Except, in this case, it sounds like Congress just gave them the money without NASA requesting it. FTFA:
Over the last several months, NASA has increasingly emphasized development of a habitation module that could be tested in cislunar space in the 2020s. That module could then be used for human missions to Mars that NASA hopes to carry out some time in the 2030s.
I'm not the biggest space-geek in the world, but I do follow a couple of weekly podcasts, and both/r/space and/r/spacex on reddit, and this is the first news I've heard of this 'emphasis on development of a habitation module.' Of course they have the BEAM module going up next year, but that's been in the works for years already. In any case, I don't think this particular boost to NASA's budget was spurred by the sort of sci-fi fan uprising, whipped up by NASA propaganda as you describe.
FTFA: "flight time of six minutes.... an excruciating six hours to recharge the batteries."
The ArcaBoard supposedly has a software-limited top speed of a leisurely 12.5 mph, and you’ll only be able to enjoy a flight time of six minutes. That’s right; after six minutes, you’ll be sitting back on solid ground. And if you want to recharge for another six minutes of flight time, you’ll have to wait an excruciating six hours to recharge the batteries. However, if you’re simply willing to simply throw money away, you can purchase the optional ArcaDock, which will set you back another $4,500. The ArcaDock reduces charging times down to a mere 35 minutes.
I think the problem here is that NDT is just not keeping up to date on the 'New Space' sector. Investors are just starting to realize that space is an option. You can invest $10b now on a copper or gold mine, with an eight year payout, or you can invest $6b on an asteroid mission with a 15~20 year payout. To a big-ticket investor, these two opportunities look very similar.
I wonder what he'll say in a few weeks (or months) after SpaceX 'sticks the landing' on their first booster recovery, which will forever change the economics of space flight.
My guess is he just spends too much time rubbing elbows with 'establishment' types in the space business, and doesn't fully appreciate the revolution taking place below the 'mainstream' radar.
the atmosphere really is.... too thick to light a retro rocket at high speed.
SpaceX claims that their SuperDraco thrusters are capable of igniting during Mars EDL, at supersonic speeds. Of course, we won't know for sure until they actually do it, but given their accomplishments to date, I see no reason to doubt them.
Bub Zubrin's Mars Direct plan is the most likely scenario, at least in the next few decades. Eventually someone will build large-scale cyclers as you describe, but not until mining of asteroids and the moon gets underway, making materials available in space. Judging by his past statements, Elon intends to land people on Mars before that is likely to happen, which most likely means he intends to do it with the Falcon Heavy, at least for those first few 'flags & footprints' missions. If that is so, then they'll most likely use some variation on Zubrin's architecture. In fact, Zubrin himself has outlined a mission (which calls the 'Trans-Orbital Railroad') using Falcon Heavies.
We know very little about SpaceX's upcoming Mars Colonial Transporter, except that it is intended to transport 100 people to Mars with each flight. It's highly unlikely that they'll make that their first trip to Mars, which means they'll do it with Falcon Heavy first, and that means Mars Direct.
As for when...? I reckon they'll get boots on the ground sometime in the late 2020's.
Why isn't this automated? I know... they say it's a test run, so certain safety features are disabled, but ffs, can't you at least find an operator who knows wtf he's doing? This is just sad.
You'll have to ask Freeman Dyson about that, but IMO, after a couple of generations of humanity living in "spinning donuts" in orbit, perhaps the cultural norms would change, and some people would be drawn to the frontiers, as has been our experience for many centuries. Why did Shackleton go to Antarctica? Why did Hillary climb Everest? Because it's there.
150 years ago, a gold-pan and a shovel (and a mule) was all you needed to trek west and find your fortune. Who knows what the equivalent of that kit will be in forty or fifty years? There could be abundant reasons for making that trip. We'll just have to wait and see.
Fair enough, and I alluded to that with my EM-Drive comment. But that brings up the "leapfrog" problem: "popsicles" might wake up after 20 years en route only to be greeted at their destination by people who arrived five years earlier with the newly-discovered "magic carpet" propulsion system. And as TFA points out, by the time we even get close to thinking about such decisions, our robotic exploration tech will have advanced to the point where sending humans out there for pure science would be a needless waste of resources.
Relativistic travel is an interesting issue, especially for travel within the solar system. For example, let's say you're traveling from Earth to the Kuiper Belt, a distance of roughly four or five light-hours, and you make the trip at 2% of C (including acceleration and deceleration at either end), giving you a (subjective) trip time of a few months. How much 'objective' time would have passed back home? A year maybe? That would probably be acceptable to most people, especially if you could still send messages back and forth along the way. (It would be weird to watch weeks go by in days, but I reckon folks could adjust to that.)
Ultimately, we're not arguing against each other here. I acknowledge the fact that technological advances will (most likely) extend our reach exponentially in the coming decades. But I still think TFA is largely correct in framing the next century or so squarely in the Earth-Mars neighborhood.
Those are all things that the settlers would have been doing on their original island.
Most of the tech needed for a colony in the Kuiper Belt will have been perfected decades earlier in Earth orbit, on the moon, Mars, and the main-belt asteroids. The definition of "habitable" in this context simply means having enough of the raw materials available from the periodic table, and the knowledge and tools to create a functioning ecosystem capable of sustaining human life.
Obviously, no one would dream of building a colony that far out unless there were already hundreds of similar ones already thriving in what TFA calls "home" (ie: the space between Earth and Mars).
Freeman Dyson gave an interesting talk a couple of years ago, speculating about the next few centuries of exploration and settlement. He envisions colonies in the Kuiper Belt in a couple hundred years, but not much beyond Mars for the next 50 or so. And he anticipates an "island hopping" model of interstellar expansion, similar to the Polynesian settlement of the Pacific. Anyway, it's an interesting talk. (34 min)
Bill Boeing said, about 100 years ago: "We are embarked as pioneers upon a new science and industry in which our problems are so new and unusual that it behooves no one to dismiss any novel idea with the statement that ‘it can’t be done!’"
It's a stretch to claim that humans will never travel beyond Mars, but human settlement beyond Mars is a different argument with a much better case to be made, at least until we come up with radical improvements in propulsion. People may be willing to spend months in a tin can to get somewhere, but years is another matter. Some explorers might visit the orbit of Jupiter or Saturn, but anything farther out would be an entire career in one trip. And there's not much in the way of useful resources out there that can't be found in the much more convenient asteroid belt.
Then again, maybe they'll crack the secret of the EM Drive, next week, and we'll be zipping around the solar system by 2030. That would be cool, but I'm not holding my breath...
Nostalgia is a huge market. (Surely you've seen Pawn Stars? American Pickers?) A few years ago, one of my employees, a 20-year-old, bought a Nikon FM2. I said, "What are you doing with a film camera in this day and age?" She just wanted to "go retro" and learn photography the old fashioned way.
You seem to be conflating my two queries. I don't wan't VHS-quality video, I want 35mm film-quality stills from the lenses and bodies currently residing in my basement. As others have noted, there have been medium- and large-format image sensors available for decades, but they cost many thousands of dollars. I ought to be able to get a 35mm "consumer" version for a few hundred bucks. As long as it had 1080p resolution or better, I would buy it. And I'm sure there are a lot of other old-timers like me who would buy it too.
True enough, but maybe I don't want to just toss all my old camera bodies. I reckon that if somebody came up with a digital replacement back for a few standard brands, they could make a killing off of old geezers like me.
Why don't we have a plug-in digital replacement for VHS/Beta tapes? With modern tech and materials, it wouldn't be that hard to devise a digital interface to the old helical-scan mechanism in the standard cassette formats. Not much of a market, for sure, but if they're still making tapes, apparently somebody is still using them. Might make a good kickstarter project for someone...
Another in the same vein... why can't I get a digital-imaging back for my old 35mm Nikon cameras? Seems like I should be able to get something like that for a few hundred bucks in today's economy.
Who needs compatibility? The "standard" you're talking about is the rules of the road, as we all experience them. The only thing missing is person to person communication... eye contact, waving someone to go first at a 4-way stop, etc.. Eventually, it would also be nice to have cars that can talk to each other well enough to safely form "draft trains" to conserve energy, but that will require some changes to the law anyway. In the meantime, since Elon is pals with the Google guys, I wouldn't be surprised if they're already talking about that sort of thing with each other. On the contrary, I'd be surprised if they weren't.
This is true. And the need for a vehicle becomes more apparent as you get to cities smaller than that... say, Douliu or Pingdong... Still, I think Taiwan is largely on the right track in this regard. (Politics is another kettle of fish...)
But how DO you shop when you need more than a carton of milk?
When the supermarket is a 5-min walk, you just make multiple trips as needed. I hit a supermarket once or twice a week, and hit a convenience store once or twice a day (about 1 min walk). It's really not that different from walking across the barnyard to grab a couple of eggs from the chicken coop. (Trust me, I'm from Iowa.)
Evidently, I'm not as "price conscious" as you are, but luckily for me, Taiwanese people are. (A Jewish pal who used to live here would joke that if his girlfriend got pregnant, their kids would be the stingiest people on the planet...;-) Thus, the local market is very competitive, and you're unlikely to save more than a few percent, no matter how far you travel.
If I put my mind to it, it's not hard to cram a couple of weeks' worth of groceries into two or three bags, easily portable with two hands for the short distance involved. (I'm single too, and do a lot of cooking at home.) But for the most part I don't HAVE to put that much thought into it. My grocery store is five minutes away by foot... If I need something that I can't get at the 7-11 in five minutes, I'll get it from the supermarket in fifteen minutes. They are both open 24/7.
All of which supports my basic argument that Taipei has more or less transcended the need for privately owned cars. (Hell, I don't even have a scooter anymore.) Maybe if I lived in Linkou or Wugu, it would make sense to own such a vehicle, but here in the heart of the city, it's a complete waste of time and money. I do have a driver's license, so I can rent a car whenever I need one, but thus far that has never happened.
But I think you'd agree that Taiwan's "mixed zoning" habits are much more conducive to walkable communities, no?
My example was intended for those times when you run out of something, like... "Honey, we don't have enough milk for breakfast, so you'll have to go get some." In that case, you're not going to drive halfway across town to save twenty cents on whatever it is you need. More to the point, when most of what you need is within walking distance, such elaborate planning (as you describe) is not as necessary.
My nearest supermarket is a five-minute walk. Three minutes in the opposite direction is a traditional "wet" market. Another ten minutes beyond that is another supermarket (though I usually take a bus for that one). Some things are farther away, but this city has excellent public transit, so nothing is more than about 35~40 minutes away. I spend maybe 20 or 30 bucks a month on transportation, perhaps a bit more if I take the taxi a few extra times for some reason.
But Taipei is not a good comparison to Evanston, it's far more densely populated. (There are probably two or three hundred thousand people within a 1 km radius from me right now.) The real problem in America is suburban sprawl, where millions of people are trapped in business-free zones, often miles away from even the nearest gas station. Simply allowing more flexibility in zoning would spur the growth of a more decentralized and convenient array of options, many of which could be accessible on foot.
Taipei has made remarkable progress with public transit, but it was always a very walkable city. The main reason is zoning (or lack thereof), which allows businesses and residences to co-mingle. In most Taiwanese cities, you're literally never more than a few hundred meters away from a 7-11 or Family Mart, and there's an ample scattering of supermarkets, eateries, and other shops in between.
The same thing could be accomplished in most American suburbs by simply allowing more variances for people who want to, say, convert their living room into a small shop. That way, if you just need a carton of milk (for example), you wouldn't have to drive to the supermarket, you could just walk a couple of blocks to Mrs. Smith's house.
What about the scrap yard workers? You'd think that somebody along the line would recognize such an icon of American history, and get the idea that it might be worth more than scrap. It just boggles the mind.
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Except, in this case, it sounds like Congress just gave them the money without NASA requesting it. FTFA:
Over the last several months, NASA has increasingly emphasized development of a habitation module that could be tested in cislunar space in the 2020s. That module could then be used for human missions to Mars that NASA hopes to carry out some time in the 2030s.
I'm not the biggest space-geek in the world, but I do follow a couple of weekly podcasts, and both /r/space and /r/spacex on reddit, and this is the first news I've heard of this 'emphasis on development of a habitation module.' Of course they have the BEAM module going up next year, but that's been in the works for years already. In any case, I don't think this particular boost to NASA's budget was spurred by the sort of sci-fi fan uprising, whipped up by NASA propaganda as you describe.
FTFA: "flight time of six minutes. ... an excruciating six hours to recharge the batteries."
The ArcaBoard supposedly has a software-limited top speed of a leisurely 12.5 mph, and you’ll only be able to enjoy a flight time of six minutes. That’s right; after six minutes, you’ll be sitting back on solid ground. And if you want to recharge for another six minutes of flight time, you’ll have to wait an excruciating six hours to recharge the batteries. However, if you’re simply willing to simply throw money away, you can purchase the optional ArcaDock, which will set you back another $4,500. The ArcaDock reduces charging times down to a mere 35 minutes.
I think the problem here is that NDT is just not keeping up to date on the 'New Space' sector. Investors are just starting to realize that space is an option. You can invest $10b now on a copper or gold mine, with an eight year payout, or you can invest $6b on an asteroid mission with a 15~20 year payout. To a big-ticket investor, these two opportunities look very similar.
I wonder what he'll say in a few weeks (or months) after SpaceX 'sticks the landing' on their first booster recovery, which will forever change the economics of space flight.
My guess is he just spends too much time rubbing elbows with 'establishment' types in the space business, and doesn't fully appreciate the revolution taking place below the 'mainstream' radar.
the atmosphere really is .... too thick to light a retro rocket at high speed.
SpaceX claims that their SuperDraco thrusters are capable of igniting during Mars EDL, at supersonic speeds. Of course, we won't know for sure until they actually do it, but given their accomplishments to date, I see no reason to doubt them.
Oops! I thought I was replying to the GP, sorry for the confusion.
Bub Zubrin's Mars Direct plan is the most likely scenario, at least in the next few decades. Eventually someone will build large-scale cyclers as you describe, but not until mining of asteroids and the moon gets underway, making materials available in space. Judging by his past statements, Elon intends to land people on Mars before that is likely to happen, which most likely means he intends to do it with the Falcon Heavy, at least for those first few 'flags & footprints' missions. If that is so, then they'll most likely use some variation on Zubrin's architecture. In fact, Zubrin himself has outlined a mission (which calls the 'Trans-Orbital Railroad') using Falcon Heavies.
We know very little about SpaceX's upcoming Mars Colonial Transporter, except that it is intended to transport 100 people to Mars with each flight. It's highly unlikely that they'll make that their first trip to Mars, which means they'll do it with Falcon Heavy first, and that means Mars Direct.
As for when...? I reckon they'll get boots on the ground sometime in the late 2020's.
Why isn't this automated? I know... they say it's a test run, so certain safety features are disabled, but ffs, can't you at least find an operator who knows wtf he's doing? This is just sad.
Thanks for the reality check. Much appreciated.
You'll have to ask Freeman Dyson about that, but IMO, after a couple of generations of humanity living in "spinning donuts" in orbit, perhaps the cultural norms would change, and some people would be drawn to the frontiers, as has been our experience for many centuries. Why did Shackleton go to Antarctica? Why did Hillary climb Everest? Because it's there.
150 years ago, a gold-pan and a shovel (and a mule) was all you needed to trek west and find your fortune. Who knows what the equivalent of that kit will be in forty or fifty years? There could be abundant reasons for making that trip. We'll just have to wait and see.
Fair enough, and I alluded to that with my EM-Drive comment. But that brings up the "leapfrog" problem: "popsicles" might wake up after 20 years en route only to be greeted at their destination by people who arrived five years earlier with the newly-discovered "magic carpet" propulsion system. And as TFA points out, by the time we even get close to thinking about such decisions, our robotic exploration tech will have advanced to the point where sending humans out there for pure science would be a needless waste of resources.
Relativistic travel is an interesting issue, especially for travel within the solar system. For example, let's say you're traveling from Earth to the Kuiper Belt, a distance of roughly four or five light-hours, and you make the trip at 2% of C (including acceleration and deceleration at either end), giving you a (subjective) trip time of a few months. How much 'objective' time would have passed back home? A year maybe? That would probably be acceptable to most people, especially if you could still send messages back and forth along the way. (It would be weird to watch weeks go by in days, but I reckon folks could adjust to that.)
Ultimately, we're not arguing against each other here. I acknowledge the fact that technological advances will (most likely) extend our reach exponentially in the coming decades. But I still think TFA is largely correct in framing the next century or so squarely in the Earth-Mars neighborhood.
Those are all things that the settlers would have been doing on their original island.
Most of the tech needed for a colony in the Kuiper Belt will have been perfected decades earlier in Earth orbit, on the moon, Mars, and the main-belt asteroids. The definition of "habitable" in this context simply means having enough of the raw materials available from the periodic table, and the knowledge and tools to create a functioning ecosystem capable of sustaining human life.
Obviously, no one would dream of building a colony that far out unless there were already hundreds of similar ones already thriving in what TFA calls "home" (ie: the space between Earth and Mars).
Freeman Dyson gave an interesting talk a couple of years ago, speculating about the next few centuries of exploration and settlement. He envisions colonies in the Kuiper Belt in a couple hundred years, but not much beyond Mars for the next 50 or so. And he anticipates an "island hopping" model of interstellar expansion, similar to the Polynesian settlement of the Pacific. Anyway, it's an interesting talk. (34 min)
Bill Boeing said, about 100 years ago: "We are embarked as pioneers upon a new science and industry in which our problems are so new and unusual that it behooves no one to dismiss any novel idea with the statement that ‘it can’t be done!’"
It's a stretch to claim that humans will never travel beyond Mars, but human settlement beyond Mars is a different argument with a much better case to be made, at least until we come up with radical improvements in propulsion. People may be willing to spend months in a tin can to get somewhere, but years is another matter. Some explorers might visit the orbit of Jupiter or Saturn, but anything farther out would be an entire career in one trip. And there's not much in the way of useful resources out there that can't be found in the much more convenient asteroid belt.
Then again, maybe they'll crack the secret of the EM Drive, next week, and we'll be zipping around the solar system by 2030. That would be cool, but I'm not holding my breath...
Nostalgia is just that.
Nostalgia is a huge market. (Surely you've seen Pawn Stars? American Pickers?) A few years ago, one of my employees, a 20-year-old, bought a Nikon FM2. I said, "What are you doing with a film camera in this day and age?" She just wanted to "go retro" and learn photography the old fashioned way.
People spend money for lots of weird reasons...
You seem to be conflating my two queries. I don't wan't VHS-quality video, I want 35mm film-quality stills from the lenses and bodies currently residing in my basement. As others have noted, there have been medium- and large-format image sensors available for decades, but they cost many thousands of dollars. I ought to be able to get a 35mm "consumer" version for a few hundred bucks. As long as it had 1080p resolution or better, I would buy it. And I'm sure there are a lot of other old-timers like me who would buy it too.
True enough, but maybe I don't want to just toss all my old camera bodies. I reckon that if somebody came up with a digital replacement back for a few standard brands, they could make a killing off of old geezers like me.
Why don't we have a plug-in digital replacement for VHS/Beta tapes? With modern tech and materials, it wouldn't be that hard to devise a digital interface to the old helical-scan mechanism in the standard cassette formats. Not much of a market, for sure, but if they're still making tapes, apparently somebody is still using them. Might make a good kickstarter project for someone...
Another in the same vein... why can't I get a digital-imaging back for my old 35mm Nikon cameras? Seems like I should be able to get something like that for a few hundred bucks in today's economy.
Who needs compatibility? The "standard" you're talking about is the rules of the road, as we all experience them. The only thing missing is person to person communication... eye contact, waving someone to go first at a 4-way stop, etc.. Eventually, it would also be nice to have cars that can talk to each other well enough to safely form "draft trains" to conserve energy, but that will require some changes to the law anyway. In the meantime, since Elon is pals with the Google guys, I wouldn't be surprised if they're already talking about that sort of thing with each other. On the contrary, I'd be surprised if they weren't.
This is true. And the need for a vehicle becomes more apparent as you get to cities smaller than that... say, Douliu or Pingdong... Still, I think Taiwan is largely on the right track in this regard. (Politics is another kettle of fish...)
But how DO you shop when you need more than a carton of milk?
When the supermarket is a 5-min walk, you just make multiple trips as needed. I hit a supermarket once or twice a week, and hit a convenience store once or twice a day (about 1 min walk). It's really not that different from walking across the barnyard to grab a couple of eggs from the chicken coop. (Trust me, I'm from Iowa.)
Evidently, I'm not as "price conscious" as you are, but luckily for me, Taiwanese people are. (A Jewish pal who used to live here would joke that if his girlfriend got pregnant, their kids would be the stingiest people on the planet...;-) Thus, the local market is very competitive, and you're unlikely to save more than a few percent, no matter how far you travel.
If I put my mind to it, it's not hard to cram a couple of weeks' worth of groceries into two or three bags, easily portable with two hands for the short distance involved. (I'm single too, and do a lot of cooking at home.) But for the most part I don't HAVE to put that much thought into it. My grocery store is five minutes away by foot... If I need something that I can't get at the 7-11 in five minutes, I'll get it from the supermarket in fifteen minutes. They are both open 24/7.
All of which supports my basic argument that Taipei has more or less transcended the need for privately owned cars. (Hell, I don't even have a scooter anymore.) Maybe if I lived in Linkou or Wugu, it would make sense to own such a vehicle, but here in the heart of the city, it's a complete waste of time and money. I do have a driver's license, so I can rent a car whenever I need one, but thus far that has never happened.
But I think you'd agree that Taiwan's "mixed zoning" habits are much more conducive to walkable communities, no?
My example was intended for those times when you run out of something, like... "Honey, we don't have enough milk for breakfast, so you'll have to go get some." In that case, you're not going to drive halfway across town to save twenty cents on whatever it is you need. More to the point, when most of what you need is within walking distance, such elaborate planning (as you describe) is not as necessary.
My nearest supermarket is a five-minute walk. Three minutes in the opposite direction is a traditional "wet" market. Another ten minutes beyond that is another supermarket (though I usually take a bus for that one). Some things are farther away, but this city has excellent public transit, so nothing is more than about 35~40 minutes away. I spend maybe 20 or 30 bucks a month on transportation, perhaps a bit more if I take the taxi a few extra times for some reason.
But Taipei is not a good comparison to Evanston, it's far more densely populated. (There are probably two or three hundred thousand people within a 1 km radius from me right now.) The real problem in America is suburban sprawl, where millions of people are trapped in business-free zones, often miles away from even the nearest gas station. Simply allowing more flexibility in zoning would spur the growth of a more decentralized and convenient array of options, many of which could be accessible on foot.
Taipei has made remarkable progress with public transit, but it was always a very walkable city. The main reason is zoning (or lack thereof), which allows businesses and residences to co-mingle. In most Taiwanese cities, you're literally never more than a few hundred meters away from a 7-11 or Family Mart, and there's an ample scattering of supermarkets, eateries, and other shops in between.
The same thing could be accomplished in most American suburbs by simply allowing more variances for people who want to, say, convert their living room into a small shop. That way, if you just need a carton of milk (for example), you wouldn't have to drive to the supermarket, you could just walk a couple of blocks to Mrs. Smith's house.
What about the scrap yard workers? You'd think that somebody along the line would recognize such an icon of American history, and get the idea that it might be worth more than scrap. It just boggles the mind.