the same gravity, and AIR. Mars has none of these (although if you insist, I will grant you rock for shelter). Traveling across space to Mars isn't like traveling on the ocean to a new continent. Sure those guys had balls to risk traveling to a new land they had never seen, but they understood that they could take fish from the sea if they were hungry and could distill water from the ocean if they needed water. Space is empty, you cannot refuel your supplies from the cold vacuum of it. So the trip isn't bad. Let's get to Mars, see what you need then. You may argue that you can grow your own food, produce your own oxygen, and create your own shelter. If you're going to live on the ship you came in on, that's fine, just means you only have a few hundred feet to walk around in for the rest of your life. If you want something bigger, you need infrastructure to build it. And I mean massive infrastructure, because there are no hardware stores on Mars. Hell, there are no trees on Mars, so you better be building with rocks. But then you need massive tools to cut and move the rocks. And to seal them, because it's not like building a stone hut on Earth, you need that shit to be air tight. And as for air, you need a system to replenish your air, permanently. Unless, of course, you don't care to breathe. And you'll need redundancy, because that's not something that can go down for a weekend. So that's even more stuff you need to pack. Food. Grow your own, sure. But that takes space. And light. Assuming the biology of plant growth works decently on Mars, you still are getting less sunlight than normal. Growing in your own greenhouse would take significant space to feed people for a year, and if you have a particularly bad crop, there are no Indians to come and help you. And finally, Mars has roughly 1/3rd the gravity of Earth. That will cause problems to your body, and there's no way to fix that currently.
Fuck you and your colonist ideals. Early pioneers took great risks but they weren't idiotic. To assume that they would willfully head off to settle a land that is impossible to live in just states your ignorance. If you still can't get your head around it, then explain to me why no one's built a house on top of Mount Everest. It'd have quite the nice view.
I'm no less close minded than you. Your plan would kill people and create a monetary sink hole that would destroy any future space program. It's a never ending system that either ends with the most costly care packages ever created, a failed mission that requires the colonists to come home, or the death of the colonists. I believe in a future in space and I wish to god it would hurry up, but space is not that easy, and if you thought about it for a minute, you might see that sending people on a one way trip would do more harm than good. Small steps aren't bad, especially when a failed mission could mean an even bigger step back.
The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica is actually a great example, thanks for bringing it up. It's entirely dependent on the outside world for supplies except for air and water. Everything, and I mean everything is shipped in. There's no self-sufficiency to speak of.
We think of Antarctica as an inhospitable place, but it's a tropical paradise compared to anywhere we can land people in space. It has unlimited oxygen and and water, no dangerous radiation, earth normal gravity, unlimited water, vast mineral deposits, and temperatures that can be survived with nothing more than some warm clothing.
Nonetheless, if external support was cut off from the south pole station, then despite having all the existing buildings, infrastructure, machinery, and a staff of hundreds of brilliant scientists and researchers, everyone there would die.
Let me reiterate this: your examples of 'colonies' are all places where the people there are supported by enormous external supply chains, and would die if those supplies are cut off. On Earth, we can keep the supplies going because we can afford to, and because it's worth it -- the relatively low overhead of air freighting in everything is small compared to the valuable science that can be performed in Antarctica, or the money people are willing to spend to climb Everest.
All of these are expeditions, not colonies. They're not self sufficient, and it wouldn't be cost effective to make them self sufficient.
Shipping stuff on Earth is cheap. Air freight to a frozen desert in the middle of nowhere is a negligible overhead when compared to sending stuff to Mars. Even in the wildest, most delusional dreams of space fanatics, there is no way to do it for less than about $100 per pound.
Look around your house -- really look -- and for everything you see, ask yourself: how many pounds is that?. Could anyone afford to live like this if it cost $100 per pound more than it would otherwise? How many pounds of water do you use? How many pounds of air? What does your house weigh?
Try that again with the current, realistic cost of sending things to Mars of $10,000 per pound.
We're still the only nation that seems to reliably be able to send anything to Mars.
1. Moon
2. Helium 3
3. ????
4. Working fusion engine
5. rocket fuel//profit.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
How NASA projects should work:
President gives a mission to NASA
NASA estimates method and budget
Congress approves budget
NASA completes mission
Here is how it actually works:
President gives a mission to NASA
Congress chooses the method (maximum jobs) and budget (way too small)
NASA tries and fails to make congresses' stupid ideas work
New President cancels old mission in favour of a new mission that is "better" because he can take credit for it