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Trump Has Grand Plan For Mission To Mars But Nasa Advises: Cool Your Jets (theguardian.com)
Donald Trump would like to see Americans walk on Mars during his presidency. Nasa would love to get there that quickly, too. The reality of space travel is slightly more complicated, however. From a report: On Monday, during a call with astronaut Peggy Whitson, who was aboard the International Space Station, Trump pressed her for a timeline on a crewed mission to Mars, one of Nasa's longest standing and most daunting goals. "Tell me, Mars," he asked her from the Oval Office, "what do you see a timing for actually sending humans to Mars? Is there a schedule and when would you see that happening?" Whitson answered by pointing out that Trump, by signing a Nasa funding bill last month, had already approved a timeline for a mission in the 2030s. She added that Nasa was building a new heavy-launch rocket, which would need testing. "Unfortunately space flight takes a lot of time and money," she said. "But it is so worthwhile doing." Trump replied: "Well, we want to try and do it during my first term or, at worst, during my second term, so we'll have to speed that up a little bit, OK?" It was not clear whether the president meant the remark as a quip or something more serious.
For the record: I am very pro humans going to Mars. I realize the hurdles, I realize the dangers. I realize we can't economically achieve it right now. I believe in the Buzz Aldrin model of an initially one way trip, I'm aware there is a high risk of life in the early days, (so should any applicant to go).
With all that said, if it takes Trump's ego to get us to Mars, I am all for that. He might actually be one of the very few men at the top willing to risk the political backlash of failure.
Even if we're going for the wrong reasons, I would be glad if we took the steps.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
You underestimate the stupidity of humanity. Have you ever met people?
I work in IT support. Are people as bad as users?
Worse, and there is some overlap. Some users are people as well.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
So, Venus's middle cloud layer, then?
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."
A President finally challenges NASA like Kennedy and everyone jumps down his throat because of who is saying it. Trump comes from a world where the delays and cost over runs from NASA the last 20 years are not acceptable. NASA is so risk adverse they can't accomplish their goals. What Trump should do is mandate the test pilot approach again, admit that space exploration will cost lives, and tell them to start getting things done.
"The man is so completely divorced from reality that there's really no way to anticipate what he will do." One constant is that everything he does is about himself. Another constant is that he destroys everything he touches. He loves "strong leaders", i.e., moral degenerates that will step on anyone...errr...like him. The only exceptions are the ones where he thinks he can aggrandize perception of himself by going against a "strong leader" as in Lil'Kimmy and Assad.
Another thing to realize is that he's lost control of his administration, although that is putting it euphemistically. The Defense Dept. is doing things he doesn't understand. His own EPA administrator was exhorting the coal wackos to lobby Trump against the climate accords, as though EPA wasn't really part of the Cabinet. The Cabinet has gone off on their own, even his ghost minders have been sidelined. Treasury's minder got shunted off to a basement office. The rest are being "reassigned" by the Cabinet secretaries. How could they do that if that asshole was in charge? Even his "tax plan" was joke. It was written on a single piece of paper because his attention span won't allow him to comprehend any more. The people writing it know it is crap, but they also know giving him a sheet of talking points makes him feel like he's the President.
He's in charge of nothing except screwing things up.
I was a bit surprised by some of my fellow slashdotter's negative comments on this.
I've really hated the lack of focus on science and ignoring of scientific facts in the current administration. While I'd love to sell science funding for science's own sake, it is just not working well with a lot of our population and government representatives.
As the same time, we know putting a man on the moon generated a huge amount of scientific research and learning. So if the current administration wants to characterize funding as helping "go to Mars", I'm glad to live with it given the scientific work that will be generated because of it.
Trump does this because it's part of his style, and it's worked well for him in the past as a leadership strategy: throw a bunch of stuff out there and see what sticks, then shrug off as a joke or hyperbole the stuff that gets a bad response. It serves at least four purposes:
- it keeps opponents on their toes since they're never quite sure when he is exaggerating or not.
- it plays well into "dog whistle" politics because supporters can outwardly claim that some appalling statement wasn't really serious, while secretly convincing themselves that it really was.
- makes it easy to get rid of underlings. You failed to accomplish the task I gave you? You don't know me well enough to know that I was serious about it this one time? You're fired!
- allows him to shirk responsibility for failure. Oh, that plan didn't actually work out? I never meant for it to anyway.
I used to work under a boss who had this same leadership style, and I'll say this: as an employee, it sucked.
It's downright pathetic that NASA - formerly the epitome of America's can-do and forward-looking approach - is "oh wait, slow down, that's dangerous, that's expensive..."
Fuck you NASA, you hidebound, overbureaucratic, topheavy, ass-covering bunch of time-servers. (And by that I don't mean the people at the program levels - they're still rocket scientists: I mean the admins and the politicals at the top.)
Look, I get it: Trump's a boob. An ignoramus. If you're one of the literati, then you *have* to reflexively HATE him. If he said 2+2=4, we'd change basic math just to make sure he was wrong. So if he says we should go to Mars, well, we certainly need to get in the way of that, right?
But we went to the Moon in THIS is what we need. Oh, and we're going to decide what needs to get made and where it gets built, no more pork-barreling our budget into congressional districts for political points. That's stupid.
-Styopa
>There's absolutely no guarantee that money will actually make it to people capable and willing to accomplish this.
We can get rockets to Mars now, and have done so several times. We've seen Musk's tail landing tech coming along nicely, and the math works out so we know it's possible to get it right for Mars.
>Not to mention it takes forever for a rocket to make it to Mars
Most estimates are in the 150-300 day range. It depends on how much fuel you want to burn. Mars and Earth align every 25 months or so, but you don't worry about that unless you're sending humans. Longer trips are OK for 'stuff'.
>Even communications with Earth will be subject to several minutes of delay due to speed of light being finite.
4-24 minutes speed-of-light delay, assuming a direct line of sight. If you're bouncing a signal off a Sun-orbiting satellite to get around our star, then it'll be a bit longer. That's not really a problem for sending 'stuff', and the reason to send humans is they don't need live remote control.
The problem would be manufacturing and testing. Which is where the money comes in. The next decent Mars launch window is in April of 2018, then there's another in July of 2020. So you make a metric fuckton of rockets for 2018 and mount your payloads and shoot 'em off, then you follow up with humans a couple of years later.
Money. LOTS of money. Ludicrous amounts of money. But it would make a difference, and it could be done.
And the point would be to figure out how to live there, and to more efficiently do scientific research. If you could keep a geologist alive on Mars, they could do more in a week than the rovers have done since the first one landed. Humans are very flexible tools.
And ultimately, we'd want to see if we could live there. Because why not? The same reason we migrated out of the trees and then eventually out of Africa. Because it's a new place to go and make more humans.
It only has an induced magnetosphere, like Mars (although about twice as powerful). But it's big defense against radiation is the thickness of its atmosphere; radiation has to pass through a lot of mass to get to habitable areas. The radiation levels within Venus's middle cloud layer are perfectly acceptable without extra shielding.
Not in the middle cloud layer. Actually it's just the opposite, the pressure / temperature relation in the middle cloud layer means somewhat low (but still acceptable) pressures at normal Earth temperatures. But it's still by far the most Earthlike place in the solar system outside of Earth.
The unfortunate thing for Venus is that people think only in terms of surfaces; if Venus's atmosphere had stopped at its middle cloud layer, nobody would be talking about Mars today. But because Venus's atmosphere is carbon dioxide, almost any common gas can be used as a lifting gas. Including nitrogen and oxygen - ordinary Earth air is a lifting gas, offering about half as much lift as helium does on Earth. Meaning you can actually live inside your lift envelope. And airship envelopes are not particularly heavy, despite their large sizes. Your entire habitat is this completely mobile, constantly exploring new ground, accessing the surface as needed with bellows and/or phase-change balloons.
Now you're talking about terraforming, which we're nowhere near doing for any planet (not Mars either - Mars's biggest problem is that isotopic ratios indicate that almost all of the planet's nitrogen has been lost to space). Carl Sagan famously, before Venus's conditions were known, proposed seeding Venus's clouds with phototrophs in order to sequester carbon and create an oxygenated atmosphere. He later changed his mind, saying that you'd end up with a huge deep layer of carbon and a dense, hot oxygen atmosphere, and the whole planetary surface would explode. Further dampers were put on the concept when it was pointed out that, depending on what assumptions you make, it'd take tens of thousands to millions of years to sequester regardless.
Many, many different proposals for terraforming Venus have been made over the years, but honestly I think Sagan had the right idea, for the wrong reason. Namely, because we've seen this situation before. Earth used to be a world with a CO2-rich atmosphere, no oxygen, ferric oxide on its surface (well, more accurately, Fe+2 ions in the oceans), etc. Did Earth explode once microbes developed photosynthesis? Of course not. As fast as they could produce oxygen, the iron oxidized to ferric oxyhydroxide to magnetite and hematite, laying down bands of iron oxides (interspersed with sequestered carbon), which we now know as the banded iron formations. There was no "thick layer of graphite" or "dense explosive oxygen atmosphere being made" on Earth, and there's all the less reason to expect it on Venus, because in Venus's hot, dense surface conditions the abundant ferric oxide (and other species) will be even more reactive. Oxygen will be consumed as fast as it's created, until you've exhausted all available surface ferric oxide, which will take quite a long time. Indeed, if you took some of the "atmospheric ejection" or "atmosphere freezing" terraforming proposals, you'd be faced with a problem when you actually started producing oxygen in Venus - you'd be fighting against the rusting of the planet.
The low levels of hydrogen are IMHO more challenging; I don't like most of the proposals for getting more
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."
The sulfuric acid is more of a resource than a problem, and it'd be easier to colonize Venus if the sulfuric acid was denser. It's actually pretty sparse - a couple to a couple dozen milligrams per cubic meter. Standards for breathing sulfuric acid on Earth for an 8-hour shift are between one and a couple milligrams per cubic meter, if that puts it into perspective. It's like a bad smog (or more accurately, vog) than being like a bath in sulfuric acid. There are many polymers with excellent sulfuric acid compatibility.
The reason sulfuric acid is a resource is, first off, it's not 100% sulfuric acid, so there's the water content that can first be dehydrated. After further heating, you decompose H2SO4 to SO3 + H2O. Further heating, plus catalysts, can also decompose SO3 to SO2 + O2. Alternatively you can use the SO3 as a scrubber conditioning agent to help capture more moisture from the atmosphere. There's also the sulfur-iodine cycle for the generation of hydrogen.
Not so, the sunlight in the middle cloud layer is rather earthlike (depending on your latitude). The cloud decks have absorbed only about a third of the light by the time it reaches the middle cloud layer at the equator (more toward the poles), and Venus's solar constant is higher than Earth's, so it roughly equals out. Except that light comes from all sides.
Solar power has even been shown to be possible to use at the surface, albeit with extremely low power density. But enough to run, say, a seismic or weather station.
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."