Do you mean water generating plant like a tree or a building with a smokestack? Either way, water is a big problem on the moon, there's none of it. Well, there may be some on the poles but hydrogen is more rare on the moon than uranium probably. You can get oxygen from rocks but any moon colony will probably require shippments of water or at least hydrogen.
if they find an old comet in a polar crater, that could change.
I'm of the mind that it's probably better to just send shipments of parts and tools and have them waiting for the humans to put together. I once helped my dad shingle the garage. It took a weekend. I wonder how long it would take for a robot to do and how much that robot would cost. Only replace our backyard with the moon.
I'm aware of how bloated the von Braun plan was. Pretty much everyone who knows about Mars Direct does. I just invoked his name because von Braun is dead and Zubrin is not.
This is a Godsend. The Shuttle was a tarbaby from the get go. In my opinion, they should just halt plan to get the remaining 2 (or is it 3) back in space and work on plans to put them in museums.
But what about all the skilled labor wasted? Well, there are multiple plans I've heard of to build a new class of rocketry largely based on the shuttle launch stack (or bundle). That whole workforce would still be valuable and employed and the shuttle derived vehicle could be capable of launching to Mars directly without pointless pit stops at the ISS, L5, moon or wherever: Mars Direct
First off, keep your pants on. it's been less than a year.
Second, Bush has leaned on congress and got a funding increase for the Mars push when the Senate approved the NASA budget.
Thirdly, the Moon/Mars push will primarily take budget from the shuttle and ISS once those are done. Some additional funds will be diverted from other projects but science project stuff like this will continue.
Don't forget the science that will be obtained from manned Moon and Mars missions. Before you flame me about how robots are cheaper or whatever, ask yourself this: Do you believe mankind should settle other worlds? If so, do you think any number of robots will do if no humans are sent?
Dihydrogen Monoxide is found to be a pervasive, corrosive chemical found in every facet of our culture. It plays a key part in nuclear power, gaseous dihydrogen monoxide has been seen to cause burns, the chemical industry makes extensive use of it and dumps it straight into the water supply. Corporations are ignoring the DHMO threat. Third world countries suffer widespread disease due to dihydrogen monoxide contamination.
I think it's high time that the WWF, Sierra Club and Earth Liberation Front tackle this issue and get DHMO banned. It would be in keeping with their record of sound science and reasonable policy.
I'm a member of TMS but I'm glad that the Russians are doing this because TMS really cannot. Don't get me wrong, I'm a dues paying member but this is quite a bit different from TMS activities.
The MDRS missions are great for simulating certain aspects of a Mars mission on the ground but what they haven't done is lock 4-6 people in a studio apt for 8 months to see if they tear each other apart. The cramped living conditions with nowhere to go is probably one of the biggest obstacles to overcome on a manned mission.
Since TMS is volunteer, they are unlikely to find even a couple people who are able to carve 8 months out of their lives to sit in a tuna can. What the Russians are doing here is an invaluable proof of concept.
but don't a lot of other critters like dogs, whales, birds, skunks, sloths, etc, etc, etc, entail a system of bacteria and symbiotic lifeforms? Wouldn't this just mean that most complex life could be classified as superorganisms under this thinking?
umm, the link I posted was for a book called "The Case for Mars". I don't want to re-write that book here but as you might guess, the case is made for it there.
I've got a few big things that I'll mention for Mars: Air, Water and Iron. There is a lot you can do just from that starting point.
Sorry, but Kitty Hawk was a stunt, nothing more. I respect the engineering involved, but this is not flying. I don't care that some faceless person somewhere defined an arbitrary point as "the sky". Flight is CONTROLLED flight, minimally a transcontinental trip.
Unfortunately, the Wright Brothers' technology is not applicable to intercontinental travel, as near as I can tell, so I'm not sure that this does anything for the aero-plane industry, except as a something for the press to report (which may be worth something, but I tend to doubt that it means much).
The question is how many people are going to be fooled that this is really flight.
speaking as someone who is part of the political wing of a space advocacy group, we are fighting for this legislation to be pushed through.
It provides legitimacy for this budding industry and give legal avenues for people to develop it. Think of it this way: Without any regulation saying where and how a group can launch into space, the government can just shut them down based on noise pollution, safety hazards, possession of dangerous materials, any number of things. By having prescribed rules, groups shooting for space can do so without worrying about operating within a legal vacuum (and later physical one).
There's also the safety stuff that others have commented on but that's been covered.
The Mars Society, AIAA and I think the NSS are all pulling for this so that should tell you something about how spacers view such regulation.
Nature prescribes no bounds aside from the laws of physics. The fact that we as a species produce waste and use technology is neither unique nor immoral.
If you read what I wrote, I'm not an advocate of "crapping in our own nest". Doing something that hurts the survival of the human species is immoral. Killing other people and disrupting an ecosystem to the point where human life is negatively impacted both count as immoral in my book.
I fail to see how you make the logical step from "we live in houses, farm and produce waste materials" to "That's why your argument is morally bankrupt." You're begging the question.
Every known living thing consumes energy and produces waste. The fact that we do too is not inherently immoral. The degree to which we do it can be but only when it harms the survival of humans.
Tell me, what arbitrary boundaries do you place on human behavior? Should we not live anywhere where clothes are needed? Should we not be farming? Should we not use antibiotics for the sake of the microbes? On whose authority do you make these judgements? Oh, I know: your own.
I'm not arguing for rampant pollution or hunting to extinction for pleasure. It's common for people to take an all or nothing stance on this. green nuts are luddites who would have us give up farming and electricity if their ideals were taken to their logical conclusion. Polluters who take the shortsighted way out of problems are harming the human race.
Humans need to look out for humans. part of that is interacting and engineering the environment to suit us. poisoning water and crippling biospheres are to the detriment of humans but there is no reason why we should not use natural recourses and take our food from other lifeforms so long as we don't hurt our long term survival.
It always pisses me off when people live in some fantasyland where "nature" is always in perfect harmony and humans no nothing but upset it.
Extinctions, invasions and wild changes in the biosphere are intrinsic in nature. Humans are not somehow "outside of it". We are part of it and there is no valid ethical argument saying we should not strive to survive just like every other lifeform out there.
This may not have been the intent of the parent post but I've heard others who have this "humans are evil" bias. I've always wondered why they don't just go on a murder/suicide bender.
Huh? how much of the Earth's resources are spent on the laughing gas and rubber used to blast off? Even it it was as common as jumbo jets, you would still call this "a considerable drain"?
Plus where do you think the money goes once you pay it? Scaled and Virgin isn't going to set it on fire. It's going to go to the salaries of their workers and to the vendors who are providing parts, shareholders, etc.
Either make a factory designed to operate in close proximity to the sun and use the energy to make antimatter directly, or attempt to capture the naturally generated antimatter from the sun in some fashion.
I'm all for making this cheaper but the $10 trillion dollar(or whatever)/gram figure is based on the costs at Fermi Lab. They're cutting edge as far as antimatter production and we'd still have to mortgage the planet to make any meaningful amounts.
Perhaps they will be able to cut production costs by a factor of a thousand. Then a few grams would only consume the entire DoD budget.
This is insane. A gram of antimatter would cost almost more money than exists on earth if I recall. You thought nukes were expensive? wait till you see the military budget if this gets taken seriously.
I'd love to see their containment schemes so that the anti matter doesn't bump the bomb casing wall and annihilate in storage or in transit.
On a funny note this nut whom I've met in person, claims that comets are made of pure antimatter. Riiiight. That should bring production costs down:)
Pick nits if you like. I should have said "early Mercury missions".
In any case, this is still cheaper than X-15. I don't think there's any reason to think that the cost of more ambitious flights will scale in the same way that NASA's did.
With the removal of juicy government contracts, politics, and building things like a global communications network (which we have for nominal costs now), I have no doubt that private attempts will continue to undercut NASA costs by insane amounts.
I'm wondering what took up the extra mass to account for a 3 person flight. Did they have to take up extra stuff or did the weight of the pilot's 200 pound testicles suffice?
Now that the Mercury missions have more or less been reproduced for ~$25 million, I'd like to hear some reassessments of modern Moon mission costs. Same for Mars. The media (and a lot of slashdotters by the way) like to come up with estimates which go something like "if Apollo cost $X billion dollars, Mars will cost 10 times that cause it's harder".
Based on the fact that this was an order of magnitude or two cheaper than comparable NASA missions, anyone care to extrapolate a Moon or Mars mission if NASA is just turned into a clearing house for prize money? I'm guessing that Zubrin's crazy estimates of less than $25 billion seem a lot less crazy now.
I agree that it's probably not a good idea to do the first mission with all new tech. Part of the Mars Direct plan is the fact that it uses 100% existing and tested tech. However, I could see this becoming useful for transporting an initial colony (~100 people). Hell, depending on how big these can scale up, they might be able to transfer thousands of people at a time.
Shit, I'd be happy to see a team of 6 land before I die.
Imagine launching to Mars. Even if you launch in a tuna can ala Zubrin, it's still pretty confined. If you launch in an un -nflated balloon, accelerate and get pointed at Mars, you can inflate and have twice or three times the living space. As long are you're willing to be confined for a few hours at first, the place could be quite roomy and more people could be sent per trip as long as provisions are increased.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you mean water generating plant like a tree or a building with a smokestack? Either way, water is a big problem on the moon, there's none of it. Well, there may be some on the poles but hydrogen is more rare on the moon than uranium probably. You can get oxygen from rocks but any moon colony will probably require shippments of water or at least hydrogen.
if they find an old comet in a polar crater, that could change.
I'm of the mind that it's probably better to just send shipments of parts and tools and have them waiting for the humans to put together. I once helped my dad shingle the garage. It took a weekend. I wonder how long it would take for a robot to do and how much that robot would cost. Only replace our backyard with the moon.
Bu(-)JIL
I'm assuming Jedi means that you don't have affiliation.
"You're voting for Bush but you don't like him?"
Yup, I just like John Kerry less. Yes, that's possible.
I'm aware of how bloated the von Braun plan was. Pretty much everyone who knows about Mars Direct does. I just invoked his name because von Braun is dead and Zubrin is not.
This is a Godsend. The Shuttle was a tarbaby from the get go. In my opinion, they should just halt plan to get the remaining 2 (or is it 3) back in space and work on plans to put them in museums.
But what about all the skilled labor wasted? Well, there are multiple plans I've heard of to build a new class of rocketry largely based on the shuttle launch stack (or bundle). That whole workforce would still be valuable and employed and the shuttle derived vehicle could be capable of launching to Mars directly without pointless pit stops at the ISS, L5, moon or wherever: Mars Direct
First off, keep your pants on. it's been less than a year.
Second, Bush has leaned on congress and got a funding increase for the Mars push when the Senate approved the NASA budget.
Thirdly, the Moon/Mars push will primarily take budget from the shuttle and ISS once those are done. Some additional funds will be diverted from other projects but science project stuff like this will continue.
Don't forget the science that will be obtained from manned Moon and Mars missions. Before you flame me about how robots are cheaper or whatever, ask yourself this: Do you believe mankind should settle other worlds? If so, do you think any number of robots will do if no humans are sent?
Dihydrogen Monoxide is found to be a pervasive, corrosive chemical found in every facet of our culture. It plays a key part in nuclear power, gaseous dihydrogen monoxide has been seen to cause burns, the chemical industry makes extensive use of it and dumps it straight into the water supply. Corporations are ignoring the DHMO threat. Third world countries suffer widespread disease due to dihydrogen monoxide contamination.
I think it's high time that the WWF, Sierra Club and Earth Liberation Front tackle this issue and get DHMO banned. It would be in keeping with their record of sound science and reasonable policy.
I'm a member of TMS but I'm glad that the Russians are doing this because TMS really cannot. Don't get me wrong, I'm a dues paying member but this is quite a bit different from TMS activities.
The MDRS missions are great for simulating certain aspects of a Mars mission on the ground but what they haven't done is lock 4-6 people in a studio apt for 8 months to see if they tear each other apart. The cramped living conditions with nowhere to go is probably one of the biggest obstacles to overcome on a manned mission.
Since TMS is volunteer, they are unlikely to find even a couple people who are able to carve 8 months out of their lives to sit in a tuna can. What the Russians are doing here is an invaluable proof of concept.
but don't a lot of other critters like dogs, whales, birds, skunks, sloths, etc, etc, etc, entail a system of bacteria and symbiotic lifeforms? Wouldn't this just mean that most complex life could be classified as superorganisms under this thinking?
umm, the link I posted was for a book called "The Case for Mars". I don't want to re-write that book here but as you might guess, the case is made for it there.
I've got a few big things that I'll mention for Mars: Air, Water and Iron. There is a lot you can do just from that starting point.
Sorry, but Kitty Hawk was a stunt, nothing more. I respect the engineering involved, but this is not flying. I don't care that some faceless person somewhere defined an arbitrary point as "the sky". Flight is CONTROLLED flight, minimally a transcontinental trip.
Unfortunately, the Wright Brothers' technology is not applicable to intercontinental travel, as near as I can tell, so I'm not sure that this does anything for the aero-plane industry, except as a something for the press to report (which may be worth something, but I tend to doubt that it means much).
The question is how many people are going to be fooled that this is really flight.
Martian Settlement in our lifetime.
Read a little bit about it before you yell that it can't be done or that it will cost a trillion zillion dollars.
speaking as someone who is part of the political wing of a space advocacy group, we are fighting for this legislation to be pushed through.
It provides legitimacy for this budding industry and give legal avenues for people to develop it. Think of it this way: Without any regulation saying where and how a group can launch into space, the government can just shut them down based on noise pollution, safety hazards, possession of dangerous materials, any number of things. By having prescribed rules, groups shooting for space can do so without worrying about operating within a legal vacuum (and later physical one).
There's also the safety stuff that others have commented on but that's been covered.
The Mars Society, AIAA and I think the NSS are all pulling for this so that should tell you something about how spacers view such regulation.
Nature prescribes no bounds aside from the laws of physics. The fact that we as a species produce waste and use technology is neither unique nor immoral.
If you read what I wrote, I'm not an advocate of "crapping in our own nest". Doing something that hurts the survival of the human species is immoral. Killing other people and disrupting an ecosystem to the point where human life is negatively impacted both count as immoral in my book.
I fail to see how you make the logical step from "we live in houses, farm and produce waste materials" to "That's why your argument is morally bankrupt." You're begging the question.
Every known living thing consumes energy and produces waste. The fact that we do too is not inherently immoral. The degree to which we do it can be but only when it harms the survival of humans.
Tell me, what arbitrary boundaries do you place on human behavior? Should we not live anywhere where clothes are needed? Should we not be farming? Should we not use antibiotics for the sake of the microbes? On whose authority do you make these judgements? Oh, I know: your own.
I'm not arguing for rampant pollution or hunting to extinction for pleasure. It's common for people to take an all or nothing stance on this. green nuts are luddites who would have us give up farming and electricity if their ideals were taken to their logical conclusion. Polluters who take the shortsighted way out of problems are harming the human race.
Humans need to look out for humans. part of that is interacting and engineering the environment to suit us. poisoning water and crippling biospheres are to the detriment of humans but there is no reason why we should not use natural recourses and take our food from other lifeforms so long as we don't hurt our long term survival.
This is something to be proud of, not bemoan.
It always pisses me off when people live in some fantasyland where "nature" is always in perfect harmony and humans no nothing but upset it.
Extinctions, invasions and wild changes in the biosphere are intrinsic in nature. Humans are not somehow "outside of it". We are part of it and there is no valid ethical argument saying we should not strive to survive just like every other lifeform out there.
This may not have been the intent of the parent post but I've heard others who have this "humans are evil" bias. I've always wondered why they don't just go on a murder/suicide bender.
Huh? how much of the Earth's resources are spent on the laughing gas and rubber used to blast off? Even it it was as common as jumbo jets, you would still call this "a considerable drain"?
Plus where do you think the money goes once you pay it? Scaled and Virgin isn't going to set it on fire. It's going to go to the salaries of their workers and to the vendors who are providing parts, shareholders, etc.
This has got to be a troll.
Either make a factory designed to operate in close proximity to the sun and use the energy to make antimatter directly, or attempt to capture the naturally generated antimatter from the sun in some fashion.
:)
And this is the cheap way to do it?
I'm all for making this cheaper but the $10 trillion dollar(or whatever)/gram figure is based on the costs at Fermi Lab. They're cutting edge as far as antimatter production and we'd still have to mortgage the planet to make any meaningful amounts.
Perhaps they will be able to cut production costs by a factor of a thousand. Then a few grams would only consume the entire DoD budget.
This is insane. A gram of antimatter would cost almost more money than exists on earth if I recall. You thought nukes were expensive? wait till you see the military budget if this gets taken seriously.
:)
I'd love to see their containment schemes so that the anti matter doesn't bump the bomb casing wall and annihilate in storage or in transit.
On a funny note this nut whom I've met in person, claims that comets are made of pure antimatter. Riiiight. That should bring production costs down
Pick nits if you like. I should have said "early Mercury missions".
In any case, this is still cheaper than X-15. I don't think there's any reason to think that the cost of more ambitious flights will scale in the same way that NASA's did.
With the removal of juicy government contracts, politics, and building things like a global communications network (which we have for nominal costs now), I have no doubt that private attempts will continue to undercut NASA costs by insane amounts.
I'm wondering what took up the extra mass to account for a 3 person flight. Did they have to take up extra stuff or did the weight of the pilot's 200 pound testicles suffice?
Now that the Mercury missions have more or less been reproduced for ~$25 million, I'd like to hear some reassessments of modern Moon mission costs. Same for Mars. The media (and a lot of slashdotters by the way) like to come up with estimates which go something like "if Apollo cost $X billion dollars, Mars will cost 10 times that cause it's harder".
Based on the fact that this was an order of magnitude or two cheaper than comparable NASA missions, anyone care to extrapolate a Moon or Mars mission if NASA is just turned into a clearing house for prize money? I'm guessing that Zubrin's crazy estimates of less than $25 billion seem a lot less crazy now.
right on.
I agree that it's probably not a good idea to do the first mission with all new tech. Part of the Mars Direct plan is the fact that it uses 100% existing and tested tech. However, I could see this becoming useful for transporting an initial colony (~100 people). Hell, depending on how big these can scale up, they might be able to transfer thousands of people at a time.
Shit, I'd be happy to see a team of 6 land before I die.
This could also be used for interplanetary craft.
Imagine launching to Mars. Even if you launch in a tuna can ala Zubrin, it's still pretty confined. If you launch in an un -nflated balloon, accelerate and get pointed at Mars, you can inflate and have twice or three times the living space. As long are you're willing to be confined for a few hours at first, the place could be quite roomy and more people could be sent per trip as long as provisions are increased.
Just a thought.
Fear and Terror. It sounds cooler.