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How Can NASA's Road To Mars Be Made More Affordable?
MarkWhittington writes: The Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger published a piece that touched on one of the most vexing issues surrounding NASA's "road to Mars," that being that of cost. How does one design a deep space exploration program that "the nation can afford," to coin a phrase uttered by the old NASA hand interviewed for the article? The phrase is somewhat misleading since one of the truisms of federal budgeting is that the nation can afford quite a bit. A more accurate phrase might be, "that the nation is willing to spend."
Obviously the least expensive in terms of consumables.
Just cancel the F-35 project. That will buy you about 5 trips to Mars.
a relative term. with wmd on credit deception & starvation still #1 killers of us, can we afford to have the moms held back/down any longer? you go larry lessig even if the truth hurts, that plus mercy will put us back on the just right side of creation?
Well, yes. It's affordability too, but try to imagine how soured on space the general public would get to see people slowly dying in an under-resourced "base" on Mars.
If you want to make Mars at all realistic, you need to start by building a set of space and mars-dust hardened machinery capable of doing remote controlled construction. What we send would need to have the ability to tunnel, create cement from Martian soils, smelt, and construct buildings. All to create an environment that might be capable of sustaining life. This is because keeping astronauts alive is orders of magnitude harder than anything else we might conceivably do.
Technologically, we're no where near there yet. Counter-intuitively, the hardest step is the first one: getting out of our own gravity well. The minimal amount of material that we would have to get into orbit to be able to construct a settlement is considerably larger than the International Space station, which is, I remind everyone, the most expensive human construct - at $100 billion dollars. The next most difficult stage would be landing on Mars with precision, not breaking anything.
One way I can see to make things cheaper is to use the Interplanetary Transport Network to ship the bulk of the material needed for a settlement. But I'm quite sure someone better qualified than I am already took this possibility into account. The ITN has already been used to send probes, after all.
There's nothing like $HOME
The long-term goal should still be human habitation, but there is a huge amount of work that needs to come first. Any realistic Mars colony will need to be highly automated.
Additionally, the take-aways from advanced robotics research and manufacturing are directly applicable in many cases towards increasing automation in Earth construction, so the Mars/commercial robotics programs can build off each other and reduce costs.
I'm pretty sure "the nation" is not willing to waste so much money on the military, but yet here we are.
Yes, because if there is one thing you want to do on the cheap, cutting corners wherever possible, it's plan a mission to Mars.
This business of penny pinching and cost cutting and the knee jerk reaction of "well, in THIS economy..." -- it has got to stop. This cannot become the new normal. People need to CHANGE their minds.
How Can NASA's Road To Mars Be Made More Affordable?
By not sending people when there is no compelling reason to.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The "foodkrete" concept is based on pykrete, which
is a mixture of ice and sawdust. By substituting food
for the sawdust, one might obtain a material of comparable
strength for major components of a spaceship.
Although it would be weaker than titanium, it would comp-
ensate this somewhat by its being a vital cargo at the same
time it serves a functional purpose.
Also, if there's one thing that's easy in space, it's keeping
things frozen.
take all the money we spend killing people, all the money wasted on sports, and tax churches.
We'll be on mars next year.
Power it by the massive amounts of BS produced by politicians.
We can harness sunlight, wind and waves etc for electricity so this should be our next big step for green affordable energy.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Defining "what for" for one.
Also the conquest of space is not a game for short attention spans. The distances are great and the challenges are monumental.
The "game changing" technology that is needed is self replicating resource and infrastructure.
We need to put a lathe on the moon and a robot to work the thing.
Crowdsourcing, 3d printers, and Elon Musk. Managed by Donald Trump using software written by Lennart Poettering.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I have looked and I can not seem to find a complete budget for the road map. Before we ask if it is affordable we need to ask how much will it cost.
NASA will keep killing people to get to Mars until the US Congress kills NASA.
0) quadruple NASA funding
1) borrow from private companies the fast, cheap, and agile methods they use
1) go to moon
2) meanwhile send substantial numbers of machines to mars
3) build base (not a tent either, I mean a super substantial size, an actual manufacturing base, where we mine the moon, and produce on the moon
4) build space tether on moon
4) Capture and hollow out a substantial sized asteroid
5) build a small city in it
6) put in an orbit that it allows us to use it to travel to and from mars
7) make trips in it to mars
this is plenty of technological advancement and achievement involved.
this gives the astronauts a fighting chance to survive and in long run we would be better for it
that's my two cents worth!
He can get it done in 20 minutes.
You want to go to Mars? How about Saturn? Or a neighboring star or galaxy? Maybe even skip to an alternate universe all together?
Hollywood does it every year for $50-200M a pop. Most of the people in this country believe all the impossible stuff they do in the movies is real anyway, and couldn't tell if even the basic physics was so screwed up as to be laughable. Heck, even the school systems and police - you know, the "smart ones" we let teach our kids and the experts on explosives - get all their bomb identification training from Hollywood.
You want these people to fork over real money for real science when fake science that makes them feel good can be had for $11.50 a seat and a $4 soda?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
In an international project?
Surely a few of them have a few dimes clinking around in their pockets?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
What is the nation willing to spend? The true question would be: Why should the nation be willing to spend anything? To go back in history: Why was the nation willing to spend what it did to land on the Moon? The answer is: Because it wanted to show off. Because it wanted to show that its system was better than that of the "other nation".
And we are at a very similar point now. Because what we are fighting now is not a nation but a wave of religious nuts who think that all the laws that humanity needs where sent down to our planet by some God 1400 years ago, literally. While we believe that man has only to obey the laws of nature and then those that he makes up for himself.
So we should offer those nuts a bet: Let them try to pray one or more of them onto the surface of Mars and we try to land one or more of us there by learning about and applying the laws of nature and lots of good old engineering. Who wins that race is right, who loses it crawls back under his stone, with his holy book or without it as he wants.
What we need to do is to demonstrate that rational thinking and getting things done just BECAUSE WE WANT TO is what makes us human. That we're tool-using apes and we're proud of it. So let us make some awesome tools to make clear that religion is a private thing and that the book that defines us is still being written. By us. So let us turn another page.
The new (not entirely) Cold War is about exactly that. It's about clear thinking and rationalism versus magic thinking and religious madness. And mind you, this is not a war just between nations anymore. There are nuts among us too. Teach them a lesson.
When the civilization ending asteroid hit happens, the children will be the least of humanity's worries if we are not a multi planet civilization at that time.
On a lighter note, if we are not a multi planet culture when the civilization ending asteroid hits, all of our ills will be cured, Earth will recover.
SNT - Sack NASA Trolls, and let someone else have a go.
Too much hoo haa.
It simple - shut down NASA. Too many private space projects will spring up to replace it.
Stop NASA = private venture renaissance.
What you said is essentially the Obama doctrine. It kinda sounds nice. Has it worked? Are relations with Russia better? Is China better? Is the middle east more stable?
I've said it before... what we need to do to make manned space travel a permanent thing and not an expensive luxury is to find and develop order-of-magnitude improvements in launch costs, lighter and stronger materials, and much more reliable systems.
The long pole in the tent on costs nowadays is getting to orbit. If your launch costs to orbit are tens of thousands of dollars per kg your mars mission, which would require hundreds of tons of material put into orbit, will rapidly eat up any imaginable budget. If you can cut launch costs by factors of ten or a hundred the whole thing becomes a lot more doable.
How would you do it? For bulk materials and fuel, I'd probably go with a space cannon. Just because it sounds so damned cool. For getting people and more delicate things into orbit, I'd probably want do something like the black horse space plane concept using mid-air refueling of oxidizer and a non-cryogenic fuel. Actually emerging nanotechnologies have a lot of promise in novel fuel formulations that have very high energy to weight and are non-cryogenic.
You've understood an important point, but missed a critical companion point. You're correct that cash doesn't normally disappear, it circulates. But the money represents _value_, resources. _Value_ can disappear , resources CAN be squandered.
If scientists spend $1 million of their time doing anything else, such as working on vaccines, you end up with $1million worth of vaccine research done, and still they spend their salaries on stuff. If the engineers design safer cars, we get safer cars (millions of them), and the engineers still spend the cash. On the other hand, if the engineers spend their time designing a space probe, we get a space probe (one) and then literally send that value off into space.
When we say "spend $100 million on mars " what that means is "spend $100 million worth of engineer's time, rather than spending that time on making cars safer, making high speed internet more affordable, etc.)
You CAN argue that it's better to spend that money (engineering time, etc) on a mars probe than to spend it on anything else. And that's exactly the argument you have to make. Because we only have a certain number of engineers , and they only work a certain number of hours. Dollars are a way to put a consistent number on all of the different resources used up in a project, including people's time.
Use the Martian atmosphere to slow down the capsule. And don't plan to return. Make the crew as small as possible for each one way trip. Send cargo separately.
Fantastic. We can just drive there, and when we get tired, pull over and stop.
Maybe we should wait until the "private sector" can manage to do what the US government did over half a century ago...put a human into orbit.
The "private sector" can't find it's ass with both hands, tax breaks and a Federal Reserve subsidy in the form of 0% interest rates. How is it gonna make it anywhere near Mars?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The private sector isn't putting people in orbit, on the moon, or on Mars, because it's a colossal waste of money. And it was a colossal waste of money half a century ago as well.
Hopefully it isn't, because there is nothing of value on Mars, and there is no value in settling Mars at this point.
Oh, "the private sector" is excellent at identifying risk-free boondoggles, crony capitalism, and government handouts, which is exactly what a manned NASA mission to Mars would be... and what you advocate.
I've often wondered if NASA could even get us to the moon again, let alone Mars. Typical of recent bureaucracies, I wonder if they could manage the finances as well as the technical development of another manned lunar landing. Heck, we can't even shuttle a person to the ISS today.
NASA seems to have stopped its ability to accomplish complex tasks as they have in the past IMHO.
Or figure out how bears hibernate and apply it to humans on the journey out and back.
Get rid of NASA.
Would you give your $10 to NASA trolls?
If NASA did not exist, there would be thousands of private companies hitting kickstarter to fill the vacuum.
I'd give a couple of them my $10 based on technical merit (and some prospect of getting back something useful).
I am against a manned mission to Mars. I'd rather see the money spent on something that will do some good, like infrastructure investment.
We didn't do the moon missions until after the interstate highway system was built and we had Social Security and Medicare. We have to prioritize better.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Apollo: 25B
STS: $200B
It's not unreasonable to estimate that a major space undertaking will be an order of magnitude larger by the time things are done. I could be shy by 20-30%, but I think 2 Trillion is a fair over-under cost.
It will never happen with the current budgets. Even if you stripped out all the pet projects and tail chasing and gave over all the launch vehicle research to private industry you'd still only have 3-5 Billion to spend. There are many technical challenges which exist which still need to be solved in parallel for this to happen, and my predicted $2T isn't going to happen at $5B/yr.
The second mission to Mars will be quite a bit easier, and the 100th will be as simple as putting a comm satellite in GEO. Note that GEO is still a wickedly expensive endeavor, but it's so routine now that private industry can do it. It is worth noting, however, that supersonic flight - though pretty much perfected by the government, still isn't practical or affordable for commercial use.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Offshore it to India (Like everything else) and expect a 10x price reduction.
I hate that the world has become a place where I can suggest this with a straight face, but just make it a reality show and get the public to pay for it. Put "celebrities " on as astronauts, add in lots of drama and angst, an explosion or two, a few tense deadlines, overly dramatic music, and your set. Once the monkeys get hooked on the show, then they can pay 2.99 per text message to vote for who gets shoved out the airlock or whatever. Humans are stupid. Cater to that, and you'll have all the money you could ever want.
I was referring to the UK, France, Canada, Australia, etc.
NASA is stuck in a the 70s mode of space exploration, and they have no means of getting out of it even if they wanted to (thanks to Congress).
You are absolutely correct. Planning for a mission 30 years out is preposterous. No one working at NASA today will still be there by then. And the politics in Washington will have flipped hands at least 4 times by then.
First we need a Moon base and a regular shuttle to the Moon,. Much in the model of the ISS except on the Moon. Once that becomes old-hat, then, and only then, can we even begin to contemplate Mars.
Why does USA need to be the first to Mars? Why not the first with a Moon Base? Solve all the problems on the Moon first. Much easier and much cheaper in the long run - both financially and in human cost.
Robots on Mars are great. Lets get humans back on the Moon.
An even better idea would be to do it as an international collaboration - but a real international collaboration based on international treaty (like CERN) not a US-controlled project with other partners (like the ill-fated SSC). Not only do you share the costs but it might also help to reduce the need for those F-35s.
Impossible Task #1: Get real, concrete, funding from an organization more concerned with getting re-elected than supporting the well-being of the American People.
Impossible Task #2: Show the American People the technological toys that will come from the effort. Remind them that the technology they rely on most (cellphones, computers, airplanes, light weight metals, a lot of the stuff in their cars) came from tech originally developed for, or to support, the space program.
Impossible Task #3: Develop Program-management that isn't so risk-averse that people aren't allowed to try.
Realistic plan after all Impossible Tasks have been completed:
Slow. Steady. Learn to walk before you try to run. The Lunar environment is just slightly _less_ nasty than the conditions on Mars.
Plan on returning to the moon first.
Learn from the guys who made the mars rover.
Test the gear you plan for lunar use in the deserts of the South West during the Summer, and in Arctic Canada during the winter. Quartz sand is an okay simulation for the abrasive nature of lunar dust. Not quite accurate, but it behaves similar. Micro-powdered quartz glass (lots of sharp edges, tiny, breathing hazard) is even better.
Get a multi-gas solar concentrator extraction system working on Earth. Then the moon.
Get a habitat build robot working first on the Earth, then the moon.
Get your food production/resource recycling stuff figured out. You can't pack that much food on a reasonably sized vessel. 1 person year = 1 ton of consumable supplies. Farming in both locations.
Get some people up there, and figure out all the medical stuff. It's easier to equip a first-aid/responder kit if you know what you need.
THEN, and only then, start figuring out what technologies from the Earth-side tests and the moon-side tests should be "bred" to create the tools we need for Mars.
And what benefit does this give us? A functioning Lunar facility, practice in 1/6G, easy access to other places in space ("Once you are on the moon, you are half way to anywhere" - I think Asimov?), and a whole heck of a lot of technology that actually works.
Why the Chinese will do it first: Because their politicians and people have a longer attention span. A Chinese politician hopes to implement ideas/programs that will come to fruition when their children are the right age to need them, but that won't be completely useful until their grandchildren are of the correct age. American politicians look no further than the next election or "campaign" contribution.
Pass campaign finance reform
Just fund SpaceX instead, at least for the rocket portion, perhaps more.
Simplify a lot... If you need to use filters, use same size/shape everywhere...
Don't put everyone's favorite technology there just because they want it on board... Unless it improves things, less complication, easier to repair, etc... it has no place on mission... This is how to get to mars reliably, not hey lets include everyone's pet projects...
Don't forget, we put people on the moon with computers and technology that would today considered outdated, but it worked. Reliably.
And get cubesats ;) Seriously, take us amateur scientist with you and see what we can do wth small satelites in orbit of mars.. How we solve problems...
Let NASA build what it needs for the lowest cost without interference from the politicians. Stop treating NASA as a way to distribute money to the districts and spreading projects throughout the country.
NASA putting humans on Mars won't turn us into a "multi planet civilization"; we will only turn into a multi planet civilization if there are economic incentives to actually live on other planets, and at that point, NASA will be irrelevant.
Social Security and Medicare are financed separately from discretionary spending. They are also heading for bankruptcy.
Furthermore, the "interstate highway system" is never actually "built"; it is something that requires constant upkeep and continuing spending. But Congress chooses to neglect that and instead hands the money to politically connected businesses, the military, public sector unions, and powerful voting blocks.
So why do you make fun of the private sector when the private sector pursues rational policies, while the public sector engages in massive corruption and crony capitalism?
"Rational policies"? I'm going to have to ask for a citation there. Anything in the past decade will do.
You are welcome on my lawn.
50% smaller people + smaller lighter tech = win
We know how to do this, and NASA has known how since at least the mid 90's.
Mars Direct is the answer. This would get boots on Mars in 10 or so years, and if we cancelled SLS and put that money into Mars development and commercial crew, this could happen without even increasing the current budget.
The problems are NOT technical. They aren't even budgetary. The problems are political - spasmodic direction every term or two from new presidential initiatives, the use of NASA solely for vote-buying pork by congress, and the institutional dysfunction of NASA administration, favoring the most complicated, expensive, and high-risk technologies possible with these plans. If people get educated about mission profiles like Mars Direct, and start recognizing initiatives like "road to Mars" for the political pandering that they are, perhaps we can see some sanity restored to the space program.
Our relationships with the UK, Canada, and Australia have improved under the Obama doctrine? Because Bush and Blair hated each other?
In international relations, there are two major ways tight alliances are formed. First, economically- you like other countries to buy stuff"from you, because that gives you money. Second, you know they've got your back - that they can and will come to your aid militarily. Those are the big two.
Canada doesn't really have or need a military navy, their navy is similar to the US Coast Guard. Canada's navy has fewer sailors than ONE US carrier group. Why doesn't Canada have a military navy? They don't need one because the US has them covered.
Under Obama, are we buying more stuff from Canada, are"we hping them export more? Or are we reneging on previously negotiated projects and blocking their exports, spending 10 years performing repeated "environmental studies" of major pipelines from Canada, when study keeps showing that the pipeline is environmentally superior to the alternatives?
Does Canada feel MORE protected because the US military they depend on is STRONGER under Obama, or has he WEAKENED rhe military, and weakened the perception of US strength, thereby encouraging Soviet aggression? (Russia is right next to Canada, FYI. Canada wants Russia to be scared of us, not have Russia invading wherever they feel like invading while Obama frowns, not even making a strongly worded speech demanding that they stop invading neighboring areas.
Why this obsession with "round trip"? Just send the bears to mars -- one way.
...and let it solve the problem. It can send tiny self-replicating nano robots to mars (and the rest of the solar system) and terraform those ugly, hostile lumps of rock and ice and gas to our heart's content. No need to send soft, squishy, inefficient bags of meat across several AUs when you can use a sturdy swarm of several trillion nanos to do the job.
And while they are at it they can clean up Earth too.
Just make sure we survive the singularity and won't turn into grey goo!
Good read on the topic of ASI:
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
-- Truth suffers from too much analysis.
It's being built by LockMart - the same crony capitalists who are requiring a decade and billions of dollars to build the Orion capsule. They are top-heavy with incompetent managers and have adopted mafia-style business tactics. When the American people need a new plane and ask "how much?" the LockMart answer is "How mush do yuz got?"
Consider:
1. In WWII (which only lasted for the US from from Dec 1941 to August 1945) American aerospace companies designed and build over a dozen new fighter aircraft designs, nearly as many light, medium and heavy bomber designs, patrol plane designs, transport plane designs etc. They had NO CAD systems, no computational fluid dynamics software, no numerically-controlled milling machines, or numerically controlled plasma cutters, no robotic welding systems, etc. Every machined part had to be machined by hand for every prototype aircraft and all calculations and wind tunnel data analysis was done by hand. In contrast, the F-35 has been in development since the nineties and will not be filly combat ready with all promised features for another decade, at least. Yes, an F-35 is far more high-tech, but we have far more knowledge, far better tools and materials, etc.
2. The Orion capsule design was chosen over a number of other options as the follow-on to the Shuttle because it would be both fast and easy to develop (given that it was only a scale-up of the very successful Apollo CM). Orion was designed to carry 6 (which would lead the public to see it as a big step up) instead of three, but the Apollo CM was actually capable of 6 on a rescue mission (it WAS configured for 5 and rolled-out to the pad for an emergency Skylab rescue flight that ended up not needing to fly). By using the same basic design as Apollo and the same outer mold line, the capsule was supposed to not need extensive aerodynamics or structural studies (we have TONS of data from the 60s for the basic design).
The taxpayers of the US have been severely abused by the administrations of Bush41, Clinton, Bush43 and Obama who ALL (BOTH party establishments fueled by Wall St) allowed defense merger after defense merger to the point where we now only have three major aerospace firms and they carefully avoid competing too heavily against each other. Boeing goes for the bombers and tankers, LockMart goes for the Fighters, and Northrop goes for the drones and UAVs. Each makes token gestures to compete (ignore the Northrop B2, it was started before the post-cold war mergers went into high gear) but none of them feel they would be served well by true competition which would drive costs down while driving-up customer expectations.
Lack of true competition leads to massive price inflation, performance shortfalls, laziness, and vendors who cannot be allowed to fail no matter how bad they become. After the government allowed Boeing and LockMart to subsume their launch vehicles into a total monopoly called ULA, the price of each rocket launch skyrocketed and these vendors stopped even trying to compete seriously for commercial customers; they got fat and happy on the government nipple. Boeing and LockMart could have easily worked over the years to make their rockets recoverable and re-usable, but they did not because the government was not dangling dollars in front of them and they're certainly NOT going to innovate if there's no taxpayer cash in it (why do ANYTHING to cut costs when you have a monopoly?)
Do not make it an actual road.
The entire Indian Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) cost just $74 million. Less than it took to make the movie 'Gravity'.
The MOM orbiter is still happily orbiting Mars and sending data long after its supposed expiry date.
Everything in the mission went smoothly. Everything. Not a *single* hitch.
NASA does not have a road to Mars. There is no plan, no milestones, no budget, nothing. This is an even feebler attempt at justifying SLS than what was used to justify the ISS to justify the Shuttle to justify the ISS.
One of the many confused ramblings about what was needed to go to Mars (by NASA!) included a space station. Apparently a space station is critical to getting people to Mars. This story might have changed now. If a space station is necessary, it means that after they dump the ISS in the early thirties, they'll have to build a new one. For that they'll need a shuttle (without which it is impossible to build a space station - according to NASA). 10-15 years to develop that monstrosity. Then another 20 years to build the new station. Then, by 2050, they'll be ready to go to Mars. But, hang on, there is a lot to learn before they can go to Mars. New technology need to be developed, they'll have to learn to live in space (seeing as the ISS was dumped 20 years earlier), etc, etc. Another 10 years to learn this. Then 20-30 years to develop some ridiculous monstrosity to rush 4 people and 1 flag to Mars for a month's stay.
And now they're bringing the Moon back as a short term justification for that other ridiculous monstrosity, the SLS. But framing the moon as necessary for learning to go to and live on Mars. This might add another 30 years to the ridiculous 'schedule' above.
You think I'm exaggerating? Just watch. It will be at least another 40-50 year before NASA send people anywhere. That means that most adults alive now won't see this happen.
Other than some property, NASA doesn't have a lot of valuable assets.
iPad
I'm sorry you misunderstood. I'm not interested in debating with you the degree of rationality of the private sector in general, the "rational policies" we are talking about here are the pursuit of manned space flight.
So, my citation is you. You stated that manned space flight is irrational; the public sector pursued manned space flight, the private sector chose not to. Which of the two actors acted more rationally when it comes to manned space flight?
Apparently they have no budget problems, and happily deploy to remote shitholes for millions of dollars per day.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Its very simple, NASA must let ISRO of India do it. They do it in real economic way.
Rational? I don't know about that. But I do know it's the public sector's job to do the things that the private sector is unable to do. Things that don't show immediate profit.
If you doubt that there was profit from the Apollo program, I suggest looking at the device on which you are reading this.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"a $4 soda"
There is no way you can get a soda in a movie theater for $4.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
LOL
Just like the private companies were first on the Moon, right?
I guess I didn't make it clear enough. To clarify, let's use two synonyms for money - cash and resources (or if you prefer, dollars and value).
Cash (dollars) REPRESENT resources (value). Those are two different things. Resources (time, gold) are real . Dollars are just notes on paper which represent a claim on resources.
When we say "spend $100 million" what we really mean is "use up $100 million worth of resources". If you buy a car for $20,000 and light it on fire, the dollars still exist, while the car (the thing of value) is gone. You're essentially arguing that it's not wasteful to buy a car and then immediately light it on fire, because the cash you used to purchase the car still exists. Yes, the cash still exists, but it now represents a claim on a DIFFERENT thing of value. The value of the car ($20,000 worth of value) has been destroyed.
If engineers spend ten years developing some thing, that ten years of work is used up, it's gone. They can't use that same ten years on something else of value. Trading pieces of paper around doesn't change that fact.
The private sector isn't "unable" to do them, it is unwilling to do them because it isn't rational to do them.
There was lots of "profit" from the Apollo program: all the military contractors that got government handouts as part of it made tons of money.
What you seem to be arguing is that there was also an overall benefit to society (although computers and the Internet are altogether the wrong example for that). You're right: there was indeed a social benefit from the Apollo program; unfortunately, it was a lot less than the opportunity cost.
The problem with government programs is not that they have no benefit, it's that their benefit is almost always less than the opportunity cost. But since the people who want those programs to happen have big lobbies and the opportunity costs are more difficult to understand (viz your failure to comprehend), we keep ending up with more and more government programs.
Show the business world that there is money to be made off-world and you'll get plenty of investors interested in funding it.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
You mean SpaceX?
Lighting the car on fire is a bad analogy for sending probes to Mars. We _learn_ things from our space probes. We get a better understanding of our environment. We've also gotten quite a number of useful technologies for daily life out of the bargain.
The private sector is quite capable of investing things that do not show immediate profit.
Case in point: All tech start ups.
And in that case, they're quite capable of investing in things that never show a profit.
The reason that the private sector does not engage in human launches and human landings and such is that it does not have a path to profit where the risk is worth it yet for companies that new. They need to build up their capabilities and income before accepting those sorts of risks.
The difference between government and private business isn't simply profit, but the "path to profitability" and what risks can be sustained against investment.
Taxes we know we'll probably never get back what we put into it. We accept that, but also expect that money to be used for "important things". Businesses have investors, and the investors will accept risk, but controlled risk, because the investors are relying on their investment to make money back for them. That makes them slower to do revolutionary things, but they do find the way to take the revolution into a sustainable process.
1. Build a *real* space station, 500-1000mi up.
2. Build true spaceships - orbit to orbit.
3, Put another station in orbit around the Moon.
4. Put a base on the Moon, which lets you mine and refine in low-G, then use solar power
to run an electromagnetic launcher to put stuff back into lunar orbit.
5. Take true spaceship to Phobos and/or Diemos, and make one of them, at least, another
space station.
6. *Then* go down to the surface.
And as for you "robots only" turkeys, go back to your video games, we know you're not interested
in real life.
mark
If engineers spend ten years developing some thing, that ten years of work is used up, it's gone.
Absolutely wrong. Every penny you paid those engineers was recycled into the economy.
Whoa there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You are welcome on my lawn.
make it look like a NASCAR car. hang a camera outside it all through the trip to broadcast the sponsors back to earth. put sponsorship stickers all over the astronauts' suits too, like NASCAR drivers.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Lighting a car on fire shows that when money is spent on something stupid, value is actually lost. GP got confused and thought that as long as cash isn't burned, value isn't wasted. Burning the car is a vivid way of showing that spending money on something wasteful does in fact "use up" money aka resources.
So we've established that a mars mission does in fact use up resources which could have been used elsewhere. Now you can argue that the Mars mission is (or isn't) the BEST use of those resources.
The next Mars rover costs about $2.5 billion. If spending $2.5 billion on traffic safety would be expected to save 25,000 lives, you can now argue that what we learn about Mars is more important than 25,000 lives.
Maybe you can make a convincing argument that sending another probe to Mars is more important than traffic safety. What you can't do is claim that all the resources used in building the Mars probe weren't actually used, because those resources were paid for. They were paid WITH MONEY THAT COULD HAVE INSTEAD BEEN USED ON TRAFFIC SAFETY.
I said you're confusing cash versus work, resources, value. You replied:
> > that ten years of work is used up, it's gone.
> Every penny you paid
You're STILL thinking they are the same thing.
I buy a car for $20,000. I light the car on fire. Did the value of the car go up in smoke? Yes, that value is gone. Even though the cash I paid to acquire that value still exists.
The "ten years of work" is the actual time they spent out of their professional careers, and the work is used up. They won't get that ten years back, and when they were working on that project they weren't working on another. The money is just accounting here.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
They're certainly working at it. However, they're not going to the Moon, let alone Mars.
I think working at commercial spaceflight is not only positive, but necessary for the future, but what they're doing barely qualifies as spaceflight.
That one may be conquered: http://www.newser.com/story/21...
Simple - make it illegal for NASA to exist Sell off all its assets to highest bidders. Privatize the lot. Shocking what happens next. Thousands of space faring companies spring up everywhere.
You know what's stopping thousands of space faring companies springing up everywhere now?
The cost/benefit analysis.
Even if a consortium could raise the $100bn (or whatever) to get a manned mission to Mars, where's the payback?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Social Security and Medicare are financed separately from discretionary spending.
It's all basically government money raised from borrowing and/or taxes.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The private sector is quite capable of investing things that do not show immediate profit.
Case in point: All tech start ups.
They may not expect immediate profit, but they certainly expect profit at some point.
And in that case, they're quite capable of investing in things that never show a profit.
That is no longer a rational decision.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
No, it's not "government money", it is money that you and I and everybody else pays.
In any case, PopeRatzo's version of history is that our benevolent legislators made tough tradeoffs and prioritized between different long-term "investments", namely putting the "interstate highway system" and "Social Security and Medicare" ahead of the moon missions.
That reading of history is bullshit. There were no real tradeoffs involved (Social Security, for example, cost next to nothing when it was passed), and those decisions were largely made as handouts to special interest groups and the military. Among them, the Interstate Highway System was the most useful, but Eisenhower was motivated in large part by the German Reichsautobahn and its military applications.
The "ten years of work" is the actual time they spent out of their professional careers, and the work is used up.
Correct. And very usefully so. And their work has produced things and knowledge of value.
But the money is NOT used up. It just keeps circulating.
Lighting a car on fire shows that when money is spent on something stupid, value is actually lost. GP got confused and thought that as long as cash isn't burned, value isn't wasted. Burning the car is a vivid way of showing that spending money on something wasteful does in fact "use up" money aka resources.
No one is arguing with the fact that resources can be used up. It was there in my first post, but you missed it.
But money (such as tax) is not used up. It just keeps circulating. Trying to restrict the amount to which the government circulates the money via tax and spend is bad for the economy.
Maybe you can make a convincing argument that sending another probe to Mars is more important than traffic safety.
Why would I do that? The answer is for the government to spend on both. It's not necessary to chose. That's a false dichotomy.
The point is this: Is it a worthwhile thing. Then the government should spend on it. If not then they shouldn't. They don't have to choose between worthwhile things because some small-government people don't understand economics. There are no choices between spending on this worthwhile thing or that worthwhile thing - they are false dichotomies.
Your burning of a car example is excluded simply because it's not a worthwhile thing for a government to do. No other reason.
A mission to Mars should simply be judged on whether it is a worthwhile thing, employing people for a worthwhile result, not on whether it's more important than some other arbitrary government spend.
Russia is right next to Canada, FYI.
I don't know where you get your maps from. On my maps, the closest country to Canada is the USA. Russia is closer to the USA than it is to Canada, geographically speaking.