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Why NASA's Road To Mars Plan Proves That It Should Return To the Moon First
MarkWhittington writes: NASASpaceFlight.com published the results of current NASA thinking concerning what needs to be launched and when to support a crewed mission to Phobos and two crewed missions to the Martian surface between 2033 and 2043. The result is a mind-numbingly complex operation involving dozens of launches to cis-lunar space and Mars using the heavy lift Space Launch System. The architecture includes a collection of habitation modules, Mars landers, propulsion units (both chemical rockets and solar electric propulsion) and other parts of a Mars ship.
It doesn't "prove" a damn thing. NASA has been saying that a lunar base is a step to Mars for a decade at least .
From this article published in 2006 on NASA's website regarding why we should return to the moon:
Exploration Preparation
Test technologies, systems, flight operations and exploration techniques to reduce the risks and increase the productivity of future missions to Mars and beyond.
source: http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/home/why_moon.html
The first lunar landing will probably be the last. There's nothing to gain by going back there now - there's nothing to be exploited. The moon was a scientific curiosity and we've pretty much discovered all we want to discover about it.
With that in mind you need to persuade someone to launch a rocket there with the aim of launching a rocket somewhere else. Those rockets are not cheap. I don't think we have the economic power to do that again now without something to gain from landing on the moon. See point A.
Too much money, too much risk, no measurable gain. Plus you'd have a hard time creating the political systems on Mars that we have on Earth for a small colony. You need to get a bunch of politicians and a police force over there first to make sure Mars turns into what the USA wants Mars to turn into. You don't want it turning into a pot-smoking hippy paradise.
But I think it would take an awful lot of launches to get the fuel production up and running on the moon. And you'd need to design a new, hopefully reusable, moon launched vehicle/fuel depot.
I think the real problem is how expensive the SLS will be to launch, not the number of launches. Build a truly reusable vehicle, orbit the fuel depots around Earth. Send ISRU equipment to Mars (with lots of backups) and produce the fuel for the return trip. Then the cost of launching large payloads is reduced and there is no need to build a Moon base.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
no it doesn't. it proves it should not go at all.
Sounds like a boring future to me.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
"no it doesn't. it proves it should not go at all."
Have you read the article at all? Its main point is quite simple, the moon could be used as a refuelling stop for a Mars mission. Since most of the mass involved in a trip to Mars consists of fuel, the use of the Moon as a sort of interplanetary gas station would greatly reduce the number of trips need to rocket people to Mars.
This is the point you should rebut to support your assertion it's bullocks to go to Mars.
We have this small planet like object orbiting fairly close by. Why not use it to test theories and equipment before blasting it off so far away it takes years to get there?
Getting more thrust out of the same amount of fuel makes a big difference.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
There is one big reason why the US should: Technology. And being the number 1 technology country. Or rather, becoming it again.
The US technology advantage was evident in the early 50s. It eroded quickly by the time the 60s came around. By 1970, the US were again the leading technology powerhouse of the planet, with US companies being the top, not among the top, but actually being THE top, of technology development. The US industry drew from this technological advantage until long into the 1980s and in some areas until the turn of the millennium. Even without any large scale investment in that area.
Screw the moon. And the mars while we're at it. Both are scientifically at best a curiosity, at worst a disappointment. But they give technology development a focus. Never before, or after, the moon program we made such incredibly fast developments in so many technological fields. Electronics. Computers. Propulsion. Metallurgy. Synthetic materials. But also some other, less "tangible" fields, from process management (which was pretty much invented back then) to organization structuring, people management and medical advances. And let's not forget the very real domestic and international boost the esteem of the United States got.
Yes, the cost was prohibitive. And one can of course argue that if you apply that money to researching these things directly, you will end up with cheaper results. But very synthetic results. Not to mention that you cannot justify those expenses to the population. And the results, as well as their value, is not immediately identifiable to those that should copy these results and put them to good use.
So yes, the direct use of such programs is insignificant. But the value of the indirect benefits is incredible.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is the politicians giving the missions. We've already been to the Moon, logically, Mars is next. Except we all know there is nothing logical about it. I won't even get into the real reasons we went to the Moon; you all know them.
I might ask NASA what they think we should do. As the politician in charge, I'd take that with a grain of salt, but certainly give it due consideration. The main saltiness would be that they want to do exactly what the appropriating politicians want to do.
In the last thread a guy suggested a real spaceship. Sort of like a space station, except able to attach enough thrusters to go somewhere. A rotating habitat surrounded by a meter of water. Sounds damned expensive, but peanuts I think, compared to all this Mars shit.
Rich people would pay, scientists could study, astronauts could explore; and you don't die from being in it too long.
Then, after it's been a killer space station for a while, and perhaps looped the Moon and orbited an asteroid or something else neat; you have the option of firing it off towards Mars if you must.
That beats the shit out of focusing all our wealth on disposable stuff for the one single purpose of placing a footprint on red dirt.
Not if you just lose your guilt and fap every day. That's cheaper than US $ 100 billion.
"cis" literally means "on this side of", just as "trans" literally means "on the other side of".
cis-lunar space can be loosely defined as that part of space that is within half a million km from Earth (which includes the Moon itself, as well as all the Earth-Moon Lagrange points).
For those who have not been paying attention:
President Obama has sabotaged any plan to get to Mars in the next few decades by the following actions:
1. He initially killed the Constellation program, which was designed to go to Mars and which, while begun under Bush, was actually supported by both parties in both the House and Senate (a near political miracle). He initially tried to replace Constellation with nothing, but then supported commercial crew to/from low Earth Orbit (to service the ISS which will be splashed into the Pacific in 2024 or 2028). He has slow-walked, obstructed, and transferred funds away from the big Mars rocket congress mandated and now his administrator has indicated it will not be able to fly its first manned mission until 2024. This stalled the post-Columbia disaster bi-partisan support for a Mars push. It also did not help that Obama sent his Administrator Charlie Bolden to go on Al Jazeera TV and tell them NASA's main mission under Obama was to make Muslims feel good about their contributions to science (see it on YouTube) - this showed a complete lack of seriousness about manned spaceflight.
2. Obama claimed, as he was ordering lots of shuttle-era infrastructure destroyed and employees laid off, that he was converting Kennedy Space Center into a futuristic "multi-user" launch facility where multiple rocket types from multiple vendors would be stacked in the VAB and rolled out to the two pads (39A and 39B) which would be restored to Apollo-era-style "clean pads". The old Apollo and Shuttle support structured in the VAB were ripped-out to be replaced with structured theoretically supporting a wide variety of rockets. Each vendor would use a custom MLP adapted to his rocket, would stack in one of the 4 VAB high bays, and any would be able to launch from either pad. This was all a lie. Obama made a deal with SpaceX who have trashed the 39A pad, making it unusable by anything but a SpaceX Falcon9, and constraining SLS rockets to only 39B which will choke the maximum flight rate. Musk has built a large building, complete with huge corporate logo, right in the middle of the crawler way on OUR national historic landmark which he is mutilating.
3. Everybody knows a Mars mission will require either a handful of Large SLS-sized rockets or a LOT of smaller rocket launches. Obama has limited the manufacturing capacity of SLS to 2 per year, and the trashed 39A means all SLS launches MUST use 39B which will require refurbishing between launches as all pads do. This means there will be no way to launch enough of the large rockets rapidly enough to assemble a large Mars mission in orbit in a reasonable time. If it takes 6 SLS launches to send 3 people to Mars, just assembling that in orbit will take THREE YEARS thanks to Obama.
4. Of course, the larger problem is that Obama has DOUBLED the national debt in only 7 years. The Nation will owe $20,000,000,000,000 by the time he leaves office and will have promised to pay-out another $200,000,000,000,000 in benefits for which it has not yet found a source of funds. We now spend 70% of the national budget on welfare and other social programs, plus hundreds of billions of dollars per year just in interest on the debt. Interest rates have been held artificially-low during the Obama years but MUST eventually rise - and when they do the interest on the debt will balloon to be more than we spend on the entire military. The CBO (the non-political institutional budget analysis service of congress) says it can see no way for the government to pay all the bills beyond the year 2030. There is simply NO WAY the taxpayers will fund a space program while social security checks are bouncing in 2030. It's over. Get used to it. Obama has killed the Mars dream and don't look to Musk to keep it alive - HIS plans depend on government purchases of flights on his rockets.
First, while Mars requires a longer journey, it actually isn't substantially harder to send a rocket to than the Moon. If you use aerobraking, it's about the same delta-v. Yes, more consumables would be needed because the flight is months instead of days, which does affect the mass of the payload, but it may also be easier to build a sustainable colony on Mars (presence of an atmosphere and maybe water, higher gravity). So I don't think Luna is even really useful as a practice run.
Second, a launch schedule like this is pretty much the only thing I've heard that could justify the development of SLS. The entire project has smelled like "big bucks on development, goes over budget or budget gets slashed so it only gets used a few times" from the beginning. If they can get Congress to give them the budget for this, yes, that would be worth making SLS for. Will Congress spring for thirty-plus Saturn V-class rockets, for only three missions? I don't think so, but I hope they will anyway.
NASA's new mission is to reach out to muslims. It's called the Muslim Outreach Program. I don't see what any of this space nonsense has to do with any of that.
Someone call President Obama! NASA isn't doing what they are supposed to be doing!!
Seriously though, NASA should focus more on the muslims down here on Planet Earth instead of this "Mars" thingie that may not really even exist.
Of course, it is entirely possible that President Obama doesn't have the intellectual capacity to figure out what NASA is supposed to really be doing, so perhaps that is why the have a Muslim Outreach Program at NASA (AKA National Aeronautics and Space Administration). In Africa, one of their space programs involves a spaceship made out of wood. And nothing else. No engine, nothing.
Who thinks we would have been better off spending the trillion dollars on the Iraq and Afghanistan war on space? For that money and time we could have a permanent ISS size base at one of the lunar poles. In fact it would be pretty much the same companies making the ships as make the equines for the war machines.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I'm offended by your Cis-Lunar, Solar-o-Normative, Earthiarchal space explorations. Check your privilege!
NASA is a joke amongst federal agencies in the US Federal Specter.
NASA is run by Obama as if NASA were a 1850's cotton plantation in Georgia!
The 'Age' of NASA ended with the Apollo program. NASA must be killed!
To accomplish what NASA (Obama OverLord) wants to do will require 300 Trillion dollars!
Too much!
And what does 300 Trillion Dollars buy? There dead Astronauts before their capsule crash dives on Mars to "Smithereens".
OH! Now wont that make a Fourth of July Firecracker for the President, after Obama!
That is what this is all about! Three dead Caucasians for a half-breed President to feel good about himself!
Seem a 'reorganization of priorities' needed.
Which is priority:
A) burning 300 Trillion dollars to kill 3 Causations in a NASA tin can to Mars?
B) Killing 30 million Europeans for 50 Billion dollars in the next European War, to commence in 1-3 years!
Oh yeah when those 'Europeans' get their panties knotted up their ass, they tend to be very judgmental, of all thangs.
Ha ha
Ha ha
I watched this documentary not long ago, I think it's worth consideration for the simplifications it makes for getting to and from Mars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcTZvNLL0-w
All that technology came from solving something *NEW* not reliving previous problems. So many things were invented from Teflon to the Sony Walkman.
Nobody needs to re-invent the walkman and pans are already non-stick. They need to find a *NEW* problem to solve from which they can learn *NEW* things. That's clearly energy and climate giving the pressing rate of temperature increase. NASA could focus on that. Like the sun screen idea or find a way to reverse the CO2 rise, or *something NEW*.
As for returning to the moon why?.... it takes so much effort to put stuff into space first because you need it free from earths gravity. Planting it on the moon at 1/6ths earth gravity just them adds extra problems. They then need to escape the moons gravity, and cope with the dust. It's pointless.
If they need to jazz up a space mission, perhaps some sort of dare-devil loop the loop by the astronauts, when their matching Harleys are in the air above the rocket, they drop and base jump into the cockpit, meanwhile a troop of drum majorettes in skimpy red-white-blue dresses dance as killer drones do a fly past...
You keep using that word. I do not believe that it means what you think it means.
Was it a boring past too? Why do you people give such mystical power to a dead vacuum with nothing in it is incomprehensible to me.
First of all, the proposed SLS plan has nothing at all to do with getting to Mars, and everything to do with giving the illusion that SLS has a nice full launch manifest. The mission profile is deliberately designed to require the maximum number of launches of an insanely expensive rocket - so basically, the point is to take as long as possible and spend the maximum amount of money to get to Mars.
Instead, using technology that exists today (no on-orbit ship manufacturing or propellant depots) we could get to Mars in 10 or so years using something like Mars Direct. The only reason NASA isn't pursuing this, or a plan very much like it, is because it completely obviates the need for many of NASA's pet projects, and SLS. Also, it doesn't funnel maximum $$$ into certain congressional districts.
The reason we can't get shit done in space is because the politics of NASA are broken. The moon is just a distraction - it's like taking off from Kansas and stopping at Iceland on your way to Australia. There might be some things of interest on the moon, but it makes absolutely no sense as a Mars stepping stone.
"You rocket people. I want to see some dudes walking around on the Moon. You have 7 years. Do it."
And they did.
Today, not so much. Christ...it takes 20 years just to get some new airplane off the ground.
Science follows engineering, engineering follows manufacturing. All the major Science countries have high tech manufacturing industries. And the USA is actively wiping out the foundation of their science and technology industries by exporting it to the third world. Those in charge of the USA care a great deal about quarterly profits, and not much at all about the long term supremacy of America.
1950s/1960s space program also had the mundane utility of developing technology for nuclear weapons delivery. That is a solved problem now. You have that little East-Asian country as much impoverished as an African one that is working on that to troll you.
You run the risk of creating technology that is of no use anywhere else (space life support) and importantly creating new "lost technology" of which Saturn V is a good example. 30 years after SLS is shut down and the supply chain gone it will cost yet another $100 billion to start again.
I'm sure you could spend $100 billions in other ways, as in $5 billion a year for 20 years in research/industrial. Nuclear fusion, ocean monitoring, even exploring wild life.
Hell ITER was bogged down in funding but it's cheap enough that France could have paid for it all on its own (we wasted as much on a nuclear missile program, and on over-engineered over-sized fission reactors)
Having a national program that jump starts American science and technology is a great idea, but you can get the same results at less cost using other types of projects. Organ regeneration, where you make damaged or missing body parts grow back (as opposed to organ transplants from dead bodies) would have huge benefits to all Americans, and massive science/technology spin-off benefits. And the payments from foreigners using the process would pay for it with interest. Terra-forming California would turn the state into a tropical paradise that also could feed the country, and you could sell the tech to rich middle east countries.
There is a plan to go to Mars, it is a fairly sensible one, and not landing on the Moon is a feature, not a bug.
That does not imply that I don't think we should go back to the Moon. I think we should, but I think we should do it commercially.
And that is the same thing that most people miss about defense spending. Nearly all our modern technology came either from military research or the space program. Go back in history and you'll find much the same thing. Engineering needed to build better siege weapons followed by engineering needed to build better defenses, etc. Indirectly, everyone has benefited from the science required to feed both the machines of exploration and war.
OMG did you see the photos with Obama having horns!?!?!?! When I was at church in my prayer group, asking God to kill gays we were all discussing how Obama is really the anti-christ and is in a conspiracy with leftist world leaders to send us all to FEMA camps to be killed! You should join us.. I think you'd enjoy it!
Defund NASA and give all the money to Elon Musk. Thanks. P.S.* You can add the IRS and the Mid-East War budgets too.
Seriously, the GOP is working to kill off private space, esp. SpaceX. The argument is that they do not want to spend .5B on private space, BUT, are happy to send several billions to Putin's space program instead.
Mark, why are you not writing about this? The GOP are traitors in this esp. since they want to kill private space, and force the money over to their communist style SLS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We landed there? Really? Surely you jest.
We can't even get past the Van Allen radiation.
Why can't we just give up on this stupid idea of going to Mars which has a low probability of success and even lower probability of actually being seen through, and instead just send more robots each of which has an excellent chance of success?
Got news for you. Most of the design for the moon was already in the works in 1957. The saturn family started clear back then.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Mars is easy to get to. OTOH, It is hard to send humans there alive and in good health, or to get them back alive as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Watching paint dry, to me, is boring. $100B is a cheap price to pay to do something different. Besides, in the future, money is just a footnote in a history book.
Mars Direct requires Saturn V / Energia class launch capability.
Yes, they remain unsettled for a reason, but are still much more hospitable, than any other body of the Solar system. And the Internet latency will not suck.
Oh, and almost forgot, there is also ocean floor — roughly 2/3rds of the planet's surface... Today's 7 billion humans can grow to 40 or 60 before we really should start spending serious efforts to spilling over to another rock...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If it is too much trouble to put a permanent full time base on the moon, there is no way man should be going to Mars. It is at least 100 times easier to land on the moon and live there than it would be to go to Mars and stay for over a year until there was a good return window.
Check your privilege terranlord. Your humansplaining is hurtful to those that identify as other-celestial or planet-fluid.
More seriously, thank for the info. Was curious about the term, but not enough to rtfa - everyone knows a Mun base isn't helpful. Now Minmus...
As opposed to a vacuum with SOMETHING in it? You have a very strange definition of "vacuum". Maybe you should have your head checked for random vacuum within it.
Remember when we went to the Moon? Of course you don't, because we never went back! Mars will be the same. Go once for glory, then never again.
Commercial crew funding is a political fight president Obama created and continues to wage. He knows congress wants deep space missions (that was the bi-partisan choice after the Columbia broke up on reentry) but he campaigned in 2008 on a promise to de-fund NASA and transfer the money into public education (he made the promise in the early spring of 2008 to a meeting of the national teacher's union).
When he tried to shut down manned spaceflight in 2010 it was even too much for many Democrats. He initially tried to get support by proposing the Orion capsule be completed in a crippled way ONLY for use as a "lifeboat" for the ISS (to be launched unmanned and only used to return crews to Earth in a very unlikely severe emergency). This failed to win congressional support. Then Obama hand-picked a committee (the Augustine Committee) to come up with a plan and he settled on commercial crew (which was a plan started by Mike Griffin under Bush as "commercial cargo" with an option for later crewed missions). Obama keeps trying to rob money from the deep space projects congress wants and uses "commercial crew" as the excuse. He has been offered funding for BOTH but refuses (because that would bust budget caps and he only is willing to do that if congress will let him bust the caps on ALL spending.) President Obama is, in effect, holding funding for commercial crew hostage in an attempt to massively bloat ALL government spending.
The congress won't let him gut their deep space priority, and he won't accept any more for commercial without hundreds of billions more for everything else, so commercial crew suffers and he and his advisers keep running to media outlets and trashing the Republicans. His supporters trash the congress for allowing Obama to keep buying Russian rocket rides THINK about it! - Obama keeps insisting on paying in-advance for Russian seats, when he COULD use the same dollars to purchase seats in-advance from Musk if he wanted to. He has DOUBLED the food stamps program (does he admit to doubling poverty in the country???) in addition to growing most other wealth-redistribution programs of the US govt, and it's STILL not enough. He is fixated on boosting all social welfare spending to insane levels and commercial crew is a sacrificial lamb in that fight.
Everyone reading this? Click on this link to take a look at past comments from 'turkeydance'; it's a bunch of brainless one-liners that read like 'turkeydance' is just a troll account. I submit to you all that 'turkeydance' is nothing but a common, garden-variety, 4chan/b/-esque troll, and as such should be ignored. Furthermore, even if not a troll, this person has no imagination, apparently no ambition, and for those reasons alone should be ignored.
I am interested in your theories; can you provide documentation on either assertion?
Specifically, how is the government trying to kill private space industry? Also, how is the same government spending billions on Putin's space program?
I try to #include <assert.h>
I appreciate if you could do the same.
Madness! Ignorance! You idiots, you've been administered an Idiotentest for years, you failed then & are even more shamefully failing now. A disaster.
Will they swallow the Moon joke after this?: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/radiation-belts-around-the-earth/
The Van Allen article: http://www.thesleuthjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Van-Allen-Radiation-Belts-Disclosure.pdf
"Our measurements show that the maximum radiation level as of 1958 is equivalent to between 10 and 100 REM per hour, depending on the still undetermined proportion of protons to electrons. Since a human being exposed for two days to even 10 REM would have only an even chance of survival, the radiation belts obviously present an obstacle to space flight" (Radiation Belts around the Earth in Scientific American Volume 200, Issue 3)
You had 10 years to digest that peer reviewed authority published in an all-respectable & popular journal & yet you did eat that piece of fecal farce in 1969. Then, in 2014, the NASA itself did concede that man, nay even man-made hardware of any kind never made it too far into space. This notwithstanding, your godless stubborn stupidity compels you to build space elevators or roads. Roads! This is Babel revisited: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZqSWWKmHQ (a video, not a "difficult" paper. Even attention-deficit fools like all you heathen swine have no excuse)
Stop watching porn, you children of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim or Zoar: http://time.com/135853/porn-brain/
"And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness." (2 Thessalonians 2.10-12)
The end is near.
We can build a swimming pool there! And it will be fun! See here.
But they give technology development a focus.
I think that's it right there. Technology development on its own largely depends on profit/loss market forces to shape its direction and development. As just one example, pharmaceutical research is biased towards therapies that are profitable, not necessarily ideal therapies or even cures, since cured people don't buy medicine.
A major space exploration program focuses technology development on its utility, first and its economics later. And it's not always the technologies the space program has developed, it's the practical research done developing them that's often the enduring value.
What is it that you don't want us to see/find on the Moon? What are you hiding?
It seems to me that the logical step before establishing a permanent base anywhere else in the solar system we need to have a permanent presence on the Moon. It is the logical step to develop the knowledge and experience needed for such an endeavour. It is close enough to earth that "relief missions" can be contemplated, yet hard enough to reach that you better had a solid plan in place requiring it to be self-sustaining. Once the bugs are out of the system on the Moon is the time to take on Mars. And yes, permanent settlements are needed to make it worth doing, otherwise they are nothing but very expensive vacations for a little bunch of people. The resource commitment needed to reach it, means that from the start, the manned mission should aim to be a permanent settlement.
Now that I have added my little bit of uninformed opinion to the general Slashdot noise, I consider my day complete.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
The problem is that if we hadn't, those fuckers would have consolidated power and brought the fight here. It's much cheaper to fight at home, if you're a bean counter. It's much better to figth in some other fuckers country if you're a dad.
You have to read Zubrin with a boxcar load of salt, as he's not always clear about the difference between actual proven technology, lab experiments, and back of the envelope calculations.
Most of the technology doesn't in fact actually exist today. The whole handwaving scheme relies on technologies and systems that have been tested (at best) on the the bench under strict laboratory conditions. (Some of it hasn't even made it off the back of Zubrin's envelope.)
Both 'plans' are laughable!
The first humans to visit Mars, and return, will not be anyone alive today and not NASA's (US Navy's) employees or any other National Space Program's, of today, employees.
Seriously, a manned mission to Mars now is a one off, plant the flag bit of stupidity. We go, we look around we plant the flag and take some pictures and then we come back. Complete waste. I don't want to even start buying in to the go to the moon as practice or as a stepping stone to Mars bit either. Screw Mars...For now.
There are plenty of great reasons to go to the moon again, build bases, and stay, permanently. Just for starts, science that is better done in vacuum without the debilitation of weightlessness, science that would benefit from being in the moon's EM shadow, science that would simply be safer not done on Earth at all. Perhaps, longer term, the moon is a manufacturing base to start exploring and exploiting the rest of the solar system. The moon could also be a sort of Ark to preserve bits of humanity just in case.
Whatever, the moon is only a few days a way. Getting there is doable now, or at least very soon. Getting there is doable by several different countries. It would be a great thing to cooperate and go do things on the moon together. Peaceful competition is also great motivation. Multiple countries involved in human spaceflight to the moon and around earth will necessarily help build earth orbital and cis-lunar infrastructure. With that kind of space-based infrastructure we might actually build the kind of spacecraft necessary to go to Mars and the other planets safely, and routinely. Think Discovery One, a la 2001.
Every process and every human activity has its ebbs and flows, inhale and exhale cycle, sow and reap cycle. Right now, we are in the middle of a global diffusion cycle of technology. End result of it will be rising of global base line of technological development. However, as always, the leadership will rest in the mind of great thinkers, those who look further. Technological design expertise is becoming a cheap commodity. That is "sowing" phase of a cycle. That will have lasting effects on technological progress in years and decades to come. US and handful of other developed countries will remain on the forefront of scientific research, top tier of knowledge tree, because they attract the best (who come to join their peers, it is a sort of network effect) and they dictate the direction of user-level tech evolution. worldwide cheap technological industry infrastructure will lower the cost of future scientific research. That will be the "reaping" phase.
Hey genius. It takes more fuel to split water than you would get afterwards by burning hydrogen...
No. It takes more energy. And transforming energy from one form to another is quite useful, as in converting solar to fuel. Look out a window and find a plant, it is converting solar energy to fuel, sugar, via photosynthesis. On the moon use solar energy to power the electrolysis of H2O into H2 and O2. Or if you happen to have a handy nuclear power source ...
Meanwhile a total copypasta of mere speculation from /r/spacex:
SPACEX, 2020: SEND A SMALL ORBITER AND LANDER. Being only four years from today, use an off-the-shelf spacecraft bus for an orbiter and a lander which is a set of ground penetrators like what was tried with Mars Polar Lander. Probe the subsurface at the MS1 or the candidate sites.
SPACEX, 2022: LAND A PAYLOAD ON MARS AT MS1 with a substantial solar array with processes that stores methane and oxygen. This should not be wasted and should have the potential to act as a backup to the second such system delivered to MS1.
SPACEX, 2024: LAND A DRAGON CARGO AT MS1 which delivers some initial supplies for the first human landing. Include an expandable module that will function as a Quonset hut for supplies. Before 2024, a standard adapter for connecting modules on Mars must be defined, a critical development milestone, so that this and subsequent deliveries can be integrated into a functional outpost.
SPACEX, 2026: LAND A HABITAT MODULE. The module must have the bare essentials to sustain the first landing crew and must operate for the next 3 years to prove the technology ready for a landing before 2030. Likewise, this module would not be wasted and would function as a backup.
SPACEX, 2026: SECOND MISSION. Land a second-generation CH4/O2 processor and an Earth-return launch vehicle at MS1.
SPACEX, 2029: THE FIRST HUMANS TO MARS. Send a crew of 7 astronauts to Musk Station 1. The 2029 mission will involve two Falcon Heavy launches - A "Red" Dragon with living habitat for the journey and a Earth-return launch vehicle with supplies. A first-gen MCT might be the transporter but time & cost between now and 2029 can only support the logistics of a small crew (7).
A container built to hold in 1 bar of pressure in a solid vacuum would stand up to Mar's atmosphere just fine. As for the abrasive dust, the dust on the Moon just sits there except for the very brief moments when an astronaut tracks it into the airlock. The dust on Mars moves, sometimes very quickly, which means high speed wind storms as well as abrasive dust and electrostatic discharge. Those temperature variations? The Moon is locked, one side is constantly in sunlight, the other constantly in darkness. Unless you are traveling from one side to the other, the temperature doesn't fluctuate very much. Unlike Mars, where it goes up and down every 24 1/2 hours.
Overrall, it's much easier to be on the Moon than Mars. After all, if you can build a space ship in the first place, you've pretty much built a Moon habitat.
Sorry, but every part of the moon (with some exceptions) gets sunlight. It is locked in relation to Earth, not the Sun, with the result of a 29.5 day "day".
http://www.universetoday.com/19725/lunar-day/
http://www.universetoday.com/20524/how-long-is-a-day-on-the-moon/
read up on atmospheric pressures and temperatures, specifically the extremes on Mars vs. those on the Moon, and the relative radiation levels. Basically you can use a similar design but you have to overengineer the hell out of it to make it feasible on BOTH, because the Moon has no ozone and has ridiculous 28-day cycles with insane temperature extremes.
Well any equipment dealing with water ice would be in the shade and not subject to lunar temperature extremes, that is how the the ice has survived after all. As for equipment on the surface exposed to sunlight, go underground or make shade. There are lava tubes in places waiting to be used. Or one can build walls from the lunar regolith. Or one can put up a tarp like when camping in the desert, no wind on the moon so its more practical than on mars. The lunar regolith has the advantage of also helping with micro-meteors and provides some radiation shielding.
Most of the technology doesn't in fact actually exist today. The whole handwaving scheme relies on technologies and systems that have been tested (at best) on the the bench under strict laboratory conditions. (Some of it hasn't even made it off the back of Zubrin's envelope.)
There's engineering to do, certainly. The technical details are only a small part of what matters though: if we don't get away from this institutional habit of doing engineering in the most inefficient way possible, we're never going to get anything done. Politics shouldn't enter into engineering decisions, and as long as they continue to NASA will be enormously dysfunctional.
Another great example of this - the X-33 VentureStar actually had a lot to offer as a shuttle replacement, and was showing some serious promise as an SSTO vehicle that would have a much faster turnaround and be far cheaper in the long run than the shuttle. However, NASA and LockMart administration insisted on doing new technology for the sake of new technology even when the old technology was superior . This exploded cost and risk, and ultimately the program was cancelled because the new carbon fiber tanks weren't workable, even though engineering had been saying that all along, and standard aluminum alloy tanks would have worked just fine (and likely saved weight in the end). We've got politicians and ideologues making engineering decisions, so is it any surprise that much of our space program is ineffectual?
Look at all MarkWhittington posts. Blatant marketing of this web site. I thought we had moderators. Please ban this spam.
The technology does exist.
We have submarines.
We have people on Mount Everest, in the Antarctica, we had people on the moon.
We could have gone to mars 40 years ago. There is no fancy extra technology needed. No idea why people like you always claim that. Are you waiting for a Star Trek Enterprise ship to go to Mars?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
that science and engineering are no more than wealth-redistribution programs and that working to advance civilization is equal to holding it back by shifting resources from the productive to the counter-productive? You think that a dollar spent fueling the lazy and self-destructive lifestyles of drug addicts, and drunks, and people who'd rather sit on the couch playing video games than actually becoming productive responsible citizens, is equal to a dollar spent expanding man's knowledge of the universe and eventually making humanity multi-planetary and therefore more-likely to actually endure?
Wow
Why are you on slashdot? You sound more like the smoke pot and live in a hemp teepee sort. All that money that was spent inventing semiconductors and modern computers (mostly as part of military ballistic missile programs, with a kick from the put-a-man-on-the-moon effort) was, apparently in your mind, wasted and should have gone to subsidizing poor lifestyle choices???
You get more of what you subsidize. That's the ENTIRE POINT of government subsidies. Obama gives subsidies to wind and solar power because he hopes to encourage MORE of it.
no it doesn't. it proves it should not go at all.
Correct. We should just let the Chinese explore space, and others explore space We'll just do more important things, like slip into a closet, and make money by selling our hats to each other.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Having a national program that jump starts American science and technology is a great idea, but you can get the same results at less cost using other types of projects.
After all, endless research has proven that we can't do more than one thing at a time. How many people you figure died waiting for replacement organs because of NASA?
And the terraforming of California has already been tried - and it's an utter failure. Already the Colorado river no longer reaches the sea, http://www.counterpunch.org/20... ground level is falling - in some places at a foot per year! - http://www.bakersfieldnow.com/... and now they want Oregon's water as well. They're framing it a sending "surplus water from the Columbia River to California." California doesn't want surplus water - they want all of it, Certainly in every case so far -I suspect they'll want to plant rice paddies if they get Oregon's water. A really bad example you chose.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I think its appropriate to rehash what is always brought up about space. It won't happen until companies are making money from it and I mean from something other than just performing the mission. Currently, there is a TON of money being made in commercial space with respect to communications satellites in GEOs, some MEO, and emerging LEO. There was money to be made and the commercial world stepped in. We have around a dozen satellites going up each year.
With respect to humans in space, there hasn't been a market to drive a need for it. Mining and things along that route are too much of a risk for commercial companies to move to. A fundamental question any company asks is what the other guy is doing. Right now, the only other human space flight guy is NASA with the ISS. LEO is space but not by much so the commercial world has mainly focused on space tourism - something that they know will work since we've been doing it for decades. That's not to say that its easy by any means but the risk involved is much smaller than doing something beyond LEO.
IMHO, the moon makes sense because NASA needs to be the one to push the risk they took to get to LEO out to the Moon. Only then will commercial space follow. Take the CRS (Commercial Resupply Service) missions, for example, which are currently flown by Orbital ATK and SpaceX. These are commercial companies who are delivering supplies to the ISS. Not to offend anyone but I will focus on Orbital ATK for my example since they represent what people think of when they think of the free market. They are a company out to make money and are responsible to shareholders. They will do what makes sense to survive. SpaceX is an oddity since it is are financially responsible to no one and is led by someone who plans to die on Mars.
The risk to fly to ISS was acceptable enough for Orbital ATK to take. While the primary mission remains to resupply the ISS, what is less publicized, is the money being made by an emerging market for space in LEO. This includes Nanoracks, who can't stuff enough of the things on the spaceships, along with other more science based experiments. The market is growing.
NASA has to be one to give the markets some data to calculate the risk to within some level of confidence. The problem with a mission such as Mars is that it will take a long time to reduce that risk. Take a look at how many shuttle flights make folks comfortable enough to accept risk to ISS. The same would happen with Mars but would take much longer (generations). The article makes that painfully clear.
The moon offers what the ISS has become. Routine flights to that destination will recreate what we have today with CRS. That is the reality - again ignoring SpaceX at the moment. Once a company such as Orbital ATK thinks it makes sense to go to a Moon base for financial purposes, we'll be where we are today with respect to ISS. Then NASA can focus on pushing that further (to Mars or elsewhere) but it makes sense that they don't leave the Commercial world behind too far. If they do, we end up with more Apollo type missions - successful but not permanent achievements.
And as former submariner, I'm sharply aware of the technology used by submarines. And it's limits. And how little of it applies to going to Mars.
None of which are relevant to the challenges of a Mars mission.
With enough money (it would have taken a great deal, more than Lunar missions), and with enough willingness to take the risks (odds are, knowing what we know now and wasn't publicly discussed then, that we'd have lost the first crew, maybe multiple crews), yeah.
I have no idea why you (clueless idiots with no reading comprehension and the IQ of used bubblegum) think I'm saying we need new technology, because I never said any such thing. A critique of another's proposed technology in no way is the same thing as claiming new technology is required.
"Worst president of all time" sounds like a statement that needs a little bit of backup. Care to actually have evidence for the things you say?
nothing mysterious about this.
Obama's budgets have ALWAYS given loads of money to Commercial space to try and build out multiple launchers. However, the GOP has gutted it over and over.
You can google for NASA budget on parabolic arc
And what is the repercussion of the GOP's cuts to the commercial space? Well, it means that a LOT more money has to flow to Putin to fly astronauts to the ISS. Most importantly, America cut a deal whereby we pay for all non-russians that fly there. So, at this time, the GOP is forcing us to pay 70-80 million / seat that goes to the ISS. And what does Russia pay? Nothing. WHy? Because 2 of the seats are occupied by westerners while the 3rd is a Russian, and it costs 140 M to launch. IOW, We are paying for EVERYBODY to go to the ISS.
So, rather than us paying for Russian flights to the ISS, it would actually be CHEAPER for us to pay commercial space to finish this development, then it is for us to spend this money on the Russians. The GOP KNOWS this (as does mark), but they do not care. Instead, they want desperately to kill off SpaceX.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is the GOP the continues to gut commercial space.
You neo-cons continue to gut NASA esp. commercial space.
But, fools like you are too attached to your party and are unwilling to look at facts.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Worst president of all time" sounds like a statement that needs a little bit of backup. Care to actually have evidence for the things you say?
1. He's black.
2. Er, that's it.
I think that's all the evidence most of the Trumpeteers need.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Watching paint dry, to me, is boring. $100B is a cheap price to pay to do something different. Besides, in the future, money is just a footnote in a history book.
Yes, once we work out how to generate infinite free energy and faster than light travel the universe will become a much more interesting place.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
we need to get rid of one martian moon--preferably the smaller one. (push it out to the asteroid belt on a 100,000 year journey) Or we need to merge it with the larger one and create a SUPER MOON. One Gravitic pull from ONE moon will straighten out the chaotic Martian axis rotation over time, and the chaotic weather patterns will cease. (planet wide dust & snow storms). This is all based on Dr Robin Canyup's one moon theory. this will ease colonization :)