Voyager and the Coming Great Hiatus In Deep Space

MatthewVD writes "Some time in the next decade, the Voyager probes will run out of juice and finally go silent after almost a half century of exploration. John Rennie writes that the lack of any meaningful effort to follow up with a mission to interstellar space shows the "fragile, inconsistent state of space exploration." It's particularly frustrating since the Voyagers have tantalized astronomers with a glimpse into about how the sun's magnetic field protects us from (or exposes us to) cosmic rays. Have we gone as far as we're willing to go in space?"

Comments

Indeed

[Creedo]

In regards to funding such efforts, Neil deGrasse Tyson recently said:

“Without it, we might as well slide back to the cave, because that’s where we’re headed right now — broke.”

It's rather pathetic that we are willing to waste untold amounts of resources on mindless violence, and yet let programs which could further our knowledge of the universe sit unused on the drawing board.

Re:Indeed

[similar_name]

In an almost perfect world people wouldn't give up on a perfect world. Luckily as a whole we don't. While history has its ups and downs the overall trend seems to be up.

Re:Indeed

[cusco]

Space exploration doesn't make rich people richer **TODAY**. Wealthy people used to think in terms of dynasties, founding colonies and funding explorations that they knew would never pay off until the time of their grandchildren. Today if it doesn't pay off in under a decade it isn't seen as worth investing in. Funding solar power satellites for example with a financial break-even point of 20 years are essentially unthinkable, even if the payoff were enormous.

Re:Indeed

[neonv]

Mindless violence has unfortunately been the fuel for space exploration. The Germans in World War II developed the rockets that gave rise to putting satellites into orbit. The Cold War drove spending on space exploration out of fear of being destroyed from space. Men walked on the moon only from fear that the other super power would get there first. Now that there is no threat of war between super powers, there's no more fear that drives spending on space exploration. Though Space X and Virgin Galactic give some hope that things will change, it won't be at the same rate of development in the forseable future.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't mean to minimize any urgency to continue space exploration--it's important to lobby and press for pushing the envelope however we can.

However, space exploration isn't dead.

For many years I've been waiting, and continue to wait, for New Horizons to reach Pluto (http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/). Assuming this goes on as planned, it will be amazing to finally see Pluto and Charon -- something that, if I'm alive at that time, I can say I'm glad I lived to see. The fact they plan to continue the mission into the Kuiper belt is even more impressive. If anything's carrying the torch of Voyager and Pioneer at the moment, it's New Horizons. The way I feel about it now is similar to how I felt about Voyager meeting Uranus and Neptune in the 80s when I was a child.

Another thing that's fascinating to me to see unfold is private spaceflight. The fact that there is a realistically burgeoning private spaceflight industry in the US is pretty damn amazing if you ask me, and I'm excited to see it continue.

I'm all for large federally funded space exploration research (and research of all kinds) but I sometimes feel like there's a sky-is-falling narrative that's not quite right. Give credit where credit is due.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Define amazing.

To say that "sticking a little RC car on Mars" isn't an achievement is frankly incredibly insulting to the people that designed it. You want bigger? Look at the Mars Science Laboratory which is being dropped via rocket crane because it's so heavy. Quite honestly, sending things to the Moon is easy. Sending stuff to Mars is incredibly difficult and the staggering cost of developing human support systems to do it outweighs the enormous amount of robotic science you could do with the same amount of money.

Oh and let's not forget that Voyager was never meant to end up in outer space. Initially it was meant to explore Jupiter and Saturn, but the mission was extended, extended and extended a bit more. And why not? The hardware was still functioning perfectly. Look at Spirit and Opportunity, they have massively outstayed their welcome on Mars thanks to the engineering that went into them.

So what's out there now? Well, New Horizons is on its way to Pluto as I type with a presumed extension to visit the Kuiper belt afterwards. If they don't send that out of the solar system afterwards, I'd be very surprised. The mission is supposed to end in 2026, but who knows. The way you do something like this is have a mission in the solar system and then find a way to use the satellite after it's done doing your science.

Oh and we're not slouching on launches either

http://claudelafleur.qc.ca/Scfam-science.html#2011
http://claudelafleur.qc.ca/Scfam-planetary.html#2011

We're actually launching a lot more than we used to. The difference is we've got other things we're interested in rather than finding out what's in interstellar space - cool prospect as it is.

There will always be new innovation in science and there will always be nostalgic people. What actually happens is somewhere in-between, science marches on, but the visible effects diminish. When we look at space science, you're comparing things that happened over a period of around 30-50 years ago. Think about life 50 years in the future. We will be recalling the days when we went from 2D graphics to 3D graphics, a time when the world wasn't connected via the internet, when a cellphone went from being bigger than a brick to smaller than a deck of cards. In 30 years what will have changed? Probably lots, but will anything in these fields ever rival these first steps?

Re:Indeed

[Grishnakh]

Not true; they're all fairly similar.

Star Trek reflected America's boldness and ambition in space and hope for a utopian future. It was revived in the late 80s and early 90s with a spin-off that showed the same thing. Now, 20 years later, we have no entertainment that's remotely similar to this. Most sci-fi these days is dystopian and has nothing to do with human space travel, and usually shows what a bleak and horrible future we're going to have soon (some of it involving zombies).

The WTC again reflected America's boldness and ambition, in building the (then) world's largest building, and two of them. The design was rather fugly, but then again early 70s design generally was unfortunately, but from an engineering perspective they were impressive. It took a long time for anyone to build anything taller. Of course, 30 years after they were built they were destroyed, and 10+ years later we still haven't gotten around to rebuilding them, nor have we built anything remotely similar in this nation in the last 40 years.

The Concorde was not American, it was British and French; however, it too reflected the boldness and ambition of western culture. The fastest passenger plane ever built and flown; however, nothing better was ever built, and the Concorde has been mothballed because 1) not enough people wanted to pay the enormous ticket price and 2) as I said before, we never bothered to try to make anything better which could have been more economical. In fact, air travel is significantly slower today than it was 40 years ago, for everyone, as passenger jets flow slower now to save fuel.

The Space Shuttle was American, and again was bold and ambitious (though rather stupid from an engineering standpoint). Even though it was much more costly than a traditional capsule like the Soyuz (which is why it was stupid), we stuck with it for many years, and finally now we've gotten rid of it, and replaced it with nothing, so we have no more capability to send humans out of the atmosphere; we have to rely on the Russians for that now, and maybe the Chinese in the future.

All four of these are fairly similar: they're examples of big, ambitious projects that western nations took on back in the 60s-70s, which are now dead, and not replaced with anything better or even remotely as good. Instead of striving for greatness and doing big things, we've decided as a culture we don't want to bother because it costs too much or it's too hard, and instead we'd rather spend much, much bigger sums of money on foreign wars and bailing out badly-run companies that don't produce anything of value. Basically, they're great examples showing that Western culture has faded in prominence and is on the way to extinction, or at least to morph into something nothing like the glory days we remember. It's much like the middle eastern Islamic culture: 1000 years ago, that culture led the world in learning, mathematics, etc. Now where are they? At some point, 500 or so years ago, they took a U-turn and went straight back to stone-age thinking. We're doing the exact same thing right now.

yes

[Anonymous Coward]

we have

Re:We've probably gone farther

[PsychoSlashDot]

There virtually no interest in anything that isn't personally and obviously of benefit to Joe Average these days. If it isn't a new iPhone app or a new GPS option in their car, or a simpler way to get bigger breasts, or an indisputable cure for baldness, crow's feet, or liver-cancer, Joe Average doesn't want to hear about it and CERTAINLY won't want to pay for it.

Ignorance is bliss, and as long as the digital TV signal carrying Jersey Shores is nice and strong, that's all the technology most people care for.

It's the specials, the freaks, the weirdos who insist on dreaming and asking "what if". We read science fiction and speculative fiction, and we play games that model hypothetical situations and we desperately want to know MORE about many things. Even if human teleportation devices can't be invented in our lifetime, we want to see the steps as the precursor technology is built. But we're not normal.

New Horizons on the way

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite true. We are existing the Age of Reason into the Age of Dark Ages 2. From the proponents of ignorance (ie. intelligent design) to people's tendency to bashing science as "unscientific" because it does not paint rosy pictures for them (eg. AGW) to simple fear of unknown (eg. nuclear). It has been rather sad last 20 years in terms of people's perception of science.

On another note, there is another probe racing for Pluto. It will then go on exploring the Kuiper belt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

Voyager 1 is moving a bit faster though so it will remain furthest measurement platform out there until it stops working, but still, new tech is on the way out there too.

After New Horizons, well, don't expect much for at least the next 20 years..

It's ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

We're in good company judging by how busy the galaxy seems to be.
Yet another minor footnote of a species in the grand scheme of things that did not use their small window between having the technology to try leaving their home planet. And the next global disaster that wipes life off the planet.

Gamma ray burst, comet, meteor, supervolcano, germ, pole shift, nuclear/chemical/bio war, toxic air/earth/water/food, solar flare, global warming, ecosystem collapse, rogue black hole, particle accelerator mishap, nanotech accident, and many other things we can't even predict.

We backup our computer data. But not our species.

Unlikely? Nah. We know at least most of those WILL happen again at some point in the future.
But it would be hard, and expensive, and take a while to even attempt to create a new human location..
So lets just not do it. Lets continue keeping all our stuff in one place. Screw space! Planning ahead is for suckers.

Lets go watch tv. I've got popcorn.

Re:It's ok.

[blahplusplus]

"So lets just not do it. Lets continue keeping all our stuff in one place. Screw space! Planning ahead is for suckers."

It's more like the fact that the vast majority of the population isn't intelligent enough to want it and most of them are struggling (financially) so exactly why would they want to spend something that smarter future generations could do much quicker and efficiently then old human being v1.0?

I think people who rail against events in our time forget how inefficient and slow human beings are. IMHO we should focus in making better human beings and/or robots/AI tools that augment human intelligence. Our main problem isn't that we're not curious, it's that we don't have enough intelligent, responsible and secure human beings on planet earth.

Re:We've probably gone farther

[Anonymous Coward]

This bad behaviour is tied to religion. People are happy to say that "God did it and we don't need to ask questions." The only purpose in their lives is to both hinder and remove the rights of persons that do not believe in the supernatural. It's a cancer on this earth that must be eradicated through education.

We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[Taco Cowboy]

How many years already the Voyager spacecraft kept sending us valuable data?

And it does all that without any of the super-gigaherz chips nor gigabytes of RAM nor terabits/s connection devices

On the other hand, do you think your iPad will last 5 years?

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[davydagger]

consumer products != space grade industrial products.

before you start talking about modern consumer electronics which are the best they've ever been, think about consumer grade hardware in the 1990s.

boot times where 5+ min. never worked right. plug and play didn't work, no standards on HW.Drivers sucked.

sheet, we got it easy today.

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[TheRaven64]

On the other hand, do you think your iPad will last 5 years?

In five years, you will be able to get a new one with a higher resolution display, a much faster processor, much more RAM and storage space, and support for the latest mobile network standards. Your current model can do more processing in an hour than the computer on the Voyager probes can do in a year.

In contrast, the Voyager probes were very expensive to produce one-off products and are in a location that is almost impossible - and totally impractical - to service or even get replacement parts to. In other words,they were both built with completely different sets of design requirements.

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[mug funky]

if you're not fundamentalist, why are you attempting to excuse your fundamentalist allies?

i don't give a damn about your brand of christianity, or the Apollo astronauts'.

talk to the fucking politicians. the ones that have been fighting resource wars under the guise of ideals and beliefs for so long that they've started believing the lies they use to justify yet another war over resources.

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[cowboy76Spain]

Ok, you did pray and care for the astronauts. No problem with that, as long everyone is doing it freely.

The issue at hand is that some of us think that all that praying served for nothing else than for you feeling good. I am not saying that it is a bad thing or that I am opposed to it. I mean that if you wanted to help astronauts, using that time for doing extra work and donating the proceedings for the NASA -or even for improving the funding of the local schools- would have been more efficient. Of course, it was your time and your election to do, but remember that not everyone thinks like you.

The problem now is that people in power are agreeing to reintroduce superstition as a valid alternative for science. If things keep going this way, maybe in a few years when a levee breaks it would not be because of bad engineering/maintenance, but because "that city was full of sinners and God punished them".

Re:We sure don't make stuffs like they used to

[camperdave]

Did the ipad 3 cost hundreds of millions of dollars?

Yes, in all likelyhood.

Re:choices

[I_am_Jack]

But there certainly is some kind of trade off. Effort and resources directed towards ocotmoms and the idle must come from somewhere.

Again, only two choices? Sensationalizing the most extreme of social contract obligations as the only reason we're not funding more deep space research? Puh-leeze. The reason more deep space probes are not being launched is because people don't give a crap. And CISPA will be passed because (IMHO) the Internet blew its collective social activism wad fighting SOPA and everyone has gone back to Minecraft, WoW and Berk memes because they think their effort as 1's and 0's superheroes for a day crushed the special interests (and at least at this point, no one is telling otherwise). The only reason Apollo made it as far as it did is because NASA hired the best and brightest on Madison Avenue to make it an all-consuming interest for Americans. Not a day would go by without something reminding you we were in a race with the Russians and we had to win. As soon as we got there, everyone lost interest. Why? Because NASA sold the first men on the moon as the goal (Kennedy was a tad short-sighted, apparently), not the continued exploration of the moon. As soon as people give a crap and fight for what they want (or what they're told what they want), and if deep space exploration is what they're told they want, then we'll have more Voyager-like probes than you can shake a stick at.

Whatcha gonna do?

[macraig]

Seriously, what are you gonna do to persuade the average human of the critical importance of space exploration and colonization? They can neither see nor reason past the ends of their noses. They would rather argue about abortion and gay rights and whether so-and-so 'had work done' and what sort of debauchery they have planned for Friday night. That's on the 99-percent end of the scale; on the other end you have people who can't see nor reason past their own bloated bank accounts and genitalia.

Obligatory but equally depressing xkcd

[kevingolding2001]

I'm surprised nobody else has posted this yet.
65 years

Re:Blame the b*tards in Congress...

[Anonymous Coward]

Politicians are a reflection of the people they "serve." We're the problem.