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What If the Apollo Program Never Happened?
astroengine writes "In a recent debate, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said he would like to beat the Chinese back to the moon. He has even been so bold as to propose setting up a manned base by 2020, driven by empowering private industry to take the initiative. It's ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972. Between then and now, NASA's small space shuttle fleet filled in for space travel, but astronauts could only venture as far a low earth orbit — at an altitude much lower than the early pioneers reached. If there were no Apollo crash program to beat the Soviets to the moon, would we have planned to go to the moon eventually? But this time with a commitment of staying? Or would we never go?"
You wouldn't be reading this.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
It's ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972.
I think that word doesn't mean what you think it means.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Without space exploration there isn't much point to our civilization.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
In a recent debate, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said he would like to beat the Chinese back to the moon. He has even been so bold as to propose setting up a manned base by 2020, driven by empowering private industry to take the initiative. It's ironic to hear moon travel still being debated 40 years after the last Apollo landing in 1972.
How is that ironic? Establishing a base versus traveling to are two fairly different goals in magnitude with one totally encompassing the other. Aside from that, I don't think it's ironic that 40 years have passed and we need to reevaluate a moon mission. It's seriously still a nontrivial problem today, it's not like riding a bike. In my mind, the fact that they did it forty years ago doesn't take away the danger and knowledge involved with such a feat but instead just proves how badass and ahead of their time those people who worked on the Apollo Program were (yes, yes, Wernher von Braun and Nazi scientists, I'm aware).
And as far as it's being "debated" I challenge you to name one thing that requires government spending that hasn't been debated off and on over the years. Oh, the massive Department of Defense spending, right, for some reason nobody debates that ballooning military industrial complex and that's about it. Wouldn't want to look "weak" going into office now, would we. Speaking of which, I'm all for a shift of some of those funds to space exploration. It took a space race with 'the ruskies' to get us to the moon maybe another 'rah rah USA' race with those other 'commies' will help us establish a presence and research lab?
My work here is dung.
the more obvious it is that it never happened at all.
Without the lash of the Communist menace, Congress would not have spend trillions to shoot people into space.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Part of what got our country into gear was JFK's death. JFK was even trying to covertly kill the program by rigging it so Republicans would kill it for lack of favorable earmark kick backs and similar games.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
Every administration comes and tugs NASA around like a lapdog to appear like they're visionary and progressive but they keep hindering good progress. We really need to speak out against this. It's a problem that doesn't serve science at all. Both parties do this and neither one of them is interested in the real science behind their attempt to look like they're in the know about space exploration.
We never went to the moon. Let's go!
The man is a complete loon. His only saving grace is that he's not from Alaska.
We wouldn't have such a vibrant black market for moon rocks, we wouldn't have our National flag on the moon's surface giving the finger to other nations, we'd have missed out on some decent Hollywood flicks on the subject, and the government would have blown the money on something else similarly unproductive.
http://www.moonlandinghoax.net/
The Cold War and the sudden and unexpected advances the Soviets made in their remarkable early space program (thanks to the sadly underrated and largely forgotten genius of Sergei Korolev) where the primary motivators that led to Apollo. Without the strong desire of the U.S. to have a major "first" in space over such a military rival, it's very unlikely the U.S. would have ever gone beyond LEO. Unlike LEO, there was relatively little to gain strategically or technologically from a manned moon mission. It was mostly a nationalistic pride thing. Apollo was designed to show that the U.S. was capable of space firsts too, and everything about the mission--from its highly public nature to the planting of the U.S. flag--was meant to highlight that.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The Apollo program never happened.
Stanley Kubrick faked it. He later admitted his involvment using the film "The Shining" as his medium.
Just ask this guy: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/luna/luna_apollomissions10.htm
I know Newt is just making vaporous campaign promises and that there are "trickle down" benefits for ordinary people from the space program, but if you are going to spend big to have new technology why not do something more people can benefit from directly?
- a national network of bullet trains?
- a "space race" for an electric car with the same range as a gas powered car and that can be recharged in under 10 min?
The fact is, we wouldn't have gone to the moon w/o the space race. There is no economic reason (with our current technology) to go there. Once we have developed reliable fusion power and developed high strength materials/structures (putting in place one or more space elevators for example) to turn it into a serious commercial venture then everyone will go into space. How soon till we are sophisticated enough to do that? Given how things are currently progressing in the world, I'd guess maybe in a 500+ years from now it will be viable.
We need to invent warp drive by 2063 to meet the Vulcans, but it's 2012 and we can't even get to the moon!
For one thing, we might have practical fusion power by now.
The Apollo program taught a lot of lessons, but one of them was "If you're a government-funded research program, DO NOT SUCCEED." Congress began axing the budget for space exploration about ten minutes after Armstrong's "One small step for a man..." After all, we did the job, beat the Rooskies, hallelujah now we can quit wasting all that money.
I've noticed one thing about fusion: it's *always* "twenty years off" and has been since the early fifties. Tiny little steps, "we need more funding", and "maybe we'll get something in (this year+20). And over the past forty years, a lot of bold proposals for testbeds that, while crude and inefficient, might actually have WORKED so they could be improved, have been shot down. (cf. Bussard's proposal to use heavy, water-cooled high-strength magnets to brute-force a solution.)
See you in 2032, when "We'll have fusion in 2052." will be the rallying cry.
I.e., put public money in private hands. Just what we need more of, Grinch.
I'm a fan of space travel, but we don't need any new grand initiatives when we can't pay our bills. Unless this is going to put millions of people to work, save it for better times.
Let the Chinese have the next go. Or is America going to start a cold war with them to start the space race to get to Moonbase Alpha first?
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
Gingrich's speech was no more than pandering to the crowd ahead of the primary election. He's made bullshit promises in every state he's campaigned in so far. How does funding a new moon mission mesh with the Republican party's insistence on deep budget cuts on everything but military spending? Face it, we aren't going to the moon or Mars anytime soon. One side of the aisle wants to overspend on the military, the other wants to overspend on social programs. All the debate over taxes and discretionary spending is political theatre. Neither party is willing to make the sacrifices necessary to fix budgetary problems and neither really gives a damn about space exploration.
Just like energy, which cannot be created or destroyed; the .gov cannot "create" something that benefits more people than the required taxing harms.
What was the point of sending humans? The nation's scientists all said that robots could collect the data and specimens that they were interested in, and that sending human beings needlessly increased the risks and costs. The only reason we sent people to the moon was to show the world that our space program could compete with the Russians'.
Palm trees and 8
Why do we need to be the first or beat anyone to doing anything? It's not really a competition. If China finds a profitable reason to be there, then we can raise money and go back. As it stands, we could not figure out why to be there so why bother again? The moon has plenty of space for everyone.
Seriously, the moon and Mars are a waste of time and money. Near earth orbit, in constrast, has a lot of potential for power generation, enhanced telecommunications, earth observation and eventually, permanent, self-sustaining living environments. As "cool" as it would be to get to Mars or the moon (again), there's just no compelling reason to do so that's not served better by near earth orbital stations and satellites.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Can't wait to read the delusional Space Nutter posts...
You mean the government can't create something like the Internet, which has increased productivity of every modern country in the world? If your argument about $in=$out was true, we would never advance as a a society. Fortunately you are very wrong.
What's the economic incentive for private industry to build/support a moon base? Without government funding, what's the return on investment? More moon rocks? Mining what minerals? A good view of the ocean? Seriously. Companies don't really invest in altruistic endeavors without a profit motive.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
- Carl Sagan
Because compared to those two, a moon base is easy to achieve, for different reasons. There's no right of way issues for a moon base, everyone equally benefits (or not) from a moon base, and we know a moon base can be achieved with current technology.
There would be no Tang!
Oh, the humanity! *sob*
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
Technology is such a thing that has to be continuous.
How comes, that most powerful engines that NASA has NOW (RD-180, thrust 4.15 MN), are designed/made in the USSR/Russia, and they have half of the thrust of the engines from the cancelled Soviet Moon travel project - the missile named H-1. The most powerful carrier rocket in existence now is also Russian - namely "Energy". NOTHING (nothing!) is left from the engines (F-1, thrust 6.77 MN) that supposedly brought Apollo ships to the Moon (Saturn V). Documentation is LOST.
In contract - first men in Space - Russia still is the only county that is capable of bringing man to space now. DESPITE all the hardships of the 90s. All this is even stranger then 9/11.... War Is Peace / Freedom Is Slavery / Ignorance Is Strength ?
Vassili Leonov
Just like a politician to bring up a massive government boondoggle which might have some scientific benefits, but which provides no possibility of a payoff in practical terms.
I propose a different science/engineering race with China:
The first to build and get patents on associated technology for the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor. China announced a year or two back that they had begun.
LFTR most likely would provide a trillion dollar+ payoff to whoever gets there first and can deploy it both domestically and sell exports to other countries within the lifespan of the patents.
Or how about the closely related WAMSR - the Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor.
Those look both doable, almost certainly cheaper than a moonbase (though possibly still somewhat expensive), and would have enormous benefits for mankind.
But, no doubt Republicans would decry a program to rapidly get the LFTR or WAMSR up and running as a socialist, big-government program. . . but somehow, a freaking moonbase isn't. Oh, I know why - because there's no actual money to be made on a moonbase, so the private sector doesn't care about it and thus doesn't need "protection" from government programs.
Well, clearly, if we had never actually BEEN to the moon we would still think it was made of cheese, and would be at war with Italy over the mining rights for the Lesser Mozzarella Mountains and the Plains of Parmesan
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Nope, sorry, there was no such thing. Nearest we came was Apollo 13.
What a stupid statement. Even stupider is that you are using the internet to make that statement.
We (Americans) won't go anywhere soon. We simply don't have a fear big enough that going to the moon can fix. Whether its gay marriage, the liberals, the conservatives, big media, global warming, China's economy or the European debt crisis, what ever your issue, the moon has no answers so we will not be going there soon.
really must be headed for the ash heap! With Obama calling for the restoration of industrial manufacturing, and a major challenger calling for a re-run of the space race, what'll they think of next, Washington recrossing the Potomac? ("Oh, yeah, he can come BACK across now! (did he find his coin?)" )
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Because computers would still take up an entire floor of a building. Without the size and weight restrictions of space travel, why bother building them small and cool enough to fit in a desk-sized unit? Sure it'd be cool to have tiny pocket-sized computers, but who has the budget to build them?
'Waste anything but time'.
These are truly magical words to a bureaucracy.
When they were uttered, NASA became an enormously powerful agency, with a massive budget, and the resulting craft was guaranteed to be ridiculously expensive, and optimised entirely wrongly for an ongoing space program.
NASA then set the precedent for the 'right way' to do space - which proceeded on, helped by space being seen not as a place to do things in, but a convenient way to feed aerospace companies welfare.
For example, NASAs last attempt to 'reduce the cost of space launch' (x33/venturestar) had not one, not two, but three completely untried technologies on it.
SpaceX - by doing it in a much leaner manner, have developed a rocket and engines for a tiny fraction of the budget of what NASAs estimation tools say it'd cost them.
And you know that it'd have overrun in reality.
If you look at a typical NASA procurement requirement, you do not see 'Must deliver cargo of mass M to position P with speed S'.
You see a long list of requirements that are only incidental, but so happen to require expertise only available from the two or three 'usual suspects', meaning only they can make credible bids.
The lack of funding, and the clear utility of satellites may well have lead to much cheaper rockets being developed a lot sooner.
They never did land on the moon. Or did anyone ever bring back any moon cheese?
Because compared to those two, a moon base is easy to achieve, for different reasons
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills"
- John F Kennedy
and we know a moon base can be achieved with current technology
and the Japanese don't have bullet trains?
That is both historically wrong, and just plain stupid. You really should try harder not to let your blind hatred for taxes get in the way of facts.
The GPS system, the internet, spinoffs in electronics from NASA, and the Interstate Highway system are just a few examples where the US government created something that resulted in a net positive.
I'm sure it's easy for you to believe that all government spending is a waste because everything in my previous list existed before you did. But if you aren't willing to accept successes of the past then you will prevent successes in the future.
well why did the soviets want to get to the moon? would they have planned to go to the moon if it wasn't for america trying to get there?
'nuff said.
Seriously, anyone complaining that fusion research doesn't get any funding hasn't seen the budget for ITER - the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. Last I checked it was around 15 Billion dollars. That also isn't the only fusion research going on - there's the National Ignition Facility for one, and I think a couple others too.
I think the moon program was during a "sweet spot" in our history, when the country was still relatively young and powerful, we were not so divided as a nation, and the government procurement process had not become so corrupt. I think that even a crash program would not work now -- that there's not enough money on earth to fund what a Saturn 5 project would cost today, given what the process has become. I think it's barely possible for private industry, but I suspect that even that would be essentially shut down by regulation. China would be willing to take more chances, and are accustom to achieving projects of large scale in recent times. They might be able to do it.
To answer the original question, had we missed the opportunity to do an Apollo crash program at the time in our history when it was done, we'd still be in low earth orbit, at staggering cost, today.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
What-if scenarios such as this one are pointless. What if the American revolution hadn't happened? What if the Romans had had an industrial evolution? What if Hitler had won the war? What if 911 never happened? What if a hacker had a girlfriend?
All of these questions are only useful in an entertainment sort out way (that's the only polite way I could phrase this). They aren't really answerable in any way that is useful in analyzing things as they currently are and where they appear to be going. Sometimes fun to think about of course.
Gingrich's speech was no more than pandering to the crowd ahead of the primary election. He's made bullshit promises in every state he's campaigned in so far.
The idea of a more permanent return to the moon is something Newt has talked about for decades, and also pushed forward a bill or two on.
Newt has been really "into" space for a long, long time. I agree the timing of talking about this is pandering but fundamentally Newt really is interested in furthering space exploration.
How does funding a new moon mission mesh with the Republican party's insistence on deep budget cuts on everything but military spending?
Here is where your ignorance shows. You didn't even finish reading the SUMMARY much less the actual story!
Newt wants to take some small portion of the NASA budget to issue X-Prize style prizes that move private industry forward in the goal of a lunar space colony.
When put the way he actually means, does it sound so crazy? The tax payers pay very little, private industry takes all the risk. It would accelerate the already growing private space industry but with a very beneficial focus beyond just "going to space".
Regardless of who actually becomes president this is a very good idea to support private space travel and to reduce government spending in space at the same time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...to a bloody pulp while we still have overwhelming military superiority.
the government(s) created less than 1% of the networks that now are "the internet", and hardly any of the software now in use ...
Up to the Moon landings people were driven by the spirit of discovery. With most of the earth known and a Moon landing having found the true nature of the body (i.e. not Cheese, not dust, not ice, ...), there's not much else driving exploration. Sure, there's Mars, but ask the common person to point to the Moon and they readily will, ask them to point to Mars and they'll not even know if it is in the night sky, at the present, let along where it is.
The Space Program also lead to a voyage of scientific discovery. Many materials and processes were discovered out of necessity, which really did lead to a massive boom in consumer products and medicine. Perhaps this is what n00t is after, kickstart the ol' 'merkin economy with an infusion of government cash into laboratories to develop the next space suit, rocket drive, solar shielding, etc.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Kennedy lied. Not about that going to the moon was hard (it was and is), but that that's why we were doing it. We were doing it to beat the Russians.
They have bullet trains. They don't have electric cars which can recharge in 10 minutes and have the same range as gasoline-powered cars.
I always found that to be a dumb comparison. They came back and plundered and eventually set up some colonies. However said colonies were in the tropics and already had flora and fauna (not to mention millions of humans already living there). This is so many orders of magnitude larger, it would be more akin to Columbus landing in Antarctica in a rowboat. The moon landing was a bit of a stunt more than an end solution as the commitment to funding was not going to happen. That is the other major difference. Why would such enterprises receive funding if there is no monetary return? Columbus came back because there was something of tangible (and re-sell-able) value. Find gold or oil on the moon (or some substance that would "solve the energy crisis") and people would be lining up to go. Perhaps "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" had it right, and we should just send up prisoners on a one way trip to build the colony as that would be a way to save some $$ on getting it done.
Space would have become a USAF business in the US. The USAF had the Dyna-Soar program (small manned craft, launched on a rocket, lands on wings), which was cancelled in favor of Apollo. The USAF also had the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, which was a lot like Skylab, but earlier. The USAF would probably have sizable manned space stations by now, equipped with missile defenses.
The Gusmobile (the six-seat Gemini) might have flown. With both the Gusmobile and Dyna-Soar, the US would have had a solid low-orbit manned capability.
More robotic landers would have been sent to the Moon. The USSR sent several large ones, which explored more of the Moon than the astronauts did. But landing and retrieving humans from the moon probably would have been skipped. Face it, the place is rather dull.
Recoverable boosters probably would have been developed. (A parachute system almost went into the Saturn V.) At some point, a large shuttle might have been built. Probably more like Buran than the US shuttle. Although Buran looks like the US shuttle, it has no launch engines; it's purely a payload at launch. Buran was much less fragile than the US shuttle; the USSR once flew one to Farnborough for an air show. Also, it was realized after a few US shuttle launches that a titanium-based design could stand the heat load, which would have eliminated the ceramic tile headache. A more robust shuttle with mostly reusable boosters could achieve a respectable launch rate.
But how will we get mutant, tri-boobed women if we don't put a colony on Mars?
Thankfully there are a lot of people throughout history that ignored the people telling them there was no good reason to do something and went ahead and did it anyway. Otherwise we'd probably still be apes. That said, it shouldn't be done with government money, it should mostly be done with private, which is at least part of what Newt is talking about.
It doesn't matter what anyone says. There's no money to go to the moon or anywhere else.
The US can't go to the moon for the same reason Greece and Spain can't go to the moon. Bankrupt countries can't afford ambitious vanity projects.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/09/apollo_17/
Go nuts.
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Roughly equates to:
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We went to the moon to prove we could do it -- yes that was driven by anti-soviet desires. This is kind of like climbing Everest -- prove you can do it. There is no economic case for building a permanent settlement at the very top of Everest. There is no economic case for a permanent lunar settlement --- UNLESS it's part of a larger coherent human exploration program. Sure we could mine the moon for minerals and send them to earth, but I'ave not seen anyone show math to prove it feasible. Most lunar mining I've heard of is to stage further exploration -- that is, you can mine the moon cheaper than you can send material from out of LEO -- so you want to use lunar material for next-stage exploration needs when possible.
It must really get your goose to know that the "discovery" of America was funded by a government program.
the government(s) created less than 1% of the networks that now are "the internet", and hardly any of the software now in use ...
True. But what entity got the ball rolling? Government.
Government is great for tackling the "tails" of the probablity of returns of captial investment - things that have very little return but a great benefit to society like health insurance for those of us that are uninsurable by the private sector and things that are so damn risky that no private enterprise in their right mind woudl tackle it; which is also a great benefit to society like the Moon landings and other space exploration.
Why the fuck doesn't firefox's spell check work here on Slashdot?
If the Apollo missions never happened then I would have approx. 90min of my life back rather than sitting through that piece of shit "Apollo 18" movie.
No, we wouldn't have gone. At the Apollo program's peak, the US was willing to spend 0.8% of GDP on getting men on the Moon. But, it doesn't make sense to talk "Apollo" in isolation. This was but a part of a massive reaction to contemporary Soviet technical advances. Today, Apollo's portion of GDP would equal $1t, or 30% of the 2011 Federal budget.
Without the space race, we may have put someone in orbit by now, but still be thinking about landing on the moon. Robotic probes would have rolled over enough of the Moon's surface that the Federal government would conclude that there was no point to the added expense of a human being (remember to mouse over). Republicans wouldn't even be wasting their breath telling fairy tales about restarting a Moon effort, were it not for the lingering inertia of moon-shot infrastructure in key electoral districts.
Private efforts? Please. Without the force-fed Federal expenditures that created our aerospace knowledge base, the risk to R&D investments - starting basically from scratch - would have been too high relative to expected rewards.
Luke, help me take this mask off
"driven by empowering private industry to take the initiative"
There is no economic profit to setting up a moon base. None. Zero. Zip. It's a net loss, economically-speaking, and will be so for the foreseeable future. So what he's really talking about is providing HUGE government subsidies to make it worth the effort of private companies to bid on and win the government contracts to do it.
In other words "driven by empowering private industry" == SOCIALISM (in Newt's fevered mind, if he were consistent with current conservative doctrine). Now *that's* ironic.
That being said, I have no trouble with encouraging private industry or government agencies to pursue ambitious space programs. But call it what it is, Newt: a giant make-work project at taxpayer expense. Trying to put a thin veneer of private industry involvement over the top of a government project in order to make it politically palatable to his constituents is silly. Let's have a good conversation about whether spending that kind of money on a space project is a good way to yield economic results from taxpayer money (I personally think it is, if structured properly). That's the way it worked in the Apollo era, and it can work that way again if the public wants the government to invest their money in it, but whether private industry is involved or not it will be public money being spent.
Low Earth Orbit - to boldly go where hundreds have gone before!
Without the lash of the Communist menace, Congress would not have spend trillions to shoot people into space/
And Newt isn't going to spend the money either. He is just pulling a Baltar (desperately looking for an issue that would set him apart from his rival.
While I think good points could be made for a manned moon base, there are a few other issues that also need to be addressed. Currently much of the NASA budget goes to supporting science programs and space based observatories. These programs are producing a wealth of information. If NASA had to re-direct their focus to a manned moon base, many of the programs would be cut. This would be a big setback to our understanding on the universe. Our technology is much better then what we had in the sixties. Our robots can work in space much easier and more efficiently then people in space.
Remember when we first sent the astronauts to the moon, it took a big fight on earth to get the astronauts at least a little training in geology so they would know what rocks would be interesting and what are not. The chance of an untrained astronaut bringing back something interesting to study was actually pretty small.
I'm not saying that a lunar base wouldn't be exciting, however, there are trade-offs that are not being discussed. In a perfect world the science projects would not be impacted by a new goal, however we do not live in a perfect world.
At one time the United States didn't have rocket technology either. My point is if you are going to spend a large amount of government money to do develop new technology and do something ostentatious......why not do something that will have a direct benefit for many people.
The government could even make money back on developing electric car technology.
Because they compete with private industry, which makes them dangerously close to communist in the eyes of republicans.
If that was true, then the only real users of telescope (those spying on their neighbours 16 year old daughter) would be seeing that the moonlandings occured on a pure pristine and squishy moon before said moons were a twinkle in the mailman's eye.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ahhh, so he wants to just institute incredibly ineffective policies. Alright, that makes more sense.
I mentioned the X-Prize because that showed the approach was sound. That was the seed for a lot of companies making great and innovative advances in space flight, to the point where one of the competitors will be taking over where the shuttle left off shortly.
So why do you claim it's ineffective? Evidence is that it's vastly effective, far more so than a tradition governmental space program, or (even worse!!) handing over truck-fulls of money to a hand picked set of companies that are supposed to build what you want, only they actually are not capable and were use picked because the CEO donated to the right campaign.
The X-Prize style approach is brilliantt because (a) it drives private investment towards a goal (like a lunar colony) while at the same time rewarding only companies that succeed in a goal instead of sucking up the best at the start of the process.
So please tell us all the failings of the plan that are SO MUCH WORSE than the cost overruns we have seen in NASA and other government-funded space entities.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You can do the trains with current technology too. Most of Europe has them. I've got a station for a highspeed line just half an hour away on foot, though it doesn't go as fast as the bullet trains do. The problem is cultural. In the US, a car isn't just a means of transport - it's a symbol of freedom and self-determination. The power to go where you want, unshackled to any schedule.
> a national network of bullet trains?
I'm not actually sure that would be of much use. A trip from the northeast to California would be at least 15 hours, and a trip from New York to Florida would be 8 hours. There is no price point that makes a trip that long 'worth it' to do.
Regional high-speed rail would be awesome, though. It would be awesome to be able to easily commute to/from New York City on a daily basis from Boston or D.C.. That would have very real positive economic consequences for the entire eastern seaboard.
Similar story if you could link San Francisco and Los Angeles in under two hours.
You basically have to beat planes on time AND price to make it work. And you obviously have to beat the pants off of cars, because people WILL drive if it's not much faster to take the train.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The Apollo Program cost was estimated at $24.5B in 1975. This is $150-$170B in 2007 dollars.
About one half what the Congessional Budget Office estimates the 2008 bank bailout has cost taxpayers.
The bank bailout was spending money here on Earth where it could be put to good use. The bank bailout saved the economy, stopped the recession, kept unemployment low, stopped all the foreclosures, uhhh...
Nevermind!
The Moon or Bust! Uhhhh....
The moon and bust!
As long as the people printing the money are in charge of spending the money what do we have to worry about?
Space Nutter revisionist bullshit. The really sad part is that you can't even be bothered to use the computers you claim only exist because of space to do some research.
The first & second south pole expeditions arrived exactly 100 years ago. But the third one was in 1956. The technology and motivations had improved by then.
Because all that shit is Obama's shit. Obama's the one talking about bullet trains and electric cars. Republicans are not allowed to admit that anything that a Democrat thinks up might be a good idea and vice versa -- it's in the constitution!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The problem with NASA is that people need to see faces and become familiar with the men and women that fly and carry the program. Back in the day we knew the names of every astronaut that flew in Gemini. Children were proud the know the names of the Gemini 7. Can anyone name a currently flying astronaut? Could anyone even name one astronaut that flew in the last 7 years? Most people can't. If you can't bring in the public, you can't bring in the money.
No, they have only sold millions of the Prius, creating a world lead in hybrid powertrains.The Volt is not nearly as good. Perhaps investment in things people benefit from is better than prestige pork barrel?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Something like the ISS? Ben there Done that!
Low Earth Orbit - to boldly go where hundreds have gone before!
Are you talking about Low Earth Orbit or the Sideling Hill Service Plaza rest stop in the Pennsylvania Turnpike?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Ok so it doesn't suck, but it really isn't that useful a place to go on its own. There's nothing there. I could see a base there as being useful for launching further deeper space missions, but then we first need to solve some other issues. Really right now the space research we should be focusing on seems to be launch costs. It costs WAY too much to put shit in space. Like $10,000/pound. We need to bring that cost down, then maybe we can look at putting more things (like a moon base) out in space.
Once we get more efficient launch methods, then maybe we talk about a moon base.
I was sexually molested by a dolphin.
- Carl Sagan
(I am assuming that all the unmanned missions would have been flown same as in the real world, and of course that is a big assumption .)
We would know very little about the formation and early evolution of the solar system. Apollo nailed that, and our current knowledge is largely based on Apollo samples. The Soviet Luna samples would help, but I don't think they would be enough.
We also probably wouldn't have any Lunar Laser Ranging (that's a harder call, but all of the early LLR was US, and I don't think that without the Apollo LLR
the French would have put retroreflectors on the Lunakhods). That, plus no Apollo ALSEP seimo network, would mean we would know very little about Moon's deep interior, such as whether or not it has a core.
I think that those are the two biggest ones.
Of course, if Apollo had never happened, Alexi Leonid would probably have been the first man on the Moon, but the implications of that are too far outside the reach of my crystal ball.
Building an electric car with the same range as a gas powered car that can be recharged in under 10 minutes is a trivial task. It's called a trailer and hitch. Make a standard power connector embedded in a hitch. Anything under ~100 miles, and you can run on the batteries in the main car. If your going to drive more than 100 miles, you plug in the small trailer and go. The trailer could be an extra battery pack, a gasoline generator, a natural gas generator, or other device capable of delivering electric power to the main vehicle.
The benefits of LEO are appreciable, but launching stuff from the surface of the earth is prohibitively expensive. If we could build stuff off earth, for use off earth, we'd be way better off. Sure, the up front costs are *enormous* but the long term payoff is there. The moon is close by, we know how to get there, and it has most of the materials for satellite building. A lunar colony could pay for itself by producing solar power satellites for use in LEO.
Building an electric car with the same range as a gas powered car that can be recharged in under 10 minutes is a trivial task. It's called a trailer and hitch. Make a standard power connector embedded in a hitch. Anything under ~100 miles, and you can run on the batteries in the main car. If your going to drive more than 100 miles, you plug in the small trailer and go. The trailer could be an extra battery pack, a gasoline generator, a natural gas generator, or other device capable of delivering electric power to the main vehicle.
Your right. without all of the initial seeds of government funding, something would have spontaneously popped into existence and without all that early government involvement, the miraculous free market would have developed flying cars and moonbases! The non existence of these items just proves my point, which is that the government is evil and is stealing your money !!!
Without Project Apollo we would have been spared decades of strained, lame "We can send a man to the moon, but we can't..." analogies. That would be a plus.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Shortly after the Apollo missions, we had Biosphere II from which we should reasonable extrapolate the relative value of developing the technologies we use to send people into orbit or on to extraterrestrial surfaces. We do not possess the knowledge or the technologies to support life off-planet. We either ignore this fact or gloss over it in favor of militarizing 'space'.
Mr. Gingrich is attempting to use a tired, nationalistic appeal for political advantage because he knows it worked once, and he's not creative enough to find a new way to pitch a national subsidy for military-industrial R&D with a real world, practical approach to 21st century global needs. IMHO 'The Limits to Growth: the 30 Year Update' and the pressing environmental needs of 7 billion humans down here on earth should lead us to openly acknowledge that 'our' future is a global future which depends not on trade but on a reality bounded by the limits of global ecology.
To me the most important thing that came out of the space program was the perspective that humanity exists within an isolated and limited environment, and the changes this brought to NASA's mission of exploration, when they were turned back toward earth, led us to enhance our ability to understand the nature our world and the those limitations. It's about time our 'leadership' had the courage to stand tall and recognize that our industry, as supported by our taxes, should be steered toward understanding and developing Earth Systems Science and a long term shift to a sustainable humanity that is fully dependent on global ecology.
When will the right wingers realize that their human-centric priorities have always been superceded by environmental realities?
It's about time we had a political leaders with the balls to stand up and tell the American people that the space race to other worlds is currently unaffordable and we need to concentrate our technological resources on ensuring that our world and its human population are survivable. If Newt brought that kind of realistic perspective to the Presidential campaign, I might be tempted to consider voting for him, notwithstanding his right wing, power-centric, elitist views on laissez-faire capitalism or his jingoistic approach to international relations.
There's a few problems with bullet trains, namely the speed and the cost. Japan is very different from the USA: it has very densely-packed cities, but these cities aren't very far apart from each other: look at a map, the country is tiny, yet it has almost half the population of the US. A bullet train simply doesn't have very far to go there. The US is a little different: cities are much farther apart. A flight from NYC to LA takes 6-8 hours or so. That's traveling at roughly 500mph, so a bullet train, if it doesn't stop (not likely), would take roughly twice as long. Not many people are going to bother with something like that. In reality, a bullet train would not take a straight course, and would make several stops along the way, so you're looking at probably a 20-24 hour ride to get across the country. A plane ticket for that trip only costs $2-300, and doesn't take all day.
Bullet trains would make some sense for regional clusters, such as the northeast corridor (where they do have the Acela Express which isn't exactly a bullet train but is faster than normal commuter trains), and for the pacific coast (San Diego to Seattle or even Vancouver). Then the ride times would make more sense compared to plane flights.
However, we have two other big problems here:
1) funding. Building a bullet train requires a ton of money. Where's that going to come from? We're too busy pouring all our money into mideast wars, the war on drugs, the prison-industrial complex, and giving tax breaks to the 1% (which will soon be zero taxes, when a Republican gets elected).
2) TSA. Getting on a bullet train will be just as much a hassle and degrading as getting on a plane, so for those short regional trips, it'll make more sense to just drive your car.
Personally, I think we should just give it up. We're never going to be a world-leading country any more, and if we're lucky, we'll narrowly avoid repeating what happened to Germany in the 1930s. Humanity should return to the Moon and then the stars, but it's not going to be under the leadership of the USA.
I note that all the examples you name are spinoffs of military spending (including the interstates).
Still government, but not the same as bread and circuses.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What would have happened? The same thing as if Jesus had never really risen from the dead. Some people would have faked it. Called those who questioned it crackpots. And made a lot of money from it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
That and the whole population density/economic viability thing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
eh, we'll never know what would have happened if the government did not intervene ... before electronic computers insurance companies, banks and other private firms that needed large scale computations just hired a whole lot of women (and men too, but it was a "woman's job" ) to sit at tables and do computations ... they were called "computers" :); IBM was building computing machinery even before 1939 and before cryptography and trajectories for balistic rockets pushed the US govt. sponsor electronic computers, so I guess the private companies would have built their own internets, that would have looked quite different, but we'll never know.
I take your comment and raise you the interstate network.
If eisenhower hadn't pushed it through, a trip that takes 4 hours would take a day of driving.
or as an older example, the transcontinental railroad. If Grant had not pushed that through, the western US would not have been nearly as developed, and the west coast would have developed as it's own country.
If Truman hadn't pushed the TVA, the the southern states would probably never have gotten stable electricity and flood control.
carter and telecoms
JFK and sattelites
the list continues.
The government steps in when a project is important for the nation's interest but no commerical interest either has the timeframe, the motivation, the money, the connections, or the guts to attempt it. There are some things that the invisible hand can not do.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
* - I take no credit nor blame for this post.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
A lunar colony could pay for itself by producing solar power satellites for use in LEO.
And where would it get the raw materials? In case you haven't heard, the moon doesn't have any metals. Unless you're making those satellites out of rock, with solar panels made out of rock, and rock wires, you've still got to ship all your raw materials up from LEO. Then you've got to land them in a gravity well (it may be 1/6th gravity but it's still there), and then ship them back up again. If you're not going to build them on Earth, then you might as well build them in LEO.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
On the night before the launch of Apollo 11, Wernher von Baun made this comment about the future
“If it had been our intention merely to go to the moon, bring back a handful of rocks and soil, and forget the entire enterprise, then we would certainly have been history’s biggest fools.”
- Wernher von Braun
and yet, that’s exactly what we did
Want to mobilise people do do something? lofty peaceful goals don't work. We got to the moon because the fear of Russian dominance in space (and the possibility of Russian space-nukes orbiting the planet) was so great, and the hatred for "the enemy" so strong, we felt compelled to.
As the global empire of our day, we have nothing BIG to truly fear or hate. A few ragtag terrorists killed a few thousand citizens and we spent many billions, more than a program of gradual colonisation of Mars via oxygen/iron extraction robots and GM organisms would likely cost. We spent that money because of far and hatred.
Greed is the only thing that will truly motivate a mars/moon mission nowadays. If they find gold on Mars, we'll probably be just fine :D
What a violent statement! Not to mention racist, saying the Chinese came from the moon.
I always found that to be a dumb comparison. They came back and plundered and eventually set up some colonies. However said colonies were in the tropics and already had flora and fauna (not to mention millions of humans already living there). This is so many orders of magnitude larger, it would be more akin to Columbus landing in Antarctica in a rowboat.
Good analogy. Note how many profitable, self-supporting commercial colonies have been set up in Antarctica since its discovery in 1820.*
*Zero. In fact there has never been a single permanent resident of Antarctica. It had no human population at all during the winter until 1956 when the first year-around base was set up. Permanent settlement of Antarctica and setting up a self-sustaining economy there is orders of magnitude easier than settling Mars.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Sorry Columbus, as "cool" as it would be to find a new trade route to India there's just no compelling reason to do so that's not better served by near-water navigation and mapping.
We're all mutants, look it up.
You can get a third boob installed on you GF (I know /.) for a few thousand dollars. I favor the middle of the back location (for dancing).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
... that could have been avoided.
How might we falsify that statement? Or indeed, find any proof supporting it. It sounds to me more like a statement of ideology than a fact. Public policy shouldn't be based on ideology.
Great Intellect...
"trickle down" benefits of a moonbase would be invaluable for us on Earth.
Even when it comes to nitty-gritties like inventing dust-repellant/tolerant materials (since moon dust sticks to everything like wet flour) those could aid in creating oil-free engines for cars. The energy recycling hurdles, alone, could vastly improve your home's cooling and energy efficiency.
As far as the moonbase goes, it puts our defense contractors' enormous brainpower/resources toward efficiency development -- which ends up being a very good thing for you within a matter of years.
...the Silence would not have fallen.
The UK still likes to think of itself as a powerful country but it has a debt crisis that is worse then the Greek are facing while their spending is far higher and with a "need/want" to defend pieces of land on the other side of the globe. Yes, the Falkland conflict is back and the UK just had to sell of half its fleet but don't worry, they shall never be slaves or something.
The UK believed for a long time that the country side need not be ruined by efficient farms, the real food production could be shifted offshore and manufacturing followed soon after. The country that started the industrial revolution (according to the brits and who is going to doubt them) is now an industrial reject. Does it really matter if a sailing nation has its port cranes and ships made in China? No, surely not, all those workers can find different jobs, in service industries... any day now... jobs are bound to arrive in Manchester and Liverpool to replace those dirty smelly jobs with nice burger flipping and insurance sellling jobs... just give it a decade or two more, they already been waiting for half a century so a bit more can't hurt.
The economy is like a jenga puzzle with a time delay build in, so you start pulling blocks and think, wow I can remove whole sections and the tower doesn't fall over so it must be okay... and then the time delay kicks in and BOOM, it all comes crumbling down.
Take the Apple/Foxconn boycott discussion below, some posters actually excuse Apple for doing this because there are no factories left in the west that can do this kind of production... they might be right... so they are defending outsourcing as the right thing to do because outsourcing ripped production capacity that once existed from the west... godwin be damned but the nazi's put jews in ghetto's and then used the fact that jews lived in ghetto's as justification for the holocaust.
To far? The same story ALSO had people supporting Apple by saying that American workers no longer had the skills for that type of work... so you remove the jobs and then claim that since no Americans are doing those jobs, they can't do them anymore... NICE!
The UK still invents stuff but if someone then wants to produce it, China is the place to go and what is produced in China is copied in China. The top talent certainly still exists but the support base is gone. It can still be found in isolated places, that metal shop that can produce any spare part just from looking at the broken parts. That painter who can restore a 500 year old house... I seen them work. They are old men, old men working alone because nobody young takes it up anymore. But these are the kind of people that once could have produced the first steam engines, or build rocket engines from scratch. The Space Shuttle had plenty of production line work, just with workers who through the years became really good at their individual tasks. Now they are gone. Some retired, some finding other work but their skills are lost and no new kids are replacing the old farts, learning on the job.
The problem is that the economy is to fragile and small changes take to long to show their effect to leave it to the market. Or for that matter to politicians who can only see to the next election. There is a reason high speed trains were neither a commerical NOR a political project but rather the work of civil engineers. Goverment workers who could see beyond the next quarter and the next election and look for the long term benefits.
Leave it up to business or the politicians and you get Amtrak and British Rail... both disasters. A businessman asks"does it make a profit next yet" and public rail is about how it benefits the entire country (make the workforce more mobile, relieve congestion on the roads) not pure profit margins. The politician asks "if we delay maintence now, can I offer a tax cut to my voters" and that happens then for 2 decades until people start dying.
Move the factory and you can not longer produce locally, the workers will loose the skills and kids will seek
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...seems to have now become (according to the socialist left who are hellbent on world domination) is to take every penny of money on planet Earth, and redistribute all that wealth, precisely evenly, amongst every living human on the planet. Then after each man, woman, boy and girl on the planet gets their $7895 (using December 2011 numbers) then everything will suddenly become a peachy keen utopia.
I'm not a historian, physicist, or engineer so I'm going off of my layman's interpretations. But, we kind of had parallel "space" efforts with our rocket planes like the X-51 that lost out to rockets. Had we not gone with massive, wasteful brute force rockets and gradually transitioned into space with reusable rockets and aerospace planes, maybe we'd have grown our space program more organically from high altitude flights, to LEO, to the moon?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
There's literally no reason to go to the moon. Sure it has vast Helium-3 deposits but it would cost more to transport than it's worth. Can anyone give me even a sound scientific reason to go back? Sure, "spirit of adventure" and all that, but the spirit of adventure doesn't pay the bills. Travel to the "New World" Americas only continued due to how ridiculously lucrative it was. Maybe if the moon was made of solid palladium we would go back but otherwise I doubt that will happen until space travel becomes significantly cheaper. Who cares if China goes to the moon? If they went tomorrow we already have them beat by over 40 years. Also any mention of Newt Gingrich is irrelevant; the man is a criminal and a liar and deserves the guillotine in my opinion.
Like Time Travel, playing "What If?" is fun to a point.
Of course we live in the only alternative time line we know is possible.
But I'll play.
In the 70s all the rage was speculation on power generation plants to solve the oil crisis.
In the 00s all the rage has been sun-brellas to deflect sunlight from the poles to reduce global warning.
Combine the two and in a history where the shuttle program didn't get going and we might have satellite power generation stations in the 80s and the conversion of those into satellite solar shields in the 90s. Instead the money went to boosters that bootstrapped the solar power generation industry. Then NASA was spun off as a quasi commercial business and ran a space shuttle program in the 00s. Later generations might be looking at passive solar sails to explore the near earth objects for building materials, and using sails in some kind of paper scissors rock game of wrapping dangerous near earth objects and deflecting them further out into space, or bringing them into approved manufacturing plant corridors in earth orbit.
Are you joking? Iron makes up nearly 15% of the moon's crust, with local concentrations varying. The same goes for aluminum. The plurality of the atoms in regolith are silicon which is even MORE useful for making solar power satellites. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Surface_geology (see the table on the right).
As for the gravity well. Remember the saturn V? That was required to get men *to* the moon. Remember the small box at the bottom of the lunar lander? That was the rocket required to get men *back from* the moon -- with room to spare for a light truck, no less. The gravity well on the moon is much, much, much much smaller than that on earth. The technology used in linear motors on rollercoasters is more or less perfect for launching satellites from the moon, using the same type of solar panels you would be exporting as your power source.
The country was not young. It had been more divided in the civil war and during prohibition, but was still divided over racial equality. The trip to the moon happened at a time when the young men who fought WWII were mature enough to be a major presence in the leadership of the country. Both public and private sector. They believed the government could accomplish great things without too much waste (they had seen it happen multiple times in their life).
This was the true 'can do' generation. They had beat the great depression, won the world war and rebuilt nations in their own image. Little things like a 250,000 gap of irradiated vacuum and a deep gravity well were not going to stop them from getting to the moon.
They expected solutions that worked and they delivered them.
Isn't it obvious? The private sector would have got us there. We could be flying up to the Moon and eat KFC while feeling good about how much weight we lost! It would've happened if it wasn't for those meddling gov't bureaucrats. What is Newt thinking? The last thing we need is the gov't getting in the way of the Free Enterprise System.
May the Holy Blessings of the Invisible Hand rain down on us all. AMen
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I quote thusly:
But imagine an alternative world history where there was no World War followed by a polarizing competition between two superpowers on the verge of annihilating each other.
In the 1960s the X-15 experimental rocket planes were already flying to the edge of space. This would have evolved into a fleet of orbital planes and lifting bodies and the next logical step in aerospace history.
So if there was no World War, why would the experimental rocket planes even exist, considering that the rocket technology itself came out of the war? Unfortunately, the whole article becomes totally irrelevant after this error.
Dear AC, computing machinery was build before any government showed any interest in it. Cryptography and balistic rockets did give a boost to interest in automated computing, but large companies already had big rooms filled with "computers", meaning real people doing pen-and-paper computations, working on all sorts of computations, so there was no need for "initial seeds", because the need was there. We might have had even computers able to deal with numbers with arbitrary precision sooner. ... but we'll never know :) the govt. took money from your grandparents (or grand-grandparents) and paid IBM and others pork barrel rates for something they would have done with their own capital.
We already have flying cars: they're called planes ... oh, you mean flying cars with rockets ? Soon, baby, soon :)
Private companies are forbidden by law (the space treaty) from running moonbases, or anything else above Earth orbit.
When Newt has established his moon base and is picking the 13,000 people he says he needs to petition to become a state, what do you think will be the first question on the application form?
Private industry does not make huge risks or think that long term. Think about it. The existing stuff is more of a game for some wealthy people do instead of charity.
Nuclear? it doesn't happen; government subsidizes and INSURES as well as helps clean up the mess for free. Private industry never would take on the risk; they need others to take on the REAL risks-- and if you got rid of all laws then the risk to them would be far less; however, any problems would end up being the public's risk-- again they externalize risks with or without laws because the risk is too high.
In this day of short term investing it is even LESS likely for an industry to seriously get into this stuff until we are near the edge of it being easy. Newt wants to have government jump start industry by doing all the hard stuff for free; not an unusual move for government... but it never jives with the republican BS about government not creating jobs etc. Anybody see the irony of their hands-off BS while at the same time talking about creating jobs (with government if you get them in.)
Your right. without all of the initial seeds of government funding, something would have spontaneously popped into existence
Yeah, and folks would be using Compuserve and MSN and AOL and AppleNet or whatever that would be called, without being able to even email each other...
No sig for the moment.
just as we spent way too much on manned flights to/from the space station we shouldn't be spending anything on manned flights to the moon yet. We've got a remote control robot on Mars and another on its way so how about putting some on the Moon and start building something? Or atleast share control so universities and science labs can explore what's going on.
and while we're at it, throw in a cage with some stationary robots and some balls to fling at each other? Seriously, we should be doing robotic exploration and building on the moon well before anything else. The next thing you know they'll be funding a golf course up there for retired astronauts and we don't need that.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
except for the following bit:
driven by empowering private industry to take the initiative.
When I read that a chill went down my spine. And not the good kind of chill, either.
It's not that I'm against private industry playing an even larger role than it did in Apollo, it's that in this case "empowering private industry" means giving it boatloads of taxpayer money and "take the initiative" means letting them spend it without meaningful oversight. It'll be the Iraq reconstruction contractor bonanza -- in space.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No, society has become too prudent to squander gigantic sums of money on chest thumping displays of prowess and bravado when there are so many better ways to spend the money. When you knock Ali to the canvass once, you've proved something. When you get back into the ring for a rematch, you're just desperate to pay the rent.
I regard the human genome project, not the space program, as the most significant technological landmark I'll witness in my lifetime. Easily the upside of cracking the genetic code is a thousand times greater than any benefit from a collection of moon rocks, that apparently NASA doesn't even care enough about to provide secure inventory.
I've always felt that the biggest issue for space exploration was when a certain U.S. president changed the requirements. It wasn't enough to send people to the Moon. People were already working on that. It had to be done before 31 December 1969. This made some approaches more viable than others. As a hurry-up job they didn't care about the post-Apollo future. Get them to the Moon, get them back, by the end of the decade. Only one way would work in the time available, a man in a can. And that's the way they did it. With more time they would have done it differently. Part of a system, a unified plan.
It's sort of what you might get if, for example, in 1935 somebody had said "we need an airplane that can carry 400 people, and we need it now". The resulting airplane might have resembled the Spruce Goose, a brilliant, but sterile, achievement. They would not have designed a 747, because too much development needed to happen first.
...laura
Actually, the samples returned from the moon showed a large amount of Silicon, Aluminum, Iron, Magnesium and Calcium. And if your talking about samples returned from the Maria you can add Titanium to that list. While the Lunar crust is lacking stuff like Carbon and Nitrogen it's not clear that there aren't area's where geological processes have concentrated otherwise rare elements. We haven't even scratched the surface of what might be there.
Depending on what your building you I am sure that producing everything on the Moon is impractical. But I believe that we have many products where shipping 1 kg of the raw materials(cu is a good example) to the moon and then using those plus lunar materials would be a big win. It's even better if we have a system to loft the finished goods into Lunar orbit via electromagnetic means. That combined with Solar powered VASIMR tugs could allow for large expansion in earth orbit.
I doubt that even in the most optimistic plans we won't have need for a large amount of items produced on the Earth(for space applications). But I could see simple things like solar panels being manufactured on the moon and being integrated with electronics shipped up from earth.
The main effect of the Apollo Project was not scientific, it was psychological. Sputnik had scared the Americans (and the rest of the world) with Soviet technological superiority. The response to this was a push for science and technology in the US, of which the Apollo Project was part Beating the Russians to the Moon restored the confidence of Americans (and the rest of the world) in US superiority.
The alternative to the push towards science would be a push towards religion. This happened, but would have even stronger. If US could not be the undisputed master of the material world, it could at least be the master of the spiritual world. New ideas and technology would no longer come from the US. US military would still be formidable, but without the crushing superiority. US would look inwards, only keeping enough of an active interest in world affairs to keep the oil flowing. US had saved the world from dictatorship in WWII, from now on, the world could look after itself.
Europe would be unable to fill the power vacuum, although they would be a leader in science. France and England would still be occupied with crumbling empires, and preventing West Germany to take leadership. They would fall under influence of the Soviet Empire. The Soviets were always numerically superior, but they were scared of US technology. With that gone, they would be even more expansionist. Their economic system would still be doomed eventually, but by expansion they would be to delay the collapse. Without the protection of the US, Japan would see the need to regain their military might, while keeping their economic growth. Japan would become the new leader in technology. Mao's China would suffer from the pressure from two sides (Soviet and Japan), and never develop into a new superpower.
So, at this time, the America's would still be under US influence, Africa, Europe, and South Asia would be under Soviet influence, and SE Asia (and Oceania) dominated by Japan. Technologically, we would be 20 years behind. The Soviet and Japanese empires would both start to show signs of recession, while the US might be rediscovering science which would eventually lead to a come back on the international scene.
I entirely disagree.
The idea of any significant exploitation of space without a base on the moon is deeply flawed, on simple economics (until we have a space elevator, anyway).
The fact is that lofting every single kg of mass out of Earth's very deep gravity well is hard, dangerous, and expensive. The only point at which large-scale exploitation or permanent habitation of space will be possible is if the 000's of tons of raw material - metals, water, air - are already UP there. A lunar base and the relative ease with which raw materials could be mass-driven into lunar orbit suddenly opens the possibility of large scale construction of ships and, yes, orbital habitats (which will probably be located nearer the moon than Earth anyway).
Further, one of the most significant barriers to long-term human habitation in space is radiation, which can really only be mitigated by mass - short of lofting even more 000s of tons of matter just to serve as shielding, the Lunar surface (and subterranean bases) provides a perfect redoubt for humans hiding from persistent radiation showers.
I'd finally argue that in terms of space habitation, we need to walk before we run. I'm no engineer, but I suspect that construction of a subterranean lunar colony for 1000 people would be at least an order of magnitude simpler and more fault-tolerant than building a similarly-scaled space-habitat. The only benefit I can see in favor of the space habitat (and it's a biggie) is that theoretically we could build a torus or a large-enough cylinder and spin it for artificial gravity*, something self-evidently not possible with a moon base.
*as much as this is a stable of science fiction, I'm not entirely convinced it's going to serve as interchangeably with actual gravity as portrayed. Coriolis forces, EÃtvÃs effect, all sorts of 'funky' things happen until the diameter and thus RPM of the structure are huge, something like 250m diamter.
-Styopa
Exactly. I use a train to commute daily (in the US, in California) and am seriously disappointed when I compare the rail network of the US with those elsewhere. Even short-run trains here are barely functional, barely funded, and just a step above a freight train.....
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
The really sad thing is that dipshit Gingritch isn't interested in advancing science or human knowledge, but simply engaging in a petty dick waving contest with China over who can get to the moon first. Its a shallow attempt by a shallow man to prove that the USA is the greatest country on Earth. If anything good comes out of such a venture, it will be purely accidental.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The best use of high-speed rail is regional connections. From San Francisco to LA, or Portland to SF, or such, makes great sense because net-net, it's faster than flying when TSA time, flight delays, security theater, and other idiocies are factored in.
Plus, most of us in the US have never seen a US train that runs on passenger-only tracks. Current rules prioritize freight over passengers, and that makes rail travel slow and unreliable. It's dumb, but money can buy dumb when it benefits someone.....
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
I think of many good pure science reasons to establish colonies on the moon and beyond.
But can you make a case for profitability, beyond , perhaps driving innovation.
Tourism is unlikely to cut it , unless the cost can be brought WAY down and the same for any kind of materials, manufacturing or mining. The further away from the mood you go the worse that cost of transport becomes.
Why not drive innovation by colonizing the sea or the antarctica, both of which seem more useful and within our reach at this point.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Comparing Japan to the US geographically is silly. They have half the US population in an area 3/4 the size of California.
Of course a bullet train (or any other type) makes sense there. It does not make sense in the US, however. The cost to build a basic line from San Francisco to Los Angeles is currently estimated at 120 billion for the "starter kit", and it will take 20-30 years. Even using optimistic estimates*, the cost of a ticket would be about $2000.
*Like instant full-capacity trains, zero cost to repair the original lines, employees work for free, etc.
AH, the Space Race. This makes sense. After all the Republicans are stuck in the 1960's, what with their constant worry about communism and other old fashioned ideas. Probably hasn't occured to them that we've already been there.
My guess is that Newt's Moonbase would be something like this.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Bullet trains just don't make sense in the US. In, for example, Japan, there are fewer metropolitan areas, so transportation that's limited to a few high-traffic routes makes sense. There are too many combinations of origins and destinations here for anything but an insanely expensive and huge train network to be useful.
We'd be better off with a network of short-haul auto-trains built in the interstate highway right-of-way. Hop on just south of Dallas, for example, and get off at Waco, get back on the next section if you're going all the way to Austin. (basically a commuter train for cars) Bonus if you can charge electric cars on the train (suddenly that 100mi range doesn't seem so bad). This gets existing gasoline-powered cars off the road, and means that it's still useful even if it doesn't go exactly where you're coming from or going to.
The moon is demanding its virginity back!
You had me worried there, I originally read it as "less than a million".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Whoosh....
This article assumes that the moon landings actually occurred. It discriminates against conspiracy theorists.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
What do you mean, "what if"? Everybody knows it was a hoax perpetrated by t
BRB, somebody at the door.
Or rather, hole where it used to be, with a large man in a dark suit standing in it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No one has a plan for going to the moon. The first moon program was done at a fraction of the actual cost due to the national pride and the massive donation of talent by the populous. It would cost twice as much to go again,but the plans all call for spending 1/10 of what was spent before. No one has a plan for going to the moon.
Just sayin...
the .gov cannot "create" something that benefits more people than the required taxing harms.
Like the interstate highway system? I'm sure glad I don't have to pay a hundred dollar toll to get to St Louis over very dangerous two lane highways, or pay the higher prices it would cost to have goods shipped.
And where do you think the ineternet came from? Almost ll that medical tech in your local hospital was born from the space program.
Rub your two remaining brain cells together and you might think of some on your own... but that's a little to ask of an anarchist, I guess.
Free Martian Whores!
Current rules prioritize freight over passengers, and that makes rail travel slow and unreliable.
Please retract that. The agreements Amtrak and other passenger agencies operate under are varied and many. In many cases, the exact *opposite* of what you said is true.
There would be an unused patch of land in the Nevada desert ;-)
Wasn't that more or less how the US went to the moon the first time?
Dilbert RSS feed
And how many Saturn Vs will it take to get enough equipment to the moon to make those solar panels? It's much more efficient to make the solar panels on Earth and launch them with Deltas and Atlases than it could ever be to put a solar panel manufacturing station on the moon, and then launch satellites from there back to Earth orbit.
BTW, the men didn't make it all the way back from the moon with the little rocket they had at the surface. There was a big command module rocket to help them along the way.
>metals, water, air - are already UP there.
On the *moon?* None of them are "up there" on the moon in sufficient quantities to matter. Any metals that are there still have to be shoved up a gravity well. We'd do better to capture some of the iron bearing meteors that wander by with a rocket or a magnet, tugboat them in stable positions at the lagrange points (assuming there aren't enough there already), point some mirrors at them until they melt up and spin with magnets until the iron reaches the surface.
>the Lunar surface (and subterranean bases) provides a perfect redoubt for humans hiding from persistent radiation showers.
Or the Terran surface, assuming you stay on the side where the sun isn't. And since you need to have water anyway, how about always having the tank face the sun? Any long term environment will also involve farming, with dirt, which can also be aimed sunside.
>subterranean lunar colony for 1000 people would be at least an order of magnitude simpler and more fault-tolerant than building a similarly-scaled space-habitat.
You ever watch dirt mining? I fail to see how excavating a cavern on the moon and trying to seal it off (good luck) is simpler than assembing a series of pre-made, hermetically sealed, interlocking tin cans in low earth orbit.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Given the we only need to meet the same technology we supposedly had to reach the moon, we should be able to meet it at a fraction of the cost. Yet we can't and the explanation is that it is too expensive to do.
Let me see my PC can't do what a computer would do in the 60s? We don't have machines that are as powerful as those in the 60s? Are you kidding me? The only explanation is that we never landed and that it was a shame to disgrace the Russians. Of course that would mean that the US manufactured and deceived the majority of the populace in the interests of propaganda. And we all know the US wouldn't do that!!
Prior to the space race, the USAF and NACA had been working on powered high-altitude and sub-orbital flight (development began in 1955, even though the first flight wasn't until 1959). After Sputnik and for the moon race, this incremental approach towards higher, faster, further was dropped to a much lower priority, in favor of ground-launched rockets. They were tremendously wasteful of fuel, but they could get us into orbit more quickly since the fundamental R&D had already been done by the Germans (the early Redstone rockets were essentially upgraded V2s).
If Sputnik and the moon shots hadn't happened, we probably would have continued along the lines of the X-15, pursuing space planes instead of rockets. Which would have put us 10-20 years ahead in scramjet and hypersonic technology. Meaning it's possible we could have had a scramjet-based hypersonic transport flying the JFK-NRT route in 1 hour today. Of course since we haven't yet developed the technology, it's impossible to say with certainty. We don't know what problems and pitfalls lie ahead, or even if it will be commercially economically viable.
Wasn't that more or less how the US went to the moon the first time?
Yes, and look what happened when we "won" that race. The Bad Astronomer made a great post about it.
If the Apollo program had never happened -- indeed if NASA had been disbanded entirely in 1962:
Seastead this.
Most of NASA's budget in the early days wasn't about scientific experiments. It was about developing spy satellite capabilities. The US wanted heavy lift rockets that could boost remote sensing and relay satellites into orbit. That's also why the shuttle was it size it was; think about how nicely the Hubble fit in that cargo bay, think about how nice the pictures would be if it turned around and looked down instead of up...
Today there's no need for a cover story like beating the USSR to the Moon.
And the only reason the Soviets beat the US with Sputnik was because at the time it wasn't clear if an Earth orbiting craft violated a country's "airspace". Once the precedent was established (and nobody complained about it) the US space program was off and running.
The sad part is that there has been huge number of upmoderated posts on Slashdot over the last decade and some... hoping for exactly that. Only now the the contest appears to be possibly in the offing, it's being proposed by the Wrong Party - so now it's a bad idea.
Most of our military spending is really about government contracts for private companies. A kind of stimulus package, except that to justify it we have to keep having wars and exaggerating threats. Not only is space is a much more worthy subject for funding, and if we tolerated even 0.01% of the losses we do for the military we could get people on Mars in a decade.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Building an electric car with the same range as a gas powered car that can be recharged in under 10 minutes is a trivial task. It's called a trailer and hitch. Make a standard power connector embedded in a hitch. Anything under ~100 miles, and you can run on the batteries in the main car. If your going to drive more than 100 miles, you plug in the small trailer and go. The trailer could be an extra battery pack, a gasoline generator, a natural gas generator, or other device capable of delivering electric power to the main vehicle.
Yeah, but women couldn't back it up.
Probes have been sufficient for other solar planets. Multiple probes sent to the moon would have happened in the 80's (probably) and again in the 90's to make certain it was a dead rock. Wild theories of 'possible' alien lunar life would be a constant drone heard across the internet. Hell, I still hear there are Nazis hiding on the darkside to this day after we sent some rockstars out there.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Well, it was that, or nuking the moon, so...the human race is silly.
The difference last time is that we were competing with a juggernaut who had one-upped us in the technology realm (hence the sudden shift in educational focus, from teaching the populace superstitions to science, because some of the people upstairs had grown suddenly worried that the Big Red Bear might want to give them all a huge hug -> it was more an act of desperation, likened to handing out military grade weapons to anyone over the age of 12 to try and keep the country around for a little longer).
Remember, it was the arrival of Sputnik that spurred the US into action -> something about another country being able to position things in high places (like, I don't know, weapons...) was seen as a "Bad Thing."
Now we have a similar "problem." The US likes its citizens to try and outdo each other in the arena of "who can be the dumbest person alive while still retaining enough brain cells to breathe without a ventilator." Putting too much effort into work is seen as more dangerous than not completing the work at all. And the way to success is seen as through luck, connections, or riding someone else's coattails; when a company goes IPO, and its value shoots through the roof, people do not regret not working there (and getting in on some stock options), but on not investing in that IPO before it went public: people do not say "OMG, I could have worked at Google, and made billions, what did I do?"; instead, they scream about not getting in on that stock the day the IPO went public (so they could flip it a few hours later, to other Suckas), or not sitting on that stock (if they sold out early). It's a race to the bottom, intellectually speaking. Contrast this with most Asian cultures, where if you aren't at the top of your class, you bust your balls to get there. Look up the meaning of the phrase "cram school" if you want to understand more.
Consider this: when my brother wishes to "feel intelligent," he watches Jersey Shore, makes fun of the people on the screen for their intellectual inferiority, and feels that much better about himself. When I want to "feel intelligent," I load up a MIT lecture on the Fundamentals of Engineering, and feel better if I can actually understand what they are doing (run some equations through my head, etc.). One path focuses on finding someone who is less intelligent that yourself (benefits: you do not have to do anything to feel superior), another on finding someone more intelligent than yourself (benefits: you understand the inner workings of a jet engine). Guess which one Americans tend to prefer...?
Right now, the US is now in the situation that the USSR was in: if we send our economy into overdrive, like we did last time, to try and deal with the Chinese, the US will crack like an egg. No one, of course, wants to hear that -> "Why yes, sir, we can hit the turbo button again, and surely it will carry us ahead!" is something every sycophant will say, because they don't have the balls to point out the cracks in the US's superstructure. We can't afford a space race right now, trying to pursue one won't bring the US out of its recession, and the attempt will sink us (which I guess is fine for the people upstairs, as their private jets will carry them to their chateaus in other countries where they can try running a country again; as for the rest of us, this place will be hell). The Chinese economy appears, despite the bad advice they've received, to be in a healthier position that our own; an economic war is not advised.
I am John Hurt.
We wouldn't have Tang and Velcro! Horrors.
You can't honestly imagine a company would invest BILLIONS to only be compensated for that investment if they're first to do something? The X-Prize does NOT show the approach is sound. Look at who won; SpaceShipOne cost $100 million to build, so the project is in the hole $90 million dollars. Not every project will have a bored billionaire paying for it. And did SpaceShipOne do anything that the U.S. government hadn't already done decades before?
You can't honestly imagine a company would invest BILLIONS to only be compensated for that investment if they're first to do something?
It doesn't take BILLIONS to, for example, deliver a practical means to erect structures on the moon in under a certain timeframe.
In fact if you would look at the XPrize again, I mean I only mentioned it every time, LOTS more money was spent by private industry than was given out as prize money. That's because companies all over can get funding to make the attempt. Some of them don't succeed, those investments then may fail - or possibly not if they can make money off what they learned along the way.
Either way very little money was spent to get a LOT of great results. I don't see how you cannot understand this simple fact when as I said an example is right before you of exactly how it can work and continue to work!
The DARPA contests around autonomous vehicles is another example. Basically, any time the approach is tried it yields great results. And yet YOU would not even try to start with, instead sticking to the most expensive and wasteful way to make something happen instead.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Good God man, if people like you had steered human history we'd all be in Africa still.
Huh? The reason why one of those competitors will be taking over shortly has absolutely nothing to do with prizes. The whole acquisition process has been the same as the traditional one (we'll pay you to do research and make proposals, then downselect among those proposals, lather, rinse, repeat) NASA has used since roughly forever. They've gussied up the rhetoric and rigged the game differently than before, but it's really just the same old game.
I don't think you realize just how many launches it would take to get useful scale solar in orbit. Its just not possible. The ISS took dozens of shuttle and soyuz/proton launches and it has a total capacity on the order of a few hundred kW. For space solar to be worth it, you'd need several hundred Megawatts, and it'd have to be cheap. If you can build panels on the moon and launch them electrically, you might hope to do it and clean up earth's power problem. If you build them on earth, you'd need thousands of launches at least.
A bootstrap type facility used to build progressively bigger sets of machine tools using in situ materials would certainly take more total launches than Apollo did. However, the total launched mass in machine tools to the moon would be far smaller than sending all of those solar panels up directly. Now, I'm not saying it is the only solution to our power problem, but it is a mighty attractive option and is certainly a way that a bootstrapped moon colony could be justified.
Additionally, of course, once you have people there, you could start to do other stuff that would be expensive to launch from earth. The science projects that you could do on the moon are frequently discussed, and if you had manufacturing capacity for satellites on the moon, along with a staging point for most of your equipment, a trip to mars would become much more feasible. Yeah, it would be easier to go directly to mars -- if that's all you wanted to do -- another flags and footprints mission. But if you want a supply train that leads to a multiplanet trading economy, a moon colony is a cornerstone.
Readily accessible bulk material already in orbit, along with tools to shape it into things we need would be a game changer. It would open up the whole solar system. Sure, getting off the planet would still be hard -- and it would do nothing for population pressures here on earth, but it would bring some of the more valuable assets of deep space into reach.
Ever wonder why the Apollo CM and LM systems were based on the guidance systems for the Polaris A-3?
Because the space program didn't pay to shrink those computers - the DoD did.
The branch of the government that wanted to put computers on ballistic missiles. And on fighters and bombers. And on submarines. Etc.. etc... That branch isn't NASA.
You're incorrect. There are plenty of metals and oxygen on the moon. The moon (apparently) lacks carbon, nitrogen, and possibly hydrogen (for water) -- although recent evidence indicates that h2o may in fact be available on the moon.
I don't know where this 'there's nothing useful on the moon' meme came from, but you're not the first person to voice it, and it's rather silly.
> the .gov cannot "create" something that benefits more people than the required taxing harms.
Reply, abstracted - Libertarian bullshit.
In a liberal democracy, a government provides those goods and services which in some way meet a cost-value metric of the citizens and their representatives, or they eventually go away. As with any large private organization, when inertia develops, it can take a while to eliminate funding for goods and services that don't pass the metric.
The broad brush claim that (in this case) the US Federal government is strictly a cost center is libertarian dogma (or a GOP primary season talking point), not a fact-based argument.
Luke, help me take this mask off
It was the rising costs of America's foray into socialism with Johnson's Great Society that doomed the space program continuing beyond low Earth orbit. It was the rising costs of the social programs that caused Nixon to halt the last few Apollo launches.
As an interesting sidenote right or wrong trillions of taxpayer dollars have went into social programs that could have went elsewhere. If it were not for those programs America might have decided before now that it was worth spending the money to put colonies on the moon and men on Mars. After all, the money spent on social programs dwarfs what is spent by NASA.
Current space travel is being constrained by the budget deficits of which social programs are the largest share meaning future space travel will be almost non-existent as the costs of social programs (and other government expenses) continue to balloon out of control.
Why do we need Moonbase Alpha?
1. There is simply no other place where we can build large spacecraft. Earth's gravity well is too deep. The moon is a nearly perfect manufacturing base. First build a nuclear power plant and then a smelter. Then start plundering the natural resources of the moon to build stuff.
2. It would be an easier experiment than trying to live on Mars or Jovian moons. Only once we have successfully lived on the moon for a while would it be worth trying for Mars or Titan.
3. It would allow us to build kilometer scale radio telescopes facing away from the earth and not being as subject to terrestrial interference allowing for a much more effective SETI program. In addition to SETI it would allow for terrestrial sized telescopes of all sorts that don't have to worry about the atmosphere getting in the way of the astronomy.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
"We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade, and do other .... things... to other, er, Things... with, ah, stuff.... for the purposes of - ahem - certain objectives.... tasking some rather particular, mmm, assets... about which which I'm not at liberty to comment further, and I'd appreciate it if you'd not repeat that last part. Heh heh. Good times. Anyone for coffee?"
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
The branch of the government that wanted to put computers on ballistic missiles. And on fighters and bombers. And on submarines. Etc.. etc... That branch isn't NASA.
True, and frighteningly often forgotten.
"The shiny Space Future: brought to you by the people who decided it would be cool to build thousands of flying robots that can melt cities into toxic slag. And hold them over your head, on a hair trigger, for the rest of your life. Mmm-hmm! Smell that, son? That there is 100% home-grown Apocalypse, and ain't she a beauty! Oh and by the way you also get a compu-tater in-tron-net or somesuch machine. I don't understand the specifics but the backroom boys say it's a way for you to chat to all your little friends and play wholesome patriotic war-games and steal movies. Heh. But don't worry, we'll throw you in jail if you even think of doing that last one. No, don't say a word. You can thank us by joining the Army when you grow up!"
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
If you believe mankind possesses the knowledge, intelligence and technology to leave the planet now, I'd love to see you try. And while you're at it, if you could find the means to take whoever else believes this drivel, please, do so.
Biosphere II proved that there's currently only 1 sustainable ecology available to mankind; it's earth.
The fact that people are convinced otherwise is evidence of the wonderful power of propaganda. The fact that they don't know any better is evidence that we don't spend nearly enough resource on teaching youth about science or critical thinking.
All that aside, much of the world's "leadership" seems hell bent on ignoring the reality that we're quickly moving toward the limits of population growth and consumption, based on our current implementation of energy production, consumption and willful ignorance toward polluting the global environment with whatever chemicals we deem expedient to facilitate the first two.
MIT's report to the Club of Rome entitled, the Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update, presents an informative discussion of the means by which we might explore the reality of our future in order avoid man made global catastrophes. So why is this such a forbidden topic of discussion? Most of the people I know aren't blind to the reality that human population growth has reasonable limits, but most have been led to believe, even in the absence of informed discussion, that we just can't do much to address the problem... Bunk!! There's no reason to accept the party line of people who just don't want to admit that our economic systems and values that are leading us down the garden path, away from anything remotely realistic.
Earth and her problems are those which should be first and foremost. Stop wasting time with space and questions of human survival off-planet that promote with willful ignorance and participation of future generations that would be required to suffer desolation here so a few might chance survival elsewhere.
Sorry, but we couldn't sustainably live there.
At least not without violating Article 4 of the Antarctic Treaty:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System
And the Madrid Protocol:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_on_Environmental_Protection_to_the_Antarctic_Treaty
Luckily, we never ratified the Moon Treaty:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Treaty
-- Terry
even better, I wish slashdot and their CSS brainfuck trust would implement the functionality of the defunct slashdotter firefox plug in that allowed you to solectively collapse threads/branches and not with that slider based on mod points. Just collapse an entire thread you see is going someplace you don't care about so that you can actually read stuff that interests you.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Without the Apollo program, we would not have the Saturn V - the vehicle that allowed us to launch the Voyager probes. The Apollo program itself - not exactly a huge advance scientifically and the important bits (obtaining samples of moon rock) could certainly have been achieved much more easily using a probe with a return vehicle to carry the sample. Nevertheless, the program itself enabled the Voyager probes, which were, and still are, simply awe inspiring.
the title should read "What if the Apollo program had never happened?" since that's what the summary is about.
The way it reads, the title sounds like someone is still questioning whether it did. It's as inflammatory as OJ's book "If I did it'".
The US already did it so it wouldn't matter if we did it again. If China did it it would be a big public relations coup for them. No one could ever deride "made in China" in the same way we do now ever again. It's would bring a lot of pride and credit to that nation.
The next big accomplishment that any western nation or Russia might accomplish that could compare to a moon landing is a space colony of at least 100 people. Be it on on the moon or mars. My vote would be for mars. Mars has a lot more potential for resources and manufacturing. It also has significant enough gravity. It's very close to the asteroid belt which is also valuable for mining metals and water that you don't need to lift into orbit.
Best bet would be on China doing it first. They seem to be the only ones putting money into long term engineering and R&D. Maybe around 2030.
Until we decide what the purpose of manned space flight is over unmanned -- other than the romantic one of sending people there -- we shouldn't do manned space flight. It's way expensive and yields much less than unmanned. Almost all of the great successes of the last 20 years have been unmanned, with the possible exception of Hubble and its maintenance.
The twenty traits of a political psychopath:
1. glib and superficial charm
2. grandiose (exaggeratedly high) estimation of self
3. need for stimulation
4. pathological lying
5. cunning and manipulativeness
6. lack of remorse or guilt
7. shallow affect (superficial emotional responsiveness)
8. callousness and lack of empathy
9. parasitic lifestyle
10. poor behavioral controls
11. sexual promiscuity
12. early behavior problems
13. lack of realistic long-term goals
14. impulsivity
15. irresponsibility
16. failure to accept responsibility for own actions
17. many short-term marital relationships
18. juvenile delinquency
19. revocation of conditional release
20. criminal versatility
E Proelio Veritas.
Yes, but it was also important. The outcome of the US getting to the moon first was a treaty with the USSR that banned weapons in space. The USSR would almost certainly not have signed such a treaty if they'd maintained their early lead in the space race: they'd have put nukes in LEO and had a first and second strike capability that the USA could not match. The moon itself was largely irrelevant - investing a lot in rocket development and building the launch capability was.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Just like energy, which cannot be created or destroyed; the .gov cannot "create" something that benefits more people than the required taxing harms.
Similarly, wealth can neither be created nor destroyed, which is why we are materially on exactly the same level as the Ancient Greeks. Oh, wait...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
That and the whole population density/economic viability thing.
You don't need to have a country where people can live fifty miles from the nearest shop. It's a waste of land. Nobody needs that much space between neighbours.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
A relatively small X Prize is not going to get anyone to spend gargantuan amounts of money on a moonbase.
You cannot govern through X Prizes.
Why, with our massive amounts of debt, do Slashdotters lust after a moonbase? Too many comic books as children? A lack of connection to the real world where many more urgent problems exist?
I've read a lot of discussion about getting off this rock before things that will happen millions of years in the future. My concerns are a lot more immediate, lest we won't be here to worry about solar expansion, heat death, or a world-ending collision. Not to mention we're just learning about quantum physics (Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell for instance, funneled his experience into funding and promoting lots of research into quantum physics and noetic science) and realizing that there's a whole lot more to the laws of the universe than we've thought. I'm undoubtedly for manned space exploration and I believe that doing so will provide nigh-unlimited benefit to our terrestrial population. Think of many of the scientific advances that have come from our short space program thus far, encumbered by inefficiency and cut budgets, profit motive always getting in the way. Hell, look over to the former Soviet program and look at all the scientific research that came out of there, some of which was squashed later for various political reasons.
The greatest enemies we have to manned space exploration and the benefits it could confer upon humanity, are greed and shortsightedness. Even during the height of US and Soviet space programs, there were times when someone forgot to double check, pushed something ahead because they wanted X to happen before Y or on Z date, etc..and it led to brave, highly trained men and women dying. There are heartbreaking stories that have come out of Cosmonaut corps (including a close friend of Yuri Gagarin) where you can hear someone as they realize they're about to suffocate or burn to death on reentry, cursing those who ignored engineering reports because they wanted the flight to happen on an anniversary of a Russian victory for morale reasons. We had our own share of issues, though not nearly as many (Challenger Explosion could have been prevented; there was ample evidence of failure of O-rings based on temperature and either the design could have been updated and the O-rings replaced or the mission could have been called off - truthfully both should have happened - until a better temp profile was available in a later launch window. Because of previous delays and the Shuttle program being ordered to basically launch as much as possible, as fast as possible or lose funding, those Astronauts died).
Greed interceded here even when these programs were the "darling" of their nations, under relatively strict controls and had disastrous effects, so I shutter to think what would happen if, as some suggest, space exploration became a venture exclusively of private industry. You want BP refining the fuel for your ship with their paid-off safety inspectors? Comfortable with Halliburton enough that you stake your life on them using the money for the project on buying the right titanium alloy, instead of a cheaper one and using the rest of the money for hookers and cocaine? When you're seated on a giant explosive would you not at all be worried that the launch date was set before the end of the fiscal year so that stock prices could rise from your successful launch? On the other side, could you spend years investing your time and energy into engineering the next big push into manned spaceflight (with all of your research retained and owned exclusively by Lockheed Martin Space Ventures) only to find that you're out of a job and your Miracle Material (that you believe could revolutionize medical nanotechnology) will have its schematic relegated to a basement server somewhere never to see the light of day in spaceflight or other uses, all because a minor, totally unseen and easily fixable exhaust problem meant people sold LMSV stock and thus "confidence" was down, so the board decided to scrap everything associated with the mission and start from scratch, causing their stock to rebound with the "new product" they were now backing; meanwhile, actual space flight and associated progress never happens. This cycle repeats for quite a few years and LMSV has an
Early scientific minds were willing to chance being charged as religious heretics in order to study and eventually publish information about the solar system and basic physics models.
Yeah, that's why Leonardo spoke in code.
Ahhh.... no. Not at all.
We'll overlook that he wrote in 'code', not spoke. Exactly where do you find da Vinci being hereticized by the Church? Where do you find him being actively impaired by the powers-that-were?
Principal reason for his writing in 'code' as I understand it (from a seminar with Pam Long) was to keep competitors *in the private sector* from stealing his ideas and discoveries... without proper compensation. He shares with the Wright Brothers an important attitude... one not ungermane to the present discussion... which was a recognition that the most significant use of many of the technologies being developed was... war.
And I was born long before Apollo 7, and unless this is an alternate reality it did not 'blow up'. Apollo 13... yes, sorta. Apollo 1... didn't blow up, it caught fire, and it was on the ground at the time. For an unalloyed rocket disaster, you need to look past anything von Braun developed to STS-51L, perhaps more particularly at why it was launched with the OAT where it was... not really a technical 'failure' at all, in the sense of something not well understood by the developing teams...
Good analogy. Note how many profitable, self-supporting commercial colonies have been set up in Antarctica since its discovery in 1820.*
*Zero. In fact there has never been a single permanent resident of Antarctica. It had no human population at all during the winter until 1956 when the first year-around base was set up. Permanent settlement of Antarctica and setting up a self-sustaining economy there is orders of magnitude easier than settling Mars.
Well then, I guess all those claims by Argentina are imaginary. (Or perhaps Argentine colonization of the Antarctic would necessarily be no more 'real' than those possibly-apocryphal 'African space programs', Argentina obviously having no industrial presence or capable technical people?) [Note: sarcasm.]
And the problems of Antarctica are so much greater than those of, say, the North Slope of Alaska that no one would undertake them? ...
Nope, I wouldn't buy it for a quarter... ;-}
I know whats up there, let the Chinese there first, trust me, it's better that way.
Be seeing you...
The Apollo project was wrongheaded to begin with. Von Braun and other levelheaded types (including myself) advocated a staged approach. First, build a permanent support base in orbit. Second, assemble the lunar vehicle at the station, requiring only modest boosters rather than the very expensive Saturn. Off the shelf Atlas boosters would work fine. Since travel between the lunar surface and the support station would be far safer and less expensive than earth surface to moon and return, exploration and basing would be much less problematical. (Earth surface to orbit is 90+% of the cost.)
The support base, built after the fact, was again wrongheaded. Idealistically making it "International" was an incredible bungle. Governments always screw things up, a whole bunch of them screw things up royally. Instead of a year or two, it took decades and cost an order of magnitude more. For that matter government should simply offer incentives like the ones offered now for achievements by competing companies. The bidding process instead limits to "big iron" companies like Boeing with good political connections who can be relied upon for complex top dollar forever projects.
Who are you to tell anybody where/how to live?
That attitude is why there is still net immigration to the USA from Europe. People vote with their feet.
You don't _need_ any of the stuff you've got. Shelter and food should be enough for everybody.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
...we had spent the 13 billion (1968 dollars) in renewable energy research?
No Apollo Program? The X plane Project would have come to fruition and instead of WW2 lifting platform tech (which is all today's rockets are....just high tech V2's), sub-orbital flight would today, no doubt, be completely routine, cheaper, cleaner and orders of magnitude safer than strapping your ass to a barely controlled explosion and hoping for the best. If it wasn't for that stupid race, humanity wouldn't have been stuck with a 'quick fix' for the last 40 years (with a least another 20years of 'quick fix' to come before the alternatives come online). Steven Baxter, one of my personal favourite sci-fi authors, has some excellently written and extensively researched 'what if' short stories about precisely this subject (he spent considerable time befriending, interviewing and gaining amazing insight from real astro/cosmonauts, which really shows in his books).....If anyone takes this subject seriously and wouldn't mind gaining some new insights....I suggest reading Steven Baxter's "Phase Space" (or any of the short stories it contains, and his other sci-fi novels are well worth the read)
The plan was to move more slowly, using airplane-like vehicles to get into orbit. Ultimatley, the moon was the goal. JFK's challenge derailed the early shuttle program in the late 1950s-early 1960s. Use of 'disintegrating totem poles' replaced the development of reusable spacecraft parts. The shuttle program that we got after Apollo was another quick-easy-expensive program, rather than the result of 20+ years of development. sorry no cites, but I have little time right now for this....mebbe later. (google should find bunches - look up project dynasoar, X-15, etc)
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.