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Vice President Pence Vows US Astronauts Will Return To the Moon (engadget.com)
Before astronauts go to Mars, they will return to the Moon, Vice President Mike Pence said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday and in a speech at the National Air and Space Museum today. He touts "humans exploration and discovery" as the new focus of America's space program. This "means establishing a renewed American presence on the moon, a vital strategic goal. And from the foundation of the moon, America will be the first nation to bring mankind to Mars." Engadget reports: There have been two prevailing (and opposing) views when it comes to U.S. endeavors in human spaceflight. One camp maintains that returning to the moon is a mistake. NASA has already been there; it should work hard and set our sights on Mars and beyond. The other feels that Mars is too much of a reach, and that the moon will be easier to achieve in a short time frame. Mars may be a medium-to-long-term goal, but NASA should use the moon as a jumping-off point. It's not surprising that the Trump administration is valuing short-term gains over a longer, more ambitious project. The U.S. will get to Mars eventually, according to Pence, but the moon is where the current focus lies.
It'll probably take a bit more time than you kids have in office.
That is the whole point. Every president likes to make promises that don't come due till long after they have left office.
Unless the Trump administration is seeking increased NASA funding for this fiscal year, you can just ignore anything they say about space.
Not without their wives present.
As far as long term goals go, I wish that Venus would be put on equal footing with Mars. It really is an excellent, and far too neglected, destination.
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
Actually check the link that you replying to. Nobody is talking about habitation on the surface.
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
If this is to be the new focus of NASA, how about shoveling the money they need their way?
... anywhere Obama didn't want to (and vice versa). If Obama was for it then Trump (or perhaps more precisely his supporters) are against it. It doesn't matter if it is right or wrong, they have PRE-judged the situation. Why? Because, and I'll be frank, they're racists or to use a softer word, bigots and PREjudice is what you'll get from them.
That "and vice versa" part became an anti-Trump rant pretty quick. My impression is that the way US politics works neither side can concede that the other side was right. Either an issue is born bi-parisan or it becomes a Democrat/Republican thing that the other side must reject and treat with disdain. At best they might fumble the ball like when Trump tried to abolish Obamacare but under no circumstances could the Republicans admit that that they'd rather it stays. It still has to be some kind of terrible solution that only lives because we couldn't agree on how to throw it out. You don't see Democrats saying "that was a great Republican idea, let's keep working on that" very often either.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The point still stands. On Mars if something goes to utter shit and everyone dies you can at least go back and start with almost the same resources before it failed. On Venus it just sinks to the surface, and the sulfuric acid rain ensures anything that cracks on impact is destroyed.
As discussed in the above, it's incredibly difficult to actually "sink" a Venus habitat. Beyond how slowly large airships actually leak, the vast majority of the habitat's lift is dedicated to lofting the propellant on the ascent stage and (depending on the design decisions) the ascent stage itself. Meaning in the worst case you can ditch your ascent propellant (or even the ascent stage itself) and stay aloft on a tiny fraction of your peak design lift.
The easiest expansion design is via the "airworm" layout, where you have individual envelopes joined one after the next, each acting as lift cells, but containing their own propulsion, power generation, etc, and being able to function fully on their own. Even in the event of the total loss of one cell, there's no effect on the remainder.
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
There's a sweet spot you have to balance on on Venus - too low and you crash, too high and you burn up. This is due to material constraints - you're pretty much limited to teflon and other plastics as coatings due to the sulfuric acid atmosphere. Metals would corrode. If you go to high the plastics melt (or at least will become soft allowing any stresses in the hull to crack them open. If components of the structure bump into eachother good luck with that because a scratch on the coating will likewise cause corrosion of the inner materials in a matter of days. The plastics themselves will have a lifetime of about 20-30 years at best in those conditions even if nothing goes wrong, so you will have to constant be recoating everything to keep it stable, and as far as I am aware there are no hydrocarbons on venus to make more. All this equates to: if the colony fails for whatever reason there will certainly be political issues lasting upwards of a half-decade preventing another attempt, then you're shit is corroded and destroyed leaving you to start fresh when/if it gets restarted. On Mars it could all go to Hell, politicians could bicker about whether or not to allow it to happen again for another several decades, and if they finally restart it most of the equipment will need at most the dust wiped off and some welding to function again. Every colonization attempt in Human history has had some massive collapse associated with it, it's not a matter of if it happens but when for something as complex as colonizing another planet, therefore that must be built into the plan. Venus is not within our current technological capabilities (Hell, for that matter Mars isn't either given we still crack water for O2 and the plan on Mars is to crack Iron Oxide for O2, but at least that provides building materials as a byproduct and there's a viable pathway to it.) Venus is a much more difficult place than Mars.
It's funny you say Democrats don't often say Republicans have good ideas. Obamacare was originally a Republican proposal. The Republicans are falling over themselves to kill a healthare bill they created only because the Democrats were the ones to pass it.
I hope he delivers himself to the moon.
As far as long term goals go, I wish that Venus would be put on equal footing with Mars. It really is an excellent, and far too neglected, destination.
Long term Venus has an even bigger "But why?" problem than Mars. Neither Mars nor Venus is very human-friendly but Mars is far more robot-friendly. Opportunity is two days away from operating for 5000 days on Mars. Since you're on the surface you have the potential to start making fields of solar arrays, greenhouses, excavate underground structures, mining and refining, build roads and create a much more earth-like outpost or colony. Venus will essentially be an orbiting spaceship, you have what we send and it's very hard to see us ever expanding on that or utilizing the local resources on Venus.
At least not in any way that we couldn't do with remote control from earth, since it'd be remote control to the surface anyway. On Mars there's at least the potential for human/robot co-projects or mobile robot supervisors, you also don't need absurd equipment to get out and fix things or tow broken robots back to base for repairs. All of this is much further into the future than "just" sending a manned mission though. Not that we have a feasible plan to terraform either planet, so in that respect neither can become a new earth. But if the end goal is something the size of the base in Antarctica I'd go with Mars.
I'm hoping we'll start with something that's at least a semi-permanent presence like a new crew going every 2.5 years when the launch window is optimal, like if we've built the habitat and everything around it supporting it and all the technology to get people to and from Mars I hope we can use it more than once and it becomes more of a resupply/expansion. If we're doing it just to do it once it's a bloody expensive trip. With the Moon you could have people land, lollygag around a few days and leave, on Mars you're committed to make it work for years. And if you're doing years, then I think doing decades with resupply/rotation can't be that far off.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It wasn't connected to anything else in the article, just a bit of personal politics slipped in where it didn't belong. The editor should have stripped it out and explained the difference between journalistic and OpEd authorship.
Venus has over 2 orders of magnitude higher deuterium than Earth. Venus has much higher energy resources than Earth. Venus is located in a place with a strong Oberth effect (easier to launch probes to the outer solar system). Venus has fast transits to Earth. Venus is easier to live on than Mars (much more Earthlike) environment in the middle cloud layer). Venus's atmosphere acts like a "refinery" to some extent, baking / eroding chemicals out of rock and precipitating them at various layers of the atmosphere. Venus's surface has been exposed to very different (and generally favorable) enrichment processes relative to other places in the solar system. Venus has little to no overburden. Etc, etc, etc.
On Venus, your habitat is a solar array. Is a greenhouse. A truly massive one in both regards, with - unlike Mars - tons of sunlight and Earthlike pressures. There's no need to excavate anything. The planet "mines" itself of many numerous resources and passes them right through your propulsion.
**Facepalm**
Once again: We're not talking about the surface, and we're not talking about orbit. We're talking about the middle cloud layer.
There is a far better case to be made for local operators on Venus than on Mars, in that robots on the surface are much more time-limited on Venus than on Mars, so communications delays matter much more. On Mars, so what if your rover sits idle for a while? It's getting so little power from the sun that it needs time to charge (if it's solar powered) regardless. And speaking of rovers, both the habitat and its surface probes are vastly more mobile on Venus. With a Mars habitat, you're stuck using only the resources found near where you settled; the further away, the more onerous delivery of materials becomes. With a Venus habitat, the whole planet is yours from a single habitat (although it's easiest, in the beginning, to stick to the high latitudes of a single hemisphere).
Speaking of that, Venus has more frequent launch windows.
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
Unless the Trump administration is seeking increased NASA funding for this fiscal year, you can just ignore anything they say about space.
Normally I'd agree, but in this case I'm cautiously optimistic, if only because VP Pence seems to be a genuine NASA fanboi... he was nine years old for Apollo 11, and asked for a seat on the space sub-committee when he was elected to Congress. Pence was apparently the driving force behind Trump's decision to reconstitute the National Space Council which met yesterday for the first time.
Given the amount of disruptive innovation in the space industry lately (led by but not limited to SpaceX), now is a particularly opportune time to "innovate" on the policy side as well. Will the new NSC ever amount to anything more than a few high-profile meetings? Hard to say... As you rightly point out: No bucks, no Buck Rogers. But when a handful of billionaires like Musk, Bezos, and Bigelow are investing their own cash to bring new capabilities to the market, you really couldn't ask for a better time for government to get on the bandwagon too.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
I see three benefits:
1) Reinvigorate our Space capabilities. Every-shifting politics and evaporating budgets have left pretty far from what we were in our ability to actually field a viable space program. We have no shuttles, we rely on Russian equipment and/or to launch bother personnel and satellites.
2) Test runs for Mars. All the same challenges of landing a mars mission are present on the Moon, but being so much closer it makes a much better place to test out the systems. If we cant do the moon, a mars trip is suicide. We havent actually tried since the days where the most advanced piece of tech around was a hand-held calculator. It's probably worth trying again with today's tech.
3) Foundations of Industry. A trip to mars has a bunch of challenges that are specific to inter-planetary missions, while the R&D to get a working lunar base would have much broader and more local applications. I agree that the future of lunar travel is going to be in the private sector, but current private technologies (and current International Law) inhibit that for now. However, private companies working under government contract accomplishes much the same thing, without running afoul of legal implications of ownership and profit generation and whatnot.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
It was NOT a Republican proposal, it contained a fragment of an idea put forth by a Conservative think-tank.
Or maybe you're thinking of "Romneycare", where a rather liberal State legislature did the same thing. It still wasn't a Republican idea, it was just signed into law by a Republican governor whose veto would have been overridden.
That's not something that can be catalyzed. That's not to say that there's not terraforming possibilities - there are. But that's not one of them. :)
That said, the sulfuric acid is much more of a resource than a curse, at least for the foreseeable future. It's readily scrubbed and separated. Heating first separates out the water, then decomposes the H2SO4 to H2O + SO3. The SO3 can either be used as a conditioning agent to help nucleate free water vapour for further capture, or heated further over a vanadium oxide catalyst to yield SO2 + 0,5 O2.
It'd actually be easier to establish a colony on Venus if there was more of it, not less.
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
I have been hearing this for years. Call me when they take off.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.