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NASA's Bolden: No American-Led Return To the Moon 'In My Lifetime'
MarkWhittington writes "A clash over the future course of American space exploration flared up at a recent joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board. In one corner was Al Carnesale of UCLA, who headed the recent study issued by the National Research Council that found fault with the Obama administration's plan to send American astronauts to an asteroid. In the other corner was NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who has been charged with carrying out the policy condemned by the NRC report."
It's traditional for the summary to contain more pertinent information than the headline, not the other way around. Just sayin'.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Defence is not what USA does, it's not what USA has been doing since the end of WWII. Yes, including what passes for 'defence' nowadays, shutting down all military basis around the world, brining all troops back to America, getting rid of 90% of offence spending. Of-course legitimate defence is what Congress is authorised to collect taxes for in the first place, it's actually an appropriate role for gov't as per the Constitution (which I disagree with, by the way, I don't think central gov't should be running defence!)
You can't handle the truth.
Let's remember:
"Mr Bolden said: "When I became the Nasa administrator, he [Mr Obama] charged me with three things.
"One, he wanted me to help reinspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.""
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7875584/Barack-Obama-Nasa-must-try-to-make-Muslims-feel-good.html
Unless there are muslims to assuage on the Moon, we're not going back.
-Styopa
Look at this little planet Earth, its moon is HUGE. Only Jupiter and Saturn have bigger moons. Luna is nearly as big as Mercury, half as big as Mars but its home planet hasn't colonized it. Obviously there's no intelligent life there. Let's claim them both for the queen of the galactic empire.
Obama's plan is beyond daft. Asteroids are unstable, there is no place to hide from cosmic radiation or Bremstralung X-rays from solar wind. A mission failure in the lunar capture plan could lead to a global disaster. Could Columbus and Magellan have discovered the New World before they had ever sailed the Mediterranean? Could the Polynesians have found Hawaii and New Zealand if they weren't already experienced navigators amongst the nearby islands of Polynesia? What if the first of England had decided to capture Sumatra and bring the entire island home for the British crown before the British Navy had ever ventured as far as Ireland, would you have considered that to be a good plan? Its better than Obama's plan.
In an era of decreasing budgets, marketing is key to build support to perform any activity. If it's a choice of getting funds to return to the moon because the public is receptive to the idea, or getting nothing because the count of people interested in asteroid exploration is about 12 ...
There are actualy several fundimental reasons to return to the moon, not the least of which being the establishment of a launch platform there that could ease exploration of deeper space.
I actually waffle quite a bit on where I land on this topic, and I've not been convinced by anyone's conclusions either way, so I wont put forth more than that.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Well yes and no. Yes in at this moment there really isn't a point, we simply don't have the tech to make going to the moon worth doing right now. Back then it was more about beating the USSR so the fact that they couldn't do much more than pick up a couple hundred pounds or rocks and doing a couple of basic experiments was fine, no reason for the flag waving today. If China or India want to blow a pile of money to say they did it? Knock yourselves out, been there and done that. As for the no part we know that Helium 3 is found to be plentiful there and since helium 3 looks like it might be good for fusion reactors in the future WHEN we can set up a base THEN it would be worth going, with a permanent base (most likely all robotic) one could make the case for the trip.
Frankly the one thing I see NO point in though is "meatbags is spaaace!" because the amount of resources you have to use to get a fragile meatbag into space with today's tech? Really not worth it. The robot doesn't need food, air, water, toilets, can be powered for decades with an RTG, its just better to send a machine to do it. Does that mean we shouldn't work on making new engines capable of moving us meatbags out there? Of course not, but as of right now with the tech we have the machines are just a better choice.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
We're not going to an asteroid, we're not going to Mars, and we're probably never going to the Moon, either. NASA is a toy of the executive branch. Every prez comes up with a hot new "plan" and it never gets past the the planning stage. Bolden will be out on his ass looking for work in less than four years, maybe sooner, and NASA will be back to square one - again.
It's difficult question - we could do manned missions again, but what's practical reason behind this? Research? Basics can be covered by robotics - probes, rovers, satellites. What would be more important though that NASA and others would work with research how to make actual flight to Mars (or return to Moon) as painless as possible. If that results in actual mission after let's say 10 years - I don't really mind, because sometimes it's better than once and right. NASA is still light years ahead of anyone else in the world anyway.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Sorry to burst your Rep bubble, but private has been pouring insane amounts of money and they still can't get their launch right more than the NASA. Also while there's no real resources starvation on Earth initiative to go and explore for private money won't be enough - they will better rage costly war than trying to mine Moon. They never really plan in long term.
Only hope is that new initiative of mining asteroids. But it is also at least 20 years away, and probably will grab some gov grants along the way anyway.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
The United States, which presently has no human space flight capability, isn't sending men to the moon in the foreseeable future!
I know you're shocked, so I will pause for a moment to allow you to recompose yourself.
. . . .
Sadly there was no real alternative to electing Obama.
We need a D. D. Harriman . (yeah, I know its a different future history but still RAH)
What Bolden is simply acknowledging is that NASA's manned spaceflight program is over. Sure, they're still recruiting and training astronauts, but that's so they can keep the ISS manned until it is retired. The future of manned space flight, including space stations, Moon bases and interplanetary and interstellar travel will belong to private industry. NASA will focus on scientific missions. There's nothing wrong with that - it represents the evolution of the space industry. Billionaires like Elon Musk can build, launch, and return space capsules today. Fifty years ago, Musk's approach would have been highly unlikely, if not completely impossible. The US government will help fund and provide frameworks - think DARPA's development of the Internet and now the 100-year starship project and the humanoid robotics initiative. Along with its own research and development, private industry will take the frameworks and ideas DARPA is developing now and leverage and exploit them in unimagined ways, just as with the Internet.
That all depends on what you use the meatbag for. People tend to forget that meatbags are still one of the most advanced machines on Earth (and you can always augment a meatbag, once robotics and cybernetics gets to that point). Sure, the robot doesn't need food, air, etc, but those aren't really that significant of needs. They're just mass in the end.
In exchange, you get capabilities that aren't reflected in robots, such as on site decision making and complex on site study of surface characteristics and high maneuverability even in a bulky space suit. The Moon incidentally is the only place where such capabilities don't shine due to its closeness to Earth.
Ever wonder why even forty years after the end of Apollo, that no one from the US government dares go back to the Moon? Aside from the "Been there. Done that." attitude so common in space advocacy and the public, it's because you can't top the manned activities (all from only two man-weeks on the Moon!) with a few robots, even forty years later. Instead, it'll take an extensive though not necessarily manned effort to do better.
Several people replied with a question they thought was insightful but which was rather a non-sequitur. They wanted to know what was wrong with NASA inspiring children or expanding international relations. The answer is "Nothing." The problem is that none of those three things should be NASA's primary mission. NASA's primary mission should have something to do with the Aeronautics and/or Space. We have another agency that is tasked with expanding international relations, as a matter of fact that agency was established for the express purpose of managing the U.S. government's foreign relations. It is the State Department. If NASA is going to make foreign relations one of its primary goals, it is going to make itself redundant. Reaching out to Muslim nations also falls under the rubric of the State Department and NASA doing so is redundant. We also already have an agency that has one of its primary focuses as inspiring children to get into science and math (or at least it should). That is the Department of Education. Once again if NASA starts making that its focus it becomes redundant.
I will repeat, the head of NASA should see his primary missions as being involved with Aeronautics and Space, not foreign relations or education (although both of those may be secondary or tertiary objectives).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Sadly there was no real alternative to electing Obama.
I'd like to see the Modern Whigs gain support, if for no other reason, because one of their goals is to reform the electoral process to reduce the ill effects of our plurality voting system.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I hear that pathetic excuse a lot. I voted for Romney because there was such an alternative. I thought it was better than voting Libertarian that election cycle which was yet another choice.
If Mankind won't return to the moon in your lifetime, don't think this can't be fixed relatively quickly
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
1) The Saudi prince flight was about a deployment of a satellite, and the prince was a trained representative of the Arab Satellite Communications Organization. He gained that role politically, of course, but are you judging the Arab world in who they decide is or is not an astronaut? I would say it's just a different culture; the blame you place on the Reagan Administration is unfounded.
2) There's a difference between Arabs and Muslims. As I said, Saudi prince officially represented Arabs. He is also Muslim.
3) Nobody has said that we shouldn't help Muslims, or that we should exclude Muslims. What we are saying is that Obama specifically targeted Muslims; take that how you will.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
elon musk is him. We will be on the moon by 2020.
Nobody is saying they shouldn't do those things, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's foremost task should be to expand United State's scientific and technological knowledge in the fields of space and aeronautics. The fact that all three of his primary tasks are essentially PR outreach programs with three different groups is telling; it seems to point that President Obama sees NASA as more of a good PR machine than the top-tier place for science and engineering that it once was.
and they still can't get their launch right more than the NASA
NASA has no launch vehicle. And the few attempts to develop a replacement for the Space Shuttle have all failed hard.
A great deal of enthusiasm exists for going to Disneyland, that's not a science reason, it's a marketing reason.
Let's put an amusement park on the Moon. We can call it the Happiest Place Orbiting the Earth.
I got George Bush lite....but it was still better than a vulture capitalist. Anyone notice that the core republicans stayed away, letting him take the fall alone ?
If you want to argue that there is value in an organization for that, fine. Do so. See if you get support for it. But that's not what NASA is. NASA has never been a humanitarian effort, nor a social effort. It's mission has always been and should always be, to advance aeronautics and space sciences.
What Obama did by making such a ludicrous statement was the equivelent of saying that The Department of Education's primary mission is to advance nutritional standards, or that the IRS' primary mission is to study the effects of welfare in the inner cities. There might be a loose association with these other agencies and the suggested mission, but that's not what those agencies are designed to do, equipped to do, or tasked with.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Sorry, but there's nothing useful in either place AND they're both at the bottom of another god damned gravity well. Orbital stations for spaced based solar would at least be *useful*. Satellite based internet would be useful. Is there something wrong with useful? Why is it that when we talk about space exploration, it always descends into some dick-waving "me there first" macho-chimpanzee rant.
We know how to get into space. We know there are useful and profitable things to do there. Can we just get on with it please?
The moon is useless and if there's life on Mars, it's not going anywhere. We can wait.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden must be killed.
Then we can go back to the moon.
A manned exploration for the purpose of establishing a settlement is one sound reason. There is yet much to learn about mankind's physical and psychological ability to exist outside of Mother Earth for extended periods, and a settlement on the lunar surface would help advance technology for a Martian adventure. Breaking the gravitational fields of both Earth and Luna in advance of a trip to Mars is obviously a terrible waste of fuel. Breaking gravity from Luna alone is practical enough to be considered.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
One of NASA's major roles has always been public relations and/or propaganda. Why do you think the US went to the moon in the first place? It was to inspire Americans and scare Soviets.
Is the end of manned space flight really a bad thing?
How are people going to get into space, if they stop going into space? The idea driving our exploration of space is that we will eventually be there. Get rid of that and there really isn't much reason to do anything aside from some commercial and military-based Earth-facing activities. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge just isn't that valuable.
Sure, we could explore a dozen new worlds that would never matter to us rather than extensive manned expeditions. But what would be the point?
Settle down. Since we've rung out the towel that is the American tax base, we're borrowing all we can already, and we lack the political will to cut ANY spending... NASA would have an easier time picking ticks off an angry bobcat than getting a significant budget increase. Perhaps they're angling for some riyals?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The long-term strategic interests of the United States are most cost-effectively served by building goodwill to the US throughout the world. If that means we use NASA as one such vehicle to deliver outreach and some long-term interest in people moving to and supporting the US, why not? Money not spent bombing the Middle East is money that can go to NASA and other pure science programs which don't necessarily have immediate practical applications (but are frequently of the most value long term).
There are actualy several fundimental reasons to return to the moon, not the least of which being the establishment of a launch platform there that could ease exploration of deeper space.
I think this is ultimately futile in the near term. The only thing we should be doing on the moon right now is figuring out how to get robots to semi-autonomously manufacture habitats and simple materials from local resources. We simply can't afford to bring all that stuff with us. We should be trying to figure out how to live off the land out there. Sending a bunch of robots to build our habitats in advance is the only practical way we put people in space until some cheaper way to get a lot of mass into orbit is devised. Chemical rockets just aren't efficient enough to do the job.
You need to take a second look at Earth if you think our "double-planet" is half-colonized. We can relatively trivially colonize the interior of the Sahara or Antarctica or the oceans, for an insignificant fraction of the cost of colonizing Luna.
To me, by suggesting the most expensive option, you seem to be talking about economic waste.
If you're going to advocate such waste, and that it be done compulsorily (i.e. funded through government) then I'd like to be persuaded that we're already in a post-scarcity economy. Show me our robot butlers, flying cars, closed-due-to-lack-of-sales strip mines, and nearly 100% unemployment rate, please. When we have those things, I'll believe there's no limit to the extravagance we can bear. Until then, though, colonizing the places I mentioned above, is way more sane.
I'm not convinced asteroid mining is profitable either, but at least on the face of it, it's not as guaranteed to be a net loss, as lunar colonization is.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
There are a lot of things closer than Alpha Centauri. For example, there's our entire Solar System. Now, why someone would ignore Mars and talk about Alpha Centauri is beyond me.
... for electing Obama.
Check out what Obama want's Bolden to do. Direct quote from Bolden:
"When I became the NASA administrator, (President Obama) charged me with three things," Bolden said in the interview which aired last week. "One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering."
Their "foremost" task is to make Muslims feel good. He literally said that. Yet he still heads NASA
Thanks, jackasses, for electing Obama.
That is no direct quote from Bolden at all - that is a myth.
I all honesty, you are 100% right about the budgets. I still have this naive hope that Americans will wake up and recognize that a SIXTEEN TRILLION DOLLAR DEBT is unbelievably irresponsible and that taxes will never close a gap that huge.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
And just a little more fuel for thought; the public is who the government is supposed to work FOR. If the public doesnt want it, the government shouldnt even be attempting to ram it down our throats. But you are obviously one of those elitist pinheads that thinks you and a small group in Washington are better equipped to tell everyone everywhere how to live their lives.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e857ZcuIfnI
But what if China actually develops the infrastructure to reach the Moon, pretty much at will, and then decides missile bases would be a good idea? Far fetched. But, how would/could the rest of the world respond?
Missile bases on a Moon? To bomb Earth? But will they have a giant LASER? Really, will they hire a bold weird Canadian guy to do the job for ONE. MILLION. DOLLARS?
You can't handle the truth.
Helium 3 isn't really that common on the Moon, just more so then on Earth. According to wiki
The abundance of helium-3 is thought to be greater on the Moon (embedded in the upper layer of regolith by the solar wind over billions of years),[1] though still low in quantity (28 ppm of lunar regolith is helium-4 and from one ppb to 50 ppb is helium-3)
and is also much harder to fuse then isotopes of Hydrogen or Lithium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
If you want to stay in space so you can say... maintain a power generation station, and NOT haul heavy (and therefore expensive) materials up from a gravity well, like Earth then redirecting some comets and mining asteroids are your best bet.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Right, because there's some sort of profit motive here that we should be serving. Some guy's business is going to get ahold of this and that will make all of us (shareholders) rich, rich, rich!
Let's point out that there are slightly bigger barriers to entry in the space exploration market than in the internet market. And if there's one thing in the world that isn't going to get smaller and more efficient with time, it's a gravity well. At least until we develop a space elevator. So the market is guaranteed to be in control of a few large players -- most likely only one -- and make most of its money off of government agents. The cynical part of me suggests that this is exactly the role that Musk wants to inhabit.
For any industry, the amount of competition is directly proportional to the cost to enter the market. Space exploration is at about the level where billionaires and people with the net worth of a small country can play around with it. More or less on the public dime. So, just like the internet.
I'll skip the discussion of what exactly there is in space to make money off of. Without the possibility of competition, a large profit potential would just make things worse.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Just send human controlled robots up there, the delay to the moon is according to internet 1.3seconds. :p
Will be hard to controls the bots at start, but you get used to planning 1.3 seconds in the future after a while
Ah, so you changed from "exploring space" to "exploring Mars". I see. When simple calculations showed you how utterly ridiculous and nonsensical your notions are, you cowered and scurried back into our solar system....
"it's because you can't top the manned activities (all from only two man-weeks on the Moon!) with a few robots"
Citation needed. Also, this argues for improving robots, which will be absolutely required for the conquest of space. That environment will be forever hostile to unprotected humans.
Why not spend a thousand years perfecting the machines we must have? We can send fleet after fleet of them to do our will, and they can be expendable. Humans are burdensome to support at our primitive level of technology. Let the whole of Terran tech catch up for a few centuries. The universe will still be there.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
A manned exploration for the purpose of establishing a settlement is one sound reason. There is yet much to learn about mankind's physical and psychological ability to exist outside of Mother Earth for extended periods,
We already know plenty about mankind's physical and psychological abilities in space/moon. There is little data to be gained having had MIR, ISS, and other long term confinement scenarios and experiments here on earth.
and a settlement on the lunar surface would help advance technology for a Martian adventure.
Then you have to ask why you want to send meatbags to Mars anyway when we can explore that dead planet with much cheaper robots (and future androids). Sadly, in the current climate if there is no immediate payoff for sending humans then there is little reason to pursue it (even though we all understand the potential long term benefits of it).
Please God tell me you are joking, you are...right? Missiles on the moon would be the most RETARDED MOVE EVAR because by the time the fucking missiles reached earth the war would have been over for a couple of days. I don't know what the flight time to reach China is but I remember during the cold war that to reach pretty much anywhere in the USSR was less than an hour flight time and using the best rockets we have today a missile from the moon would take a MINIMUM of 3 days, and that is if everything was in perfect alignment.
So no Dr Evil, putting missiles on the moon would be beyond pointless. The whole point of nukes is MAD and MAD don't work if your shit won't get there for 3-4 days after the war is over. Hell you could wipe out China and then just send up some ICBMs to waste the nukes in space, they would be pretty damned useless as a threat or defense strategy.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
... for electing Obama.
Check out what Obama want's Bolden to do. Direct quote from Bolden:
"When I became the NASA administrator, (President Obama) charged me with three things," Bolden said in the interview which aired last week. "One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering."
Their "foremost" task is to make Muslims feel good. He literally said that. Yet he still heads NASA
Thanks, jackasses, for electing Obama.
That is no direct quote from Bolden at all - that is a myth.
Actually it is a direct quote in an interview with Al Jazeera (at the 1:20 ish mark) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e857ZcuIfnI
A robot with a meat or just connected to a meatbrain remotely is a good approach.
The former can be just an augmented human. The latter has little advantage over the current approach once the robot gets too far away from the meatbrain.
At other times, I've changed to "exploring the Moon", "exploring nearby asteroids", or just "exploring the Solar System". My perfidy knows no bounds - well except those of time.
Always leave yourself plenty of wiggling room when discussing things that make no sense.
I also notice you conveniently brush aside my numbers.
The presence of numbers can't defend a massive non sequitur. For example, why speak of going to Alpha Centauri when there are many places in the Solar System that can be reached in less time than it takes light to reach Alpha Centauri? Mars can be reached in about six months; the Moon in three days; I think Venus is about four to five months; and Earth crossing asteroids in weeks.
Similarly, it's pretty irrelevant that there is a lot of volume in space. We're not trying to use every bit of volume in space.
Second, going to space traditionally means going to interesting places or doing something interesting in space, not going to a random nowhere in space. That has been true as long as people have spoken of the matter. I don't care why you're misrepresenting the meaning of "go to space". There's no point to it aside from annoying everyone on the internet.
The entire solar system is a few planets in a huge volume of NOTHING.
No one (at least outside of fiction) has ever characterized the Solar System as anything other than what it is. It's been known for a long time that distances in space are a bit longer than those to your neighborhood grocery store. It's also been known for a long time that the "space loons" have been talking about going to the "few planets" in space (and the many other interesting objects in space) not the "huge volume of NOTHING".
How many more pictures of dead rocks or frozen wastelands do you need
Well, why haven't we taken enough pictures of dead rocks and frozen wastelands on Earth?
how will having humans floating around a tin can help?
Why isn't everyone just living in the most optimal environments for humans? Why do we have people in the seas, living on mountains, arid deserts, and the frigid polar ice caps? Why did we make thousands of vast cities, some in rather hostile locations, rather than just live on a beach?
It's pretty clear you don't think about this. This is not the first time I've corrected such statements by you and yet you still insist on repeating the same grotesquely wrong statements without even a hint that you've read my previous rebuttals. It doesn't take that long to learn the point of view of people with whom you disagree. Yet you never bother to try.
I guess Kennedy's "Report from Iron Mountain" was a hoax after all...
that the space program was created to be a distraction and economic prop.
Also, this argues for improving robots, which will be absolutely required for the conquest of space. That environment will be forever hostile to unprotected humans.
Or it argues to the need of protecting or improving humans. We currently have the technology to protect humans.
Why not spend a thousand years perfecting the machines we must have?
Because you wouldn't have done anything to improve the lot of people living in between now and then. Or expand the horizons of human civilization. And there's a good chance we hit a road bump between now and "perfect machines".
For example, who's going to allow the launch of von Neumann robots in the midst of widespread public hysteria about artificial intelligence? Wouldn't it be a bit of irony to have developed "perfect" robotic probes only to have those blocked from use for millennia?
By using current technology rather than waiting and hoping for future technology, we avoid a big failure mode of space colonization that the future technology never comes.
Humans are burdensome to support at our primitive level of technology.
They aren't that much of a burden. Another aspect of the problem here is that it isn't that hard. The main obstacles are economic not technological.
The Moon incidentally is the only place where such [human] capabilities don't shine due to its closeness to Earth.
We can build a lot of infrastructure and manufacturing capability on the Moon without a single person present. So why aren't we trying?
He can't be worse than Shrub's pick for the spot, a Pentagon bean-counter who thought that launching a 1960s-era Command Module on 1970s-era SSRBs was a cutting-edge program, and then named the mess 'Orion' so that everyone would forget the real Project Orion.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
In all truthfulness, State doesn't seem to be doing a very good job at it, either.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Because even shipping just a screw back from there would make it a $100K screw?
Even it took 2 days to return the favor of being nuked out of existence, the destruction would still be inevitable, and thus a credible threat, and would therefore act as a strong deterrent to a first strike. Since the moon nukes couldn't be quickly or easily preemptively destroyed in a first strike (or even sabotaged) without triggering the hour long destruction of the Earth, it's far from retarded. I assure you the U.S. would change its tune in an instant if it appeared the Chinese were going to colonize the moon. They aren't gong to ignore the militarization of the moon by anyone, friend or foe.
There are non-military advantages to having a permanent base on the moon, as well. Having the infrastructure to transport humans back and forth to the moon would serve as the foundation for eventually colonizing space, as well as sending out sophisticated deep space robotic exploration devices for pure science purposes. Right now the U.S. can't even put a man in orbit. Sending robots to Mars is awesome. Thankfully that ability hasn't been phased out (yet). Science is no longer a long term priority in the U.S. unless it can yield short term wealth. Other nations are more far sighted, and they will benefit accordingly.
There may well not be any short term return from colonizing the moon itself (although that may not be true once the moon is more thoroughly explored). It is assured that there would be side benefits, such as the numerous ones given to society by the 1960's space program.
Actually, taxes are the only way to pay back a 16 trillion dollar debt. After all, that's how the Federal Government gets its money. It will, of course take time. And taxes combined with spending cuts will cut the deficit.
The problem is two fold:
* We need to run a surplus to have any real hope of paying down the debt.
* No one will allow for cuts of any real substance.
* The richest in the nation and the corporations they own engage in concerted tax-evasion efforts.
The point of Helium-3 is that it is the one resource found on the Moon that can be extracted at a profit with current launch costs for shipping equipment to the Moon and sending fuel from the Earth to power the launch vehicles from the surface of the Moon to return back to the Earth. Extracting oxygen (and potentially hydrogen) from the surface of the Moon would be an added bonus... but the business case can be made without that added cost savings.
Unfortunately the global demand for Helium-3 is currently rather small. Besides fusion research, it is also used as a refrigerant as it is the coldest isotope of any element that any substance can be and remain a gas. It has some uses (especially for superconductor cooling), so there is some value to it.
BTW, I agree with your general assessment, especially for fusion fuel sources. The leading element that many fusion researchers are hoping for now is Boron, due to the lack of neutrons flying around as a product (something that He-3 unfortunately produces with its fusion).
Actually, taxes are the only way to pay back a 16 trillion dollar debt. After all, that's how the Federal Government gets its money. It will, of course take time. And taxes combined with spending cuts will cut the deficit.
The problem is two fold:
* We need to run a surplus to have any real hope of paying down the debt.
The current approach being done to pay off 16 trillion dollars in debt is to devalue the dollar so you can pay it off with a 1945 penny (melted down and sold for scrap metal prices of copper). Either that or paid off with Zimbabwe Dollars instead because they will have a more favorable exchange rate.
It doesn't have to be this way, and I would hope that your "solution" was used instead.... by trying to seek a balanced trade market for American goods and having the federal government only stick within its revenue stream. Unfortunately "discretionary spending" being cut 100% won't balance the federal budget... which is largely why most politicians don't even bother trying any more.
It would probably be cheaper to mine it from the atmosphere of Saturn. Processing 150 million tons of lunar regolith (remembering it is only in the top layer) for a ton of He3 does not seem simple or cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Nope, he's a retired army man.
General Charles Bolden is a Marine, not a soldier. There is a huge difference.
If you are going to be critical of the guy because of his military service (including his service after he left NASA as an astronaut and went back to the USMC earning his stars), at least get the branch of service he served in correct. While General Bolden would likely be polite to you if you got the two confused, don't try that at any bar full of Marines. You might not survive to see the morning.
But what if China actually develops the infrastructure to reach the Moon, pretty much at will, and then decides missile bases would be a good idea?
EPIC FAIL BAD IDEA!
Distance ICBMs need to travel from China to strike the US: ~12,000 miles. Distance IPBMs need to travel from moon to strike the US: ~230,000 miles. Most optimistic estimate I have seen of the cost on lifting mass from Earth to the moon with new launcher systems: $2400 per kg. Weight of one US LGM-30 Minuteman missile: 35,000 kg (but let's assume a missile launched fro the moon would need to only weigh 15,000 kg.) Weight of the materials for a launchpad on the moon and the materials needed for humans or robots to assemble them there: let's say 1,000,000 kg. Most optimistic cost for China to put 10 of these missiles + a launch pad on the moon so that they can take 20 x as long to reach the US as if they had been launched from China: $2.7B excluding the costs of developing, testing and maintaining the system which would likely be at least an order of magnitude greater.
If the US really considers China a strategic threat, we can only hope this would be the kind of astonishing boondoggle they would waste their money on.
"95% of all Slashdot
Getting to Saturn is much harder than getting to the Moon, and nothing has ever gone to Saturn and returned back to the Earth (other than a few photons in the form of radio telemetry). Good luck with that. The technology might be developed to do just that if there was a demand though. Are you sure it would be cheaper and easier getting it from Saturn?
Helium-3 does have value and can be sold here on the Earth... so price is not a major problem. Trying to extract He-3 from sources here on the Earth (currently obtained as a by-product of nuclear bomb development and perhaps extraction from natural gas extraction efforts) is surprisingly much more difficult, hence the high value placed upon this substance. I have no idea what the current global demand for He-3 is right now, but it does have value and a market as a commodity. A few kilograms might be enough to make the whole effort worthwhile and might just satisfy global demand as well.
Note, this mining of stuff on the Moon is not science fiction and has been proposed by people who have the money to pull it off.
Couldn't agree more.
... etc.
Defense is generally when you respond to protect yourself from an attacker.
Defense is not what the USA has done for many years.
More accurate words that describe what the USA taxpayer's 'defense' funding is used for are words like: Invade, attack, assail, assault, occupy, enforcement, pressure, coerce, compel, spy, dominate, afflict, oppress, encumber, harass, plague, torment, torture, trample
I'm all for the USA having the biggest, most sophisticated and competent army in the world, it comes in handy when the leaders of TPLAC's (or northern peninsula communist regimes) go off the rails - but if it were for "Defense", you would expect to see a lot more of it inside the states, and not so much of it in places that never posed a real threat to the states.
Places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia & Vietnam.
Actually getting to Saturn isn't much harder then getting to the Moon, at least if you don't mind spending a lot of time, getting back I'm not so sure of but probably not that much harder.. The time thing isn't too bad if you treat it like a pipeline, once the flow starts you keep it flowing. Either source in large amounts of tens of tons is going to be expensive and involve new engineering techniques which means lots of unknowns. Most people who talk about harvesting resources in space haven't put much thought into it and seem to think it'll be much like working on Earth with the addition of space suits. I think that all kinds of new engineering challenges are going to crop up and take time and money to learn to engineer around. Quite possible but a positive return on investment is likely to take a while.
According to wiki the current US demand is 60,000 litres a year. Not sure what that would mass, probably somewhat less then a ton. 10's of tons would be required for large scale fusion plants which is what I consider impractical to mine on the Moon.
With the price shooting up to $60,000+ a litre, small scale mining might be somewhat profitable but it still seems it would be simpler to create it here on Earth through nuclear synthesis. Of course if you're really just interested in going to the Moon then He3 might offset the costs but large scale production...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Yeah, what obama said in so many words.
It's much more important for us to put missiles on geostationary satellites than on the moon.
Why would you travel 300,000km further than you have to.
I vote asteroid. We've already "done the moon thing". Let's boldly go where no human has gone before. Plus, it's better practice for Mars.
Your vote?
Table-ized A.I.
Oh good God man, do you know NOTHING about how MAD even works? It is NOT a credible threat because you would have THREE DAYS to knock the damned things down, with that much lead time hell they could afford to miss every other shot and still knock out every missile in the bunch.
What you are attempting to describe, horribly wrongly I might add, is what is known as a "got you last" which again does NOT work if the things take up to a fricking week to get here! For an example of how a REAL "got you last" works you might want to read up on the US nuclear sub strategy or the Russian "dead hand" system but in BOTH of those cases they work as a deterrent because the enemy knows no matter how fast they are they WILL be hit. With the Dead Hand System if you nuked Moscow, managed to kill every single leader all of the missiles WILL launch and start raining on your cities in less than an hour. with the US "Nuclear Sub Strategy" there are nuclear subs constantly patrolling in the Atlantic and Pacific, even to this very day. If you managed to take out Washington, kill every leader from the POTUS to the most junior member of congress all it takes is a single American base to send the alert and when the subs can't contact Washington because its gone? Well no matter how well you bomb the land bases there are still enough sub based ICBMs to wipe out every major city in Russia.
So just quit while you're behind dude, because there is no way a moon base attack would fit into any kind of MAD strategy, fuck you could literally send up rockets filled with pebbles and just shred the damned things before they even got close. The ONLY reason why orbital platforms were a threat, and why everyone agreed not to build them, was with even a weak rocket you could use the Earth's gravity well to increase the speed and the first bombs would be blowing up in under 20 minutes flat which is why they were banned, both sides wouldn't even have the 30-45 minutes to make the call that they would have with an ICBM making it much more likely for one side to launch "just in case" thus making it too risky.
I'm sorry but other than Dr Evil nobody with a brain would build a nuclear moon base except to maybe attack another moon base, it would be just too easily defeated. The whole point of MAD is to have a weapon the enemy can't stop so if they attack you they too will be destroyed, the moon is just too damned far away for that to be the case. Hell you might as well say "What if they build nukes on Europa?" as it would make the same amount of sense there, in both cases you'd give the enemy so much reaction time it would just be completely pointless.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The moon makes total sense as a mining platform for future mars missions (assembly in Moon-Earth L2). Sure probably fully or mostly automated with robots. But humans make some limited sense. The advantage of humans is that they can improvise, which robots can not. The other option is to have the capabilities to build new robots on the surface of the moon. But that only works because Earth-Moon real time communication is possible. That will fail for any other target. But the level of robots is probably going to significantly be higher than in the olden times of Apollo.
If the US really considers China a strategic threat, we can only hope this would be the kind of astonishing boondoggle they would waste their money on.
- no, USA is perfectly happy with China wasting its money to subsidise American consumption, USA doesn't want Chinese to divert resources from that task at all.
You can't handle the truth.
If you can fuse 3He you can fuse D. Some of the ash from DD fusion is...3He. It would be cheaper and make far more sense to just breed 3He in DD fusion reactors that ever mine it from the moon. Its a desperate reason made up because even the biggest "man on the moon" fans can't come up with anything better.
Lets not forget that we can't fuse TD which is only about 60x easier and gives about 65x more power density. That is even if/when we can fuse 3He, that 1GW TD reactor is now a tiny 15MW! Still cost the same to build however.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
..They're just mass in the end.
Mass is *everything* in space. Its not ever just mass. 1Ton of rover to mars is expensive. 50Tons is dreaming. And all that dead, useless life support system that absolutely cannot fail, could be another 40 odd rovers! And even then the rovers will be much cheaper.
Pound for pound, dollar for dollar humans suck at space exploration. Right now a meatbag on mars or the moon is nothing more that misguided nationalism.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Well, there were rumors that someone saw a whale there. Maybe we should send whalers first.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Welcome to the World Wide Web.
" This exposes you as a Brit"
This exposes you as an idiot, therefore an American. Guess what? Maybe I watched Red Dwarf years ago and "nutter" stuck with me? Is your mind so tiny you can't see that? Again, an American, and a Space Nutter too.
"Secondly, you seem to forget to consistently post as AC or as your user."
Since I just created that account yesterday ....
"Idiomatic usage is a giveaway, so check your writing before posting."
Oh wow, gee thanks Dick Tracy for your keen insight, you're a fucking moron.
Fine, no manned *GOVERNMENT* mission... If the government isn't going to do it could they, at least, get out of the way and give the approvals so that private industry CAN do it?
Sheesh...
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
The richest in the nation utilize the tax code to their advantage. That's not tax-evasion, it's accounting. And you can damn well bet that every single liberal/lefty/anit-capitalist that's ever made a speach about the horrible rich and their corporations pays someone to do the exact same thing, or does the best they can on their own.
Bloomburg, Huffington, and Michael Moore aren't knowingly sending a single red cent more to the fed than they need to.
Want to solve this? Flat tax, straight sales tax, no loopholes, no subsidies. Close the shit down and make it absolutely even across the board. You are no more able to get the left to push this kind of reform than the right.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Fine, dont tax food, rent or utiliities for any home making less than $50k?
Tax the shit out of luxuries. That way those rich bastards with 3 summer homes, 2 Bentley's and a private jet are sending cash to Washington daily. I'm good with that. Those living the most lavishly get taxed exponentially more. Great.
The point is, you STILL cant get the left to do this. You know why? Because there are so many RICH on the LEFT living like rockstars. They are hypocrits that love to bash those rich assholes you're hear condemning, and yet live very much like them and even mroe so in a great many examples. They will not vote to do the right thing because they would bend themselves over in the process. My point being that you love to demonize those corporations but instantly give a pass to the Hollywood elite and the political figures saying all the right things but acting the opposite.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
We'll go back to the moon when there is an economic reason to go, I honestly suspect there will be some one there in 12 years, probably an Elon Musk funded venture. let the flame wars begin, ;P
If stopping a missile attack from outside the atmosphere were such child's play, we wouldn't have any worries about asteroids hitting the Earth's surface, would we?
Mutually assured destruction doesn't have a time limitation, unless you are really short sighted. You'd launch a first strike even if you knew that within forty eight hours your nation would be in the same condition as the one you attacked?
And, missiles are 20th century technology. What if a rail gun were on the moon, aimed at your abode. Feel confident that you could toss some pebbles into the air to deflect it? Weapons are evolving. Missiles may be what we have today, but with infrastructure on the moon, an adversary would have a great vantage point from which to launch future attacks, as well as observe (satellites would be knocked out of the sky pretty much in the first minutes of any belligerence.) Having infrastructure on the moon would be the equivalent to controlling the high ground.
In 1967, the U.K., the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. signed the "Outer Space Treaty" HTTP://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty. They lived in the shadow of the MAD doctrine, and had the foresight to see that weapons positioned in space could be quite advantageous.
You can't provide any credible proof that moon based ballistic missiles could be stopped as easily as you claim, let alone at all. When the technology exists to 1) reliably stop 100% of intercontinental missiles, and 2) prevent asteroids discovered within forty eight hours from striking the Earth, let me know.
The reason why we don't improve humans is the same reason there is no 6 million dollar man (would that be $600 million with inflation?) and that is because our immune systems suck. When you try to improve the human you end up with their immune system attacking the improvements, hell there are dozens of diseases that all come down to "their immune system fucked up" such as arthritis and if you are gonna have a human that can function well in space cyborg will be the way to go.
As for fear of AI? Totally justified IMHO. I'll never forget a little Q&A I read once with one of the guys that was building drones and robots for the military, he said "So we get invited into this meeting with a bunch of brass and one of them says 'so we asked you hear to find out what something would cost' so he slides over a picture...and its the T-800 from the Terminator. At first i thought it was some gag, just pulling our leg before they got down to what they really wanted but...nope, they saw the Terminator like a tech demo and just wanted it built". Coincidentally the same thing was said by the director of Blue Thunder who said he was shocked when the movie came out and his secretary started getting calls from every military and SWAT on the planet, all saying the same thing...how much do you want for it? So yeah, as long as militaries have a bigger hard on for guns than common sense any true AI will probably end up being misused. Hell even what we already have is being misused, I had to shake my head and say "Did nobody watch Robocop?" when it was reported they had a robot go nuts on a test in South Africa and shoot up the stands, it was pretty obvious like ED-209 they were more concerned by how big a gun they could mount than in safety.
And finally "meatbags in spaaace!" just doesn't make sense with current tech. Sure if you were to go "New World Order" so that one group ruled the planet so you could split the costs? Yeah you COULD do it, but why? For the SAME costs as sending 3 meatbags to the moon you could send a robot to the outer reaches and get a LOT more hard science done that will broaden our understanding of our system a LOT more than the meatbags will. I mean just look at all the data we have gotten from the Voyager probes, can you even imagine what it would cost to even go to half the places its gone with just a single meatbag? hell just to give the one schmuck enough supplies so that it isn't a suicide mission you'd probably need a ship the size of the Empire State Building, and that is just sending one poor bastard out there and back.
So I'm sorry but with our current level of tech its just not worth doing, it'd be like saying you had to build a 747 in 1912, the amount of resources it would take would be just insane and in this case we can get more done with less by just ditching the meatbags.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"we simply don't have the tech to make going to the moon worth doing right now"
From the Carter years: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
Also at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Advanced_Automation_for_Space_Missions
Also look up Gerard K. O'Neill and SSI.
Besides, the challenge of making a habitat work on the Moon would be a way to learn a lot about how to live more environmentally sustainably on Earth. Exploration can mean new things are learned and imagined and that learning can be more valuable to bring back than any physical resource. One of the biggest successes of Europe putting colonies in North America is that centuries later they could stop a devastaing war in Europe and Asia and reconstruct the most problematical social institutions there:
http://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/
"How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."
And:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Japan
"The constitution was drawn up under the Allied occupation that followed World War II and was intended to replace Japan's previous militaristic and absolute monarchy system with a form of liberal democracy. Currently, it is a rigid document and no subsequent amendment has been made to it since its adoption."
Aren't ideas and examples for a better way of living worth more than physical stuff or energy? See also James P. Hogan's sci-fi novel "Voyage from Yesteryear".
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Perhaps sending probes near FTL to other planets for the purpose of deploying teleportation devices. The first step mankind makes on another planet outside our solar system might in fact be through a teleporter (quantum fax) and not stepping down off a spaceship.
Life is not for the lazy.
Again quit while you are behind dude. You are actually comparing stopping an asteroid that is 5+ miles across to taking out what is MAYBE 50 tons, REALLY? Surely to God you didn't honestly think about that comparison or were high when you wrote it because even 3 seconds worth of thought would have shown you the flaw in your logic. One is a million plus tons of solid iron and nickel moving at 36,000 miles an hour and carries enough force to make a crater the size of the gulf of Mexico, the other doesn't weigh squat by comparison, is fragile as hell, and again you have THREE DAYS to intercept.
I'm sorry dude but you can tapdance all you want but we have gotten to see pretty much ALL of the major crazy cold war plans by both sides since the wall fell, everything from nuclear bombs used to power rockets to actually building solid telephone pole sized rods of tungsten to throw at people from orbit so the freefall would generate enough speed it would be like a non nuclear nuclear bomb, and yet with ALL those crazy ideas on BOTH sides you won't find a single memo even floating the idea of missiles on the moon....why? Because it would be pointless, that's why.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"..and yet with ALL those crazy ideas on BOTH sides you won't find a single memo even floating the idea of missiles on the moon....why? Because it would be pointless, that's why."
Here's your final reality check of this thread. You can return to your Dr. Evil matinee reruns soon.
Headline - November 26th, 1959: "It Would Be Hard To Hit Missile Bases On The Moon".
Link: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1891&dat=19591128&id=NAkpAAAAIBAJ&sjid=3NUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2514,2905067
The entire underlying reason for the "Space Race"? If anyone was going to have a missile base on the moon, it was going to be the United States. Find me a solitary shred of credible information that contradicts that statement. The viability of anti-ballistic missile defenses has not yet reached the ability to shoot down missiles moving far slower than those which would arrive from the moon.
Why you insist on arguing against a forgone conclusion, made by the governments of the (then) most powerful nations on Earth, before space travel was even technically feasible, is your business.
Unless you can post something credible that rises above just trying to belittle my posts, we are done here.
Sadly those same mythologies proved very convenient in propping up and justifying slavery - in the complete absence of a king of any description. Shame really, and a missed opportunity.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.