That said, the Russian segments of the ISS were intended to be a part of Mir 2 (the second iteration of that station) and there definitely was a sense of closure with Mir anyway on the part of the Russian government. It was also not the first and certainly won't be the last space station put up by the Russian government.
If you could put the ISS into a orbit where perhaps future generations (I'm talking a thousand years from now or so) could worry about the refurbishment, I'm sure they could figure out how to turn it into a museum. Assuming that the cost of getting into space would drop considerably over that period of time, bringing workers and materials would not really be a problem and as a historic relic there might even be political rationale or even public sympathy in the form of donations that could perform such a task.
The real trick is simply putting the ISS in a position where such a task could be done. At the moment, it is close enough to the Earth that it needs very regular maintenance simply to maintain its current orbit and can't be left abandoned for very long (about a decade at most... sort of like what happened to Skylab and Mir). Quite literally, the atmosphere of the Earth is going to bring it down to the Earth if nothing else is done.
The only way to push the ISS up to a higher orbit is to attach some kind of thruster pack (likely an ion engine or something with a very high specific impulse but low thrust over a long period of time). It can take a few years to get to its final orbit as it won't be inhabited, but it does need to either go up or down as staying where it is right now simply won't work.
Why would it need to be covered? The point is that the ISS is going to be abandoned in place somehow, most likely at the bottom of the Pacific right now.
The only real concern would be potentially having the ISS break apart a little bit at a time, and those individual parts becoming separate pieces of debris in space. Boosting the ISS up to a higher orbit (no mention at how high) simply makes it possible to abandon the station without any further maintenance or cost, even though the initial boosting would cost some money.
An ideal orbit for the ISS would be one of the LaGrangian points "near" the Moon (L4 or L5), It would be out of the way for anything that would be put into space for a long time, and quite possibly it could eventually be salvaged for parts and/or sheer mass for any future endeavors in that part of the Solar System. The nice thing about those locations is that you don't even need to worry about any regular maintenance except for perhaps keeping the vehicle operational if that might even remotely be a goal, and even then it could be refurbished eventually by future groups that may have the money to care about something like that.
I certainly think it is much better to put the ISS in a place like that as opposed to dumping it into the middle of the Pacific Ocean.... which is the current plan. It most definitely won't be going to the Moon under any possible scenerio. If anything, sending it to Mars would be just as viable from a delta-v perspective.
The Pacific Ocean option wouldn't even be worth salvaging at a future date, other than to melt parts down as scrap. I would hate to see anything from the ISS even in a museum that came from a Pacific splashdown.
Re:Why not use it as a site to build the next one?
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How Long Can the ISS Last?
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· Score: 3, Informative
China is building a space station. They would have joined the ISS project if the US hadn't blocked them. It's basically US pride that is holding everything back.
It wasn't just the U.S. government that wasn't interested in having China join. There is also a concern by both Russia and America about the quality of any potential modules and spacecraft that would be attaching itself to the ISS in any docking procedure... and it was Roscosmos that would have taken the largest burden for such activities as the Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft would have most easily docked with the Russian segment rather than conforming to the American docking ports.
It was much more than pride at stake here, and while NASA officials were certainly the most vocal in opposition to Chinese participation, there were many other obstacles to getting Chinese astronauts on the ISS. If anything, it was also Chinese pride that sort of shot the whole project down too as they didn't want to be treated as a junior partner in the endeavor as well.
If the ESA and Roscosmos had wanted the Chinese Space Agency involved in the ISS, I'm sure it would have happened. There are other countries involved besides just Russia and America.
I seriously doubt that a Sea Dragon launch could have sent up the ISS, but I would agree that sending up 5-10 Saturn V launches would have most certainly done the trick. If anything, shutting down the Saturn V program was a huge mistake... when viewed in hindsight.
Every single mission that was accomplished with the Shuttle program (including sending up 7-man crews) could have been done with a Saturn V and done by far and away cheaper as well. Improvements in materials, guidance computers, and an evolutionary design change over time as has happened with the Soyuz rocket and spacecraft would have made the Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft a very modern and versatile platform to continue a real space exploration program and maintained at least the capability of going to the Moon as an option instead of having to re-invent the wheel again now that that capability has long since been lost.
What would have been lost, perhaps, is the need for international cooperation that went into building the ISS, but even that is not certain. Much of the basis for building the ISS came from the Apollo-Soyuz mission, where exchanges of technical information already were happening between the Soviet space program and NASA.
Even funnier is how the test stand originally built to handle a production run of over 100 Saturn V vehicles is now being used by SpaceX in Texas for testing the Merlin engines. That was the projection done by Werner Von Braun, and contracts were signed to have a contingency of building that many vehicles.
I do think the ISS would look quite a bit different than the current structure had it been built using Saturn V/I/Apollo hardware, although the modular approach would likely have been done still. It would likely have been an upgraded version of the Skylab modules, and I would even dare say that the Skylab backup that is currently in the Smithsonian very likely would have been a part of or even would have become the core American module for the ISS. It definitely would have been much roomier for the astronauts in the ISS with Saturn V launched modules.
Unfortunately, that is not the path that history took.
I can imagine that 3D printers could print something like the good old Zilog Z80 within 10 years.
Can you get a 3D printer to even just print out a standard 7400 NAND gate? That seems like quite the leap of technology to get even that far, and would seem to be at least on the threshold of possibilities. So far, I've never seen even something like that. There even would be a pretty active hobbyist market if you could get a few thumb-sized chips printed out in that manner.
No, I think you missed the whole point. Private commercial spaceflight is about people who are trying to make space activities pay for themselves rather than relying upon whims of charity and what politicians happen to be in office at the time or not.
In order for a private company to be able to get money from "other people", they must provide value in some manner that causes those other people to want to empty their wallets. It doesn't matter if you are a street musician or a large company like Wal-Mart, you simply won't survive in business if you aren't doing something useful that others like.
A government doesn't really care about that. Politicians do care on occasion about getting re-elected, so they will try to "bring home the bacon" to their respective voters when possible. Sometimes they simply think something like a rocket going into space looks cool, or they may just have a whim or fancy about doing something different just because it is different. Politicians certainly don't care about their constituents beyond simply getting re-elected... and non-elected bureaucrats don't even care about that other than how it impacts their personal empires within the government.
And sadly, it is the coercion part of taxation that really is the big difference. Would you rather that activities in space be paid for by people who are voluntarily handing over money because they want to pay for stuff happening in space and are dreamers about stuff going on up there, or would you rather that it be paid for by people who have it taken away from them by armed thugs that can, have, and will kill or at least incarcerate those people if they fail to pay up? I guess that really is the "simple enough" answer.
Study up a bit on what actually happened at Fukushima first. It really was a disaster waiting to happen for a number of reasons well beyond just the GE reactor design. I will refrain from any other comment regarding the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant design.
There were many other problems with both plants. Chernobyl in particular was widely acknowledged even in the industry and dare I say Soviet engineers as an outdated design even before it received power. And then the triggering event for the meltdown at Chernobyl was to deliberately remove the coolant from the reactor in a manner to intentionally cause a scram event in an operational reactor? Yeah, that was real smart.
Then the Fukushima plant showed some utter brilliance by not only failing to have any sort of emergency plans other than scream at the top of the lungs and run out of the plant making sure Godzilla wasn't directly behind them, but also placing the back-up diesel generators that might have operated those pumps in a position that they were completely unusable if a tsunami ever hit nearby. Yeah, I guess Japan has never seen any of those freakish things of nature in its history. The plant was not only an older and poor design by current standards, it was even poor for the time it was built and "features" done strictly because it would save a few thousand dollars. Simply scathing critiques of the operation of that plant can be found from competent engineers and nuclear plant operators who have actually reviewed what happened. Fukushima simply didn't even follow existing standards of the nuclear power industry and neither did Chernobyl follow even the lax standards of the USSR when it had its problems.
To me, the largest problem with some of the nuclear plant designs is that they try to maximize their efficiency by being these mega generation plants, thus generating the megawatts of power that you are complaining about here too. To me, smaller plants that are more dispersed in more locations is also a significant solution as you don't have nearly so much heat that you need to lose.
As for showing you a currently running commercial reactor that does anything, I would also point out that there hasn't been any new commercial plants that have been commissioned since Three Mile Island, as environmentalists simply get in the face of anybody even trying. Don't you think it is possible for some new ideas to be developed since 1977 when the last plant was built in America? Yes, some new plants have been built elsewhere as well, but it continues to be a screaming match as the anti-nuclear skeptics continue to think anything with the word "nuclear" is pure poison. They also complain about too much Di-Hyrdrogen Monoxide causing all sorts of problems in these plants as well, simply because DHMO is such a dangerous chemical that also needs to be banned.
It isn't for the lack of engineering ideas that offer a substantial improvement in terms of both safety and reliability to build nuclear power plants, instead it is a bunch of Luddite environmentalists who don't know a damn about even the periodic table, much less actually comprehend the basics behind nuclear processes that go into these reactors which are impacting public policy regarding permits and environmental assessments for building new nuclear power plants.
One of the more "recent" design ideas is to build a pebble bed reactor which would have survived both of the mishaps that hit Fukishima and Chernobyl. This basic design has the reactor shutting itself off through chemistry rather than active participation of the plant engineers when power fails or temperatures go too high. In other words, the core simply can't melt down.
This is hardly the only design of its kind, and there are other ideas that clearly make building fission reactors much safer today than they were in the 1950's and 1960's. I would dare say quite a bit has happened in terms of nuclear plant construction since the 1971 commissioning date of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
The problem with "society" setting goals is not the lack of goals but rather then plethora of goals that sometimes are at odds with each other. Some societies and civilizations seem to be more efficient at letting those dreamers who come up with wild and crazy ideas like building rockets going to the Moon be able to accomplish that goal and others not so much. None the less, it is that conflict of ideas which makes up human experience and decides what ideas actually get done or not.
For me - space colonization is the top goal. If we are the only intelligence in the universe it would be a terrible shame if no intelligent creature ever saw all those wonders. If there are other intelligences out there - history shows that when the "guys on the boats" meet the "guys on the shore" , its a LOT better to be the guys on the boats.
That by far and away sums up the reasons why countries have been and are involved in spaceflight activities. Those who are involved want to be the guys on the boats. I think this is an excellent observation.
It isn't a coincidence that all of the major countries of the Earth have at least some sort of spaceflight program in one form or another. In fact, going over that list I put in the hyperlink the question more becomes "why does Mexico not have a space agency and probes in space?" Mexico surprisingly is the country with the largest economy not actively doing stuff in space, although I'll admit even they are at least trying. Even Ghana wants to get into the business of doing stuff in space. Those last two countries are particularly interesting, especially given their respective histories of being on the receiving end of that battle between the guys in boats and the guys on shore.
The problem with wind power is that you are limited on where you can put those turbines. For places where it is appropriate, go ahead and put them in. Unfortunately even if the whole Earth is covered with these structure, the world would need more power.
As a part of the mix to obtain energy necessary to drive the world in the 21st century, wind power has its place. Don't let it get to your head that it is the ultimate cure to solve all of the world's energy needs.
Fukushima was a disaster waiting to happen.... just like Chernobyl. Neither plant had any indication of learning from previous experiences in the nuclear power industry and were plain cruddy designs that any newly graduated nuclear engineering student could have designed better. Both plants also required electrical power being supplied to those plants simply to operate.
I'd also point out that even if you treat the designs of these plants as typical (which they aren't, nor are they anything approaching the design of a plant that would be built today) the amount of pollution and I dare say even radioactive debris contamination is far less than what you get from other energy producing activities around the world. No, it isn't perfect and there are some embarrassments in the nuclear power industry that certainly need to be examined with proper engineering reviews and teaching those lessons to the next generation so they can improve and do better.
Still, it is a hell of a lot better to build a nuclear power plant today than it is to build dozens or hundreds of coal/oil/bio-diesel plants which generate electricity. Not only it is technically cheaper (especially if you use standard designs for those plants and not constantly try to re-invent the wheel for each new plant), but the impact on the overall environment is far less for nuclear power plants than it is for any other kind... including solar farms.
One of the things that happens when people go into space, as opposed to sending robots to go there, is that your actual thinking patterns change by being in a completely different environment. Quite literally, a completely different set of neurons are firing inside of the brains of astronauts who go "up there" into space to see stuff for themselves. These new thoughts and ideas that have never been experienced by any other human before in turn lead to entire sets of human knowledge that simply would never be possible had people never gone up to see things like that for themselves.
A really good example of this is what happened on the Apollo 8 flight, when that crew saw the Earth rising above the surface of the Moon in a fashion similar to how we see the Sun rising above the horizon here on the Earth. That is something which robots (which had been to the Moon before and even snapped photos of the Earth from the Moon previously) never even considered.... including those technicians which operated those earlier probes to the Moon never did.
This particular photograph of the Earth rising over the Moon has been argued as the seed and catalyst that sparked the entire environmentalist movement and was responsible for many of the environmental laws that we have in today's society. It gave rise to the concept of "Spaceship Earth" and definitely changed the thinking many people had previously thinking the Earth was vast. Instead, we saw the whole of human existence that could be literally covered up by a thumb.
I could give other examples from other astronauts, and every single one that I've ever met (I've personally talked with several astronauts in my lifetime) has said that no photograph does justice to the experience of actually being there. The colors of the Earth are far more vivid than anything you've ever seen, and when looking at the Earth from space you simply know that it is alive in your gut in a fashion that simply can't be transmitted through telemetry.
That is why we need to send astronauts into space. We need not just researchers doing stuff in brand new environments and testing things in a fashion never tried before, but we also need poets, musicians, authors, and even politicians who can get up there and help break up our ways of thinking to perhaps break log jams of ideas here on the Earth as well.
I can't even imagine how this video is going to transform the world:
Chris Hadfield is definitely going to be a substantial influence for good as a result of his experiences in space. He also would deserve to punch you in the face if you said his contributions to humanity were meaningless and that everything he did could have been accomplished in a laboratory on the Earth.
What everyone is forgetting is that the private sector built nearly all that stuff 40 years ago and NASA was there to provide the reason and to tie it all together.
The "private sector" did not "build all of that stuff" on their own or for their own purposes. I didn't see a Grumman spacecraft being used by prospectors for resources on asteroids. These "private sector" companies were all working off of "cost-plus" contracts that were essentially an extension of the federal government, being directed by engineers employed full time by the U.S. government, and whose only possible customer was the U.S. government.
These contracts were at the time simply seen as nothing more than a contract similar to what these same companies were doing to build military aviation equipment. To say that the "private sector" build spacecrafts is the same logic as saying the "private sector" built the U.S. Air Force or the U.S. Navy. Yes, private companies were involved in creating the hardware that those organizations use, but it would be a far cry to say that Boeing has their own air force and conducts bombing runs on cities in Afghanistan.
There are companies like FedEx, and Delta Airlines that have purchased for their own purposes aircraft and aviation assets for their own purposes which have absolutely nothing to do with a government. They are flying between destinations because they think they can make a profit by performing that service on behalf of others. This is the thing that is different with many of the newer companies who are currently engaged in spaceflight, as they are hoping to make a profit by utilizing space as something private individuals would want in and of itself. There are thousands of different ideas on what might be profitable in space, and a great many of these ideas don't depend on a government grant or mission being involved. I think that is an important distinction you are missing when you talk about what the "private sector" was doing 40 years ago in space.
At the time, 40 years ago, the only company that was really trying to get into space and do stuff in space for their shareholders and not for a government contract was AT&T when that company sent up the Telstar satellites. That was impressive in and of itself, and unfortunately required special legislation in the form of an act of congress giving them permission to go into space. Even worse, once AT&T got into space and proved that their concepts were viable, that government permission was yanked out from under them and give to another company who was able to successfully lobby in Congress that AT&T shouldn't be in space.
The reason America has been stuck in low-Earth orbit is mainly a lack of will to go beyond... and cost. Furthermore, the economics of trying to lower the cost of going to space simply aren't present in a traditional Manhattan Project style of crash space program like Apollo became. Apollo contractors had signs above their desks and big banners in factories which said "waste anything but time".
That made sense for the nuclear bomb when there was real concern that Nazi Germany and/or Imperial Japan might be able to research the technology first (not to mention the "evil empire" of the USSR) and use those bombs on America. It was a race for sheer survival, hence why insane amounts of money were dumped on that particular project. Nuclear bombs likely would have been built eventually without such a crash program, and in hindsight the whole venture was a foolish waste of money as well, but it none the less did happen.
I say the same thing is true about the Apollo project. In fact many of the people who helped to get the Manhattan project going were involved in Apollo, especially in terms of the funding mechanisms and those who were redirecting national resources to get it to work. It is hard to imagine now in 2013, but in the 1960's almost everybody in America knew at least somebody who was a relative, neighbor, drinking buddy, or former roommate that was working for a NASA contractor even if they weren't. It really was a national effort. I would even go so far as to suggest that it did more harm than good, but it was none the less an interesting catalyst for pushing some aspects of American technology forward that wouldn't have happened otherwise for decades or even centuries.
The smaller companies like Blue Origin, Armadillo Aerospace, and "the Spaceship Company" are examples of what spaceflight would have been had NASA not been given that effectively blank check and 5% of the federal budget to get to the Moon. Companies like Planetary Resources and Shackleton Energy are trying to find business cases for going into space for its own sake, and now private industry is finding its own reasons to utilize space that have nothing to do with furthering some political objective.
True, but as usual the "count the pennies" argument ignores what you get for those pennies, robots suck donkey balls are pretty much everything except repetitive mindless work and they're slow as frozen molasses.
Which is why I think we need to spend the next century or so making better and smarter robots. Once we have robots that can efficiently maintain a base it will be time to send humans there. Humans shouldn't have to waste time on drudge work in space.
You are assuming that advances in artificial intelligence are even possible and that it is just a matter of time before we create a computer like Hal or Data. In spite of some initial early success and some things that mimic human intelligence like ELIZA and some computers that can mimic human thinking for very narrow and rigidly defined things like Chess, we still haven't been able to come up with any computers that have an original thought.
Heck, there still are people who think NASA even sends some of the most advanced computers into space that are generations ahead of what we are using right now. I hate to break the news here, but NASA actually works with computers that are a generation or two behind what everybody else has been using. The Voyager spacecraft, to give an example, are some of the very last working computers which still have core memory. The "advanced" computer being used in the New Horizons spacecraft which is currently going to Pluto is basically a radiation hardened Sony Playstation (one).
Space is simply a very difficult environment to work in, and "smarter" robots don't really exist. Yes, there should be robotic probes that should likely go and explore these distant places in the Solar System first, and there is a whole lot of good that can come from such efforts. But we aren't sending out HAL to explore the planets, much less artificial beings of superior intelligence.
The reason we have no self-sufficient "colony" in Antarctica is mainly due to those same international agreements. You can certainly extract sufficient quantities of Uranium, petroleum, and other resources to build facilities necessary to build greenhouses and get food production and most things you need to be self-sufficient. If anything, the growing human presence in the Arctic areas of the world flat out proves you wrong and shows what could be happening in the Antarctic as well.
As to if it is wise to have huge mining operations in Antarctica and settlements of millions of people there is something that should properly be debated.... and I think there are many people who would likely agree that Antarctica is a part of the world that likely should remain as an international version of a national park wilderness area. In other words, one of the last continental sized objects of the world mostly free of human artifacts perhaps ought to remain as such simply because having another continent full of people who might go to war, cause wars, dump pollution onto this planet, and do potential harm to everybody is likely a worse alternative than simply leaving the place vacant. None of that addresses the technical capability of building such a series of self-sufficient settlements, it merely shows that it is political considerations as opposed to the technical ones that cause a lack of settlements.
McMurdo base is an example of what a mostly self-sufficient settlement in Antarctica would look like. It definitely is what would be considered a small town in most other parts of the world, with the one exception that children aren't really being raised there. A few locations being operated by Chile and Argentina do have families with small children living on that continent though, but those base locations aren't nearly up to even McMurdo standards.
I'll also point out that there are other places around the world where if transportation links were severed that people would die in large numbers. Los Angeles in particular is one of those locations, where in fact the first settlement by people of European descent (as opposed to the native Americans) actually died off completely simply because of a lack of water. Native American settlements didn't even exist in the area... which is one of the reasons why the Spanish tried in the first place. The same thing happened to Jamestown in Virginia. These places are currently inhabitable simply because the technological infrastructure is there to provide the support necessary for people living there. Antarctica might require much more advanced technology than is needed to survive in Los Angeles, but settlement of Antarctica is happening in the 21st century and not the 19th.
I tend to be pessimistic in terms of "artificial intelligence" progress that some people seem to keep thinking is going to happen with computers and robots. Doubly so for "expert systems".... that can admittedly be useful in niche applications but tend to miss a whole bunch of things in the process. Even chat bot programs are usually something I can spot after a time, even though they've improved slightly since the original ELIZA program. Some legitimate progress has been happening, but it is extremely slow in coming and I doubt that any sort of self-aware robot like HAL or Data will ever be developed by computer scientists in the future. This is something I've studied in detail and have devoted my professional life in terms of investigating. A century more won't many any bit of a difference, even assuming that Moore's Law will even apply.
There is also the example of Harrison Schmitt going to the Moon and doing field geology work, where his eye and on the spot knowledge of geology was incredibly useful for obtaining samples that even the other astronauts simply weren't able to gather... and certainly got things done during his brief tenure up there on the Moon that simply wouldn't have been done had he or some other geologist never went there in the first place. I would argue that he did more for actual science in space than almost all of the other robotic space probes combined. It is a pity that more actual scientists never got the chance to go up there, and even more disappointing that an extended stay shelter was never built on the Moon.
I'm not saying to be a luddite and dismiss robotic probes either, as there is most definitely a role for those to be used. If there is a niche and role to use them, please use them and even use them first. I just think those who are so religiously devoted to robots need to realize that there is a place for people in the cosmos too. Besides, the extreme cost for travel into space is something I also think is temporary.
They technically should have fired their abort profile anyway. Also, they were not in "perfect alignment for rendezvous", as the command capsule was already well beyond immediate intercept range.
Simply put, your suggestion that "if you can get off the surface of the Moon, you can get back to orbit from higher up" is wrong. Yes, they could get into some sort of orbit, but not necessarily one that would put them in an ideal location to be able to get back home. If you want to get a glimpse of some of the difficulties involved in such a mission profile, at least try to play Kerbal Space Program a few times and try that lunar orbital rendezvous yourself. It isn't nearly as easy as you suggest. Real life is much harder than KSP too, but at least it gives you a glimpse into the actual difficulties for orbital mechanics.
More to the point, timing is everything, and Neil Armstrong pretty much closed the window for a possible abort well before he tried that final maneuver to land. Once on the surface of the Moon, the time to depart is much easier to do so you can take the precious little fuel on the ascent engine and be able to be in the same place as the command capsule with a minimum of delta-v adjustment. You can wait on the ground for an hour or two for an ideal insertion into orbit.
When I say that Neil Armstrong had only eight seconds of fuel remaining, it wasn't just eight seconds until "BINGO" with a reserve still available.... that was just eight seconds until the lunar lander was just a thing that would then have a ballistic trajectory to wherever it was moving. The fuel tanks were basically dry.
On the other hand, Neil Armstrong did have with him "Dr. Rendezvous", literally the guy who invented the mathematics of orbital rendezvous in space and earned a PhD from MIT trying to figure out how to get that accomplished in the first place. If anybody could have figured out how to get back to the command capsule under those conditions, it would be him.
I saw some cable maps subsequent to my post which showed this connection very clearly. Thank you for pointing that out.
Still, my suggestion still stands that Brazil could use a few more direct connections to other countries from around the world. A connection from Rio to Johannesberg, to give an example, would IMHO help both cities out and furthermore help the internet as a whole in a number of ways. It certainly wouldn't be fragmentation. Neither would a "direct" connection to Chile from some where in southern Brazil going around the southern tip of South America. There definitely are ways Brazil as a country could be connected to the rest of the world.
What you are looking for here is something related to barratry. I wish such a concept actually applied in U.S. federal courts, although there are several states that have become enlightened enough that it does apply to those state court systems.
Even more important, I wish judges would actually enforce such a concept and disbar those who abuse the system. Unfortunately, in the "real world" you don't tend to find things so clear cut and lawyers being complete jerks. Usually they know at what point they are going to cross over the line and try to stay on the proper side of that line, even if they may tend to push those limits from time to time. It takes a real idiot of a lawyer who doesn't know the laws of their own profession.
First of all, 3D printers really aren't that good yet. There is definitely some promise there, but nothing that you wouldn't by far and away make huge piles of money with simply doing terrestrial applications first.
The cost of a government mission to Mars has been proposed to be about $100 billion dollars. That is expensive, but it is definitely in the range of something that a 1st world country could afford to accomplish if they cared enough about the issue to actually accomplish the goal. Perhaps you might be able to develop one of those fancy 3D printers with that kind of money... perhaps you couldn't (since it hasn't been done yet). The cost of a comprehensive robotic mission to an outer solar system location is still on the order of about $1-$10 billion. With that money, you would also need to build a nuclear reactor capable of making fuel for the RTGs that you will be needing in that part of the solar system as well or perhaps use that $100 billion for building a practical nuclear fusion device instead. Solar panels simply don't work when you are that far away from the Sun.
I've seen private proposals for going to Mars that are considerably less than that $100 billion figure. Elon Musk is claiming something less than $1 million per seat going to Mars (perhaps as low as $50k per person), although using the Robert Heinlein suggestion that getting to LEO is "halfway to the rest of the Solar System", let's use the Space Adventure's cost of manned spaceflight to LEO of about $50 million per person and multiply that by four. That is a budget of $200 million per person, and let's say we need a dozen people for the trip for a grand total of about $3 billion (playing fast and loose with the figures. I think that is a reasonable budget for a private flight to Mars if some serious entrepreneurs got involved. If you think this figure is off, consider it is at least in the ball park for what is being suggested by the Inspiration Mars Foundation's trip to Mars with a crew of two.
If you really think you can build this self-replicating Von Neumann machine that can repair itself and do all of these other wonderful things on a budget of about $3 billion, plus get that vehicle to to Mars or Jupiter, I think you are going to be so stinking brilliant that you would get a Nobel Prize in Physics as well as land several contracts with NASA. Either that or simply call your proposal here to be utter bullshit and can't be done. Going into space is hard, and there is a role for astronauts to play as well, at least while our technology isn't at Star Trek levels like your idea requires.
Considering that Neil & Buzz landed on the Moon with only 8 seconds of fuel remaining in their landing engine, they came pretty close to becoming permanent residents on the Moon anyway... not to mention that the original landing site was horrible as well (Neil Armstrong deliberately avoided that spot and traveled a couple more miles down range for a better spot... hence why the fuel was so low). They were real engineering test pilots that day in July of 1969, which is part of why they deserved the recognition they got too.
It is also an example of why you don't want to have necessarily ordinary folks with no training or qualifications on a "first trip" to some place exotic like Europa. You can do that once the trip to that location is ordinary and boring.... sort of like the places Space Adventures sends people now. Sadly, customers for Space Adventures still need to spend six months at Star City in Russia before they go into space, but at least it is mostly ordinary (although rich) people who go.
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What deorbited Mir was not really a lack of funds but rather political pressure from NASA and the U.S. government who didn't want to have Roscosmos distracted by Mir. There was MirCorp who was providing funding to keep Mir going and had even sent up a crew of cosmonauts to get it prepared for other visitors.
That said, the Russian segments of the ISS were intended to be a part of Mir 2 (the second iteration of that station) and there definitely was a sense of closure with Mir anyway on the part of the Russian government. It was also not the first and certainly won't be the last space station put up by the Russian government.
If you could put the ISS into a orbit where perhaps future generations (I'm talking a thousand years from now or so) could worry about the refurbishment, I'm sure they could figure out how to turn it into a museum. Assuming that the cost of getting into space would drop considerably over that period of time, bringing workers and materials would not really be a problem and as a historic relic there might even be political rationale or even public sympathy in the form of donations that could perform such a task.
The real trick is simply putting the ISS in a position where such a task could be done. At the moment, it is close enough to the Earth that it needs very regular maintenance simply to maintain its current orbit and can't be left abandoned for very long (about a decade at most... sort of like what happened to Skylab and Mir). Quite literally, the atmosphere of the Earth is going to bring it down to the Earth if nothing else is done.
The only way to push the ISS up to a higher orbit is to attach some kind of thruster pack (likely an ion engine or something with a very high specific impulse but low thrust over a long period of time). It can take a few years to get to its final orbit as it won't be inhabited, but it does need to either go up or down as staying where it is right now simply won't work.
Why would it need to be covered? The point is that the ISS is going to be abandoned in place somehow, most likely at the bottom of the Pacific right now.
The only real concern would be potentially having the ISS break apart a little bit at a time, and those individual parts becoming separate pieces of debris in space. Boosting the ISS up to a higher orbit (no mention at how high) simply makes it possible to abandon the station without any further maintenance or cost, even though the initial boosting would cost some money.
An ideal orbit for the ISS would be one of the LaGrangian points "near" the Moon (L4 or L5), It would be out of the way for anything that would be put into space for a long time, and quite possibly it could eventually be salvaged for parts and/or sheer mass for any future endeavors in that part of the Solar System. The nice thing about those locations is that you don't even need to worry about any regular maintenance except for perhaps keeping the vehicle operational if that might even remotely be a goal, and even then it could be refurbished eventually by future groups that may have the money to care about something like that.
I certainly think it is much better to put the ISS in a place like that as opposed to dumping it into the middle of the Pacific Ocean.... which is the current plan. It most definitely won't be going to the Moon under any possible scenerio. If anything, sending it to Mars would be just as viable from a delta-v perspective.
The Pacific Ocean option wouldn't even be worth salvaging at a future date, other than to melt parts down as scrap. I would hate to see anything from the ISS even in a museum that came from a Pacific splashdown.
China is building a space station. They would have joined the ISS project if the US hadn't blocked them. It's basically US pride that is holding everything back.
It wasn't just the U.S. government that wasn't interested in having China join. There is also a concern by both Russia and America about the quality of any potential modules and spacecraft that would be attaching itself to the ISS in any docking procedure... and it was Roscosmos that would have taken the largest burden for such activities as the Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft would have most easily docked with the Russian segment rather than conforming to the American docking ports.
It was much more than pride at stake here, and while NASA officials were certainly the most vocal in opposition to Chinese participation, there were many other obstacles to getting Chinese astronauts on the ISS. If anything, it was also Chinese pride that sort of shot the whole project down too as they didn't want to be treated as a junior partner in the endeavor as well.
If the ESA and Roscosmos had wanted the Chinese Space Agency involved in the ISS, I'm sure it would have happened. There are other countries involved besides just Russia and America.
I seriously doubt that a Sea Dragon launch could have sent up the ISS, but I would agree that sending up 5-10 Saturn V launches would have most certainly done the trick. If anything, shutting down the Saturn V program was a huge mistake... when viewed in hindsight.
Every single mission that was accomplished with the Shuttle program (including sending up 7-man crews) could have been done with a Saturn V and done by far and away cheaper as well. Improvements in materials, guidance computers, and an evolutionary design change over time as has happened with the Soyuz rocket and spacecraft would have made the Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft a very modern and versatile platform to continue a real space exploration program and maintained at least the capability of going to the Moon as an option instead of having to re-invent the wheel again now that that capability has long since been lost.
What would have been lost, perhaps, is the need for international cooperation that went into building the ISS, but even that is not certain. Much of the basis for building the ISS came from the Apollo-Soyuz mission, where exchanges of technical information already were happening between the Soviet space program and NASA.
Even funnier is how the test stand originally built to handle a production run of over 100 Saturn V vehicles is now being used by SpaceX in Texas for testing the Merlin engines. That was the projection done by Werner Von Braun, and contracts were signed to have a contingency of building that many vehicles.
I do think the ISS would look quite a bit different than the current structure had it been built using Saturn V/I/Apollo hardware, although the modular approach would likely have been done still. It would likely have been an upgraded version of the Skylab modules, and I would even dare say that the Skylab backup that is currently in the Smithsonian very likely would have been a part of or even would have become the core American module for the ISS. It definitely would have been much roomier for the astronauts in the ISS with Saturn V launched modules.
Unfortunately, that is not the path that history took.
I can imagine that 3D printers could print something like the good old Zilog Z80 within 10 years.
Can you get a 3D printer to even just print out a standard 7400 NAND gate? That seems like quite the leap of technology to get even that far, and would seem to be at least on the threshold of possibilities. So far, I've never seen even something like that. There even would be a pretty active hobbyist market if you could get a few thumb-sized chips printed out in that manner.
No, I think you missed the whole point. Private commercial spaceflight is about people who are trying to make space activities pay for themselves rather than relying upon whims of charity and what politicians happen to be in office at the time or not.
In order for a private company to be able to get money from "other people", they must provide value in some manner that causes those other people to want to empty their wallets. It doesn't matter if you are a street musician or a large company like Wal-Mart, you simply won't survive in business if you aren't doing something useful that others like.
A government doesn't really care about that. Politicians do care on occasion about getting re-elected, so they will try to "bring home the bacon" to their respective voters when possible. Sometimes they simply think something like a rocket going into space looks cool, or they may just have a whim or fancy about doing something different just because it is different. Politicians certainly don't care about their constituents beyond simply getting re-elected... and non-elected bureaucrats don't even care about that other than how it impacts their personal empires within the government.
And sadly, it is the coercion part of taxation that really is the big difference. Would you rather that activities in space be paid for by people who are voluntarily handing over money because they want to pay for stuff happening in space and are dreamers about stuff going on up there, or would you rather that it be paid for by people who have it taken away from them by armed thugs that can, have, and will kill or at least incarcerate those people if they fail to pay up? I guess that really is the "simple enough" answer.
Study up a bit on what actually happened at Fukushima first. It really was a disaster waiting to happen for a number of reasons well beyond just the GE reactor design. I will refrain from any other comment regarding the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant design.
There were many other problems with both plants. Chernobyl in particular was widely acknowledged even in the industry and dare I say Soviet engineers as an outdated design even before it received power. And then the triggering event for the meltdown at Chernobyl was to deliberately remove the coolant from the reactor in a manner to intentionally cause a scram event in an operational reactor? Yeah, that was real smart.
Then the Fukushima plant showed some utter brilliance by not only failing to have any sort of emergency plans other than scream at the top of the lungs and run out of the plant making sure Godzilla wasn't directly behind them, but also placing the back-up diesel generators that might have operated those pumps in a position that they were completely unusable if a tsunami ever hit nearby. Yeah, I guess Japan has never seen any of those freakish things of nature in its history. The plant was not only an older and poor design by current standards, it was even poor for the time it was built and "features" done strictly because it would save a few thousand dollars. Simply scathing critiques of the operation of that plant can be found from competent engineers and nuclear plant operators who have actually reviewed what happened. Fukushima simply didn't even follow existing standards of the nuclear power industry and neither did Chernobyl follow even the lax standards of the USSR when it had its problems.
To me, the largest problem with some of the nuclear plant designs is that they try to maximize their efficiency by being these mega generation plants, thus generating the megawatts of power that you are complaining about here too. To me, smaller plants that are more dispersed in more locations is also a significant solution as you don't have nearly so much heat that you need to lose.
As for showing you a currently running commercial reactor that does anything, I would also point out that there hasn't been any new commercial plants that have been commissioned since Three Mile Island, as environmentalists simply get in the face of anybody even trying. Don't you think it is possible for some new ideas to be developed since 1977 when the last plant was built in America? Yes, some new plants have been built elsewhere as well, but it continues to be a screaming match as the anti-nuclear skeptics continue to think anything with the word "nuclear" is pure poison. They also complain about too much Di-Hyrdrogen Monoxide causing all sorts of problems in these plants as well, simply because DHMO is such a dangerous chemical that also needs to be banned.
It isn't for the lack of engineering ideas that offer a substantial improvement in terms of both safety and reliability to build nuclear power plants, instead it is a bunch of Luddite environmentalists who don't know a damn about even the periodic table, much less actually comprehend the basics behind nuclear processes that go into these reactors which are impacting public policy regarding permits and environmental assessments for building new nuclear power plants.
One of the more "recent" design ideas is to build a pebble bed reactor which would have survived both of the mishaps that hit Fukishima and Chernobyl. This basic design has the reactor shutting itself off through chemistry rather than active participation of the plant engineers when power fails or temperatures go too high. In other words, the core simply can't melt down.
This is hardly the only design of its kind, and there are other ideas that clearly make building fission reactors much safer today than they were in the 1950's and 1960's. I would dare say quite a bit has happened in terms of nuclear plant construction since the 1971 commissioning date of the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
The problem with "society" setting goals is not the lack of goals but rather then plethora of goals that sometimes are at odds with each other. Some societies and civilizations seem to be more efficient at letting those dreamers who come up with wild and crazy ideas like building rockets going to the Moon be able to accomplish that goal and others not so much. None the less, it is that conflict of ideas which makes up human experience and decides what ideas actually get done or not.
For me - space colonization is the top goal. If we are the only intelligence in the universe it would be a terrible shame if no intelligent creature ever saw all those wonders. If there are other intelligences out there - history shows that when the "guys on the boats" meet the "guys on the shore" , its a LOT better to be the guys on the boats.
That by far and away sums up the reasons why countries have been and are involved in spaceflight activities. Those who are involved want to be the guys on the boats. I think this is an excellent observation.
It isn't a coincidence that all of the major countries of the Earth have at least some sort of spaceflight program in one form or another. In fact, going over that list I put in the hyperlink the question more becomes "why does Mexico not have a space agency and probes in space?" Mexico surprisingly is the country with the largest economy not actively doing stuff in space, although I'll admit even they are at least trying. Even Ghana wants to get into the business of doing stuff in space. Those last two countries are particularly interesting, especially given their respective histories of being on the receiving end of that battle between the guys in boats and the guys on shore.
The problem with wind power is that you are limited on where you can put those turbines. For places where it is appropriate, go ahead and put them in. Unfortunately even if the whole Earth is covered with these structure, the world would need more power.
As a part of the mix to obtain energy necessary to drive the world in the 21st century, wind power has its place. Don't let it get to your head that it is the ultimate cure to solve all of the world's energy needs.
Fukushima was a disaster waiting to happen.... just like Chernobyl. Neither plant had any indication of learning from previous experiences in the nuclear power industry and were plain cruddy designs that any newly graduated nuclear engineering student could have designed better. Both plants also required electrical power being supplied to those plants simply to operate.
I'd also point out that even if you treat the designs of these plants as typical (which they aren't, nor are they anything approaching the design of a plant that would be built today) the amount of pollution and I dare say even radioactive debris contamination is far less than what you get from other energy producing activities around the world. No, it isn't perfect and there are some embarrassments in the nuclear power industry that certainly need to be examined with proper engineering reviews and teaching those lessons to the next generation so they can improve and do better.
Still, it is a hell of a lot better to build a nuclear power plant today than it is to build dozens or hundreds of coal/oil/bio-diesel plants which generate electricity. Not only it is technically cheaper (especially if you use standard designs for those plants and not constantly try to re-invent the wheel for each new plant), but the impact on the overall environment is far less for nuclear power plants than it is for any other kind... including solar farms.
One of the things that happens when people go into space, as opposed to sending robots to go there, is that your actual thinking patterns change by being in a completely different environment. Quite literally, a completely different set of neurons are firing inside of the brains of astronauts who go "up there" into space to see stuff for themselves. These new thoughts and ideas that have never been experienced by any other human before in turn lead to entire sets of human knowledge that simply would never be possible had people never gone up to see things like that for themselves.
A really good example of this is what happened on the Apollo 8 flight, when that crew saw the Earth rising above the surface of the Moon in a fashion similar to how we see the Sun rising above the horizon here on the Earth. That is something which robots (which had been to the Moon before and even snapped photos of the Earth from the Moon previously) never even considered.... including those technicians which operated those earlier probes to the Moon never did.
This particular photograph of the Earth rising over the Moon has been argued as the seed and catalyst that sparked the entire environmentalist movement and was responsible for many of the environmental laws that we have in today's society. It gave rise to the concept of "Spaceship Earth" and definitely changed the thinking many people had previously thinking the Earth was vast. Instead, we saw the whole of human existence that could be literally covered up by a thumb.
I could give other examples from other astronauts, and every single one that I've ever met (I've personally talked with several astronauts in my lifetime) has said that no photograph does justice to the experience of actually being there. The colors of the Earth are far more vivid than anything you've ever seen, and when looking at the Earth from space you simply know that it is alive in your gut in a fashion that simply can't be transmitted through telemetry.
That is why we need to send astronauts into space. We need not just researchers doing stuff in brand new environments and testing things in a fashion never tried before, but we also need poets, musicians, authors, and even politicians who can get up there and help break up our ways of thinking to perhaps break log jams of ideas here on the Earth as well.
I can't even imagine how this video is going to transform the world:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo
Chris Hadfield is definitely going to be a substantial influence for good as a result of his experiences in space. He also would deserve to punch you in the face if you said his contributions to humanity were meaningless and that everything he did could have been accomplished in a laboratory on the Earth.
What everyone is forgetting is that the private sector built nearly all that stuff 40 years ago and NASA was there to provide the reason and to tie it all together.
The "private sector" did not "build all of that stuff" on their own or for their own purposes. I didn't see a Grumman spacecraft being used by prospectors for resources on asteroids. These "private sector" companies were all working off of "cost-plus" contracts that were essentially an extension of the federal government, being directed by engineers employed full time by the U.S. government, and whose only possible customer was the U.S. government.
These contracts were at the time simply seen as nothing more than a contract similar to what these same companies were doing to build military aviation equipment. To say that the "private sector" build spacecrafts is the same logic as saying the "private sector" built the U.S. Air Force or the U.S. Navy. Yes, private companies were involved in creating the hardware that those organizations use, but it would be a far cry to say that Boeing has their own air force and conducts bombing runs on cities in Afghanistan.
There are companies like FedEx, and Delta Airlines that have purchased for their own purposes aircraft and aviation assets for their own purposes which have absolutely nothing to do with a government. They are flying between destinations because they think they can make a profit by performing that service on behalf of others. This is the thing that is different with many of the newer companies who are currently engaged in spaceflight, as they are hoping to make a profit by utilizing space as something private individuals would want in and of itself. There are thousands of different ideas on what might be profitable in space, and a great many of these ideas don't depend on a government grant or mission being involved. I think that is an important distinction you are missing when you talk about what the "private sector" was doing 40 years ago in space.
At the time, 40 years ago, the only company that was really trying to get into space and do stuff in space for their shareholders and not for a government contract was AT&T when that company sent up the Telstar satellites. That was impressive in and of itself, and unfortunately required special legislation in the form of an act of congress giving them permission to go into space. Even worse, once AT&T got into space and proved that their concepts were viable, that government permission was yanked out from under them and give to another company who was able to successfully lobby in Congress that AT&T shouldn't be in space.
The reason America has been stuck in low-Earth orbit is mainly a lack of will to go beyond... and cost. Furthermore, the economics of trying to lower the cost of going to space simply aren't present in a traditional Manhattan Project style of crash space program like Apollo became. Apollo contractors had signs above their desks and big banners in factories which said "waste anything but time".
That made sense for the nuclear bomb when there was real concern that Nazi Germany and/or Imperial Japan might be able to research the technology first (not to mention the "evil empire" of the USSR) and use those bombs on America. It was a race for sheer survival, hence why insane amounts of money were dumped on that particular project. Nuclear bombs likely would have been built eventually without such a crash program, and in hindsight the whole venture was a foolish waste of money as well, but it none the less did happen.
I say the same thing is true about the Apollo project. In fact many of the people who helped to get the Manhattan project going were involved in Apollo, especially in terms of the funding mechanisms and those who were redirecting national resources to get it to work. It is hard to imagine now in 2013, but in the 1960's almost everybody in America knew at least somebody who was a relative, neighbor, drinking buddy, or former roommate that was working for a NASA contractor even if they weren't. It really was a national effort. I would even go so far as to suggest that it did more harm than good, but it was none the less an interesting catalyst for pushing some aspects of American technology forward that wouldn't have happened otherwise for decades or even centuries.
The smaller companies like Blue Origin, Armadillo Aerospace, and "the Spaceship Company" are examples of what spaceflight would have been had NASA not been given that effectively blank check and 5% of the federal budget to get to the Moon. Companies like Planetary Resources and Shackleton Energy are trying to find business cases for going into space for its own sake, and now private industry is finding its own reasons to utilize space that have nothing to do with furthering some political objective.
Which is why I think we need to spend the next century or so making better and smarter robots. Once we have robots that can efficiently maintain a base it will be time to send humans there. Humans shouldn't have to waste time on drudge work in space.
You are assuming that advances in artificial intelligence are even possible and that it is just a matter of time before we create a computer like Hal or Data. In spite of some initial early success and some things that mimic human intelligence like ELIZA and some computers that can mimic human thinking for very narrow and rigidly defined things like Chess, we still haven't been able to come up with any computers that have an original thought.
Heck, there still are people who think NASA even sends some of the most advanced computers into space that are generations ahead of what we are using right now. I hate to break the news here, but NASA actually works with computers that are a generation or two behind what everybody else has been using. The Voyager spacecraft, to give an example, are some of the very last working computers which still have core memory. The "advanced" computer being used in the New Horizons spacecraft which is currently going to Pluto is basically a radiation hardened Sony Playstation (one).
Space is simply a very difficult environment to work in, and "smarter" robots don't really exist. Yes, there should be robotic probes that should likely go and explore these distant places in the Solar System first, and there is a whole lot of good that can come from such efforts. But we aren't sending out HAL to explore the planets, much less artificial beings of superior intelligence.
The reason we have no self-sufficient "colony" in Antarctica is mainly due to those same international agreements. You can certainly extract sufficient quantities of Uranium, petroleum, and other resources to build facilities necessary to build greenhouses and get food production and most things you need to be self-sufficient. If anything, the growing human presence in the Arctic areas of the world flat out proves you wrong and shows what could be happening in the Antarctic as well.
As to if it is wise to have huge mining operations in Antarctica and settlements of millions of people there is something that should properly be debated.... and I think there are many people who would likely agree that Antarctica is a part of the world that likely should remain as an international version of a national park wilderness area. In other words, one of the last continental sized objects of the world mostly free of human artifacts perhaps ought to remain as such simply because having another continent full of people who might go to war, cause wars, dump pollution onto this planet, and do potential harm to everybody is likely a worse alternative than simply leaving the place vacant. None of that addresses the technical capability of building such a series of self-sufficient settlements, it merely shows that it is political considerations as opposed to the technical ones that cause a lack of settlements.
McMurdo base is an example of what a mostly self-sufficient settlement in Antarctica would look like. It definitely is what would be considered a small town in most other parts of the world, with the one exception that children aren't really being raised there. A few locations being operated by Chile and Argentina do have families with small children living on that continent though, but those base locations aren't nearly up to even McMurdo standards.
I'll also point out that there are other places around the world where if transportation links were severed that people would die in large numbers. Los Angeles in particular is one of those locations, where in fact the first settlement by people of European descent (as opposed to the native Americans) actually died off completely simply because of a lack of water. Native American settlements didn't even exist in the area... which is one of the reasons why the Spanish tried in the first place. The same thing happened to Jamestown in Virginia. These places are currently inhabitable simply because the technological infrastructure is there to provide the support necessary for people living there. Antarctica might require much more advanced technology than is needed to survive in Los Angeles, but settlement of Antarctica is happening in the 21st century and not the 19th.
I tend to be pessimistic in terms of "artificial intelligence" progress that some people seem to keep thinking is going to happen with computers and robots. Doubly so for "expert systems".... that can admittedly be useful in niche applications but tend to miss a whole bunch of things in the process. Even chat bot programs are usually something I can spot after a time, even though they've improved slightly since the original ELIZA program. Some legitimate progress has been happening, but it is extremely slow in coming and I doubt that any sort of self-aware robot like HAL or Data will ever be developed by computer scientists in the future. This is something I've studied in detail and have devoted my professional life in terms of investigating. A century more won't many any bit of a difference, even assuming that Moore's Law will even apply.
There is also the example of Harrison Schmitt going to the Moon and doing field geology work, where his eye and on the spot knowledge of geology was incredibly useful for obtaining samples that even the other astronauts simply weren't able to gather... and certainly got things done during his brief tenure up there on the Moon that simply wouldn't have been done had he or some other geologist never went there in the first place. I would argue that he did more for actual science in space than almost all of the other robotic space probes combined. It is a pity that more actual scientists never got the chance to go up there, and even more disappointing that an extended stay shelter was never built on the Moon.
I'm not saying to be a luddite and dismiss robotic probes either, as there is most definitely a role for those to be used. If there is a niche and role to use them, please use them and even use them first. I just think those who are so religiously devoted to robots need to realize that there is a place for people in the cosmos too. Besides, the extreme cost for travel into space is something I also think is temporary.
They technically should have fired their abort profile anyway. Also, they were not in "perfect alignment for rendezvous", as the command capsule was already well beyond immediate intercept range.
Simply put, your suggestion that "if you can get off the surface of the Moon, you can get back to orbit from higher up" is wrong. Yes, they could get into some sort of orbit, but not necessarily one that would put them in an ideal location to be able to get back home. If you want to get a glimpse of some of the difficulties involved in such a mission profile, at least try to play Kerbal Space Program a few times and try that lunar orbital rendezvous yourself. It isn't nearly as easy as you suggest. Real life is much harder than KSP too, but at least it gives you a glimpse into the actual difficulties for orbital mechanics.
More to the point, timing is everything, and Neil Armstrong pretty much closed the window for a possible abort well before he tried that final maneuver to land. Once on the surface of the Moon, the time to depart is much easier to do so you can take the precious little fuel on the ascent engine and be able to be in the same place as the command capsule with a minimum of delta-v adjustment. You can wait on the ground for an hour or two for an ideal insertion into orbit.
When I say that Neil Armstrong had only eight seconds of fuel remaining, it wasn't just eight seconds until "BINGO" with a reserve still available.... that was just eight seconds until the lunar lander was just a thing that would then have a ballistic trajectory to wherever it was moving. The fuel tanks were basically dry.
On the other hand, Neil Armstrong did have with him "Dr. Rendezvous", literally the guy who invented the mathematics of orbital rendezvous in space and earned a PhD from MIT trying to figure out how to get that accomplished in the first place. If anybody could have figured out how to get back to the command capsule under those conditions, it would be him.
I saw some cable maps subsequent to my post which showed this connection very clearly. Thank you for pointing that out.
Still, my suggestion still stands that Brazil could use a few more direct connections to other countries from around the world. A connection from Rio to Johannesberg, to give an example, would IMHO help both cities out and furthermore help the internet as a whole in a number of ways. It certainly wouldn't be fragmentation. Neither would a "direct" connection to Chile from some where in southern Brazil going around the southern tip of South America. There definitely are ways Brazil as a country could be connected to the rest of the world.
What you are looking for here is something related to barratry. I wish such a concept actually applied in U.S. federal courts, although there are several states that have become enlightened enough that it does apply to those state court systems.
Even more important, I wish judges would actually enforce such a concept and disbar those who abuse the system. Unfortunately, in the "real world" you don't tend to find things so clear cut and lawyers being complete jerks. Usually they know at what point they are going to cross over the line and try to stay on the proper side of that line, even if they may tend to push those limits from time to time. It takes a real idiot of a lawyer who doesn't know the laws of their own profession.
First of all, 3D printers really aren't that good yet. There is definitely some promise there, but nothing that you wouldn't by far and away make huge piles of money with simply doing terrestrial applications first.
The cost of a government mission to Mars has been proposed to be about $100 billion dollars. That is expensive, but it is definitely in the range of something that a 1st world country could afford to accomplish if they cared enough about the issue to actually accomplish the goal. Perhaps you might be able to develop one of those fancy 3D printers with that kind of money... perhaps you couldn't (since it hasn't been done yet). The cost of a comprehensive robotic mission to an outer solar system location is still on the order of about $1-$10 billion. With that money, you would also need to build a nuclear reactor capable of making fuel for the RTGs that you will be needing in that part of the solar system as well or perhaps use that $100 billion for building a practical nuclear fusion device instead. Solar panels simply don't work when you are that far away from the Sun.
I've seen private proposals for going to Mars that are considerably less than that $100 billion figure. Elon Musk is claiming something less than $1 million per seat going to Mars (perhaps as low as $50k per person), although using the Robert Heinlein suggestion that getting to LEO is "halfway to the rest of the Solar System", let's use the Space Adventure's cost of manned spaceflight to LEO of about $50 million per person and multiply that by four. That is a budget of $200 million per person, and let's say we need a dozen people for the trip for a grand total of about $3 billion (playing fast and loose with the figures. I think that is a reasonable budget for a private flight to Mars if some serious entrepreneurs got involved. If you think this figure is off, consider it is at least in the ball park for what is being suggested by the Inspiration Mars Foundation's trip to Mars with a crew of two.
If you really think you can build this self-replicating Von Neumann machine that can repair itself and do all of these other wonderful things on a budget of about $3 billion, plus get that vehicle to to Mars or Jupiter, I think you are going to be so stinking brilliant that you would get a Nobel Prize in Physics as well as land several contracts with NASA. Either that or simply call your proposal here to be utter bullshit and can't be done. Going into space is hard, and there is a role for astronauts to play as well, at least while our technology isn't at Star Trek levels like your idea requires.
Considering that Neil & Buzz landed on the Moon with only 8 seconds of fuel remaining in their landing engine, they came pretty close to becoming permanent residents on the Moon anyway... not to mention that the original landing site was horrible as well (Neil Armstrong deliberately avoided that spot and traveled a couple more miles down range for a better spot... hence why the fuel was so low). They were real engineering test pilots that day in July of 1969, which is part of why they deserved the recognition they got too.
It is also an example of why you don't want to have necessarily ordinary folks with no training or qualifications on a "first trip" to some place exotic like Europa. You can do that once the trip to that location is ordinary and boring.... sort of like the places Space Adventures sends people now. Sadly, customers for Space Adventures still need to spend six months at Star City in Russia before they go into space, but at least it is mostly ordinary (although rich) people who go.