First off, look at my sig, we're on the same side.
That aside, I'm not proposing mining the Moon and throwing ore at Mars. That makes no sense. If we build a base on the moon, build ships there and lanuch them, it would potentialy be less fule consuming to get it to Mars.
Even if that hair-brained scheme doesn't hold up, the solar farm, H3 mining and astronomy aspects of a Lunar base still give it some oomph to my eyes.
That being said, it we had to spend money on one thing, it should be Mars.
So the plan is to build a station at L1 and use it as a jump off point. Let's think about that. We'll have to burn fuel (cash) to get away from Earth. Dock with the station for some reason, then blast off to other places. Does this really save fuel? Wouldn't it be cheaper to just blast off from Earth to Mars or the belt? Why the middle man?
Even if there is fuel savings in that plan, the infrastructure is this: launch hundreds of tons of equipment into L1. Fly up, put it together and maintain it. That would cost billions just to do that. How long until that initial investment is made up by any possible energy savings in going from Earth to L1 then outward? I would guess it would be decades if not centuries if there's any savings at all. Wouldn't we have space elevators, fusion and all that other cool stuff by then anyway?
I maintain that just blasting off to the destination remains the best way to go. No interplanetary rest stops. They'll probably smell like pee just like on Earth anyway.
I'm for Mars direct too. I'm just making the point that the Moon is still a better idea than any further stations.
As far as materials go, it the moon is made of the same stuff that Earth is more or less, we'll probably find enough metal up there to make it work our while. Not to send back to earth but to sent out to Mars. We can ship the Air and water that we need for a small base. I'm not crazy enough to imply terraforming the moon but a base there is not without merit.
Mars is where the action is.
Unfortunatly, to this administration and the preceding ones, Mars is where the inaction is.
You're missing my point. The useful stuff floating up there is called "the Moon", "Mars" and "Asteroids". There's nothing but dust at the LaGrange points of the Moon and Earth.
It's like starting a farm in the middle of the Sahara because you heard that Africa is a fertile place.
I'm sure this point was beaten to death in yesterday's story about moon missions, but space stations don't make much sense.
We've already got ISS for better or worse as a 0g test lab. On the Moon, we could build a solar farm that would fill our energy needs on Earth pretty much entirely. We would also be able to get a telescope bigger and better than anything else in existence. Lastly, the Moon offers a nice balance of construction material and low gravity which would give us a great jump-off point to Mars and the belt.
Speaking of Mars, putting people there would have more benefits than I care to type. New world for humanity, extraterrestrial science (possibly biology), easy access to the asteroids, ability to live off the land that can't be done on the moon or deep space...
Another thing while I'm all steamed up, isn't the LaGrange point between the earth and moon L1? That's an unstable point that would probably require regular correction so it doesn't fall to earth or the moon. SOHO has to deal with issues like that. I would hope that they would at least think to put it at L4 or L5 for stability's sake.
Could someone please enumerate the benefits of a L1 station cause I don't see them.
I think we're using different scales of comparison. The link you provide is going by percentage of GDP. The figure I heard I think goes by just taking the amount and adjusting it for inflation over the years.
I would be so bold as to say that since the GDP is higher today, we wouldn't have so spend the same percentage of the GDP to get the same amount of budget for NASA.
You're kidding right? NASA already gets allocated huge budget. The problem is that they just waste it on bloat. Properly directed, the current budget will be plenty for lots of stuff. Remember that during the good old Apollo days that the NASA budget was only 10% more in today's dollars and we got lots more done then than we have over the past 30 years.
It's all about direction.
I still think we should push for Mars first but that's another story.
Agreed. Of course getting to Mars is hard. Getting into low earth orbit was hard. Sailing across an ocean was hard. Adapting to a colder environment when migrating from Africa was hard. I hope that defeatist attitudes aren't widespread in govenrment and NASA about getting to Mars.
There will be risks, engineering chalanges, and deaths but this is already the case with NASA. Think Apollo. The fact is, pusing the envelope of human civilization will never be "easy".
Fair enough. What about.5G or.3G? Is there an easy to compute formula for diamater of a craft and "gravity"? Partial gravity might be enough to counter a lot of the health problems.
What I would like to know is why more research isn't being done on artificial gravity. So many of the health problems encountered in LEO gravity cound be sidestepped if you just spin the damn craft.
I would love to know why some of the effort being spent on watching things get sick in 0g isn't being directed to something as simple as spinning a glorified beer keg in orbit with some mice in it.
This is probably a crazy troll but the comet thing is still a while off technologically speaking. Flinging them into the atmosphere to burn up would probably be the way to go so it doesn't kick up a 200 year dust storm and cool the planet even more.
As for nukes, I've read proposals that include nuking one or both poles for some quick, cheap heat and atmosphere. sounds pretty cool to me.
Yeah, I raised my eyebrow when I read that too. What I thought was funny was how they mentioned Mars Express is due to enter Martian orbit on Christmas Day and send a British-built Beagle 2 lander to the surface, while the NASA rovers should arrive on Jan. 3 and Jan. 24
So they are worried about a man made meteor seeding the planet but sending rovers to the surface is somehow alright???
hey, if we do "contaminate" the surface, that will save genetic engineers a lot of trouble if we ever try to terraform. "space quarantine treaty", now there's a treaty we've got to get rid of.
something like this does happen in the Red Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. If you haven't read it yet, it's a good read.
and yeah, such a thing is worrying but it all depends on how tight the corporations grip the colonists. and hey, no one said the road to a livable mars would be smooth.
I agree that nuking the poles, which are water by the way on both poles with a CO2 frosting during the winter, is a good way to kick things off.
Some benifits are that you get a bit of heat from each blast (obviously), CO2 and H20 gets melted in the blast and dust can get kicked up in the blast if they're deep enough to decrease the light reflectivity.
Mars is Radioactive and generally inhospitable anyway so I don't think the fallout would be that big of an issue. besides as long as it isn't doped with something to make it "extra" radioactive (cobolt i think) a modern nuclear device turns most of the fule straight into energy. just a little bit of fission is used to kick off the big fusion reaction. Plus, the poles are even more inhospitable than the equator. no one will be there for some time to feel any affects. At least for the south anyway, the north will become an ocean that people will use for water.
as far as the legality, that's true but if terraforming gets started, it's likely that that old relic of a cold war law will be relealed along with the part that forbids ownership of anything outside of lower earth orbit.
for getting rid of all the nukes, I've heard stories of how many devises are out there. that might take a while.
Everything that canadd heat to the atmosphere will probably be needed. mirrors, nukes, nuke plants, coloring the surface, super greenhouse gasses, aerobraking commets, the whole works.
Take a look at the Mars Soceity forums on Terraforming. Pretty interesting.
Mars has lots of water. not a problem. Nitrogen and heat are the big missing components. Check out this and specificaly this for some good reading on terraforming.
A base on deimos or phobos makes far more sense-- or simply a large asteroid in earth orbit. I don't hold with gravity wells-- simply too expensive. In earth's case, you make an exception since we have so much infrastructure down here. But otherwise, why bother with Mars, other than as a flag-planting exercise.
You're still going to have to supply the mining opperation from somewhere and Mars has the resources to do it. Agriculture can be run from there either from greenhouses or on a terraformed landscape. Human settlement would fare better on Mars with it's thin but existant atmosphere, water and higher gravity (then Phobos).
The idea is that Matrian settlement isn't just setting up house on Mars for the sake of setting up house. That's a lot of science to be done, a lot of expantion of the human race and economic growth.
The afforementioned triangle trade of course assumes that there are settlements.
What have the shuttle missions gotten us? What experiments did that do that couldn't have been automated? What satelites did they put in orbit that cound't have been put there in a normal rocket?
Killing the Low Earth Orbit shuttle program would free billions to start a maned program to Mars. playing around in LEO is worse than useless. It is costly and risks lives needlessly.
Inflation is bound to happen, that's true. I've heard that a good sized (whatever that means) astroid has about a trillion dollars of raw materials. That sounds like incentive enough to me to start a mining process. Once we are able to mine astriods with some "ease" it should still be profitable to do it even it the value gets cut by 90%, that's still a shitload of cash.
Granted, that's a whole lot of number-making-up ans speculation but I'd bet that inflation wouldn't be a deterent for a long time.
NASA needs direction not funding change. They were able to get us to the moon since we set a clear atainable but chalenging goal. The budget was only about 10% more in todays dollars to do that. If we redirected NASA's efforts to establishing a Mars exploration and setelment program, we could easily do it. we are in a better position today to go to Mars then we were in the 60's to go to the Moon.
The payoff isn't just Mars or access to the astroid belt. It's a generation of people inspired to persue careers in science and technology that will advance the human race to new levels of existance.
Dr. Robert Zubrin has suggested that there could be a new traingle trade with the astriod belt, Mars and Earth. Since it takes a lot less effort to get to the belt from Mars, a base there makes the most sense.
Earth -> high tech to Mars Mars -> mining equiptment, low tech goods and food to the belt Astroid belt -> trillions in materials and H3 to Earth
Yet another good reason to get NASA to make Mars a goal.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, look at my sig, we're on the same side.
That aside, I'm not proposing mining the Moon and throwing ore at Mars. That makes no sense. If we build a base on the moon, build ships there and lanuch them, it would potentialy be less fule consuming to get it to Mars.
Even if that hair-brained scheme doesn't hold up, the solar farm, H3 mining and astronomy aspects of a Lunar base still give it some oomph to my eyes.
That being said, it we had to spend money on one thing, it should be Mars.
So the plan is to build a station at L1 and use it as a jump off point. Let's think about that. We'll have to burn fuel (cash) to get away from Earth. Dock with the station for some reason, then blast off to other places. Does this really save fuel? Wouldn't it be cheaper to just blast off from Earth to Mars or the belt? Why the middle man?
Even if there is fuel savings in that plan, the infrastructure is this: launch hundreds of tons of equipment into L1. Fly up, put it together and maintain it. That would cost billions just to do that. How long until that initial investment is made up by any possible energy savings in going from Earth to L1 then outward? I would guess it would be decades if not centuries if there's any savings at all. Wouldn't we have space elevators, fusion and all that other cool stuff by then anyway?
I maintain that just blasting off to the destination remains the best way to go. No interplanetary rest stops. They'll probably smell like pee just like on Earth anyway.
I'm for Mars direct too. I'm just making the point that the Moon is still a better idea than any further stations.
As far as materials go, it the moon is made of the same stuff that Earth is more or less, we'll probably find enough metal up there to make it work our while. Not to send back to earth but to sent out to Mars. We can ship the Air and water that we need for a small base. I'm not crazy enough to imply terraforming the moon but a base there is not without merit.
Mars is where the action is.
Unfortunatly, to this administration and the preceding ones, Mars is where the inaction is.
You're missing my point. The useful stuff floating up there is called "the Moon", "Mars" and "Asteroids". There's nothing but dust at the LaGrange points of the Moon and Earth.
It's like starting a farm in the middle of the Sahara because you heard that Africa is a fertile place.
I'm sure this point was beaten to death in yesterday's story about moon missions, but space stations don't make much sense.
We've already got ISS for better or worse as a 0g test lab. On the Moon, we could build a solar farm that would fill our energy needs on Earth pretty much entirely. We would also be able to get a telescope bigger and better than anything else in existence. Lastly, the Moon offers a nice balance of construction material and low gravity which would give us a great jump-off point to Mars and the belt.
Speaking of Mars, putting people there would have more benefits than I care to type. New world for humanity, extraterrestrial science (possibly biology), easy access to the asteroids, ability to live off the land that can't be done on the moon or deep space...
Another thing while I'm all steamed up, isn't the LaGrange point between the earth and moon L1? That's an unstable point that would probably require regular correction so it doesn't fall to earth or the moon. SOHO has to deal with issues like that. I would hope that they would at least think to put it at L4 or L5 for stability's sake.
Could someone please enumerate the benefits of a L1 station cause I don't see them.
I think we're using different scales of comparison. The link you provide is going by percentage of GDP. The figure I heard I think goes by just taking the amount and adjusting it for inflation over the years.
I would be so bold as to say that since the GDP is higher today, we wouldn't have so spend the same percentage of the GDP to get the same amount of budget for NASA.
to give credit where's it's do, I'm linking to this.
The above post is taken largely from Bob Zubrin's excelent book Entering Space.
You're kidding right? NASA already gets allocated huge budget. The problem is that they just waste it on bloat. Properly directed, the current budget will be plenty for lots of stuff. Remember that during the good old Apollo days that the NASA budget was only 10% more in today's dollars and we got lots more done then than we have over the past 30 years.
It's all about direction.
I still think we should push for Mars first but that's another story.
Agreed. Of course getting to Mars is hard. Getting into low earth orbit was hard. Sailing across an ocean was hard. Adapting to a colder environment when migrating from Africa was hard. I hope that defeatist attitudes aren't widespread in govenrment and NASA about getting to Mars.
There will be risks, engineering chalanges, and deaths but this is already the case with NASA. Think Apollo. The fact is, pusing the envelope of human civilization will never be "easy".
Fair enough. What about .5G or .3G? Is there an easy to compute formula for diamater of a craft and "gravity"? Partial gravity might be enough to counter a lot of the health problems.
What I would like to know is why more research isn't being done on artificial gravity. So many of the health problems encountered in LEO gravity cound be sidestepped if you just spin the damn craft.
I would love to know why some of the effort being spent on watching things get sick in 0g isn't being directed to something as simple as spinning a glorified beer keg in orbit with some mice in it.
Can someone tell me why this isn't being done?
I think they will have more to offer on the fission side of things. Fission we've got. This new project is fussion.
This is probably a crazy troll but the comet thing is still a while off technologically speaking. Flinging them into the atmosphere to burn up would probably be the way to go so it doesn't kick up a 200 year dust storm and cool the planet even more.
As for nukes, I've read proposals that include nuking one or both poles for some quick, cheap heat and atmosphere. sounds pretty cool to me.
Yeah, I raised my eyebrow when I read that too. What I thought was funny was how they mentioned Mars Express is due to enter Martian orbit on Christmas Day and send a British-built Beagle 2 lander to the surface, while the NASA rovers should arrive on Jan. 3 and Jan. 24
So they are worried about a man made meteor seeding the planet but sending rovers to the surface is somehow alright???
hey, if we do "contaminate" the surface, that will save genetic engineers a lot of trouble if we ever try to terraform. "space quarantine treaty", now there's a treaty we've got to get rid of.
something like this does happen in the Red Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. If you haven't read it yet, it's a good read.
and yeah, such a thing is worrying but it all depends on how tight the corporations grip the colonists. and hey, no one said the road to a livable mars would be smooth.
I reply to some of this here
I agree that nuking the poles, which are water by the way on both poles with a CO2 frosting during the winter, is a good way to kick things off.
Some benifits are that you get a bit of heat from each blast (obviously), CO2 and H20 gets melted in the blast and dust can get kicked up in the blast if they're deep enough to decrease the light reflectivity.
Mars is Radioactive and generally inhospitable anyway so I don't think the fallout would be that big of an issue. besides as long as it isn't doped with something to make it "extra" radioactive (cobolt i think) a modern nuclear device turns most of the fule straight into energy. just a little bit of fission is used to kick off the big fusion reaction. Plus, the poles are even more inhospitable than the equator. no one will be there for some time to feel any affects. At least for the south anyway, the north will become an ocean that people will use for water.
as far as the legality, that's true but if terraforming gets started, it's likely that that old relic of a cold war law will be relealed along with the part that forbids ownership of anything outside of lower earth orbit.
for getting rid of all the nukes, I've heard stories of how many devises are out there. that might take a while.
Everything that canadd heat to the atmosphere will probably be needed. mirrors, nukes, nuke plants, coloring the surface, super greenhouse gasses, aerobraking commets, the whole works.
Take a look at the Mars Soceity forums on Terraforming. Pretty interesting.
Mars has lots of water. not a problem. Nitrogen and heat are the big missing components. Check out this and specificaly this for some good reading on terraforming.
A base on deimos or phobos makes far more sense-- or simply a large asteroid in earth orbit. I don't hold with gravity wells-- simply too expensive. In earth's case, you make an exception since we have so much infrastructure down here. But otherwise, why bother with Mars, other than as a flag-planting exercise.
You're still going to have to supply the mining opperation from somewhere and Mars has the resources to do it. Agriculture can be run from there either from greenhouses or on a terraformed landscape. Human settlement would fare better on Mars with it's thin but existant atmosphere, water and higher gravity (then Phobos).
The idea is that Matrian settlement isn't just setting up house on Mars for the sake of setting up house. That's a lot of science to be done, a lot of expantion of the human race and economic growth.
The afforementioned triangle trade of course assumes that there are settlements.
What have the shuttle missions gotten us? What experiments did that do that couldn't have been automated? What satelites did they put in orbit that cound't have been put there in a normal rocket?
Killing the Low Earth Orbit shuttle program would free billions to start a maned program to Mars. playing around in LEO is worse than useless. It is costly and risks lives needlessly.
Inflation is bound to happen, that's true. I've heard that a good sized (whatever that means) astroid has about a trillion dollars of raw materials. That sounds like incentive enough to me to start a mining process. Once we are able to mine astriods with some "ease" it should still be profitable to do it even it the value gets cut by 90%, that's still a shitload of cash.
Granted, that's a whole lot of number-making-up ans speculation but I'd bet that inflation wouldn't be a deterent for a long time.
NASA needs direction not funding change. They were able to get us to the moon since we set a clear atainable but chalenging goal. The budget was only about 10% more in todays dollars to do that. If we redirected NASA's efforts to establishing a Mars exploration and setelment program, we could easily do it. we are in a better position today to go to Mars then we were in the 60's to go to the Moon.
The payoff isn't just Mars or access to the astroid belt. It's a generation of people inspired to persue careers in science and technology that will advance the human race to new levels of existance.
That link should have pointed here
Whoops
Dr. Robert Zubrin has suggested that there could be a new traingle trade with the astriod belt, Mars and Earth. Since it takes a lot less effort to get to the belt from Mars, a base there makes the most sense.
Earth -> high tech to Mars
Mars -> mining equiptment, low tech goods and food to the belt
Astroid belt -> trillions in materials and H3 to Earth
Yet another good reason to get NASA to make Mars a goal.