Slashdot Mirror
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?"
There is virtually no interest in space among the many people I interact with, my customers, my suppliers, the other parents at school, or my neighbors. My interest in astronomy and space is regarded in the same manner as my telescopes, as a curiosity or mild eccentricity.
I can't imagine that people like these will be willing to commit money, either as tax or investment, in furthering space research, not until they see something that affects them personally and requires return to space.
On the positive side, this something can be anything, even a surprise threat from North Korean FTL probe leaving for Alpha Centauri.
I respect Mr. Rennie's effort in encouraging further efforts in deep space exploration, but I think his argument may go a little away from principle. The Voyager probes were not designed to be deep space probes. As I recall having learned, the Voyager probes were designed to photograph the planets and record relevant non-visual data, during the recent "grand conjunction" phase in the solar system.
I'm afraid I must apologize for my evident lack of citations, here. As my own specator knowledge of it holds, and anyone may wish to correct me: It's been a pleasant suprrise that the Voyager probes have continued functioningm, for so many years since after they completed their assigned missions.
Personally, I think it also may serve in making a constructive comment towards the niceties of reliable manufacturing practice in the construction of space exploration systems. "But maybe that's just me" ;}
I'm 35 years old and the most exciting events in space exploration to happen in my life time have been two space shuttles exploding and killing the astronauts, sticking a station in space (that is at the end of its life already), and sticking a little RC car on mars. My parents and grandparents? They had the space race. First man in space. First space walk. First moon landing. In their life times, the world stopped to watch for news of events as they unfolded in space. In our life time, nobody knows the name of any astronauts and the only time there is coverage is when something explodes.
We will have no glorious moments like our parents and grandparents. There will be no amazing massive exploration event in our life time. People are more worried about potholes and "banning" gay sex than they are about furthering the progress of all mankind. So stop getting your hopes up that anything amazing is going to happen. For all intents and purposes, space exploration is dead.
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.
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.
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.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Very unfortunately, that's impossible. There isn't enough Plutonium left for all those probes, and the politics are not in favour of investing in nuclear power plants that can produce it.
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.
Good one. But I'd say that voyager has to be one of the most ambitious projects ever made. I mean a space probe that would keep going deeper and deeper into space for years to come. Thats something to be excited about. Carl Sagan said "If the space is a big ocean lying out there, we have just started to dip our knees in the water". Well, I would want to swim as far as possible into it. Probably there are more important matters back here on Earth, but I would still go for another slice of space.
I think wealthy people still do think in terms of dynasties and legacy. You've got people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet doing a lot of work to leave their legacy on the world. And people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson have set up companies with ambitious plans to get into space.
I hope that what we're seeing is just a low point in history, where we're making the transition from government-funded space exploration to private funding.
This may be a good thing. While I think it's great that China is investing in space, we've seen with the United States that governments can quickly lose interest in space and stop funding exploration. Having private companies might be the only sustainable way to fund space exploration.
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.
The problem with the space program is US funding. Increasingly citizens in the US want their entitlements without any strings attached.
Despite all the debates and rhetoric about it, entitlements aren't the problem. Social Security and Medicare the two big entitlements are in fact paid for from separate taxes that exceed the amount spent on those programs. Look at the federal budget. Military spending, is the biggest portion, bigger than all entitlements combined. NASA's budget is less than 1% of the federal budget. What's killing us are all the "wars", the overseas wars, the "war on drugs", the "war on terror", etc.
Don't misunderstand me, we need a military, we need defense. But the "war on drugs" is a complete waste, the "war or terror" is out of control, and the other wars are just a way for people supplying the military to get rich while bankrupting the country.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
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?
The Voyager spacecraft computers are some of the last active computers in the Solar System still using hand-wrapped core memory. I think that says more about the space probe than almost anything else. There might be a couple museums which fire up a computer every now and again with such a memory module, but this is certainly the last one in a production environment. It shows how rugged that kind of design really can be.
Then again, saying it is the last one in the Solar System may not even be accurate, so it might just simply be said it is the last one currently running in the Milky Way Galaxy... unless we meet some alien races to dispute that fact.
My parents and grandparents? They had the space race. First man in space. First space walk. First moon landing
In short, all of the easy stuff was done before you were born. Getting into orbit has gone from being something on the national news to something that happens so regularly that a vast amount of modern infrastructure depends on it. In fact, it's become so easy that we now worry about the amount of stuff in orbit.
Once you've got into orbit, you're most of the way to the moon, in terms of energy usage. Going to other planets is harder, although we've done that with probes. But after that there's the question of motivation. There are lots of reasons to want to get into orbit - it's the ultimate high ground and gives you an unparalleled view of the Earth. Getting to the moon? Well, you can wave a flag, but after that it's a pretty uninteresting lump of rock. Mars? Even if it were made entirely of gold (or something actually useful, like refined uranium) then the cost involved in getting things back from there would make it largely uninteresting.
And the step beyond that, travelling to other stars, doesn't just require better engineering, it requires new physics. If anyone works out how to build a superluminal engine, then you can bet that there will be a huge amount of funding devoted to building it, but until then the problem with space is finding something useful to do there. Even scientific missions are better done by small unmanned probes.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Here we go again. I remember how eagerly my church watched and prayed for the moon astronauts when they launched on their missions. Many of those astronauts were in fact Christians. This same lie appears on every single post here about any scientific topic. I for one eagerly support all exploration of the wonders that the Lord has created. The reason for the dirge of deep space exploration is simple to see and as usual it's all about the God of most people, the dollar. No one has figured a way to make money there in the short term so therefore the interest has to be carried entirely on the Governments dime. With budgets being trimmed and wars to fight that is one small dime nowadays. Personally I think it's foolish not to explore but I don't get to decide.
Politicians are a reflection of the people they "serve." We're the problem.
Did the ipad 3 cost hundreds of millions of dollars?
Yes, in all likelyhood.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!