They're not a second-rate computer manufacturer, they have a small market share. Any company that could come up with the great ideas and implementations that Apple has is hardly second rate.
Yes, I'm aware of that. However, I envision a heavy-lift booster that, unlike the Saturn V rocket, seperates the expensive rocket engines from the craft and reuses them. That would drop the cost to orbit dramatically.
Something to add to number 4: The booster should have recoverable rocket engines. Instead of throwing away the expensive turbo-pumps after launch, return them to earth to be reused.
I couldn't imagine anyone talking like this in the 60's. It just goes to show that NASA's not doing it's job. Space flight and exploration used to captivate the American people. Even now most people would be in favor of a manned Mars mission, but NASA has dropped the ball.
Kids born in the mid-70s think space exploration is the shuttle, launching bricks and wings into LEO and then coming home, maybe leaving something there, maybe getting seven days worth of science about how spiders and rats respond to micrograv.
Gone are the days when going to space meant GOING somewhere. NASA is without direction, groping desperately for a project to keep its funding, and the people of Earth are losing interest very quickly, because it's the same thing over and over again.
A manned Mars mission or similar pursuit is the only way NASA can save itself, but when the government is more concerened about a Muslim with a chip on his shoulder than inspiring the people of the US to greatness, it will never happen.
NASA needs a president like Kennedy to give it a goal, to focus its efforts on a point of light in the night sky and say "We will go there." If this does not happen, I am afraid that NASA will be cut back so severely that it will be ineffectual, and American space and aeronautical science will fall well behind that of China, Europe and even Russia.
Mars has lots of raw materials, such as iron, aluminum, platinum-group metals, as well as lots of volatile chemicals. Imagine if we had access to the planet Earth before all of the major mineral deposits had been taken, how much material that would constitute. And then imagine that we're not destroying a biosphere to get at them. That sounds like reason enough for me to go there.
Mars also provides a perfect environment for carbonyl forging. (I think that's what it's called.) This process works by disolving metals in a carbon dioxide liquid and then spraying or pouring that into a form. Then the CO2 is evaporated and the metal is left, making strong, lightweight and easily produced high quality manufactured goods. This could very well be the first export of a Martian colony.
Why do I want to go to Mars? Because I want to forge a new world. I want the challenge of building something out of nothing. It has natural resources that can be used for further space exploration without having to divert them from terrestrial necessities, provides an environment less hostile than any other near planetary body, and is a far superior launch point that Earth, due to its more distant orbit and lower gravity. I want to go to explore and to increase human knowledge. Above all, I want to go to ensure the survival of the human race. Should a large body collide with Earth, we may very well be wiped out. I don't want to lose our contributions to the Universe.
I don't have the time to go around and around on this, so this will be my last reply.
Fortunately, they could be pretty sure that they would have fresh air, water and food in the New World. None of those are found on Mars, you are reliant on the technology you bring with you to keep you alive.
The processes that would be used to generate the materials needed for life support have been in use by industry since the 1800s. The reactors proposed are based on the ones used in nuclear naval vessels. Both are durable, reliable, and rugged.
Other systems, such as door seals, would only encounter one different element; dust. If we have all the water we could ever need, this won't be a problem because the seals could be cleaned very easily. They will not be exposed to a hard vacuum, but an atmosphere similar to the one that the SR-71 and U-2 fly in.
Not the same at all. The Soviet long endurance records all took place within the Earth's magnetosphere where they were protected from the majority of solar radition. The Apollo missions were so short that they are hard to extrapolate from and they all took place during times of low solar activity.
Then launch at low levels of solar activity. At any rate, microgravity is nothing we have not experienced before.
Mars astronauts would be exposed to solar radiation both during the transit to Mars and whilst on the surface.
In transit, yes. On the surface, no. While there would be higher levels of UV radiation than on earth (which have been dealt with in LEO), other harmful radiation is blocked by Mars' atmosphere. A simple solution would be to cover the top of the hab with sandbags to shield out almost all of the radiation.
There is a difference between doing something worthwhile that is hard and something that is pointless and hard. IMHO exploring Mars is firmly in the latter category.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this point. I feel that exploring space is key to the future of the human race, and that technologies developed in the exploration of space have great uses in terrestrial life.
So for $50 billion I could get 150 Phoenix missions (probably more once mass production cuts in), explore vastly more of Mars, land in places that are too risky for manned missions, spend far longer looking and not risk anyone's lives.
Let's assume for a minute that Phoenix can explore an area of 10 square meters. Let's also assume that you can get 500 missions for the cost of 5 manned missions. Let's also assume that, with the help of a pressurized rover, the manned missions have an effective range of 1000km (possible, there are cars that can go that far). This means that the probes can explore 5000 square meters, or 5 square kilometers. The manned missions can explore 5 x 3.14 x 1000km x 1000km (5 times pi times radius squared). The manned missions have an effective exploration area of 1.5 million square km, or about 300,000 times the area of the probes. Of course, that assumes that all they do is drive around. However, I think that each mission is capable of exploring both geologically and archeobiologically 10 square km (50 km^2 total), meaning that they still have 10 times the effective exploration capacity of 500 Phoenix missions. The very fact that the human crews can travel to newer and more interesting places as opposed to waiting six months for another mission to get there and having the added risks of 500 launches.
That is also not counting the value of the experience from living on Mars, the establishment of outposts on the planet for future colonization, and the increased amount of science able to be performed by humans because of their ability to act on their own to solve problems and explore new developments further.
Like I said, I can't go around and around on this. If you disagree, then we'll just have to leave it at that.
In "The Case for Mars," Zubrin talks about the court bureaucrats in China. The emporer had opened up china in the late 1300s and sent treasure fleets to Indonesia, India, Arabia, and even the west coast of Africa. They had seven masts when European ships had at most two.
Then the emporer died. The bureaucrats though he had wasted funds on a folly of an idea (exploration) when more important things needed to be done at home, like irrigation projects. They ordered the fleets destroyed just as they were about to enter the Mediterranean, and China was subjugated by Europeans who had the will to explore and the courage to accept the risks.
Why do I bring this up? Because it's ideas like yours that poison exploratory programs. Instead of grand gestures, you want small cheap steps. You speak of needs at home when they can be solved by innovating for the world. Material hyper efficient fuel cells and computers, inexpensive access to fusionable materials, and cheap metals and chemicals are all available in space. We must have the courage and conviction to simply reach out and grab them, and this can be done for a small percentage of the GNP. Merely increasing NASA's budget to the same percentage of the federal budget as it was during the Apollo era and providing a lofty goal will be enough for NASA to land several humans on Mars and more (like develop an economical heavy-lift launch vehicle). We simply have to want it enough.
Doesn't work that way. We'd have to launch the rocket towards where Mars is going to be, not where it is right now. Ideally, we would have launched 60-90 days ago, making the communcation round trip tip the minimum (about 6 minutes) during the most difficult part of the trip; landing.
And they could sit there for months or years whilst we make up our minds. Not like the astronauts who would be dependent on their air supply. The lunar explorations were always curtailed by the fragility of the men.
What if they could make all the air and fuel they'd ever need? Mars Direct calls for the production of methane, oxygen and water on Mars, as opposed to taking it all with us. The exploration of the world would probably never had happened if they had to bring everything they needed with them.
We've done the easy bit. We haven't done the bit that involves spending months in microgravity, slowly cooking in solar radiation before attempting to live on a planet with a radically different environment.
The amount of radiation, barring a solar flare or coronal mass ejection is well within tolerable limits. Russians have spent years in orbit, and though they were not able to function, we're only talking about three months tops. This is, of course, not including the possibility of using a tether to create gravity. And the environment on Mars is much more temperate and friendly than the environment on the moon, and we've been to the moon.
If we only did what was easy, none of us would get out of bed in the morning.
It's a sales book, of course it says it will be cheap. My Windows XP manual told me that my life would be much easier after installation. Experience of all high tech projects shows the opposite.
Even if we TRIPLE the cost of the proposed plan, it's still less than what we just spent on a war. ($150 billion.) And that gives five 1.5 year missions covering thousands of square km of the surface, establishing outposts, making discoveries, and learning about how to survive there.
We must take the initiative to go to Mars and stop fearing what might happen.
All great colonizations started with explorers. Columbus, Hudson, Ponce de Leon. We should follow the Mars Direct plan and put outposts on the Red Planet, complete with 100KW nuclear reactors and greenhouses. This will prove our technology and provide a beachhead for the impending colonization.
Howeever, I disagree that a mission to a new star system is more probable than a Mars mission. Congress would never approve the funding, even though their constituents want it.
However, they are still hampered by the fact that they are essentially "dumb" implements. They can't say, by themselves anyway, "Hey, that mountain over there looks like a good place to look for fossils. Let's hop in the rover and go take a look." No, they have to wait for human operators to decide for them, then tell them exactly how to get there, all with a 40 minute round trip communication time. Most of the time in a robotic Mars mission is spent sitting on the surface, waiting for orders.
Humans can, should, and will go to Mars. Hopefully in my lifetime, but definitely in my children's. Anyone who's read The Case for Mars knows how easy and cheap it can be.
Someone once said "Once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere." We've been halfway to Mars for almost 50 years. Let's get there.
Instead of the cost-plus accounting that has kept space agencies so expensive, NASA should issue its own X-prize(s).
First, award a contract for 20 heavy lift vehicles (100-ton+ payload) to the first company that can bring the cost to launch down to $1000/kg to LEO at a cost of $200 million per vehicle, or something close to that. This would finally open up space to NASA. The space station could have been built with three launches.
NASA needs to stop throwing bricks into space with the shuttle and focus on getting there and staying there, not just coming back down once we've finished. We need to get our eggs out of one basket.
I don't think that would work due to the accuracy necessary and the speeds involved. It's incredibly difficult to dock two spacecraft, and I can only imagine how hard it woudl be to catch a 10cm thick cable.
However, there have been plans to put rotating apparati in orbit around earth and the moon. One would pick up craft in LEO and fling it to the one in lunar orbit, which would place it a little higher than the highest lunar mountain moving at 0 velocity relative to the moon, at which point it would drift to a slow landing with the aid of some small landing rockets. Sounds very complex and costly to me, though.
mmmmmkay, they spent their last few cents on their broadband connection and huge hard drives so they can't possibly afford CDs... RIGHT.
maybe they should seek damages from the people who get the "disposable income" instead, like pizza deliverers and breweries?;)
I think the poster is getting at the fact that the people who can't/won't/don't pay are college kids. Their broadband is, effectively, free, as is their electricity, and their parents bought them the PC in most cases. Piracy costs most college students nothing.
Same story, only they dicked me over for passing my insurance licensing test in addition to my moral problems with the industry. In general, the people who last a long time at a telemarketing firm are sleazy people who'll do anything for a buck. Heck, about half of my fellow employees were on work release.
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They're not a second-rate computer manufacturer, they have a small market share. Any company that could come up with the great ideas and implementations that Apple has is hardly second rate.
Well, you could always get one of those boxes that let you switch between PCs... but then you run the risk of Windows driver conflicts.
(I've never needed VPC on my Mac.)
The one where the mixer technician turned up the "Suck" knob.
Yet another symptom of the utter lack of musical talent in pop culture.
Yes, I'm aware of that. However, I envision a heavy-lift booster that, unlike the Saturn V rocket, seperates the expensive rocket engines from the craft and reuses them. That would drop the cost to orbit dramatically.
Something to add to number 4: The booster should have recoverable rocket engines. Instead of throwing away the expensive turbo-pumps after launch, return them to earth to be reused.
Just a thought.
I'd volunteer to live on Mars. Anything to get away from idiots who see no use in a manned space program.
Nah, it'll be Utopia Planitia, to check on the progress of the Enterprise.
God I'm a dork.
Forgot one: Finding Nemo. Now that was a great movie, not for the CG, but for the story. Pixar Rulez.
I couldn't imagine anyone talking like this in the 60's. It just goes to show that NASA's not doing it's job. Space flight and exploration used to captivate the American people. Even now most people would be in favor of a manned Mars mission, but NASA has dropped the ball.
Kids born in the mid-70s think space exploration is the shuttle, launching bricks and wings into LEO and then coming home, maybe leaving something there, maybe getting seven days worth of science about how spiders and rats respond to micrograv.
Gone are the days when going to space meant GOING somewhere. NASA is without direction, groping desperately for a project to keep its funding, and the people of Earth are losing interest very quickly, because it's the same thing over and over again.
A manned Mars mission or similar pursuit is the only way NASA can save itself, but when the government is more concerened about a Muslim with a chip on his shoulder than inspiring the people of the US to greatness, it will never happen.
NASA needs a president like Kennedy to give it a goal, to focus its efforts on a point of light in the night sky and say "We will go there." If this does not happen, I am afraid that NASA will be cut back so severely that it will be ineffectual, and American space and aeronautical science will fall well behind that of China, Europe and even Russia.
I think saying the Martians have WMD is the only way we'll get a manned mission with US help.
Actually, we had a mag 5 abotu a year ago. Keep your west-coast disasters to yourself.
Those things are hot already! What will putting a diamond chip into them do? Will scorch marks on your crotch be the new geek fashion?
Is "Damn you fine!" a question? :D
Mars has lots of raw materials, such as iron, aluminum, platinum-group metals, as well as lots of volatile chemicals. Imagine if we had access to the planet Earth before all of the major mineral deposits had been taken, how much material that would constitute. And then imagine that we're not destroying a biosphere to get at them. That sounds like reason enough for me to go there.
Mars also provides a perfect environment for carbonyl forging. (I think that's what it's called.) This process works by disolving metals in a carbon dioxide liquid and then spraying or pouring that into a form. Then the CO2 is evaporated and the metal is left, making strong, lightweight and easily produced high quality manufactured goods. This could very well be the first export of a Martian colony.
Why do I want to go to Mars? Because I want to forge a new world. I want the challenge of building something out of nothing. It has natural resources that can be used for further space exploration without having to divert them from terrestrial necessities, provides an environment less hostile than any other near planetary body, and is a far superior launch point that Earth, due to its more distant orbit and lower gravity. I want to go to explore and to increase human knowledge. Above all, I want to go to ensure the survival of the human race. Should a large body collide with Earth, we may very well be wiped out. I don't want to lose our contributions to the Universe.
I don't have the time to go around and around on this, so this will be my last reply.
Fortunately, they could be pretty sure that they would have fresh air, water and food in the New World. None of those are found on Mars, you are reliant on the technology you bring with you to keep you alive.
The processes that would be used to generate the materials needed for life support have been in use by industry since the 1800s. The reactors proposed are based on the ones used in nuclear naval vessels. Both are durable, reliable, and rugged.
Other systems, such as door seals, would only encounter one different element; dust. If we have all the water we could ever need, this won't be a problem because the seals could be cleaned very easily. They will not be exposed to a hard vacuum, but an atmosphere similar to the one that the SR-71 and U-2 fly in.
Not the same at all. The Soviet long endurance records all took place within the Earth's magnetosphere where they were protected from the majority of solar radition. The Apollo missions were so short that they are hard to extrapolate from and they all took place during times of low solar activity.
Then launch at low levels of solar activity. At any rate, microgravity is nothing we have not experienced before.
Mars astronauts would be exposed to solar radiation both during the transit to Mars and whilst on the surface.
In transit, yes. On the surface, no. While there would be higher levels of UV radiation than on earth (which have been dealt with in LEO), other harmful radiation is blocked by Mars' atmosphere. A simple solution would be to cover the top of the hab with sandbags to shield out almost all of the radiation.
There is a difference between doing something worthwhile that is hard and something that is pointless and hard. IMHO exploring Mars is firmly in the latter category.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this point. I feel that exploring space is key to the future of the human race, and that technologies developed in the exploration of space have great uses in terrestrial life.
So for $50 billion I could get 150 Phoenix missions (probably more once mass production cuts in), explore vastly more of Mars, land in places that are too risky for manned missions, spend far longer looking and not risk anyone's lives.
Let's assume for a minute that Phoenix can explore an area of 10 square meters. Let's also assume that you can get 500 missions for the cost of 5 manned missions. Let's also assume that, with the help of a pressurized rover, the manned missions have an effective range of 1000km (possible, there are cars that can go that far). This means that the probes can explore 5000 square meters, or 5 square kilometers. The manned missions can explore 5 x 3.14 x 1000km x 1000km (5 times pi times radius squared). The manned missions have an effective exploration area of 1.5 million square km, or about 300,000 times the area of the probes. Of course, that assumes that all they do is drive around. However, I think that each mission is capable of exploring both geologically and archeobiologically 10 square km (50 km^2 total), meaning that they still have 10 times the effective exploration capacity of 500 Phoenix missions. The very fact that the human crews can travel to newer and more interesting places as opposed to waiting six months for another mission to get there and having the added risks of 500 launches.
That is also not counting the value of the experience from living on Mars, the establishment of outposts on the planet for future colonization, and the increased amount of science able to be performed by humans because of their ability to act on their own to solve problems and explore new developments further.
Like I said, I can't go around and around on this. If you disagree, then we'll just have to leave it at that.
In "The Case for Mars," Zubrin talks about the court bureaucrats in China. The emporer had opened up china in the late 1300s and sent treasure fleets to Indonesia, India, Arabia, and even the west coast of Africa. They had seven masts when European ships had at most two.
Then the emporer died. The bureaucrats though he had wasted funds on a folly of an idea (exploration) when more important things needed to be done at home, like irrigation projects. They ordered the fleets destroyed just as they were about to enter the Mediterranean, and China was subjugated by Europeans who had the will to explore and the courage to accept the risks.
Why do I bring this up? Because it's ideas like yours that poison exploratory programs. Instead of grand gestures, you want small cheap steps. You speak of needs at home when they can be solved by innovating for the world. Material hyper efficient fuel cells and computers, inexpensive access to fusionable materials, and cheap metals and chemicals are all available in space. We must have the courage and conviction to simply reach out and grab them, and this can be done for a small percentage of the GNP. Merely increasing NASA's budget to the same percentage of the federal budget as it was during the Apollo era and providing a lofty goal will be enough for NASA to land several humans on Mars and more (like develop an economical heavy-lift launch vehicle). We simply have to want it enough.
Doesn't work that way. We'd have to launch the rocket towards where Mars is going to be, not where it is right now. Ideally, we would have launched 60-90 days ago, making the communcation round trip tip the minimum (about 6 minutes) during the most difficult part of the trip; landing.
Oh boy! Meetings! "One small step for management, one giant leap for management kind."
And they could sit there for months or years whilst we make up our minds. Not like the astronauts who would be dependent on their air supply. The lunar explorations were always curtailed by the fragility of the men.
What if they could make all the air and fuel they'd ever need? Mars Direct calls for the production of methane, oxygen and water on Mars, as opposed to taking it all with us. The exploration of the world would probably never had happened if they had to bring everything they needed with them.
We've done the easy bit. We haven't done the bit that involves spending months in microgravity, slowly cooking in solar radiation before attempting to live on a planet with a radically different environment.
The amount of radiation, barring a solar flare or coronal mass ejection is well within tolerable limits. Russians have spent years in orbit, and though they were not able to function, we're only talking about three months tops. This is, of course, not including the possibility of using a tether to create gravity. And the environment on Mars is much more temperate and friendly than the environment on the moon, and we've been to the moon.
If we only did what was easy, none of us would get out of bed in the morning.
It's a sales book, of course it says it will be cheap. My Windows XP manual told me that my life would be much easier after installation. Experience of all high tech projects shows the opposite.
Even if we TRIPLE the cost of the proposed plan, it's still less than what we just spent on a war. ($150 billion.) And that gives five 1.5 year missions covering thousands of square km of the surface, establishing outposts, making discoveries, and learning about how to survive there.
We must take the initiative to go to Mars and stop fearing what might happen.
All great colonizations started with explorers. Columbus, Hudson, Ponce de Leon. We should follow the Mars Direct plan and put outposts on the Red Planet, complete with 100KW nuclear reactors and greenhouses. This will prove our technology and provide a beachhead for the impending colonization.
Howeever, I disagree that a mission to a new star system is more probable than a Mars mission. Congress would never approve the funding, even though their constituents want it.
However, they are still hampered by the fact that they are essentially "dumb" implements. They can't say, by themselves anyway, "Hey, that mountain over there looks like a good place to look for fossils. Let's hop in the rover and go take a look." No, they have to wait for human operators to decide for them, then tell them exactly how to get there, all with a 40 minute round trip communication time. Most of the time in a robotic Mars mission is spent sitting on the surface, waiting for orders.
Humans can, should, and will go to Mars. Hopefully in my lifetime, but definitely in my children's. Anyone who's read The Case for Mars knows how easy and cheap it can be.
Someone once said "Once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere." We've been halfway to Mars for almost 50 years. Let's get there.
Instead of the cost-plus accounting that has kept space agencies so expensive, NASA should issue its own X-prize(s).
First, award a contract for 20 heavy lift vehicles (100-ton+ payload) to the first company that can bring the cost to launch down to $1000/kg to LEO at a cost of $200 million per vehicle, or something close to that. This would finally open up space to NASA. The space station could have been built with three launches.
NASA needs to stop throwing bricks into space with the shuttle and focus on getting there and staying there, not just coming back down once we've finished. We need to get our eggs out of one basket.
I don't think that would work due to the accuracy necessary and the speeds involved. It's incredibly difficult to dock two spacecraft, and I can only imagine how hard it woudl be to catch a 10cm thick cable.
However, there have been plans to put rotating apparati in orbit around earth and the moon. One would pick up craft in LEO and fling it to the one in lunar orbit, which would place it a little higher than the highest lunar mountain moving at 0 velocity relative to the moon, at which point it would drift to a slow landing with the aid of some small landing rockets. Sounds very complex and costly to me, though.
mmmmmkay, they spent their last few cents on their broadband connection and huge hard drives so they can't possibly afford CDs... RIGHT.
;)
maybe they should seek damages from the people who get the "disposable income" instead, like pizza deliverers and breweries?
I think the poster is getting at the fact that the people who can't/won't/don't pay are college kids. Their broadband is, effectively, free, as is their electricity, and their parents bought them the PC in most cases. Piracy costs most college students nothing.
Same story, only they dicked me over for passing my insurance licensing test in addition to my moral problems with the industry. In general, the people who last a long time at a telemarketing firm are sleazy people who'll do anything for a buck. Heck, about half of my fellow employees were on work release.
This industry needs to die. Now.