Why the Russians are involved anyway
on
NASA Gets Smart
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· Score: 3
Most people forget that the reason why the Russians are involved in the ISS is because of their long experience of long-term human spaceflight and spacestation construction, i.e. Mir. The idea was that the ISS would be a great political exercise, and NASA would be able to learn a lot from Russians.
Problem is, the Russians are getting (justifiably? who knows) annoyed at the larger and larger role the US is playing in the ISS - they're being forced into the position of junior partner. Then they realise that they have a perfectly good (well, operational, at least) space station in orbit that's been there for god knows how long, and exactly why do they need the ISS in the first place?
Now that they've got corporate buyers interested in Mir, they'd rather go and do their own thing.
The only (admittedly large) advantage of using the Moon as a storage site is that it doesn't undergo geological activity - you could probably leave data there for millions of years without worrying about earthquakes or continental plates colliding.
However, if you're not too worried about keeping your data for that long, you may as well just put it into a high Earth orbit where it isn't likely to run into anything, or buried in a mountain. This has the advantage of being cheaper than having to throw it all the way to the moon, vacuum proof whatever storage device you're using and also radiation proof it.
After all, inside the Earth's orbit you don't have to worry so much about radiation.
You have to keep in mind, though, that eventually anything in orbit around the Earth, the Moon included, is eventually going to fall down and crash into us.
There's always the solution of building some kind of self-replicating data store that will avoid the damaging effects of radiation and generally getting destroyed by natural causes, but then you've got the problem of the information in the data store 'mutating' through 'reproduction'. Really, the only solution is to build some kind of ultra-protected probe and throwing it out into interstellar space.
Unfortuantely, even *then* you'll be faced with ablation of the data store material into the vacuum. Fast forward a few eons, and then the fundamental particles of the data store itself begin to liquify and generally mess up.
So, it's a no win situation, really.
Re:There is an economic reason to go to Mars
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 1
'Using stuff which hasn't even been invented yet...'
As a matter of fact, the technology in the Mars Direct and the NASA reference mission is all available right now, even the ISRU stuff. The Mars Direct plan, for example, calls for use of hardware that could be *bought off the shelf*. We're not talking about nuclear rockets here, we're talking about using Atlas boosters and stuff like Shuttle-C technology.
Basically, it's because we don't really need to go to the Moon. There's not that much there (when compared to Mars).
While the Moon is admittedly a lot closer, it has its fair share of problems. Firstly, while it *may* have a lot of water as predicted by the Lunar Prospector, it has few raw materials for which a colony would need.
Take, for example, nitrogen or phosphorus. Both are essential to the growth of plants - i.e. food, but the Moon has next to none. All that would have to be flown in.
True, you could go and mine an asteroid and use a mass driver to throw them down to the Moon, but that begs the question - if you're going to mine an asteroid, exactly why are you going to the Moon in the first place?
If it's gravity you want, you can always generate artificial gravity the 2001 way - by using rotating segments or tethers in your ship.
Mars, however, has all the elements you could possibly want in abundance. No mining asteroids for the Martians - they could even get water and oxygen by simply mining the air!
The Moon would be a great tourist destination though, I'll give you that.
Re:Benefits of station & moon
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 1
I'm certain that you could build a lot of a spaceship out of Moon rock - I used to belong to Artemis UK myself - but the fact is that you can easily find a near-Earth asteroid that has magnitudes of times greater raw materials than the Moon.
Re:Out of the Real World
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 1
I did the maths on this a while back. If Bill Gates, with his $100 billion, decided to throw it all into Mars exploration, he could fund theoretically 41 missions to Mars, each with 4 people on board. So that'd be 164 people to Mars.
This is based on a $20 billion one-off charge for the first mission, and $2 billion for each subsequent mission (estimations based from 'The Case for Mars).
In fact, he could probably set up a self-sufficient colony on Mars. Imagine that - Bill Gates could essentially become ruler of *two planets* now!
Re:There is an economic reason to go to Mars
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 1
The current plans for Mars missions (i.e. Mars Direct and the NASA Mars Design Reference Mission) call for sustained exploration of Mars, using a sequence of staggered launches. You'll see a lot more than one trip to Mars, if we decide to go there.
It's been estimated, in fact, that the first Mars mission would have one-off costs of $20 billion, and subsequent missions would cost as little as $2 billion each, with costs lowering every time.
There seems to be a huge misconception about exactly how difficult and how much a Mars mission would be - this most probably stems from the 1989 Mars plan drawn up by NASA, saying that the mission would cost nearly half a trillion, and take 20 years. This is obviously not the case anymore.
Check out http://www.gen-mars.freeserve.co.uk/essays/mtalk1. htm for a talk I wrote to introduce the concept of a Mars missions to people.
Re:First we need a good launcher...
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 1
Meh. I always think we're going about SSTO the wrong way. What we really need is a hybrid space-plane, or a craft that can fly in 'air mode' while it's in the air, then switch on the rockets when it gets high enough.
I take it you know about the Roton?
I recently attended a lecture given by a guy working on SSTO systems. He's of the opinion that chemical based systems (i.e. rockets) are old-hat, and that we'll be using electrically powered systems, such as magnetic accelerators and mass drivers to basically shoot things into orbit.
Either that, or the good old laser-launcher system. I'm always eager to hear the stuff the guys at the Renssalier (bad spelling) Polytechnic Institute are up to; they're developing a laser-launcher system that has huge potential. We're talking Mach 35 into orbit, with such ridiculously high-Gs that you need to be submersed in liquid so you don't break your back.
Re:Out of the Real World
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 1
Actually, it's a proven socio-economic fact that if you feed starving people, birth rates go down considerably (at least, that's that I heard from a lecture given by a Professor from Oxford University).
Which explains why western European countries are having serious trouble keeping their population at a replacement rate of 2.1 children per couple. In some cases, such as Italy, population is dropping significantly.
Overpopulation will be solved by improving people's quality of life - and that means making sure they'll have enough to eat - so they don't need to have so many children to support them.
James Cameron is currently working on a Mars movie for IMAX, to be screen either late their year or early next year. It's fictional, of course, but depicts a mission to Mars, and a settlement.
He's also been working on a Mars mini-series based on Kim Stanley Robinson's seminal Red Mars trilogy. Both projects have Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars, and the founder of the Mars Society, as a consultant.
There used to be information about this on the Mars Society homepage, but it appears to have gone now.
Re:What it is good for?
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 1
You can't say that *no* good has come from the colonisation of America - in fact, you're in a vanishingly small minority by making that remark.
Let's take an obvious example: democracy. While there had been numerous short-lived democracies before America, America was the first country to show the world that democracy *worked*. A major reason why democracy developed was because the settlers weren't constrained by existing laws - they were starting from an empty slate. The quality of life in America is one of the highest in the world, and that's a bad thing?
In much the same way, people believe that settling Mars will give the colonists the opportunity to test new systems of government, outside of the constraints of the systems on Earth. Of course it's not guaranteed that they'll end up with something better than democracy, but I think that it's worth spending a little money on, if it'll help the population of Earth.
The starving multitudes are not just mouths to be fed. There is a *reason* why they don't have enough food to eat, and it's not because we're not giving them enough money, it's because of the way their country's governments are organised.
Please do not try to use emotional blackmail on me, or twist my words by saying that I'd like to see people have their photos taken on other planets.
If we went your way, we'd drop everything we are doing now - particle physics, astronomy, nanotech, medical research - *everything* - to go and feed the poor. Would you rather know the fundamentals of physics than feed a starving person?
Let me take it further. Why don't you sell your car, or your computer, to go and feed the starving? It's easy to preach morals, but harder to enact them.
Of course I feel for the starving and the homeless. But if we concentrated on solving all the problems we have now, we would get nowhere at all. We will always have problems.
Do you realise the political impossibility of 'giving' billions of dollars of aid to third-world countries? You can't just hand it to a million starving people, it has to go through the government. You can't just give the starving people food, because that money is going to run out.
You can't just give them money to start farms or buy fertiliser, because, by and large, they already *have* enough food, they're just not getting it. The problems of the starving and the homeless cannot be solved solely through money.
Re:Benefits of station & moon
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 1
Sorry lad, but the Moon has officially bugger-all raw materials. In Stephen Baxter's words, if you mined an asteroid (carbonacous chondrite, full of water, organics and all sorts), the *slag* you'd be left over with would contain more raw materials than your average Moon rock.
Comparing the costs of setting up a self-sufficient colony on the Moon vs. building ships on Earth, you'll probably find that it's more economical to build ships on Earth for the time being.
Re:What it is good for?
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 2
Ah, yes, why don't *you* give me a reason for why we went to America, because the colonies sure as hell didn't make any money for decades if not longer after they were founded.
There's nothing on Mars to bring back to Earth, no. You won't make much physical cash from Mars. Mars has a wealth of possibilities, and unlimited potential. It holds a record of planet formation, of weather patterns, of extra-terrestrial life, geography and geology and asteroidal activity. It has minerals, metals and every element required by humans in excess. It has water, enough to have formed an entire ocean. It has space, enough for millions of humans, animals and plants. It could become a new home for humanity, a cutting-edge scientific outpost, a utopia or a dystopia. Mars is whatever we want it, and make it, to be.
Settlers going to Mars are going to be faced with the harshest environment humans have been exposed to. They'll be under an enormous amount of pressure and stress to think up solutions to problems, and I think we'll probably see quite a few scientific inventions coming out of Mars.
In response to another of your points, no, life would have gone on on Earth if the MPL hadn't crashed. But for your information, some of the first real evidence we had for the existence of global warming came from data gathered by probes sent to Venus. Those probes showed a runaway greenhouse effect, and helped convince a lot of people that global warming wasn't a fiction.
Really? With 20 or 30 billion, you could feed the world? Are you aware that we can already feed the world quite comfortably right now, if we just distributed the food around a little better?
We spend 20 or 30 billion, if not more, on aid to third-world countries every year. Do you see conditions improving? No.
People say that we should spend money on getting rid of the homeless, curing cancer, building more hospitals, and all the rest. I've always replied that any amount of money will not make these problems go away, and certainly not the relatively small amounts used to explore and colonise Mars. Yes, we shouldn't ignore the problems we have now, but it's just not practical and it's not possible for us to make sure that conditions are perfect at home before venturing outside.
The problems of the third world, the disease, wars, famine, global warming and terrorism are not caused by lack of money. They are caused by human 'nature'. I certainly don't want to say that we shouldn't do anything about them because, at heart, we are all scumbags (which we aren't. At least, most of us aren't). But we can only find the answer to these problems within ourselves, not within our wallets.
And your implication that a mission to Mars would be merely 'Flag and footprints', like the Apollo missions, is woefully uninformed and out of date.
Re:Every few years it's another plan....
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 1
As far as I'm aware, the X-Prize is only applicable for teams getting humans into orbit, not to the Moon. It's an order of magnitude more difficult to contemplate landing on the Moon.
And even if I'm wrong, the X-Prize really is only a token prize; it's not actually worth that much, only a few million. You're not likely to recoup your investment on it.
Commercial interest in space will only come about when CATS is available (Cheap Access To Space). Well, that's not entirely true, but at the moment when it costs $10k to lift a pound into space, it might as well be.
I wrote a paper about some of the socio-economic prerequisites for getting into space, which was presented at the Second Mars Society convention - it's available online here
Re:sad commentary on science
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 3
There is a very constraining limit as to how much science interplanetary probes can actually do. Taking the state-of-the-art Nomad robot for example (the one looking for meteorites in the Antarctic) - you might think that's a shining example of how much science a robot can do.
When you realise that it's dozens if not hundreds of times slower than a human, then you'll be able to put things into perspective.
This also goes for the Mars probes - we can only do so much science when we've got minutes of lag between communications and robots that can't even move at walking pace.
Think about the loss of the MPL, most likely because it landed in the wrong spot. Humans could have avoided that - hell, Neil Armstrong avoided it on the Moon.
Certainly unmanned flights are economical - NASA's new strategy has proved that, but sooner or later we're going to reach the bounds of what can economically be done without humans.
Well, it was quite a big coinkindink that I happened to be writing a post when I saw your name right after my post, so I thought I'd check out what you'd said.
It's hard to tell, with Banks' books. I was reading some advanced stuff back when I was 13 - I slogged through the Red Mars series by KSR when I was 14, so I suppose it wouldn't have been beyond me.
I think the fact that Baxter's novels are painted on such a wide, epic (and ethereal) canvas is what makes it appeal to most people. Although I've had quite enough of million year timescales and black-holes-seeding-new-universes now, what with all of Greg Egan.
If you're thinking of Baxter's Xeelee sequence, yeah, it is a bit out there. But I'd suggest you try Titan, Moonseed or Voyage - they're far more down to earth, and they've got some great bits of information about NASA.
I'm not entirely sure whether Iain M Banks' Culture series is quite suitable for 13 year olds. Doubtless they're excellent books (I'm subscribed to the Culture-list myself) but some parents might find parts of the content questionable (violence, sex and so on).
Also, a lot of concepts are pretty advanced and subtle.
To be honest, it really depends on the 13 year old in question, but I would think that the Culture series is probably a bit much. There's plenty of good stuff that's written for kids, and it's not bad. Take, for example, the Web series, written by a load of top-quality SF writers like Stephen Baxter.
There's a great series of books dealing with advanced physics (no, really!) for kids around 10-13, called the Uncle Albert series.
They basically involve a girl called Gedanken (German for thought-experiment) visiting her Uncle Albert (Einstein), and he can 'transport' her into his thought-experiments, where she does interesting stuff like try to travel at the speed of light, see what it's like living on a 2D surface, explore black holes and more.
You've be surprised at how well they explain difficult concepts like general and special relativity, quantum mechanics and so on. They're written by Russell Stannard, the Professor Emeritus of Physics at Open University, UK.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people forget that the reason why the Russians are involved in the ISS is because of their long experience of long-term human spaceflight and spacestation construction, i.e. Mir. The idea was that the ISS would be a great political exercise, and NASA would be able to learn a lot from Russians.
Problem is, the Russians are getting (justifiably? who knows) annoyed at the larger and larger role the US is playing in the ISS - they're being forced into the position of junior partner. Then they realise that they have a perfectly good (well, operational, at least) space station in orbit that's been there for god knows how long, and exactly why do they need the ISS in the first place?
Now that they've got corporate buyers interested in Mir, they'd rather go and do their own thing.
The only (admittedly large) advantage of using the Moon as a storage site is that it doesn't undergo geological activity - you could probably leave data there for millions of years without worrying about earthquakes or continental plates colliding.
However, if you're not too worried about keeping your data for that long, you may as well just put it into a high Earth orbit where it isn't likely to run into anything, or buried in a mountain. This has the advantage of being cheaper than having to throw it all the way to the moon, vacuum proof whatever storage device you're using and also radiation proof it.
After all, inside the Earth's orbit you don't have to worry so much about radiation.
You have to keep in mind, though, that eventually anything in orbit around the Earth, the Moon included, is eventually going to fall down and crash into us.
There's always the solution of building some kind of self-replicating data store that will avoid the damaging effects of radiation and generally getting destroyed by natural causes, but then you've got the problem of the information in the data store 'mutating' through 'reproduction'. Really, the only solution is to build some kind of ultra-protected probe and throwing it out into interstellar space.
Unfortuantely, even *then* you'll be faced with ablation of the data store material into the vacuum. Fast forward a few eons, and then the fundamental particles of the data store itself begin to liquify and generally mess up.
So, it's a no win situation, really.
'Using stuff which hasn't even been invented yet...'
As a matter of fact, the technology in the Mars Direct and the NASA reference mission is all available right now, even the ISRU stuff. The Mars Direct plan, for example, calls for use of hardware that could be *bought off the shelf*. We're not talking about nuclear rockets here, we're talking about using Atlas boosters and stuff like Shuttle-C technology.
Basically, it's because we don't really need to go to the Moon. There's not that much there (when compared to Mars).
While the Moon is admittedly a lot closer, it has its fair share of problems. Firstly, while it *may* have a lot of water as predicted by the Lunar Prospector, it has few raw materials for which a colony would need.
Take, for example, nitrogen or phosphorus. Both are essential to the growth of plants - i.e. food, but the Moon has next to none. All that would have to be flown in.
True, you could go and mine an asteroid and use a mass driver to throw them down to the Moon, but that begs the question - if you're going to mine an asteroid, exactly why are you going to the Moon in the first place?
If it's gravity you want, you can always generate artificial gravity the 2001 way - by using rotating segments or tethers in your ship.
Mars, however, has all the elements you could possibly want in abundance. No mining asteroids for the Martians - they could even get water and oxygen by simply mining the air!
The Moon would be a great tourist destination though, I'll give you that.
I'm certain that you could build a lot of a spaceship out of Moon rock - I used to belong to Artemis UK myself - but the fact is that you can easily find a near-Earth asteroid that has magnitudes of times greater raw materials than the Moon.
I did the maths on this a while back. If Bill Gates, with his $100 billion, decided to throw it all into Mars exploration, he could fund theoretically 41 missions to Mars, each with 4 people on board. So that'd be 164 people to Mars.
This is based on a $20 billion one-off charge for the first mission, and $2 billion for each subsequent mission (estimations based from 'The Case for Mars).
In fact, he could probably set up a self-sufficient colony on Mars. Imagine that - Bill Gates could essentially become ruler of *two planets* now!
The current plans for Mars missions (i.e. Mars Direct and the NASA Mars Design Reference Mission) call for sustained exploration of Mars, using a sequence of staggered launches. You'll see a lot more than one trip to Mars, if we decide to go there.
. htm for a talk I wrote to introduce the concept of a Mars missions to people.
It's been estimated, in fact, that the first Mars mission would have one-off costs of $20 billion, and subsequent missions would cost as little as $2 billion each, with costs lowering every time.
There seems to be a huge misconception about exactly how difficult and how much a Mars mission would be - this most probably stems from the 1989 Mars plan drawn up by NASA, saying that the mission would cost nearly half a trillion, and take 20 years. This is obviously not the case anymore.
Check out http://www.gen-mars.freeserve.co.uk/essays/mtalk1
Meh. I always think we're going about SSTO the wrong way. What we really need is a hybrid space-plane, or a craft that can fly in 'air mode' while it's in the air, then switch on the rockets when it gets high enough.
I take it you know about the Roton?
I recently attended a lecture given by a guy working on SSTO systems. He's of the opinion that chemical based systems (i.e. rockets) are old-hat, and that we'll be using electrically powered systems, such as magnetic accelerators and mass drivers to basically shoot things into orbit.
Either that, or the good old laser-launcher system. I'm always eager to hear the stuff the guys at the Renssalier (bad spelling) Polytechnic Institute are up to; they're developing a laser-launcher system that has huge potential. We're talking Mach 35 into orbit, with such ridiculously high-Gs that you need to be submersed in liquid so you don't break your back.
Actually, it's a proven socio-economic fact that if you feed starving people, birth rates go down considerably (at least, that's that I heard from a lecture given by a Professor from Oxford University).
Which explains why western European countries are having serious trouble keeping their population at a replacement rate of 2.1 children per couple. In some cases, such as Italy, population is dropping significantly.
Overpopulation will be solved by improving people's quality of life - and that means making sure they'll have enough to eat - so they don't need to have so many children to support them.
He's also been working on a Mars mini-series based on Kim Stanley Robinson's seminal Red Mars trilogy. Both projects have Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars, and the founder of the Mars Society, as a consultant.
There used to be information about this on the Mars Society homepage, but it appears to have gone now.
You can't say that *no* good has come from the colonisation of America - in fact, you're in a vanishingly small minority by making that remark.
Let's take an obvious example: democracy. While there had been numerous short-lived democracies before America, America was the first country to show the world that democracy *worked*. A major reason why democracy developed was because the settlers weren't constrained by existing laws - they were starting from an empty slate. The quality of life in America is one of the highest in the world, and that's a bad thing?
In much the same way, people believe that settling Mars will give the colonists the opportunity to test new systems of government, outside of the constraints of the systems on Earth. Of course it's not guaranteed that they'll end up with something better than democracy, but I think that it's worth spending a little money on, if it'll help the population of Earth.
The starving multitudes are not just mouths to be fed. There is a *reason* why they don't have enough food to eat, and it's not because we're not giving them enough money, it's because of the way their country's governments are organised.
Please do not try to use emotional blackmail on me, or twist my words by saying that I'd like to see people have their photos taken on other planets.
If we went your way, we'd drop everything we are doing now - particle physics, astronomy, nanotech, medical research - *everything* - to go and feed the poor. Would you rather know the fundamentals of physics than feed a starving person?
Let me take it further. Why don't you sell your car, or your computer, to go and feed the starving? It's easy to preach morals, but harder to enact them.
Of course I feel for the starving and the homeless. But if we concentrated on solving all the problems we have now, we would get nowhere at all. We will always have problems.
Do you realise the political impossibility of 'giving' billions of dollars of aid to third-world countries? You can't just hand it to a million starving people, it has to go through the government. You can't just give the starving people food, because that money is going to run out.
You can't just give them money to start farms or buy fertiliser, because, by and large, they already *have* enough food, they're just not getting it. The problems of the starving and the homeless cannot be solved solely through money.
Sorry lad, but the Moon has officially bugger-all raw materials. In Stephen Baxter's words, if you mined an asteroid (carbonacous chondrite, full of water, organics and all sorts), the *slag* you'd be left over with would contain more raw materials than your average Moon rock.
Comparing the costs of setting up a self-sufficient colony on the Moon vs. building ships on Earth, you'll probably find that it's more economical to build ships on Earth for the time being.
Ah, yes, why don't *you* give me a reason for why we went to America, because the colonies sure as hell didn't make any money for decades if not longer after they were founded.
There's nothing on Mars to bring back to Earth, no. You won't make much physical cash from Mars. Mars has a wealth of possibilities, and unlimited potential. It holds a record of planet formation, of weather patterns, of extra-terrestrial life, geography and geology and asteroidal activity. It has minerals, metals and every element required by humans in excess. It has water, enough to have formed an entire ocean. It has space, enough for millions of humans, animals and plants. It could become a new home for humanity, a cutting-edge scientific outpost, a utopia or a dystopia. Mars is whatever we want it, and make it, to be.
Settlers going to Mars are going to be faced with the harshest environment humans have been exposed to. They'll be under an enormous amount of pressure and stress to think up solutions to problems, and I think we'll probably see quite a few scientific inventions coming out of Mars.
In response to another of your points, no, life would have gone on on Earth if the MPL hadn't crashed. But for your information, some of the first real evidence we had for the existence of global warming came from data gathered by probes sent to Venus. Those probes showed a runaway greenhouse effect, and helped convince a lot of people that global warming wasn't a fiction.
Really? With 20 or 30 billion, you could feed the world? Are you aware that we can already feed the world quite comfortably right now, if we just distributed the food around a little better?
We spend 20 or 30 billion, if not more, on aid to third-world countries every year. Do you see conditions improving? No.
People say that we should spend money on getting rid of the homeless, curing cancer, building more hospitals, and all the rest. I've always replied that any amount of money will not make these problems go away, and certainly not the relatively small amounts used to explore and colonise Mars. Yes, we shouldn't ignore the problems we have now, but it's just not practical and it's not possible for us to make sure that conditions are perfect at home before venturing outside.
The problems of the third world, the disease, wars, famine, global warming and terrorism are not caused by lack of money. They are caused by human 'nature'. I certainly don't want to say that we shouldn't do anything about them because, at heart, we are all scumbags (which we aren't. At least, most of us aren't). But we can only find the answer to these problems within ourselves, not within our wallets.
And your implication that a mission to Mars would be merely 'Flag and footprints', like the Apollo missions, is woefully uninformed and out of date.
And even if I'm wrong, the X-Prize really is only a token prize; it's not actually worth that much, only a few million. You're not likely to recoup your investment on it.
Commercial interest in space will only come about when CATS is available (Cheap Access To Space). Well, that's not entirely true, but at the moment when it costs $10k to lift a pound into space, it might as well be.
I wrote a paper about some of the socio-economic prerequisites for getting into space, which was presented at the Second Mars Society convention - it's available online here
There is a very constraining limit as to how much science interplanetary probes can actually do. Taking the state-of-the-art Nomad robot for example (the one looking for meteorites in the Antarctic) - you might think that's a shining example of how much science a robot can do.
When you realise that it's dozens if not hundreds of times slower than a human, then you'll be able to put things into perspective.
This also goes for the Mars probes - we can only do so much science when we've got minutes of lag between communications and robots that can't even move at walking pace.
Think about the loss of the MPL, most likely because it landed in the wrong spot. Humans could have avoided that - hell, Neil Armstrong avoided it on the Moon.
Certainly unmanned flights are economical - NASA's new strategy has proved that, but sooner or later we're going to reach the bounds of what can economically be done without humans.
Well, it was quite a big coinkindink that I happened to be writing a post when I saw your name right after my post, so I thought I'd check out what you'd said.
It's hard to tell, with Banks' books. I was reading some advanced stuff back when I was 13 - I slogged through the Red Mars series by KSR when I was 14, so I suppose it wouldn't have been beyond me.
I think the fact that Baxter's novels are painted on such a wide, epic (and ethereal) canvas is what makes it appeal to most people. Although I've had quite enough of million year timescales and black-holes-seeding-new-universes now, what with all of Greg Egan.
If you're thinking of Baxter's Xeelee sequence, yeah, it is a bit out there. But I'd suggest you try Titan, Moonseed or Voyage - they're far more down to earth, and they've got some great bits of information about NASA.
I'm not entirely sure whether Iain M Banks' Culture series is quite suitable for 13 year olds. Doubtless they're excellent books (I'm subscribed to the Culture-list myself) but some parents might find parts of the content questionable (violence, sex and so on).
Also, a lot of concepts are pretty advanced and subtle.
To be honest, it really depends on the 13 year old in question, but I would think that the Culture series is probably a bit much. There's plenty of good stuff that's written for kids, and it's not bad. Take, for example, the Web series, written by a load of top-quality SF writers like Stephen Baxter.
There's a great series of books dealing with advanced physics (no, really!) for kids around 10-13, called the Uncle Albert series.
They basically involve a girl called Gedanken (German for thought-experiment) visiting her Uncle Albert (Einstein), and he can 'transport' her into his thought-experiments, where she does interesting stuff like try to travel at the speed of light, see what it's like living on a 2D surface, explore black holes and more.
You've be surprised at how well they explain difficult concepts like general and special relativity, quantum mechanics and so on. They're written by Russell Stannard, the Professor Emeritus of Physics at Open University, UK.