It probably wont happen anytime soon, if ever at all, but imagine if there were no politcal bounds to space exploration, if the top 20, or even top 5 countries got together and funded one space exploration thingy-mabob, we could really make some progress.
They pretty much did do that already. It was called the International Space Station, and we all know how much of a fantastic success that's been.
There's an article over on MSNBC with more info about the moon trip proposal. It turns out that the mission design is basically the same one that Constellation Services International, a small California space firm, proposed to the Russians last year. It seems that the Russians have just taken the proposal and blown off CSI. You can see the older article about CSI's design (with a diagram showing how it'll work) here:
NBC News space analyst James Oberg wrote about the Lunar Express concept eight months ago: As laid out by Constellation Services International's Charles Miller, the passenger would first be brought up to the international space station aboard a modified Russian Soyuz craft. Then the Soyuz would make a rendezvous with a booster-equipped logistics module that has been sent into orbit separately. The beefed-up craft would make an elongated figure-8 course around the moon - not landing there, but slingshotting around to return to Earth.
Oberg was amazingly prescient when he wrote, "The obvious question is what would prevent the Russians, or some other international space business, from simply stealing the idea and blowing off Miller and his associates."
In an e-mail exchange with Oberg, Miller was "sorry to say" that CSI was not involved in the Russian round-the-moon project, reported by Moscow-based Channel 1 (in Russian) as well as the RIA Novosti news service.
Instead, the news reports say that Russia's Federal Space Agency and Energia, the prime contractor for much of the country's space hardware, are working on the project. Channel 1 says proceeds from the two-week, $100 million tour package would go toward building Russia's next-generation spaceship, the Kliper.
The Lunar Prospector mission had a total cost of $63 million -- ~$34 million for development, ~$25 million for the launch vehicle, and ~$4 million for operations. Although it didn't soft-land on the moon, it did orbit the moon for 19 months and perform a targeted hard landing.
That said, the money from the NASA prize would probably be only a portion of the payback. Just look at SpaceShipOne and the X Prize -- they got $10 million from the prize itself, a $21 million deal with Virgin Galactic, and untold millions more in their advertising deal with 7 Up.
After I made the submission, I came across the following bit on Space Politics, which I think gives a better context for the competition:
Since Michael Griffin became NASA administrator a few months ago we have seen a gradual change in the agency's position on the role of commercial entities in carrying out the VSE. Griffin initially said he was open to it, but noted in early May that he did not want to get into a position where the agency had to rely on commercial contracts to carry out the vision: "I cannot put public money at risk depending on a commercial provider to be in my critical path." Last month, Griffin said he wanted to press ahead with commercial ISS resupply services--cargo initially, later extending to crews--to free up resources elsewhere.
Yesterday, though, NASA raised its commitment to commercialization even higher. Speaking at the Return to the Moon conference, NASA's Chris Shank made it very clear: "We've run the budget and we can't afford to do this with a traditional approach." A non-traditional approach, he explained, will put a far greater emphasis on commercialization, including ISS crew and cargo and perhaps other opportunities, such as purchasing launch services for the CEV. Later in the day, NASA's Brant Sponberg unveiled the agency's new Innovative Programs effort, which includes a mix of service procurements, other transaction authority, and prize competitions.
I also rather liked this bit on Clark Lindsey's RLV News:
Jim Muncy gave a brief but interesting summary yesterday of how he sees the situation with US space policy. He saw Shank's presentation as an indication that the long battle by the entrepreneurial space community to get commercial spaceflight companies welcomed as partners in space development has been won. However, winning a battle can actually mean tougher consequences than losing since now comes the challenge is to fulfill that partnership successfully.
Getting another "big idea" accepted is also making progress. Large scale space settlement must become the primary goal of the space program. No Antarctica-like outposts on the Moon but Las Vegas-es instead. Griffin, in fact, stated in testimony to Congress that human expansion into the solar system is his long term vision for space policy. However, this big idea is still foreign to many at NASA, in Congress, the press and the general public.
Why is Google constantly being mentioned on the front page, for completely trivial, non-stories?
However, if you look at the number of comments that these "trivial non-stories" get, even ignoring the "why does Google keep on getting mentioned here?" and "this is old news" comments, they're still somewhat higher than for the average story. So even if you think it's a waste of front-page space, apparently the average slashdotter doesn't think so.
I'd call BS on a lot of what he says. From another article:
"I found a list of officers' names," he claims, "under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'... What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers' and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US Navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet."
McKinnon, however, said he can't remember much about the project as he had been "smoking a lot of dope at the time".
About 3 million people die every year from air pollution. That's about an order of magnitude greater than the number of people who have died in the entire history of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, including Chernobyl, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
However, if you ask a random person which causes more deaths, what do you think they'll say?
Keep in mind that the quote was popularized by a Michael Moore movie. Seriously, when was the last time that a quote used in a Michael Moore movie wasn't taken out of context?
Could people PLEASE STOP USING THIS. Seriously, shove it up your blogosphere.
I wasn't aware that the British Broadcasting Corporation was part of the blogosphere. Anyways, although I'm sure the term sounds kind of crude to us technological elite, I suspect it conveys the general idea perfectly to those who aren't quite so familiar with the jargon.
This reminds me of the ZERO-G company, which offers commercial weightless flights on a specially-modified Boeing 727. Folks like Buzz Aldrin and Burt Rutan have flown on it, as well as everyone's favorite slashdotter John Carmack. Carmack posted a description of the flight, along with photos and a video.
I'd love to go myself, but I think it's still a little too rich for my poor grad-student blood.
Well I wish them the best and Musk's heart is in the right place but I'll wait to see if A) their vehicle works consistently and B) if they can eek out a revenue stream to stay solvent.
Indeed. I'm rather tensely awaiting their launch later this year.
It appears government subsidy is inevitable, the first launch being a Navy satellite.
I'm not sure if I would consider the purchase of a service at market prices a subsidy. In any case, it's certainly preferable to a cost-plus contract.
Granted though I doubt the resources you are going to find on the Moon are going to be nearly the value of the ones on Mars, especially water which is probably the most important of all.
I agree somewhat -- for many resources Mars seems better than the Moon. However, I think quite a lot can still be done with lunar regolith. Regolith is almost 50% oxygen by weight, and if a fractional portion of hydrogen and a power source is provided, you've got water (and breathable oxygen).
It has great potential to end up as the end and not the beginning, it will turn boring like the ISS, people will question the cost, it will end up being a decade or more of delay in going to Mars and I'll be dead before a Mars trip happens if its not killed before it even starts.
To be honest, that's also a worry of mine. If the base is almost solely the domain of government activity, I could easily see it ending up like the ISS. However, if private industry is able to build their own facilities up there (perhaps adjoining the government-run ones) and launch costs are low enough, I could see the endeavour becoming quite sustainable with things like lunar tourism.
The problem is that history shows that grand plans like "becoming a truly spacefaring nation" get funded for a little while -- long enough for the politicians to take credit for their daring vision -- and then cancelled. Witness the aftermath of the final Apollo missions: Saturn V assembly line shut down, a retreat to low earth orbit, and a boondoggle tincan in orbit that exists more or less so that we can continue to claim to have a manned space program.
Actually, I think those are exceptions which prove a general rule: Once a government program gets entrenched in the bureaucracy, it goes on almost indefinitely on sheer inertia (for better or worse). Work on the Saturn series lasted "only" from 1957 to 1973. People have been working on the Shuttle since 1968 and the Space Station since the 80s, and we know that both of those are refusing to go away.
I think the best shot we have of actually sending people to Mars is to just go. I think that if we stop at the Moon, people (i.e., Congress) will get tired of the costs and call it a day once we've built some tin can "base" on the Moon, which we can them promptly abandon...or sell to the Chinese.
Sure, that's the best shot of sending to people to Mars, but after the glamorous one-shot, what happens the following year? IMHO, the best way to do things is to have things be as sustainable as possible, and also attempt to have a commercial space industry grow along with it.
Nuclear fission is not a good idea. Think of all the problems we've had with the radioactive waste.
As opposed to the problems we've had with waste from other energy sources? More people die each year from fossil fuel air pollution than have died in the entire history of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
Most well-respected mission designs came to the conclusion a long time ago that the Moon wasn't a "stepping stone" to Mars, it was an unnecessary detour.
It's not supposed to be a stepping stone in the literal sense, but a stepping stone in the sense of gained experience. I thought NASA head Michael Griffin stated things quite well in his recent Congressional testimony:
With regard to the moon, I believe the experience to be gained by living on and exploring another planetary surface only a few days away from home will be invaluable to the successful conduct of a future Mars expedition. Certainly such experience is not essential; one can readily envision a Mars expedition architecture which does not employ any further lunar experience as a stepping stone. But because it can be envisioned does not make it wise. I personally consider it an act of technological hubris to proceed directly to Mars, with no human experience beyond Earth orbit having been incurred since 1972. It can be done, and it will be cheaper, but the risk to both the mission goals and to human life will be significantly higher.
If the goal of the United States is solely to mount an expedition to Mars, then I can at least understand, if not credit, the concern that returning to the moon is a distraction. But if the goal of the United States is to be truly a spacefaring nation, then bypassing the moon is silly.
Basically, NASA's been partnering up with private organizations to offer cash prizes for space-related achievements. Congress has unfortunately put a limit on how much of their budget they're allowed to devote to competitive prizes, but they've still been able to offer prizes for space tethers, beam power, and extracting oxygen from lunar regolith.
A while back I also tried submitting an article about NASA and its plans for commercial delivery of cargo and passengers to the ISS, but the story was rejected. Here's the text of it:
At a recent talk, Michael Griffin outlined NASA's plans for helping to generate a robust and competitive commercial market in orbital spaceflight. The speech and Q&A transcripts from the talk are available. In a move reminiscent of the US government kickstarting the early airline industry by purchasing airmail services, NASA plans on supplementing government-derived transport by purchasing cargo delivery services to the International Space Station from commercial providers, followed by crew transportation after the systems have proven themselves. Unlike traditional government contracts, sellers wouldn't see a profit before the services are delivered and the emphasis will be on actual performance instead of process and specifications. Aviation Week has some commentary on the announcement.
Hey, kids you should aspire to be astronauts so you can be a space janitor or a space maid in a space hotel.
I don't know about you, but (Roger Wilco jokes aside) I would give almost anything just for the chance to be a "space janitor." I'm sure many other people feel the same way.
You are going to have to hope some of the private ventures can scrape together the funds to build an afforable launch vehicle to LEO.
The absolute pinnacle I can see NASA aspiring to is a moonbase which will end up looking a lot like an ISS except on the moon. People living in tin cans trying to find things to do on a place totally hostile to life.
And learning how to make use of off-planet resources, which we have effectively zero experience with at the moment. Such experience will be quite useful for extended settlements on Mars and elsewhere.
At the point you have colonists on Mars and not Astronauts that is the point you have accomplished something, you have achieved a revolution and you will change the way humans think about the universe.
I agree.
Not sure the solar power thing will fly anytime soon. Nuclear reactors on Earth are a lot better bet.
Agreed. I don't think space solar power is going to be economical any time soon.
I'm sure NASA will never break out of the round trip mode of thought but it is totally the wrong mindset for a Mars policy.
I personally suspect that we won't ever see one-way trips from NASA -- it's politically impossible. With low enough launch costs, however, I could see self-funded groups pursuing that...
It should be noted that the plans for the moon aren't just some flags-and-footprints mission like we did 30-some years ago, but setting up a permanent, sustainable lunar base. We still have very little experience with making use of in-situ off-planet resources, and this is the perfect chance to be able to do that. An added benefit over Mars is that if something goes wrong, we can quickly go back.
As far as science goes though, it probably won't have too much of an impact in the short term, except for possibly doing things like setting up a telescope on the dark side of the Moon. It will have a huge impact however on learning how to create effective settlements on other terrestrial bodies, which will have very beneficial effects in the long-term on science, industry, and humanity as a whole.
Interesting idea, but what's to stop people from making inaccurate predictions in order to influence policy?
A large portion of Hanson's paper is dedicated to possible problems with the idea. Here's the relevant section:
Potential Issue: People Could Buy Policy Via The Markets
Imagine that speculators know that a certain interested party, a manipulator, wants to move some price in a certain direction. If speculators know this manipulator has no special information about this topic, then if he began trading large amounts in order to move the price, speculators would see easy pro ts in moving the price right back. The same result follows if this manipulator has relevant information, as long as the speculators know just how badly he wants to move the price, and how much money he has to spend on this. If speculators can predict a bias, they can and will correct for it. A manipulator can thus only influence the price if speculators both think he (or those who trade for him) might have relevant information, and are unsure about how badly he wants to move the price. This implies that on average interested parties cannot bias the price; they can at worst only add noise.
A manipulator may sometimes raise the price when observers under-estimate how badly he wants to raise the price, but such cases are balanced by other cases where the price is lowered because observers over-estimate how badly he wants to raise the price. Furthermore, the fact that interested parties lose their bets on average will attract more speculators to study this topic. The added information from such efforts may more than compensate for the noise from manipulator trading.
For example, interested insiders who happen to have an unusually strong desire to raise the market estimate of a certain proposed stadium s pro tability might succeed, but then some other possible stadium's estimate would be reduced because their insiders happen to have an unusually weak desire to raise that stadium's profitability estimate. And the existence of such insiders would attract more speculators to study stadium profitability.
If there is a terrorist bombing, we get money back (taxes).
Actually, that's a little bit like the idea behind government by futarchy, the system of government referenced in my sig. Robin Hanson, an economics prof at George Mason University, has a web page about it here:
The gist of it is that policy decisions are either made or advised by a prediction market. In a prediction market, on can bid on what sort of effect a policy decision might have. In the case of the Patriot Act, one might bid on the probability that there would be a terrorist attack if the Act was extended, versus what the probability would be if it weren't extended. If one's bid ends up being correct one makes money; otherwise, one loses money. It sounds a little hokey at first, but the interesting thing is that prediction markets tend to be better at predicting future events than basically any other method out there. There's of course a number of people who have knee-jerk reactions to anything that involves markets, but such is life.
In more elaborate schemes, citizens can vote on metrics of national welfare, perhaps as some function of GDP, personal liberties, mortality rates, and so on. One can then bid on how different policies would be expected to impact the national welfare metric, and policies which would benefit it would then go into effect.
Back to the case of extending the Patriot Act, even if the extension promotes national security, it would have negative effects on personal liberties. Depending on what sort of metric citizens vote on, this may be judged to be an overall good or an overall bad.
And no, I have no sort of affiliation with Hanson, prediction markets, or anything of the sort. I just think it's a cool idea.
According to this article, Doohan requested that his ashes be sent into space. His family is honoring his wishes, launching the ashes with Space Services. It's a little out of the ordinary, but it seems like a rather fitting finale for him.
How would it be if you just paradrop smart vehicles (or remote) and just play "enemy combatant extermination".
The thing I don't get about this line of argument against unmanned combat vehicles is that we already have killing devices which we can paradrop over other people with approximately zero risk to our own soldiers. They're called bombs.
Slashdot Mirror
It probably wont happen anytime soon, if ever at all, but imagine if there were no politcal bounds to space exploration, if the top 20, or even top 5 countries got together and funded one space exploration thingy-mabob, we could really make some progress.
They pretty much did do that already. It was called the International Space Station, and we all know how much of a fantastic success that's been.
There's an article over on MSNBC with more info about the moon trip proposal. It turns out that the mission design is basically the same one that Constellation Services International, a small California space firm, proposed to the Russians last year. It seems that the Russians have just taken the proposal and blown off CSI. You can see the older article about CSI's design (with a diagram showing how it'll work) here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6558855/
From the newer article:
NBC News space analyst James Oberg wrote about the Lunar Express concept eight months ago: As laid out by Constellation Services International's Charles Miller, the passenger would first be brought up to the international space station aboard a modified Russian Soyuz craft. Then the Soyuz would make a rendezvous with a booster-equipped logistics module that has been sent into orbit separately. The beefed-up craft would make an elongated figure-8 course around the moon - not landing there, but slingshotting around to return to Earth.
Oberg was amazingly prescient when he wrote, "The obvious question is what would prevent the Russians, or some other international space business, from simply stealing the idea and blowing off Miller and his associates."
In an e-mail exchange with Oberg, Miller was "sorry to say" that CSI was not involved in the Russian round-the-moon project, reported by Moscow-based Channel 1 (in Russian) as well as the RIA Novosti news service.
Instead, the news reports say that Russia's Federal Space Agency and Energia, the prime contractor for much of the country's space hardware, are working on the project. Channel 1 says proceeds from the two-week, $100 million tour package would go toward building Russia's next-generation spaceship, the Kliper.
The Lunar Prospector mission had a total cost of $63 million -- ~$34 million for development, ~$25 million for the launch vehicle, and ~$4 million for operations. Although it didn't soft-land on the moon, it did orbit the moon for 19 months and perform a targeted hard landing.
That said, the money from the NASA prize would probably be only a portion of the payback. Just look at SpaceShipOne and the X Prize -- they got $10 million from the prize itself, a $21 million deal with Virgin Galactic, and untold millions more in their advertising deal with 7 Up.
After I made the submission, I came across the following bit on Space Politics, which I think gives a better context for the competition:
Since Michael Griffin became NASA administrator a few months ago we have seen a gradual change in the agency's position on the role of commercial entities in carrying out the VSE. Griffin initially said he was open to it, but noted in early May that he did not want to get into a position where the agency had to rely on commercial contracts to carry out the vision: "I cannot put public money at risk depending on a commercial provider to be in my critical path." Last month, Griffin said he wanted to press ahead with commercial ISS resupply services--cargo initially, later extending to crews--to free up resources elsewhere.
Yesterday, though, NASA raised its commitment to commercialization even higher. Speaking at the Return to the Moon conference, NASA's Chris Shank made it very clear: "We've run the budget and we can't afford to do this with a traditional approach." A non-traditional approach, he explained, will put a far greater emphasis on commercialization, including ISS crew and cargo and perhaps other opportunities, such as purchasing launch services for the CEV. Later in the day, NASA's Brant Sponberg unveiled the agency's new Innovative Programs effort, which includes a mix of service procurements, other transaction authority, and prize competitions.
I also rather liked this bit on Clark Lindsey's RLV News:
Jim Muncy gave a brief but interesting summary yesterday of how he sees the situation with US space policy. He saw Shank's presentation as an indication that the long battle by the entrepreneurial space community to get commercial spaceflight companies welcomed as partners in space development has been won. However, winning a battle can actually mean tougher consequences than losing since now comes the challenge is to fulfill that partnership successfully.
Getting another "big idea" accepted is also making progress. Large scale space settlement must become the primary goal of the space program. No Antarctica-like outposts on the Moon but Las Vegas-es instead. Griffin, in fact, stated in testimony to Congress that human expansion into the solar system is his long term vision for space policy. However, this big idea is still foreign to many at NASA, in Congress, the press and the general public.
Why is Google constantly being mentioned on the front page, for completely trivial, non-stories?
However, if you look at the number of comments that these "trivial non-stories" get, even ignoring the "why does Google keep on getting mentioned here?" and "this is old news" comments, they're still somewhat higher than for the average story. So even if you think it's a waste of front-page space, apparently the average slashdotter doesn't think so.
I'd call BS on a lot of what he says. From another article:
9 150245,00.htm
"I found a list of officers' names," he claims, "under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'... What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers' and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US Navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet."
McKinnon, however, said he can't remember much about the project as he had been "smoking a lot of dope at the time".
http://software.silicon.com/security/0,39024655,3
Interesting factoid of the day:
About 3 million people die every year from air pollution. That's about an order of magnitude greater than the number of people who have died in the entire history of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, including Chernobyl, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
However, if you ask a random person which causes more deaths, what do you think they'll say?
Soo taken out of context.
Keep in mind that the quote was popularized by a Michael Moore movie. Seriously, when was the last time that a quote used in a Michael Moore movie wasn't taken out of context?
Could people PLEASE STOP USING THIS. Seriously, shove it up your blogosphere.
I wasn't aware that the British Broadcasting Corporation was part of the blogosphere. Anyways, although I'm sure the term sounds kind of crude to us technological elite, I suspect it conveys the general idea perfectly to those who aren't quite so familiar with the jargon.
This reminds me of the ZERO-G company, which offers commercial weightless flights on a specially-modified Boeing 727. Folks like Buzz Aldrin and Burt Rutan have flown on it, as well as everyone's favorite slashdotter John Carmack. Carmack posted a description of the flight, along with photos and a video.
I'd love to go myself, but I think it's still a little too rich for my poor grad-student blood.
Well I wish them the best and Musk's heart is in the right place but I'll wait to see if A) their vehicle works consistently and B) if they can eek out a revenue stream to stay solvent.
Indeed. I'm rather tensely awaiting their launch later this year.
It appears government subsidy is inevitable, the first launch being a Navy satellite.
I'm not sure if I would consider the purchase of a service at market prices a subsidy. In any case, it's certainly preferable to a cost-plus contract.
Granted though I doubt the resources you are going to find on the Moon are going to be nearly the value of the ones on Mars, especially water which is probably the most important of all.
I agree somewhat -- for many resources Mars seems better than the Moon. However, I think quite a lot can still be done with lunar regolith. Regolith is almost 50% oxygen by weight, and if a fractional portion of hydrogen and a power source is provided, you've got water (and breathable oxygen).
It has great potential to end up as the end and not the beginning, it will turn boring like the ISS, people will question the cost, it will end up being a decade or more of delay in going to Mars and I'll be dead before a Mars trip happens if its not killed before it even starts.
To be honest, that's also a worry of mine. If the base is almost solely the domain of government activity, I could easily see it ending up like the ISS. However, if private industry is able to build their own facilities up there (perhaps adjoining the government-run ones) and launch costs are low enough, I could see the endeavour becoming quite sustainable with things like lunar tourism.
The problem is that history shows that grand plans like "becoming a truly spacefaring nation" get funded for a little while -- long enough for the politicians to take credit for their daring vision -- and then cancelled. Witness the aftermath of the final Apollo missions: Saturn V assembly line shut down, a retreat to low earth orbit, and a boondoggle tincan in orbit that exists more or less so that we can continue to claim to have a manned space program.
Actually, I think those are exceptions which prove a general rule: Once a government program gets entrenched in the bureaucracy, it goes on almost indefinitely on sheer inertia (for better or worse). Work on the Saturn series lasted "only" from 1957 to 1973. People have been working on the Shuttle since 1968 and the Space Station since the 80s, and we know that both of those are refusing to go away.
I think the best shot we have of actually sending people to Mars is to just go. I think that if we stop at the Moon, people (i.e., Congress) will get tired of the costs and call it a day once we've built some tin can "base" on the Moon, which we can them promptly abandon...or sell to the Chinese.
Sure, that's the best shot of sending to people to Mars, but after the glamorous one-shot, what happens the following year? IMHO, the best way to do things is to have things be as sustainable as possible, and also attempt to have a commercial space industry grow along with it.
Nuclear fission is not a good idea. Think of all the problems we've had with the radioactive waste.
As opposed to the problems we've had with waste from other energy sources? More people die each year from fossil fuel air pollution than have died in the entire history of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power.
Most well-respected mission designs came to the conclusion a long time ago that the Moon wasn't a "stepping stone" to Mars, it was an unnecessary detour.
1
It's not supposed to be a stepping stone in the literal sense, but a stepping stone in the sense of gained experience. I thought NASA head Michael Griffin stated things quite well in his recent Congressional testimony:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=1215
With regard to the moon, I believe the experience to be gained by living on and exploring another planetary surface only a few days away from home will be invaluable to the successful conduct of a future Mars expedition. Certainly such experience is not essential; one can readily envision a Mars expedition architecture which does not employ any further lunar experience as a stepping stone. But because it can be envisioned does not make it wise. I personally consider it an act of technological hubris to proceed directly to Mars, with no human experience beyond Earth orbit having been incurred since 1972. It can be done, and it will be cheaper, but the risk to both the mission goals and to human life will be significantly higher.
If the goal of the United States is solely to mount an expedition to Mars, then I can at least understand, if not credit, the concern that returning to the moon is a distraction. But if the goal of the United States is to be truly a spacefaring nation, then bypassing the moon is silly.
What I, however, would most like to see, is a collaborative effort between NASA and the fledgeling private sector space initiatives.
c _index.html
It's called the Centennial Challenges Program:
http://exploration.nasa.gov/centennialchallenge/c
Basically, NASA's been partnering up with private organizations to offer cash prizes for space-related achievements. Congress has unfortunately put a limit on how much of their budget they're allowed to devote to competitive prizes, but they've still been able to offer prizes for space tethers, beam power, and extracting oxygen from lunar regolith.
A while back I also tried submitting an article about NASA and its plans for commercial delivery of cargo and passengers to the ISS, but the story was rejected. Here's the text of it:
At a recent talk, Michael Griffin outlined NASA's plans for helping to generate a robust and competitive commercial market in orbital spaceflight. The speech and Q&A transcripts from the talk are available. In a move reminiscent of the US government kickstarting the early airline industry by purchasing airmail services, NASA plans on supplementing government-derived transport by purchasing cargo delivery services to the International Space Station from commercial providers, followed by crew transportation after the systems have proven themselves. Unlike traditional government contracts, sellers wouldn't see a profit before the services are delivered and the emphasis will be on actual performance instead of process and specifications. Aviation Week has some commentary on the announcement.
does a mission to the moon where we've already been several times, with rovers and all, excite you?
A mere mission doesn't really excite me. However, learning how to create a sustainable settlement on the Moon excites me quite a bit.
Hey, kids you should aspire to be astronauts so you can be a space janitor or a space maid in a space hotel.
M .20050721.gtbcspace21/BNStory/Technology/
I don't know about you, but (Roger Wilco jokes aside) I would give almost anything just for the chance to be a "space janitor." I'm sure many other people feel the same way.
You are going to have to hope some of the private ventures can scrape together the funds to build an afforable launch vehicle to LEO.
Like SpaceX?
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
The absolute pinnacle I can see NASA aspiring to is a moonbase which will end up looking a lot like an ISS except on the moon. People living in tin cans trying to find things to do on a place totally hostile to life.
And learning how to make use of off-planet resources, which we have effectively zero experience with at the moment. Such experience will be quite useful for extended settlements on Mars and elsewhere.
At the point you have colonists on Mars and not Astronauts that is the point you have accomplished something, you have achieved a revolution and you will change the way humans think about the universe.
I agree.
Not sure the solar power thing will fly anytime soon. Nuclear reactors on Earth are a lot better bet.
Agreed. I don't think space solar power is going to be economical any time soon.
I'm sure NASA will never break out of the round trip mode of thought but it is totally the wrong mindset for a Mars policy.
I personally suspect that we won't ever see one-way trips from NASA -- it's politically impossible. With low enough launch costs, however, I could see self-funded groups pursuing that...
It should be noted that the plans for the moon aren't just some flags-and-footprints mission like we did 30-some years ago, but setting up a permanent, sustainable lunar base. We still have very little experience with making use of in-situ off-planet resources, and this is the perfect chance to be able to do that. An added benefit over Mars is that if something goes wrong, we can quickly go back.
As far as science goes though, it probably won't have too much of an impact in the short term, except for possibly doing things like setting up a telescope on the dark side of the Moon. It will have a huge impact however on learning how to create effective settlements on other terrestrial bodies, which will have very beneficial effects in the long-term on science, industry, and humanity as a whole.
Retiring the space shuttle boondoggle and being done with the space station will provide more than enough money.
For future reference, here's NASA's budget:
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/107486main_FY06_high.pdf
Interesting idea, but what's to stop people from making inaccurate predictions in order to influence policy?
A large portion of Hanson's paper is dedicated to possible problems with the idea. Here's the relevant section:
Potential Issue: People Could Buy Policy Via The Markets
Imagine that speculators know that a certain interested party, a manipulator, wants to move some price in a certain direction. If speculators know this manipulator has no special information about this topic, then if he began trading large amounts in order to move the price, speculators would see easy pro ts in moving the price right back. The same result follows if this manipulator has relevant information, as long as the speculators know just how badly he wants to move the price, and how much money he has to spend on this. If speculators can predict a bias, they can and will correct for it. A manipulator can thus only influence the price if speculators both think he (or those who trade for him) might have relevant information, and are unsure about how badly he wants to move the price. This implies that on average interested parties cannot bias the price; they can at worst only add noise.
A manipulator may sometimes raise the price when observers under-estimate how badly he wants to raise the price, but such cases are balanced by other cases where the price is lowered because observers over-estimate how badly he wants to raise the price. Furthermore, the fact that interested parties lose their bets on average will attract more speculators to study this topic. The added information from such efforts may more than compensate for the noise from manipulator trading.
For example, interested insiders who happen to have an unusually strong desire to raise the market estimate of a certain proposed stadium s pro tability might succeed, but then some other possible stadium's estimate would be reduced because their insiders happen to have an unusually weak desire to raise that stadium's profitability estimate. And the existence of such insiders would attract more speculators to study stadium profitability.
If there is a terrorist bombing, we get money back (taxes).
Actually, that's a little bit like the idea behind government by futarchy, the system of government referenced in my sig. Robin Hanson, an economics prof at George Mason University, has a web page about it here:
http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.html
A research paper is available here:
http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf
The gist of it is that policy decisions are either made or advised by a prediction market. In a prediction market, on can bid on what sort of effect a policy decision might have. In the case of the Patriot Act, one might bid on the probability that there would be a terrorist attack if the Act was extended, versus what the probability would be if it weren't extended. If one's bid ends up being correct one makes money; otherwise, one loses money. It sounds a little hokey at first, but the interesting thing is that prediction markets tend to be better at predicting future events than basically any other method out there. There's of course a number of people who have knee-jerk reactions to anything that involves markets, but such is life.
In more elaborate schemes, citizens can vote on metrics of national welfare, perhaps as some function of GDP, personal liberties, mortality rates, and so on. One can then bid on how different policies would be expected to impact the national welfare metric, and policies which would benefit it would then go into effect.
Back to the case of extending the Patriot Act, even if the extension promotes national security, it would have negative effects on personal liberties. Depending on what sort of metric citizens vote on, this may be judged to be an overall good or an overall bad.
And no, I have no sort of affiliation with Hanson, prediction markets, or anything of the sort. I just think it's a cool idea.
Actually, there already are some fairly extensive sources of imagery data available for the ocean floor:
c e_predict.html
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/announcements/announ
According to this article, Doohan requested that his ashes be sent into space. His family is honoring his wishes, launching the ashes with Space Services. It's a little out of the ordinary, but it seems like a rather fitting finale for him.
Apparently, my cousin has Ethernet over Power, that was installed by The Internet Service Guy...
Does the cord for it look something like this?
http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/
How would it be if you just paradrop smart vehicles (or remote) and just play "enemy combatant extermination".
The thing I don't get about this line of argument against unmanned combat vehicles is that we already have killing devices which we can paradrop over other people with approximately zero risk to our own soldiers. They're called bombs.