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SpaceX's Mars Vision Puts Pressure on NASA's Manned Exploration Programs (marketwatch.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Entrepreneur Elon Musk's announcement late last month accelerating plans for manned flights to Mars ratchets up political and public relations pressure on NASA's efforts to reach the same goal. With Musk publicly laying out a much faster schedule than NASA -- while contending his vision is less expensive and could be financed primarily with private funds -- a debate unlike any before is shaping up over the direction of U.S. space policy. Industry officials and space experts consider the proposal by Musk's Space Exploration to land people on the red planet around the middle of the next decade extremely optimistic. Some supporters concede the deadline appears ambitious even for reaching the moon, while Musk himself acknowledged some of his projected dates are merely "aspirational." But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration doesn't envision getting astronauts to Mars until at least a decade later, a timeline NASA is finding increasingly hard to defend in the face of criticism that it is too slow.
Is a lonely number.
Two can be as bad as one It's the loneliest number since the number one.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
"increasingly hard to defend"
Seems to me the defence is quite easy.
"We're going to do it properly and safely and with some kind of guarantee."
In what world does NASA have less access to money than SpaceX?
The problem is that government agencies waste money. If you don't believe it, go work for any city, county, state or federal agency in the USA. Keep a critical eye out for waste and inefficiency. In less than 3 months, you will see why NASA cannot keep up with the private sector. If you cannot see it after 3 months, then you are a perfect fit. Enjoy your new job.
He says astronauts are going to be heroes and will die with honor.
0 G for a few months is not terrible. We have good data on this. This along with radiation is part of why most Mars plans favor fast trips. Once on Mars the radiation level is much lower (it is about halved outright simply because there's a big planet in the way, and one can then live underground without too much effort), and the gravity is then about a third of Earth's which is enough to probably deal with most of the issues from gravity. These aren't big issues.
NASA has plenty of money for science and exploration, they just need to stop wasting half their budget on Manned Spaceflight (that does neither).
How does Musk propose getting around the 0-g effects on the human body?
By harnessing the detrimental affects of radiation to just kill the travelers outright. 0.G effects are the least of your concerns here.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
So in order to save money for manned explorations to Mars, NASA should stop spending money on manned spaceflight? Are you reading your own words?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If he can't make his goals of Telsa 3 production, why should we believe he can put people on Mars...
Hey, the first schedule is always based on "If nothing goes wrong" planning. It's how industry always works....
Ah, reminds me of a conversation I had with a sales exec once who was yelling about how engineering (me) never cooperated with him on the schedule... I kept saying that the best delivery date we could hope for was 6 months later than he wanted (or as it turns out, what he promised the customer already w/o asking me). Then he hit me with the following question... "So what keeps you from doing this?"
My answer was "I'm not totally sure, but all the internal milestones are too aggressive and one or more of them will obviously slip. Something will go wrong." (which turned out to be a mistake).
He then asked "So what can you do if nothing goes wrong?"
I should have said "I can create lasting world peace!" or some such nonsense, but I had to admit that if *everyone* met their dates, I could too.
Problem was, I was the install team and was responsible for proving to the customer it all worked, so when the milestones from development and hardware slipped, my part of the schedule got shorter and shorter. Finally, I got blamed for the failure to deliver on schedule, not because it was actually my fault, but because it was my tasks that where not complete....
BTW... Can anybody guess when we got done? Would you be surprised to learn it was right at 6 months late?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I recommend you read what you wrote there. First off to your 0G claim: https://science.slashdot.org/s...
That's for a year in space. BFR trips to Mars will be around 3 months.
As for radiation, they only experience we have of sending people to an area that's not protected from the earths magnetic field is to the moon. We have no experience of keeping people outside of its bubble for months. And then it doesn't get much better once you get to Mars as Mars has no magnetic field to protect people. The planet may provide some protection at night from the sun, but nothing from all the background radiation. And in what world is building underground not "too much effort"? Here on earth it's a right pain in the ass where we can, you know, breath, and have established infrastructure.
Yes, we don't have that much experience with people in those sort of high radiation environments, and that could be a cause for concern. Some proposals have suggested having one's fuel tanks act as an additional barrier (and frankly, I suspect that the next version of BFR will have something like this or end up having a water-ice shield). It is true that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field, but this ignores the fact that as I pointed out, one has functionally about half as much radiation as in deep space simply because one is on a planet. As for building underground not being too much effort, I stand by that statement, although part of the disagreement there may come down to how we are defining effort; the point is that the level of resources needed is comparatively tiny. Note by the way, that major parts of why building on Earth is very tough is that almost everywhere we want to build has other things in the ground we want not damage (sewage, electric lines etc.) and again, higher Earth gravity also makes that tough.
And again to your claim about a third of earths gravity "probably" enough, first off, citation?
So, this is discussed with some reasoning in Zubrin's "The Case for Mars." Unfortunately, most of what we have to understand this is biological modeling rather than experiments. Unfortunately, the primary experiment which was going to at least get some useful data here, the Mars Gravity Biosatellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Gravity_Biosatellite was canceled. Before we do go to Mars we should probably do at least some experiments in this regard, and as satellite launch costs go down, this should be easier.
Then of course there's the whole, what do you eat when you get there? You can't exactly grab a hoe, till some ground and plant seeds. It's sort of really cold and a near vacuum. Or are you going to plant those underground as well? And this may come as a surprise, but plants don't deal with radiation too terribly well either.
The primary point under discussion was the issue of gravity which is what I was responding to. This is a distinct issue. Frankly, food issues actually strikes me as much more likely to be a serious problem, not because of radiation or the like, but because Martian soil is so high in perchlorates which are very unfriendly to conventional living organisms.
It's a tough issue. Any reasonable colonization plan calls for decreasing reliance on imports per capita over time as, one by one, they develop local production lines for various feedstocks and finished products. But at the same time, the population keeps growing. So the question is, how does the balance of these factors play out? As you rightly note, total independence will not happen any time remotely soon. But how quickly can the bulk be reduced relative to how quickly consumer demand on Mars grows?
The other aspect is questions of economic activity. There are a lot of potential avenues for revenue (VISA fees, tourism, exportation of rock for collector purposes (small market, but launch costs may be high), exportation of rock for the superpremium decorative stone market (large market, launch costs must be low), exportation of platinium-group metals (large market, launch costs must be low), exportation of gemstones (moderate to large market, launch costs may be high, but must find appropriate pegmatites), scientific research (studies of the planet, astrophysics research which requires physical separation of hardware elements over great distances, etc), telecommuting (can only pay for a small amount of imports, but if import needs are low enough it can be justifiable), exportation of premium agricultural goods marketed on their exotic nature (small to moderate market, launch costs must be low), and so forth. Venus has a few more avenues for profit than Mars due to its naturally enriched deuterium, energy resources, etc, plus lower overburden, more exotic surface conditions, ability to dredge, and easier mobility between locations - but offset by the hostile surface environment and the need to haul materials up to colony height (over 50km) each trip.
Whether the revenue at a given point in time on a given colony can pay for imports, that's a big question that requires detailed analysis.
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
Let him. He won't do it because he's all hot air. Great talker, horrible on the follow through. He'll soon understand why space exploration is costly, both in terms of dollars and lives.
SpaceX's solution is simple: go fast. They propose carrying smaller cargos at higher speeds rather than higher cargos at smaller speeds.
That said, Musk is a bit handwavy on issues related to gravity and radiation. He seems to genuinely believe it won't be a problem, but a lot of people in the field aren't so sure. At this point in time, we don't even know if a person can live on Mars for protracted periods of time without suffering problematic degeneration due to the reduced gravity. At least with Venus, gravity is close enough to Earth that we can say, "It's probably fine". With Mars it's more of a case of "We hope it's fine", while in the case of the moon it's "We're worried that it's not fine".
If gravity on Mars turns out to be too low for proper human health, then what? Genetically engineer / selectively breed humans for Mars conditions? Go through the expense of having all settlements be built into centrifuges? That sort of thing starts making you wonder why you'd even go to Mars in the first place rather than focusing on asteroids...
And even if it's fine to live there, there's very serious concerns about when people first arrive if they're not living in artificial gravity in transit. You launch a healthy young person into orbit, and when they come back a couple months later it's like they're an octogenarian. You can't expect these people to just "hit the ground running" on another planet. Again the shorter the trip, the better, but there's limits to how much you can shorten it with chemical rockets (and said limits are worse for Mars than Venus).
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
Wow, a month delay on a greatly accelerated production target, on a vehicle where the original plan wasn't to start production until "some time" in 2017, after explicit statements that the deadline was moved up in order to be able to hold supplier's feet to the fire because some would inevitably miss it. My teapot can hardly handle this tempest!
Maybe when we start doing similar concern trolling about future SpaceX missions we can have a tempest in Russell's teapot.
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
Where's the pressure for pine cone eating research Where is the "we choose to eat this bag of pine cones not because it is east, but because it is hard" spirit?
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
None. If it can't make things locally, it's not going to survive. You can't just ship a spare part to Mars overnight when it breaks.
Tesla cars don't exist? Solar roofs? If that's all vapor then it is truly spectacular vapor.
He's from South Africa, not Russia.
Manned spaceflight produces very little science, and most of it is science about how humans live in space.
But it's not really true. Congress need to stop telling NASA to waste billions of dollars a year building rockets that will cost billions of dollars per launch and have no funded payloads. Then NASA could afford to do something useful.
Musk's problem isn't getting people to Mars... it's that he's not sinking any R&D funding into keeping them alive once they get there, while mouthing off about establishing a significant permanent colony.
We still don't know if a mammal can remain healthy in 0.38g, nor where we'd get all the resources required, how to do much with the ones we're pretty sure are there under local conditions, or how to maintain a closed biosphere indefinitely.
I'd love to see a Mars colony, but first I think we need to do something stupidly simple... like send a rover-sized box to Mars with a few lab mice in it to see what happens. And maybe make a few serious major efforts at artificial closed biospheres here on Earth.
Until we know how to live on Mars, Musk's technology is better for sending more rovers than humans.
Using old rocket tech will not result in new technology filtering down through industry like it did before. After 60 years we already have just about all the secondary tech we are going to get out of rocket based spaceflight initiatives. Now is the time for physics research on non-relativistic propulsion and next gen nuclear reactors for self sustaining permanent outposts. I will not advocate banging our heads against the rocket wall for the sake of being able to say that we clawed our way to Mars and achieved nothing else in the process. We are not yet capable of manned exploration for the sake of exploration itself, and that's what needs to change. Stop pretending rockets are acceptable to a space faring race, they are inefficient, massive, unsafe, unreliable, and primitive. DEAL WITH IT.
From TFA: But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration doesnâ(TM)t envision getting astronauts to Mars until at least a decade later, a timeline NASA is finding increasingly hard to defend in the face of criticism that it is too slow.
That criticism largely comes from the legions of ill-educated members of the Cult of Elon. Not that being ill-educated is all that notable in the space fandom community, it's practically a defining characteristic. Another defining characteristic is their credulity and inability to distinguish the gap between plans and power points and actual flying hardware.
Much of the rest of the criticism comes from lazy journalists - bashing NASA or worshipping Musk is great for clicks. A two-fer is manna from heaven.
And there's the folks who don't grasp that NASA isn't an independent organization - it's part of the Executive branch of the US Government. It's only going to go to Mars if it becomes Government policy and Congress and the Administration are behind the concept and fund it.
And on top of all that is Musk's (in)famous overpromising and under or late delivering. He's an optimist, but not always realistic.
While I have no doubt that Musk and SpaceX will eventually get to Mars... There's simply too many technologies and too many mission techniques to master for a mission to be likely in the timeframe he proposes. Yes, they're already building the BFR - but while the booster is the most visible and sexy piece of the system, it's only one piece. (And one that hasn't flown yet.) Notably absent from Musk's discussions, beyond vague hand waving of intent, is any mention of progress on the flight hardware. It'll no doubt be built on a modified Dragon, but that's just the hull, again one part of the overall system.
[Dons flame-retardant suit in preparation for the arrival of legions of cultists.]
Then of course there's the whole, what do you eat when you get there? You can't exactly grab a hoe, till some ground and plant seeds.
The food that arrived long before you did? Every proposal about sending humans to Mars involves sending a supply cache well ahead of the humans, and making sure it lands safely, before humans ever launch. The US military and NASA both know a great many things about preserving food for long periods of time. NASA research into the topic continues to this day. It's something that can be done on the ground easily enough, which is mostly what NASA does these days.
People visiting Mars is much like people visiting the polar regions of Earth, or the highest mountains. You send supplies out ahead, and follow along behind. Except this time, robots can take the supplies ahead, instead of an advance party of other humans. Point is, the technique for getting people into and out of inhospitable places has been well understood for hundreds of years. Logistically, a trip to Mars is no different than a trip to the peak of Everest. Do it badly and people will die, sure enough. Do it right, and everybody is fine.
Elon Musk's own presentation to IAC this year made sure to point out that there would be 5 cargo-only launches in advance of the first human launch. Each of those launches could carry as much as 150 metric tons. 750 metric tons is a lot of sandwiches.
You're an idiot if you think NASA doesn't have way more money than SpaceX does.
Question: How many CENTURIES will it take for a Mars colony to stop needing massive subsidies from Earth? We need a discussion on who is going to pay the many Trillions of dollars needed to support this.
Nobody can answer that question. We don't have a functional transport method, we don't know the complications of living on Mars, we don't know the feasibility of using local resources which is why we need to do experiments. Perhaps we send a greenhouse and it'll over-perform massively like the Mars rovers and become a semi-permanent food supply. Perhaps it'll die and the astronauts will have to eat MREs until they can return home. There's a theory we can produce methane fuel using the CO2 in the atmosphere, initially with hydrogen from earth, later possibly with water ice and so on.
That said, I don't think anyone has a business plan for any exportable resource so it's probably a net negative for a very long time. But how big of a cost, that's a pretty open question. And it's a bit like putting the cart before the horse, we'll expand the Mars presence if the costs make it feasible. For now nobody's talking about a presence bigger than that we can just get up and leave, if we start having so many people on Mars that pulling the plug is non-trivial that's way into the future.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
> Manned spaceflight produces very little science
What criterion do you base your hypothesis on? What are you defining as "science"? What about the technologies produced/influenced/spun off from research done for Manned Space Flight? Pacemakers, for example, utilize several technologies developed by NASA engineers for the manned spaceflight operations.
I wouldn't blame it on war though...we never would have gone to the moon to begin with had it not been for enormous cold war spending. Competition tends to do things like that. War tends to do things like that.
NASA for decades has been primarily a program to send pork back to all 50 states, by using cost-plus contracts and making sure that as many congress-critters as possible can point to jobs they brought to their district. One report put ARES/SLS spending at $19B to date, and Orion at $13B to date. So we've spent nearly half the adjusted cost of the Apollo program with no hardware in flight yet. And the same report puts NASA overhead at 72% of Orion cost. NASA isn't really trying to return us to space as much as they're trying to run a jobs and pork program. Now I love NASA, have since I was a kid. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize an out of control government program thats been taken over by MBAs and politicians.
...competition is good.
On the other, the current form of racing to do this or that before anyone else is going to end up costing someone their life.
I would suggest we don't really have anything to prove these days and that their needs to be far more cooperation between all the various entities building and launching space vehicles.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
So what exactly are these gross inefficiencies at NASA, how does SpaceX do it better, and why can't those fixes get applied at NASA? You'll need to do better than "it's gubmint" to sound like you aren't talking out of your ass. Please, amaze me with your knowledge of the problems at NASA. If there's some actual insight you have to these organizations, spit it out, that's why I come to Slashdot.
I'd also like to know the methodology you used to gauge that NASA "can't keep up". Because as things stand, SpaceX hasn't done much more than retread the ground that state-sponsored space programs covered 50 years ago. Musk talks big and sets dates, but having people on Mars by 2025 sounds about as realistic as the Model 3 production goals being met this month. There may come a time when space travel gets commodified to the point where state-sponsored programs are irrelevant, but we aren't there yet, and I doubt we would have left Earth at all in the absence of the US and/or Soviet space programs.
NASA has 'access' to far more money. NASA also doesn't have to EARN that money - it's given to them. Now, they DO have to document everything in triplicate and form a committee on a regular basis to discuss if they need more committees or more paperwork or both and then put all the suggestions into practice to test which is the most efficient and then have a round of committees discuss further...and hopefully at that point they will be able to order lunch.
SpaceX is a for-profit company. They don't get free money handed to them to go out and do something. Even when they partner with the government, NASA, etc. and get federal money it's in return for access to the tech they're developing.
I do agree that NASA has not been funded the way it could be BUT we're better off that way. NASA is a dinosaur and so mired in paperwork and oversight that they are hugely inefficient to the point that they need to be put out to pasture. SpaceX is doing what NASA never could (functionally reusable launch platform) and the reason is not complex: NASA is forced to make large compromises for political reasons in order to obtain the needed approvals to get it's funding. An example: The Space Shuttle SRBs are made from multiple joined segments sealed with giant o-rings (sidebar: challenger explosion) because the factory given the contract to make them (and thus that state's senator agreeing to sign the funding bill) was much too far away to ship a single-piece SRB. So instead of selecting a company to build them near enough to the launch platform that they could be transported, a major design compromise was created which ultimately allowed for the challenger accident to happen.
SpaceX has far fewer limitations. They have to kiss some ass to get launch permits and other things but nowhere near the level of BS that NASA deals with. I don't blame NASA though - I blame all the self-centered politicians and their constituents who destroyed NASA decades ago.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
In what world does NASA have less access to money than SpaceX?
Possibly this one.
NASA has access to more money than SpaceX. NASA--the National Aeronautical and Space Administration--spends some of it's money on aeronautical research. They also spend money sending robot probes to various places. They also spend money on the International Space Station.
Yes, I'm pretty sure if you gave NASA the money they have now and told them to can all that other stuff and just worry about putting a man on Mars, things could get done much faster. Is that a good idea? Nope.
According to the sci-fi I have read and watched, Martian colonization has never ended well.
Many spare parts would just be fabbed on-site. 3D printing (and the next gen of multi-material micro/nano-scale assembly) is robust enough to cover a lot and related cutting/milling/grinding/shaping/finishing equipment is ripe for a generational improvement and consolidation. It's probably one of the most important techs that will come out of a mars colony project and key to short term survival.
But for all that you need feed stock. Raw iron, steel, gold, carbon, and so on. Sourcing those locally is the second major challenge and key to medium-long term survival.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
At this point in time, we don't even know if a person can live on Mars for protracted periods of time without suffering problematic degeneration due to the reduced gravity. At least with Venus, gravity is close enough to Earth that we can say, "It's probably fine". With Mars it's more of a case of "We hope it's fine", while in the case of the moon it's "We're worried that it's not fine".
Well, when you consider the extreme differences in mass from the anorexic to the morbidly obese I think a healthy person will survive a few years on Mars, it's only 0.38g but compared to 0g it'll all hang like it's supposed to hang and flow the way it's supposed to flow. I'd probably also consider wearing a weight vest/bracelets/shoes to get a more earth-like strain, it wouldn't be quite like on earth but combined with an exercise program my guess is you'd do better as a Mars astronaut than an Earth couch potato. Whether it's really feasible to live on Mars is another story, but I don't think it's a big issue for an initial mission. The worst part might actually be back on Earth once you hit 1g again, but hopefully NASA got decent health insurance...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"What are you defining as "science"? "
You know. Science.
'Spinoff' arguments are almost entirely bogus, because if you wanted those technologies, you could have just spent the money on developing them and forgotten the whole man-in-spam-can thing.
Ah, Rei, always to be counted on to apologize for Musk...
With regard to radiation: we should probably only send women. For the Y chromosomes we should send frozen sperm in a shielded and lead lined vault to protect from mutations. This way only half the genome sent would be exposed to the high radiation levels. Alternatively, a big lead lined capsule for men and women, but to get enough shielding would be impractical.
NASA has 'access' to far more money.
NASA also has a much wider remit.
NASA--the National Aeronautical and Space Administration doesn't manufacture that much. They manage projects, contract out to subcontractors and then assemble the stuff and then put the NASA sticker on it. Their strength is in having subject matter experts, long term view, strong project management, strong quality and risk management (some say too strong), and lots of funding (no fear of going bankrupt). What they do is define interfaces to make sure everything will fit together, manage timelines etc.
SpaceX on the other hand is very vertically integrated (read any of the stories how Musk started SpaceX).
SpaceX are the first ones to demonstrate reusable boosters, if that's not new ground, what is? The whole industry considered reusability impossible. It's key to bring costs down. The entire launch industry is scrambling to catch up with SpaceX.
Yes, Musk sets dates - it's important to set goals and deadlines - how else can you meet them if they are not set and known? One of the key criticism against NASA (by Zubrin for example) is that their goals are too far out, exposing them to political trends.
Who actually cares if Musk misses a goal by a year or two? We know that his goals are ambitious - he does this to put his company under pressure to try and meet these goals.
Still, I believe if SpaceX is two years late (which I expect they will) he'll still be 10 years faster than any government.
Their entire budget is certainly big - problem is most of it is earmarked for many ongoing projects and there is little left for discretionary use.
Moreover, now they have to fly to the moon first before they can send people to Mars: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a...
There is no "pressure" needed for anti-aging because there is a strong market pull (demand). Just ask your wife how much she's spending on anti-aging lotions etc.
Joking aside - there have been tremendous advances in extending life expectancy worldwide: https://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo
You may educate yourself here with more updated numbers: https://www.gapminder.org/
It's actually not a big hurdle, because nobody on Mars would be foolish enough to declare political independence before being economically (or materially) independent. If they did that the host country could just stop sending supplies.
There will be a long time before you can manufacture everything on Mars (or in space). Most notably it won't make sense to produce computer chips on Mars since (i) they won't need many, (ii) chips are relatively low mass items, easy to ship from earth, (iii) chip fabs are relatively big and very specific facilities that only break even if you produce many millions of identical chips.
Having said that I would probably be natural if Mars became a somewhat politically detached entity from their host countries. At minimum they'd ask for "no taxation without representation" - I believe there's a precedent for that.
Why the United States? I'd be surprised if they were the only country going for Mars. In fact, I'm fairly sure that China will push for Mars too, or maybe even get there first if the US let's it slip. They are already planning to send a rover in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Such big projects don't come without a political or at least economic agenda China.
Countries like Luxemburg are also preparing their coffers - excuse me: laws: http://www.spaceresources.publ...
It's quite possible that Mars or Moon gravity are better for human health than Earth gravity. Less stresses, less wear and tear all around. The issues we have with microgravity are mostly because the human body evolved with the expectation of things naturally flowing downward, and that's certainly not an issue on Mars.
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"The whole industry considered reusability impossible."
To be fair, they didn't consider it impossible, they considered it to not make economic sense. Boeing, for example, proposed a reusable Saturn V first stage in the 60s, but it would have required at least sixty launches to repay the development costs.
Sovereignty is not a hurdle. The outer space treaty already forbids the USA or any other country from laying claim official claim to any part of Mars. For the foreseeable future, Mars colonies will be effectively controlled by Earth powers because they can't sustain themselves without outside help. Once they can, unless they discover some sort of amazing new precious material not available on Earth, I think you'll find governments unanimously say "Alrighty then, have fun with your self-rule and try not to die!"
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WTF is "Non-relativistic propulsion"?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Elon Musk and NASA have different goals, hence the different timelines: NASA wants to send astronauts to Mars and bring them back alive.
As usual, those who are unable to refute the facts, stoop to attacking the messenger.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Or you send fertilized embryos in a lead jar, and implant them in the women as required. That means the kids have less radiation damage, and you get a better genetic variation as you can use a different mother for every kid.
We need a launch loop or an orbital ring to make space travel cheap. Once we have that the total flight cost to Mars is less than flying across the Atlantic, even using old rocket tech.
Logically, this makes by far the most sense, but if this doesn't raise the mother of all morality questions, I don't know what does!!! Way to think outside the box. There's probably the basis for one amazing movie script here.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I would assume the poster means some type of propulsion that avoids time dilation or such. Like the "Alcubierre warp drive ", some type of stabilized wormhole, or such. You know, stuff that NASA isn't really researching due to the fact that these are still mostly science fiction. Now, I DO think that NASA should be putting FAR more research into tech like VASIMR, and NASA should give White's "warp-field interferometer" experiments some actual orbital time somehow.
As for "next-gen reactors", we're STILL cleaning up the last site used to make the fuel. For the past several years we've been salvaging fuel from decommissioned nukes; and only recently have started working on building new production facilities to make new plutonium-238. It's highly toxic and not easy to work with. This isn't something that Elon could do, no country on the planet would let a private individual set up a processing lab for this.
I propose a test for any new unconventional propulsion. Bring it to ISS, and raise the orbit. Even a little bit, we can measure that orbit very precisely. Call me back after that works, please. Not interested until it does.
Bruce Perens.
The pine cone industry is the backbone of this country, a pillar to its communities and a staunch defender of what makes this country great. We here at Loblolly Technicorp just donated a park bench last week and today made a meaningful contribution to a local youth sports team. We do this not because we must, but because we believe that children our our future, and all of us need to be proper stewards of our environment. Don't fear Big Pine Cone; we're just like you.
And besides, we own your senator, so....
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
and return him safely to earth then we can talk. Yes, it's been done before but can we do it again? Can we sustain a human(s) in a sealed spacecraft outside the earth's magnetic field? Can we build a spacecraft that can land on another celestial body? And take off again? crashing is easy, getting it to fly again is hard. I admit I haven't thoroughly studied these plans (much of it none of us have access) but so far it doesn't add up. I see lots of flashy graphics, I have yet to see a habitat module that can sustain a crew for months (years) during transition and no lander. Artwork of Red Dragon landing on Mars doesn't convince me. Much of this is funded by tax payer money, some of it is mine. Please make it easy for me to see how this all works. They did it for Apollo, as a child I can see how all the pieces (launch vehicle, TLI, LOR, etc) work together. disadvantage of Apollo is it was specifically made to beat the Reds to the Moon but limited use for anything else.
mfwright@batnet.com
See, I hadn't remembered the degree to which NASA farms out to outside aerospace contractors. Having everything vertically integrated certainly promotes financial efficiencies if nothing else. Since nationalizing the whole industry isnt a good idea, it seems there is an opening for a company like SpaceX to get started.
NASA has also been lacking leadership and vision for the past few decades. However, for planetary-scale projects, I think some level of centralized planning is not just a good idea, but critical to the success of real advancements like colonizing mars. What happens when someone other than SpaceX wants to go? What happens when conflicts over mineral rights gets weapons get sent up? For a project like that you can't have too many actors pulling too many different ways. What could be done is for the country to subsidize a company like SpaceX (don't we already via contracts and tax breaks?) and in turn get some degree of input into these projects. That way you get the industrial/financial benefits of how SpaceX works with some measure of insulation from market forces that might cause the company's focus to shift to something other than advancing humanity.
I am talking about LFTR and other associated reactors which compliment it. LFTR solves the main problems with nuclear power, meltdowns (passive safety), cooling failures and inefficiencies, proliferation risks, fuel costs and proprietary supply, waste type and volume, and burning old "waste" fuel which is mostly useful fuel and not waste at all. Here's the original presentation on LFTR by NASA engineer Kirk Sorensen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Large companies waste money too. If you don't believe me, you should try working for one for a few months, look for waste and inefficiencies and report the results. The reality is that humans are not very good at running complex shows.
one person eats about 2000 pounds or about a metric ton of food a year. Water can presumably be largely recycled and some can be found on Mars, so we can ignore this. So you are right, this is probably adequate for a while.
I'd be cautious with subsidizing - it has downsides. See, Dieselgate actually goes back to the German government giving tax breaks on diesel fuel to help transportation; it led to private car owners demanding diesel cars and manufacturer following that demand. So in the end the entire German car industry was led into the wrong direction.
NASA is very good at exploration. Actually what they did with all the probes they sent to Mars and the other planets is to lay the groundworks for going there. Now that we know there's water on Mars, we can actually seriously consider going there. This exploration is a very valuable service and since the information provided to everyone it's less likely to create wrong incentives.
If someone other than SpaceX wants to go, by all means they should. Whether it's smart to replicate the effort - probably not in the beginning. Would be smarter to team up - SpaceX does the transportation, another company the spaceport, another the stations etc. There are so many gaps to be filled, no need to step on each others feet. It's one reason why Musk keep drumming for his mission - he needs collaborators.
Don't think there will be conflict over mineral rights. There's tons of resources in space. The asteroid belt has more than enough.
Main problem is now how to jumpstart the entire business. It probably needs SpaceX leading the pack and just creating the demand.
But I'm pretty sure staying there will not be economical perhaps for centuries. Even "The case for Mars" says so. Humans are not very good at planning for centuries.
Honestly I don't really think the moon is a good place for NASA; they've been there and done that. They shouldn't even be bothering with earth either because the tech has advanced so well that now the private sector is doing well enough there...And leave the climate science to the NOAA; for space based observations, they can obtain everything they need cheaper and faster from the private sector than NASA can do right now. NASA should be setting its sights on deep space, including how humans might safely reach deep space. Mars is a good place for them because it's pushing their boundaries in a healthy way because NASA is the only space organization with enough money to do grandiose things like that.
Meanwhile, let the private sector focus on what it does best: Make big things become more practical so that they're available to the masses. By that I mean they can lower the cost of spaceflight. Reusable rockets are a wonderful example of that in action. NASA tends to not focus on that because whatever they need, they'll just throw a lot of money at it with little concern for waste. NASA already proved that we can land on the moon; we don't need them to prove it again, so the next logical step is to make it practical, so that is a good place for the private sector. The possibility of tapping raw materials and energy from the moon is a great profit motive.