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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."
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?
Neither: we're going to cancel it outright, a month after the next President gets sworn-in.
i never understood why NASA insists on making the Mars trip a return mission. Why waste 3 years there and back stuck in the middle of space doing no science?
Just send a couple of guys there and make it a one way mission. They can start colonising immediately and start building stuff. Pioneers used to do that sort of thing all the time in the new world.
People place too much value on human life. If the Chinese send anyone theyd do it that way.
I bet NASA could find a million volunteers to do it and id be one of them. Id do it for a single week on Mars.
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beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
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?)
If America is going to get humans to Mars SpaceX is your best bet, not NASA. NASA is completely indifferent to actually building a new launcher. NASA's only goal is to keep Senators Shelby, Nelson, Hatch and Hutchinson happy with perpetual jobs programs in their states so their money keeps flowing. That's why they keep proposing launchers that are always 10 years away from ever launching.
The beauty of SpaceX is they get some money from Congress but they can probably support themselves on commercial and military launch contracts and ride out the sheer stupidity of America's political system.
Here is an excellent article on SpaceX in Air and Space Mag.
Elon Musk's goal is almost entirely aiming towards colonize Mars and disrupting launcher design so thoroughly that we can actually afford to get big things in to LEO and beyond.
Article has excellent stuff on the really innovative stuff they are doing, like their heat shield. They aren't patenting anything because they don't want to give China a HOWTO so they can rip off all the cool stuff they are doing. They also give the finger to all the existing aerospace companies that try to gouge them on parts. If the price isn't reasonable they build their own and often improve on existing designs. They are probably going to undercut China's Long March on LEO launch cost which is impressive with their plant being in very expensive California and having a relatively expensive American work force. They are beating China on cost using innovation.
A really compelling part in the article is an engineer at one of their competitors rooting for them to succeed. They are almost the only shot America has of recapturing the Apollo magic and beating China in the new space race.
@de_machina
The plural of spacecraft is spacecraft.
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.
Both you and the AC that replied to you before me are equally right, and at the same time both wrong.
In the current state of affairs and absence of sufficient collective awareness and conscience, private entities not beholden to the tug-of-war of politics are the only entities likely to be able to fund a continued space presence (much less an expansion of that presence).
On the other hand, the consequences for the human collective if such an infrastructure is left in private hands would be nothing less than THE END of any chance of reigning in the One Percent that nearly controls everything now. Can you imagine the "network neutrality" debate translated into the infrastructure required for space exploration and colonization?
Never mind that ALL discussions of so-called network neutrality are a deliberate mis-frame, because the only true neutrality would be public ownership of the infrastructure - the wires - and THAT has never even been part of the main discussion; it's only been unimportant people like me with no voice even mentioning it at all. (Meanwhile the government in Australia finally gets something right that doesn't repeat our political stupidities, with its plan to buy back their wires as part of its own broadband initiative.)
Frankly, we don't dare even allow Space-X or any single government to get a controlling foothold off-planet until we've evolved the necessary collective awareness and wisdom to prevent the result from reading like the plot from any one of dozens of dystopian science fiction novels. WE NEED TO OWN THAT INFRASTRUCTURE, all of us; it needs to be a co-op enterprise. The human push into space must be a SOCIAL endeavor, and by social I mean the entire human tribe, not just one splinter group of it.
The current Scientific American has an interesting article on the path that manned exploration out of the Earth-Moon system might take. It employs aspects of the unmanned program to cut cots and to have a more flexible program. One interesting aspect is that the main spacecraft is parked in high earth orbit and human crews fly to it in a small craft. Once on the main craft, it does a swing by the Earth to get a speed boost. Its main engine is electric-power (off of solar arrays). While only part of the Scientific American article ("This Way to Mars," 12/2011 issue) is free, they do kindly provide links to its references at the bottom of the page. See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=this-way-to-mars .
Apparently, you need about 100 tons in low Earth orbit for such a craft. That would be two launches of SpaceX's proposed Falcon Heavy. It seems way more likely to fly than NASA's proposed Space Launch System (SLS).
You put you lives in the hands of for profit airline companies and car makers. Don't be ridiculous
"The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing." - Arthur C. Clarke ~1980
If you haven't watched the anime Planetes, you should. One of the main topics is what you're talking about. It's one of the best hard science fictions I've seen/read.
1. Moon
2. Helium 3
3. ????
4. Working fusion engine
5. rocket fuel//profit.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Corporations only have the amount of power they currently enjoy and can only act as criminally as they do without real fear because the government has power they can co-opt, and are able to do it safely because of the sheer size of government. If the government wasn't so all-encompassing and huge, corporations wouldn't have the power they do.
This makes absolutely no sense.
It's not capitalism that's given corporations the power they have these days as so many like the OWS protesters scream about, it's a too-large government that by it's very nature of being so large & powerful, attracts corruption and covers up corruption in it's labyrinthine maze of finger-pointers, always blaming something/someone else and muddying the waters such that curbing corruption is impossible. It becomes a circular self-reinforcing system until it collapses and leaves the poor sucker citizens to suffer the consequences.
And this is akin to saying "the problem with all this crime is that we have laws!"
Elon Musk isn't doing SpaceX to profiteer. He is doing it because he wanted to launch payloads to Mars and all of the previous alternatives tended to suck.
He needs to turn a profit on his launchers so he can plow the money back in to R&D to work on the next steps in the technology. The SpaceX business model is totally the right one, and it has NOTHING to do with the OWS and the 1% strife. We should be cheering him on for putting a bunch of aerospace engineers back to work in California, and for pouring over NASA's engineering docs from Apollo through now and preserving and building on all that hard won knowledge.
One reason NASA is completely dysfunctional is Congress and one president after another keeps forcing them to change their designs and even their goals every 4-8 years, they force them to do things with more focus on which states the jobs programs will be in, Florida in particular being an important swing state, rather than if its the best design for the goal. The Chinese might be able to make the state funded model work since most of their politburo is technocrats and engineers. Letting a bunch of clueless lawyers run your space program⦠really bad idea.
@de_machina
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
Frankly, we don't dare even allow Space-X or any single government to get a controlling foothold off-planet until we've evolved the necessary collective awareness and wisdom to prevent the result from reading like the plot from any one of dozens of dystopian science fiction novels. WE NEED TO OWN THAT INFRASTRUCTURE, all of us; it needs to be a co-op enterprise. The human push into space must be a SOCIAL endeavor, and by social I mean the entire human tribe, not just one splinter group of it.
No. Or at least, only in the broadest abstract sense, in which we truly already do collectively 'own' it. Imagine if the integrated circuit technology invented in the early-mid 1960s had been owned and developed collectively. We would still be running 128 K bit memory and 100 KHz processors, and disk drive capacity would be still approaching 10 Mibibytes. If (as so many of us believe) NASA in its post-Apollo structure has held back space exploration rather than advanced it, how can you propose that this, a particular expression of a collective approach, makes any sense?
No, progress has always and will always depend on individual creativity, risk taking and initiative. In fact I'm rooting for the first trillionaires, who will achieve trillionaire status by collecting $100 billion in investment and using it to exploiting the literally unlimited resources available to a space-faring civilization. They are the ones who will pull this off, risking their own and their investors' futures and their participants (employees etc.)) lives. Excellent examples - Elon Musk, Mark Shuttleworth, Jeff Bezos, Burt Rutan, Richard Branson, and Robert Bigelow.
Do not forget for one minute that there is no technical difference (other than the pre-existing legal basis for shooting the opposition without repercussion) between a government and a corporation. The plain fact is that space is big - really big, and communications and transport are relatively slow compared to the distances. So it is inevitable that any future spacefaring civilization will be segmented and diversified, analogously to the world in the era of sailing ships when it could take months or years to get from Europe to China.
Whether the management of the various elements of a spacefaring civilization - planetary, asteroidal or orbital communities - are governments or companies is a rather unimportant distinction - in the end, both will act similarly to protect their interests. (A 'company' was, originally, a group of people who establish a contractual agreement to work in common - in some cases under a government or military regime, in others under a profit-making regime. But all 'companies' must make a 'profit' - acquire more resources than are spent - else they die.) Let the legal structure be developed and firmly established on the basis of a common understanding of the rights and responsibilities of humans, to prevent and minimize the impact of internal and inter-agency conflict and preserve human and other rights, and work very hard to establish a permanent philosophy and practice of ethical interactions, and there is a chance that most (not all) conflicts between groups will be restricted to activities within that broad legal basis. For example, there have been almost no significant deadly conflicts between the various states of the United States. California has not sent their militia to attack Oregon over water rights on the Klamath River. That is the best that you can hope for.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/