Buzz Aldrin To NASA: Retire the International Space Station ASAP To Reach Mars (space.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: If NASA and its partner agencies are serious about putting boots on Mars in the near future, they should pull the plug on the International Space Station (ISS) at the earliest opportunity, Buzz Aldrin said. "We must retire the ISS as soon as possible," the former Apollo 11 moonwalker said Tuesday (May 9) during a presentation at the 2017 Humans to Mars conference in Washington, D.C. "We simply cannot afford $3.5 billion a year of that cost." Instead, Aldrin said, NASA should continue to hand over activities in low Earth orbit (LEO) to private industry partners. Indeed, the space agency has been encouraging that move by awarding contracts to companies such as SpaceX, Orbital ATK and Boeing to ferry cargo and crew to and from the ISS. Bigelow Aerospace, Axiom Space or other companies should build and operate LEO space stations that are independent of the ISS, he added. Ideally, the first of these commercial outposts would share key orbital parameters with the station that China plans to have up and running by the early 2020s, to encourage cooperation with the Chinese, Aldrin said. Establishing private outposts in LEO is just the first step in Aldrin's plan for Mars colonization, which depends heavily on "cyclers" -- spacecraft that move continuously between two cosmic destinations, efficiently delivering people and cargo back and forth.

Comments

OR -

[sheramil]

- attach boosters to the ISS and SEND IT TO MARS.

Re:OR -

[sheramil]

I didn't say send humans to Mars.

Re:OR -

[Snotnose]

What a waste of a good space station. Attach boosters to it and send it to congress.

Re:OR -

[Rei]

It's also a lot heavier than an equivalent craft built today would be, which means a heavier transfer stage. Solar power systems for example are approaching an order of magnitude better power density than the ISS's solar arrays.

Re:OR -

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're trying to send a message, you don't need to land something as heavy as ISS at congress's doorstep. Just use a small launch vehicle (Pegasus, for example), with a small reentry vehicle (deploys parachute, jettisons fairing, needs a rather low CEP), whose payload consists of, in order from bottom to top:

  * Crush zone
  * Paper bag filled with frozen dog poop (reinforced as necessary), a small amount of accelerant, and an ampule of a hypergolic ignition fluid designed to rupture on impact (or equivalent electrical igniter).

Re: OR -

[ColdWetDog]

Wait, you mean there's more to going to mars than just building big rockets and putting people in them? Going to mars is more complicated than anyone knew.

No, that's healthcare. Going to Mars is easy compared to rejiggering the American Medical Industrial Complex.

Re:OR -

[K. S. Kyosuke]

But it's already in orbit.... That means a lot.

No, it means very little. It's so heavy that just launching the fuel for TMI would involve so much mass that you could launch a more capable modern assembly AND its TMI fuel in a smaller mass budget than just the TMI fuel for the ISS.

Re: OR -

[budgenator]

Who do you think, the 1%ers are ruining this country, don't you fucking white trailer trash rednecks know anything?

Re:OR -

[silentcoder]

None of those meet the reason why colonizing elsewhere is a good idea: so that the next time the universe throws a giant rock at earth this isn't the only place in the universe where humans exist.

It's important to protect this planet, it will be home to the vast majority of humans for the foreseeable future. We should not destroy our home. But there are things we cannot protect against. The planet wil be fine. Life will bounce back. It probably won't include us.
The only defense around that is to live in more places than earth.

That said - I'm not sure what makes Mars more attractive than the moon for a first colony. Most of the difficulties about living on the Moon are present on Mars as well - and it's a lot easier to get to. More-over, if we do build a permanent settlement there - with launch capability, then suddenly further expansion becomes a great deal cheaper. You need a lot less fuel to launch from the moon than from earth since the gravity is way lower and there's no atmospheric drag.

Re:OR -

[silentcoder]

1) Living on the moon is not the same as VISITING the moon. I was talking about colonies. Colonization requires radically new technology we've not done before - but we would be able to reuse a lot of the tech we build for colonizing the moon to colonize mars later.

2) Only a factor if you think it's critical the colony trade with earth from natural resources. Not really a factor if the major point of the colony is to exist - colonists can always trade with each other, and they'll certainly develop other things to trade with us later.

3) You're wrong about how space works. There's a reason we say "low earth orbit is halfway to anywhere" - once you're in orbit the cost of changing orbit is relatively low compared to the massive cost of getting into orbit. Mars may be closer to the asteroid belt but I'm willing to bet it's actually cheaper to mine them with launches off the moon. You can't launch from Mars for anywhere close to how cheaply you can do it from the lunar surface.

4) Erm - my whole point was to ask why that would be ? There is basically nothing that the moon lacks which Mars does not also lack. You cannot answer me questioning an assumption by restating that same assumption without providing any new information.

5) And if you understand why that is true, you understand why you're wrong in number 3. But it DOES take a lot less energy to LAND on the moon than on Mars - you have a much smaller gravitational force to overcome with your slow-down actions. And it takes a GREAT deal less to get back up again (whether to mine an asteroid, ship trading goods to earth or whatever). A colony means landing a great deal of extremely heavy things - the kind of things parachutes aren't much help with (and the thin Atmosphere on Mars makes them only a little useful anyway) - it's going to be mostly rocket-braking to land anything safely. The moon is a MUCH easier target for that.

Re:OR -

[ShanghaiBill]

I doubt you can put much acceleration on the frame

Once a craft is in orbit, you don't need much acceleration to go places. You can attach some ion thrusters, and power them with the solar arrays. Even an acceleration of 0.001g applied continuously will get you to Mars far quicker than any chemical rocket could.

Re:OR -

[jwhyche]

Can I do the math for this?

Re:OR -

[WrongMonkey]

Even when the universe has thrown a big rock at Earth, it was still the habitable planet in the solar system. Earth could simultaneously be hit by an asteroid, nuclear war and global warming and still be a paradise compared to Mars. There is no feasible scenario where Mars or the Moon are better a places to restart humanity.

Re:OR -

[david_thornley]

The Universe doesn't throw giant rocks at Earth all that often. There hasn't been an event wiping out all life on Earth in something like a billion years now, and humans are remarkably difficult to eradicate. I don't think one of the fifty-million-year ones would do it.

If we're wiped out on Earth, then to continue the species we'd need completely self-sustaining colonies, able to replace anything they've got with available resources and able to expand. We won't be able to build that for centuries.

So, while I'm not averse to planting colonies off Earth, it will be a long time before we can survive (as a species) a giant mutant star goat.

Reach Mars or colonize Mars?

[m.alessandrini]

I think that, yes, in a few decades it could be theoretically possible, given the proper money, to send some people there and back. But then it's so far, so expensive and so uninhabitable, that I'm afraid it will remain a proof of concept, and Mars will be forgot for the following century, much like going to the moon.

Maybe it would be better to start sending material and structures, and only then sending actual people. It's sad in my mind, but maybe we should give up seeing men on Mars in our lifetime, if we want it to be something more than a passing experiment.

Re:Reach Mars or colonize Mars?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as the world can't even make a simple semi-permanent habitation on the moon, something that's only four days away with current rocket tech, there's zero chance at putting people on Mars. Space propulsion engineering has barely moved on from the 1960s, and that was based on German 1940s long distant bombs.

The whole "Mars" wankfest is a job creation scheme to empty the tax payers' pockets into a select few mega-corp pockets with a few crappy factories popping up to justify it.

Re:Reach Mars or colonize Mars?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Lots of things are actually easier on Mars. The atmosphere removes a large portion of propulsive braking; the Moon requires 100% propulsive braking. On Mars, return fuel is easily available in substantial regions of the planet; on the Moon, return fuel is available on the south pole, and only if your fuel is hydrolox. Gravity is more bearable, too.

Re:Reach Mars or colonize Mars?

[DerekLyons]

Lots of things are actually easier on Mars. The atmosphere removes a large portion of propulsive braking; the Moon requires 100% propulsive braking.

No, landing is actually harder on Mars - the gravity is too high to use propulsive braking, and the atmosphere too thin for aerodynamic braking. Which means mixed mode braking, and freakin' enormous parachutes. Not long ago it was estimated that a LEM sized lander would need total parachute area larger than a baseball infield - and they'd have to go from packed to fully inflated in under .1 seconds. (Meaning that at one point in deployment, the edges of the chute and the shroudlines would be moving faster than the local speed of sound.) It's much harder to land on Mars - which is why the various rovers have had to use such Rube Goldberg methods.
 

On Mars, return fuel is easily available in substantial regions of the planet

In theory. In practice... well, we don't know. None of the hardware required has moved off the prototype bench and none has been tested with anything resembling the toxic materials that make up Martian soil.

Private only? Really?

[getuid()]

Call me a communist if you need to, but I'd rather not see something as important in humanity's future as space exploration in *exckusively* private hands.

Just look at how well privately owned essential infrastructure works out for the masses all over the world so far, e.g. with internet, mobile phones, water, public transportation, health...

Some perspective: 3.5 billion is less than the military spending of the USA in one single day. Less than even the *increase* in budget from 2016 to 2017, by more than an order of magnitude.

Re:Private only? Really?

[slew]

Call me a communist if you need to, but I'd rather not see something as important in humanity's future as space exploration in *exckusively* private hands.

Just look at how well privately owned essential infrastructure works out for the masses all over the world so far, e.g. with internet, mobile phones, water, public transportation, health...

Some perspective: 3.5 billion is less than the military spending of the USA in one single day. Less than even the *increase* in budget from 2016 to 2017, by more than an order of magnitude.

Okay, I'll call you a communist. Historically, it's been the case with nearly all "public" infrastructure outside of communist countries that private companies, plan it, design it, organize short-term financing for it, build it, maintain it. Of course with public infrastructure, the government is there to consult, kibitz, cajole, zone, and regulate it, and inevitably foots most of the bill, but of course owns the artifact at the end of the day.

Often as an incentive to reduce public outlays, concessions are offered to the public companies to reduce the actual net present cost to the public for the infrastructure. E.g., build a dock or railroad and you get this adjacent land for development, design a spacecraft for us and you can take the technology to build rockets for private launches, etc, etc...

Eventually, these *concessions* to private companies can form the seed for whole new private enterprise that accelerate the economy of a country. Call me an evil capitalist, but that's the way it works... the even the socialist (pseudo-communist USSR and China) world...

How does this work in your theoretical communist world?

Re:Private only? Really?

[Rei]

The whole "public vs. private", socialism vs. capitalism debate is a big red herring when it comes to launch services. Because:

1) Most spacecraft are already built by private companies, either in part or nearly in whole; and
2) New private startups are offering far lower prices than the old traditional providers.

It's idealism vs. pragmatism. I don't care what ideology you have; new companies like SpaceX are vastly undercutting NASA and its traditional private partners (Boeing, Lockheed, etc).

Re:Private only? Really?

[tehcyder]

It's idealism vs. pragmatism. I don't care what ideology you have; new companies like SpaceX are vastly undercutting NASA and its traditional private partners (Boeing, Lockheed, etc).

If someone wants to rely purely on free market capitalism to fund a manned trip to Mars, good luck to them. Presumably the fact that they have costed it and realise it would just lose them money is the main stumbling block?

Re:Private only? Really?

[Solandri]

It's idealism vs. pragmatism. I don't care what ideology you have; new companies like SpaceX are vastly undercutting NASA and its traditional private partners (Boeing, Lockheed, etc).

A public space program gets funded because people think it's a good idea.

A private space program gets funded because it actually is a good idea (return exceeds investment).

The problem with manned space exploration is that it's generally a bad idea. And I don't say that from a public vs private space exploration standpoint. Just ask anyone in NASA about the manned vs. unmanned exploration budget division. We get much better bang for the buck with unmanned exploration. Just look at a typical list of NASA's greatest missions. The only manned mission on the list is the moon landing.

Re:Private only? Really?

[angel'o'sphere]

Historically, it's been the case with nearly all "public" infrastructure outside of communist countries that private companies, plan it, design it, organize short-term financing for it, build it, maintain it.
That is completely wrong.

Historically nearly all infrastructure in Europe was state owned (Railways, Telephon, Roads, Water distribution, Gas distribution, Electric Grids, Post/Mail, Power Plants etc.)

Since the mid 1990s most European countries started to privatize parts of the infrastructure. Some countries with success, some failed misserable in certain areas, e.g. the British railway system.

E.g. the French Power Company is still 85% state owned.

Re:Private only? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Show us where the spices and slaves are on Mars. Reality is a bitch.

Re:Private only? Really?

[Dutch Gun]

The problem with manned space exploration is that it's generally a bad idea.

That depends entirely on what your actual goals of space exploration are. I support both manned and unmanned space exploration, but for two entirely different reasons. Robotic missions are best for long range exploration and scientific discovery. Naturally, you can cut many, many expenses when you don't have to support a human life, or have to worry about a return voyage.

I want humans going into space for perhaps less logical reasons: an innate desire to explore and settle the universe. One could also argue, from a purely logical point of view, that there's no immediate benefit to gathering pure scientific knowledge about other solar bodies if it's not going to have an immediate practical impact on life at home. But then, we humans aren't purely logical creatures.

As such, I think it's probably best to consider ALL space exploration as a very, very long-term investment in our species, one in which we're unlikely to see a real payoff even in our lifetimes. In the very long term, humans are going to be better off if we can leave the planet and establish permanent, independent colonies on other worlds or in space. It's the exact same argument as learning more about the larger universe and how it works. I simply feel it's worth doing for its own sake.

Re:Private only? Really?

[slashdot_commentator]

Call me a communist if you need to, but I'd rather not see something as important in humanity's future as space exploration in *exckusively* private hands.

You are absolutely right. Right now, spece exploration is exclusively in private hands. That is because public sector funds are not being spent on manned space exploration. Look at all that (zero) progress.

On the other hand, the private sector is obviously more efficient in developing ways of making a profit than government. So, why not let the government offload non-useful enterprises like the ISS to the private sector? Let the private sector develop commercial infrastructure to sustain the ISS (for space tourism). Once the private sector has built its infrastructure, then they will be more amenable to improve the economic utility of its current infrastructure by taking on more profitable ventures.

Now (US) government can take away the billions of dollars spent every year sending people to the ISS (and maintaining the ISS) on actual space exploration, like a Mars mission.

Re:Private only? Really?

[slew]

Sigh... I think people need to study history more.

Let's just take German railway history as an example. Please google the Deil Valley Railway Company (one of the first joint stock companies in Germany). It wasn't until later that railway operation like these were taken over by the Bergisch-Markisch Railway Company and only later these private enterprises were nationalized by the the Prussian State Railway.

Nearly all the other public works in Europe have a similar history, sure they belong to the government, but that's either because they contracted a company to do it, or bought out (or nationalized) that company later.

Re:Private only? Really?

[slew]

And lest we leave out the "post office", please read this wiki entry on the Thurn-und-Taxis Post. This was a private company. Nearly all german states still continued to contract with this company to handle postal service after they were finally given the right to create their own postal service. Eventually this was nationalized by Prussia as well.

In contrast, in the USA, the postal service has been a government monopoly from the get-go.

I think people's general observation about the government owning everything in Europe somehow also assumes it started that way, which is far from the historical record. In fact, historically, it has often been the case that either private enterprises make the first move and government later nationalizing these endeavors OR "royal" governments handing a lucrative contract to some "nobelmen" who enrich themselves by spending public monopoly money in the name of the state to build their own private dynasty (eventually morphing into companies and getting nationalized as post-royal European governments gained political power and money).

By the way, the latter is happen in contemporary china ("nobelmen" in communist china were military and politburo folks) and is making some people really really rich (like their european dynasty prototypes)...

But the government "technically" owns it all either way...

Re:Private only? Really?

[djinn6]

Human colonization of space is meaningful because it's redundancy. If earth ever gets wiped out somehow, we have backups.

Re:Private only? Really?

[Dorianny]

The whole "public vs. private", socialism vs. capitalism debate is a big red herring when it comes to launch services. Because:

1) Most spacecraft are already built by private companies, either in part or nearly in whole; and 2) New private startups are offering far lower prices than the old traditional providers.

It's idealism vs. pragmatism. I don't care what ideology you have; new companies like SpaceX are vastly undercutting NASA and its traditional private partners (Boeing, Lockheed, etc).

Even though they are all building rockets doesn't mean they are trying to achieve the same thing. NK builds their rockets on a shoestring budget and sometimes they even manage to complete a flight path, quite a successful program for their purposes. NASA, the Air Force, and the various Spy agencies asked Being and Lockheed to build rockets that are reliable as possible and that's what they got, at eye watering costs of course. SpaceX and the new breed see a whole new type of a business plan, one where they are launching large numbers of mass produced satellites a month, if one doesn't make it than it is not so important. Of course NASA would be insane to take even a .01% higher chance of failure with the one of a kind, decades in development James Webb Space Telescope.

Re:Private only? Really?

[angel'o'sphere]

Obviously we are talking about times when "socialism" was a word to recon with.

Why you bring up "private companies" especially companies run by nobility before even a democratic and socialist regime exists is beyond me.

Give the money to Elon

[wisebabo]

His Interplanetary (Mars) Colonial Transport is so much more economical than the other proposed alternatives ($500,000 for a first ticket dropping to 140K later) that even if he's off by an order of magnitude it'll still be (much) cheaper.

Will he be able to pull it off? Frankly I have no idea but if you had asked me 10 years ago if he could get a 10 story booster to fly back to its launch pad and land, or build an electric car company worth more than GM or become one of the biggest solar providers in the U.S. I wouldn't have stopped laughing.

Give him a chance, it's almost assuredly better than you or I or certainly those idiots in Washington (maybe not the scientists but certainly their politician masters) could do

Re:Give the money to Elon

[Rei]

Every time you try something radical it's a toss of the dice. Musk's successes don't mean that everything he does will be successful. I generally am in agreement with the logic processes that lead him to each approach he wants to try to revolutionize new industries (it's generally just looking at them as a ruthless optimization problem, requiring as few new technologies as possible - for example, with the Boring Company: tunnel costs are roughly linearly proportional to boring cross section, while diameter is constrained by number of lanes, space per lane (which is much higher than the width of a car), shoulder/pulloff space, etc. So have cars ride on automated sleds to reduce space per lane, move them very fast to increase throughput and thus reduce the number of lanes (while simultaneously cutting travel times), cut the tunnel width in half, and you're cutting the boring cost by 75%, at the cost of having to engineer and build sleds; combine that with simultaneous casing rather than bore/stop/case, borehead improvements, etc, and push it down further if you can). But there's always a gamble with everything he does, and there can always be failure. Past success is no guarantee of future success.

ITS has an unusually large gamble involved, even by the standards of Musk's companies. Just to pick issue one of many: it's cryogenic composite tanks. Composites and cryogenics don't play well together; there have been attempts in the past, and they were failures. Musk is wanting to take us from "zero launch vehicles of any size using composite cryogenic tanks" to "by far the largest launch vehicle ever built, fully reusable up to a thousand times (for the booster), out of composites". That's a huge jump. Now, to be fair to them, there has been a lot of low level research in the past several decades, and attempts to improve the technology seem to have been going well. And it's also understandable that they'd want to move away from aluminum to composites - the strength to weight ratios are far higher, and strength to weight is everything when it comes to high payload fraction rockets. But it's a risky endeavour.

To get costs down as far as they want requires revolutionizing everything, from the pad to range services to telemetry to thermal protection to the state of the art on reentry design and so on down the line. They're also working on insanely high pressure, full flow staged combustion engines with a rarely used propellant mix, used up to a thousand times each with low maintenance (although their initial signs on that front are promising - your biggest concerns are erosion, and they're reporting that with the new alloys they're using erosion appears to be minimal). The scale of the challenge they're taking on with this one is much bigger than that they took on when founding SpaceX, or Solar City, or Tesla - and I'd argue bigger than Hyperloop and the Boring Company as well (although not as extreme as what they're taking on with Neuralink). Expect long timescales. Expect glorious, pad-destroying failures. Expect initial prices much higher than their ultimate goal, and long periods of time to get them down. And to fund it, their satellite venture is going to have to play out. Which it probably will (improving communications and satellite technology has thrown this opportunity in their laps - Blue Origin is trying for a piece of the potentially massive market as well), but it's another case of breaking-new-ground which throws another risk into the process.

But kudos to them for trying. With everything, really.

Re:Give the money to Elon

[Gavagai80]

Sure, one of these days he's going to use the notoriety gained from SpaceX, Tesla, etc to go found an online payments company where he'll make his real money.

Re:Give the money to Elon

[Dutch Gun]

Shooting rockets into space is "cheap advertising"? Damn. Someone should let McDonalds know about this so they can get to work building some McRockets. Surely cheaper than just buying advertising space, right?

Re:Give the money to Elon

[Areyoukiddingme]

ITS has an unusually large gamble involved, even by the standards of Musk's companies. Just to pick issue one of many: it's cryogenic composite tanks. Composites and cryogenics don't play well together; there have been attempts in the past, and they were failures. Musk is wanting to take us from "zero launch vehicles of any size using composite cryogenic tanks" to "by far the largest launch vehicle ever built, fully reusable up to a thousand times (for the booster), out of composites". That's a huge jump. ...

They're also working on insanely high pressure, full flow staged combustion engines with a rarely used propellant mix, used up to a thousand times each with low maintenance...

Ordinarily I'd agree with you. If we were talking about the usual suspects (NASA/Boeing/LockMart), they'd have a pile of paper at this stage and not much else.

But SpaceX has (had) a giant carbon fiber tank which they successfully burst tested to 2/3rds the design pressure back in November, then blew up testing with liquid nitrogen on February 17th 2017. (Judging by the pictures, it failed at the equatorial seam.)

They've built and tested a 1/3rd scale Raptor engine (which I presume you already knew, but other readers might not). It's the first full flow methane fueled rocket engine ever to be test fired, and only the second full flow design in history. (The first was Russia's RD-270, tested back in 1967.)

Having done those things is impressive enough, but the absurdly fantastic part is how rapidly they've done it. They were in Mississippi at the Stennis Space Center in late 2013 to refurbish and modify the E2 test stand to handle methane. Slashdot covered that. They were done with that process April 21st, 2014. Slashdot didn't notice that part. They used that test stand to validate their design and conducted the scale model test firing on September 26th, 2016, just 2 years, 5 months, and 5 days later. And it worked. They were so sure it would work, they didn't even bother with the customary 'burp' test to be sure it would ignite properly. That's a ridiculously rapid development process for any rocket motor, let alone for a design that's been done only once before in history and never for the fuel they selected. For comparison, development of the F-1 used on the Saturn V started in 1955 for the Air Force and it wasn't until 1965 that it underwent a successful test firing without destroying itself, after three years of self-destructive test firings.

SpaceX have definitely set themselves some very hard tasks, but their demonstrated ability to actually get to the test article stage, and from there to the production stage, and to do so quickly, is unmatched in modern times.

It's useless to send humans on Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

It's way more costly, risky and frankly, rovers can do an equivalent job.

We are still lacking the technology ...

[Ihlosi]

We are still lacking the technology for establishing even a somewhat self-sufficient colony on any celestial body.

Here's the short list:

Power. Except for the moon, Venus and Mercury, where solar power may be feasible, I don't see any option other than nuclear fusion for sustainably fulfilling a colony's power needs.

Flexible, small scale chemical engineering. We need a way to synthesize almost arbitrary chemical compounds out of simple precursors. Basically, a machine that will produce a spoonful of sugar out of CO2, H2O and power. Or one does of acetaminophen out of H2O, CO2 and NH3.

Flexible, small scale manufacturing. We need to reduce the size of the smallest manufacturing unit that is capable of producing a copy of itself as well as producing other useful outputs.

Medical technology. We need better ways of easily diagnosing and treating a number of diseases, especially cancer (which will be a problem on any extraterrestrial colony).

Launch-to-orbit technologies. Especially ones that don't involve the vehicle having to contain all of the fuel and reaction mass necessary to reach orbit.

Life-support and maintenance. The colony needs to remain habitable for decades or centuries, unlike our current and past space stations that were simply de-orbited when they became too dirty.

Easy and flexible genetic engineering of microorganisms, plants and possibly animals, to adapt them to the colonys needs.

Re:We are still lacking the technology ...

[FooAtWFU]

Power. Except for the moon, Venus and Mercury, where solar power may be feasible, I don't see any option other than nuclear fusion for sustainably fulfilling a colony's power needs.

Wilfully blind to nuclear fission, I see.

Re:We are still lacking the technology ...

[Ihlosi]

Wilfully blind to nuclear fission, I see.

No, not willfully blind. I have excluded fission after careful technical consideration. Nuclear fission requires very specific resources that may cost more energy to acquire and process on an extraterrestrial settlement that the amount that can be gained from them as fuel.

And a colony that depends on regular shipments of fuel from Earth fails one of the very basic criteria of self-sufficiency. It is an option during the ramp-up phase to self-sufficiency.

To be more precise: The technology needed is at least D-D fusion. Deuterium should be common enough on most celestial bodies (especially those farther away from the Sun than Earth) that self-sufficient energy supply is possible.

Re:We are still lacking the technology ...

[Ihlosi]

Where's your vision?

Design engineer here. I get paid for implementation, not for visions. I'd be really rich if it was the other way 'round.

Re:We are still lacking the technology ...

[tehcyder]

a colony that depends on regular shipments of fuel from Earth fails one of the very basic criteria of self-sufficiency

Duh, all we need to do is find a small asteroid made mostly of uranium, nudge it into orbit around Mars, then Bob's (*) your uncle.

(*) Robert Heinlein described this very scenario in one of his early science fiction works. Probably.

Re:We are still lacking the technology ...

[Ihlosi]

OK, so our two options are either a "fully self-sufficient, Earth-goes-pop-and-noone-notices" colony, or nothing at all? Can anyone say "false dilemma fallacy"?

It's not a false dilemma. A colony that does not eventually reach the point of self-sufficiency is a dead-end outpost. A colony that has to wait six months for critical equipment to arrive from Earth is a death trap. So is a colony without either sufficient evacuation capacity or tons of redundancy if anything goes wrong. And I doubt it is feasible to provide evacuation capacity for more than just a handful of people.

Sure, we could probably send a few people for a picnic and some digging to Mars. But staying there for years, or decades, requires more technology. Once on Mars, you're months away from either returning to Earth or receiving anything from Earth. Just consider medical issues that can probably wait a few days, or even weeks, but not months or years, for example

Getting along? What are you talking about.

[Ihlosi]

$3.5 billion, pfff. Imagine the leaps in science and space exploration we could make in no time if those silly humons just got along ..

Sorry, but a world where 7 billion people magically get along with each other is a fantasy.

It would be laudable, however, if humanity would just spend a little less money and effort on not getting along.

Re:Getting along? What are you talking about.

[Rei]

Curious how women and children are seen as a resource to you, equivalent to money, land, water, and other resources.

Rather than, you know, human beings.

or sell it

[4im]

Why not sell the US parts to either the international partners or to potentially interested private companies? I'm quite sure some of the partners would be interested in keeping the station running, it is certainly a question of money though.

There's been talk about putting a station around the moon, I'm not sure if it would currently be feasible to push the ISS that far - or even to a lagrange point (e.g. L5 as proposed in The High Frontier).

I'd certainly prefer to see NASA just staying on with the ISS, but getting a higher budget - it certainly needs it much more than the seemingly utterly wasteful US military complex.

Re:or sell it

[Rei]

ISS is not designed to operate out of LEO. There are plans to build a new station around the moon (in a rather curious orbit). NASA wants it to be effectively a Mars spaceship, just parked around the moon, while the Russians want it to be a permanent fixture around the moon. So the plan appears to be to develop it so that a "Mars spaceship" portion can undock from the rest at an arbitrary future date.

Who knows how far along the design and development will actually get.

As for buyers... great if you can find them, and sure, get whatever money out of it that you can. But let's not fall for the sunk cost fallacy here. In a way, building an ambitious space project is akin to buying a computer. It may be the shiniest sleekest piece of modern technology when you make it, and it serves your purposes, but it's quickly rendered obsolete by advancing technology. ISS is increasingly obsolete, with modern technology allowing for structures that are lighter, more maintainable, and more capable for a given cost. For example, compare ATK Megaflex or Ultraflex to the ISS's solar arrays. Furthermore, part of the whole point of building such things is to advance technology. You don't advance technology by continuing to use old technology and just incrementally improving it. That may be the best option for a period of time, but eventually you need to start over with a new design that incorporates the knowledge accrued since your last design.

Re:NASA to Buzz Aldrin

[geekmux]

NASA to Buzz Aldrin: Whatever. You won't be going on it, Mr Did-it-second.

Out of a population of over seven billion humans, a total of twelve of them have walked on the moon.

First, second, or last, it's one of the most exclusive clubs in the history of mankind.

Re:What's the obsession with mars?

[KozmoStevnNaut]

It's not so much about Mars itself (other than to say "hell yeah, we put people on another planet!"), as it is about the spinoff technologies it will create.

Going to Mars first = very stupid idea.

[Angeret]

Sending people off to Mars before we can prove survivability is a really dumb way to get people killed and possibly kill future off-world exploration. First, we need to prove we can sustain a colony on our nearest neighbour, the moon, and ONLY then start thinking about sending people off to another planet. Are the people who want a Mars colony *now* the kind of people who'd send a newly upright toddler off to drive a busload of other toddlers across the country? Probably.

Pick a spot on the moon suitable for a test colony, seed the area with redundant supply drops, THEN send a risk aware space trained construction crew to build the habitats. Spend at least 5 years learning how to live off-planet, working out all the bugs and expanding, then consider Mars. And FFS, make it a multi-national effort or there'll be so much political fallout it'll kill the project as sure as explosive decompression.

Was it a paid speech?

[zedaroca]

Only someone paid for that would claim we cannot afford 3.5 billion.
It's hard to consider any other points made when the lack of good faith has been established.

think about orbital staging

[v1]

The ISS is certainly a financial burden but it seems well-suited to assist with transit to mars. To get to mars will require a meat can that's too big to go up in one launch, so it's going to require multiple launches and some staging in orbit. The ISS is one of the few existing stations that could be used for staging right now. (chandra I suppose, but the ISS would be better?) Even if you tried minimal support with staging, it would be less failsafe in the event of a problem. The ISS has a return capsule mounted to it and loads of power for example. NASA loves redundancy.

There's also some discussion about making a warm-up mission like a return to the moon, again orbital staging and a place to return to without returning astronauts and gear to earth is a big plus. Then there's the matter of where the support crew are going to hang out during construction and testing.

Also, I don't know how much the US spends on the ISS vs the rest of the world - I assume the costs are at least split up a bit. If we do a private or US-only mars trip, no one else is going to chip in on the staging and orbital support like we're probably getting with the ISS now.

So if they're going to do without the ISS to save money, it's going to cost some money anyway to develop and launch the replacement staging support. It may end up saving a little money in the end, but is a much less attractive option at that point., Losing that huge orbital facility and all the science and other side-benefits it constantly generates, just to save a percentage of that 3.5B$. The first quote I see on "what did the ISS cost" returns $150B. You don't just abandon that kind of investment without a very good reason. I see his point, but I don't think it's sufficient justification.

Re:think about orbital staging

[Gavagai80]

The ISS has no real advantages for staging, and some disadvantages compared to using an empty spot in orbit. First, it's in an orbit designed for its own purposes at a low altitude -- not designed for transfer to Mars -- and this could increase fuel costs significantly. Second, it has no manufacturing or assembly capabilities and retrofitting it with such will likely be more expensive than launching those facilities directly. Third, the "advantage" of being an emergency fail safe can as easily be seen as a disadvantage of endangering 6 more lives unnecessarily if something should go wrong that damages the station, and a soyuz can be parked in any random orbit if you want one so there's nothing special about the ISS having a soyuz.

Also, the seals on the ISS are going to have failed long before we can reach Mars -- and it's not easy to fix.

Re:Should we allow ourselves off-world?

[Baron_Yam]

>We can't get it right down here, so why should we start branching out?

Whatever your definition of 'right'... because we'd have more opportunities to get it.

Because an unused system may as well not exist, so I prefer a universe with intelligence in it. Life has an inherent value greater than that of non-living material. Intelligent life has an inherent value greater than that of mindless life.

Re:NASA to Buzz Aldrin

[Shatrat]

Those cues aren't necessary if the joke is funny.

What the ISS does is important

[mhollis]

I met Buzz Aldrin some years ago when he was on a book tour signing books. Very nice guy. I respect him but I think he is wrong on this issue.

Firstly, right now, they are testing how fire works in micro-gravity on the ISS. Knowing how to deal with fire aboard a craft on the way toward Mars is essential research. Some people on earth don't know how to deal with a kitchen fire and training astronauts in necessary knowledge can prevent unnecessary deaths. Apollo 1 happened in my lifetime (as well as Buzz Aldrin's) and that was caused by fire in 1G. Apollo 13 had an explosion (fire) that could have killed three astronauts on the way to the Moon.

We continue to learn more about long-term weightlessness on the ISS. We continue to learn more about EVA (spacewalks) and repairs to the exterior of a spacecraft. We continue to learn about how the surface tension of various liquids works and we are learning about how to grow plants (that can process Carbon Dioxide into oxygen safely) in micro-gravity.

In short, the ISS is serving an excellent function.

What Buzz Aldrin needs to to is to start encouraging a priority change for NASA. When we mounted the Apollo program, NASA's budgets were very high. After all, we were in a space race. We did not achieve all of the planned Moon landings because NASA's budget was cut. Surely Aldrin recalls this. So, were I to meet up with the distinguished gentleman again, I would ask why we're spending so much on war that could be spent on NASA and engage many of the same companies who are lobbying for war contracts. We need to change the US priority from war to the peaceful use of much the same technology for exploration.

Oh, and Martian regolith may well be poisonous, so were we to begin colonizing Mars, we would need to address that.

How about we solve the radiation problem.

[Mysticalfruit]

How about we solve the radiation problem of sending people to Mars first. You know... having gone to the moon, those bright flashes you saw in your vision even when your eyes were closed... those comic rays are NOT good for humans...

Let's go to the moon first and figure out how to deal with the radiation problem first... then we'll go to Mars.