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NASA Pondering L2 Outpost, Return To Moon
New submitter Joiseybill writes "Now that the election is over, any voters that may have been influenced can rest easy. Space.com reports that the agency has been 'thinking about setting up a manned outpost beyond the moon's far side, both to establish a human presence in deep space and to build momentum toward a planned visit to an asteroid in 2025.' Space policy expert John Logsdon said, 'NASA has been evolving its thinking, and its latest charts have inserted a new element of cislunar/lunar gateway/Earth-moon L2 sort of stuff into the plan. They've been holding off announcing that until after the election.' According to the article, 'Rumors currently point toward parking a spacecraft at the Earth-moon L2 gateway, so NASA (and perhaps international partners) can learn more about supporting humans in deep space. Astronauts stationed there could also aid in lunar exploration — by teleoperating rovers on the moon's surface, for example.'"
Link to past thread: http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/09/26/030246/nasa-mulling-earth-moon-l2-point-for-mars-staging-station
Tomorrow is another day...
The more discussed, the better. If it was here two weeks ago, the planet's population has increased by somewhere in the vicinity of 2,952,992 humans since then.
Getting time to leave.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Don't get me wrong, I love space and cannot wait to go to mars for vacation when I retire! But better this than more election coverage... As for your argument, I somehow doubt the newborns will be able to contribute to this discussion. In other news, a facebook phishing scam has been left unreported on Slashdot. I blame the editor ;-) looking forward to all of your comments here.
Tomorrow is another day...
Often, I hear people demanding to know what practical reason humans would have to travel to the moon again. Many people bring up pipedreams like space ports, or lunar mining complexes.
I have a better reason.
The moon is tidelocked with the earth, has a very stable orbit, and a fairly large circumference. We should put an interferometric space telescope on the dark side of the moon. We could then use the entire circumference of the "visible/invisible" hemisphere terminator zone as the effective aperature size, and be free of atmospheric distortions.
The kinds of pictures we could get from such a telescope would make hubble look like a cheap webcam in comparison.
Put the command/control antenna on the visible side of the moon, and have it garanteed to always be pointed at the earth.
L2 is actually significantly easier than going to the Moon, assuming you want to stop and not just crash. You need to expend fuel to slow you down in the Moon's gravity well, and for L2 you do not. Relative to the Earth, the Moon and L2 are very close in energy to reach, not counting the gravity well.
There's only a 1.3 second one-way communication delay between here and the Moon, making real-time control from Earth perfectly feasible (unlike Mars which has a 3 to 22 minute delay). The L2 point is even further away from the moon than the Earth is (on average around 4-5 times further) , thus there is an even larger communication delay which would make real-time control far less practical. Teleoperating a rover on the moon is a very contrived reason to place humans at the L2 point.
Better known as 318230.
I thought facebook was a phishing scam!
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
The role of a human on a science mission is to provide a way to rapidly react to situations at the location and to give very short instructions to perform complex tasks or for somebody 'on the spot' to make some sort of judgement call in terms of what to do next in a time critical situation. I wouldn't call that a lack of utility, but it is a narrow set of situations where early exploration science missions admittedly don't need to have those kind of parameters.
Right now there is still a whole lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of things that can be done with robotic spacecraft, so I would have to agree that some sort of increase in spending for robotic missions is warranted even at the expense of manned spaceflight. Then again you have projects like the James Webb Telescope that have been sucking up even the money that could be spent on other deserving robotic missions, so demonizing the manned spaceflight program really shouldn't be the only target here. More intelligent and fiscally responsible spending should be happening in this area.
None the less, when Harrison Schmitt was on the Moon, he was able to perform the kind of scientific analysis on the spot that simply couldn't have been done by a robotic probe. There really is a need to send up some geologists to the Moon to perform a really extensive survey of lunar materials and to follow up on previous scientific research that has been done there. The kinds of things that a robotic vehicle could do on the Moon would be significantly limited without having somebody on site able to really perform the kind of science that needs to be done there.
Carl Sagan performed a major disservice to America by making it a manned vs. unmanned mission argument anyway. The reasons and needs for either really have separate motivations and objectives, other than robotic missions are really good for doing the early preparatory work needed to make manned missions successful.
Maybe someone should explain L2? LaGrangian points are not exactly common things discussed over coffee, and the importance of the Earth/Moon L2 isn't going to be readily understood by most people.
L2 is referring to the L2 Langrangian point
Quick Primer:
Any time two planets interact with each other there are 5 points where gravity is essentially zero. These can be though of as eddies in a stream. These are known as "Lagrangian Points". They are referred to as L1, L2,...L5. L1 is the point between Earth and the Moon. L2 is the point behind the moon. L3 is the point behind the Earth. L4 and L5 are not in a direct line between the two bodies. They exist at a 60 degree angle off of the first 3.
These Lagrangian points exist between ANY two gravitational bodies. The greater the gravity, the larger the 'hole'. Anything that falls into this 'hole' stays there. This makes it ideal for a satellite or similar. It wouldn't drift away. Just like the eddy in a stream, the external current keeps forcing everything back into the hole.
Humans will not go to Mars or any other location in our solar system for decades, possibly a century or two. They probably will rarely if ever go to the moon in our lifetimes. The money and justification are simply not there. We have a historic responsibility to play our role and leave the rest for future generations to each play the role that corresponds to them.
The reason why it will take decades or even centuries in order to put people on Mars or elsewhere in the Solar System has nothing to do with money, but simply the will and having governments permitting people to be able to go there in the first place. Money and justification is not an impediment.
One relatively cheap and easy way to encourage development of space economically is to simply say over the next century that any activity which takes place primarily in space is exempt from any form of taxation. Providing liability wavers would be something else that doesn't cost money but would make a huge difference for activities in space as costs could be a whole lot more predictable. The same could be said about simply making some sort of sane type of space law where things like ownership of resources obtained or manufactured in space could be made much more certain. There are people who are willing to go into space and to do things on their own dime, so it really doesn't need to cost anything from a government perspective, and if people can make money they will pay whatever it takes to get there.
Besides, I think the current approaches for getting into space are far too overpriced and other methods for getting into space can be done much more cheaply, even if ultimately it is exploding the equivalent amount of energy of a small nuclear bomb under your chair to put yourself or at least a metric ton of "stuff" into orbit. Cost is even less of an issue in terms of moving stuff around that is already in interplanetary space (aka extracting resources from asteroids). A couple of companies are currently in the process of setting up the infrastructure to do just that.
If you are asking if the USA or for that matter any other country in the world (or even group of countries) has the money to put together a government boondoggle that is a Manhattan Project-style "waste anything but time" mission that would put a bunch of people on Mars, I'd have to agree that such money simply doesn't exist. The Apollo missions were pretty much the most that could be done using such a fiscal model. That isn't exactly true, as the money dumped into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could have easily supported such a mission and have done it in under a decade. But it would be in the trillion dollar range none the less and it wouldn't be done in the name of science. If any science actually was accomplished, it would be an afterthought and not the purpose of the mission. I would dare say that spending that kind of money on a "stimulus" program instead of the junk that it was spent on non-military spending (appropriations above and beyond the normal budgetary process mind you as well) could have paid for such a mission as well.
I just simply reject the notion though that we must scale back our dreams. Some creativity in terms of how to finance these missions could happen, but I also am suggesting that even framing the debate in terms of manned vs. unmanned missions and that you can only have one or the other is simply the wrong approach to be taking at all. If it makes sense to send robots and to do something useful, send them. There are separate reasons though to get people into space as well, and if they are going to be on the frontier of human experience they might as well be doing some science too.
America as well as several other countries from around the world have scientific bases set up in Antarctica... at rather significant expense I might add too. If robotic missions were so wonderful, why do you think people are at those research locations instead of tele-operated robots? Note that there are teleoperated robots in Antarctica as well, so it isn't an either-or proposition. I'm just asking you to justify your logic in light of a similar situation that exists perhaps a little closer to home.