Slashdot Mirror
Congressional Testimony Says NASA Has No Plan For the Journey To Mars (blastingnews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: Testimony at a hearing before the House Science Committee's Subcommittee on Space suggested that NASA's Journey to Mars lacks a plan to achieve the first human landing on the Red Planet, almost six years after President Obama announced the goal on April 15, 2010. Moreover, two of the three witnesses argued that a more realistic near term goal for the space agency would be a return to the moon. The moon is not only a scientifically interesting and potentially commercially profitable place to go but access to lunar water, which can be refined into rocket fuel, would make the Journey to Mars easier and cheaper.
I've been saying this since the idea of going to Mars came up in the first place. Let's go back to the moon and figure out how to live there, before travelling an insane distance and strand someone on another planet, and leave them to die.
interactive hologram, or it didn't happen.
Of course there is no plan, because it isn't realistic to have humans living on Mars. The radiation and differences in gravity will see to that. People always say: "oh we will *just* build underground". With what? An excavator you bought at the Home Depot on Mars? It isn't realistic to ever have humans living on Mars. You can't even have people living permanently on the Moon for the same reason. Gravity. Radiation.
It seems like the technical ability to go to the moon has more or less been lost, and then someone wants them to leapfrog to Mars.
NASA spent a bunch of years putting stuff exclusively into low Earth orbit (which was always a criticism of the Shuttle), and then subsequently lost the ability to do that ... and to add insult to injury they need to rent lift capacity from Russia, or buy rocket engines from them.
How anybody could expect them to go to Mars when they've not demonstrated the ability to go to the moon in 43 years?
Of course they don't have a plan ... they have neither the budget for it, nor the technology at the moment.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Why not Venus?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Explosive allows to make the stuff "shovel-able", breaking big chunk into smaller one. You still need the excavator to shovel the stuff out. You would also need something like it on the moon, but it is not that far away.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
We're pretty sure that - in particularly limited areas - there's water, in some form (ices, hydrated minerals, etc). The problem is not only that you have to set up large-scale offworld mining, melting, filtering, and storage (an engineering project of quite significant note, given the harsh environment and the cost of delivering hardware to the lunar surface), but you also have to create low-cost reusable rockets designed for repeat operation on the moon with little to no maintenance, fueled by materials from the lunar surface. Which is a vastly harder, more expensive task. After all, it makes no financial sense to mine a tonne of water from the surface of the moon and then deliver it into lunar orbit or beyond with 10 tonnes of hardware/propellant sent from Earth, which in turn took 100 tonnes to get off the surface of the Earth. Everything has to be long-term operable entirely in the lunar environment with lunar resources.
There's not any realistic budgeting scenario where it's even remotely cheaper, all capital costs included, to get your water from the moon in the remotely near future than to just launch it from the earth on existing rockets. But, if your goal is to advance the tech of reusable rockets, space mining, in-situ propellant production, etc, then by all means go ahead. Just don't pretend like you're doing it as a "cost saving measure" for a Mars mission.
It's times like this I wish I had a friend named 'The Professor'.
I know many are saying we should go back to the moon first... and we probably will, if anywhere. It makes sense for all the reasons the other posters listed. But, NASA isn't 100% responsible for calling the shots... and as James Cook said, "Never underestimate the incompetence of government."
The technical ability to go to the moon, or even low earth orbit, is at our finger tips. The practical ability to do so today does not exist in the NASA storehouses.
The mathematics required to go to the moon and return was at least half the battle. Anyone who has had to slog through Battin knows that pain. But we are, to a certain extent, beyond that now. Our ability to simulate orbital mechanics and transfers far exceeds anything imaginable back in the last 50s and early 60s. NASA didn't not land rockets back on earth like SpaceX because they didn't think it would be more convenient, they didn't do it because the entire computational infrastructure that existed couldn't handle the mechanics.
Just about everything that was done has been advanced since the Apollo era. Will we need to re-invent some things? Sure, but in many cases the materials, technologies, and capabilities we have today would make all but the lessons learned books* obsolete for new construction.
We haven't really "lost" anything but the will. And by will, I mean solid, long-term funding commitments.
*yes - they do exist. They have been written for many missions and you can browse through them at several NASA libraries.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Imagine a project at work that will take a year. You've been commissioned to do a study and you present it with the schematics. Good, now go do it.
Oh, I can only guarantee you that I will give you time to work on it for the next month, and in a month I'll tell you if you have time. I'll need you to develop a complete spec and fixed manpower pricing. But you won't have anyone to work on that, because I need all your people to be working on my other pet project.
Fast forward 6 months:
So why haven't you worked on this? Oh, and by the way, your boss is about to retire. His replacement almost certainly doesn't care about this project.
We'll call you in in 6 more months to yell at you for not being complete.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
All we really need to do is enslave the 1/3 of heaven that has been cast down here with us and make them build our shit on Mars. I think it is funny that we spend all this money on the search for alien life when we have documented evidence that the little mutherfuckers are right here on Earth. I personally would love to have a few enslaved demons to wash my car and cut the grass.
This couldn't have anything to do with announcements that Russia is building a Moon lander, could it? Nahhhhhh.
Why? Mars is much easier. Moon is only slightly closer (energetically speaking).
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it's cold as hell.
Look at the budget for NASA. It's one thing to say "This is our plan sometime" and another thing to invest in it
Space nutter detected by the statements: "The Moon is only slightly closer than Mars." And "Mars is much easier to settle than the Moon".
Since sending materials to the moon is very expensive, sending robotic 3D printers that can build objects out of moon dust could significantly reduce the expense of such an operation. Some materials, no doubt, would need to come from earth.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Obama should get about the same amount of credit for future Mars missions as either Bush, who both proposed manned missions to Mars.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
"but we are going anyways, so please give us money."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Sounds like a good analysis. Personally, I don't give a rip about having people walk around on Mars: I think it's far more important to advance technology of reusable rockets, space mining, etc., so I think going back to the Moon makes far more sense.
Think about it this way: we landed men on the Moon over 40 years ago. We haven't been back since. What good did it do us, besides having some neat photos and museum exhibits about our past greatness which we cannot replicate now (without a whole lot of money and effort--we can't just launch a Moon mission next month if we wanted to)? We've actually **lost** the capabilities we had back then: back in the early 70s, we had the ability to send men to the Moon, and we did, several times. Today, we simply don't. Going to Mars will be no different: we'll spend a bunch of money on some big-ass rockets and send a handful of people to Mars, they'll walk around, and then we'll have nothing to show for it besides some photos and rock samples, and we won't be able to easily do it again because it'll be too expensive (because we chose the most expensive method possible because we wanted to do it as quickly as possible).
If we develop technologies more, then trips to other planets and moons will be cheaper. No, a singular trip to Mars will not be cheaper than the slower method of going back to the Moon and developing a lot of tech and capabilities, but **lots** of trips to Mars, to Saturn, to Titan, etc., will be far, far cheaper if we develop the tech now, than just sending singular trips to each of these places.
So the important question is:
Do we want to just send some people to walk around on Mars, and then quit all manned space exploration after that?
Or do we want to be able to send manned missions all over the solar system?
If your answer is the former, then going straight to Mars is the correct choice. If your answer is the latter, then going to the Moon is.
Do you think the European colonies in the Americas were cost effective from the start?
It took quite a lot of support from to get those colonies self sustainable, specially if it wasn't possible to enslave the natives to do their master's bidding.
The colonies were sold in Europe as way for riches, and to get more land, but mostly to get windfall riches after the Spanish stroke the motherload with the Aztecs and the Incas.
All other colonies had to endure several decades of very little growth and dependency of their country of origin,
The moon is a lot worse cause there null infrastructure, and the affordable technology for getting to orbit and out of Earth orbit doesn't exist yet.
But we now have ways to automate stuff, and we could send automated stations that could assemble buildings and materials in the Moon.
Probably, have an automated station building materials and equipment for some years would make it feasible to colonize the moon.
I had a look at the Mars-One website today. According to their roadmap, we'll be seeing astronauts entering the habitat simulations sometime this year.
Who needs NASA anyway?
(/sarc)
Living on the moon isn't that interesting, because there is almost nothing useful up there except for solar energy.
Think so? The moon has no atmosphere so it is potentially awesome for astronomy. The moon could provide a useful base for deep space exploration as its gravity well is much smaller than Earth's. It could be a source of raw materials. It may be possible to produce propellant on the moon. The moon consists of more than moon dust and reflected sunlight.
The goal should be to become self sufficient on Mars.
A fine goal but how do you get there? It's not hard to make a reasonable argument that colonizing the moon (which is much closer) could be a useful stepping stone to the goal of Mars and beyond. Putting an entire infrastructure to support human habitation on another planet is a monumental undertaking and we don't even have a fraction of a percent of the technology needed to do that. The Moon could be very useful in development of some of that technology.
If you can do that, you can make real progress towards colonizing the solar system because you don't have to bring everything from earth.
I could make the same argument regarding moon colonization.
That is a valid point but gravity is lower as well. You'd only need the abilty to move 38% the weight you would on earth right? It wouldn't be glamorous work but given a winch and a few men...
And space suits and food and oxygen and habitats and tools and tools to make tools and water and communications gear and construction equipment and the list goes on and on and on. You are taking SOOO many things we have here on earth for granted. I'm as big a fan of working towards colonizing other planets as you'll find but I don't think a lot of people appreciate the difficulty of the endeavor unless you intend it to be a one way suicide mission.
We know how to build ships that can reach 0.2c
Until we actually build one and it travels that fast that is not true.
Problematic is it to scale that for humans ... however I'm pretty sure most of us will witness the first probe going to an other solar system.
Not in my lifetime. Not in yours either.
Care to offer a counter-argument then rather than just ad hominems?
The moon is almost outside the Earth's gravity well. For non-perishable shipping purposes that's all that really matters - once you've escaped Earth the rest of the solar system can be reached for almost zero additional delta-V. More rocket just reduces the shipping times. Obviously that's a big deal for shipping radiation-sensitive humans, but they're only a small fraction of the shipping weight of an outpost, and can be sent once the supplies are already in place.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think neither the moon nor Mars are good destinations; we should be heading for the asteroid belt.
No, if you want to send men all over the solar system, you develop infrastructure that doesn't live in a gravity well. Which, I believe, is what NASA is actually doing. Unfortunately "mission to some to be named asteroid the identity of which depends on when we have enough funding to do anything but build a useless congressional pork rocket project" doesn't have the same ring as "return to the moon".
So the important question is:
Do we want to just send some people to walk around on Mars, and then quit all manned space exploration after that?
Or do we want to be able to send manned missions all over the solar system?
I agree that your questions are the right ones to be asking. I disagree that they point to moon operations, though.
The decision that will enable travel all over the solar system isn't moon or Mars - it's commerce or government. We need high-volume space access with a profit motive included. This is happening with SpaceX and others (Blue Origin, SNC, Virgin Galactic) but NASA is still holding on to the old way of doing things.
The biggest win would be if NASA would abandon SLS entirely (they could keep Orion if they want) and start architecting missions exclusively around COTS launch providers. Instead of one SLS launch you get 7 or 8 Falcon launches, or 4 or 5 ULA launches - adding that kind of volume to the launch market would help development happen faster and help bring costs down more and more.
Once that approach is taken, then the moon or Mars is just a detail - there are mission profiles that could get us to a sustained presence on either one in a handful of launches on EXISTING commercial vehicles. Get us to Falcon Heavy in a few years and the case is even more clear cut.
"This is a misguided mission without a mission, without a launch date, and without ties to exploration goals," concluded Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). "It's just a time-wasting distraction."
From the looks of it, this mission will probably not receive funding. It's a bit of a shame. It would have been a good opportunity to start developing asteroid mining technology. Perhaps no one is ready for that yet.
Here we go again... NASA is doomed to keep a single course to Mars.
I think only reason they talk about Mars is if talk about the Moon, then need to put up some real money now to build transfer stage and lander. But talk about Mars because you can always defer those costs of hardware 20 years into the future for some other smucks to deal with. Also why colonize Mars? I don't see a huge land rush to Gobi Desert even though that place is 1000 times easier to settle. Reason is that place is a terrible place to live, we only fantasize about Mars because it is so far away.
Matula posted this on NASAwatch:
I blame most of the destination argument on the creation of the Mars underground in the 1980's. Prior to that NASA was focused on using the Shuttle for industrialization in LEO with projects like demonstrating the repair and return of satellites, building structural items in orbit, tethers, etc., all logical starting points for building a Cislunar industrial capability that would have given us the Solar System. NASA didn't even have plans to send robots to Mars. By advocating that we needed to skip the Moon and go rushing off to Mars they started this entire useless destination debate that has paralyzed space policy ever since.
Although their arguments made no rational or economic sense, falling back on outdated ideas like "manifest destiny" and painting Mars like a second Earth, they struck some cord among a very vocal hard core group that has shouted down any rational space strategy ever since. We see it now with Senators force feeding the SLS with money it doesn't need while starving commercial crew because the SLS would, in theory, be able to take astronauts to Mars. As a result the ISS is only one Soyuz failure away from being abandoned.
We need to give Mars a rest and once again spend the limited budget on building capabilities in space, space tugs, orbital refueling, lunar LOX, that would serve for going to all the interesting destinations beyond Earth, not keep wasting money on plans to go to a single one that is already well mapped and explored.
end quote
mfwright@batnet.com
And so are you. Humans are delicate blobs of protein, fat, and carbs in aqueous solution or suspension. Not the right stuff for space. The only good reason for humans to leave the Earth is to travel to another hospitable planetary surface to establish a permanent colony. All else is engineering ego.
There is little that a human can do in space that can't be done faster and cheaper (when you count life support costs) by an AI controlling robots. But NASA has become a very conservative and bureaucratic organization that feels more comfortable doing what it has already done. For engineers this may be fun but it's not very productive. Once you've expended the boost energy to get out of Earth's gravity well, Mars is not much further away, energy wise, than the Moon.
And there IS a very good reason to establish a self-supporting colony on Mars. Survival of the species.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
It's exactly that kind of congressional thinking that has left NASA with no ability to even get humans into space for the last 5 years.
SpaceX currently only has the ability for fairly light lift to orbit for satellites and ISS cargo runs. SNC and Blue Origin are working off NASA's old technology to get humans to low Earth orbit. And Virgin Galactic is suborbital flight only (so lets not even consider this one for anything other than a joyride for rich men at the moment). Ultimately none of these are pushing the boundaries beyond what the Russians have kept reliably running for the last 5 decades.
NASA is trying to push boundaries to move on beyond LEO however congressional politics have been flushing every attempt to even catch up down the drain every few years, and this whole session looks like they are finding excuses and setting it up to do it again as soon as Obama is out of office.
How are humans a small fraction of the shipping weight when you include shielding, life support systems and food that lasts six months?
love is just extroverted narcissism
I'd at least like to see them doing something like this contest that I suggested here a while ago.. As it stands, getting to Mars is hard enough; but unlike the Moon I don't think it's practical without a robotic "advance team" to prepare the way.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Damn belters
People always say: "oh we will *just* build underground". With what? An excavator you bought at the Home Depot on Mars?
Obviously we first need to build a Home Depot on Mars - problems solved.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
That's physical distance, I'm talking energy distance, completely different thing. The energy difference is what's important for rocketry - as long as you're not standing still, physical distance can be crossed just by waiting to coast across it, no extra energy needed. Energy differences require the application of energy, no amount of time will cross it.
Look at this crude drawing of gravitational potential energy around the Earth and moon for reference.
http://www.cyberphysics.co.uk/...
The Earth's surface has a specific potential energy of -62.6 MJ/kg, the moon's orbit (sans moon) only -0.5 Mj/kg (always negative, because zero energy is traditionally taken to be at infinite distance so that all calculations share the same zero). That means that once you make it from the Earth's surface to the Moon's orbit (+62.1MJ/kg), it only requires 0.8% more energy to escape from the Earth entirely. And once you're free of the Earth you can use gravitational slingshots to take you anywhere in the solar system without spending any more propellant aside from fine-tuning course corrections. The so-called Interplanetary Transport Network that most of our probes have taken advantage of. It's slow, but you don't need to spend energy except to get free of Earth.
If you want to get there faster, like if carrying astronauts who can't survive in interplanetary space for long, then you need to consider the orbital energy of the planets, in which case Earth is at about -444 MJ/kg, and Mars at about -291MJ/kg, a difference of about 152MJ/kg. So getting to Mars without gravitational slingshots takes about 3.45x as much energy as getting to the moon. Admittedly more of a challenge. On the plus side, if we start out orbiting in the opposite direction as the moon, we can at least slingshot around that to double our initial momentum, lowering the requirements to only 2.45x as much energy as needed to get to the moon.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
There's not any realistic budgeting scenario where it's even remotely cheaper, all capital costs included, to get your water from the moon in the remotely near future than to just launch it from the earth on existing rockets. But, if your goal is to advance the tech of reusable rockets, space mining, in-situ propellant production, etc, then by all means go ahead. Just don't pretend like you're doing it as a "cost saving measure" for a Mars mission.
This! Ive been accused of naysaying regarding the Spacex landings on a barge.
I think it is a similar issue. If teh main purpose is to do barge landing, and enough resources are applied, yep, it's possible.
Likewise, setting up a moonbase to mine water to produce fuel is probably a 50+ year project in and of itself, and no assured success. It's an entire program, and back of the envelope math tells me that it will treble or quadruple the costs.
It would be cool, but is the most expensive option of the two.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Well, if you're going to take six months then yes, that's a problem. On the other hand Musk is saying his planned super-heavy MCT rockets will be able to make the trip in a few weeks carrying, I think, a hundred colonists. Fast enough that you don't need the shielding. And he's pretty much managed to deliver on all hist claims so far.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
[...] you also have to create low-cost reusable rockets designed for repeat operation on the moon with little to no maintenance, fueled by materials from the lunar surface. Which is a vastly harder, more expensive task. After all, it makes no financial sense to mine a tonne of water from the surface of the moon and then deliver it into lunar orbit or beyond with 10 tonnes of hardware/propellant sent from Earth, which in turn took 100 tonnes to get off the surface of the Earth. Everything has to be long-term operable entirely in the lunar environment with lunar resources.
There's not any realistic budgeting scenario where it's even remotely cheaper, all capital costs included, to get your water from the moon in the remotely near future than to just launch it from the earth on existing rockets.
Electromagnetic mass drivers might make more sense than rockets for launching raw materials from the moon. At least that was what Gerard K. O'Neill and company concluded decades ago... Of course, you still have to build the mass driver on-site or deliver it there and run a mining operation.
I have to think that for sufficiently large scale offworld operations, you're going to want to mine materials from somewhere - either the moon or asteroids. As interesting as the topic is, I don't think we'll be building semi-permanent moon bases, Babylon 5, or mars colonies within ten years though.
Elon Musk knows that the only way to ensure the long term survival of mankind is to start a colony off Earth. While NASA is constrained by the whims of Congress, Musk said the hell with waiting and started SpaceX so he could build his own rockets. SpaceX announced in May 2015 that they are positioning Dragon V2 spacecraft variants—in conjunction with the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle—to transport science payloads across much of the solar system, in cislunar and inner solar system regions such as the Moon and Mars as well as to outer solar system destinations such as Jupiter's moon Europa. Details include that SpaceX expects to be able to transport 2,000–4,000 kg (4,400–8,800 lb) to the surface of Mars, including a soft retropropulsive landing using SuperDraco thrusters following a limited atmospheric deceleration. When the destination has no atmosphere, the Dragon variant would dispense with the parachute and heat shield and add additional propellant.
SpaceX began development of the large Raptor rocket engine for the Mars Colonial Transport[MCT] before 2014, but the MCT will not be operational earlier than the mid-2020s. SpaceX have not yet publicly released details of the space mission architecture nor all the system components of the MCT, nor a timeline for earliest MCT missions to Mars. Elon Musk hopes to unveil the space mission architecture at the International Astronautical Congress in September 2016.
We know a few basic things about the SpaceX Mars architecture:
Two stages to orbit. First stage is a single booster with many Raptor engines which returns to launch site for reuse. Second stage is the Mars Colonial Transport, comprising a pressurized cabin section and a propulsion section, also powered by multiple Raptor engines.
MCT is refueled in earth orbit by multiple propellant tankers after expending its initial propellant load during launch. After refueling, MCT departs for Mars and performs a propulsive entry, descent, and landing on Mars. MCT is refueled for the return trip using methane and oxygen produced on Mars. It returns to Earth and lands propulsively. Both stages are 100% reusable. Nothing is jettisoned.
We also know that SpaceX will send Dragon spacecraft to Mars (using Falcon Heavy) before sending the first MCTs, which will be unmanned cargo ships for landing habitation modules and other surface hardware in preparation for the arrival of the first humans.
We don't yet know some of the technical details, including the number of Raptor engines on each stage and the precise stage diameter. We don't know how many distinct variants of the MCT will be produced (cargo, tanker, etc.) and exactly how they will be configured.
But mostly, we don't know the business model: Is this a hobby project funded by their commercial launch business, or is there a profit-making opportunity inherent to the Mars plan? To what extent is SpaceX banking on substantial funding from NASA, who might be able to buy rides from SpaceX long before they are able to send astronauts to Mars using their own equipment?
I don't know if the business model will be clarified as well as the technical architecture when Elon does the reveal in September. That's the part that has space enthusiasts genuinely scratching our heads.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
You are correct, all the money in the world is insufficient. Which is why we need resources from other worlds/asteroids. People aren't going to leave earth unless they can make a buck or gain fame. As with royalty of old, we need government to fund exploration for future commercial development. I do not think it is a false dichotomy to say that we must expand or collapse. Certainly the Earth is not completely exploited but we will eventually tap out the easy resources. Is that the time to begin to act or now when we have resources to spare?
Knowing it all since the late 70's.
For approximately 1.5 trillion dollars the world 2014 military spending. Lets use, half... nah a quarter of that directed to space. Plenty of money for maintenance and payroll. That give you $325 Billion for space development. 2014 total expenditure was about $65 billion so thats 500% more resources available. Give the engineers and scientists some money to burn.
Your country wants to opt out? No space for you! (literally)
Knowing it all since the late 70's.
No, if you want to send men all over the solar system, you develop infrastructure that doesn't live in a gravity well. Which, I believe, is what NASA is actually doing.
What are you talking about? I certainly don't see any such infrastructure, just a dumb idea to go straight to Mars without developing any of that infrastructure. That infrastructure you talk about is exactly what I'm advocating with a return to the Moon, though I'm open to other options like asteroid mining to get materials and then building stations at Lagrangian points. But the Moon seems simpler for now since we don't know how to build large stations without launching them piece-by-piece from Earth first, and what I think we need is some offworld manufacturing, which is easier done on the Moon at this time because of 1) proximity, and 2) gravity (we don't know how to manufacture stuff in zero-g; 1/6g is workable, while still massively decreasing launch costs over launching stuff from Earth).
It's much too far away; it's even farther than Mars. It also doesn't have that much mass, and it's all spread out except for Vesta and Ceres. We should be sending probes there, for sure, but we're nowhere near ready to send people there. Even Mars makes more sense than that.
The Moon is right next door, has plenty of material (not sure how usable it is for construction, but from what I remember it is possible to make "lunar concrete" with the regolith), has some water at the poles, has some gravity for manufacturing but not too much so it'll be cheap to launch from there or even build a space elevator (this is entirely possible on the Moon because of the low gravity), and will give us practice in doing stuff offworld without having to endure 6+month transit times.
So they know for a fact that there is enough water there to send ships to Mars, as well as support the needed infrastructure?
I assume this means enough for More than one or two missions, or is NASA still in Apollo -do it and ditch it - mode?
That message is a troll? Dis place be gotten a liddle weeeeeerd sometimes..
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
A Ship that you can point in a direction and go.
This is not Star Trek. We do not have reactionless drives and unless there's a wild loophole in thermodynamics, we likely will. You are always going to be held back by the rocket equation.
A Ship with a multi mega watt power source
Ludicrous. Why would you even want to try to dissipate that much heat?
A Ship with several smaller vehicles for going to and from a planet
This is not Star Trek. There isn't going to be a one-size-fits-all solution for descending a gravity well. Hence why Curiosity's descent was so complicated -- and again, you run up against the rocket equation.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Seriously, this guy is an idiot.
Ok, he does not like ARM. Yet, he claims that it does not have any scientific or engineering merit. Neither are accurate, or even close to accurate.
To move part of an asteroid will require a new tug. This will require new engineering that will then be used for asteroid mining. it can also be used to save the earth from an inbound asteroid.
Then you have several astronauts in space around the moon for several weeks. We have not sent anybody beyond LEO since the 70s and none for several weeks. This will require new engineering to protect the crew and will provide a great deal of science about radiation.
finally, we have the boulder itself. The astronauts will be able to work on it, and figure out a number of things: Namely how to deal in lowGs.
If we are going to mars, it is very likely that we will land and stay on one of the moons FIRST. They also have low G. So, this really does make sense.
Finally, NASA does not have to re-direct all of its resources to go back to the moon. NASA has been hard at work on developing new private space's capabilities. In particular, they have over 4 companies working on different re-usable lunar landers.
Sadly, ppl like whittington is too wrapped up in the past to think of what Eisenhower and Kennedy wanted for NASA, which was that they would go above and beyond, not just repeat.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Any major manned project at this point is going to involve a lot of robotic probes and preparation. But asteroids are a lot easier to get to and from than Mars, precisely because of their lack of gravity and lack of atmosphere. Mars has just the wrong amount of each: enough to be a nuisance, not quite enough to make it really Earth-like.
A lunar space elevator might be a nice project. But in the end, the moon is a really harsh environment, the resources it has are hard to get at, and it, too, has just too much gravity. The proximity of moon to earth also means that remotely operated robots are a reasonable alternative to manned exploration. The 3s delay is annoying, but something remote operators can learn to deal with, in particular when assisted by robotics.
I still think our primary focus should be exploration of the asteroid belt, first with robotic probes, then towing asteroids into lunar orbits, creating habitats, and finally moving out there.
Why? Mars is much easier. Moon is only slightly closer (energetically speaking).
Naw, the moon would be much easier. Energetically, there might not be a big difference, but timewise there is. Both in radiation exposure and return ability in case of an emergency, the moon is far more favorable for initial experimentation travel outside of LEO. The gravity is also less which makes it easier to land and get off of. Mars has an atmosphere which is too thin to help land and too thick to ignore. Combined with the higher gravity, the moon is much more easier once again. From there, you get trade offs. Mars has perchlorates and the moon as sharp regolith. I'd like to see a manned Mars trip, but it is by no means easier than the moon. I suspect that any serious plan for Mars will probably include moon trips to test.
"Testimony at a hearing before the House Science Committee's Subcommittee on Space suggested that NASA's Journey to Mars has produced exactly what Congress has allocated funds for, almost twelve years after President Bush announced the goal on Jan 14, 2004"
That's entirely my point, though. Any launch vehicle that lives or dies at the whim of congress (and has design requirements forced on it to boot) is never going to be anything more than a jobs program. Space access is not the reason SLS exists. Keeping Alabamans employed is, and it is succeeding brilliantly at that task.
So, remove that aspect of control from congress. NASA offers $100M for a rocket, and buys it off the shelf when they need it vs dumping $4B on building the Senate Launch System. With the fixed launch price, industry is motivated to get cheaper because then their profit is larger. Congress doesn't get to force a vehicle to use obsolete, expensive hardware like the SRBs. If NASA has its plans upended every 8 years as presidents are wont to do, the vehicle is still there, it just flies somewhere different.
NASA should be doing fundamental research and launching missions that aren't commercially viable (no reasonable ROI) and LEO access (even heavy lift) doesn't fit - it's something we've known how to do for years. Even BLEO, do a couple small launches and do on-orbit assembly, or wait a bit for Falcon Heavy (which will likely fly before SLS anyhow). SLS is the absolutely worst place NASA could be spending money if we actually care about doing stuff in space.
One of the first things we should build on the moon is a magnetic launcher. Using rocket fuel to boost from the moon on a regular basis is crazy. If we were to build a powerful magnetic launcher, we could also "throw things" at incoming objects that threaten earth to adjust their orbits.
Any major manned project at this point is going to involve a lot of robotic probes and preparation.
Yeah, we're already doing that. We've sent robotic probes to the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt lately. Have you forgotten about all the hubbub over the bright spots they found on Ceres? We are *not* ignoring the asteroid belt.
But asteroids are a lot easier to get to and from than Mars, precisely because of their lack of gravity and lack of atmosphere.
I disagree. True, Mars has enough of an atmosphere to be a nuisance (because you need reentry shielding, but there's not enough there to be really useful for aerobraking), but it's also significantly closer than the belt. Farther = a longer journey. For a probe, a few extra months might not be that big a deal, but for humans, it is. Mars is already too far as it is (as in, "too long a journey for most people to want to sit in a spacecraft that long", plus the radiation concerns).
A lunar space elevator might be a nice project. But in the end, the moon is a really harsh environment, the resources it has are hard to get at, and it, too, has just too much gravity.
The environment isn't that harsh; it's 3 days away (super-close in celestial terms), and there's no annoying atmosphere, and just enough gravity so that we can operate on it without having to invent all-new methods for every simple little thing. But the gravity is low enough that a lunar space elevator should be quite doable, unlike Earth (where the gravity is way too high so we don't have good materials with enough strength, and we have a thick atmosphere that causes all kinds of problems with such an elevator).
The proximity of moon to earth also means that remotely operated robots are a reasonable alternative to manned exploration.
I disagree entirely. For simple probing around, sure, that'll work OK, but if you want to do any really serious work, you have to have boots on the ground. Remotely-operated vehicles are *not* going to build factories, mines, etc. We do *not* have that kind of technology yet. Some heavy-equipment stuff could definitely be converted to remote-control: dump trucks, shovels, etc. But that'll only work as long as nothing goes wrong. As soon as something breaks or gets stuck, you're going to need some people there to deal with it. So you could definitely get by with a lot less manpower on-site, by operating a lot of vehicles remotely, but you'll still need some. It's just like our UAVs ("drones") used by the US military: the planes are flown remotely, I think even by people stateside, but you still have to have real people on-site in the theater to refuel them, do maintenance work, etc., when they land. It'll be the same for heavy equipment on the Moon.
I still think our primary focus should be exploration of the asteroid belt, first with robotic probes, then towing asteroids into lunar orbits, creating habitats, and finally moving out there.
We're already exploring the asteroid belt. We could stand to do more though. But there's no reason we can't get started building habitats and industrial facilities on the Moon simultaneously. We already know there's a crapload of asteroids out there with valuable ores, so we might as well prepare for using them. And we should definitely be working right away on building the technology for capturing and towing these asteroids.
The point is that since there's so much we still don't know about the moon, it makes sense to make it a priority before considering Mars. The fact that going back to the moon can also be helpful in doing the Mars thing, just adds to it. One step at a time. We haven't been to the moon for so long, everything has to be developed again, so start there. It should be a no brainer. I'm all for going to Mars, but I also wished the going back to the moon thing was done a couple of decades ago. Then going straight to Mars would make more sense.
No, not really. We're sending out unmanned probes for getting data. What I'm referring to is robotic mining and fabrication facilities.
Pretty much all the technology needed for autonomous repairs and for remote operation exists. We aren't deploying it in current environments because there isn't much need to in most environments. In the one environment where they would be helpful, satellite repair, the organizations with an effective monopoly on launches have little interest in pushing the technology.
But why would you build "factories, mines, etc." on the moon anyway? The moon is a fairly deep gravity well, so getting stuff off it is not all that easy; and the stuff we're mostly interested in (metals, volatiles, organics) is much harder to get from the moon than from either earth or asteroids.
Depends on what you mean by "we" and "no reason". If you assume unlimited funding for governmental space agencies, they can, of course, put manned habitats on the moon while also doing other things. But for anything that survives a cost/benefit analysis and is self-sustaining long term, I don't think the moon is going to make much sense. I think that was the issue with the moon program in the first place: there just hasn't been any economic reason for going back.
I'm assuming that we need to make economic tradeoffs and that space exploration will only survive if it makes economic sense. And under those assumption, the asteroid belt is the only way to go. Building lunar and Martian colonies is technically feasible already, but very costly, and provides little economic return; I think those colonization plans will only take off once other space related activities have expanded our economy to the point that we can afford them as luxuries.