Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
I'm pretty sure "the nation" is not willing to waste so much money on the military, but yet here we are.
The long-term goal should still be human habitation, but there is a huge amount of work that needs to come first.
This is the understatement of the century.
People came to america because it was "the land of plenty" (Pretty much the opposite of Mars)
People go work on oil rigs, the arctic, deep sea, etc... because it's "temporary misery for great (pay/research/experience)"
Mars is neither "the land of plenty" or "temporary misery for great pay".
In order to make a mars colony viable, then you need to make people WANT to go there and not just the few crazies.
Until then, you're much better off building condos in the sahara with nice swimming pools because that will be a a lot cheaper and a MUCH MUCH easier sell.
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?
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.
Which is exactly why as a space systems engineer, I'm working on Seed Factories ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... ). Fully automated self-replication is hard. Instead, a Seed Factory grows grows from a starter set by three methods rather than one:
* Diversification - making new machines not in the starter set
* Scaling - making different size machines (usually larger), and
* Replication - making exact copies of what you already have
Your starter set allows you to make *some* parts and materials locally. The remainder is imported. As you add more machines, you can do other processes and make other products, and reduce how much you need to import.
Rather than try to make it all automated, you use remote control and *some* live humans where necessary. Thus an asteroid processing plant in near-Lunar orbit, or robots building a Lunar base can mostly be controlled from Earth, with occasional human visitors to fix things. Once you are producing food, water, oxygen, fuel, etc , then you can bring in more permanent occupants. The same goes with Mars. Start with a control station on Phobos, which is close enough for real-time VR. The crew remote control surface robots who prepare the landing site. Once enough equipment is set up down there, humans can follow.
Other people are working on finding asteroids and how to bring them where you need them. That's why I'm working on self-bootstrapping factories. Once you have the raw materials, you have to make useful products out of it. Launching whole industrial plants is too heavy and expensive. So you want to make most of the equipment on-site if you can, out of the materials you are mining.
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.
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.
...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.
Whoa there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You are welcome on my lawn.