If you've read the Red Mars trilogy, you know about the hypothetical conflict between Mars preservationists "the Reds" and terraformists "the Greens". While these books are set in the future, within the Mars-nerd community people are already starting to form similar ranks. From scientists who condemn manned missions as contaminating a virgin planet to people already doing research on what greenhouse gas mixture to use to heat up the place. There is a NASA debate on this that got some press recently.
The time may not be now but there will come a time (hopefully) when settlement of Mars becomes a possibility. Once NASA or whoever does a proof of concept mission, settlement will occur if the price is right for private citizens. Even if it's a million dollars for a one way trip, I bet the population would go from 0 to thousands in a few years.
NASA might not use it but this is a good precedent. If private industry can come up with space travel for prices like these, it would open Mars to private settlement when that time comes. It will still cost a bundle but it wasn't unheard of back in the colonial days of the Americas for people to cash in their life savings for a start in the New World. If I can get to Mars when I'm 50 or 60 by cashing in all my chips, I'd be there like a shot.
I'm rabidly in favor of space exploration and manned space exploration in particular. We're on the same side. I'm just of the opinion that there is a place for manned missions and a place for automated ones. In the case of most of the stuff in ISS, it could be automated. In the case of doing field work on the Moon or Mars, you better believe we should have humans there since it is a more complex environment and human intuition can go a long way.
ISS has completely ballooned over anyone's budget expectations and that's mainly because it doesn't really have a point or clearly defined goal. "let's build a space station" doesn't count as a goal in my book because I haven't heard a good reason why one is needed.
Space exploration cash should be spent on missions that will yield the most bang for the buck. Sometimes that will take humans and sometimes it will involve machines. they are not mutually exclusive as so many people seem to argue.
I guess it doesn't hurt to use ISS for this kind of thing as long as it's there. I just have a problem with it existence in the first place. Can you name me some reasons why $100 bn should have been spent on an orbital station rather than manned planetary exploration, manned and unmanned asteroid investigation or even something as mundane as robotic probes which we could have sent to every large body in the solar system for that cost?
Still not a justification for ISS
on
Testing Relativity
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This is probably going to be marked flamebait or offtopic but this experiment could have been unmanned. If anyone claims this is a good reason to have a manned space station, I defy them to specify how having humans aboard is needed in this case.
You can adopt a defeatist attitude about it or you can take action by getting involved with your local representatives to keep the mission on track. ISS was in need of some oversight and a Mars push will be too. I would suggest you get involved with a space advocacy group if this matters at all to you. If not, by all means continue posting reasons why it can't be done while others fight for it.
Zubrin's estimate was 20 bn. That's low, fine. Nasa reviewed it, scaled it up and costed it at $60 bn. Even it it's 1.5 times that like you said, that's $90 bn over 10 years. $9 bn is a little more than half of nasa budget and it you divert the shuttle and ISS costs, they can swing it.
It can be done right and within the current budget. Going to the moon was done on a budget of about 10% than NASA has to day (adjusted for inflation by the way). Handwaving is throwing around titanic price tags based on guesses and making claims that it will be "really really expensive" just because it sounds hard. A detailed plan and budget is not.
You can find any number of ways to squander $1tr. Just because it's possible to fuck it up and do it wrong a-la ISS doesn't mean that you're destined to do it that way.
I think you need to do some reading on this subject.
Re:Bang for the buck
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you're looking for actual numbers on thrust, cost and whatnot, I suggest reading The Case for Mars
It's written by an actual rocket scientist and he is very good at laying out the numbers without taking leaps like "it's 100 times as far so it'll cost 100 times as much".
So what? It's not like Mars is a rapidly changing environment.
doing this faster means you get more done in s given amount of time. That translates into getting more science done for your money.
That's what the ground controllers are for. The robots act as the senses for the ground controllers. And better robots do exist. I think the Mars rovers only have about 256MB memory -- they can do better than that. Besides, if humans were there, what would they do? They would use special equipment to take readings of Mars, just as the rovers do. If Mars was like Earth, then sending humans would be justifiable -- there would be so much there to explore that humans could do more. But Mars is pretty barren. A simple rover will suffice.
The people on the ground have a 15 minute time lag, no sense of touch, smell, hearing or taste. I'd hardly call that comporable to being able to grab a rock, go back to the hab, and play with it with all your senses for a few hours. They could do that say 100 times in a week easy. The rovers have done study on maybe a couple dozen rocks and it's been 2 months now. It's that kind of ability that justifies humans on a Mars mission. in interplanetary space, taking pictures is fine so let the robots do it.
- Humans can do everything that the robots can but hundreds of times faster.
- They can use their intuition and perception in ways that robtos cannot.
Better robots don't exist yet. Humans are the best tool for scientific discovery for things like exploring the surface of Mars. To underscopre my opening point, I'm not saying that we should launch humans in a probe to Neptune to take pictures. In that case a robot make sense. for feild geology work however, it's humans hands down.
Re:This is a fight that shouldn't be fought.
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 1
We're both playing with made up numbers but it seems clear to me that humans would outstip machines by so many orders of magnitude, it would greatly outweigh the price ratio.
If you have to send 10,000 robots to get the same work done as 4 or 6 humans, you don't really gain much do you.
Re:Bang for the buck
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Simply not true. First, the rovers were more like $400 million each. I'm not sure where you get your figure of humans costing 100 times more. That's simply wild speculation on your part.
Two humans could have done everything the two current probes have done in the past two months in a few hours tops. It would cost more but in the two year stay that humans would undertake, they would produce tens of thousands of times the scientific data that machines would. It's not just volume either but quality. Having a human doing something in real time is far more productive than telerobotics. I reitterate my point: humans are better at some things than machines and will do them for lower cost. Yes, even in space.
Space tourism will need to follow government sponsored missions. This is a public works project that at this point can only be undertaken by a government entity. Once we get the proper hang of it, private industry will be able to take advantage. Exploration will need to precede tourism or settlement just as it has at every point in history.
This is a fight that shouldn't be fought.
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Look, let's take politics out of this. Space exploration at this point in history is about doing science and obtaining data. For some things, that's better left to machines. Gas giant probes are a perfect example.
For geologic work however, humans just plain do a better job. The current two probes, God bless them, would have been pretty much useless if humans were up there instead. To grossly over simplify it, I want the most megabytes for my buck. If a human can send back 100 megabytes of scientific data as opposed to 10 from a robot, send the human. if it's the other way around, send the robotic probe.
This shouldn't he a fight of man vs. machine. It should be an intelligent decision of whom or what to send on a particular mission. For some it will be humans and for some robots. They are not mutually exclusive for space exploration.
I guess it depends but I'm just going with what the article says.
The only thing I can think of is that the structure of the foam is such that it deflects radiation in such a way that it just turns it into heat as it bounces around within its structure.
I'm a space nut so you can guess where I'm going with this.
Aerogel is a really cool substance. It's glass foam that's very very light and it's an excellent insulator. I don't know about it's radiation blocking properties though.
If this carbon foam is of comparable weight as aerogel (negligible), it's perfect for space use. The lighter the better since it costs $thousands/kilo to get stuff off the ground. If it blocks radiation, fantastic. Water and metal are the big rad blockers now but they're heavy. If it can act as a good insulator too, you're golden. If not, a sandwich of aerogel and carbon nanofoam could act as a heat trapper so you don't freeze and a radiation blocker so you don't get zapped. And all for practicaly no weight. Shazam!
If I'm not mistaken, all the European probes found was hydrogen. While that's very suggestive of water, finding mineral evidence is more convincing still. Hell, we knew Mars had water decades ago in the poles. This is signifigant since it points to larger and larger amounts that did exist or possibly still do.
Let's not get into a pissing contest of who has the better space agency. Every step towards Mars settlement is a good one.
I don't think NASA is claiming anything more than broad speculation with lots of caveats. They're pretty sure there was lots of water. When? How much? How long? Who knows. Since I'm paying for this info anyway, I'm glad they're making it available as quick as they are.
Besides, isn't releasing this data to the world defacto peer review?
A little history on this is in order. Imagine wavy vertical lines transporting you back to the past.
The year is 1989 and I'm growing out a mullet. The first president Bush makes an attempt to rejuvenate NASA by setting Mars as a goal. Since he's a politician and not a scientist, he delegates the details to a group to give him a plan and price tag. What he got was the infamous 90-day report. The 90-day report amounted to implementing a Mars exploration plan that included every pet project that NASA had. It involved building giant craft in orbit, sending them to lumbering to Mars, have a crew land for 2 weeks and then go back to Earth. The estimated cost was an insane $450 billion which they comically expected to get. At the time, I was too concerned with getting my hands on a Sega Genesis to care or understand.
NASA had lost their minds and took the presidential initiative to mean that they were getting a blank check for everything they ever wanted to fund. King George the First saw the price and turned them down flat. He wasn't aware that there were any other ways to do it so it was slated to happen in "the future". Since then, there have been severaldifferent plans developed to get to Mars on a tight budget and stay there long enough to do some real science and establish a permanent presence.
$100bn is still a shitload. If I recall correctly, the military budget is about $400bn. 25% of that is a sizable amount and more than I'm even willing to spend on NASA and I'm a space nut.
I suggest everyone check out Mars Direct. It's a plan estimated by its creator to cost around $20bn to start up and $2bn per mission. Even NASA's version is only $60bn when they ran their numbers.
One last thing. The 90-day report figure of $400 bn back in the early ninties was based on the Werner Von-Bruan plan of Mars exploration. It was impractacle and is now widely accepted to be the wrong way to do it.
Grandparent post is making a foolish comparison. It's talking like old folks who go on about how a coke cost 5 cents "back then" but forget that they earned $4 per day.
Slashdot Mirror
I love the idea that they're trying to distance themselves from the normal, off-the-shelf homeless tracking software.
Yes, I know it's April first.
If you've read the Red Mars trilogy, you know about the hypothetical conflict between Mars preservationists "the Reds" and terraformists "the Greens". While these books are set in the future, within the Mars-nerd community people are already starting to form similar ranks. From scientists who condemn manned missions as contaminating a virgin planet to people already doing research on what greenhouse gas mixture to use to heat up the place. There is a NASA debate on this that got some press recently.
The time may not be now but there will come a time (hopefully) when settlement of Mars becomes a possibility. Once NASA or whoever does a proof of concept mission, settlement will occur if the price is right for private citizens. Even if it's a million dollars for a one way trip, I bet the population would go from 0 to thousands in a few years.
NASA might not use it but this is a good precedent. If private industry can come up with space travel for prices like these, it would open Mars to private settlement when that time comes. It will still cost a bundle but it wasn't unheard of back in the colonial days of the Americas for people to cash in their life savings for a start in the New World. If I can get to Mars when I'm 50 or 60 by cashing in all my chips, I'd be there like a shot.
I'm rabidly in favor of space exploration and manned space exploration in particular. We're on the same side. I'm just of the opinion that there is a place for manned missions and a place for automated ones. In the case of most of the stuff in ISS, it could be automated. In the case of doing field work on the Moon or Mars, you better believe we should have humans there since it is a more complex environment and human intuition can go a long way.
ISS has completely ballooned over anyone's budget expectations and that's mainly because it doesn't really have a point or clearly defined goal. "let's build a space station" doesn't count as a goal in my book because I haven't heard a good reason why one is needed.
Space exploration cash should be spent on missions that will yield the most bang for the buck. Sometimes that will take humans and sometimes it will involve machines. they are not mutually exclusive as so many people seem to argue.
I guess it doesn't hurt to use ISS for this kind of thing as long as it's there. I just have a problem with it existence in the first place. Can you name me some reasons why $100 bn should have been spent on an orbital station rather than manned planetary exploration, manned and unmanned asteroid investigation or even something as mundane as robotic probes which we could have sent to every large body in the solar system for that cost?
This is probably going to be marked flamebait or offtopic but this experiment could have been unmanned. If anyone claims this is a good reason to have a manned space station, I defy them to specify how having humans aboard is needed in this case.
Now geology, that's a different story.
You can adopt a defeatist attitude about it or you can take action by getting involved with your local representatives to keep the mission on track. ISS was in need of some oversight and a Mars push will be too. I would suggest you get involved with a space advocacy group if this matters at all to you. If not, by all means continue posting reasons why it can't be done while others fight for it.
Zubrin's estimate was 20 bn. That's low, fine. Nasa reviewed it, scaled it up and costed it at $60 bn. Even it it's 1.5 times that like you said, that's $90 bn over 10 years. $9 bn is a little more than half of nasa budget and it you divert the shuttle and ISS costs, they can swing it.
It can be done right and within the current budget. Going to the moon was done on a budget of about 10% than NASA has to day (adjusted for inflation by the way). Handwaving is throwing around titanic price tags based on guesses and making claims that it will be "really really expensive" just because it sounds hard. A detailed plan and budget is not.
You can find any number of ways to squander $1tr. Just because it's possible to fuck it up and do it wrong a-la ISS doesn't mean that you're destined to do it that way.
I think you need to do some reading on this subject.
If you're looking for actual numbers on thrust, cost and whatnot, I suggest reading The Case for Mars
It's written by an actual rocket scientist and he is very good at laying out the numbers without taking leaps like "it's 100 times as far so it'll cost 100 times as much".
So what? It's not like Mars is a rapidly changing environment.
doing this faster means you get more done in s given amount of time. That translates into getting more science done for your money.
That's what the ground controllers are for. The robots act as the senses for the ground controllers. And better robots do exist. I think the Mars rovers only have about 256MB memory -- they can do better than that. Besides, if humans were there, what would they do? They would use special equipment to take readings of Mars, just as the rovers do. If Mars was like Earth, then sending humans would be justifiable -- there would be so much there to explore that humans could do more. But Mars is pretty barren. A simple rover will suffice.
The people on the ground have a 15 minute time lag, no sense of touch, smell, hearing or taste. I'd hardly call that comporable to being able to grab a rock, go back to the hab, and play with it with all your senses for a few hours. They could do that say 100 times in a week easy. The rovers have done study on maybe a couple dozen rocks and it's been 2 months now. It's that kind of ability that justifies humans on a Mars mission. in interplanetary space, taking pictures is fine so let the robots do it.
- Humans can do everything that the robots can but hundreds of times faster.
- They can use their intuition and perception in ways that robtos cannot.
Better robots don't exist yet. Humans are the best tool for scientific discovery for things like exploring the surface of Mars. To underscopre my opening point, I'm not saying that we should launch humans in a probe to Neptune to take pictures. In that case a robot make sense. for feild geology work however, it's humans hands down.
We're both playing with made up numbers but it seems clear to me that humans would outstip machines by so many orders of magnitude, it would greatly outweigh the price ratio.
If you have to send 10,000 robots to get the same work done as 4 or 6 humans, you don't really gain much do you.
Simply not true. First, the rovers were more like $400 million each. I'm not sure where you get your figure of humans costing 100 times more. That's simply wild speculation on your part.
Two humans could have done everything the two current probes have done in the past two months in a few hours tops. It would cost more but in the two year stay that humans would undertake, they would produce tens of thousands of times the scientific data that machines would. It's not just volume either but quality. Having a human doing something in real time is far more productive than telerobotics. I reitterate my point: humans are better at some things than machines and will do them for lower cost. Yes, even in space.
Space tourism will need to follow government sponsored missions. This is a public works project that at this point can only be undertaken by a government entity. Once we get the proper hang of it, private industry will be able to take advantage. Exploration will need to precede tourism or settlement just as it has at every point in history.
This is an important myth to bust.
Look, let's take politics out of this. Space exploration at this point in history is about doing science and obtaining data. For some things, that's better left to machines. Gas giant probes are a perfect example.
For geologic work however, humans just plain do a better job. The current two probes, God bless them, would have been pretty much useless if humans were up there instead. To grossly over simplify it, I want the most megabytes for my buck. If a human can send back 100 megabytes of scientific data as opposed to 10 from a robot, send the human. if it's the other way around, send the robotic probe.
This shouldn't he a fight of man vs. machine. It should be an intelligent decision of whom or what to send on a particular mission. For some it will be humans and for some robots. They are not mutually exclusive for space exploration.
No data structures class? That's like the cornerstone of a decent CS degree. That and some decent theory classes.
I guess it depends but I'm just going with what the article says.
The only thing I can think of is that the structure of the foam is such that it deflects radiation in such a way that it just turns it into heat as it bounces around within its structure.
I already commented on this over here but hey...
I'm a space nut so you can guess where I'm going with this.
Aerogel is a really cool substance. It's glass foam that's very very light and it's an excellent insulator. I don't know about it's radiation blocking properties though.
If this carbon foam is of comparable weight as aerogel (negligible), it's perfect for space use. The lighter the better since it costs $thousands/kilo to get stuff off the ground. If it blocks radiation, fantastic. Water and metal are the big rad blockers now but they're heavy. If it can act as a good insulator too, you're golden. If not, a sandwich of aerogel and carbon nanofoam could act as a heat trapper so you don't freeze and a radiation blocker so you don't get zapped. And all for practicaly no weight. Shazam!
If I'm not mistaken, all the European probes found was hydrogen. While that's very suggestive of water, finding mineral evidence is more convincing still. Hell, we knew Mars had water decades ago in the poles. This is signifigant since it points to larger and larger amounts that did exist or possibly still do.
Let's not get into a pissing contest of who has the better space agency. Every step towards Mars settlement is a good one.
I don't think NASA is claiming anything more than broad speculation with lots of caveats. They're pretty sure there was lots of water. When? How much? How long? Who knows. Since I'm paying for this info anyway, I'm glad they're making it available as quick as they are.
Besides, isn't releasing this data to the world defacto peer review?
How exactly does distance have anything to do with price in this situation?
A little history on this is in order. Imagine wavy vertical lines transporting you back to the past.
The year is 1989 and I'm growing out a mullet. The first president Bush makes an attempt to rejuvenate NASA by setting Mars as a goal. Since he's a politician and not a scientist, he delegates the details to a group to give him a plan and price tag. What he got was the infamous 90-day report. The 90-day report amounted to implementing a Mars exploration plan that included every pet project that NASA had. It involved building giant craft in orbit, sending them to lumbering to Mars, have a crew land for 2 weeks and then go back to Earth. The estimated cost was an insane $450 billion which they comically expected to get. At the time, I was too concerned with getting my hands on a Sega Genesis to care or understand.
NASA had lost their minds and took the presidential initiative to mean that they were getting a blank check for everything they ever wanted to fund. King George the First saw the price and turned them down flat. He wasn't aware that there were any other ways to do it so it was slated to happen in "the future". Since then, there have been several different plans developed to get to Mars on a tight budget and stay there long enough to do some real science and establish a permanent presence.
Wavy lines back to the present.
$100bn is still a shitload. If I recall correctly, the military budget is about $400bn. 25% of that is a sizable amount and more than I'm even willing to spend on NASA and I'm a space nut.
I suggest everyone check out Mars Direct. It's a plan estimated by its creator to cost around $20bn to start up and $2bn per mission. Even NASA's version is only $60bn when they ran their numbers.
One last thing. The 90-day report figure of $400 bn back in the early ninties was based on the Werner Von-Bruan plan of Mars exploration. It was impractacle and is now widely accepted to be the wrong way to do it.
Grandparent post is making a foolish comparison. It's talking like old folks who go on about how a coke cost 5 cents "back then" but forget that they earned $4 per day.